Death by Cheapness

Last week my grandfather set off the fire alarm in his Florida apartment complex at 11 PM. That very same night, in New York City, I had a shamanic vision. It was all sparks, licking flames, haze, and then oblivion.

Maybe you think I’m speaking metaphorically about an orgasm. If so, you’ve obviously never had sex with me. I’m talking about death. I think I now know how I am going to die. Strike the tragically fated hot air balloon chase scene from the script!

“Death isn’t funny! God forbid,” my mother and sister exclaim simultaneously from different geographic locations. Don’t worry ladies, all 223,594* of my readers are knocking on wood right this minute.

* Oddly enough, this is the same exact same number of people who are currently following Rachel Maddow on Twitter. Coincidence? Not unless you consider it coincidental that I copied the number directly from her Twitter page.

The circumstances of my demise will be tragically comical. And the shame of it is, I’ll be dead. So I won’t even have the opportunity to laugh about it. I’ll succumb to conditions to which I’m genetically predisposed: cheapness and idiocy.

But I’ve gotten ahead of myself. Let me start from the beginning. As the French would say, le source. As I would say, ma’ crazy Indalian family.

One of the benefits to being a part of an unwieldy familial tribe of colored folks, is that you spend a good deal of your formative years in a multigenerational household. Whether it’s grandparents moving in—Heeeyyy, First Granny Marian Robinson!—or unmarried children returning home to “regroup”—unemployed graduates, in the house! [Pun. Ha.]—you have ample time to observe exactly how crazy you’re destined to be.

As far as I can tell, for me this will involve a combination of Prozac, graceless denial of old age, and the slow calcification of long held grudges that remain unaffected by otherwise pervasive memory loss. Party on, Wayne! Party on, Garth.

For most Indians in the U.S., the three-generations-under-one-roof arrangement is a non-negotiable cultural expectation. Just ask my “American” (read: non-Indian) mother. There are no loopholes in the Indian Intergenerational Responsibility contract. Believe me, she looked. Like those AIG bonuses, the agreement is ironclad.

Italian-Americans, on the other hand, go through an elaborate and arduous linguistic and emotional tug-of-war. This goes on for at least two decades, since all that olive oil and red wine allows them to live a very long time. In the Italian cultural clan, children and aging parents are bound by blood, guilt, and doublespeak. There is a lot of hand-wringing, insistence, and a circular dialogue that goes something like:

Come live with us (but please don’t).

Don’t worry we’re fine (but you should worry).

Please move closer (oh god don’t move closer).

No no! We don’t want to be a burden
(but we kind of do because we created you and love is martyrdom).

I’m not asking again, will you please come and stay?!
(Seriously, last time.)

We’re never moving!
(I bet you a calzone she asks again next week.)

Practically speaking, this just means that Italian grandparents remain in their houses until death, or a hospital social worker, intervenes.

As for the infamous Poppi, he’s permanently relocated to his bachelor pad in Florida in an effort to escape the watchful eye and melodious harangue of his only daughter, my mother. Poppi seems quite pleased with this arrangement; however, it completely upends my intergenerational insanity fieldwork.

If I can’t tell just how off-his-rocker he’s become, then I won’t know what flavor of crazy is in store for Old Age Jana. And if I don’t know that, how will I ever be able to convince my life partner to do the right thing and die before me?

What I do know is that, left to his own devises, Poppi has become what some might call an extreme conservationist. Or what my mother calls a “cheap Sicilian SOB.”

Homeboy reuses paper towels. Fine. We’re in a recession. Some might consider this a thrifty move. Homeboy reuses paper towels after using them to blot excess oil off his daily omelet. (Yes; like what middle school girls do to their pizza.) He blots one day, and then sort of hangs them to dry for the next day’s blotting. Ad infinitum.

Last week he found that his omelet blotters had become so saturated with built up grease that they could no longer serve their oil absorption purpose. (Vomit. I’m vomiting everywhere.) So like any insane old person, he noted this problem, and cooked up a solution. [I’m a pun-demon. It’s beneath me, I know.]

As opposed to throwing away the grease laden paper towels, he decided it would be best to “dry them out first”. What does this even mean? Well, LEMME SHOW YOU SOMETHING! Apparently it meant placing the oil laden paper towels in the microwave, and turning the microwave on.

I’ll take a raging grease fire in the microwave, for $1000, Alex.

Cue: Billowing smoke, Florida-volume fire alarms, and the evacuation of a complex full of folks who’d been asleep since 8 PM.

Fear not. He quelled the flames and doesn’t have a scratch on him. Poppi is in fine form. You can laugh till you cry now. I’ll wait.

Now I know, for certain, that within me lurks a genetic predisposition to be hazardously cheap. And it will be my undoing.

I keep a ledger. Yes; like in the pioneer times. I force The Wife to wash and reuse plastic zip-lock baggies. I pretend it’s because I’m environmentally conscientious. But it’s actually because I become incensed every time I need to fork over $3.99 for another box of 50 snack bags. (I know she throws them away when I’m not looking. I know!) When I heard of Poppi’s microwave fire, I laughed and laughed at the absurdity of it. Then I realized that I reuse greasy parchment paper when I bake cookies. Yes; I, Jana Sikdar, “wipe off” oily parchment paper and save it to reuse. And I reuse it more than once. Between this horrible habit and smoking near my oxygen tank, I don’t know how our apartment is still standing.

“$4.99 for a roll of new Parchment Paper,” I think to myself. “What kind of sucker do they take me for?!” I just rub the grease in before placing the flammable paper into a 325 degree oven. No worries.

If I am already this idiotic and reckless in my stinginess, is there a deep end deep enough to fathom where I’ll be 60 odd years from now? I give myself a decade before I start rinsing and reusing paper towels. Tops.

Decades from now, I’ll say, “My grandfather taught me this trick,” and then toss a couple of greasy paper towels into the microwave for a quick drying. “These have got another month in ’em, at least.”

But I won’t see the microwave grease fire coming, because I will have been too stingy to get new glasses.

My headstone will read:

Here lies Jana.
Like her people before her,
Man, was she cheap.

If heaven exists,
She’s haggling with God for a discount code.

In what ways do you risk life and limb to be preposterously cheap? Tell me your tale. (Poppi and I are always looking for new ways to save a buck.)