The Naked Truth About Boys (A Classic ZippityZern Essay)

The Naked Truth About Boys

(A Classic ZippityZern Essay

Dateline: New Smyrna Beach; A Summer Gone By; A Mexican Restaurant:

Adam, the youngest boy chick in my nest, ate one full cup of raw, jalapeno peppers in one sitting, on a fine Saturday, while the folksinger at the restaurant sang “Copacabana.” We watched. It was a bet.

You know the kind of bet I mean. The one that goes like this, “I’ll bet you one hundred dollars you won’t eat that massive pile of jalapeno peppers that you’ve just picked off your nacho’s, because you despise them, and they will probably make you throw up.”

You know! A boy bet. Adam won the bet. The other boy involved? His father, of course.

Items that do NOT work to alleviate jalapeno pepper tongue burn include: water, soda (diet or regular), licking the restaurant’s checkered table cloth, sugar, salt, tongue scraping with (fork, knife, spoon, nacho chip, napkins—cloth or paper—bread,) air drying, or sucking the waitress’ apron.

Boys are so weird; I said it when I was nine, and I stand by it. Watching Adam chew, snot, and cry his way through the entire heap of toxic peppers was revolting boarding on disgusting with a dash of horrific, but worse was the four hours of male speculation on what a full cup of jalapeno peppers was going to do to Adam’s gastrointestinal track and when. Boys are so weird.

My son-in-law was happy to add to the discussion by relating a charming collegiate “Taco Bell – Hot Sauce Packet” story. The bet was for the consumption of one hundred packets, but the guy “melted down” (i.e. vomited) at fifty hot sauce packets. Disgusting but highly amusing was his official commentary.

It’s a wonder to me that any members of their sex survive to reproduce. My boys thundered out of my uterus counting the days until they could hurl sharp sticks, tie up the cat, kidnap the Barbie dolls, skewer themselves with homemade arrows, and ride the pony naked (true story—don’t ask.)

I knew that I was dealing with a new brand of barbarian when I heard myself saying, “There is no playing of computer games in this house, NAKED, mister—or pony riding!) I tried to think of all the ways they could break the rules while naked. I couldn’t.

Please don’t misunderstand. I love boys. They are fun. They are game. They are always ready to go hiking through the mud of the The Little Big Econ State Park knocking down the giant Banana spider’s webs that block the trail with big sticks.

Boys are exciting and unpredictable, and you absolutely never know when they’re going to show up at your baby shower in a yellow convertible Volkswagen Beetle without their pants on—for a lark. It happened to a good friend of mine, and it wasn’t a problem until my friend trotted all her girlfriend’s attending the party out to meet her husband, the proud pop to be. True story. She had a boy.

I love boys, but sometimes I don’t feel sorry for them. As we left the restaurant, my husband (a boy) whispered, “Where am I going to get a hundred bucks to pay Adam?”

“Not my girl purse,” I said, while batting my long eyelashes.

Gentlemen, I salute you and all those like you. You make life interesting, but honestly, put your pants on!

Linda (Barbarian Mother and Overlord) Zern

Becoming a Statistic--In the Third Person (Almost)

It was one of those noises that I, oops, (that should read—she) SHE could not ignore. One of those noises that comes in the middle of the night and that can smack a person awake with the reliability of a mortar round—a pounding, thumping, ominous noise—indicating either roof collapse or raccoon attack.

I, oh crap, (I mean Linda) LINDA came awake with the vigor of an android becoming self-aware, eyes snapping open like a Chatty Kathy doll. The glowing dial of the clock read two a.m.

To the thump-thump of a midnight heart attack, Linda scrambled into her fluffy yellow bathrobe, pulling the mismatched purple polka dot belt tight. She worried about the effects of the frigid—even deadly—December weather and pulled on a nappy overcoat over the top of the whole bedtime fashion mess.

It was the blue coat she wore to muck out the barn. There was hay in the pockets and sticking out of the collar. Hay scratched her neck and jabbed her in the jowls. Images of a scarecrow may have come to mind. Hmmmm, let me think! Yes, yes, they did.

