250=1, Story 11

250=1 is a set of stories, each exactly 250 words in length, including the title. Click here for more of them.

Junior The Third.

Junior the Third isn’t as large as he was supposed to be. 

He’s missing a toe, for one thing. 

The toe was bitten off in a fight in 10^th grade, by a dog that got excited when Junior The Third and Daniel were fighting because Daniel had said “Junior The Third ain’t a Christian name” which implied that Junior would be going to Hell and that might mean that Amy wouldn’t go to Homecoming with him.

His name had kept him off the high school football team, too, as the Coach wasn’t sure what name to put on the jersey, and so Junior joined the drama club and painted trees and had a few lines in The Wizard of Oz.

“Your name’s Junior, and you’re the third one,” is how Mom explained his name. Dad wouldn’t talk about it and Junior got the idea that Dad worked on the oil rig because of his son’s name, which was wrong but Junior thought it anyway.

Now, Junior sort of hunches over and tries to avoid attention on the subway and doesn’t work out as much as he could and he avoids drinking milk because he doesn’t want to be seeable.  A lifetime of attention over something he couldn’t control has given Junior an aversion to people noticing him.

But Amy went to Homecoming with him, and she’d even married him, and they’d had a son, who sometimes went to Junior’s office with him. 

The son’s name was Arthur.

We are READY TO GO. Well, almost. (Vacations)

Continuing the story of my recent vacation to Florida... read part one by clicking here, or part two by clicking here.


I may have mentioned once or twice my displeasure with the medical establishment, a displeasure that arises from their inability to deal with my own heart condition, which for simplicity's sake I'll just refer to as Yossarian's Liver.

One thing I have learned from my repeated exposures to Big Medicine is that Big Medicine doesn't like it when you come in there all knowing what you've got and uppity and all.  As I've said in the past, if you go into a doctor's office and tell them what you think you have, they will make up their mind immediately to never ever treat you for that thing and will probably use that little ear-light thing to inject your brain with test DNA they cooked up over lunch just to see what happens.  That is almost certainly a real thing that doctors do, in my mind.

So I at least never tell the doctors what I think is wrong with me.  My entire job in a doctor's office consists of two tasks:

1.  Act like I couldn't possibly have any clue what's happening to me even if I saw it happen, like, for example, let's say you were in your backyard with your kids and spraying them with a hose because it was hot out, and you upset a nest of bees you didn't know was there and you rescued your boys from the bees without them getting stung at all because YOU ARE A SUPERHERO FOR CRYING OUT LOUD but you got stung 17+ times yourself (your wife will say it was 16 in the future but you will want to be very clear that it was "at least 17" and that "there may have been more" because while 16 is a lot, 17 is more but sometimes you also think maybe 17 doesn't sound like that many bee stings.

Let's say that happened to you and you go into the ER because you're having trouble breathing.  The last thing you will want to do is tell the doctor that you got stung by a bee and are having trouble breathing, because that doctor will then not be able to treat you for bee-sting-related-shortness of breath while he goes to search for the experimental DNA to load into the ear thing, and you will be told "Okay, you're free to go" just moments before you pass out on the stretcher in the ER (which, if you are going to pass out on a stretcher, is a good place to do it.)

2.  Act as though I am going to die at any time and can't possibly focus on what is going on.  This is pretty easy if, for example, you go to the doctor when you can't breathe, or are having a heart attack (which they will diagnose as heartburn and try to send you on your way, also, something they only do when they run  out of Ear DNA) but it's harder to do if you just have a sore throat and cough and can't talk.

I knew those rules when  I took myself and Mr Bunches and Mr F, all of us sharing the same sore throat, cough, and lack of voice, to the Urgent Care on Saturday morning, but I also knew this:  just about two months before, there had been a run of strep throat through the boys' school, and I had gotten it.  I had lost my voice and had a cough and had a sore throat, and the doctor who I AM NOT EVEN KIDDING said "You don't have strep" also gave me antibiotics (he didn't say why he was giving them to me if I didn't have strep, so obviously he was just mad that I'd told him (A) there is strep throat going around and (b) I have it, but he was out of Ear DNA) and I was better in three days.

So that Saturday morning, I took a calculated risk and told the receptionist and the nurse and eventually the two different doctors we had to see ("On Saturdays, we have the children seen by the pediatric unit," Doctor One explained to me, all but adding "It's our way of further dehumanizing this entire experience and ensuring that it's as long and tedious as we can make it.") that I thought we had strep throat, and that also we were leaving on vacation just as soon as they were done and gave us antibiotics.

