When you are engulfed in flames - By David Sedaris Page 0,76

hit and killed by a truck and, after a short spell in Heaven, he’s sent back among the living in the body of an elderly white man. The reviews had been tepid at best, but I swear I’ve never seen anything funnier. I tried not to laugh, I really did, but that’s a losing game if ever there was one. This I learned when I was growing up. I don’t know why it was, exactly, but nothing irritated my father quite like the sound of his children’s happiness. Group crying he could stand, but group laughter was asking for it, especially at the dinner table.

The problem was that there was so much to laugh at, particularly during the years that our Greek grandmother lived with us. Had we been older, it might have been different. “The poor thing has gas,” we might have said. For children, though, nothing beats a flatulent old lady. What made it all the crazier was that she wasn’t embarrassed by it — no more than our collie, Duchess, was. It sounded as if she were testing out a chain saw, yet her face remained inexpressive and unchanging.

“Something funny?” our father would ask us, this as if he hadn’t heard, as if his chair, too, had not vibrated in the aftershock. “You think something’s funny, do you?”

If keeping a straight face was difficult, saying no was so exacting that it caused pain.

“So you were laughing at nothing?”

“Yes,” we would say. “At nothing.”

Then would come another mighty rip, and what was once difficult would now be impossible. My father kept a heavy serving spoon next to his plate, and I can’t remember how many times he brought it down on my head.

“You still think there’s something to laugh about?”

Strange that being walloped with a heavy spoon made everything seem funnier, but there you have it. My sisters and I would be helpless, doubled over, milk spraying out of our mouths and noses, the force all the stronger for having been bottled up. There were nights when the spoon got blood on it, nights when hairs would stick to the blood, but still our grandmother farted, and still we laughed until the walls shook.

Could that really have been forty years ago? The thought of my sisters and me, so young then, and so untroubled, was sobering, and within a minute, Chris Rock or no Chris Rock, I was the one crying on the night flight to Paris. It wasn’t my intention to steal anyone’s thunder. A minute or two was all I needed. But in the meantime here we were: two grown men in roomy seats, each blubbering in his own elite puddle of light.

Old Faithful

Out of nowhere I developed this lump. I think it was a cyst or a boil, one of those things you associate with trolls, and it was right on my tailbone, like a peach pit wedged into the top of my crack. That’s what it felt like, anyway. I was afraid to look. At first it was just this insignificant knot, but as it grew larger it started to hurt. Sitting became difficult, and forget about lying on my back or bending over. By day five, my tailbone was throbbing, and I told myself, just as I had the day before, that if this kept up I was going to see a doctor. “I mean it,” I said. I even went so far as to pull out the phone book and turn my back on it, hoping that the boil would know that I meant business and go away on its own. But of course it didn’t.

All of this took place in London, which is cruelly, insanely expensive. Hugh and I went to the movies one night, and our tickets cost the equivalent of forty dollars, this after spending sixty on pizzas. And these were mini-pizzas, not much bigger than pancakes. Given the price of a simple evening out, I figured that a doctor’s visit would cost around the same as a customized van. More than the money, though, I was afraid of the diagnosis. “Lower-back cancer,” the doctor would say. “It looks like we’ll have to remove your entire bottom.”

Actually, in England he’d probably have said “bum,” a word I have never really cottoned to. The sad thing is that he could remove my ass and most people wouldn’t even notice. It’s so insubstantial that the boil was actually an improvement, something like a bustle only filled with poison. The only real