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carts. There were pieces missing from it, too, like the silverware basket, which I’d replaced with a plastic salad strainer that worked fine. It wasn’t all that quiet when it ran, either; in fact the sound was so loud that houseguests had once mistaken it for a helicopter SWAT team. Also, each cycle seemed to take twenty years and all the glasses came out afterward coated in some kind of calcified film. All the same, though, I would never have thought to replace it if Lary hadn’t called and got me all convinced that a new dishwasher would change my life. “All right,” I told him. “Get it for me and I’ll pay you back.”
    Two entire days went by before I called him to politely inquire as to its whereabouts. “Where the hell is my goddamn dishwasher, you booger-eating loser?” I shrieked at him. I’d just spent the last forty-eight hours entertaining dishwasher fantasies in which I wore pedal-pushers, served appetizers from a tray, and accepted everyone’s compliments on how sparkly all my barware was. Plus, I’d just seen a commercial for that same brand dishwasher that demonstrated its abilities, the best being that it could disintegrate an entire three-layer birthday cake with one cycle.
    “I lost it,” he said, and he sounded serious . I mean, normally he’d have any number of bizarre reasons at the ready for flaking on me. For instance, he once forgot to feed my dog and told me it was because he was forced to copulate with aliens to save the world. It just wasn’t like Lary to not put any effort into lying to me. “Really, where is it?” I asked.
    “Really, I lost it,” he kept telling me. “It fell off the back of my truck.”
    “No, really.”
    “Really.”
    “No, seriously.”
    “Seriously.”
    There was a full fifteen minutes of this before I finally believed him, at which point, of course, I had to detonate. ‘What the hell do you mean it fell off your truck? What kind of extra-chromosome bottom-feeding fool loses a dishwasher?” I ranted, the whole while slowly coming to grips with the fact that I was now stuck with my original dented-ass dishwasher that sounds like a leaf blower and doesn’t disintegrate birthday cakes, and somehow that just made my life a lot less enjoyable all of a sudden.
    Here I was, starting to envision something new and different that offers all kinds of added excitement to my life, and then it gets pulled out from under me like a bad parlor trick, and suddenly my otherwise perfectly fine life up to then seems like a total turd pellet. It took me awhile, as I put my grit-covered glasses away in the cupboard, to re-appreciate my rusty wreck dishwasher with all its improvised parts. In the end the thing still works perfectly fine. Everything does. As with anything, pieces will always break and be replaced. None of us ever leave here whole, or not outwardly anyway. Everywhere you look are the patched up and put together, not new, but not uninteresting nonetheless. In the end, the very last thing it does is make life less enjoyable, and I am perfectly fine with that.

A Tapeworm and Other Parasites
    B ILL WAS NOT at all very sympathetic about my tapeworm. He was too busy bitching about how prostitution was the only way to make money in Costa Rica. Seeing as how he was five hundred years old with bad eyes and gout (whatever that is), I had to tell him straight out that I doubted he could get much for his body, especially since there were so many pretty whores in Quepos for him to compete with, and most of them hanging out right there at his pensione bar.
    He rolled his big, bad eyes and wondered again how I could be my mother’s daughter. When he met my mother, he was living in his car. They met at a dusty auction house in Chula Vista, California, where they’d haggled over a box of mostly broken stuff. In the end my mother outbid him.
    “Good fight,” he said, his cigarette hanging loosely from his lips like a little snapped appendage. “I’ll buy half off