Fun Fragments

Hammer Time

Corrine's high school drama club participates in the state's one act play festival this March and I've been building the set for their production. Recently, I brought the hammer down onto my hand.

"Fucking cock-sucking whore!" I shouted and then threw the hammer across the stage and into the wings.

"Really, Dad?" Griffin asked me. I had forgotten he was with me.

"What?!"

"You had to throw the hammer?"

Lactose Insolence

Gabrielle insists that Abraham Lincoln's wife, Mary Todd, died from what she calls "drinking too much milk."

"No she didn't," I corrected her.

"Then what did she die of?"

"I don't know but it wasn't from drinking too much milk."

"So you don't know."

"Gabrielle."

"What? I'm just saying."

"Drink your milk."

Naked Junk

Standing naked in our bedroom after a shower, I had to hop out of the way when Corrine opened the door to enter for fear of being seen by the kids.

 "Relax," Corrine said. "The kids have seen your junk before."

"Junk?" I quipped.

"Well?"

Return of the Naked Junk

At work a few years ago I texted Corrine like a horny teenage boy.

"Send me a naughty picture of yourself."

"Ok," she texted back and I sat waiting.

After a few minutes I texted again, "Well?"

"What?"

"Are you going to send it?"

"Shut up."

"Huh?" I fired back.

"I sent it to you."

"I didn't get it."

"Shut up!"

"I'm not kidding. What is it a picture of?"

"A picture of me holding my boob."

"Didn't get it."

"FUCK!"

Apparently in her haste to send it to me, she had selected her daughter's name - Alyssa - in her contact list, rather than Andy.

Wait. It gets better.

Alyssa had lent her phone to her boyfriend that day, who had received the picture.

"I am never sending naked pictures over the phone ever again," she said later that day.

Revenge of the Naked Junk

In a foolish moment of juvenile delinquency, and a perfect case of short-term memory loss, Corrine and I took a picture of ourselves in the buff standing in front of our bathroom mirror. I asked her to send it to my phone. It never arrived.

Months later my mother and father came to see the kids off to school for their first day of school. After the bus left, my mother turned and said "I saw a picture of you naked the other day."

Thinking it was a picture of me as a child that she had unearthed in her trove of family pictures she keeps in her closet, I laughed it off.

"Oh yea?" I smiled blithely and started to head into the house.

"Yeah, you're standing there with a hahd on," she said, snickering.

"Um..." I said, scowling. And then light slowly dawned on marble...um...head

Corrine began to laugh. I began to shit myself.

My mother produced her phone and there, on the screen, was the picture Corrine and I had taken.

"Well, a sem-eye," my 70-something-year-old mother teased.

"Dear Jesus," I said and crawled back into my house, from which I didn't emerge for seven months.

It seems, in her haste to send it to my phone, Corrine instead had sent it to one of my siblings, whose names also start with the letter A.

Speaking of Bad Dreams

Lately the kids have been telling us of their nightmares.

In one conversation at breakfast, Gabrielle said she had had a dream where she was being chased by animals who "used to be my friends but then became not my friends anymore."

"Wow," I offered.

"Yeah, they got mad at me and chased me, then they ate me."

"Why did they get mad at you?"

"I don't know. I think they were sick. But hungry, too."

Griffin then chimed in, as is often the case when not wanting to be outdone by his sister.

"I had a nightmare too," he said.

"Ok," I said.

"You were a zombie and Mom was a zombie and Sissy was a zombie and everyone was zombies!"

"Well that sucks," I said.

"Yeah and you chased me. Everyone chased me and then bited me. It was so scary."

"Bited you?"

"Yeah. Here and here," he said, pointing to both sides of his neck.

"Were we zombies or vampires?"

"Zombies. You were vampires last week."

"Bailey?" I asked our red head.

"What?"

"Did you have a nightmare?"

"I not do it," he said guiltily.

"I didn't say you did anything. I asked if you had a nightmare."

"Yeah. I had a nightmare," he said.

"What was it of?"

"What?"

"The nightmare, Bailey."

"Oh."

"Well?"

"What?"

"Aww, Jesus Christ, the nightmare, Bailey. What was your nightmare about?!"

"I forgot."

The Hitched Hiker

On my way to work this week I picked up an older man on the side of the road holding a sign that read "Windham."

"Mighty nice of ya," he said, hopping into the front seat. "How far ya headed?"

"Westbrook," I answered.

"Well, that works perfect for me, don't it?"

