Yesterday’s post and comments raised some questions again for me. Like, how many more crappy nostalgiac posts about my youth will I make you skim through how will I talk to Jackson about big kid stuff like drugs. Will I tell him that they’re all bad? Or that some drugs can be used responsibly, as I instinctively knew when I was a teenager. I tried lots of things, once, and never went back. Maybe I don’t have an “addictive personality” (although it took quite a few years to kick the Marlboros), but there are some heavy hitters in Jackson’s bloodline who vasocongest at the sight of a cocktail onion. But most especially, do I tell him the pre-AIDS story about drinking the bottle of Southern Comfort and having sex in the booth at the porn shop and then spending five minutes trying to get my key in the door until my mom finally opened it, let me sleep with all my clothes on, and put a trash can next my bed? Or do I just stand there like a billboard spouting empty abstention rhetoric because it’s just less confusing to say DON’T DO DRUGS OR HAVE SEX BEFORE YOU’RE IN A COMMITTED RELATIONSHIP, EVEN THOUGH I DID! AND IT WAS FUN!

ALSO: The link’s nine months old, but good post and discussion here.

I’m always ready for Jackson to go to sleep before he is, but if after we get through three or four books he still isn’t down we’ll snuggle up under his covers and he’ll whisper, “Tell me a story about you.”

Of course I have a million stories about being a kid, and the ones he likes best involve conflict with another kid and how we worked it out, or a time I was scared of something but got through it, or detailed stories about accidents where someone broke something. Consquently, one of his favorites is The Story About The Time Mommy Got Pulled Over By The Police At Gunpoint.

One afternoon the summer I was sixteen I was driving up Broadway with my friend Randy. We were driving in my mom’s old convertible, and Randy, who was a year ahead of me and went to Heritage High School in Littleton, had a cap gun. It looked like a real revolver; it was heavy and it didn’t have the orange plastic tip that cap guns have now to make it obvious they’re toys. We were driving up Broadway because we were going to go shopping in Cherry Creek at some chic New Wave store run by a couple of gay men Randy knew. At some point that summer Randy and I had made out at a party.

“Made out” means kissing.

Yes, I have kissed other people besides your father!

But then a couple of years later I ran into Randy dancing at a club and he was all, “Hi! I want you to meet my lover, Ken!”

In this case, lover means boyfriend.

Okay, but at this point, in the story with the cap gun, Randy wasn’t really copping to his sexualtiy and we weren’t really boyfriend and girlfriend; we just went shopping a lot.

So, we were driving up Broadway and chatting and Randy was sort of idly aiming his cap gun at different targets and pretending to shoot: gas pumps, bus benches, trees, used car lots. If someone looked at him funny he’d just wave and smile and yell, “IT’S FAKE!” Somewhere just south of Littleton Boulevard, though, I noticed flashing lights in my rear view mirror and I was all, “Oh, no! Did I run a light? Was I speeding? Is one of my tail lights out?” The cop used his P.A. to tell us to pull over, so I turned off of Broadway and parked under some trees across from the Jack in the Box, in the gravel next to the old Assemblies of God campground.

Randy was this very funny and confident kid so he was getting all unbuckled and ready to get out of the car and explain everything very pleasantly to the police when the cop came on over the P.A. again and screamed, “STAY IN YOUR VEHICLE! THROW THE GUN OUT OF THE VEHICLE AND PUT YOUR HANDS UP WHERE I CAN SEE THEM!”

So, yeah, we were in trouble. We were afraid to talk to each other now, and the cop made us sit there for a long time and we didn’t know why until we heard two more cop cars come screeching up behind us with their sirens blaring. He had called for backup.

“TAKE OUT YOUR DRIVER’S LICENSE AND REGISTRATION AND THROW THEM OUT OF THE VEHICLE!”

I had an oxblood Etienne Aigner wallet. I leaned over to open the glove box in a really slow, deliberate way, which is what you tend to do when someone has a gun pointed at your head. I threw my bits of paper on the ground outside of my door. I didn’t dare look, but I heard someone walk over and pick them up.

“OKAY, NOW GET OUT OF THE CAR! ONE AT A TIME! PASSENGER FIRST!”

Randy got out. They made him lie spread-eagle, face down on the ground. One of the cops took his wallet and ID. Then I had to do the same thing. When I got out of the car I saw six cops, two guarding Randy, four with guns pointed at me. I figured out that we’d been waiting for a woman cop to show up. I got down like Randy and she came and stood over me and cocked her gun.

