Everything Happened | vol. 245

24 Hour Party People

I walked to elementary school. The last stretch was climbing the concrete steps up what felt like a vast unending hill into the schoolyard from Clubside Drive, named because it abutted the cracked and weedy blacktop of the neighborhood swim club parking lot.

Summiting Everest, basically

There was a time, long before a Street View vehicle captured this, that the hill was terraced using wooden beams the thickness of railroad ties. It wasn’t a landscaping feature, I don’t really know what they were for, maybe it made it easier to mow. But it formed a sort of X Games training facility when the bell rang and masses of unsupervised elementary school kids issued forth.

My siblings and I had been instructed not to jump our bikes down the hill, even though everyone else was doing it. It was to be the domain of kids whose parents didn’t make them wear helmets, and who were allowed to watch Beavis and Butthead. We were to ride our bikes home, not stop anywhere, and start our homework. It’s not like we had cable anyway.

This was fine with me, a person who recently was trolled by my own family for being afraid to accelerate in a go-kart on a closed track.

I don’t know why no one else was around when I saw the kid flip and land on his side. He was screaming, there was lots of blood and I was embarrassed to see the waistband of his underwear as he examined his wound on his hip. I remember there was yellow stuff oozing out of it, which alarmed me.

"My mom is a nurse! I’m going to go get her!”

I took off on my bike and pedaled home as fast as I could, feeling like Jessie Alden from the Boxcar Children: responsible, quick-thinking, a leader. My mom drove us back to the hill in the Astro van and she sat next to him on the beam and asked him questions.

Somehow, maybe there had been other kids around after all to spread the word, a parent of his arrived on the scene. They seemed irritated by the excitement. There was an awkward moment where my mom told the dad, whose arms were folded across his belly, that the boy should go to the emergency room and that he needed stitches.

Back in the Astro van, I asked my mom what the yellow stuff was that I saw.

”That was his subcutaneous fat,” my mom said matter-of-factly, not taking her eyes off the road. Then, “I really hope they take him in.”

We moved out of state the next year, and when we moved back, the beams were gone.

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I know it’s hack to call myself a teen mom (I was 29) but I was not mature enough to have a kid. Me deciding to have a baby because I was bored and possessing excess confidence must be like kids who enlist in the military right out of high school. “Sure, it was hell for all you dorks but for moi?…..it’s gonna be kinda metal.”

When they gave me the forms to complete on the mother-baby floor of the hospital, I wrote my own mother’s name for “mother’s name.” Then I did it again the next week at his first pediatrician appointment. The way my brain insisted upon being the baby.

Like most things, I suspect you do not become mature enough for anything by waiting for childishness to slip off of you. You become mature via the act of doing something that matures you.

The weeks after giving birth were a struggle not because I was tired (though my bones felt like ash) and not because I couldn’t bond with him (I wanted to French inhale his every breath in a never-ending loop) but because I was blown into the stratosphere by how irrevocable it all was.

Here I had done something fun as a bit and now an entirely new unit of consciousness had been implanted into this sour-smelling baby loaf who lived at my house. And if he ever felt pain, it would be my pain too, and long after I was gone, the canvas of me, my flaws, my expressions, my delights, would be central to his understanding of himself and the world.

It was a little too metal, actually!

There is a lot of prolonged eye contact with a baby. You: obsessed with them. Them: wondering what your next move is. Also, famously, they can’t say shit. You’re both trying to read each other like a couple making eye contact across the room at a house party trying to urge the other one to wrap it up already, I want to go home. And you’re doing this, like, all day.

Just a guy

When Desi was around 6 months old, we left my friend’s house late at night, and it was just him and me. Nick must have been working. I buckled him into his rear-facing seat but there was a little headrest mirror I had just found on freecycle and installed. It allowed me to steal glimpses of him while I was driving, for fun. I looked into my rear-view, and there he was in his rear-view, and we got into one of our classic staring contests. Him: bald, mute, blinking expectantly. Me: grinning with all the inhibitions of someone high on laughing gas.

I said out loud to him, “I can’t believe you’re going to tell me things someday.”

---

“I’M GOING TO DIE!!!”

Maybe if you saw what I saw, you would also think my first thought, which was: this is a prank?

