Lawn Boy(2)
This Was Not the Plan
Friday night, while Mom was pulling a double down at the Tide’s Inn, I was at home, babysitting Nate for the third night in a row. Not that I’m complaining, but I could use a break. I watch my brother pretty much every night except Tuesday and Saturday, which consists mostly of placating him so he doesn’t go ape shit. Surrender to Nate’s will and it’s pretty smooth sailing, most of the time. Overexert your own will, however, and you’re asking for trouble.
Because unlike me, Nate knows exactly what he wants.
Mom and I make an effort to limit his TV time, because it seems like the right thing to do. So after a dinner of mac and cheese with turkey-dog slices and banana-flavored instant pudding, we screwed around with Mr. Potato Heads in the bedroom for a while. Nate likes to jam the arms and legs into the eye sockets, then hurl them across the room. He thinks it’s hilarious. I can’t really say that I share his amusement, but then I’m pretty much done with Mr. Potato Head at this stage of my life.
Nate smelled pretty ripe, so I finessed all three hundred pounds of him into the bathtub, using a couple of Oreos as incentive. After a hot bath, he’s usually pretty sedate, which is when I cave in and set him in front of the TV in the kitchen, where he slouches at the table drowsily watching Despicable Me 2. As long as Nate’s hypnotized by the television, I can generally count on him to stay in one place, which means I can almost have a life of my own, which mostly means reading.
I read at least two books a week, sometimes as many as four. Call it self-improvement. You see, old Mike Mu?oz would like to figure out who the hell he actually is, what he’d actually like to do with his life. He aches to be a winner. I’d like nothing more than to spread my proverbial wings and fly the fuck away from my current life, or maybe just get above it for a while. At this point, I feel like I’m nothing more than what everybody needs me to be or whatever the situation demands of me.
Nebulous, that’s the word I’m looking for.
“Nate, you good in there?” I shouted from the living room.
No reply.
“Nate?”
Nothing.
Had I been paying closer attention, my first clue that all was not right in our household would’ve been the fact that the relentless burbling of those idiotic Minions had ceased at some point. But the truth is, once you’ve sat through Despicable Me 2 enough times, you stop hearing the little fuckers. Besides, I was too wrapped up in my book to notice. It’s called The Octopus, by a dead guy named Norris, and it was recommended to me by the new librarian. The novel is about corporate tyranny in the 1800s, about how powerful outside forces impose their wills on us and disenfranchise us and beat us to jelly, until we’re seemingly powerless to fight them because they own the game. They are the landlords of the world. Sound familiar? Take away the sheep-herding poet, and The Octopus could’ve been written yesterday.
You’d think I would’ve smelled the smoke before the fire alarm started squalling, but oh no. It wasn’t until Nate shouted that I raced to the kitchen to find smoke so thick that I could hardly see him through the haze, fists clenched, tears streaming down his face.
I grabbed the hot mitts and threw open the oven door, exposing a molten pizza. Molten, because Nate had neglected to take off the plastic wrapper and remove the cardboard Frisbee from underneath. It didn’t help that he was broiling it. I rushed the pizza to the sink, where I deposited it in a smoldering heap, opening both taps full throttle.
“You okay?” I said. “Did you burn yourself?”
That’s when he gritted his teeth and raised his balled fists to chest level, and I knew that unless I could calm him within the next three seconds, he would go Incredible Hulk on me.
“Here, buddy, have an Oreo,” I said. “Have as many as you want.”
Tears still streaming down his face, he grabbed a fistful of cookies. As soon as he stuffed them in his mouth, his breathing began to quiet.
You’ve got to hand it to my brother—the man knows how to leverage his position. You don’t want to negotiate with Nate. If things had gone a little differently with his birth, he might have ended up being one of those people who invented themselves and did whatever the fuck they wanted with their life. Become the first Mu?oz to wriggle out of the primordial mud and grow some balls. Why not? He’s got the single-mindedness. He doesn’t take no for an answer. He might’ve cured cancer for all we know. But things didn’t work out that way. As is often the case in the 360, complications arose. Shit happened. And instead of being an astronaut, my older brother is a three-hundred-pound toddler.
The tears, it turned out, were mostly for the pizza, our last. I shepherded Nate to the living room and, with expert finesse, convinced him to eat a microwaved burrito instead of a pizza. Turning on the big TV, I plugged in the first Despicable Me, whereupon, with the aid of the Minions, I soon managed to restore order.
Mom came home almost two hours late, noticeably tipsy. Apparently, she was unable to smell the aftermath of our near disaster over the blue tendril of smoke curling off her Vantage.
“Sorry I’m late, honey,” she said.
She set her purse down on the dining-room table and proceeded straight to the kitchen for a tumbler of chardonnay with ice. That’s pretty much her go-to. But don’t judge her. Let’s see you take it on the chin from three husbands, your boss, the state, the insurance companies, and anyone else who stands in your way. Let’s see you bring home the bacon, get slapped on the ass all night, do zero self-care, take three vacations in twenty-five years, and not make a mess of raising kids all by yourself. Yes, it’s true, she’s been unlucky and unwise in love. It happens. And anyone who has ever been a waitress at the Tide’s Inn, with its “colorful characters,” its gazillion cast-off scratch tickets, and its signature bouquet of mop water and burnt hamburger meat, will tell you that the place just takes the umph right out of you. Between the job and Nate, she hasn’t got much left for herself by day’s end.