Читать книгу The Happy Hypochondriac Survives World Travel - Kat Spitzer - Страница 13

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Lobster Fest

One year in my early teens, my parents decided with some family friends that we should all hop into their van and drive down to the Florida Keys for the weekend. I was an only child and my parents owned their own business, so we were often able to do these sort of last minute, fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants adventures. In, fact, they very rarely planned a getaway more than two weeks in advance. If we had a good staff or manager at the business, which fluctuated frequently, then my dad would announce that we could go somewhere. So, on this weekend in late summer, we decided to make the eight hour drive to Key West.

The others involved were lifelong friends of my parents. The couple had known my parents in the good old Miami days, days of sunshine and yellow short-shorts (on my mom) and halter pantsuits (again, on my mom) that I saw only in pictures. I was born in Miami and my parents seemed to have good memories of their early courtship and newlywed years, so these were the “good ol’ days” in my mind. The woman in the couple, Maria, had been my mom’s maid of honor, but in an interesting twist, could not remember serving in that role. It became a big thing of showing her the pictures to remind her that she donned a pale blue dress and a beehive ‘do to stand by my mom during her nuptials. The couple had a young child, Michael, about four or five at the time of the road trip. They were game for an excursion.

With no reservations or planning whatsoever, we headed down to the Keys, singing songs at the top of our lungs, working on creating a great memory. We were Americana in an eighties van.

Sometime around the beginning of the Seven Mile Bridge, we heard from Michael, who had otherwise been very quiet.

“I need to go to the bathroom.”

“Okay, as soon as we see someplace, we can stop.”

“No, I mean, I need to go right this second. I’ve held it as long as I can.” You could see his parents getting frustrated.

“What do you mean? This is the first we’re hearing about it. How can it already be an emergency?”

“It wasn’t an emergency. But now I’ve been holding it and it hurts really bad, and I need to go now or I’m going to pee-pee all over the car.” Everybody fell into a noisy cacophony, one person’s voice drowning into all others, a big stew of chatter.

“Ohmigod…Nowhere to stop…water on either side of us…can’t pull off…going to piss all over the car…that’s so disgusting…don’t you dare…will spank you if you do…it hurts so bad…” until finally it just sounded like large, unrecognizable noise.

Before we knew what was happening, my father rolled down his window and started pouring a Big Gulp cup of Diet Coke out into the wind. The wind promptly threw some of it back in through the window, where it found my mother’s face and hit it with a large slap.

“David! You just threw Diet Coke in my face!” She rubbed furiously at her eyes, now all brown and sticky.

“I’m just trying to give the boy some place he can take a piss,” he yelled.

“But I don’t have any napkins or a towel to wipe it off!” she yelled back. More commotion as the driver, Tom, leaned over to the glove compartment to dig for napkins collected from previous fast food stops. The car swerved as he took his eyes off the road. Everyone screamed and he veered back into his lane just in time to avoid a head on collision with a Ford sedan and the resulting trip over the rail of the bridge. The yells overlapped and cancelled each other out. We could see each other but our words would never reach past the obstacle of our neighbor’s words. I looked at Michael, and as his eyes bulged with pain and urgency, my mind raced through the horrific possibilities. Exploded kidneys! A ballooning, ruptured bladder! Maybe his body would fill up and urine would spill out of his mouth. What if he cried yellow tears of pee? How did our bodies take care of overflow problems? We didn’t just have a shut-off valve.

Michael grabbed the cup, his mother yanked his pants down (we weren’t wearing seat belts in the back- a van, the eighties, remember?), and he cried as he peed into the cup; a sound of pure relief. The cup filled halfway, then filled up some more. We went silent as he did his business.

“It’s going to overflow!” The din started again. The Big Gulp cup was brimming. Could a kid’s bladder even be that big?

My mom, still wiping soda from her face, grabbed her drink, but instead of pouring it out, just put it under the stream. There was no hope for that drink now. It was a urine soda, not unlike the color of Mountain Dew.

The car went silent again, a roller coaster of emotions. At the last of the droplets, we stayed perfectly still. We had seen things. We’d been a part of an intimate moment that we should not have witnessed. Michael pulled his pants back up and sat back in his seat, staring out of the window. Was he mortified, or just over it? Hard to tell. Nobody said a word for quite some time. Finally his mom broke the silence.

“David, can I have the lid for this cup?”

“Well, hmm. It kind of flew out the window when I poured the drink out.”

“WHAT?”

“You littered?” I piped in, forever getting to the true heart of the crisis.

“What the hell am I supposed to do with a huge, uncovered cup of pee?” said Michael’s mom.

“Why don’t we just toss it out the window?” said my dad.

“NO!” We all said it in unison, but I couldn’t help noticing my mom’s voice was the loudest. I don’t blame her. She could still lick the Diet Coke off her face. Straight urine, and urine soda might not be as advisable or desirable. Instead, the moms carefully held on to their uncovered drinks and hoped for no bumps in the road. I was suitably disgusted by the whole thing. Who wants to be in such close proximity to pee in the car? This wasn’t baby pee. This was full-on kid pee, it smelled like mushrooms, and that was gross.

We finally made it across the bridge and eventually came to a reasonable spot to pull over, pour out the cup contents, offer another pit stop, just in case, and be on our way. We had made it through the trial. Key West wouldn’t be too far now and we could find a hotel, check in, and clean ourselves up. My mom and Michael were, of course, in the worst shape.

“Why are all the hotels along here saying no vacancy?” I asked, noticing the signs in an area that wasn’t usually as popular. “Is something going on?”

“Eh, who knows? Maybe some sort of fishing thing over here,” said Tom. We kept driving. The number of hotels became denser as we neared Key West, each one with its No Vacancy sign lit. The nice ones were full. The ones resembling the Bates Motel were full. We stopped at a few just to confirm and were turned away. Finally, at about the eighth hotel attempt, my dad asked about the cause. It just seemed so unlikely that every hotel in the Keys was booked up.

“Lobster Fest, sir. You didn’t make a reservation?” He chuckled like we must be kidding. Surely we weren’t that stupid? We didn’t respond with a chuckle in return. His look morphed and seemed to call us idiots with the expression. “If you don’t have a reservation, you don’t have a chance in hell of finding a place for the six of you. Don’t you know about Lobster Fest?” No, we did not, in fact, know about Lobster Fest. We had somehow missed the fact that the largest festival in the Lower Keys was happening.

Disgusted and disheartened, the adults decided to immediately turn around and drive the entire eight hours back home. Nobody was allowed to drink a single thing.