"I suppose it does."

I swelled with pride in having given a fellow human some assistance on a freezing day. I was uplifted by my own act of benevolence. I saw people in high places bestowing upon me the highest of civilian medals and Jesus himself shaking my hand and leading me to the head of The Line when my time came.

Within minutes, however, I was breathing onto my window and scrawling my suicide note.

A mile from where I picked him up, he launched into a monologue about his married life, the darkness of which was so deep that I was swallowed by its infinite despair.

He went on for miles about the vagaries of marriage: the unexpected twists and turns that had come with being "with the same woman for ovah fahty-five ye-ahs." How she was never appreciative of his toil, his service in the army, his head injury, his sacrifice for the sake of her contentment, his love of corn out of season.

Yes. He even claimed she did not appreciate that he loved corn in the winter.

On and on and on he preached, for miles. And not once did he sound angry.
 
"My wife don't even eat suppah with me no more," he said at one point.

"Wow. Well, that's so...I'm really sorry about that," was really all I could offer him and my hand was on the handle of the door ready to spring myself into a snowbank going 65.

Of course, in the back of my mind I wondered why he hadn't already buried the shrew in the back yard of their home when he said this final thing:

"But, you know, that's why I love her. Heh heh."

Really?

I let him out at an auto-parts store in Windham and he ducked his head back into the car before closing the door.

"See me on the road, be sure to stop, ok? I'm outside every day, same time."

"Ok. I won't waste a second to stop. See ya later!"

 I drove away, happy in knowing that my wife is appreciative of everything I do.

I have pictures to prove it.

Wanna see 'em?

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The Kemsen Crush

My 6-year-old son is in love with my teacher.

I mean his teacher.

Who used to be mine.

No, I don't mean she used to be mine. Not mine mine in the leather-jacket-wearing, hickie from Kenickie kind of way. I mean she used to be my teacher.

But I used to wish her to be mine in that other way. 

Well, no. I don't mean I'd wished she'd given me hickies. I don't think I knew what a hickie even was when I was 13. I just mean she was my first teacher crush. My only teacher crush, for that matter.

Her name is Kemsen and I wanted to marry her.

And now, it would seem, my son is similarly smitten.

Granted, I was in junior high when it happened to me, while Griffin is merely a first grader. Clearly his Kemsen Crush affection thermometer mercury level is much lower than mine was. Lower meaning that crushes in a 6-year-old still hover around 10 degrees while when you're a teenager they rise to a boiling point.

Now, for Heaven's sake, don't run out and Google every reference you can find about 'teacher-and-student scandals' and try to apply it to my situation. Relax. This was an innocent crush, and in no way was (or is) Kemsen anything more than a pure-as-the-driven-snow teacher. And neither was my crush on her anything untoward. I was a 13-year-old, 68-pound dork who attended the Church of Christ. I didn't start entertaining impure thoughts or slow dancing with girls or start masturbating until, like, a year ago.

This is merely my G-rated, crush-on-a-teacher story universally experienced by just about every student on the planet. Including, it would seem, my son. Poor little nearly-toothless bastard.

I met Kemsen for the first time while sitting in the fourth row, first seat, of an English class on the second floor of the Oxford Hills Junior High School in 1982.

I was 13 and wore a pair of tan/brown/light-colored (how the hell would I know?) corduroys that my mother had purchased during our typical last-minute school shopping trip to K-Mart in Lewiston the week before. I remember the pants because it was the first week of September and our school classrooms had these monolithic, almost cathedral-sized windows that converted sunlight into raw energy that was further absorbed by my pants. Aside from the whiff-whiff-whiff sound they made whenever I walked, I always smelled like burnt hair.

Most everyone else in my class wore non flammables that breathed. I wore haz-mat chic and got the same kind of withering glances from my peers that one now casts upon piles of dog shit. Or Wal-Mart greeters. They chattered about their summers, who they were dating, and how they were all going to the Auburn Mall that weekend to see Fast Times at Ridgemont High, even though it was rated R. I was not allowed to watch rated R movies until my first child was born 10 years later.

It was then, while avoiding any eye contact with, or addressing direct questions about my pants from, my classmates, that our teacher entered.

Kemsen floated into the room that day to the sound of Air Supply's  Lost in Love, with her Farrah Fawcett feathered curls and her brilliant Colgate smile. She crossed the front of the room clutching books that she laid down on her desk with the delicacy of a new mother putting a child in a crib. I think she even patted them.

