it's Thursday - another dirty story (#6)

Ah… more inspiration – puke. Oh do we have puke stories.

Puke after field trip… You know when you chaperone the field trip, and the teacher, out of some serious malevolent sadistic moment of revenge (maybe you forgot to make non-chocolate cupcakes for the last birthday, or you questioned her about your kids handwriting on a particularly stressful day) gives you the group with THE KID. Oh yeah, my kids went to a ‘choice’ school, which in part means that you “choose” to chaperone lots of field trips because they need drivers as buses are not in the budget for schools that get 70% ppor (if you need to know about ppor, just ask).

You know that kid… in my oldest daughters class it was a kid named C – he was adorable, and I liked him actually. Funny, didn’t have to be perfect in front of him, could slip and blaspheme or maybe even mutter an expletive when I slammed the trunk on my hand trying to stow 42 more lunches, could even listen to regular rock music and he never bitched that my car smelled like cigarettes. In my youngest daughters class it was C’s younger brother… M. M was even cuter than C with these huge mischievious blue eyes and a little dimply grin that would charm Mother Theresa into letting him TP the Vatican. M also had the same endearing qualities that his brother had – with regard to the music and the vocabularly choices and even the stinky-assed car. They were both monsters however, and most mom’s would NOT chaperone them more than once, so while I accuse the teacher’s of malevolence, I think it was also convenient that I would actually allow the little hellions into my car. I’m not even sure which one, I think M, actually tried to escape from the car on the freeway once. They both would wander off ALL of the time, but I was rather adept at staying BEHIND my group and observing their path to the wrong part of the museum and a quick retrieval before anyone was the wiser. My sons class, which falls in the middle, didn’t have a boy from this particular family. Instead his class had three or four of the little buttwipes from other families – and they made M the escape artist animal abuser and his brother C the vodka drinking porn providing little pervert look like saints. One of these little hooligans, the one whose parents were oblivious to his social idiocies, was placed in my group for a field trip. He was a pale skinned, red headed, way way freckled (those huge freckles that red heads get), chubby, spoiled little pain in everyone’s ass. (Actually his mother was totally to blame, and a bigger pain in the ass than the kid – you know how that goes – he coulda been a cool kid if she hadn’t mollycoddled him and let the world know how freakin perfect she thought he was at every opportunity). Fortunately his more than perfect mother generally chaperoned field trips, so ordinarily no one had to deal with the little beast. (Picture Dudley from the Harry Potter books combined with that little red headed hellion from the Bad News Bears – or was it that hockey movie about ducks???) But alas, the day came when perfect mommy had to go be perfect for her other son, or her husband, or was starting a support group for mom’s who can’t do enough volunteering and ass kissing – and that teacher, she actually even said it out loud to me (how politically incorrect) saddled me with him because she was sure that I was the only parent on the trip that could handle him. Through most of the field trip he was actually rather quiet and compliant – he didn’t bully the other kids too much, far less than usual… he didn’t run off, sass me, insist on getting his own way, etc. He ate his lunch rather than throwing it at people – which was a huge improvement over his usual field trip lunch time antics. Finally, the trip ended – my son of course wanted ‘shotgun’ so the other little darlings – son’s best friend – what a great kid- and another sweet kid that never quite fit in but son and his friend were always kind and included him, and he requested me because he absolutely adored me (still hugged me in SIXTH grade – EVERY time he saw me!) – he knew no one would bully him in my car probably and of course the beast all climbed in the backseat.

You know that look a kid gets on their face about 10 minutes before they puke. That sorta pale green can’t smile or move their facial features in any way, staring blankly and actually starting to look smaller than they are? The beast got that look on his face… about 5 minutes from the school… so I said “hey T, you don’t look good, are you gonna hurl?”. He replied that no, he would not hurl, he was fine he just had a headache. He got greener as I exited the highway and headed up the road to the school. “You sure you’re okay T” “Yes, I just have a headache”… then… that true green, you know the look, and the strange shape the mouth takes… the ‘its about to blow green and puckered look’… we were 100 feet from the door of the school… no sense stopping til we got to the door. As I pulled to the front door, the boys all bailed, they could see it coming too, and the janitor was walking out of the building right at that moment… my son bless his heart ripped open the back door and T leaned out and let fly with the most amazing amount of chunky looking slime… then he got up took three steps and erupted again, the two puddles on the sidewalk nearly touching… a few more steps and another huge puddle, fewer chunks, more volume, running down the sidewalk toward the others. The sidewalk was about 30 feet long to the door… the janitor picked up a quick pace to the kid and pulled a bag from his pants pocket (janitors are like boyscouts, prepared for anything) and handed it to him and guided him into the clinic. The Bell rang – the front doors burst open and 120 first and second graders began pouring out of the school like bees erupting from a broken hive… willy nilly everywhere, and then they stopped… it was a domino effect pileup of small children, trying to stop in time – the kids who could see the huge mess – probably 12-15 feet long and about 4 feet wide, a river of puke – trying to navigate around it with the pressure from behind pushing them forward. I felt compelled to try to direct the traffic, I enlisted the other boys… we were pushing first and second graders to the sides of the river of goo, the teachers couldn’t see the mess but quickly realized that we were redirecting their darlings onto the grass toward the kindergarteners and they were about to lose them all in the confusion before their mom’s could get them. Somehow someone stopped the flow of children out the front door and directed them all back down the halls and through the classrooms that had doors on the front side of the school. Parents who were used to hovering around and picking up their children began to gag and run away, no help at all… they just wanted to determine their child had not made this hideous mess and wasn’t dying somewhere of some fatal gastrointestinal dilemma. Soon the janitor reappeared with the hose, but then disappeared again and went and got the ‘sawdust’ stuff… you know the pink sawdust… wow that stuff is absorbent. I ventured into the clinic to check on T – his butt was sticking up out of the door of the tiny little bathroom that the clinic had attached to it and he was still groaning and moaning and by now heaving more dry than wet. He was also crying, poor kid, so embarrassed and hoping that he hadn’t gotten any in my car. I assured him that vomit can be cleaned and I would go find the teachers or his mom. I arrived back at the 5th grade classrooms where all of the 5th graders had been kept because we “hadn’t returned” yet and they couldn’t be dismissed til they were all accounted for. His mom (bitch) was loudly complaining to the teacher that not only had she sent him with that weird Mrs. Me, but that she knew for a fact that I had probably stopped somewhere on the way back and that I had no consideration for the rules or other people. I, in fact, have never stopped on the way home from a field trip – and I do respect the rules and the teachers, just not usually the other parents. I stepped into the room, and in my best impression of Donna Reed, looked her square in the eye and told her that her son had indeed needed to stop on the way back, but that I had managed to return him all the way to the front walk of the school before he threw up what was apparently 42 gallons of vomit and that he was currently with the Clinic Aide having the most hideous dry heaves I had seen since college. Then the teacher dismissed the class and followed me out to the front where we found the Janitor shoveling pink sawdust into a trash can and cursing that TR Brat! Apparently… T always vomits in such volume, and had done it on several occasions in his years at this school. Further, the kid didn’t know what I meant by ‘hurl’ so he really did think that he was not going to ‘hurl’. I only had to just barely clean up a few wee bits of vomit that barely caught the threshold of the car, and not the rest, so I’m not sure this would have qualified for the contest – but it was nasty just the same.