The Taming of the Jordan

October 15th, 2003 Posted in 2003

I’m at Guardian Drugs a little over a half hour ago buying some cleaning supplies and razor blades. As I walk out of an aisle, a little kid in a stroller takes a particularly vicious kick at my shin. It hurts like a bastard, and I immediately utter a curse and shoot the little hellion a stink-eye, which he ignores. Little bastard. His mother is blissfully ignorant of her son’s behaviour, and I don’t feel up to having to tell her that it’s horrible. Instead, I dart down another aisle in search of one of those flushing pucks you put in the toilet.

A few minutes later I’m in the line myself. In the next line over is the woman with the stroller, and ahead of her is a pretty big fat guy, who I recognize immediately as a fellow lonely bachelor. The kid, at this point, is just flipping out. I have no idea why the kid’s doing this, but I’ve heard kids flip out before, and this kid’s leaving them all in the dust. He’s ripping shit off nearby shelves, viciously kicking the shins of the bachelor guy ahead of him, and most importantly, he’s SCREAMING. This kid is screaming louder than I’ve ever heard anyone scream before. It is both unsettling and a little scary, and I’m half-wondering if the windows will be able to handle the stress. Imagine you were over at a friend’s place helping them fix their car, and you’ve just leant deeply into the hood to check out something buried deep in the guts of the engine, when your friend considerately slams the hood shut on you and leans on the horn for forty-five minutes. There was that kind of quality to the screaming: loud, immediately bracing and intensely painful.

Which, I guess, is what kids just DO sometimes. I mean, I suppose this to be the case; I don’t have any. All cards on the table here: I don’t particularly WANT any, at least any of the brood this one came from. What’s actually most annoying about the whole display is the twenty-something mother of the child, who’s standing around with her twenty-something friend chatting about this and that and pretty much ignoring the little hellspawn entirely. Which is fine, I suppose, if that’s your parenting technique. However, as a technique, this “ostrich” approach starts to wear visibly thin when the child in question is ripping the covers off of magazines and smashing shoeheel after shoeheel into the sorrowful bleeding shins of total strangers.

The twenty-something mother looks down at the child distractedly, coos a “Jordan, come on now, stop it,” and then goes back to Plan A, which is ignoring him completely. “So I fucking say to Jeff, `Where the fuck did the Ozzy tickets GO then, motherfucker?’ and he’s all fucked up about it right, but I know he’s full of shit and…”

Like a sailor, this woman. Again, I don’t have children. Consequently, I really have no place to look down my nose at any example of child-raising, even one as translucent and questionable as the “parenting” in front of me. I might casually suggest, however, that if your child learns the words “fuck”, “shit”, and “Ozzy” before “mommy”, it’s probably time to invest in a thesaurus and a more diligent reading schedule.

The fat bachelor in front of the woman isn’t nearly as laid-back about Jordan’s behaviour, since he’s the one getting repeatedly kicked. And so, he – quite reasonably, I thought – suggests that one of the two women restrain the child in such a way that its powerful pinwheeling limbs might stop buffeting him in the calves.

Ugh. This next part I hate, because it’s so predictable. That’s right: it’s time for another episode of “Two Not-Intelligent Strangers Causing a Scene”. The twenty-something mother cranks the righteous indignation dial up to ten. “Hey, listen, fuckwad,” she retorts. “It’s my fucking kid, alright, and he’s just a kid, so fucking cool it, alright? Fuck,” she adds, rolling her eyes at the injustices of the world thrust upon her. I might not have transcribed her speech verbatim, I should note. It was difficult to hear her over the triple-digit decibel wail of her son.

BachelorFat doesn’t take too kindly to this, and suggests that the woman is a bitch. Nobody watching the scene seems to be in disagreement with this assessment, though we’re all frankly a little disappointed that this was the best he had coming out of the gate. Like penguins, our heads shift in unison back towards SingleMom. What
manner of retort will she come up with to such a scathing accusation? Will BachelorFat win the day, or crumble under the sneaker of SingleMom? Will Jordan EVER take a breath, or will he scream for an actual eternity of time?

“Fuck you, motherfucker. You’re such a fuck,” she settles with. Apparently I’m alone in thinking she kind of phoned this in, because everyone – cashiers included – is watching the scene with avid interest. Logically, if they were to start ringing in items, conceivably the bachelor could pay for his goods and leave. But that would end this little spark-up, and no one, it seems, wants that.

The mother grabs the stroller and heads out of the store, giving her friend an unspoken “tag” to bitch things up a storm with BachelorFat. Since the child’s still screaming and destroying everything it can get its gummy hands on, she leaves a clearly identifiable path of destruction out of the Guardian Drugs. Once out of the building, she stations herself and the stroller by the big picture window in front of the cash registers, where she glowers at BachelorFat while Brandon or Jordan or HellChild or whatever pounds on the window with his feet and continues to scream. The window’s soundproofed, so all I see is Jordan’s wide-open mouth and the winces of passerby.

The show over, everyone gets back to pretending we hadn’t been watching all of this, and the cashier starts ringing in BachelorFat’s items. Twenty-something friend, meanwhile, rolls up her sleeves and gets down to ladling out some serious bitch.

“You’re such a fucking jerk,” she sneers to BachelorFat, who reddens considerably under all this womanly attention and turns his back to her. “You fucking asshole, he’s just a fuckaing kid. Fuck you. I can’t fucking believe you, you fucking asshole.” Having exhausted her “just-a-kid-you-asshole” repertoire, she seems at a momentary loss for something to be obnoxious about. Luckily, the idea strikes her to just start over. “Fucking asshole,” she chides. “Just a fucking kid, you fucking prick asshole. A fucking kid.”

My items are rung up at this point, since I’d gotten lucky enough to enter the line without the Clash of The Lower Class Titans debating roundtable. I’m still kind of glancing over at the pair of them, and apparently I’m being far too obvious about it, as twenty-something friend suddenly breaks off her admonitory stream-of-consciousness and addresses me directly.

“Hey buddy, isn’t this guy an asshole?” she asks me rhetorically. BachelorFat looks at me pleadingly. I look down at my feet and keep walking, since I’m about as big a wuss around over-bearing obnoxious women as he apparently is. She continues talking to me, mistaking my lack of response as agreement. “You know what I mean, buddy? Would you tell an innocent kid to shut up like this piece of shit over here?”

“Uh,” I say. The whole store’s looking at me for a response. “No,” I conclude.

“See?” she says, looking over at BachelorFat. BachelorFat looks down at his shoes.

Suddenly I’m inspired. “I probably would’ve drowned him years ago,” I say. Adding a perfect symmatry to my argument is Jordan himself out the picture window behind me, who’s now dislodged himself from the stroller and is running around outside hitting people.

I walk out to laughter, all casual. Inside I’m doing endzone dances. Ohhhh, I can’t believe I pulled that off. I rule. Granted, I only manage to do things like that once every six years, and every other time I just mumble random vowel sounds. But still – SO worth it for that one perfect time.