If there is an unofficial asylum in Los Angeles, it is my apartment building. Now, I know that living in L.A., it is inevitable that I encounter my fair share of oddballs, nutburgers and out-and-out mentals. However, that four of them would occupy the remaining apartments in my complex was a mathematical anomaly that Pythagoras himself couldn't explain. And perhaps that I completed the freaky quintet speaks volumes about me; maybe it would make a good topic for the therapist's couch.

The holiday season is difficult for many people, wherever they live. Last Thanksgiving, my family was scattered to the four winds, vacationing or visiting in-laws. Friends were flying away to visit their own families. Not wishing to intrude, I stoically declined their offers to join them, deciding instead to spend a quiet weekend catching up on my work, reading and renting a few movies. A knock on my door changed all that.

Mirabell was standing there in her usual pink polyester bathrobe and metallic white Air Jordans. Her damp hair flayed in the breeze, the smell of the cheap dye job she had just performed wafting all the way to Burbank. Cranberry Dream splotches dotted her wrinkled forehead. She was sucking on a Lucky Strike like an Electrolux. I watched as the fire consumed half of the cigarette before she pulled it from her crimson lips. When she spoke, none of the smoke came out.

"Whatcha doin' for Thanksgiving, sweetie?" she asked, slowly raising the cigarette back to her mouth like an automaton.

I started to tell her my plans, but she jumped in before I could speak. "The rest of us are pitching in for some Thai. You game?"

The rest of the Lucky Strike transformed into a pillar of ash.

"Thai? On Thanksgiving?"

"Yeah, it was Eric's idea. He says turkey-and-dressing is a sellout to the agricultural industrial complex."

Eric was our resident paranoid. He would only work solitary jobs that required no social interaction because he hated humans so much. The last I had heard, he was a late-night parking booth guy at LAX. He was immature, rude and stupid. In other words, he was a wannabe screenwriter.

"Eric is a moron," I explained. "Why does everyone listen to him? If you are going to do Thanksgiving, it should be traditional. You can do Thai any day." Mirabell shrugged.

An idea came into my head. One of those Martha-Stewart-I-can-do-it ideas that you wish later would have stayed dormant in your cerebral cortex.

"Let's all have Thanksgiving dinner at my apartment!" I beamed. "You can each bring a dish or two, and I'll make the turkey."

Mirabell looked at me a moment, wondering what Eric would think of the plan.

"Don't worry about Eric," I said, winking. Mirabell smiled.

"Well, okay, sweetie," she said as she snuffed out what was left of the Lucky Strike in the ashtray she always kept in her housecoat pocket. "I'll go tell the others." A wisp of smoke trailed from her pocket as she descended the stairs.

Being alone for the holiday must have been bothering me more than I would admit to myself. Deep inside, I was feeling a need to connect with people. That connection would come after all, with my weird little apartment house family. In a really strange Martha Stewart kind of way, I felt complete.

*****

As I sat at our table and stared at my assembled guests, I came to the realization that I should have accepted a friend's offer to fly with them to Boise for the holiday.

We sat around our makeshift banquet table: a square card table slaved to my round dinette. To cover the geometric incongruity, Mirabelle had thrown a couple of festive plastic tablecloths over them, festooned with cartoon turkeys and pilgrims. George sat at the head of the card table; the traditional place for the oldest male. He was a long-retired cameraman whose apartment was full of junk from his days in the big studios. I say "junk" even though much of it was the stuff collectors die for: shooting scripts, costumes, stage equipment, promo posters…God only knew what was in those huge piles. George surely didn't. His penchant for stealing our panties from the laundry room and standing under the stairs when we wore dresses made us girls vote him our "most likely to become a registered sex offender" award three years in a row.