That led to THIS EXACT EXCHANGE:

Doctor: [peering into my throat with a popsicle stick jabbing my uvula]: Why do you think  you have strep?

ME: argharbaroisergasp.

Doctor [removes stick]:  Your throat is very raw and red.

Me: [hoarsely]:  I had strep about two months ago and it was exactly like this.  There was a case of strep throat going around.  Now I have those same symptoms.

Doctor:  I don't think it's strep.  But we'll do some tests.  Did you say you're leaving on vacation?

Me: [Nods]

Doctor: They'll take a little while.

Mr Bunches at the pool in our first hotel. That blur behind him is not a ghost; it's Mr F, who mostly moves too fast for ordinary cameras to catch proof of his existence.

 The problem with admitting to doctors that you're not at death's door, that you might only have a bug that they can knock out with one of their wonder pills they have right in their white coats is that it makes them feel unimportant, I figure -- after all, other people get to wear white coats, like scientists who discover Higgs Bosons or pharmacists who [foreshadowing] will try to sell you a drop that supposedly prevents water from getting in your ear while you swim, which is clearly impossible but which has definite applications for avoiding Ear DNA -- and so if all they are is people who come in, hear that you have strep throat, and give you a pill, they start to think "Why did I even bother going to medical school?  I'm just a pill pusher.  Is this why my wife left me? How is this guy so cool, for a guy who has strep throat?" and they have an existential crisis in which they begin to despair that they will ever be played by George Clooney in a long-running TV series.

So it's far better for you if you can, while you have strep throat, sort of lie on the floor in a fetal position and gasp weakly, possibly having an aneurysm or spontaneously amputating your own leg, if you can, because that will make the doctor stop reading that Why You Should Join Doctors Without Borders pamphlet and instead work on you.

In the end, two different doctors looked at our throats and listened to our chests and looked in our ears and made us wait in those little rooms which wasn't at all the punishment it was supposed to be because I'd brought my Kindle and so we played Plants vs. Zombies while we waited.

The fact that we were not dying in a heap led the doctors to conclude that they needn't bother doing anything about us, and they sent us on our way, saying that if the other tests came back positive for strep they'd "Give us a call," and with that, we decided to embark on a new career as modern-day Typhoid Marys and spread our message of goodwill and strep virus across America.

But first, we had to pack the car, which by now you have guessed was not the minivan we thought we had rented. 

Sweetie had gone back to the rental place.  She had that morning called up our credit card company and had arranged to electronically transfer enough money to pay the entire balance, so we had this credit card that had all kinds of credit on it and more than enough, at that, to rent two, maybe three minivans.

But when Sweetie and The Boy had gone to the rental company, the same girl -- who by this point was making it glaringly obvious that it would be a cold day in Hell before she let Sweetie take this minivan -- was again uncooperative, the difference this time being that the credit card company was imposing it's own arcane rules on her, too.

So what the credit card company told Sweetie she needed was the exact amount that the car rental would cost; Sweetie had to tell them, to the penny, what the car rental agency was going to charge her.

Sweetie, for some reason, thought it would be best to get that information from the car rental company, mostly because Sweetie was still under the impression that the car rental company was in the business of renting cars.  So the car rental company told Sweetie it would cost $982.17 for the week, and Sweetie, like a sucker, believed her, and reported that to the credit card company.

Sweetie then went to the car rental company, where the car rental girl rang up her total and said "The total is $970.17."

And the charge did not go through.

Because it wasn't the exact amount.  Sweetie called the credit card company and asked the problem -- with the car rental girl right there -- and they said it had to be the exact amount and this was $12 less.

So Sweetie, in desperation for something in this story to actually work, said to the car rental girl:

"Can't you just charge me twelve dollars more?"

But the car rental girl, who could have made $12 extra dollars that day, decided to live by the Apparently Very Strict Code Of Honor That Binds Girls Who Sit Behind Desks In Sears Automotive Centers, declined that bribe, and the entire transaction fell apart, resulting in me and The Boy sitting behind Sweetie's car in our driveway trying to figure out how to fit a minivan's worth of stuff into Sweetie's car.

Main Street, Metropolis, IL, at 9 a.m. on a Sunday morning.