I knew then, and there, that she would be a special kind of teacher. Because none of my other teachers cooed at dictionaries. Or smiled. Or liked kids. Or smelled like a swath of wildflowers in the fields of the Lord.

Shut the fuck up. I'm not exaggerating. 

"Hi class," she said. And that, I believe, is the only thing I recall her saying that very first hour or so of English class. Which is ironic because, while I believed myself to be fluent in the native tongue, I swear to God her voice triggered some sort of chemical anomaly in my brain that blocked any cognitive language comprehension whatsoever.

She would talk and her words would flutter out and over me like happy butterflies, but would make no sense. I watched her lips move. Intently. Trust me, I stared at them all the time, trying desperately to understand her. I turned to my best friend, Ted, and scowled. He was opening a book to page 4. I looked at Kemsen, who was still talking, but all I heard was the gibberish of muted vowels and underwater consonants, while the erratic hummingbird pulse of my heart scared the shit out of me.

What was happening to me? I wondered if corduroy could reach a high enough temperature that, at a molecular level it could eventually break down and pass through skin and cause blood poisoning and lead to eventual brain-swelling. (See: Sylvester Stallone)

The class ended with the bell and everyone gathered up their things and left, including me.

"Listen," I told Ted while whiff-whiff-whiffing down the hall. "I think I'm dying of brain swell."

"What?"

"I didn't understand a thing she said. Not one thing. Her lips moved but all I heard was, well, Charlie Brown teacherspeak."

"You have a crush on her."

"What?! No I don't! That's, like, gross!" I scolded him, but I suspected deep down that he was right. My own father had worked as a teacher and a school principal for all of my life and I recalled stories he told of star-struck girls who used to hang May baskets on him. Boy did that piss Mom off. (And soooo make me want to be a teacher. That and getting summers off.)

I tested the theory. I returned to school the next day because, well, that's the law. I took my seat in the fourth row, the row closest to the surface of the sun, and a foot from Kemsen's desk. I braced myself for her entrance, expecting her to do so on a silver-laced cloud, or in the escort of angels, or singing directly to me in French. (On the news the night before there had been a story about Jeanine Deckers, the Singing Nun, and I had Dominique on the brain. What? It's catchy and cute.)

She entered under none of these conditions, of course, because, let's face it, what public school system in Maine do you know of would allow teachers to be creative unless they paid for it themselves? Taxpayers don't pay for clouds, dude. Or angels. Or Belgian nuns with guitars. Or basic supplies.

Of course my heart started in again. Then came the breathlessness that arrives with anticipation and really cold weather. And confusion. And lack of focus. And a desire to break out into a rock ballad that has a pretentious orchestral bridge.

She stopped me in my tracks mentally and physically. I was in some sort of shock, yet I knew I was enduring it at the same time. A cruel dream-within-a-dream kind of emotional apoplexy. The kind of feeling you get that is so shattering that your mind embargoes its explanation for a minimum of 30 years. All you know, all you recognize, is the fact that you've been struck by something you don't understand.

In other words, love.

Please spare me your picayune postulations on true love verses infatuation versus admiration versus passion versus like versus obsession versus desire.

I was 13, for fuck's sake. Someone had just detonated a grenade in my soul. I was feeling something bigger than me. With all of its fuzzy, inexplicable, knee-weakening definitions. Get a law degree if you wanna argue semantics, you parent's-basement-dwelling, formula-fed loser.

Sorry. Anyway...

On accepting the truth of my condition, everything around me now became infused with her likeness. Songs I heard on the radio were naturally written for us like John Cougar's Jack and Diane. Or Waiting for a Girl Like You by Foreigner or Chariots of Fire, because every romance needs an instrumental. (Um...Duh. Hellooo??). The lead characters on my favorite television shows were now replaced in my mind by Andy and Kemsen. I was her Remington Steele, she my... my.... whatever the female character was in Remington Steele. My imagination was consumed by images of sunsets and songs, eternal love and lots of slow-motion runs on tropical beaches.

I loved everything about her. Her name. Her way of diagramming sentences. Her really cute one-shoe-sole-is-thicker-than-the-other trick. The fact that she used to be a cheerleader at the very same junior high school. The fact that she didn't ask me if I was visiting as part of a field trip for third graders.

She was, by her smile, the valentine that came when girls in my class conveniently forgot my name on their lists of cards to be handed out. Her presence was the lighthouse in the stormy pubescent seas of junior high school. Her's was the face that helped me realize that the faces of pretty girls were not to be figured out, but simply admired.

