story # 7

late night drink

by bob gottlieb

copyright © 1992-2012 Bob Gottlieb, all rights reserved.

       Stuart was an extraordinarily obnoxious human being.  A royal pain in the hind most portion of the anatomy.  There was not a single known person, that I could discover, who enjoyed time consumed in his company.  He was just about the same age as my brother Tommy, which puts him just a couple of years younger than I.  He whined, he whimpered, and he sniveled, and his body language reflected that of a severely whipped dog.  Both what he said, and how he delivered the message were the facets of his invidious personality that most perturbed the people he came in contact with.  I am sure you have met someone whose tone and inflection of merely saying hello had you wishing that they had had a vocal cord extraction before they'd even completed uttering that initial word. If you haven't met someone with such an inflection that is so irritating that you wished yourself a Physic Surgeon with the ability to remove vocal chords merely by waving your hand in front of their throat, I envy you.  His execrable traits continued in a dizzyingly geometrically progressive spiral.  As stated he not only whined about everything, but he was constantly running to an adult to tattle about every little thing anyone did to him.  To observe him for about an hour in the company of other children you would think he was in training to  be a marathon runner.  He bolted to the nearest adult that he knew would give him attention, with every infraction of the Stuart Rules for the Treatment of Stuart.  He did all this running while ceaselessly sniffling.   He invariably needed to blow his nose, but of course he didn't, thus he had that incessant runny nose, a perfect compliment to his whining.  I hope you now you have the picture of this child with the perpetually snotty nose, with a ball of mucus that was perpetually poised on the crest of his upper lip as if waiting for the word ‘go’ before cascading into his mouth. This picture is neither fabricated, nor exaggerated, it is merely a pretty damn accurate description, it is the whole truth.  These character traits just made you want to put him out of his misery in the least humane way possible, but he had more irritants waiting for your unsuspecting and exposed mind.  He was constantly snuffling, and talking in that whiny voice of his.  He used his voice constantly to extol this myriad of mortifications that constantly befell him.  With all the other faults he possessed, his path through life was to  be no piece of cake. His crowning exacerbating bit of behavior, at least for me, was that he was not responsible for any of these calamities and indignities that continually befell him, or so he said.    He felt himself the recipient of all malevolent forces, if you will a lightening rod for all the random forces that wished to humiliate, degrade, and debase human beings.  If he tripped over a blade of grass on a putting green, a vengeful worm who was out to get him for some unknowing act he had accidentally perpetrated upon a friend or relative of said worm deliberately placed it there to trip him up.  These calamities never befell him because he didn't look where he was going; they happened because he was so immersed in his misery that in no way did he pay attention to his surroundings.  No!  These were deliberate acts aimed directly at him.

       Every person that had ever come into contact with him, including those that should have been better able to control themselves such as child psychologists and the like, wound up with a migraine headache because this snot-nosed child was such an unnecessary and consummate blot on their day.  When he walked into a room he seemed to suck all the life out of it.  He depleted everyone’s' energy to the point of exhaustion. I mean he was a walking cure for insomnia.  I don't think any grownups had any respect for him as a functioning human being in any capacity.  I think even his parents felt they were obligated to like him because he was their son, a product of their loins and the way they raised him.  Maybe they treated him nicely to make up for the guilt they felt for saddling the rest of humanity with his presence.  I take that thought back, they were too selfish to feel any guilt.  I guess in many ways he exhibited the worst of the negative traits that both of them had, but in a remarkably dense and congested form.  He was also my cousin, thus I was forced to be in his company at times.  I did not willingly acknowledge our kinship by blood, and once threatened to nail his tongue, with him still attached to it, to a fire ant hill if he ever told anyone of our kinship.  I would not submit willingly to being in his company.  This torture was at times inevitable, for instance when the whole family gathered for holidays or just got together for a family gathering.  He was worse to be around than my Aunt Millie.  Who was a big overstuffed woman that was constantly coming out of whatever piece of clothing she was crammed into.  She was always surrounded with discordant cloying smells that stuck around your nose for hours no matter what you used to attempt to wash them away.  She always had to hug you to her bursting at the seams, humongous bosom and hold your head pinioned in with all the smells of perfume, cooking, cats, and dogs mixed with distinguishing body odor, that assaulted your mind and assassinated your senses.  Then she thrust you back with her hands holding you away from her and she'd talk loud enough to burst your eardrums and demolish your cortex about how much you had grown.  Boom; than back into the too warm overflowing suffocating cacophony of smells that almost made you puke if you could have gathered the breath to do so.  Then the final humiliation of a very hard pinch on the cheek.   No matter how much you squirmed and twisted she always got you good.