Here is what we were packing into the car for our vacation:

My suitcase.
My laptop case.
My small case containing my Kindle Fire.
A case of all the cords and chargers for all the stuff we were taking.
Mr F and Mr Bunches' Ipad.
The Boy's suitcase.
The Boy's laptop case.
A bin of Mr F and Mr Bunches' favorite toys in case they missed them while they were in Florida.
A bin of Mr F and Mr Bunches' favorite snacks in case they don't sell the right kind of Cheesy Puffs and Cracker Sticks in Florida.
A foam mattress pad that would serve as a spare bed for Mr F and/or Mr Bunches in the hotels because Mr F doesn't like hotel beds and sometimes sleeps on the floor in hotels.
A suitcase for Mr F and Mr Bunches.
Another suitcase for Mr F and Mr Bunches.  ("Really?")
Approximately 14,000 suitcases for Sweetie including a plastic bin that included a hair dryer.
A giant pink hockey-equipment sized bag of  makeup, face cleansers, cold medicine, cotton swabs, and various and sundry other things.

Plus, we were taking us, but we were optional.

To pack the car, we used a time-honored system I like to call "Is this breakable?"  To use that system, you pick something up and consider whether it is breakable.  You can do that in a variety of ways, but the best way, I've found, is to ask a question:  Is it yours?  If it belongs to you, it's breakable.  If it doesn't, who cares?

Once you've sorted out the breakable from the unbreakable stuff, you pack them: If something is breakable, you put it on the bottom of the cargo area and stack things on it after first putting pillows all around and over it.

If a thing is s not breakable, you wait until you have packed the car impossibly full of breakable things, and then you pick up armfuls of the unbreakable things (i.e., things that belong to someone who's not you) and cram them into the car as fast as you can before slamming the trunk door shut and thinking to yourself "I hope we don't have to open that again EVER."

With that done, I announced that we were READY TO GO.

"Let's hit the road!" I said.

"The boys have to go to the bathroom before we leave," Sweetie said.

10 minutes later, with everyone in the car, I announced that we were again READY TO GO.

"Let's hit the road!" I said.

"We have to stop and get gas," Sweetie said.

10 minutes later, having spent $57 on gas and repacked everyone into the car, I announced we were READY TO GO.

"Let's hit...," I said.

"Do you think we should get something to eat on the way?"   Sweetie said.

And so, at 11:45 a.m. on Saturday morning, which is at least 6 hours too late to miss Chicago Rush Hour Traffic, with a car packed to the gills (cars have gills) with medicine and Play-Doh Dentist Playsets, and all of us holding McDonald's lunches, we set out on our vacation!

This is a city, as seen through our windshield. I'm not sure what city, except that I know it's not Chattanooga because it's not ugly enough.

Why would anyone want to drive through Illinois? (Vacations)

Continuing the story of my recent vacation to Florida... read part one by clicking here.

So the next day, Saturday, we woke up bright and early and sick.

I got up, on the first full day of my vacation, with a sore throat and a bad cough and a complete lack of surprise that those things were happening, as I'd seen them coming all week.  More than all week, in fact -- for about two weeks, since Mr Bunches got sick after Sweetie got sick.

Here's the thing about living with little kids, especially our little kids:  your entire body essentially becomes one giant test lab for viruses.  Although there are only four people in our immediate household (the three older kids pop by mainly to either borrow money, eat my leftover pizza, or recommend that we watch 21 Jump Street, the movie, calling it "the funniest movie ever" so that we will watch it, only when we do, we don't even laugh, AT ALL, through the entire movie.  The older kids owe me two hours of my life) it's like we have many more people than that, thanks to Mr F and Mr Bunches and their wide circle of "friends," some of whom are actually friends, like Mr Bunches' buddy "Basement" and some of whom are therapists.

I should explain about Basement.  The other day, I took Mr Bunches and Mr F to our local swimming pool, the one that's shallow enough on half of it that the boys can swim and wade without constant supervision, and also it's fenced in so that it's possible sometimes to take your eyes off a boy for as much as 0.000001 seconds, that being the longest break one can get when supervising the boys.

As we arrived at our usual picnic table there, and were taking off our Crocs and shirts -- having worn our swim trunks because I'm always able to plan ahead and save time by wearing my trunks to the pool, while I'm never able to plan ahead and think "But what will I wear home, once those trunks are soaking wet?" -- Mr Bunches looked and said "Oh, it's basement."

I was 100% sure he said basement, and only about 0.00001% sure what he meant, so I did what I usually do when I don't know what Mr Bunches is talking about, and I repeated what I thought he'd said.

Me:  Basement?

Mr Bunches:  There's my friend basement.

That also did not clear it up.  So I went to plan B:

Me:  Oh. Yeah.  Cool basement! That's great!

If you can't figure out your kids, at least try to be encouraging.  That's my motto.

So having slathered on the multiple layers of 110-proof sunscreen that Sweetie insists we use on them, including painting it on Mr Bunches' face because he is prone to sunburn on his cheeks, we hit the pool, and Mr Bunches immediately began playing with a little kid who said Hi to him and was calling him by name.

