Poor slob

Laurie
Poor slob
Starbucks, May 12, 2007

I am putting on makeup. Richard is on the floor outside the bathroom, his head resting on a mound of towels, his bare feet on the wall, when he asks what my mother said the day I pushed her chair to Columbus Circle. We move to the livingroom and sit on the couch.

“She called you a ‘poor slob’.”

He laughs. “That’s not so bad.”

“How can it not be bad, a sentence with poor and slob in it?”

“The expression is a bit ironic, sweetie.” He pronounces the t sharp.”

“There is no irony in my family. I do not come from a family of ironists. We’re buffoons and barbarians.”

“Exactly, poor slobs. The phrase comes from another time. It’s pity verging on empathy. You are grudgingly identifying with the person. You don’t want to be them, but you can almost see yourself in their place.” He touches my knee. “Let’s look it up.”

We do, and he’s right. “The Next Poor Slob is the next software developer working on your project,” a Google entry reads. Another is from Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Holly Golightly’s speech to her rain-soaked cat: “Poor slob! Poor slob without a name! The way I see it I haven't got the right to give him one. We don't belong to each other. We just took up one day . . .” A third entry reads: “Why would some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best that he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece?”

“I think the phrase went into you because it rings true,” Richard says. “I do have a tendency toward self-pity. It’s comforting to set a low bar for yourself, like my mum saying, ‘You don’t have to go to school. Better to limit your expectations.’ It’s comforting and infuriating. I don’t have a lot of money. I can’t get any job I want. Your mother was saying I’m not worthy of you.”

“She was saying I can’t do better than a poor slob because that’s what I am. She was saying you’re a poor slob for loving me.”

“Yes, maybe, but the next poor slob suggests a line, and we are all in the line. There is no getting off.”

Richard is lithe and boyish at fifty-six, and he smells like fresh laundry, but we aren’t young, whether or not we know it. He is a type 1, insulin dependent diabetic. Every two days, he inserts a catheter into his abdomen that’s attached to a pump delivering insulin. So far there aren’t complications, but they are inevitable. I see my mother on a line, looking out for snorting horses that could step on her. The line is getting longer, and she is getting smaller.