And they use it.

Last Thursday, on the final full day of the family’s summer visit to Minneapolis, Mom and Dad sat in separate cars, parked in a lot recently brimming with vehicles. As daylight crept off to the west and the water skiers packed up their equipment back on the banks of the Mississippi River, Mom and Dad negotiated how best to split up the kids in order that Mom might have one last hang with her adult friends before returning to the grind of life in Los Angeles.

Dad had thoughtlessly put the kids in his car. But the children, as usual, were preferring to ride with Mom. Dad, was willing to oblige them, happy to drive alone. So he moved and re-buckled them into her back seat, forgetting that Mom wanted to go straight to the bar. Mom wondered why Dad was filling her car with the trouble, but remained silent, either out of politeness, guilt, frustration, confusion or distraction (all symptoms of acute parenthood).

As the last of the high-powered motorboats that had whiplashed the skiers in every which direction, thundered back upstream to find their berths for the night.

Mom, conspicuously enervated, inquired as to what Dad was doing. He suddenly realized that the kids must go with him. They were tired. It was late. The utility motorboat had already retrieved the anchors from the mid-river ski jump and had began towing it to it’s northward berth, as the two children began to gently cry to remain with mommy. But no-nonsense Dad was bent on retrieving them from Mom’s car, so as to let Mom party rightly. So he stole them, stowed them and buckled them in pat, most unwillingly, into his car. They wept and began screaming for mommy.

The last of the departing families looked across the lot through the gray evening light, to see what the fuss was about. It must have looked like a divorce scene, with Dad steeling the babies after an unfavorable court settlement. Hysteria was in the air. Blood curdling stereophonic shrieks of “MOMMY, MOMMY” were heard by every River Rat water skiing performer who’d lingered after gracing the waves before the audience of hundreds. It was nearly their last show of the year—and some rehashing of the night’s vaudevillian heroics would’ve been in order.

In order to alleviate any stress felt by Mom, Dad made quick business of shutting his car doors––to mute the mournful cries for help.

Dad drove away and––confronted by a very long red light at the mouth of the parking lot––was able to deeply enjoy the rust-scraping, paint-removing, safety-glass-shattering keens of the wild beasts tethered to the rear seats. Their suffering would’ve been mortifying to someone more compassionate than stoic, dutiful, deafen Dad. But instead, somehow, he found it euphoric. He noticed the kids were squealing in unison, sharing the same note of the diatonic scale––perhaps and the 2nd A flat above middle C.

The car was their resonator, much like the body of a guitar amplifies a vibrating string. The children were using the metal vehicle as a loud speaker of woe––tunefully delivering their full-decibel load into the ears of an unfettered, intrigued musician father. As the children became aware of the behemoth sound they were making, their cries became somehow fraudulent and self-aware. The heft of the noise began to replace the impetus of the noise. The idea of making noise superceded the reason for originally making it.

Uh-oh. This caused Dad to laugh. He laughed a bit more and felt his tummy press a bit too relentlessly against the seat belt. He giggled and stifled a guffaw, and then involuntarily laughed the unbearable words in the direction of the rear view mirror, “Fake Cries!”––which brought much contempt and a renewed commitment to the sustained hail of sonic punishment being given to the upholstery, controls and windows of that cheerless ride by the children.

The children’s’ loathing and outright anger at such ridicule was expressed in two ways. Ella, sobbing, half asphyxiating on her draining sinuses and llama tears of despair, sputtered, yelling forward, “that’s rude [huge inhale] to cry at laughing [sic] [huge inhale] when someone’s sad [huger inhale], DAD!”

“I know, I know honey. You are right and I apolo…,” as Dad’s sincerest regrets brought him to renewed, unrepentant laughter.

Then as Ella reached a higher pitch of wretchedness for Dad’s insensitivity, Winston began to express his dissatisfaction in a truly genius way: He chose to cry at a pitch just a quartertone flat of Ella’s. This created such a dissonance as woe hath n’er heard. The car rattled from it as though rigged with a grill-vibrating hip-hop stereo system. The car became a tin can barely capable of holding the kinetic pressure building from incongruent pitches. Like a wet hay bale, molding and fermenting inside, ready to spontaneously combust from its concentric layered heat, the car idled with great portent. The tone was sorrow beyond sorrow. Ghastly and ungodly. Animistic and heathen. Inhuman and carnal. And ingenious.

But then, Dad noticed a twinge in his jaw, a small sharp pain. Dental work began to vibrate. His crowns falling out like porcelain figures vibrating from a shelf in a San Andreas earthquake. The odor of burning aluminum came on as his fillings heated up and became of heavy, metallic, toxic mist. The sizzling of tiny bursting blood vessels in the whites of his eyes. It was horrific, and effective and yet utterly hysterically funny… to Dad.

He laughed with more ardor as the combined din of the children heightened to a pitch that would stop a heart from beating, stop lungs from breathing, stop brains from thinking, stop defibrillators from fibbing and worse, stop the Dad from laughing. This had gone too far. This is cruel, this is maniacal, this is psychologic molestation, ruinous, indelible, unforgiveable and so he said IT––with all the volume that the brimming tin can resonator would allow him the space in which to muster the words––he yelled IT, loudly, strongly, commandfully, without nonsense nor gladness nor proudness nor satisfaction––merely with force and volume and a cold wind of ill-compassion. He said IT: “Let’s go get ice cream.”

And there fell a silence… so pregnant, so thick with possibility, so ringed with manic pleasure that not one word would be uttered by anyone under six years of age, until blocks and blocks later as the headlights of the city traffic calmly flashed across the faces of the car’s back seat occupants, when Ella, fully and unceremoniously returned to her wits, would cheerfully submit, “Wow, it’s really late for a treat.”

–Summer 2011