I thought Oh, that's nice, he must be a friend from school and focused on trying to get Mr F into the water.  Mr F likes to swim, but he doesn't like to swim with me, as he suspects that I am always on the verge of trying to trick him into actually swimming, which is fair enough because I am: my time with Mr F in any pool is divided equally between three areas of concentration:

1.  Trying to get Mr F to let me teach him how to actually swim, with arm paddling and leg kicking and face in the water and all, and

2.  Trying to remember that this is supposed to be fun for Mr F and not work, and that if he wants to swim he'll swim but if he wants to wade around in the pool and laugh like crazy he'll do that and I should relax and let him be a kid, and

3.  Feeling guilty because I'm either not teaching him to swim or I'm not letting him have fun and whichever one I'm doing I shouldn't be doing that one I should be doing the other one.

While I tried to coax Mr F into the pool, I heard a woman further down the edge say something to the boy Mr Bunches was playing with, and what she said was:

"Besian! Don't take his inner tube," by which she meant, I assumed, that Besian should not take Mr Bunches' tiny, impractical inner tube that I bought for $3.99 at Toys "R" Us but which was much smaller than I imagined and so isn't really good for much of anything but Mr Bunches loves it:

and by which she meant, also, I assume, the boy Mr Bunches was playing with, and I recalled at that instant that there had been a kid in Mr Bunches' 4K class named Besian and so, putting two and two together, I looked over at Mr Bunches, who was coming over by me, and said:

"Is that your friend, BESIAN?" pronouncing his name very carefully.

"Yeah," he said.  "Basement."

SO: Basement is one of Mr Bunches' actual friends, and he has those and therapists and friends at camp, where he goes for therapy, and what that means is that although there are only two little boys in our house, those little boys three times a week go to a large building where there are innumerable little kids, and when they're not at that camp, they have therapists coming into our house for five hours at a time, and those therapists are the same ones that spend their time at the camp with all the kids and go into other people's houses and see their little kids, all of whom (I assume) have their own friends named Basement and so the result is that you could wash your hands until they are tiny nubs and you still would have 13 zillion viruses on every surface of every thing you own.

What we do at our house is we cycle the virus of the month through us: Someone starts it, in this case, Sweetie, who woke up three weeks before vacation and had a cough and a sore throat and had lost her voice.  The rest of us try to be a little cleaner for an hour or two but by then it's pointless anyway: once someone in your house is sick, they've been sick for long enough that everything around you is seething with microscopic lifeforms trying to get into your body and reproduce, so when Sweetie wakes up sick I at first think "Drink lots of orange juice!  Wash your hands more!" and I do that for about a half hour before giving up, much the way Leo gave up when he was floating in the icy water holding onto Kate's hand.

From Sweetie, the virus had worked into Mr Bunches, who lost his voice and walked around hoarsely for a week.  Here's something fun: try to convince a 5-year-old boy with autism that he shouldn't talk to save his voice, and then as you think of ways to do that, remember that everything you've done for this boy in the past three years has been designed to do just the opposite and get him to talk to you.

Mr Bunches would come up to us and say something in his cute-and-sad little hoarse voice, rasping out that he would like "Blue bread, please"

(Blue Bread is a frozen french toast breakfast treet: it's shaped like a piece of bread, and comes in a yellow box, but there are two varieties: Plain and cinnamon.  The plain box has a blue patch on it that notes it's plain and so Mr Bunches calls plain frozen french toaster sticks "Blue Bread")

and I would be torn between trying to tell him not to hurt his voice and congratulating him on using words, which is what we're supposed to do; there's always the chance that if you tell him he shouldn't talk, he will take that literally and will not talk again, and that is a very real fear.

What I did was I tried to talk in a whisper, to show him how he could talk (which in turn made me wonder whether he would then spend the rest of his life whispering instead of speaking at a regular volume.  There's no end to worries in my life) and what he did was laugh at the way Dad talked because it was funny, and then when I'd say "You try to whisper" he'd respond really loudly "No, I think Not Whisper."

From Mr Bunches, the virus got into me, hitting my voice the same week I had to give a seminar, so I spent two days not talking at all except for the three hours I spoke to a bunch of lawyers, and then, on Saturday, I woke up feeling worse than ever and Mr Bunches wasn't better and Mr F had started coughing and he sounded hoarse, too.

"I think," I told Sweetie, "That while you and The Boy go get the rental, I should take us to Urgent Care."

...to be continued.

This is the bridge between Metropolis, IL and Paducah, Kentucky.  I made Sweetie take a picture of it because I was driving at the time.