HUMANITY VS. THE MUSTACHE

In my defense, I had three five-year-olds in the car.

The neighbors’ (delightful) younger child, who serves as a tonic to the rasp of my two against each other, is with us for some of this week, since camps are so hard to come by at the end of August. She was crammed between the twins’ car seats upon her bumper seat, which mine have decided is the epitome of cool, and they now pretend their five-point harness seats are just artifacts of a past life that their slow-to-adapt grown-ups have not yet gotten around to discarding (“we’re going to have bumper seats today, you know… or maybe tomorrow. These will probably go out on the front lawn for someone to take,” they tell the neighbor child, confidingly).

These three five-year-olds had selected “Oh no:: He said what?” by Nothing But Thieves as their going-to-the-beach jam, and were unusually noisy, even for them, about insuring that the large muppet in the front who zones out all the time didn’t forget to put it on repeat, so we had this particular banger going like groundhog’s day as we filed down the hill to a rock beach at a state park ten minutes from my home.

It was 9:42am when we arrived at the park, which I know because after we pulled in, I had to paw through my phone for a good four minutes (while the children filed a crescendo of complaints) to try and find our family’s digital three-year state park pass.

The app needed to update, maybe? Ugh, only one bar of service… I swiped and closed and reopened and loaded and reloaded, and as the minutes ran out of the bottom of the day like hot piss, three (ok, two out of three) five-year-olds began to hit, kick, shout, grab, and/or actively resent each other just a couple feet from my tired and swollen psyche.

It started to dawn on me through the melee that staring harder at my phone wasn’t going to magically make the $278 pass show up. The pass I was so proud of having purchased—like a smart person! a savings-conscious person! a person who plans ahead and knows the number of times she has to show up at the parks each year for the pass to “pay for itself”! I had done these things, for once in my stupid life, against all odds, and still…. it wasn’t going to work??!

No problem, I thought, we’ll talk to the person at the window and see if they can look up our account by name. We do this at all the other places in town, while shit falls out of my purse and one kid yanks on my pants, which sometimes partially expose my ass if the band is elastic enough, and the other one runs away and knocks over a museum shop stand full of fossils and miniature polished agates.

I pulled up to the state parks ticket booth window feeling the kind of relief one can only feel when one has relinquished some portion of the stranglehold of “the plan.” It was a plesant, spreading feeling. I smiled at the young man, still sure under the sunshine and birdsong that something could be worked out.

“Hey,” I said, warmly and nonchalantly, “looks like our state parks app isn’t loading our three-year pass.” I made sure the specificity was quick and easy, and that I seemed just a *touch* confused.

“Ooo,” he said, knowingly, “yeah, I know. Whe app has been been giving people trouble lately.”

Phew, I thought, just a tech glitch.

One of the five-year-olds (mine) began to howl, and another (also mine) started reprimanding me for jawing off with this dude no one knew or cared about while her beach was waiting, glinting, offering to her upon its long, pebbled arms all the partial shells and clouded seaglass she could possibly carry home in her dirty little pockets. Let’s get this show on the road.

“Is it something you can look up by name?” I asked, kindly, cheerfully, thoughtfully, as if this was something that had just popped into my head.

He breathed in between clenched teeth and stretched his mug in a smile-grimace, making a sort of inverted hiss of performative sympathy. “Yeeeeeahhhh, nooooo, it’s… noooooot.” Ugh.

“Which phone service carrier do you have?” he said, pretending he was the helpful sort. I told him our carrier.

“OK, so,” he said, and I tentatively prepared to listen to what looked like it might be a solution. “That’s a tough one. I have the same carrier, and it’s really spotty right here. I know over at south point, though,” he said, as if suggesting some other frat party in order to foreground both his perspicacity and his own deeply moral and ethical obervance of the fire code at his clearly superior venue, “they sometimes have better luck with it. Maybe you could drive over there and see if it loads there.” He smiled from behind a thin, fawn-colored fireman’s mustache.

This is where things began to go off the rails.

This man-boy was suggesting that I turn my car around—my car, which stuffed to the gills with three specimens of barely-belted vivacity, who were now actively beginning to grow extra arms and teeth.

This mustache-on-legs was suggesting that I come on through, into the park, in order to turn around, leave, wait for a left turn onto a busy road, drive a hundred yards back in the direction I’d come from, wind my way in upon a half-mile of serpentine roads to the other side of the park, put the vehicle in park and sit again, while the hydras in back flailed, yanking vacuously at the refresh function on my phone, to see if my pass might load there.