I spent that year in a fog. But as it turned out, I learned to love everything to do with English and reading and writing. The point is, I survived. I worked through my crush and came to understand something about the Human condition: we are supposed to be in love, we Humans. We are OK if we love our mentors, so long as its innocent. And, well, the music of the 1980s was awful, but that it's okay to love it nonetheless.

Now...what to do about Griffin.

He has Kemsen for his first-grade teacher and whenever he mentions her name, he glows like a bulb on a Christmas tree. It's adorable, really. And not lost on me, who came to be illuminated some time ago by her magic.

When I saw her again for the first time in years she had popped her head out of her classroom at the kid's elementary school. She'd migrated to the lower grades years before, I guess, but seeing her face still made me blush.

"How are you?!" she asked me and gave me a hug. Something I dreamed of getting so many years ago, but never did, to her credit as a professional. I think I heard angels, but I might be wrong.

"Hey. I saw...that...you. Teacher. Nice. Weather on the outside," I stammered.

Another couple stood a few feet away while Kemsen explained that I had been a student of hers "many years ago."

"He still blushes," the woman said. And I was. I could feel it, clearly.

I don't mind all these years later. I can appreciate now the effect a good teacher has on an absorbent student. Had she not entered my life at that moment, I may not have come to love what she loved: the written word. I find myself cooing over books all the time, as a matter of fact.

And what's more important is that Griffin loves her, whatever that means.

I think I do, and I think it's good, and pure, and cool as hell that he does and that he gets to see her every day.

Lucky bastard.

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It was the best of dimes....

I paid for three gallons of gas the other day.

In dimes.

I don't know what the most humiliating part of that day was, to be completely frank with you. Was it the actual act of handing the woman behind the counter 80 dimes? Or was it the fact that we even had 80 dimes in our house? Or how about the sphincter-tightening ride into town hoping to not run out of gas? Or the fear of running into someone at the gas station with whom I graduated high school and who drives an SUV with vanity plates that read YALLSUK?

Certainly I've had my share of public shame and embarrassment, but this drop-kicked me into a far deeper level of Hell. By way of comparison, for example:

• I've stood in line with a box of tampons, vainly over-stuffing my arms with every male-seducing checkout line impulse purchase I could find in order to hide the Stayfree logo. Listen, you can never have too many 300-count Slim Jim value jugs.
• I once went to reach for something across a teacher's desk and accidentally punched her left breast. How did I know it was her left breast, you ask? Because she was our health teacher, and we were learning human sexuality. It's a good goddamn thing I didn't punch her in the right labia majora. (What? You think I was born tall and then shrunk?).
• I was yelling to myself in the car while waiting for the light to change when I turned and saw four varsity football players staring at me from the car next to mine. I quickly pretended I was listening to Kanye and even flashed the Rock On symbol. Only to realize it was the hand sign for "I Love You."
• Just recently I was on the stand in a court proceeding and was asked how long I had been married to Corrine. I went pale, looked at Corrine's face for an answer, and finally said "Uh...um...er...six years?" Under oath. Justice is blind my ass. Now I'm blind from the look I got from my wife. Of six years. Who I love. And whose breasts or labia I've never punched.

Dimes for gas is a far different stool softener. Far different. Principally, tampon purchasing, tit-punching, and public contempt of wife fall within the arena of mild humiliation. Paying for your gas in dimes, however, is a clear sign of abject poverty and therefore beyond mere face-blushing embarrassment.

I suppose I've denied myself, all these years, the possibility that I could be poor despite all the signs being there: The long succession of $500 cars whose mileage began at 500,000; the 12 volumes of Betty Crocker ramen recipes; the non-designer wear from Goodwill Industries; the savings account passbook so unused that it still has that new bank smell. All legitimate indications pointing to a certain personal financial propensity, but ignored nevertheless.

But dimes for gas? That was the wake-up call; my Grapes of Wrath moment. Standing in line at the convenience store, I experienced a flash moment of clarity and saw my family, like the Joads, being forced to live in a boxcar. Or the 2015 equivalent: an abandoned UPS truck, since I would have no clue where to find a boxcar these days.

I pulled into the station and unclenched my teeth and my buttocks at the same time. The relief of having made it into town on the vapors of gas and whispered prayers was quickly replaced with a new fear.

