“Is there any other way out of this thing?” I asked.
He shrugged. Actually, to call it a shrug is an insult to shrugs because the garden-variety shrug takes at least some physical effort. He just shrugged with his face. I looked at the entrance of the structure and I tried to see if I could fit through the flap to get to my son, but it was hopeless. Only a very small Chinese acrobat could have contorted himself into such a tight space. I backed away from the Jungle and stared up at the boy, who was still crying.
“Okay, be cool!” I shouted. “I’m gonna talk you down! But you have to do exactly as I say. Okay?”
“Oat-kay.”
I assumed the role of police negotiator, talking a suicidal man off a ledge. “There is a slide that will take you down to me. Just follow the big kids.”
The boy ignored my advice and swam against the current.
“No, no, no!” I shouted. “That’s the wrong way!” I wanted to prove to everyone around that I was an excellent negotiator. But my son continued back where he came from, fighting back tears along the way. He didn’t want the big kids to see him crying anymore. I changed course and started guiding him through the way back to the entrance, even though he clearly knew where he was going. He lowered himself back down through a handful of cubes.
“There’s a rope bridge coming up. You’re going to have to cross it,” I said. He arrived at the bridge and while the big kids didn’t help him across, they at least had the common courtesy to get out of the way. Usually, big kids just run through smaller children as if they’re blocks to kick over. He went across the painful steps and paused once in a while to look at me, his face hot and swollen. I wanted to pole-vault up to him and kiss every part of his head, but I was helpless to aid him. He’d have to make it on his own, and I would have to watch the struggle unfold in real time.
He got to the end of the bridge and then lowered himself down to the second level. “Yes, yes!” I said. “Keep going! I believe in you!” Exhausted, he came to the ball pit and fell into it, like a triathlete collapsing at the finish line. This final obstacle was nearly too much for him. It was Shackleton’s trek across South Georgia Island. But now he was low enough that I could speak to him directly through the netting.
“You’re almost there. You can do it, little guy. Get up and wade through those balls. Wade, damn you!”
The boy slowly picked himself up and carried himself across. There was a final hole to fall into and as he slipped through the flap down to safety, I scooped him up and wrapped his legs around me and tucked his big blond head into my neck and kissed him over and over again.
“You’re all right,” I said to him. “You’re safe now, fella.”
He was stuttering through tears. “D-d-d-d-deddy, I wand to bo home.”
“We’re going home right now. I promise.”
Just then, my wife showed up with my daughter. The girl stared up at the Jungle and shrieked with delight.
“I wanna go in THAT!” she said.
My son saw the look on his sister’s face, then wriggled out of my arms and seemed to find a second wind, looking as if we had just arrived at Funland this instant. I knew what he was gonna say before he even said it.
“Don’t say it,” I begged him.
“ME TOO!”
Shit.
PIZZA NIGHT
We made pizza every week because the two kids subsisted on Kraft Mac and pizza and virtually nothing else. You can do everything right and still not succeed in getting your kids to eat properly. You can cook all your own meals. You can avoid McDonald’s and warn the children that eating at McDonald’s will make them fat and diseased. You can threaten to withhold dessert if they don’t eat half a zucchini cube. You can do all those things and still end up with a child who refuses to eat anything other than chicken nuggets assembled from fire-hosed penis meat.
One time, I bought my daughter a cheeseburger and begged her to eat it, to just take one bite, and when she did take a nibble I was THRILLED. I was ecstatic over her eating a cheeseburger, which is stupid because a cheeseburger is pure shit. The bun is shit. The patty is shit. The cheese is shit. Every element of it belongs to the FDA-labeled Shit Group. But it was something different, and I had reached a point where anything different was acceptable. She spit out the bite. I ate the rest of the cheeseburger because I’m a responsible person and I owed it to all the starving malaria babies of the world.