Dirty Laundry, Clean House

I was chatting on the phone the other day with an old buddy, someone I haven’t seen for at least eight years. Lives change, people drift apart, you know how it is. About an hour and a half into this gossip-a-thon, I remembered the reason why this friend and I drifted apart. All we ever did together was talk about other people. Frankly, it made me feel dirty. But I couldn’t get off the phone.

This next part sounds terribly selfish, and it probably was. But hear me out. The other thing I remembered about this old friend is that I used to call her when I had housework to do. I am not what you’d call a natural housekeeper. I get the work done all right, but I need distractions while I do it. When I was fourteen and had to clean my room, a kick-ass Hall and Oates album would do the trick. (Don’t judge, only love.) As a young mother, it was Phil Donahue or early, pre-Optifast Oprah. (I never quite stooped to the level of Jerry Springer.)

But back when this gal and I were running with the same crowd, I’d think nothing of bellying up to a full sink of dirty dishes with a 3M scrubby sponge in one hand, a casserole that looked like the underside of an off-road four-wheeler in the other, and the telephone receiver wedged under my chin. My friend would get the ball rolling by dishing about her co-workers, and we’d yammer on, all up in everybody’s business, as they say. Next thing I knew, it would be a couple of hours later. When I hung up the phone, I had a sparkling sink, folded laundry, a crick in my neck, and a nasty case of ring around the karma. Take it from somebody who knows, you can try scrubbing, you can try soaking, you can try spraying. But really, the only thing that’s going to clean your soul in those hard-to-reach problem areas is minding your own business.

Still, during this recent conversation, I found myself wondering—while also listening raptly and shaking out the lint trap—“Is it technically considered gossip if I haven’t the slightest idea who she is talking about? I mean, come on. She’s living in a different state, with a whole new set of dysfunctional friends, colleagues, and neighbors. Anonymous accounts of workaday backstabbing, tenuous marital emotional underpinnings, and bedroom scandals galore, starring people I will never meet—this could be a golden opportunity. The residents of this faraway South Carolina suburb will unknowingly offer their daily lives to entertain and horrify, thrill, and enthrall me as my own personal soap opera.”

I have to tell you, I was of two minds. They sounded like this: Ick! Yes. Ick! Yes. I was on the road to hell, paved with highly polished linoleum floors and salacious tittle-tattle. Ultimately, my prurience gave in to shame—but that doesn’t mean I sacrificed domestic sanitation. These days, it’s most often an audio book or some talk radio that gets me through my chores. Jim Dale’s seventeen-cassette unabridged performance of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix was enough to empty a five-year accumulation of trash out my garage, organize my tool shed, and sweep approximately three quarts of mice poops out of my attic. At least I think they were mice poops. I don’t remember spilling any caraway seeds up there.

That’s not to say my life is now gossip-free. The appetite for this kind of dirt is encoded in the human genome. These days, however, I prefer to focus on people who are well compensated for their humiliation. Soap-opera actresses, pop divas, celebutantes, Larry King. In June, a photojournalists’ exhibition in New York featured pictures of famous people’s garbage bins. “Found objects,” they call ’em in the art world. The CNN interviewer’s receptacle contained adult undergarments, and I’m not talking about suspenders worn beneath a suit coat. King’s people denied the Man-Huggies were his. Maybe it was a prank by one of his eleventy ex-wives. Whatever. The point is, no matter what mortifying things people say about Larry King, he’s still paid millions to yak on TV. In his world, a dash of notoriety is just the thing to jack up your ratings. When a tabloid ran a photo of Kirstie Alley bent over while putting groceries in her SUV’s trunk, and captioned it “Kirstie Loads Up Her Back End,” she parlayed the attention to land a TV series, a book contract, and a Jenny Craig endorsement deal. When we gossip about people like that, we’re doing them a favor. Guilt doesn’t even enter into it. Ask Katie Holmes.