“That’s why I think all kids should be put into cages until they turn 21,” Rico said, as we waited at the intersection for the light to turn green.
“Would this be in addition to your plan to forcibly sterilize everyone until they learn calculus?”
“No excuse not to learn calculus,” Rico said. “It was the most important class I ever took in college.”
“I never took calculus.”
“Really?”
“You were a bio-chem major. I was history.” I pointed out.
“And see how that worked out for you?” Rico smirked.
“Touche.” The light turned green, and we proceeded up the on-ramp and onto the freeway. “Let’s compromise. Everyone gets forcibly sterilized until they can pass a class on ethics and sex ed. No one gets let out of their cages until they graduate college or get a GED.”
“What, you want high school kids to read?” Rico asked sarcastically.
“Of course not,” I quipped back. “We don’t read. We ain’t nerds and shit.”
DrkSyders had just graduated from grad school, and was on her way to a job on the other side of the country. Given that she’s a dear friend, we all decided to get together and hold her a big-ol’ going-away party, complete with video games, board games, and anime viewings. You know. Nerd shit.
But the main thing we were going to do was fight with boffer-weapons.
Boffer-weapons are the grown-up equivalent of those cheap plastic swords you used to play with as kids. A good boffer weapon is made of PVC pipe with foam rubber wrapped around it, all wrapped in duct-tape to keep it from falling apart. You can swing a boffer-weapon pretty forcefully at a friend and cause no more damage than maybe some light bruising and damaged egos.
Boffer-weapon battles are fucking fun as hell. They’re also a surefire way to out yourself as a hardcore nerd. Not that we gave a shit. We had foam-rubber swords to beat each other up with. And we were having a blast doing so in a nice, green, grassy field at a park just down the street from her parents’ house.
Haldane was the one who got the most into it. He decided (in the spirit of the great Celtic warriors that he is in no way at all related to) to smear his skin with blue woad, like those dudes from Braveheart. So before we started our first boffer-weapon battle, he opened up this jar of blue axle grease he’d picked up somewhere and smeared it all over his chest, shouting, “CAPTAIN PLANET!” at the top of his lungs. (Robot Chicken fans will get the reference. The rest of you. . . don’t worry about it.)
And thus began a long, glorious, and awesome afternoon of swinging foam-rubber swords at each other like total goons, ruined only slightly by the heckling comments of The Teenagers.
Ah, The Teenagers. There were five of them, mostly boys, one girl. They ranged in age from around 11 to 18. Their ethnicity was indeterminate, but tended from Hispanic towards very White. They were sitting on the jungle gyms across the way, making loud heckling comments towards us.
We ignored them. You can’t really have fun boffering if you let shit like that get to you. It’s the sort of fun-time activity, like ballroom dancing or sex, that only works if you completely put aside the fact that probably look like a complete fucking dork doing it.
In fact, I probably wouldn’t have remembered The Teenagers at all if it weren’t for The Gay Couple.
The Gay Couple were friends of DrkSyders. They were. . . gay. Really gay. Wonderfully, uncompromisingly, unashamedly gay. Holding-hands in public, hugging each other, giving each other affectionate kisses, gay.
The problem is that gay men and insecure teenagers get along about as well as gasoline and fire.
The heckling took an ugly turn.
Now, there is no way that adults can respond to the heckling of children without being assholes. After all, they’re fucking kids. You’re the grown-ups. Your role in that situation is to take it, wait for the parents to show, and then let them handle it, right?
Except there were no parents around. And the heckling was getting fucking ugly indeed.
Haldane, shirtless and smeared with blue axle grease, was the one to finally break the silence. “Hey, what’s the matter, you faggots?” one of the older teenage boys shouted. “I bet you’re all faggots! You like fucking each other, faggots?”
“Yeah!” Haldane shouted back. He pointed at the youngest member of The Teenagers. “Send the little one over! We’ll show him a good time!”
Now, I don’t approve of pedophilia. I think sexually molesting children is a horrible thing to do, one of the worst crimes that an adult can perpetrate upon a child.
I have to admit, I laughed.
It certainly seemed to shut up The Teenagers. The heckling stopped. They got really quiet and started talking amongst themselves.
We didn’t think anything of it until they walked up on us like the Jets from West Side Story.
“Hey!” shouted The Oldest Teenager. “What the fuck did you say about my little cousin?”
Shit had just Gotten Real.
DrkSyders was the first to step up. She had put up with their bullshit for long enough, and she was ready to lay down the hammer. Imagine this cute, nerdy girl with a big, friendly smile suddenly turning into a fucking valkyrie warrior of justice.
“Oh, so is this the way it’s going to go?” she snarled, stepping up to them and glaring straight into the oldest one’s eyes. “It’s okay for you to shout homophobic slurs at us, but we crack one joke and suddenly it’s fight time?”
“I don’t like you guys saying shit like that about my cousin!” the Oldest Teenager retorted. “It’s not right!”
“It’s also not right for you idiots to be making fun of my gay friends! Homophobes like you are the reason why–”
“Hey, DrkSyders,” one member of The Gay Couple said. “Let me handle this.”
I should mention a few things about The Gay Couple. I mentioned before that they were affectionately, shamelessly, wonderfully, and uncompromisingly gay. They were also fucking huge. One of them was around six feet tall and two-hundred some-odd pounds and had huge meaty forearms. The other one wasn’t nearly as tall huge, but he was on his college swim team, and was pretty fucking ripped.
