Wonder Bean

I am a very frustrated child.

It is very difficult for me to allow others to traipse into my tight kingdom of oddities and routines, despite the fact that I long for such interruptions. I go on long searches in my mind for reminders of how other peoples' bathrooms look when I visit them and, upon the rare occasion of a houseguest I attempt to duplicate these minute details, such as availability of washcloths and tidy rows of cosmetics. It is very easy for me to live in a world where the cap is left off the toothpaste and a gel-like rim forms around the opening of the tube, leaving small smears of said paste on the back of the medicine cabinet in the process. It is incredibly easy for me to accumulate a small landfill under my coffee table, consisting primarily of receipts, unopened cable advertisements, a collection of crappy greeting cards I will never use and a pair of toenail clippers. It is becoming very clear to me that I have become accustomed to having my cheese sandwiches absolutely cut into triangles and finding a bit of masochistic indulgence in solitude.

I find myself spending bits of time that could be spent taking showers or picking out the day's clothing considering the word snooze on my cell phone alarm as it is going off. I am simultaneously calculating how much more time I can actually bury my nose in the blue and butter cream patterned pillowcase and wondering if snooze is, indeed, spelled s-n-o-o-z-e. Could snooze be such a silly looking word? That can't actually be possible. Yet, I have seem it a thousand other times and never noticed how incredibly stupid it looked as it blinked at me, tempting me with its Poindexter eroticism. I get slogged down in this wonderment each morning as this silly word flashes at me. Eventually I find the time spent considering the silliness has once again eaten up my chance at not having to hurry, my chance at not having to shamefully look at the clock when I walk out the door. More silliness: I should care a little more like other adults I see everyday.

However, it is not so easy to explain to others why this is the way things are and have to be for my mind to continue sailing a fine line of stability.

At the age of well, just three months shy of thirty, I know I am still a bit of a bean seed wrapped in a wet paper towel, placed in a cup and left on the windowsill. The rub is that I am the bean who never sprouted and, while the rest of the human experiment around me busted out of their wet paper towels and moved on, I am still ever so moist around the roots.

I was thinking of this as I was getting my hair cut recently.

This environment is a perfect example of why I am not the Wonder Bean. I am in the small hair salon, run by Kathy and her best friend Shelly. It is located on a street I spend a lot of time frequenting: eating, drinking coffee, getting my hair cut, buying cat food at the convenience store and visiting various friends who work at a boutique a few doors down. I have made this "my" hair salon. One of the things you should not do if you are to become a Wonder Bean is to make growing out your hair a "project." You should not name it Project: Hair Grow Out. You should not tell Kathy she is the General of Project: Hair Grow Out. Also, you should not request a dinosaur themed hair cape. However, I have done all of these things and Kathy has actually been keeping her eye out for an adult sized hair cape with illustrations on it. Not having any luck finding one, she tells me she is thinking of having her sister make a few.

Today, though, Kathy will not be in until noon. I am a little reticent about letting another soldier from another unit, albeit from the only other chair station, in on Project: Hair Grow Out. However, I am going to Denver to pick up a friend from the airport, see friends for lunch and go to the new wing of the Denver Art Museum and need to not have what I fear is sprouting into a female mullet. I want to strut around all the art and show it who is boss. Therefore, Shelly is now some sort of Private in charge of Project: Hair Grow Out.

During my hair cut, we are chatting amiably and she is talking about her two kids and how she tries to get a few extra winks of sleep on her day off.

Shelly explains, "Cartoons will usually keep the little guy entertained in his crib for awhile but then he'll start throwing things and I'm up."

This sounds as fun as a barrel of razors, I think. I can't even handle that infernal beeping from a clock radio that sounds as though it is performing a lobotomy on you with audio frequencies. All of the sudden the word snooze doesn't seem so stupid.

I only have about three or four comments at most I can ever come up with in reference to children and so I whip out the one I rely on most.

"Well, it's when they're quiet that you have to worry, right?"

"No kidding, right? My two year old (here I insert the requisite "Oh God" comment set aside by polite society for all citizens of two years of age to keep my end of the conversation up) is crazy! One day I found her drawing all over herself. Can you believe that?"

I can, actually. About two nights ago two of my friends drew all over my leg. I say something to the effect of, "Wow, I'm twenty-nine and I still do that…" but it must have slid right under the child chatter radar because she kept going on about her daughter, who sounds like she is currently rather interesting but is in danger of being repressed and becoming incredibly dull.

The things I remember about my own personal childhood are few and far between.

