I Remember Nothing (9 page)

I had no idea the Monkey Bar meat loaf was going to have my name on it, but when the restaurant opened, there it was, on the menu, Nora’s Meat Loaf. I felt that I had to order it, out of loyalty to myself, and it was exactly as good as it had been at the tasting. I was delighted. What’s more, I had the oddest sense of accomplishment. I somehow felt I’d created this meat loaf, even though I’d had nothing to do with it. I’d
always envied Nellie Melba for her peach, Princess Margherita for her pizza, and Reuben for his sandwich, and now I was sort of one of them. Nora’s Meat Loaf. It was something to remember me by. It wasn’t exactly what I was thinking of back in the day when we used to play a game called “If you could have something named after you, what would it be?” In that period, I’d hoped for a dance step, or a pair of pants. But I was older now, and I was willing to settle for a meat loaf.

By the way, I was not the only person whose name was on the Monkey Bar menu. My friend Louise had a salad named after her. It’s called Louise’s Sunset Salad.

In the next couple of weeks, I got five or six e-mails from friends complimenting me on “my” meat loaf.

Here’s what I did not say in reply:

I said instead:

I was proud. My meat loaf was a huge hit. It was out there working for me, even though I was not: I was just sitting home surfing the Net and wasting entire days thinking about what to do about the living room.

The next time I went to the Monkey Bar, I ordered
the meat loaf again. After all, if I wasn’t ordering the meat loaf, how could I expect anyone else to? But, alarmingly, something had happened to it. Instead of two slabs of meat loaf, there was now just one, and the mushroom sauce was being served on the side. I entered into a conversation about this development with the maître d’, who listened politely and then explained that another customer had suggested that the mushroom sauce be put on the side, so now it was being put on the side. I couldn’t help thinking that I might have been consulted about this change. I gently suggested that a fairly calamitous mistake had been made. I said I was the queen of On the Side, but that this meat loaf was begging for the mushroom sauce to be served right on top of it. The maître d’ promised to think about it.

A couple of weeks passed and I noticed, suddenly, that, like the dogs that did not bark in
The Hound of the Baskervilles
, I had not received any e-mails lately complimenting me on “my” meat loaf. The next time I went to the Monkey Bar, my friend Alessandra was there. After dinner she came over to our table and said, “The meat loaf tastes like a hockey puck.”

I was stunned. I knew the meat loaf was deteriorating, but a hockey puck? I wondered about our friendship. Had Alessandra not noticed my name was on the meat loaf? What if it were truly my meat loaf instead of one that my name had been frivolously attached to without even asking me? It seemed cruel and insensitive on her part.

That was on a Saturday night. On Monday I got an e-mail from my friend Sandy. It said: “Re: Monkey Bar meat loaf. Sue them.”

So I wrote an e-mail to Graydon, quite a long thing saying that while I did not mean to make trouble, I was compelled to tell him that people were talking about the meat loaf, and what they were saying wasn’t good. He e-mailed back to say that they were way ahead of me—they’d just fired the chef and replaced him with the famous Larry Forgione. They’d been unhappy for weeks. The meat loaf was only a symptom.

So Larry Forgione came in and changed the menu and the recipe for the meat loaf. It became a traditional meat loaf, tasty and moist, and while it didn’t seem to have a package of Lipton onion soup mix in it, it truly tasted like home. The mushroom sauce was still there, kind of swirling around on the plate, I don’t know why, because this meat loaf didn’t really call for it. But there it was, the food equivalent of a vestigial tail.

I was relieved. I could relax. My meat loaf had been saved, and now I could order some of the other things on the Monkey Bar menu. One of them was a perfect version of Chasen’s chili, served with a corn muffin. It was so heavenly that I decided to be faithful to it for a while. Eventually I noticed that the meat loaf had been downgraded slightly to a Tuesday night special, but I was too busy practicing monogamy with the chili to worry about the meat loaf.

I am writing this because yesterday I went to the Monkey Bar. It was a Tuesday. On the way there, I
thought I might check up on my meat loaf. I opened the menu, and before I read a word I somehow knew what I was going to see—or rather, what I was not going to see.

My meat loaf was gone.

Louise’s Sunset Salad was still on the regular menu, but Nora’s Meat Loaf was gone.

It had bombed. There was no other way to look at it.

I asked if anyone had mentioned it now that it was gone. I asked if anyone had complained. I asked if anyone had even noticed. No one has. It’s as if it never even happened.

It’s been replaced as the Tuesday special by spaghetti and meatballs. I ordered it, hoping to discover that a grave injustice had been done, but the spaghetti and meatballs were excellent. I made a small suggestion about the consistency of the grated Parmesan cheese that’s served with them, and I just hope someone listens to me.

A few years ago, I stumbled onto something called Scrabble Blitz. It was a four-minute version of Scrabble solitaire, on a Web site called
Games.com
, and I began playing it without a clue that within one day—I am not exaggerating—it would fry my brain. I’m no stranger to this sort of thing: one summer when I was young, I became so addicted to croquet that I had a series of recurrent dreams in which I was holding a croquet mallet and whacking my mother’s head through a wicket.

