Pie-Hole

by Rebecca Schoenkopf

Oh, Pie. Every time I’m stuck for a column, there you are, gums a-flappin’, just begging for one right to the kisser. Don’t get me wrong: my brother-in-law is a terrific brother-in-law. Twenty years after they met, he’s in love with my sister; he’s a good dad to my tiny niecelets; he’s providing for his family; and he hasn’t once kicked me the hell out of his house, even when I’ve really been asking for it. But sweet Jesus, as long as you keep it up with the Fox News, you will force me to make you the butt of these columns!

It is not nice of the five of us to gang up on my brother-in-law, Pie. (My sister is in the kitchen, washing dishes, where she belongs.) We are in his home, sitting on his couches, having eaten a lovely dinner my sister made for us: Tina and Gerry, her friends from high school all those decades before, who’ve driven down from T.O.; Tina’s friend Irene, who lives in San Diego too and has come over to make some new pals; David, the love of my sister’s life, the man who would have been her husband if he weren’t a damned homosexual, and who now is a librarian, which is even sexier than being a damned homosexual. The children are not ganging up on Pie, but they are there too: the baby niecelets (not so baby now); my gangling son; and Tina and Jerry’s new foster lovebug, Johnny, who is three and such a lovebug as you’ve never seen before, unless you happen to have known my own son at that sweet lovebug age. Remember that? How sweet he was, before the armpit hair? Of course you do. You could never forget it!

We are talking about Obama, Tina and Gerry and Irene and me (I guess David is in the kitchen too), and Irene is saying it is good to hear people loving him, because her friends are busy hatin’ from the left, and I have got some wine in me and am ’splaining at length about my Nader votes, and how I will never leave Mr. Obama for being a little too centrist, because the last time I did that, well, look what happened! My goodness, was I wrong! Drill away, Mr. Obama! Do what you got to do!

And then Pie stumbles in, a little wine in him too, and asks what lives Obama has saved. Which hadn’t been the question at all, of course, but doubtless it is on Talk Radio. Well ... he didn’t go to war with Russia? Or Iran? I guess? But the real answer is, of course: shut up. And then we are on how good it is to have people in charge of the government who know what the fuck they are doing with it, and what good changes in the lives of actual people almost immediately commence. Dig it: There are people in charge at Health and Human Services who actually believe in health and human services, and there are people at the Department of Agriculture who actually believe in agriculture, and so immediately after Hopey’s coronation, a change went into effect that has WIC (a supplemental food program for women, infants and children) distributing fresh fruits and vegetables in addition to its traditional omelet fixin’s of milk, eggs, butter and government cheese. That is good for women, infants and children! Three of whom are my sister and her whopping big girls!

the first food stamps

Pie had been out of work a long time in this lousy economy (even such an excellent salesman of construction equipment as my brother-in-law was going to get hosed), and his family not only got welfare, and Medi-Cal, but also a positively princely amount of food stamps (almost $700 a month!) in addition to all the omelets they could eat, courtesy of WIC. Now he is working again, and supporting his family, and it is very excellent, but Sarah and I are both sad that they don’t get food stamps anymore, due to richness. Food stamps are awesome.

(Food stamp note, courtesy of my sister: every grocery store she went to, checkers sneered at or rolled their eyes at her EBT debit card—not that she cared except to notice it, fuck them anyway—except at Trader Joe’s. Not once, never, did the checkers at Trader’s do anything but smile and sing along with the punk rock songs on the sound system. Hooray once again for Trader Joe’s!)

And there we all are, and the conversation turns to health care, and Pie asks “What’s in it for me?” and says over and over that the government has “a gun to my head” in forcing him to buy healthcare for his family. Man, those Republican talking points work, don’t they? Pie with a gun to his head! And no doubt something rammed down his throat! And I yell at him that the girls are on Medi-Cal, so Jesus Christ! And he says they aren’t, because they only were last year.

And we try to explain why there has to be a mandate, but Pie is beyond all hearing because of guns and heads and things rammed down throats, and when Irene, who is a little person, mentions that she can’t buy insurance because nobody is going to willingly cover a person with pre-existing dwarfism, he doesn’t hear that either because now he is talking about the IRS. Gerry talks about taxpayers having to cover ER visits by the uninsured, and Pie takes exception: “I’ve got a $400 doctor bill for Sadie in there right now!” and he still doesn’t understand how this would help.

(And I take Pie’s side, because every time I go to the ER—every year or two for some various weird thing—I pay every dime of the ER bill, which is roughly five times what they charge the insurance companies, and hell yeah I pay it. But still, Pie: What’s in it for you? Health insurance for your babies and no more $400 bills! Use your cabeza, hermano-in-law!)

And my sister comes in, having finished the dishes, and asks with eyes narrowed what her husband’s been saying, and I as always am ready to tattle. “He wants to cut welfare even though you were on it!” I tell on him—I have excised from this account our discussion of Meg Whitman and her scapegoating of welfare queens like it’s 1986 or something and Pie’s fairly reasonable (for him) solution of cutting welfare by, say, half and making recipients work for it. They did try to make Sarah work for it: she went to Welfare Camp, every day, punching the clock looking for a job that wasn’t there. (Had there been a job, any job anywhere in the entire universe of jobs, Sarah would have gotten it. She is the kind of woman you take one look at and immediately hire. In fact, the woman in charge of her welfare region was looking into finding funding to hire Sarah for her own self. Sarah is magic!)

And I know that the time for ganging up on Pie is over, because Sarah will take care of it all on her own. She will let him know what’s what! Or not! She will probably just look at him with evil eyes, like an Albertson’s checker facing down a welfare queen.

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