All That Jazz : I gave up martinis. I smiled instead

I awoke one morning with a big grin, which is not the way I usually greet the day, and my wife asked suspiciously, “What’ve you been up to?”

“I haven’t had time to be up to anything,” I said.

“You never smile in the morning. What were you dreaming?”

The question was meant to determine if I had spent the night running dream-naked through a field of erotic fantasies.

“The usual,” I said. “A giant spider that looked vaguely like my mother eating my feet off.”

“Nothing new there,” she said.

The grin was intended to manage stress. It was my newest attack on tension, a restructuring of old attitudes. A smile a day for life.

I smiled first thing in the morning to get it the hell out of the way. It would be uncharacteristic of me to smile later, at work. They’d make me take a urine test.

The morning-smile therapy is rooted in a conversation I had with psychologists Edward and Marjory Zerin of Westlake Village.

I met with them for a column on stress in the workplace. Hatred and jealousy down at the old potato chip plant. Fear and loathing at the word processor.

They offer management seminars to employers so they can recognize and control stress among us little people. In lieu of money, a cheerful word. Hi, boys and girls!

After talking to the Zerins for a while, however, I realized I liked stress on the job. Tension hones the writer. Fear keeps him lean. Show me a reporter with a smile, and I’ll show you a reporter whose brain has just imploded.

But then the Zerins pointed out the high cost of stress: alcoholism, drug addiction, job loss, sexual impotency, divorce, child-abandonment, car breakdown, acne, suicide and a terrible tendency to seek false relief by voting Republican.

“These are the six distress personality types,” Edward Zerin said.

He unrolled a chart with six little cartoon faces in six little sections of a circle. Each little face wore an expression meant to convey the face’s personality type: hostile, vengeful, fearful, inadequate, rejected and insecure.

As I studied the chart, it hit me. I was all of them.

“We determine individually whether we are going to make our circumstances worse than they actually are or react with flexibility,” Marjory Zerin said. “It’s up to us.”

I came away determined to smile more as evidence of an attitude shift.

“I don’t trust it,” my wife said.

“You don’t trust what?”

“You smiling.”

“Have faith,” I said, the tiny corners of my mouth upturned.

I felt like a combination of Billy Graham and Nancy Reagan.

“There’s trouble ahead,” my wife said.

I don’t blame her for being suspicious. She’s never forgotten the doctor who suggested that I deal with stress by drinking two martinis a day.

I extrapolated that into meaning that, when stress intensified, I should increase the treatment proportionately.

Chaos.

“You were better with stress,” she said.

I gave up martinis. I smiled instead.

That didn’t last long.

Two days after I began smiling in the morning, a cardiologist informed me I had a partly clogged artery in my heart.

This naturally worried me. I kept thinking of the 1979 movie “All That Jazz.” Roy Scheider plays Joe Gideon. Jessica Lange is a seductive Angel of Death. A cardiac seizure sends him singing and dancing his way into a body bag.

I could see myself dropping in mid-pirouette, as it were. Jessica Lange would be waiting.

“Who are you?” she’d ask.

“Al Martinez.” Nervous, I would slur.

“Elmer who?”

“Teenez.”

“I was expecting Roy Scheider,” she would say, looking past me. “There’s some mistake.”

“Roy Scheider is busy doing a song with Ben Vereen.”

“I’ll wait.”

As I lay on the couch brooding and fantasizing, my daughter-in-law, who is 8.9 months’ pregnant, entered the room.

“I think I’m having labor pains,” she said.

We were alone in the house.

“Stop working,” I said. “You can finish the vacuuming later.”

“Not those kinds of labor pains. Childbirth labor pains.”

“Oh my God.”

“I tried to call the doctor, but the phone isn’t working.”

“Oh my God.”

“I think what I’ll do is go next door and stay with neighbors for a while. It’s probably false labor, but then you can take it easy and won’t have to say ‘Oh my God’ anymore.”

It all worked out. The labor pains were false indeed, and she came back from the neighbor’s house in time to finish the vacuuming before dinner. The phone got fixed.

My heart? We’re working on it. It’s OK.

But that afternoon it wasn’t. I even tried combating the stress with an emergency smile in midday, a sort of perky pick-me-up, but then the dog threw up on the rug and I haven’t smiled since.

It’s hard being perky when you are cleaning up dog vomit.

Maybe I’ll go back to martinis. Then, when Jessica calls my number, I will at least be in a more relaxed mood.

Exit Elmer, singing and dancing.