Pushing open the door with its interior door handle— that should have been an exterior door handle except Home Depot had been out of exterior door handles so MY, no HER husband had settled for an inside door knob on the outside—Linda remembered to be annoyed. Pacing the back porch and peering into the darkness of the icy backyard she found no source for the strange night noise—all was quiet, icy death. Satisfied and shivering, she tried to pull open the interior-on-the-outside-doorknob and found it locked tight—tightly—locked, as in you ain’t getting back in here without a crowbar—locked.

Her dogs stared at her through the glass of the door. She cursed them for not having opposable thumbs while cold seeped up from the cement into her bones through her socks. Horror dawned. Her breath frosted. (I’m breathing faster just thinking about it.)

Panic and cold threatened to shatter Linda’s middle-aged bones. Mindlessly, she began to run. Racing from locked window to locked window around the perimeter of the house, she began to think about her upcoming college statistics class and statistics in general, and how she might become a statistic—a lonely frozen statistic curled up under the hedge next to the driveway under a sheet of rare Florida ice. She would be a pointless statistic behind a nameless headline under a bush. She considered sobbing.

Her stocking feet began to contract and curl from the cold. Her breath came in short hyperventilating gasps. Her lips chapped.

On her third circuit around the house and without slowing down, she scrambled and hopped into a pair of rubber gardening boots she found under a Juniper bush. The boots, a brown leopard print rubber, were on the wrong feet. She continued her race around the house looking for any opening, loose latch, or magic portal back into the house too frightened to stop and put her boots on the “right feet.” The boots slowed me way, way down I can tell you, (and they slowed Linda way down too!!)

She couldn’t help wondering what they—the keepers of the statistics—would think when they found her in the morning.

Would they realize that she had been afraid and alone?

Would they realize that panic and not stupidity had forced her to run around with her boots on the wrong feet?

Would they wonder about her likes and dislikes, her dreams and hopes, her arthritis that made the cold feel like ice daggers?

Would they find (her/my) body before the spring thaw?

When Linda began to loose the feeling in her fingers and earlobes she began to laugh. It was as if she was high above the scene looking down at the strange sight of herself running wildly in a circle, under a crystalline sky, hair spiked to the four corners of the county, fluffy bathrobe flapping, boots curving off in the wrong direction. Her laughter did not sound sane—even to herself.

The sudden realization that the truck was unlocked, with the garage door opener on the dash, and the side door open, made Linda reject her backup plan of crawling into a Rubbermaid storage container stuffed with hay and spending the remaining part of the night in the barn under a horse.

And so I was saved . . . and Linda was too.

Linda (Who Me?) Zern

Yearly Disclaimer

People ask me, “Why have you written a weekly essay for over ten years—before blogs, before Twitter, before ink?”

Okay, the truth is that nobody asks me why I write stuff, but they might ask me if I could run faster and catch them before they run away when I try to have a serious conversation about art, life, literature, and my compulsion to scratch things on walls with crayons.

If anyone did ask me why I’ve written a weekly essay on everything from bubble gum removal from adult buttocks to the proper care and feeding of hamsters living in your oven insulation, I would say that there are three reasons:

1) Because I got tired of talking to myself.

2) The invention of crayons

3) And, the sheer, complete, total, unadulterated power of it (writing of course, not bubble gum removal from adult buttocks which is powerful in its own way)

For example, when the cashier at Walmart makes fun of me for trying to get cash without buying anything, even though I had just charged three hundred dollars worth of potato chips and soda with a credit card, and I forgot about getting real money until it was too late, and she says, “What you think that you’ve got there—a magic money card? You got to buy something,” and then she turns to the shopper behind me and says, “I wish I had a magic money card,” I can reach for artistic vindication on the scales of literary justice.

I can say to myself, “I’m going to write about you, cashier girl, and describe you, and record your meanness, and your sarcasm, in a funny way of course, and by changing all the obvious details like the big wart on the end of your nose!”

That’s why writing is better than kickboxing for stress relief, and that’s why for ten years I’ve written it all down—the silliness, the sadness, the silly sadness that leads to wild chuckling over the eighty plus or minus years that constitutes life as we know it, unless it’s all a dream, of course, or the Matrix.

So, this is my disclaimer: Be nice to me, or I’ll write about you in a completely unrecognizable way, but I’ll know, and in my heart I will chortle my silent triumph.

Here’s to a wonderful fresh New Year and the understanding that my work is fiction and any similarity to actual persons or events is purely coincidental—maybe.

Linda (I’m Taking Notes!) Zern