Friday, May 06, 2005 Are you happy now?
Earlier tonight, I was out with some housemates shopping for candy, and there is no punchline, but I had fun. We have so much candy now, but I can't have any, because it has a special purpose. It's Spring, and it's time to lure children into the van. Sike. The purpose of the candy is not something I am currently at liberty to share.
I've been trying to write the story that my sister asked me about.
A few years ago, I lived in Delaware with my boyfriend at the time, in a furnished room in a townhouse outside of Wilmington. My landlord owned the house, and he was the kind of guy who thought it would be OK to rent out his spare bedroom to transients if he thought those transients' hearts were pure, and of course he did think that, bless him.
My landlord and his ex-girlfriend took a driving trip to Disneyworld a few weeks after they broke up. They took her car, along with his one child and her three. I heard the story of what happened when my landlord came back a week later, wild-eyed, with a three-day's growth of beard.
He was carrying his sleeping child slung over his shoulder. "Benadryl," he said. "Never could have gotten through the bus ride without it."
My landlord had been excited about going down there, before he and his girlfriend broke up. Even when they planned the trip, the relationship was fairly new, maybe a few months along. It was a little rocky, because his girlfriend's ex-husband kept calling from the prison where he was awaiting trial on manslaughter charges, and for some reason he had a real grudge against my landlord. He would call the girlfriend's house, and when one of the children answered, he would say, "Put mommy's boyfriend on the phone."
I like to think that on me, that old trick would have only worked once, and that after that, when the three-year-old came up to me with the phone in her hand, I would have stopped accepting the calls. Tell him I'm not here, baby. Tell him I'm in a meeting. There's a good girl.
When they broke up, my landlord decided it would be a shame to cancel the trip. Why not? It's OK to travel by car from Delaware to Florida with a recent ex, and your children, especially when your children hate each other.
The details of what exactly went wrong are hazy in my mind: I know that the ex-girlfriend got upset about every little thing, according to my landlord. By the time they got to the campground where they were staying in Orlando, the girlfriend for some reason refused to let her children share food with my landlord and his child. Instead they huddled away at a picnic table and ate raw hotdogs.
Still, my landlord soldiered on, and when it was finally time for everyone to go to Disneyworld, they all went together. They had a bad time. No matter how they tried to get along, the petty little biting remarks and unreasonable demands got worse and worse. They had a fight, a screaming, furious fight, right there in Ariel's Grotto, and my landlord stormed away.
He took everything of his from the campsite and went somewhere else to stay. He and his little boy successfully avoided the other family for the rest of his vacation, and when it was time to go back, he drugged the child to shut it up (He did the right thing.) and took a Greyhound bus for the twenty-odd hours it took to get back.
The last romantic prospect that my landlord had going before I moved out had him wandering dreamily into the kitchen one day and asking me if I thought it was OK to marry a stranger so that she could get a greencard. I forget what all I said to that.
I don't think he married anybody. He used to call my ex's cellphone every now and then and offer us his dog. He was sad a fair amount of the time, and I always felt a little bad for him. When I think of him now, though, I picture him in his finest hour, standing up for himself in Ariel's Grotto. There may be a moral, but if so that was not my intention, and I apologize. Goodnight. posted by Frenz | 5/06/2005 12:43:00 AM
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