Candy sat to his left. She seemed to be about fifty. No one knew where she got her money, but she had plenty of it. Some ventured she was a trust-fund kid, or maybe the ex-lover of some movie exec or star who was quietly paying off a hefty palimony award. My own opinion was that she was living off the settlement from a lawsuit received after the dentist left the nitrous oxide on a little too long. We called her The Toy Lady because every room in her house was filled with toys. Toy boxes full of games, puzzles, radio-controlled cars, dolls, rubber dinosaurs, stuffed animals, Smurfs…it was a veritable Toys-R-Us. Each room was decorated as a child's room, each with a different theme. This wouldn't be unusual if it hadn't been for the fact that Candy had no children, and none ever visited. We were surprised she had come; she was still recovering from a recent hysterectomy. But she seemed rested and in good spirits, ready like the rest of us to partake in our little feast.

Candy brought the Ambrosia salad: institutional green. Very traditional. Mirabell provided the cornbread dressing and a green bean salad, both homemade. They looked great, but the dressing smelled like cigarette smoke. George donated both a pumpkin and pecan pie, but seemed a little too eager to take out the whipped cream and spray them down. Eric brought a tray of microwavable dinner rolls and a dusty can of cranberry sauce. And I provided the piece de resistance: a fourteen-pound Butterball that I actually cooked in Candy's oven because mine didn't work. With everything in place, we looked around at each other, wondering what to do next.

"I'll say the blessing," Candy volunteered, breaking the ice.

A blessing. Very nice and traditional. Candy's sermon ended about twenty minutes later. She thanked God, her parents, our parents, the saints, and the angels; she asked God to protect her, us, and the Dali Lama; she blessed the farmers who grew our food, and she forgave the man who had killed our turkey. She showed amazing concentration, never breaking stride during George's snoring or Eric's frequent coughing, sighing, or "Jeezes."

"Amen!" Eric finally shouted during a lull in the soliloquy, putting an end to it.

"That was nice, Candy. Now let's eat!" I added, grabbing the big spoon for the dressing. Someone elbowed George awake and we soon had our plates full and were doing some serious eating.

I looked around at my happy guests. The disaster I had worried about had not materialized. The dinner would be just like the millions of others going on that day across the country. Martha Stewart would be proud of me.

"Oh," Candy said as she reached around to her oversized purse hanging on the back of her chair. "While I have you all together, now would be a good time to share this with you." She turned back to us and plopped a photograph down on the table, right next to her Ambrosia salad. But it wasn't just any photograph. It was a 2400 x 1200 dots-per-inch, high-resolution digital 8 x 11 printed on high-gloss Kodak photo paper photograph. We all craned our necks to get a better look.

I couldn't make out what it was. It was just a mass of non-descript pink glop lying in a stainless steel specimen tray. Eric asked first.

"What the hell is it?"

"My uterus," Candy replied matter-of-factly, as if we all should have known.

It was one of those great moments. A moment in which hopelessly poor taste collides with incredibly bad timing. The kind of moment that can only be created by a person whose cone of reality is well short of a full dip.

"Your what?" I asked, hoping that I had heard wrong. Surely I had; she must be telling us about some new kind of sushi.

"My uterus." A fork clinked onto its plate. George swallowed loudly; a great gulpy swallow of nothing but air.

"This dark stuff here," Candy went on to explain as she held up the photo and pointed, "is the diseased part. See?" She panned the photo around so we could all get a good look. I found myself staring at the image, along with everyone else. The think looked vaguely familiar, like something I had seen in some junior high school hygiene film.

Eric chuckled and went back to his meal. "So what do we care about your diseased plumbing?" he asked coldly as he tore off a piece of dinner roll and stuffed it into his face. It was the question Candy had been waiting for.

She launched into a diatribe about health care, insurance companies, angels, saints, the government, Area 51, the Dali Lama, our parents and a Free Tibet. She concluded with a mini-discourse on California law which doesn't allow a patient to retain their old parts, like the mechanics give you after they work on your car. However, hospitals offer a service in which they supply you with a photograph of your old parts, for insurance purposes, your family album, or to gross out your dinner guests.