My sunglasses were grinding into the gravel and I wanted to take them off but I figured it wasn’t worth getting shot for. Without moving my head I glanced over and saw about two dozen faces pressed against the window at the Jack in the Box. I could smell those nasty french fries they made that always tasted like they shared the fish fat.

They made us lie there for awhile while cars passed and people stared and we got dents in our skin from lying on rocks. I heard one of them talking on the radio. I guess they were running my mom’s plates to see if she had any outstanding warrants.

“Warrants” means if they had a list of things you’d done wrong. If you have a lot of warrants they’ll arrest you. That would have been funny, if they wanted to arrest Grandma but they got me instead!

Anyway, after what seemed like years one of the cops finally walked over to the cap gun and gave it a little push with his toe. Then he picked it up.

“Fake,” he said.

Duh, I thought.

The cop stood over Randy. “You think this is a joke? It’s not funny. You think this is funny?”

“No, sir,” said Randy.

“You bet it’s not. You could have been killed, both of you.”

“Yes, sir,” said Randy.

After another ten minutes of dicking around in the dirt they finally let us get up and dust ourselves off. They decided not to take us in, they just spent another five minutes threatening to call our parents and agreeing with each other about how what we did wasn’t funny. When they decided we were scared enough they let us get back into my mom’s car and go. I carefully pulled a U and then came to a complete stop and then used my signal and turned right and got back on Broadway, heading north at the posted speed limit of 35 miles per hour. I think Randy lit a couple of cigarettes for us and I smoked mine down as if it contained 100 miligrams of valium. When we got to the New Wave shop Randy told our story to the chic men at the store and they gave us each a plastic glass of cheap white wine with ice cubes in it. I think that’s when I finally started shaking.

I bought a black sleeveless Lycra shirt with yellow and white diagonal stripes across the chest. My boobs weren’t very big at the time, and one of the men stretched the shirt flat across my chest and said, “It’s a boy’s shirt but it’s cute on you. It makes you look butch.”

“Butch” means tough.

Puts him to sleep every time.

You may be aware that The Adventures of Sharkboy and Lavagirl in 3-D came out on DVD last Tuesday. Liz Penn sums it up nicely. (I love her line “There’s a reason children aren’t allowed to vote, drive or make movies with multimillion-dollar budgets.”*)

But don’t try getting all intellectual on these two:

They watched — by which I mean absorbed each pixel into the very fiber of their being — all or part of Sharkboy and Lavagirl in our bed almost every night last week.

They were just fine with all the plot holes and the whiney lead character.

I think it will be a few years before the distinction between J. K. Rowling and Henry James sinks in.

*It was written by Robert Rodriguez and his wee son, Marcel.

A cascade of infections
Apologies to both Charles Bukowski and Rosie O’Donnell

Jesus God! My jaw hurts.
Is it my night guard?
No.
I need a root canal.
The tooth is dead.
The tooth has three roots.
One of the roots is hooked and must be scraped clean by hand with a sharp, tiny file.
I feel the file hitting the top of my jaw.
Then the chills and fever begin.
Infection?
My dentist is now out of town.
Here’s the number of a friend of his.
Who will see you if you can get there in ten minutes.
His office is a half an hour away.

I sit in an unfamiliar dental chair.
I wait for an hour.
I read most of a New Yorker article about a man who went into the Amazon jungle and never came out again.
An assistant takes my temperature with a mercury thermometer.
It rests in my mouth for three minutes.
“The mercury isn’t even moving!”
I sit for three more minutes.
“I don’t know what’s wrong with this thing.”
“Let me see”
– I angle the glass just so –
“There. 99.4, see?”
Silence. “It says 97.”
Do I tell her each thermometer mark means two-tenths?
That three little hash marks below 100 don’t mean 97?
No.
I wait until the dentist comes in to straighten her out in front of her boss.
“We had a little disagreement about reading the thermometer.”
I’m friendly about it, but my temperature is not 97 degrees.

Feeling sick makes me put myself first.
On the way to the pharmacy I drive fast, changing lanes a lot, pulling out onto the sidewalk and making pedestrians walk around my car.
When I feel like crap, watch out.
The pharmacist looks at my prescription.
“What kind of name is Eden” she snorts. “Names today! Is that supposed to be male or female?”
I look at her.
“I don’t know.” I look down. My boobs are right there. “What do I look like?”
“Oh, God, this is for you? I’m so sorry.”
She types nervously.
I let her suffer for a minute.
“It will take about two hours to fill this prescription, ma’am, do you want to wait?”
I want to take a nap, bitch.

