Love and Hate

In the house I grew up in, we had magnetic poetry on the fridge. Nobody ever really spelled out anything profound, but once when I was about eight, my mom spelled, "Do not trust anyone." It stayed on the fridge untouched for years while other poems came and went. School papers, wedding invitations, summer vacation pictures, coupons, newspaper clippings that mentioned my father, church bulletins, obituaries, recipes, while-you-were-out notes, to-do lists, to-buy lists, to-sell-at-the-next-yard-sale lists, parking tickets, court summons, business cards, inspirational magnets, dentist appointment reminders, labels of favorite bottles of wine, niece's artwork--all danced on and off the face of the fridge in the eternal waltz of time hurtling onward, except for my mother's poem.

"Do not trust anyone." The phrase stuck in my head when I went to college, and I remember when the girl I was dating explained birth control to me and how we really didn't need to use condoms, I said, "I just really don't want to have a baby right now." What I was thinking was, Do not trust anyone.

I had a job as a waiter for after that, and there was an old man who came to the restaurant every Wednesday and always complained about the food. He ordered the same steak each week and complained to me how bad it was. I told the chef once and he admitted that the man had been coming for years, every Wednesday. He complained so much that the chef now pissed on the guy's steak each week when he cooked it. "The kitchen stinks for a while afterward," the chef said, "but that old fuck gets what he deserves. And then he's right at least, the food should taste like shit." It was the most disgusting thing I ever witnessed.

So now when I order at restaurants, or get in the back of a cab, or let a stranger use my camera to take a group photo, or sip out of the same bottle of Jack Daniel's as someone I just met, or dance with a girl at a club, or unsheathe a new razor head, or read what SPF 30 really means, or listen to the President make promises, or let my dog sniff another dog, or turn the paper to the continuing story on Page A12, or cross the street before the little white man appears, or play catch with my nephew, or try on a shirt in the fitting room of the store, or worse a swimsuit, or worse a hat--I think of my mother's unbroken poem, "Do not trust anyone." And I shudder.