I remember how I met my first best friend by eating dirt and throwing up on her toys. It was quite the journey to actually walk over to where I remember Audra and another little boy were playing a board game on the front step of her house, located a block to the left of mine. To round up the courage, I marched over to a garage sale going on at a house in the opposite direction. It is unreliable as to what my logic was in this sense. The people running the garage sale were completely independent of Audra and her friend. I was a very shy child and maybe I thought if I could pull off a shopping trip at a garage sale by myself, then I could possibly approach these two people I found interesting enough to send myself on an extensive afternoon-long mission. It seems to me there was a lot of junk at the garage sale, true to form, but somehow I found a Snoopy Sno-Cone Maker and promptly ran home to my Mom and begged her to help me use it. For those who do not remember the Snoopy Sno-Cone Maker, it is basically a large rotating blade powered by a handle. It is cleverly housed in Snoopy's dog house and any small little hand can turn the handle, cranking the blade around a piece of ice. I haven't checked the safety rating on this toy but if memory serves right, which it rarely does, I think Snoopy is actually wearing a little snow cap or something. Which is pretty cool. My Mom was in the middle of something at the time and was fairly resistant to the whole Sno-Cone making venture but must have relented in the spirit of getting me out of the kitchen so she could continue with Mom type things. (At this time, we had a double oven and I could not figure out why one would want that so I thought she spent a lot of time using it to justify its existence, despite the actual lack of baked goods around our house. Lest you think Mom didn't do Mom things, I should mention she had beautiful garden terraces and a neighbor who would throw dog crap over the fence, which she would promptly throw back. Unless it was their rabbit crap. She kept that. It was great fertilizer) So, Sno-Cones were made and I ate them. Looking back, I suppose I could have brought some with me to Audra and the little boy but again, that was only to pump me up, not to ingratiate myself into some friendship. That talent wouldn't come for another ten or so years.

Now I was armed with the courage only the Snoopy Sno-Cone Maker could provide. Of course I had put on my favorite shirt with the rainbow that stretched from sleeve to sleeve, just in case. Back up confidence never hurts. I left Oleander Street and entered Marigold, or something similar to that, and approached the porch where the board game was continuing on in full force.

"Hi," I said, scratching my nose self-consciously with my right rainbow-clad arm. I continue to do this as an adult in situations where I am slightly uncomfortable.

Audra and the oddly unimportant boy looked up at me, then at each other.

"Hey," says Audra, "You wanna' play?"

Well my Mom didn't just eat like six Sno-Cones with me for nothing, but playing it cool, I said, "Sure," and sat down on the other side of the boy.

To my delight, I discovered the game was based on monsters. I couldn't tell you what the point was. It was your basic "get around the board first and lord that over everyone else's head for the afternoon" type of game. The thing that was more interesting to me was the straw sticking out of the flowerbox to my left. Again, it's never been my nature to wonder about things like why the flower straws are in the flower boxes but be delighted by their mere presence. I was, in fact, so fascinated by the straw that I distinctly remember imagining how delicious it would be to suck the dirt up through the straw. I can still, years later, remember how I imagined it would feel in my throat. Almost like thick, muddy chocolate that I had to put extra effort into getting. However, like the Heinz Company has been telling me for years, the best things come to those who wait. So, as all of this ran through my head in what was realistically about ten seconds, I leaned over and started sucking through the straw. It tasted nothing like thick, delicious chocolate. Leaves and thick chunks of soil filled my throat, causing me to cough harshly. My hands flew up to my throat briefly before I began waving them about bird-like. Vaguely I remember making whistle slash wheeze noises as I tried to breath through the dirt and then....up...up...up! I threw it up all over the game board. And, well, it looked like muddy chocolate.

For the rest of the time that I lived on Oleander Street, Audra and I were inseparable. I have no idea what happened to the non-descript boy. In all reality he may not have existed. He could have been a smallish cardboard box and my mind may have transformed him into a boy in a red and white shirt who never appeared again just to make me feel better, to make my Mom feel better for eating all those damn Sno-Cones. Possibly, he was just a mental recreation of Calvin from the Calvin and Hobbes comic strip.

Either way, I was so comfortable in Audra's home that I did more vomiting at other dates.

One instance involved her family barbecuing fish in the garage on a huge grill. I had never tasted fish before and they gave me a bite of it. I remember chewing and swallowing it, but more so I remember how my stomach sent it right back up, telling me it was not about to have some oceanic or stream lurking organism floating around in my bile. Of course, things always seem bigger when you are little and the image in my head is a river of vomit flowing like a volcanic eruption down their driveway. In all actuality, it was probably a small puddle that was taken care of with a few small wipes of a cloth. Whatever the size or nature of the fish vomit, it was enough for me to avoid fish like the plague up until fairly recently. Even when my father would constantly fix Orange Roughy for dinner when I visited him, I would become ill from having to wage war on the playing card sized bit of hell.



My current repertoire of fish enjoyment now includes tuna salad, crab, lobster, halibut, monkfish that I had at a buffet in Las Vegas, catfish fixed in some sort of batter by my boss at a Chinese restaurant in my hometown, scallops, clams, calamari and several varieties of sushi, salmon, flounder, etc. All of this, I think is a huge development considering that, after each war with Orange Roughy that was waged upon me, I spent more time in Vomitsville. This time it was not a driveway. Each time I would spend a good ten minutes with my face hanging in my father's girlfriend's toilet, feeling like a fish failure.

I guess I should question why Audra's family was barbecuing in the garage and not outside where there was clearly plenty of space and ventilation, but I don't think there's an answer to that. As for Box Boy, I hope he's moved on from his bout with me and the monster game. I hope that, if he even exists, he is not close to thirty and still sleeping with the light on because he is terrified of Frankenstein projectile vomiting on him.