Desi has a prank kit which contains fake poop, fake vomit, a nail through bloody gauze that can clip over your finger, and a palm buzzer that zaps an unsuspecting handshake victim. But then, just as quickly I knew, no, this is not a prank. It’s just that true gore leans more Spirit Halloween than you might think.

I didn’t see the broken glass because it had fallen through to the other side of the door and onto the floor, where the girls were now standing. I wasn’t thinking about them, though. I was taking in the flaps of flesh the size of my own palms that were hanging from his forearms, the surprising grayishness of his exposed vascularity, and the blood that was both spurting and oozing as though from a partly calcified shower head. Not much subcutaneous fat to be found on a forearm, an elbow.

When I was trying to communicate the trauma of it later to friends, I would say that he “peeled himself like a potato” which is somehow unfairly gross and not grave enough.

I regret to tell you that as I tried to reckon with a situation whose seriousness I could not yet see the full shape of, my rotted brain thought, this is going to ruin the world tour.

I clamped my right and left hands over his right and left forearms, and willed my grip strength to tourniquet the hell out of whatever this mess was. My mom is a nurse!

Like a sitcom where a couple loses the key to their sex handcuffs, we were locked together as dance partners trying to find my phone. We shuffled from the kitchen to the couch and found it. Desi was screaming that he was going to die, and the girls were screaming at me that he was going to die.

I ignored them because I was trying to figure out how to use my phone without unclamping my hand but no solution occurred to me. I had to unclamp.

At this point, it seemed positive that he had the vigor to be standing upright and screaming. We called 911. “Tell them I’m going to die!!!!” he screamed to the dispatcher, which you probably also heard, if you were alive on earth that day.

Nick was not home, he was out buying lice shampoo because all of us were infested with head lice. On the worst day of your life, having a parasite might actually be the B-plot.

The girls tumbled out into the yard, shoeless, splashed with blood that was quickly drying. Desi and I sat connected on the edge of our stoop, me still squeezing him desperately, waiting for the squad. His lips were starting to look pale.

“Am I going to die?” he asked me, quietly this time.

“No,” I said, thinking that it was probably true, but even if it wasn’t, that it was a gentle lie.

The first week after the accident was hell, but we’re finding out new baseline. He’s been offering reenactments to visitors to the house, and he is hoping someone will take him on up on checking out photos of his injuries from his chart.

Earlier this week, he got busted for climbing on top of the washing machine to access snacks from a high cabinet, something that is very stupid for him to be doing but also that I’m impressed and relieved he is able to do at all.

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The night before the accident, what I imagine will be Desi’s only real day of summer this year, we were at a friend’s pool at dusk experiencing paradise. Frogs were hopping across the grass, a rippling carpet of movement. I tried to catch one and suddenly noticed them everywhere, lurching and leaping, across all my vision, they were more capable of catching me, really. Fireflies were blinking and the mosquitoes were basically tying on bibs to dine on our exposed summer skin.

It’s been ten years since the summer Desi was born, when I couldn’t get a grip. When I had to contend with the irreversible thing I had gone and done. When he wouldn’t quit staring at me like, “sooo what’s your plan for all this?”

When the kids were really little, it felt like we were hosting a 24/7 theme party where the theme was me and Nick. I certainly know how to behave at such a party, but all hosts want to sit down eventually and look at their phone. All hosts want their guests to take the hint that it’s getting late.

Then the kids grow up, if you’re lucky, if they don’t fall through the glass at a slightly different angle. And the party isn’t about you. They give you the gift of de-centering you from everything.

I try to slide into the conversations my three kids are having now and they look at me, quietly exasperated, because the theme of the party is now an inside joke they won’t be explaining to me.

Desi announced we’d be having a diving contest that night because to a certain extent, as the eldest, it’s his party now. I’m not their clown anymore. And somehow, in doing a pencil dive, I twisted my ankle, because I am definitely not 29 anymore. And when it was time for us to go home, he willingly got in the van, because he’s not 4 anymore.

We all slept on pool hair, not knowing we had nits, and not knowing what horrors awaited us the next evening. Isn’t that it, though? So many bad things will happen to us tomorrow, our imaginations too deficient to even sketch the horrors. Good thing today is: pool party.

yr mate,
Evie
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