Dear Friends,
When the Cocaine Baby walked into the classroom yesterday morning, it was actually nice to see him. He did okay, too, for the first 20 minutes or so and then the wheels started to come off. Poor little dude chipped the hell out of one of his front teeth while he was out of town, too. The worst part, other than the fact that it an adult tooth and now it is missing a big triangular shaped part right in the middle of his smile is that he clearly hasn’t seen a dentist.
It hurts him to drink cold things and it is sensitive when he eats. My heart kinda breaks for the little rat bastard, truly. It would fully break if Cocaine Baby didn’t enjoy making adults crazy so much. He got me spinning about 9:15AM or so and it all came rushing back to me. I can’t wait for him to meet the Beach Boys.
Enough about that.
*****
Mini – story #1
“I get high off Disney,” she said.
He looked at her for a second. He didn’t know her very well, but he thought, maybe, she wasn’t joking.
“Wh-what do you mean?” he stammered.
“Disney stuff does it for me,” she said with no hint of sarcasm on her face or in her voice.
She was the second girl he had met in the last four years who was from Orange County and here she was staring him right in the eye talking about how she gets off on all things Disney.
“I have a Goofy shirt,” he said.
“Why didn’t you wear it?” she asked. Now she looked like she was ready to pout.
“It’s from when I was like 11,” he said and his brain flashed like a magnesium tipped match being struck by Donald Duck.
He didn’t even like wearing it then. His aunt bought it for him when she took him to Disneyland twenty-two years ago. She often included him on vacations because her brother couldn’t keep it together enough to take his kid on a trip. He was that kid and she always reminded him of that.
She always reminded him of the fact that his mom had abandoned him, too. God, he hated her. He also was starting to realize that he hated Disney shit. This could be fun.
“Can I have it?” she pretended to whine.
“Don’t do that, please,” he said.
“Do what?”
“Whine. It’s just a stupid Goofy shirt.”
“I’m sorry. I’ve been to Disneyland almost 500 times,” she said hoping to change the subject.
“You could have bought a really nice car with all the money you spent to get in. You could have paid cash.”
“Oh, I never pay to get in. My dad is an Imagineer.”
“A what?”
“An imagineer. He works on designing the rides. He specializes in making inanimate objects dance.”
He looked at her with a new level of fascination before whispering under his breath:
“Jesus Christ.”
“What did you say?” she said.
“I’m sorry. I said ‘Jesus Christ’… I mean, that’s really impressive.”
He wondered what it would be like for Disney to be your drug. That’s what it was for her, wasn’t it? ‘She gets off,’ he thought. Disney is her fucking drug.
The images were coming too quickly to process. Mickey Mouse mainlining with her sitting there, jaw agape, staring at him like he was God. He was her God, he thought. Grinding Scrooge McDuck’s beak into a fine powder to be snorted or crawling around the dingy floors of Snow White’s castle looking for a rock.
She seemed pleased that he said her dad was impressive.
“When was the last time you went to Disneyland,” she asked.
“When I got the shirt, so I don’t know, twenty years or so,” he said.
“We should go,” she said with a little too much excitement in her voice.
That would be an interesting second date, he thought to himself as he got up to go to the “bathroom.”
“I gotta hit the bathroom. Be right back,” he said before walking out to the lobby and then right out the door of the restaurant.
*****
I don’t know where things come from sometimes. It’s a strange thing to just let the brain go and tell the fingers to push the little buttons.
See you tomorrow.
Yesterday at school.
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