Medium Raw

This, I have come to understand, is the way of the world. To resist is to stand against the hurricane. Bend (preferably at the hip, ass-cheeks proffered). Or break.

But perhaps you need more visceral evidence of the Apocalypse: Rachael Ray sent me a fruit basket. So I stopped saying mean things about her. It’s that easy with me now. Really. An unsolicited gesture of kindness and I have a very hard time being mean. It would seem…ungrateful. Churlish. To be nasty to someone after they sent you a gift of fruit doesn’t fit my somewhat distorted view of myself as secretly a gentleman. Rachael was shrewd about that.

Others have taken a more…confrontational approach.

So, it’s the party following the Julie & Julia premiere, and I’m standing there by the end of the buffet, sipping a martini with Ottavia, the woman I’d married in 2007, and two friends, when I feel somebody touching me. There’s a hand under my jacket and running up my back and I instantly assume this must be somebody I know really well to touch me in this way—particularly in front of my wife. Ottavia has had a couple of years of mixed martial arts training by now, and the last time a female fan was demonstrative in this way, she leaned over, grabbed her wrist, and said something along the lines of “If you don’t take your hands off my husband, I’m going to smash your fucking face in.” (In fact, I remember that those were her words exactly. Also, that this was not an idle threat.)

In that peculiar slow motion one experiences in car wrecks, in the brief second or so it took for me to turn, I recall that particularly frightening detail: my wife’s expression, significant in that it was frozen into a rictus of a grin, paralyzed with a look I’d never seen before. What could be standing behind me that would put this unusual expression on my wife’s face—make her freeze like that—a deer in the headlights?

I turned to find myself staring into the face of Sandra Lee. Ordinarily by now, a woman’s hand up my back, Ottavia would have been across the table with a flying tomahawk chop to the top of the skull—or a vicious elbow to the thorax—followed immediately by a left-right combination and a side kick to the jaw as her victim was on the way to the floor. But no. Such are the strange and terrible powers of television’s Queen of Semi-Homemade that we, both of us, stood there like hypnotized chickens. The fact that Sandra was standing next to New York’s attorney general—and likely next governor—Andrew Cuomo (her boyfriend), added, I thought, an implied menace.

“You’ve been a bad boy,” Sandra was saying, perhaps referring to casual comments I may or may not have made, in which I may have suggested she was the “hellspawn of Betty Crocker and Charles Manson.” The words “pure evil” might have come up as well. It is alleged that the words “war crimes” might also have been used by me—in reference to some of Sandra’s more notorious offerings, like her “Kwanzaa Cake.” Right now, I have no contemporaneous recollection of those comments.

Nor do I have any recollection of how I responded to the feel of Sandra’s icy, predatory claws working their way up my spine and around my hips—like some terrifying alien mandibles, probing for a soft spot before plunging deep into the soft goo of my kidneys or liver. Looking back, I imagine myself doing that Ralph Kramden thing: “Homina homina homina…”

Actually…no. It was closer to Cape Fear. Gregory Peck and family mesmerized by the evil Robert Mitchum—standing there in the doorway—a barely veiled menace just skirting the boundaries of acceptable behavior; with every ticking second, you’re thinking, “Can I call the police…now?…How about…now?” The menacing would-be intruder not yet crossing the line but letting you know, “I can come in any time I want.”

She was probing below my kidney area now, looking my wife directly in the eyes while doing it, too, and saying, “No love handles”—not exactly true, but I don’t think accurate meat grading was the point of the exercise. She was letting my wife—and, by extension, me—know that like Mitchum in Cape Fear

, she could walk right into our living room at any time and do to us whatever unholy and awful things she wished, and there was nothing we could do about it.

“Are your ears red yet?” were her final words as she gave one of my lobes a tug. Then, having had her way with me, she moved on. She’d made her point.

It’s Sandra Lee’s world. It’s Rachael’s world. Me? You? We’re just living in it.

If this wasn’t clear to me then, after Aunt Sandy had turned me inside out, left me shaken and husked, a shell of a man, like the remains of a lobster dinner, it became absolutely clear just last week, when Scripps Howard, the parent company of Food Network, outbid-ding Rupert Murdoch’s NewsCorp, bought my network, the Travel Channel—for nearly a billion dollars, putting me right back on Maggie’s farm again, so to speak.