Last Sunday Jackson was supposed to be at two birthday parties at the same time. I know! The preschool party circuit has no season, it’s a year-round one-two punch of presents and pinatas. Doing anything festive on September 11 still seems a little off to me, and part of me continues to mourn while another part of me cheerfully dishes out the Scooby Doo ice cream cake so the kids can have a few more years unburdened by the horrors of recent history.

The first party was very simple, just a bunch of fairly well-behaved and highly suprvised four- and five-year-olds brandishing french fries and buckets of sand at the beach. Everyone was confined to a small, safe area and no one got sunburned and best of all I was the recipient of some searing local gossip that I cannot repeat until I think of a way to do it that won’t take fifty pages of backstory to make any sense to anyone who hasn’t lived or worked with me for the last ten years.

Two hours and several cups of warm lemonade later Jackson and I slipped off to the second party, which was for Jackson’s neighborhood friend, Boloni, who was turning eight. The party was in a park on the east side that I never knew existed, and when Jackson and I arrived the population of gueros doubled. I was wearing my yard sale Chucks that I’d paid Boloni’s mom a dollar for, but I don’t think anyone really appreciated my little gesture; eighteen nicely dressed aunts, uncles, grandmas, grandpas, and cousins looked at my blue shoes, orange socks, green skirt, purple sweatshirt, and pink messenger bag with blank faces, then returned to their quiet conversations in Spanish.

I knew right away that, compared to the last party, this was going to be a free-for-all. We had missed the water balloon fights, as I could see by Boloni’s soaked t-shirt, but we were just in time for the pinata. Boloni’s big sister, Bianca, made sure all the kids lined up according to size, littlest first, and then Boloni’s mom handed Jackson a baseball bat and told him to go for it. You could tell he was totally stoked because no one had ever let him swing around anything that lethal before in his life. Fortunately, his impulse control was functioning and he got in a few good, loud smacks, enough to garner some applause but not enough to bust it open.

Boloni was right after Jackson. Even though he’s four years older, they’re almost the same height, but Boloni’s built up four extra years of pinata-busting savvy, and he beat the living crap out of that pinata. The Tootsie Rolls flew and all hell broke loose. Children were stuffing their mouths with candy and swinging from the trees. Except for one kid I noticed who was just standing there watching while water poured off the table that was stacked with all the presents. I walked over to find the kid staring at Boloni’s new blue beta fish as it flopped around on the table, dying. I scooped the fish back into its cup and shoveled as much spilled water as I could back on top of him, gave the cup to Boloni’s little sister, Monica, who ran off to the girl’s room to fill it up with water, and moved as many presents as I could away from the water. “Okay, kid, how’d that happen?” I turned around, but he had vanished.

At this point Jackson told me he needed to pee so we followed Monica to the bathrooms where we found Boloni, whose head was covered in blue frosting. “What happened to you?” I asked. “I got some cake in my hair,” he said, as one of his friends emerged from the boy’s room with a cup of water and dumped it all over Boloni’s head. “It’s toilet water!” he yelled. “Aaaahhhh, get it off, get it off!” Boloni yelled. We watched them do this three or four times, laughing and yelling, but they never got all the frosting out of Boloni’s ears.

I had to take Jackson into the girl’s room to pee*, and when we came out we found the suspected attempted fish killer standing there, and before I knew it he got this creepy smile on his face and whipped out his dick and let loose with a festive arc of pee all over the sidewalk in front of the boy’s room while a bunch of other kids started running in and out of both bathrooms pulling gleeful streamers of toilet paper out onto the grass and then running back in for more.

* To avoid confusion we don’t call it the girl’s room, we call it “the restroom for moms and kids.”

It was mayhem. And it was cute for a minute, in a Romper Room Anarchy kind of way, but when Jackson grabbed a pee-wet hunk of toilet paper to hurl at me it was time to shut it down. I got everyone out of the bathrooms, got them to pick up the dry streamers of toilet paper, at least, and put them in the trash, told everyone to wash their hands, and then herded them all back to the party. All the other grownups had been far enough away that they apparently didn’t see any of this, having strategically placed their chairs to face the other direction. Fortunately, we avoided a descent into total madness because (1) they’re good kids who knew they were crossing the line (except for the little public-peeing fish-dumper — yeah, I’ve got my eye on you); (2) kids are often more willing to listen to other kids’ parents than their own; and (3) they run in packs, like wolves, so if you can assert an “I love you but I’m not going to take anyone’s shit” alpha-dog attitude you can run the whole herd of them back to where they belong, which is on the playground being watched by their grandmas.