       My parents were not exactly crazy about spending time with Stuart's parents either.  Nothing was ever said directly to make me come to that conclusion.  However when you hear your father telling his sister we couldn't come to their bar-b-q because one of the kids was sick (I had been outside playing football  with Oscar, the twins, and Tommy and had just come into the house to go to the bathroom.  I guess I was quiet and he didn't know I was there.) and they didn't think it would be a good idea to go out at this time and leave the kid with a sitter.  Well in all fairness to my father one of the young goats owned by a family friend was having a bit of diarrhea.  He just let her draw her own conclusions.

        Inside it was a house of many hues and colors.  Not always were the colors actually different colors, but rather textures of the same color.  The arrangement of both furniture and light and the shape of the usable portion of the room established the mood of the rooms.  I remember the smoking room, which was in the front of the house, was a tan color.  The walls were done in a brocade tan wallpaper, the wood floors were tan, the tongue in groove ceiling was tan, all the furnishings in the room were tan.  Yet the room had not the slightest appearance of being monochromatic.  It was a lively feeling room that we were always trying to sneak into when we played hide and go seek.  It had all these nooks and crannies that light reached only at various different times of the day depending upon the season.  You could hide in this one little cranny in the winter even though you were in plain sight, but in the summer time the angle of the light shifted and you were exposed to the glare.  In addition that room always had the warm and rich aroma of Mr. Singular's pipe.  Every room in the house, and there were 5 bedrooms, a sewing room, and 1 bathroom upstairs, and 6 rooms downstairs; obviously the kitchen, the dining room, the afore mentioned smoking room, a library with a piano, the living room, and a den, plus 2 bathroom, and 2 big closets and the alcove containing the stairs to the cellar had an individual personality.  Each room's clearly defined character depended on either occupant or use, and the eccentricities displayed by the rooms did not always mesh except on the grandest of levels.

         We lived next to the Singular family for about 12 years, and I remember their house better than I remember my own.  I think I might have spent more time, particularly if you do not count time spent asleep, in their house than in my own.  I always had access to the house through the dormer window that was always kept unlocked, the Singular's seemed always to be glad when they noticed us, which was not every time I was there.  It was just one of those busy households where an extra body or two went unnoticed until there was cause to notice.  I got to be friends with their oldest boy the day we moved in.

         The seeming chaos of the day was typical of our large family gatherings.  Everyone, let's be honest only the women of the family, prepares a couple of the assigned side dishes and desserts at home and we all gather at the dinning place about 5 hours before we are to eat.  The adults and older children either help out in the kitchen or are taking care of business in the flower shop with the last minute frenzy.  Then the adults settle down to dinner with business still on their minds, hopefully people know better in this day and age. This early gathering afforded the kids plenty of opportunity to wreck havoc, while the adults who aren't working drink, make snide comments, and yell at the mayhem caused by the children instead of at each other.  Thus an illusion of an extended happy family is maintained by the adults until the next opportunity to cause quiet, socially acceptable torment happens to fall into someone's lap.  There were a total of 7 children, 6 related from 3 different families and Oscar.  Oscar, my cousin Marty and myself were the oldest, and the other 4, including miserable Stuart, were gathered at an age a couple of years younger than ours.  The children were excused to play in Aunt Susan's side yard when the florist shop closed, so we would be out from under foot.  This was the first time Oscar had been around miserable Stuart for any extended stretch of time, and thus he got to witness the full scope of the Stuart experience. On the very rare occasions that Stuart's family had come to our house,  he always had the opportunity of escape open to him of picking up and going home.  Stuart always wanted to play basketball with us even though he cried about being pushed, hit tripped, and any other indignity he could think of all the time.  He cried and went inside to tell the adults what we were doing to him constantly.  We even invented the Stuart rule, which said that the team that got him also got the extra man, if available, to make up for him being off tattling continually.  After about his 439th trip to the house Oscar said to me, " I see what you mean about him.  Man, I thought you were doing your usual exaggerating.  I didn't think anyone could have been as bad as you made him out to be.  I'll have to apologize to you sometime for doubting you."

