My wife’s first job involved testing water. It often found her flung to the furthest fields of Florida horse country, which is how I ended up in a hotel room with my infant daughter watching Kung Fu movies and bitching.
Since she got per diem and a hotel room, we’d turn her jobs into mini-vacations. Occasionally a job would land her in Miami or Fort Ladida which were always luxurious and ended with us staggering back to our hotel room at 3 am exuberantly inebriated. (Therefore: children.) But most jobs had her working an abandoned gas station where walking the baby involved diesel fumes and broken glass.
So there I am, watching A-team reruns while Sarah is rolling around on the bed. She can’t even sit up yet. She’s new and fragile, like highly animated pudding. I have no idea what to do with her. I make faces, cute noises. All I get is disdain and dirty diapers.
Around the time Mr. T is welding giant teeth on a golf cart, Ra starts grousing. The grouse turns into a kind of rarefied staccato, like someone trying to jump start a Dr. Seuss car, then escalates into full blown screaming horror. Her little face is crimson. She’s squirming to beat hell. And I’m deeply panicked. It's the kind of stupid fear confusion that makes a guy put on one shoe, a hat, and no pants before running out into the parking lot to jump up and down, scream-crying “somebody call 911”. Not me—I didn’t do that. Hell, I’d write about it if I did.
So I’m in this hotel room (not in the parking lot, pantless, jumping up, and down scream-crying) with le enfant hole shite when suddenly she stops. She stops and she stares at me and her eyes start to widen.
Now imagine this part in slomo.
I pick her up, my hands under her arms, and I get real close because I think that since she stopped screaming that things have gotten even worse, that something inside her, something internal, has gone horribly wrong. Before I can blink, she opens her mouth and horfs in my face.
When I say horf, I want you to understand we’re not talking a little tartar sauce on the shoulder. We’re talking serious fluid dispersion. Hurrlcane Katrina.
You ever see those nature shows where they’re filming the seashore and the ocean, like the entire ocean, pounds itself through a tiny hole in a rock and spews foam thirty feet in the air and knocks live birds out of the sky and sinks ships? It was like that, only chunky.
Sure, I saw it coming; but I was holding her—-what could I do?! I managed to wang my head sideways to avoid the initial sluice but Sarah had morphed into Pukezilla and there was no avoiding it. Against the known laws of physics, she had a limitless supply of fetid, lactatious, effluvium and—-again, we’re in slomo here—-was trying to see it as it came out of her. She’d never hurled so she was checking it out, or trying to, but as she’d cock her head to dig the unending jet cascading out of her mouth it would whip around like a psychotic cobra. She’s squirming, craning her neck, trying to take it all in as she gets it all out. She was an Exorcist-level 360 degree panoramic vomit volcano.
I can’t put her down because I think she might choke and I can’t turn her away because I’ve been slimed and I can barely hold on-—I’m afraid I’ll drop her-—so I just take it. Head to toe.
I’m not such a wimp anymore. If this happened now, after dropping both my kids more than once, after seeing them drive their foreheads, temples, jaws, eyeballs, and nearly every other soft part of them into various corners, mortises, baseball bats, pocket knives, handlebars, terrazzo floors, and each other, and still get As in math, I’m a little less likely to give a crap if they fall down. Now if Sarah yells “I hurt myself!” from the basement my first response is “Are you bleeding yet?” If Pukezilla attacked now, I’d toss her slimy ass on the bed and take a shower.
So she finally finishes. The bed is a foamy lake of alabaster chum. There’s a trail of it across the floor, across the TV, and splattering the lampshade. I look like someone dumped a barrel of cottage cheese over my head.
I look down at my Pukezilla, who’s squirming again and I expect another gusher, I resign myself to a life covered in goo, I set my jaw and steel my demeanor.
She’s laughing.
Not giggling. Not chuckling. She’s shaking with unalloyed, from the toes, ‘look at you, you horf covered dick’ guffaws.
Thirteen years later, she still thinks it’s funny.
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