I looked down into the passenger's seat and stared at the plastic sandwich baggy full of the dimes. I looked up again at the store. Foolishly I had been aching for the possibility that no one would be at a Cumberland Farms on a Friday morning in Maine. That everyone had somehow forgotten that it existed or had slept in or had overdosed the night before on their own fucking vomit.

Instead, every pump was being pumped; an 18-wheeler of fuel stood on the tarmac with the driver frigging with hoses and yacking at the local folks like they were friends from the war; the store bustled with early-morning coffee wranglers and toothless scratch-ticket whores. The line at the counter was 10 deep and I screamed at the side of the passenger window "Don't you fucking lowlife, degenerate, crack-smoking, shit-for-brains have anything better to do?!?! My problems are real! I got a bag of dimes here!""

I grabbed the baggy, dumped the dimes into my hand, got out of the car and let the coins fill up my pocket as I walked toward the store. Once inside, I took the last spot in line. I clutched the dimes in my pocket with an oily palm. The bulge so pronounced and the fiddling with the coins so audible that I just know everyone there thought I was trying to reassemble some sort of semi-automatic with my right hand. Or really loud at masturbating.

Gradually, painfully, the line moved ahead and just as I neared the counter a man took up residence behind me. I turned, cleared my throat, looked out across the store and said, "Oh. Yeah. Forgot sumthin'. You go on ahead."

"You sure? I can hold your spot," he said.

"Nah. No. It's big."

"Huh?"

"What I'm getting. What I forgot. It's big. Take a while. Over in the...that...big items section."

I stepped away and walked among the aisles of overpriced cereal and toilet paper and dog collars, every-so-often peeking toward the counter to monitor the line. It took me 45 minutes to finally catch a break.

I got to the counter and, with ironic pep, said, "Hi. I'll take 8 dollars on pump 3," to the attendant, who also just happens to have graduated high school with two of my children.

"Hey. How are you?" she asked. A line was beginning to form behind me while my intestines started to weave themselves into a French braid.

"Goodandyou?"

"Are you still living in Buckfield? I loved that house. It was so, you know, like, old and full of character and had all these creaks and groans like it was haunted or something, but not in a ghost way, in a good way."

"Um. Nope. We moved."


"Awww. That's too bad! I loved that old house. And the pond out back, did you ever swim in that? I can't remember, and the horses! Corrine still ride? I would love to ride a horse someday but I can't because I've got spine issues. So, eight on three?"

"You did where?"


"Eight dollars in gas on pump three?"


By now, the line behind me was long and everyone looked like they blamed me for why they had to come to Cumbys braless or in their night pants to get cigarettes because their goddamn good-for-nothing significant others were too hungover to do it themselves.


"Yeah. Yup. Eight bucks."


Slowly I dug deep into my pocket and produced a mound of silver.


"Hope ya like dimes. Heh heh. Heh heh. Heh heh," I flirted.

She looked back at me like I'd punched her in the labia. The woman behind me sighed windily, her breath announcing the coming of the seven angels of Satan on seven black horses. And from the corner of my eye I detected the shifting of others from one foot to another.

I thrust the coins into the attendant's hands and said "It's all there. I know. I counted it 76 times over there in the motor oil and donuts aisle."

She nodded knowingly and took the dimes and dropped them into her register.

"Say hey to Harrison and Alyssa!" she said brightly. I grunted and waved, then navigated through the gauntlet of glassy-eyed men and women I just knew had spent the previous night fornicating on their plaid couches in the pale, flickering light of a not-wide-screen television that showed a Downeast Dickering marathon.

How had it come to this? I asked myself as I pumped my three gallons of gas. I'm better than this! I'm not one of them.

But, alas, I was. 

I had to admit it. I was poor.

But, do you think I let it get to me?

No no no.

Pulling out of the convenience store parking lot I cranked the radio and began singing and drive-dancing in celebration of a gas-level display that read 52 Miles Before Empty. As if that was some great thing in a car that gets 25 miles to the gallon.

The way I was throwing down Anaconda, with my Dollar Tree shades on, you would have thought it read No Man Measures Up to You, Big Guy.

I guess I was elated because I had not fully failed. I had certainly gotten close to it - close enough to hang my toes over the edge - but I hadn't gone completely over.  I had not run out of gas and had to push it the rest of the way to the pumps. You know, like those real losers you see every so often.

I may be poor. I admit it. But I got dimes, baby. Just enough dimes to make me not pathetic.

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