The Last Time I Was Me. Cathy Lamb

what a shallow profession we were all in, announcing, “Our profession is utterly ridiculous! Our days and lives are dedicated to packaging and selling products to the American public who really, truly don’t need or want what we’re selling. Every minute of our existence is wrapped up in lies and deceit! Wrapped up in crap! We could all die tomorrow and we’d have to face God and tell him we wrapped our lives up in crap. How’s that going to go over?”

      I talked about a recent potato chip campaign that took eight people working almost round the clock for months to complete. “Potato chips! And Americans are already way too fat!” I boomed. “Way toooooo fat!”

      I talked about the endless discussions that occur in the halls of advertising about how to market a new car that, if bought, would slap the average person into deep debt for years on end. “And what about the panty and bra ads where overgrown women with impossibly large bowling ball breasts strut around on high heels? Do we think that most women can wear any of that lingerie without looking utterly ridiculous? Who thinks cottage cheese thighs are sexy? Who thinks saggy boobs can be made to look better with red satin?

      “And frankly,” I bellowed, “who even cares about having a perfect body except the shallow schmucks sitting right here? Yes, you people! You shallow schmucks!”

      I decided to yell that part at them. “Don’t we have better things to do with our time on this planet than to worry about how we look? No wonder we’re all so miserable.”

      I talked about the complete self-absorption I had seen in people in advertising. “All we do is think about ourselves, our next ad, our next success, our next promotion. We are the most boring people on the planet!” I decided to pound the podium while I cackled like an overgrown witch. “That’s not the worst of it! We’re not good people. We’re not! Our profession means nothing to anyone. We make people’s lives worse, not better. We tell them in print and on TV that if they don’t have these products, they are useless people, that they’re not keeping up, they’re not cool, they’re ugly and poor and bottom-dwelling failures. And folks, guess what? It’s all a bunch of shit!”

      I suppose hysteria makes one acutely aware of life. As does death. Death is a great equalizer. It brings your own life into pinpoint focus. I decided to speak of that pinpoint focus. “When I die, what do I have to be proud of? That I designed a campaign that sent Tender Tampons skyrocketing? That Baucom’s vaginal cream is now used by more women than ever before for irritation? That overly sugared cereals for children that surely rot their teeth are being sold at a record pace? All that so a few thick-headed asshole white men with limp dicks at the top can become even richer? It’s pointless.”

      I looked around the room. I dare say everyone looked mighty stunned. Schmucks look even uglier when they’re stunned.

      “We’re pointless,” I said, taking a deep breath. “We’re pointless. There is more to life than this.” I cried a bit. For my mother, for my useless self, for those pesky assault charges, and for the blazing realization that I had done nothing worthwhile in my entire life. Almost forty I am, and I had done nothing. Nothing.

      Well, I had assaulted and humiliated my ex, but I didn’t think that counted. That made me laugh and snicker again. I sobered up quick. “There is more to life than figuring out how to persuade women to buy a certain brand of yeast infection medicine that resembles small white bullets. There has to be more.”

      I thought of my mother, with that doctor straddling her as he forced a tube down her throat so that she could die more peacefully, of all the other doctors and nurses who had tried so desperately hard to help. I wanted to bang my head against the podium. Hard.

      Now they had become Someone Useful. They had tried to save my mother’s life. I had only tried to convince some exhausted mommy in suburbia to buy some unhealthy cavity-causing crud for her child’s breakfast.

      “There has to be more to life than Tender Tampons.” I said this so quietly I could barely hear it myself, yet at the same time the words seemed to echo right off the walls of that room like thunder.

      And then I left. I walked off that stage in my blue heels with the tiny gold chains, right out the door to my car, a low, red, expensive, humming machine.

      I sold it on the way home without a second glance back, bought a big hulkin’ Bronco and a storage trailer to haul behind it and pocketed the cash. On my cell I called my friend, Joyce Her-ber, a real estate agent, and told her to sell my town house. I called a man named Isaac Porter who owned an estate business and told him to sell my stuff. It was modern and sleek and I hated it. I called my lawyer and my mother’s special friend, Roy Sass, and he told me to stay in touch because of my little problem with the police. He also reminded me I needed to enroll in a court-ordered anger management course to show that I was getting help for my poor behavior.

      When I got home, I piled everything I wanted into the back of the Bronco and the trailer in boxes, including my silly shoe collection and my photograph books filled with pictures of my mom and Roy and my brother Charlie and his family that I had spent hours putting together.

      I wrapped up my grandmother’s teacup collection, my mother’s china, and a set of tiles with a fruit bowl painted on them. I grabbed a violin I’d hidden way back in my closet that made tears burn down my cheeks like a mini-fountain, a gold necklace with a dolphin that my father gave me two weeks before he died of a heart attack when I was twelve and, at midnight, with that moon as bright as the blazes, I left Chicago.

      I stopped by my mother’s grave and dropped tears all over her gravestone, the night dark and silky but not creepy there in the cemetery, then drove from Chicago, Illinois, toward Oregon wearing my dolphin necklace. Charlie lives in Portland, Oregon.

      Me and my insanity drove off. Together. As one. I shook my brain, my nervous breakdown making me nervous.

      I wondered if there were anger management classes in Portland?

      But who cares, I yelled out loud. “Who cares?” Life was currently quite sucky so I yelled, “Sucky! Sucky!” In fact, I might give up on it altogether and drive my ole engine-grinding, muffler-roaring, growling Bronco straight to the west coast and make a permanent dive right into the ocean. Headfirst.

      CHAPTER 2

      Although my grief for my mother covered me like the wings of a thousand black crows for the initial six days of my journey, by the seventh day I felt those wings lifting me up for the first time since her death. I talked to her in the car, pretending she was sitting right by me. We had stimulating conversations and we laughed a lot. She had cheered my speech to the advertising schmucks and revealed that she thought my retaliation against Slick Dick was justified.

      I stopped in the small town of Weltana because I liked the trees and it was raining when I arrived.

      I love rain.

      I rolled my growling Bronco to a stop off the side of the highway in front of a little yellow building with green trim. It was called The Opera Man’s Café. The walls inside were made of logs. A fire burned in the brick fireplace and a chef with a white braid flipped pancakes two feet up into the air and sung along at full throttle with Bocelli on CD. Little white lights twinkled from the open rafters over long wood tables.

      When my pancakes arrived I smothered them in maple syrup and butter, the way I liked them; the way I have not eaten them in twelve years because that would have driven me into a downward emotional spiral into hell.

      During those years I craved pancakes so much I would sometimes dream of them in the approximately four hours of sleep I snatched each night when my caffeine fix and whacked-out stress level would soften to a dull roar in my head or when I passed out from one too many drinks.

      I dreamed about those pancakes and hot syrup far more than I dreamed of sex.

      Come to think of it, I rarely dreamed about sex.

      Which tells you something about me.

      So I poured the syrup on until it formed little lakes and started in on my pancakes in that cozy café under the fir trees in the foothills of Mount Hood