Then I noticed my daughter had made a new friend and that the new friend’s dad was actively playing with both of them, which made me look terrible because I wasn’t interacting with my daughter at all. This happens at playgrounds. If one parent does something, you follow his cue like a sheep. If she checks her phone, you check your phone. If he starts clapping and saying “YAY” while swinging his kid, you do the same. I wanted to have an equal presence in this impromptu playdate, only I had to keep an eye on my son and another eye on Turkish Hooker because my parents were demanding that I stare at her. Then I spotted a rumpled man walking around the playground with no child and I quietly feared that he was a serial killer hunting for victims. I needed six eyes in my head to keep tabs on everything.
My daughter ended up on the dreaded merry-go-round, which was now loaded with older kids. One twelve-year-old was spinning it using every last ounce of strength, like he was spinning the showcase wheel on The Price Is Right. There was another shithead kid wearing a tie-dyed shirt leaning off the side of the merry-go-round and deliberately allowing his own head to drag around on the mulch. There was no parent for this child anywhere in sight. The kid was clearly an orphan who had been left there to sleep under the climbing wall and forage for wild berries. His empty head doubled as a spinning weapon for any small child trying to approach the ride. I saw one kid try to grab the spinning wheel of death and she nearly had her arm torn out of the socket thanks to the centrifugal forces at work. Suddenly, my warm and fuzzy feelings about the playground being a utopia of cooperation faded away. I had to save my daughter from the merry-go-round before it came off its moorings and went flying off to the goddamn moon. I tried to address all the kids on the merry-go-round en masse.
“Let’s slow this wheel down, guys,” I said. “Someone could get hurt.”
Again, a small miracle. A big kid hopped off and dug in his heels, and my daughter and a bunch of other kids went streaming from it, with a new batch of youngsters ready to hop on to be terrorized. The playground community had come through for me once more, and I relaxed.
But then my son came running to me. He had gone down the tunnel slide again and now he was crying. I assumed he had bumped his head on something because my son rammed his face into things fifty times a day. I bent down to hug him and reassure him, and I suddenly felt something warm and gooey on his ass. Terrified he’d diarrheaed all over himself, I turned him around and was confronted with a giant blob of . . . something. To this day, I don’t know what it was. It was yellow. And it looked like pudding. I think it was banana pudding. I thought about tasting it to confirm (and because I really like banana pudding) but reconsidered. It could have been rat poison, or animal ejaculate, or any number of other unpleasant things that were not banana pudding.
“What the hell is this?!” I asked.
“Tunnow sly!” he said through tears.
“This was on the tunnel slide?!”
“Mmm-hmm. Tunnow sly.”
“WHO PUTS FOOD ON THE TUNNEL SLIDE?!”
I went over to the tunnel slide, and it was clear that some piece-of-shit kid had smeared food all over it. Two other parents saw the crime but couldn’t point the offending kid out. Maybe the ten-year-old who had been so nice before had laid a trap. Maybe it was one of the punks who left their scooters in the pathway. I looked around for any child who had trace evidence of banana pudding on his hands, and I daydreamed about pinning that child down and choking him to death for daring to infect my son with Pudding Butt. I searched high and low for the perpetrator, but Turkish Hooker kept getting in the way. And I could STILL hear my parents talking about her outfit from the bench a few feet away.
“You think she wears those shoes all the time?”
Then my daughter started screaming because she had blisters on her hands from attempting to cross the spinning monkey bars. My daughter was already proficient enough at normal monkey bars to gain entrance into any Afghan terrorist training academy. But this playground threw in the wrinkle of having circular monkey bars that were set on an angle and could spin around. No mortal child can cross these monkey bars. You have to be a full-grown silverback gorilla if you want to navigate these bars properly. They should have installed a pit of alligators beneath the bars just to add a dash of excitement.
Now my daughter had stigmata on her hands and my son had pudding dripping from his shorts and I had no emergency pants and undies for him because I’d forgotten them, along with a bottle of water and bunny crackers to snack on. Finally, I lost my shit.
“No more!” I said. “We’re leaving!”
I began walking away from the playground, with my son trailing behind, riding a tricycle in just his underwear, and my daughter asking me to carry her thirty-pound bike all the way home because her hands hurt. I carried my son’s shorts between my thumb and index finger so that none of the animal ejaculate would get on my hands.
We managed to trudge all the way back home. The children slumped in front of the TV like dying soldiers and I took off my shoes and socks and sat in my recliner and wriggled my toes and that little moment—that split second of relief—made the entire enterprise worth it.
My mom sat down next to me.
“That was a wonderful time!” she said.
“Yeah, it was great,” I said.
“I loved how both kids interacted with the other kids. They’re very social, you know.”
“That they are.”
“But did you SEE that woman? She was one hot ticket!”
“YES, I SAW HER, MOM.”
FAKA