Which is exatly what we did. I retired to a bench near the playground to sit with the old ladies while Jackson and Monica played nicely and flirted on the swings. A lady came by honking a bike horn and pushing a cart, which I assumed would be full of shaved ice and syrup, but when she got closer and the grandmas stopped her I saw that she was selling salt-encrusted ears of white corn rolled in chili powder. They looked good, but, much like Boloni, I’d had so much cake at that point that it was coming out of my ears, so we packed up and called it a day.

Two quick Katrina related things:

Firstly, Deb is organizing Operation Panty Drop, delivering brand-spankin’-new underpants to people in Houston who’ve been displaced and dispossessed by the hurricane. Send new knickers only, please — seriously, how would you feel if someone handed you a pair of used panties? Well, okay, it depends on the panties, I KNOW THAT, but pretend you don’t get turned on by things like that and just mail her a couple of new pairs of Hanes or something.

Secondly, Liz went to Houston to help out with relief efforts and all she brought was my lousy t-shirt. Well, that’s not true, but she’s an incredible human being for going down there and actually finding a way to help people, and she’s spreading the Fussy philosophy while she does it! I’m not sure that if you’ve been sitting in the Astrodome with no underwear for two weeks you’re going to agree that “writing well is the best revenge” — it reminds me of that bit of dialogue from Manhattan where Woody Allen is at a cocktail party talking about some Nazis getting ready to march in New Jersey and a woman standing with him says, “There is this devastating satirical piece on that on the Op Ed page of the Times” about it, and Allen says, “A satirical piece in the Times is one thing, but bricks and baseball bats really get right to the point.” So, you know, revenge through good grammar and incisive adjectives is a useful long-term project, but food, water, clean sheets, and cash are still a priority at the moment.

There was a murder here on the West side last night. They found the body of a woman in a bathtub full of milk, with a banana in her butt.

The police think it’s the work of a cereal killer.

In other news, here’s why, as of today, my dog is getting only dry food for the rest of her miserable life:

via the lovely Jenijen, who got it from Jenn

What’s wrong with the word refugee? Interesting link about objections to using “refugee” to describe the citizens/evacuees/victims of Hurricane Katrina. Apparently George Bush and Al Sharpton aren’t the only ones who think it’s a Third World word that shouldn’t be used to describe displaced citizens of the world’s remaining superpower. Even though it describes the situation exactly. Refugee is a word that could be a bridge uniting us with the true plight of millions of people around the world. This is what it looks like, this is how scary it is. We forget that some people seek refuge in “temporary” shelters for years in the aftermath of natural or political disasters. “Refugee” is a word that could give us insight and sympathy, but instead we’re shunning it, banishing it as a word we just can’t bear to use because it takes away our priveleged, untouchable, free, and lucky status?

(“Disaster,” however, is a word that’s been temporarily stricken from my vocabulary. Salad dressing gone past its expiration date is no longer a disaster; neither is missing a day of yoga, not having an orgasm, nor discovering I need to lose ten pounds if I’m to look at all fetching in a Wicked Weasel. As of now those are all inconveniences. In a couple of months, however, I don’t doubt they’ll be disasters again.)

I thought Jackson was still in that place where he thought that grownups govern the world with near-Platonic rules of conduct and fairness. Even though you and I both know that everyone old enough to vote and everyone they voted for is just making it up as they go along. Evacuation plan? New Orleans didn’t have one. I don’t have one. And I live in a tsunami zone. Until last Christmas that would’ve been funny. Now every morning when I walk out my door I glance at the mountains behind me and try to calculate their distance — is it one mile? Two? How fast could I get there carrying a plastic grocery sack of food in one hand, a dog on a leash with the other, and piggybacking a four-year-old boy?

The other night Jackson was in the tub and I noticed that the dirty skateboarding accident Band-aid on his elbow was starting to loosen up, so without warning him I just tugged it off. He howled at me. And I realized that I’d robbed him of the chance to talk me out of it, and if that didn’t work at least to anticipate the pain. I took away his choice and he was furious about it.

Then yesterday after school we were watching a cartoon in bed and without even looking at me he said, “I don’t trust grownups. I only trust kids.” And I said, “This is about the Band-aid, isn’t it? I’m sorry about that.” But he didn’t answer me.

A disgusting picture of a delicious burrito

An unfortunate side effect of using Flickr is the feeling that you can post any crap photo you take and pretend you’re doing it just to stay in touch with your friends! And, um, show them what you’re eating!

Personal and confidential to Jennifer S. in Louisville: Get your ass out here, now.