I looked at him like Have you any sentience whatsoever? It did nothing to change his expression, if one can call the facial arrangements that occur behind that kind of mustache an expression.

I was forced, you see, to use my words.

“OK,” I said, “I’m not going to go drive around with three five-year-olds in the car hoping for an improved signal on my phone when it’s a known factor that the app is causing people problems. We just bought a three-year pass.” He just stared at me. “I am not trying to scam anyone here,” I said, laughing a little at this point.

“I don’t control the app,” the haired-over mollusk said.

“No,” I said, in my slow-and-very-dangerous voice reserved for children who are about to strike their sibling in the face, “you do not. But you work for the place that uses the app, and it is malfunctioning. It’s not my job to go fix the problem by driving in circles with three children.”

Then the hind-end-of-muskrat had the deep misfortune to pull out one of my most hated lines of all time, and he delivered it with the precise cocktail of whininess, resignation, and disavowed aggression that makes me flip instantaneously into goddess-of-destruction mode.

“I’m just trying to do my job,” he said, with all the fuck-you that he could get past the filter of the flattened and partially bleached vole upon his upper lip.

This phrase, that psychic weevil-shrug, that limp trickle of capitalist poison—“I’m just trying to do my job”—makes me see red so vibrant it resembles the actual inner linings of vital organs themselves more than the mere messenger of blood.

“Yes,” I said, again slowly so that I wouldn’t reach through my window and strangle him with my pinky finger, “and surely your job includes discretion.”

He shook his head as if I’d asked him to wash my car with his underpants.

“You can’t let us come through,” I said, as if presenting him with evidence of a crime committed inside a porta-potty.

He shook his head. “I have to see the pass,” he said, and pantomimed a helpless shrug. I looked again at the vast parking lot, where no one but a truck with fishing gear in the back was parked, a single orange net blowing in the empty breeze.

At this point you might be thinking, “but it was only a matter of nine dollars standing between you and that beach. Nine dollars. Is saving nine dollars really worth all the internal name-calling and despair about humanity?”— because that’s one of the many things that ran through my mind, too.

“I don’t make the rules,” said mink-smear, trying to wrap up the conversation on his terms.

“You know what I wish?” I said, squinting at him. He looked at me apprehensively before nodding, correctly assuming that it was possible I might just pick up the half-eaten peach oozing next to me on the passenger seat and mash it into his twenty-something face. “I wish that people would use their brains,” I said.

He blinked at me, as if trying to process how this mom-lady in an electric SUV, whom he had pegged by the reflexive smile and respectful eye contact as nice, and reasonable, and easy, was somehow still sitting at his parks booth window, what felt like three days later, and was now actually insulting him.

“It would be so nice,” I said, as if he already agreed with me. It was time to wrap up this dog and pony show.

“Because I am not going to drive around in circles while you sit in your booth,” I explained, as if to a first-year seminar class, “I will pay. Again,” I said.

I handed him my credit card. He ran it and printed out a receipt that I was supposed to put on my dash. I took it, crumpled it, and dropped it on the passenger side floor without breaking my gaze, and drove past the booth very slowly on the crunching gravel as menacingly as I could, still staring at the man-child as if from my Panther DeVille.

“Oh good!” said one of the children. “It’s a lucky day! That guy let us through!”

Relieved that the children had interpreted the exchange as simply a delay on the way to a lucky outcome, rather than the truth*, I drove into the lot and unloaded them like a bouquet of tiny clowns from our circus vehicle, and did a small but rich internal tapdance that I don’t think anyone but the gulls screaming overhead understood.

*The truth was this: when in the course of human events you’ve spent most of your life for some reason accommodating everyone from the Pope to the silverfish that crawl out of the shower drain, letting some fuzzy turd with a power trip know for sure that his choice in that moment is not only pointless but also gapingly stupid— just a sad little dirty wad of gum on the shoe of humanity— is less a sign of dissolution than an actual lifetime achievement.

So thank you, today I am proud to say: I hereby accept this screaming-gull trophy, with full and gnashing heart, right here, by Cayuga’s peaceful, shining waters.

A note to anyone interested in reading insightful, hotly glowing fiction that captures not only an era in a particular place but a place in the heart that few people are willing to travel to: check out Anat Deracine’s new book, Her Golden Coast, which I had the good luck to serve as a reader/editor for at one point in its process.