Cheeseburger Subversive (2 page)

“Yeah, I'm okay,” I reply.

“Damn! What about the mower?” gasps Danny Cobb.

They all abandon me and form a new circle around the upside-down lawn tractor.

“Shit, Sifter,” Mr. Potzo says to my dad, “it's toast.”

“It'll be cheaper to buy a new one than to fix it,” is Mr. Denney's analysis of the situation.

“Too bad. They don't build ‘em like that anymore,” Mr. Cobb sighs, with more affection in his voice than his wife likely ever hears.

While they all stand around, heads bowed, mourning the loss of the old lawn mower, I beat a hasty retreat into the house. I go into my bedroom and shut the door. I want to lie on my bed and pull the covers over my head, but the dirt and grass and little pinpoint bloodstains all over me make it impossible to do this without messing up the sheets, so I crawl under my bed instead.

Against the hardwood floor, I can feel the bruises forming on my back and elbows, but the bruises on my ego are much more painful. What's worse, one of the boys will probably tell the other boys at school about this travesty, and the story will eventually get around to Zoe Perry. God, that would be terrible. All the funny short stories and school bus bravado in the world will never compensate for this humiliation. Zoe will never be able to look at me again without laughing. I am never going back to school again!

I have almost convinced myself that I can adapt to life here amongst the dust bunnies beneath my bed, when I hear Dad coming down the hall towards my bedroom door. His footsteps are slow and sure, like those of a boss walking into an employee's office to tell him he's fired, or an executioner coming to take a condemned prisoner to the electric chair. Before I am able to scramble out from beneath the box spring, Dad enters the room.

“What on earth are you doing under there, Dak?” he asks.

“I dropped a pen under my bed,” I lie.

“What do you need a pen for?”

“To write you a letter of apology,” I say, thinking quickly.

“Ah, knock it off, Dak. It was an accident. I should have shown you what to do rather than leaving you to figure it out for yourself.”

That, by the way, was the closest my father ever came to admitting that he might have been even slightly wrong about something.

“We'll do better next time, Dak,” he says.

“Yeah,” I say, “we will.”

Invasion of the Blood Relatives

(Grade seven)

O
ur English teacher, Mrs. Mulvey, had given us a writing assignment to complete over the Christmas Break. “Each of you,” she said, in that smooth, melodic voice of hers, “is to write about the true meaning of Christmas, as reflected in your own experiences of the season.”

“I don't get it!” was Cliff Boswink's immediate response. This was usually what he said when he didn't feel like doing an assignment, which may explain why Cliff was taking grade seven English for a second time.

“Well, Cliff, what are some of the traditional things that come to mind when we think of the Christmas season?”

“Gettin' stuff!” he responded. Several of the boys sitting around him laughed, more likely to avoid getting punched at recess than due to any real hilarity in Cliff's response.

“Well, okay,” sighed Mrs. Mulvey, “giving and receiving gifts is certainly a part of the Christmas holiday, but what else is there?”

Jake Bellows put up his hand. “The celebration of the birth of Jesus?” Jake suggested.

“Church is for weenies,” Cliff grunted, casting a disdainful look at Jake meant to communicate that he could expect to be injured sometime during the next recess.

“Okay, then,” Mrs. Mulvey continued, “what other non-religious aspects are there to the Christmas holiday?”

Zoe Perry raised her hand and offered, “Family! Everyone has family traditions. We could all write about those.”

“Now
there
is a good idea!” Mrs. Mulvey beamed.

It is the first day back from the Christmas Break, and Mrs. Mulvey is asking for volunteers to read their compositions to the class. Cliff Boswink immediately jumps to his feet and says, “Me! Me!” He clears his throat, removes a crumpled page from his back pocket and reads:

“‘The Meaning of Christmas,' by Cliff ‘Blaster' Boswink.

“For Christmas I got a new helmet, gloves, and a tank of gas for my dirt bike, which
means
I can race around being cool a lot as soon as the snow melts. I got a new baseball bat, which
means
I can hit baseballs, rocks, and other stuff with it. I got a pellet gun, too, which
means
. . .”

Mrs. Mulvey interrupts him at this point, because many of the boys are now giggling, and she doesn't want things to get out of control.

“Yes, thank you, Cliff,” she says, and I think she would add the words “you moron” if teachers were actually allowed to say what they're thinking. “We get the idea. A very literal interpretation of the assignment, to be sure. Now, would anyone else like to share what they wrote? How about you, Dak?”

Follow Cliff Boswink? Does she think I'm suicidal?

“Um, no, that's okay,” I reply.

“Come on, Dak,” says Zoe Perry, “your stories are funny!”

She bats her eyelashes at me, and I am momentarily mesmerized by those big brown eyes of hers. I think Zoe is the prettiest, nicest girl I've ever seen, but of course, I'm not stupid enough to let anyone else know about this — particularly not Zoe! Nevertheless, there is something about impressing Zoe Perry which makes me feel a little bigger and stronger than usual, which is enough to make me rise to my feet and begin reading, even if it means upstaging Cliff Boswink, and risking potential injury.

