Let's Explore Diabetes with Owls - By David Sedaris Page 0,42

got something for you,” I’d say to a teenager. “It’s nothing huge, just a little something to show I care.”

The kids who went to good schools would roll their eyes. “I can get those in the health room,” they’d tell me.

And, in the voice of a person whose upbringing was so fundamentally different that he might as well have been raised by camel herders, I would say, “Really? For free?”

Unlike a lot of authors I know, I enjoy my book tours—love them, as a matter of fact. That said, I’m in a fortunate position, and have been able to eliminate the parts that don’t agree with me—the picture-taking, for instance. People all have cameras on their cell phones now, and, figuring, I guess, that they might as well aim them at something, they’d ask me to stand and pose a good thirty times a night. This wasn’t an inconvenience so much as an embarrassment. “You can do better than me,” I’d tell them. And when they insisted that they really couldn’t, I’d feel even worse. Thus, at readings, there’s now a notice propped atop my book-signing table. “Sorry,” it announces, “but we don’t allow photos.” This makes it sound like it’s the store’s idea, a standard policy, like no eating fudge in the fine-arts section.

“If it’s their rule, I guess I’ll have to go along with it,” I tell people, sighing as if I were really disappointed.

With the picture-taking out of the way, I’m completely free to enjoy myself, which I generally do—and immensely. Every night, after a reading and a short question-and-answer session, I’ll sit and talk to hundreds of strangers. This fellow, for instance, whom I met in Toronto—I liked his glasses, and, after I asked where he had gotten them, we fell into the topic of corrective surgery. “I hear that you have to remain conscious during the procedure,” he told me, “and that when the laser hits its target, you can actually smell your own eyeball sizzling.”

I thought about this for days, just as I thought of the special-ed teacher I met in Pittsburgh. “You know,” I said, “I hear those words and automatically think, Handicapped, or, Learning disabled. But aren’t a lot of your students just assholes?”

“You got it,” she said. Then she told me about a kid—last day of class—who wrote on the blackboard, “Mrs. J_____ is a cock master.”

I was impressed because I’d never heard that term before. She was impressed because the boy had spelled it correctly.

For hours each night I would talk to people, asking pretty much whatever I wanted. The trick, of course, is to match the right person with the right question. Take this young woman I met in Boston a few years back. I’d been signing for almost six hours, and when she finally stepped up to the table, my mind went blank. “When, um…when did you last touch a monkey?” I asked.

I expected “Never” or “It’s been years,” but instead she took a step back, saying, “Oh, can you smell it on me?”

The young woman’s name was Jennifer, and it turned out that she worked for Helping Hands, an organization that trains monkeys to toil as slaves for paralyzed people. At her invitation, I visited the facility outside Boston and spent a pleasant afternoon having my pockets picked by some of the cleverer students.

On that tour, my questions were pretty standard: “What was the last reading you attended?” “Who are you going to use this condom on?” “If you stepped out of the shower and saw a leprechaun standing at the base of your toilet, would you scream, or would you innately understand that he meant you no harm?”

Late at night I’d return to my room, scoop up the shampoos and conditioners replaced as part of the turndown service, and record everything that I had learned, not just the stories that people had told me but all the ephemera: The names of local restaurants and hair salons seen from the car window. One hotel with its Martini Tuesdays, another with its Fajita Fridays. In Baton Rouge, a woman asked me to name her donkey. “Stephanie,” I said, and later that night, too tired to sleep, I lay awake and wondered if I’d spoken too quickly.

In 2004, I offered priority signing to smokers, the reason being that, because they didn’t have as long to live, their time was more valuable. Four years later my special treatment was reserved for men who stood five-foot-six and under. “That’s right, my