I’m engrossed in the little Oedipus Rex scene playing out near the cotton candy stand.
This guy is what, twenty-two? He’s wearing jorts, the required summer attire for anyone at a tourist trap amusement park. He keeps fingering his chain wallet and stomping his Red Wings as he yells at his mom. And of course, because why not, he has no eyebrows.
Instead, he has the tattoo “Momma Tired” right there across his forehead. Fantastic. Apparently, he is upset that his mom won’t get him any cotton candy.
I’m getting a very Norman Bates vibe from him. I want to pull up a seat and see where this drama leads. I’ve got the time, as the lady in front of me at the ticket booth is on a roll and it doesn’t look like she is going anywhere soon.
“My hotel told me that I would get a discount!” she says to the young teen looking overwhelmed behind the glass.
“Ma’am, we don’t give discounts,” he says.
“Call them! They’ll tell ya,” she says.
And the teen does. The thirty people behind me collectively groan when he picks up the phone. My own kids run around the crowd trying to get lost. My wife, sitting on a bench in the sun, looks like she is about to have a conniption. A motherhood term which in this case means she is going to lose her sh*t and start smacking people with her purse if she doesn’t get some shade.
“Ma’am, the hotel says that they don’t give discounts,” the teen says.
“Well, they said so online!”
“Ma’am, they say they don’t.”
“Then tell them we are checking out and staying somewhere else!”
“Yes, ma’am,” he says.
Then she leans against the counter, takes off her flipflop, and uses it to fan herself. With her other hand, she pulls up her foot and begins to pick at her toenail while we all stand and watch, sweating in the heat. This is going to take a while.
I’m smacked in the ankle. Hard. I turn, expecting an Oliver Twist type character getting ready to pilfer my wallet. This is a backwater amusement park, a stop on the grand old family summer vacation, and I feel that the character would fit in well here. Instead, I’m looking at a huge blue jogging stroller.
“Oh, God, I’m so sorry,” I say to the grandma pushing the stroller. It’s crowded, I should have been keeping a lookout and not people watching. But in places like this, where cotton candy is at stake, I can’t help it. The lady pushing the stroller is in her 60’s, and a rough 60’s by the look of it. In between bites of funnel cake and drool, she gives me the drop dead look.
“Excuse me!” she says. Not in the way of “Oh, I’m so sorry. Isn’t it crazy walking through crowds?” but in the “F*ck you, dick head. Where’re my menthols?” type of way.
But I let it go because I’m a dad.
I understand the family vacation. I just spent the last five hours in the car with three kids that decided to sing a made-up song about cheese. So I get it, oh I f*cking get it. I look down to the stroller to wave at the kid.
It’s not a kid. It’s a beagle. A very large beagle that has as many rolls on it as the grandma’s neck wattle.
There is a fan clipped to the frame of the stroller that gives a quick mist of water as they walk past me. The dog has on sunglasses. Dog grandma runs into the next person, says “Excuse me”, finishes her funnel cake and licks her fingers.
Ok, I understand now. I’ve gone insane. Wow, I didn’t think you would actually be able to pinpoint the moment when you lost your grip on reality.
But there you go, 5:11 pm on June 17th. Awesome.
“Arrggghh!” I hear a man scream. I ignore the lady at the booth, who is now going through hotels on her phone and asking the ticket teen to call them, turning to spot the source of the scream. I was thinking that the “Momma Tired” scene had finally played out.
But nope, just more people being fantastic.
“Charles, no! No, Charles!” says a woman who is in a sweatshirt and long pants in the summer heat. She has a monkey in a baby carrier. A f*cking monkey. “Let go, Charles! Let go!”
A monkey has pulled the guy’s hair from the back. It’s a small monkey, strapped to this lady’s chest like a time bomb. The monkey is a brown thing, maybe a quarter the size of the stroller beagle. It’s wearing a sailor outfit. And he likes to pull hair. The monkey lets go.
“No, Charles. We don’t do that to people.”
Stitched onto the monkey’s baby carrier is a small sign that says “service animal.” I’m going to go ahead and call B.S.
Look, I get it that animals offer emotional support. But if you need one, perhaps coming to a place that is full of minivan people, screaming kids, and screeching carny noises is probably not the best place for you. A hundred bucks says this monkey isn’t even wearing a diaper, and she’s just letting it crap on the ground.
The lady moves on and doesn’t apologize to the dude.
And that’s it, that’s the moment that I crack. Do you have any idea how hard it is for a naturally extroverted person to call it quits in a crowd? It’s freaking hard, and yet, here we are. This is how much it takes. It takes a twenty-two-year-old with an eyebrow tat, a dog in a stroller, a lady asking a teen ticket taker to make new hotel reservations, and a service monkey. For a guy that enjoys going to the hardware store and chatting with random people, this is too much. Another family cuts in front of me at the ticket booth. They have their kids on leashes.
Then the smell of weed hits me, and I realize that the tatted guy found something better than cotton candy.
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Originally Published on Hossman at Home
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Photo by Valerie Elash on Unsplash