I was sitting there with my mouth hanging open, not knowing quite what to do next. Mirabell and George were looking at me for leadership.

Eric came to my rescue. Sort of. "So how do you know it's your uterus?" he challenged, plopping some more three-year-old cranberry sauce onto his turkey. "I mean, they could just use that same photo over and over, and none of you would ever know the difference."

"But it has my name on it," Candy explained, holding up the photo toward the rest of us and pointing. "And it's dated, too." Emblazoned across the bottom in big yellow digital letters was CANDACE CARLISLE - 2002/NOV/01.

Eric rolled his eyes. "Like that isn't easy to change in a computer."

A look of absolute loss filled Candy's face as she turned the photo around and mourned her now unaccounted-for uterus.

"They probably harvested some other stuff while they were in there," Eric goaded. "Does your back hurt?" He reached around and scratched his own.

"Uh, well…yeah. A little."

Eric nodded. "Probably a kidney. Maybe some bone marrow. Sold them to an Indonesian black market organ dealer. Maybe a piece of your spleen, too; spleen is sold in Hong Kong as an aphrodisiac."

I calculated quickly just where Eric's shins would be among the eight. My platform heel struck home with a resounding, hollow thunk. Eric let out a Shirley Temple girlie yelp. With it came a kaleidoscope of colors as he spat out a mouthful of food onto Mirabell's green bean salad.

"Hey, ya little bastard," Mirabell snarled, never a big fan of Eric, "Spit on your own damn dish!" She moved the green beans out of the way while Eric coughed and gagged. George reached over and slapped him squarely between the shoulder blades.

"Candy," I said quietly, like one speaks to a mouth-foaming dog, "why don't you show us a little later?" I smiled and nodded.

"Well, all right," she agreed, placing the photo back into her purse. She grimaced as she twisted into her missing kidney.

"And don't listen to Eric," I said, looking over at him as he rubbed his shin. His watery eyes watched closely. He knew he was still within my striking range. "He's just goofing with you about the organ harvesting. There's no such thing." I shot Eric a look.

"Yeah, Candy," he wheezed. "I'm just kidding. No one took any organs from you." He looked at me for approval. I gave him an I'll-let-you-live-for-now look.

Candy put up her photo and turned back to her food. Having no uterus at which to gaze, our appetites soon returned and everyone was munching away quietly. "Oh, I forgot the gravy," I said, remembering the saucepan on the stove. I filled a gravy boat and returned to the table.

"What kind of gravy is that?" Eric asked. The pain had left his face.

"Giblet," I replied in my best Martha Stewart tone.

"Giblet?" Eric asked. "What's a giblet?"

"Kidneys, liver…" I began to explain. Simultaneously, we all looked at Candy.

Tears welled in her eyes. A huge smile filled Eric's face.

"So that's where they went…" he added, snickering.

*****

They say this holiday is a time for thoughtful, prayerful thanks. A time to gather around friends and family to find one's center again after a long and crazy year. But this is not true.

This holiday is meant to see if a hundred-and-fifty pound man will fall from a second-floor balcony at the same rate as a plate full of green bean salad.

A physics lesson.

That's what we were about to do with Eric, who decided wisely that discretion is the better part of valor and split before we tossed him over the edge. We aren't barbarians, though; we let him load a couple of paper plates with food before we sent him out into the elements. We could see him down in the courtyard, dejectedly munching with a plastic fork while we feasted in my apartment.

In my closet, I found a nice frame I wasn't using for Candy's uterus photo, and we put it in there. She decided she'd hang it in her kitchen. Seeing as it was a time for getting along, we didn't question her decision.

We were just hoping that she'd delay her hemorrhoidectomy until after the 4th of July picnic.

Finis

Copyright 2002, 2004 - David L. Kilpatrick

All Rights Reserved. No duplication or use without express written consent of the author.