         Marty said, "It'd be nice to get rid of him for the afternoon... without us getting in trouble.  I wish he'd get sick."

         "Not much chance of something striking him suddenly, is there?"  I asked.  "Other than one of our fists!"

         "Like a rattlesnake," quipped Oscar, then more thoughtfully. "Maybe we could make him not want to play with us?"

         "Not much chance of that."  said Marty shaking his head.

         "Maybe we could make him sick." I said thoughtfully.  They looked at me, I guess my tone of voice had something in it that caught them.  I was doing some deep thinking.  Yes, I admit it, my mind can conjure up some pretty diabolical twists.  "Stuart always drinks rootbeer doesn't he?"  Marty and Tommy nodded their heads in agreement with this statement of fact.  "Marty does your mom still buy those cans of soda with the tops (for those of you too young to remember soda used to come in a can with a neck on it with a regular bottle top on the neck.) on 'em?"  He nodded his head in the affirmative to that question too.  "Let's go into the kitchen and see what we can come up with."   The 3 of us, Marty, Oscar,  and I, went into the kitchen.  I don't think the others had caught on to what was in my mind at this point.  I took a can of rootbeer out of the fridge and asked Oscar, because he had the steadiest hands, to open it very carefully so the top could be put back on without showing it had ever been off the can.  While he was doing that I opened up the shelves and started poking around.  Marty was still looking a bit puzzled, but I'm pretty sure Oscar knew by now what I had in mind.  I started pulling bottles from the shelves, vinegar, horseradish, mustard, liquid soap, pepper, ketchup, salt, powdered garlic, and about anything else that was not in soda even if remotely disgusting without being poisonous.  A dash of this, combined with a bit, and pinch, a slight shake here, and pretty soon everything shy of the sink itself was in there.  The oddest thing was it didn't have any smell to it at all.  Maybe they all neutralized one another, I certainly don't know.  Carefully the cap went back on and was bent into shape.  It was virtually undetectable from any other can in there.  We made sure there were no other cans of rootbeer visible and went back outside.  We were sure that after dinner  (No soda was allowed in Grandma's house at dinner.  I don't know why but it was some unwritten law that was never even challenged.) Stuart would grab the can of soda as was usual when we all dashed away from the table to play,  and at least get one good swallow down before he realized what was up and go running off to plead his case.  We were ready with another cold undoctored can so we could plead innocent to any wrongdoing.  We figured one sip, slam the can down and run for the bathroom and wash out his mouth or throw up, we didn't really care which.  While he was gone pour out a sip of the hidden clean can and throw the treated can away.    Good plan?  We had it all covered we thought.

         Well dinner was, as dinners there always are when the whole family was gathered, chaotic.  The children were sequestered at a separate table to spare the adults our obnoxious behavior, or maybe to keep us from hearing about all the news and gossip of which we supposedly were ignorant.  I think the children were relatively quiet and Stuart only ran to tattle 4 or 5 times.  That should have been a tip off to anyone that knew about our relationship with him that something was up.  Normally it was 3 trips per course, and this meal, what with  soup, salad, appetizer, entrée, and desert should have been good for an easy 12 trips to the adult table.  He was always the one that had the top of the salt shaker come off on his food (He never did get into the habit of testing it.), that had something inadvertently spilled in his lap while it was being passed to him, or whose food got coated with pepper when he wasn't looking or off relating the last indignity heaped upon him to his hapless parents.

         Just as we were all begging to be released from the table to go back outside, his father suffered one of his usual bouts of severe indigestion.  These attacks generally occurred at times of  convenience for his family.  The frequent attacks were blamed on an ulcer and seemed to require the stricken to go home and lay down in a dark room for the rest of the day, or a migraine headache would soon descend upon this head of family and incapacitate him for several days.  Uncle Louis and Aunt Lois quickly packed up Stuart and his younger brother Ronald (Who actually was a nice enough kid) and bolted from the scene.  Miserable Stuart was removed and we children were overjoyed with the situation and went about the rest of the day feeling as if the leaden pain of a toothache had been removed.  The Gods had smiled upon us we thought in the naiveté of our years.