“This is called ‘Invasion of the Blood Relatives,'” I say, “and it goes like this:”

In most households throughout suburbia, Christmas morning is a warm and happy family affair. Inside the cluttered split-level in which I grew up, the first few hours of December the twenty-fifth count among the happiest moments of my life.

My sister and I would wake up no later than five o'clock, and soaring high on a wave of hyperactive excitement, we would zoom around the living room, hollering and bumping into things, until our raccoon-eyed parents finally emerged from beneath their warm blankets. Occasionally, they made us suffer in anticipation until as late as six o'clock; even a minute longer than this usually resulted in my sister and me actually tugging them onto the cold floor and out into the hall. Mom and Dad were always really good sports about this, and although they always put on a great show of acting cranky and tired as they plodded down the stairs in their housecoats, I know that they were secretly delighted to see us in this annual state of euphoria.

My sister Charlotte was (and still is) three years younger than me, and was therefore granted the age-old youngest sibling's privilege of looting the first stocking. After she carefully examined each treat and trinket contained therein in a slow, deliberate way that nearly caused me to explode into conniptions of anticipation, I was finally allowed to look into the contents of my own stocking. I always got great stuff like Oh Henry bars, toy cars, and a whole book full of Lifesavers candies. My dad's stocking, on the other hand, always contained boring stuff like Bic razors, socks, and shampoo. I resolved right then and there to never become a dad.

Mom always insisted on pilfering her own stocking last. It nearly always contained a bottle of aspirin, with a little tag attached, which read, “For later, when The Cousins arrive.” This little gift from Old Saint Nick never failed to amuse Mom and Dad. We all sat in a tight little family circle and laughed about this strange gift.

As the saying goes, however, all good things must come to an end. Our Christmas morning bliss was traditionally shattered with one simple line from our mother:

“Okay, kids,” she would say, trying to mask the message of doom behind a cheery voice, “it's time to get ready for The Cousins!”

Sometimes Dad would whisper to us, under his breath, “Remember to hide any new toys that you don't want broken!”

Often Mom would hear him, and she would pretend to scold, “Arthur! What a thing to say about your blood relatives!”

By the time I was seven-years-old, I had become a great fan of vampire comic books (which I had to read over at my friend Mickey's because Mom and Dad were convinced that there was a verifiable link between comic books and illiteracy). If vampire comic books had taught me anything, it was that anything involving blood was to be avoided and feared; the annual invasion of our moderately peaceful household by our “blood relatives” had convinced me beyond a shadow of a doubt that those vampire books were absolutely correct.

After inhaling a quick breakfast, our household went into red alert mode — Mom did the dishes and gave the kitchen and bathroom floors a quick waxing while Dad brought in wood for the fireplace. My sister and I were invariably assigned to clean-your-room-and-stay-out-of-the-way duty.

While our parents whisked around like housekeeping elves, I set to work stockpiling our new Christmas toys under Dad's workbench in the basement where they would hopefully not be found by our Yuletide invaders. My sister assumed her annual duty which was to sit and monitor the upstairs window for early signs of the impending invasion. As soon as she heard the unmistakable rumble of one of Uncle Bob's botched do-it-yourself-for-less muffler jobs, she would shriek, “They're here! They're here!”

As she called out these words, my sister's voice, which was quiet and subdued on every other day of the year, had the startling effect of an air-raid siren. At her call we would all drop whatever we were doing and line up together at the back door, wearing smiles in the face of adversity.

At this point in the story, I could recount to you any one of a startling number of Yuletide disasters instigated by my tornado-like cousins. I could tell you about the year that one of them lit the Christmas tree on fire by accidentally spilling Christmas brandy on one of the branches and then
accidentally
holding a lit Christmas candle under the same branch for several minutes.

I could tell you about the time one of the older cousins challenged his brother to an eggnog-drinking contest, which resulted in some gravity-defying projectile vomiting and a unique stench which lingered for weeks after the holiday was over.

I could tell hundreds of stories like these, but just so things don't get too grisly for you, I will concentrate on one Christmas Day in particular. I was nine-years-old at the time but I can still recall the day with perfect clarity as if it were a newsreel playing inside my head.

They crash through the door and we brace ourselves. Their definition of talking is what we conservatively define as screaming. The extraordinary volume is compounded tenfold by the fact that they all “talk” at once.

They thunder into the kitchen. They have accidentally forgotten to remove their boots and they cut a quick path of mucky destruction across Mom's freshly waxed floor.

“Oh, my!” giggles my aunt as Mom scurries for a mop. “Look at the mess we've made of your lovely floor!”

A couple of the older kids take this as a cue to remove their boots; the younger ones do not bother. They figure the damage is already done.

My aunt is busy explaining that they have brought a bottle of liquor in lieu of a gift for my father, since they were absolutely horrified to discover at the last moment that the very, very, very expensive sweater they bought for him was accidentally seven sizes too large. So instead, they brought a forty-ounce bottle of rum. My father, incidentally, does not drink rum — but,
coincidentally
, it happens to be my aunt's favourite.

My mother nods complacently, knowing well that my aunt will have personally consumed the contents of the bottle before the last gift is unwrapped. This way she will “not feel so well” when it comes time to do the dishes. Sudden illnesses during cleanup time has become something of a holiday tradition with The Cousins.