The two of them crossed their arms and stared at The Oldest Teenager. “Yeah,” the big guy said. “I’m gay. So’s he. You want to talk about it?”
The Oldest Teenager glared back, seething with adolescent rage and hormonal anger.
That was when Haldane and Rico sidled up to them, casually holding a foam-rubber warhammer and longsword, respectively.
Have you ever seen Lord of the Rings? You remember that scene from The Two Towers where the Rohirrim are preparing for the Battle of Helm’s Deep, and all those boys and old men are quietly picking up swords, shields, and helmets? It was kind of like that. While the confrontation was going on, all the rest of us were quietly picking up foam rubber weapons and baseball bats and other sports gear, resting them on our shoulders, laying them across our laps, limbering up, picking targets.
The Oldest Teenager was too hopped up on macho rage and testosterone to realize what was going on. The others, however, saw and backed off. It was like one of those cartoons where the officer asks for a volunteer to step forward, and everyone takes a step back and leaves Daffy Duck standing all alone.
It was then that DrkSyders noticed that The Oldest Teenager was wearing an Iron Cross symbol as a belt buckle.
Have I mentioned that DrkSyders comes from a Jewish heritage? She went fucking livid.
“Is that a fucking Iron Cross on your godddamn belt!?” she screamed. “Why the fuck would you want to wear a symbol of the Nazi regime?”
“It’s not Nazi!” The Oldest Teenager insisted. “It means White Power!”
“White Power comes from the Nazis!” DrkSyders said. “Read a goddamn book!”
“We don’t read books!” one of The Teenagers said proudly. “We ain’t nerds and shit!”
“Great! Look me up when you grow up! I’ll hire you to clean my house!” Valencia said.
Laughter.
And that was when the one girl among The Teenagers snapped. “I love gay people!” she squeaked. “They have great fashion sense!”
The Oldest Teenager turned to stare at her, disbelievingly, at this betrayal.
It was then that he realized that he was all alone. And he was surrounded by pissed-off looking grownups holding large foam-rubber weapons.
He turned to Haldane and reached for his boffer-weapon. “Give me that,” he said.
Haldane glared at him, shirtless and proud, his chest smeared with blue axle grease, and said, “No.”
There was a tense, quiet moment that seemed to last forever.
Then Bill joined in.
“Wait!” he said seriously. “I know what’s going on here.” He walked right up to The Oldest Teenager, bumped his chest against his, and looked straight into the ki’ds eyes. “Am I Being Served?” he asked.
What the hell?
“I’ve seen this movie!” Bill said. “I know what this means. I’m being Served, aren’t I? That means we have to dance!” Bill immediately broke into The Robot, followed by a Moonwalk followed by the Running Man. “I’d do a headspin next,” he said, “but I don’t have a cardboard box to put on the ground.”
The tension broke like a snapping thread. Everyone laughed. The Teenagers backed away and quietly slunk back to the jungle gym to sulk, until their mom came by a few minutes later to pick them up in her white minivan.
Unfortunately, the fun had gone out of the afternoon. The Gay Couple took their leave. The rest of us kinda sat there and milled around awkwardly, trying to comfort DrkSyders, who was absolutely furious. “This was supposed to be a fun day, and now it’s ruined,” she griped. “You know, those kids are going to grow up to become voters some day.”
“Well,” Bill said sagely. “Look at it this way. Since they don’t read books and shit, one day they’ll eat something from the wrong bottle and die.”
We all laughed at that. . . except for Haldane. He got this thoughtful look, picked up the jar of axle grease that he’d smeared all over his bare chest, and stared at the label.
“Hey, DrkSyders? Could I uhhh. . . borrow your shower?”
“Hm?”
Haldane showed her the label on the jar.
Warning! it read. Do not get in contact with skin or eyes.
“It’s been years since I last thought of that,” I admitted. “God, what a cluster-fuck.”
“Yeah, but it’ll make a good story for your blog,” Rico pointed out.
“Fine, I’ll add it to the queue.” I looked out the window morosely, sighing. “You know, that was years ago. Even the youngest one is voting age now.”
“Eh. I’m not worried. Felons can’t vote,” Rico replied.
“They’d need to read the ballot too,” I mused. “Which they don’t do. . .”
“Because they ain’t nerds and shit!” Rico and I said in unison.
We arrived at our destination and pulled over to the side of the road. Rico stopped the car and we gathered up our things.
“You know the thing that always cracks me up about that whole thing?” I said. “That whole thing where Bill said that one day they’d all eat out of the wrong jar because they didn’t read the label. Didn’t that happen on the same day Haldane smeared that toxic axle grease all over his chest?”
“Yeah!” Rico said. “He smeared this huge handful of blue shit all over his chest, smelled something weird, read the label, and immediately asked to use DrkSyders’ shower.”
“Seriously? I thought he spent all afternoon with that shit all over his skin.”
“Nah, he immediately smelled benzene or some shit, checked the label, and realized he was a dumbass,” Rico said.
“Ah. I remembered it differently,” I mused. “I think I’ll keep it the other way. It makes for a funnier story.”
Next Time: Tales of Public Transit (Or: “I’m not waiting for the bus, I’m Ho-ing!”)
Capricious Musings 