The same sort of thing happened with Scrabble
Blitz, although my mother, who has been dead for many years, was left out of it. I began having Scrabble dreams in which people turned into letter tiles that danced madly about. I tuned out on conversations and instead thought about how many letters there were in the name of the person I wasn’t listening to. I fell asleep memorizing the two- and three-letter words that distinguish those of us who are hooked on Scrabble from those of you who aren’t. (For instance, while you were not paying attention to Scrabble, the following have become words in the Scrabble dictionary: “qi,” “za,” and “ka.” Don’t ask me what they mean, but my guess is that in the tradition of all such things, they are Indonesian coins. “Luv” is also a word, by the way, as is “suq.”)

Remember that ad, “This is your brain. This is your brain on drugs”? That was me. My brain turned to cheese. I could feel it happening. It was clear that I was becoming more and more scattered, more distracted, more unfocused: I was exhibiting all the symptoms of terminal ADD; I was turning into a teenage boy. I instantly became an expert on how the Internet could alter your brain in a permanent way, and I offered my opinions on this subject at all sorts of places, where, as I recall, no one was particularly interested.

The Scrabble Blitz site was full of other deranged Scrabble Blitzers, who dealt with their addiction by writing comments about it in the Web site chat room during the two-minute break between games, the two-minute
break being a perfect time to log off and stop playing Scrabble Blitz but you didn’t because you were totally hooked and besides you were going to play only one more game, or maybe two. The comments consisted of things like: “I’m an addict, lol” and “I can’t stop playing this ha ha.” My contempt for these comments led me to think I was somehow different from the people who wrote them, but the truth is I wasn’t—I was exactly like them except for the lol’s and the ha ha’s, and even I have used an lol and a ha ha from time to time, though not in a chat room, and most of the time, I hope, ironically, but to be perfectly honest, not every time.

The game of Scrabble Blitz eventually became too much for the Web site. Lag was a huge problem. From time to time, the Scrabble Blitz area would shut down for days, and when it returned, so did all the addicts, full of comments about how they had barely withstood life without the game. I began to get carpal tunnel syndrome from playing—I’m not kidding. I realized I was going to have to kick the habit. I thought about kicking the habit. I promised myself I would. After one more game. After one more day. After one more week. And then, one day, out of the blue, I was saved by what’s known in the insurance business as an act of God:
Games.com
shut down Scrabble Blitz permanently. And that was that. It was gone.

I went back to online Scrabble, a mild and soporific version of the game. I restricted myself to two games a
day—no more. I spent several years wandering from one Scrabble Web site to another—there are several—and recently found my way to a place called
Scrabulous.com
. I’ve been playing on this Web site for just over fifty days—I know because I recently received a congratulatory e-mail from “The Scrabulous Team” on the occasion of my one hundredth game. It crossed my mind when I got the e-mail that even two games a day was too much. But it didn’t stop me from playing: my habit was under control.

But this week, I had a major setback. I went onto the Scrabulous site to play my customary two games, and to my amazement, right there on the entry page, was a chance to play Scrabble Blitz. Only it wasn’t called Scrabble Blitz. It was called Blitz Scrabble. It was back. It was working perfectly. And not only was it back, so were all the people I used to play with, all of them making their sad little jokes about being addicted to the game, followed by lol or ha ha and even an occasional
. I decided to play just one game, or maybe two. An hour later, I was still there. My heart was racing. My brain was once again turning to cheese. I was hooked.

It’s now been five days—five days when I’ve either been playing Blitz Scrabble or thinking about playing Blitz Scrabble. Five days while tiles danced through my head as I fell asleep. Five days of turning into a teenage boy once again. It’s quite clear that there’s only one solution: I am going to have to go to the Parental Controls dial on my computer—I’m sure there is one—and
put
Scrabulous.com
on the Don’t Go There list, or whatever it’s called.

So good-bye. I’m going. I am definitely going.

But first, I’m going to play my last game of Blitz Scrabble. Make that my second-to-last. Or third.

I just got e-mail! I can’t believe it! It’s so great! Here’s my handle. Write me. Who said letter-writing was dead? Were they ever wrong. I’m writing letters like crazy for the first time in years. I come home and ignore all my loved ones and go straight to the computer to make contact with total strangers. And how great is AOL? It’s so easy. It’s so friendly. It’s a community. Wheeeee! I’ve got mail!

Okay, I’m starting to understand—e-mail isn’t letter-writing at all, it’s something else entirely. It was just invented, it was just born, and overnight it turns out to have a form and a set of rules and a language all its own. Not since the printing press. Not since television. It’s revolutionary. It’s life-altering. It’s shorthand. Cut to the chase. Get to the point. It saves so much time. It takes five seconds to accomplish in an e-mail something that takes five minutes on the telephone. The phone requires you to converse, to say things like hello and good-bye, to pretend to some semblance of interest in the person on the other end of the line. Worst of all, the phone occasionally forces you to make actual plans with the people you talk to—to suggest lunch or dinner—even if you have no desire whatsoever to see them. No danger of that with e-mail. E-mail is a whole new way of being friends with people: intimate but not, chatty but not, communicative but not; in short, friends but not. What a breakthrough. How did we ever live without it? I have more to say on this subject, but I have to answer an instant message from someone I almost know.