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most embarrassing person in the world.
    To begin with, there were the little absurdist poems that he wrote about how much he loved my mother, and what he would do
if she were suddenly transformed into something other than herself, something inanimate usually, like a toaster or a grape—
    The Woman I Love Is A Grape (For The Purposes Of This Poem)
By Victor Lipscomb
    If she were a grape and I was still an ape
    Yd wait for days and try to think of some way
    Not to eat her, to reanimate her
    But if I had to, I'd be glad to
    Because Emma is so sweet.
    For our enjoyment, he taped these poems to the fridge, like a first-grader would his watercolors.
    Then there was his music, of course, the awful songs Dr. Vic always listened to in his car and in his study, stuff like "Seasons
in the Sun" and "Dreamweaver"; songs that were so damned impossible to stop singing to yourself they were like dippy little
Post-it Notes pasted to the inside of your skull, and until the glue dried up and the note fell off, there was nothing you
could do to defend yourself against the insipid, endless trickling of the Dreamweaver's synthesizer, or to keep from chanting,
helplessly, over and over again, "We had joy, we had fun, we had seasons in the sun."
    And Dr. Vic talked to his crossword puzzles; every time he found the answer "Yoko," or "Ono," he cried out, "There she is
again!" like he was in a bingo parlor; and when he poured wine for my mother, he stood with a dish towel over his wrist and
twirled the end of an invisible mustache while he waited for her to nod; and in restaurants, Dr. Vic liked to hand his credit
card to the cashier and make an introduction, "Peter: Paul, Paul: Peter"; and finally—and I thought, most tellingly of all—there
were the utility pants he wore, which drooped from the weight of all the hard candies and dog treats that he stuffed in the
tiny pockets, so that much of the time he walked around with one hand holding up his belt, like a goddamned clown.
    There was a horrifying optimism in everything he did, which struck me as completely false, even as I knew that he could not
be more sincere—that he was, really, incapable of insincerity. Everything about him—his clomping steps, his bright, solid-colored
L.L. Bean shirts, the deflated tube of a belly that hung over his belt—testified to this irrefutable fact.
    Dr. Vic could be wounded, but he could not he discouraged. When he told me that all of this was "a life passage," I could
see in his eyes that he was actually imagining some abstract tunnel in his own mind, with a bright light at the end, and the
sound of chirping birds and jingling ice cream trucks.
    Perhaps there was nothing more at the heart of my dislike for my mother's fiance than simple incredulity. I was the son of
a single mother. I had lived in neighborhoods where ice cream trucks didn't go. It seemed to me that good will could only
carry a person so far, and after that, you were on your own.
    How this tenet translated into my current sabotage campaign was not completely clear even to me, but I knew this was not the
time for hesitation, or half measures.
    In the pantry freezer I retrieved the small plastic bag hidden under a mound of ice behind a stack of swordfish steaks. I
slipped on an oven mitt and herded the Laddies into the front yard and down to the meadow that lay a few hundred yards west
of the house. Well trained by weeks of practice, the two Pekinese bolted forward in full play mode. They dashed ahead and
then dashed back to implore me to hurry up. Their entire hind ends wagged with enthusiasm.
    "Okay, okay," I said, and pulled one of the frozen turds out of the bag and hurled it across the field. The Laddies tore after
the soaring brown lump, disappearing in a wake of trembling blue bonnets.
    The notion that there was anything cruel about teaching my prospective stepfather's dogs to fetch their own feces, or that
there was something more than a little demented about the trouble that I had gone