         Meanwhile the can of killer rootbeer sat biding its time, patiently awaiting the arrival of its unsuspecting thirsty victim, keeping cool in the fridge.

         BRRIINNGG went the phone at about 4:30 am at my parents house.  I heard it when it woke me, but didn't pay any attention as my father often got calls from the night watchman at strange hours.  I heard a muffled curse word or two and figured something had gone wrong with the boiler and he had to go out to the business himself to fix the problem.  These were the in-between hours, too early to get things done, and too late in the morning for him to go back to sleep.  He normally left the house at 6:00 am for work.  Several times a week even earlier if it was a day for shipping the orchids.  I heard him conferring with my mother and a couple of minutes later he came into my room and woke me up.  He said, "Get dressed and come downstairs!" and he left the room.  When there was this quiet no nonsense tone to my father's voice it was not the time for anything but strict obedience.  My mother and father were downstairs with the coffee pot perking merrily, just sitting at the table when I got down there.  I was not feeling too happy as I descended the stairs.  I had noticed that my brother's door had been pulled shut.  This matter concerned me alone as my brother was being excluded from this little gathering.  I was frantically going over all the misdeeds of the previous day, then started taking the search further back, wracking my now wide awake brain for any deed that could be this serious.  The time, the tone of voice, the phone call, the omission of brother Tommy, made me most apprehensive.  I could come up with nothing that was this serious.

         As I entered the kitchen I was waved to my chair at the table, and silence continued until there was coffee in cups with milk and sugar on the table for them.  I was offered no sustenance, this increased the anxiety factor, because my parents were quite thoughtful.  My parents were pretty easy going, but we knew the limits to which we could take things.  They did not hits us really, I only remember one spanking and that was not serious as I can't even remember the reason for it.  They took things away that we wanted, like free time, baseball, and for me reading time. But I knew when there was that cold quiet in the voice that this is the time to listen, and listen well or the consequences would be more severe.  My parents did not tolerate stupid behavior well.  

         My father had a strange expression on his face that I couldn't read, and he was just sitting there looking into his cup of coffee.  My mother was busy arranging and rearranging the stuff on the table.  I wanted something to happen at this point, anything at all to break the silence which I knew I better not break.  You have heard all the expressions people have of trying to convey the feeling of the silence of a few minutes seeming like hours, but until you been forced to endure a hanging silence while waiting for something you didn't know about but still dreaded, to happen to you can't relate.  If you have  been through the anguish and torture of a similar situation, the picture is vivid in your mind

         "What did you have in your mind yesterday?" my father said with a stoic voice.  My blank face answered his question for him.  With the slightest quiver in his voice he said, "What is it you and Oscar and Marty had in mind to do to that kid?  Is it true you were the one that thought of, and gave the orders?  Your uncle is sick as a dog, vomiting his guts up."

         Light burst through the fog I had been engulfed in.  The killer rootbeer had hit an unintended victim.  A victim that was deserving of its potency, but who had the capability of striking back.  I had to bite my lip though to keep from laughing at the irony of it all.  Uncle Harold was real sick.  The can of soda had done its job, it just selected the wrong person.  So Marty had squealed, I had thought he might be capable of holding up his own pants.  All I could get out of my mouth was, "It wasn't meant for Uncle Harold.  It was meant for Stuart....  and we forgot about it.  He went home when Uncle Louis got sick and we were so happy to be rid of him we forgot about the soda.  Honest!"

         There was silence around the table.  My mother started to say something and stopped.  I looked at her, then at my father and suddenly realized he was biting his lip also.  He didn't do that when he concentrated.  He was fighting for control.  He wanted to laugh?  At this point he said, "You'd better be very careful about what you do, and who helps you in the future.  Someone could've have been seriously hurt."  At this point my brother came downstairs and asked what was happening.  My father said we had just gotten up because I didn't feel well today.  Because we didn't want to wake him we had shut his door.

         My father turned to me, "I think you and Oscar won't go to work today.  I think it would be a very good idea for you to rest up at home for a couple of days.  I have a feeling that you will enjoy much better health if you avoid your Uncle Harold for a little bit."

 

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