Mrs. Averagemom stood outside young Timmybilly’s room, staring down an angry door the color of tooth decay. A white skull and crossbones leered out at her from black paper thumbtacked right into the wood of the door. Underneath the skull, the words “Keap out!” blared out accusingly in impala bold. Timmybilly was not a great speller.
She heaved a great sigh, the kind that made her bosoms inflate just the way her husband liked, and let it out softly. “Timmybilly?”
The only sounds coming from young Timmybilly’s room were the sounds of the pert derrieres of random hobags being spanked. Timmybilly had received Road Rage IX: Rape Road from his grandfather last Christmas and had been playing it nonstop. “Ow, that hurts so good,” a ho said from his room.
“Timmybilly, we’re going to the store. Mommy needs . . . supplies.” And I’m not leaving you here alone, she thought but didn’t say out loud. Not after last time.
Timmybilly didn’t respond. He did, however, slap a ho yet again. In fact, from the sound of that bass sting, it was a pimpslap power up, which meant his pimphand just gained the ability to shoot rockets. Mrs. Averagemom wasn’t any good at video games, and Timmybilly got annoyed whenever she ended up in a corner shooting impotently into a wall.
She balled up her fists, bellowed a roar that would have easily made her the 301st Spartan, and opened the door. She grabbed Timmybilly, yanked him from the bed and tore hell out of the house, tossing him into the SUV. When she plopped herself down in the driver’s side beside him and jammed her keys into the ignition, she saw that he was still gripping the controller of his Crackbox 800. He continued jamming buttons as she backed her way out of the driveway, and the mashing continued as she pulled into the street.
They drove quietly for a while. The drive was punctuated by his manic clicking, and a few occasional grunts of irritation. An elderly couple was walking hand in hand on the sidewalk. Timmybilly jerked the joystick to the right and then muttered an obscenity when the SUV did not, in fact, careen sideways to run over the elderly couple, thus earning him a Septuagenarian Smackdown worth 1000 points.
“Up down left right a,b,a,b,” Mrs. Averagemom said, and chuckled at herself. Timmybilly looked a bit dazed for a second before realizing that he was not actually still sitting in front of his video game anymore. “Where are we going?”
“The store.”
“Why?” he asked. He was still holding the controller at the ready, in case the real world presented a problem that the dutiful mashing of the top right button could solve.
“Mommy is out of . . . supplies.”
“What kind of supplies?”
“Let’s listen to the radio,” she chirped, clicked it on. Rock was the devil’s music, so that was out. Classical made Timmybilly fidgety. Country was torture porn for tractors. Finally she landed on talk radio. There. Plain, boring people talking about plain, boring things.
“Mom, what kind of supplies?”
“You mommy’s out of . . . a special thing that keeps her feeling nice and clean.”
“Like soap?”
“No, not soap.”
“Shampoo?”
“Douche, Timmybilly. Your mommy is out of douche.” She said. She forced her grip on the steering wheel to relax.
“Oh. We have one of those at school. His name’s Principal Richardson.”
Mrs. Averagemom sighed again. If sighing was allowed as an Olympic sport, Mrs. Averagemom believed she would get the gold for sure. “No, this is . . . I mean, this is . . . say, would you like a toy when we get to the store?”
“Aww, they never have anything good,” Timmybilly said. Reflexively he jammed the joystick to the left, and Mrs. Averagemom found herself turn slightly in that direction.
Timmybilly was quiet for a disturbing length of time. Mrs. Averagemom realized her son was listening to the radio. That was surprising as the radio station was not currently talking about the cheat code to making Tasselboobs the stripper take her top off in Timmybilly’s game.
Finally, he broke the silence by asking “Who is President Rump?”
“It’s Trump, with a T, son. He’s . . . the Principal Richardson of the United States.”
“Oh, you mean he’s a douche?”
“Oh look, we’re here,” Mrs. Averagemom said, and pulled into the parking lot of Plentystuff.
Timmybilly reluctantly put his controller down and followed his mom into the store. She grabbed a cart even though she doubted she’d need a cart for just one thing, but she intended to buy some other things so people wouldn’t think she only came here for douche. She did not want anybody she might happen to run into to think that her funk trunk was so full of skunk that she had to make a special trip. Not even the cashier. Or the greeter. Or herself.
“Stay right with me or okay just run willy-nilly towards the toy department and don’t listen to a thing I say,” Mrs. Averagemom said as she watched her son careening away from her towards the toy aisle without a look back.
She slipped her glasses out of her pocketbook and peered at her list. There was a single word on that list, which was douche. But she grabbed some deodorant, some toothpaste, some floss . . . basically she was trying to run a con on the sanitation aisle.
It was then she heard a piercing shriek the likes of which hadn’t been uttered since four mop-headed Brits declared that an unnamed female in fact loved them and then followed that declaration with a resoundingly positive “Yeah” repeated three times.
She knew her boy’s shriek. That was the sound he made when he was fighting the big boss of Road Rage VII — the one named “Big Damn Boss” — and ended up with a cap in his ass. That meant replaying the entire level. He had shrieked his way through an entire summer last year before finding a cheat code.
Mrs. Averagemom left her cart behind, douche and all, and began to run as fast as her mom legs would carry her toward the sound of her baby in distress. Other patrons of Plentystuff looked her way as she passed them at a mad trot, but she didn’t pay them any mind. She was fixated on the sound of her one and only child in some kind of danger. Also, she had been so consumed with trying to get him out of his room that she had left behind the coupon she cut out specifically for the douche she was planning on buying. Yep, she could see it in her mind’s eye right now, lying on the counter right beside the ugly-as-sin basket that her husband’s mother had hand woven in that seminar she took two years ago. The basket was supposed to be woven in the shape of a duck, but to Mrs. Averagemom it looked like a sick platypus.
She rounded the corner of sporting goods and managed to sidestep an errant basketball. She was sweating profusely by now, and realized that sighing wasn’t as aerobic an activity as she had previously believed.
She found Timmybilly in the toy aisle right where she knew she would find him. A couple people were piled up at the end of the aisle. She shooed them off and put her arm around Timmybilly’s thin shoulders. He was staring blankly at the toys. She looked at them, trying to see what he was seeing. There were several rows of “Ex-Bachelorette Classics,” there was a solid peg full of “Midlist Authors Attack!” And she saw the boxset of “Alienemy,” featuring the exclusive version of Colonel Crisp with the flashback mullet.
“What do you see, Timmybilly? What are we looking at?”
He raised a finger, calloused to a hard stone-like texture from his video game controller. “That figure. Do you see that figure?”
She looked where he was pointing. She peered into the vast and colorful sea of toys from properties that many loved or none loved or would never be loved. She felt . . . cold. And warm. And partially unclean.
“I see it.”
“It’s been here for months. Maybe as along as a year.”
“You mean . . .”
Timmybilly looked up at his mom with wet eyes. “Mommy . . . it’s a pegwarmer.”
Mrs. Averagemom grabbed her son’s hand. “Don’t look at it! Don’t look directly at it!”
“Mom . . . It’s never going to leave!”
“Just run, Timmybilly! Run!”
“Mommy! I’m scared!”
“Run for mommy! Run like your joystick is pointing straight up and don’t let go!”
So they ran. They ran like a mother and a child that managed very little exercise unless it was mandated by the local school system. Mrs. Averagemom’s hand grew slick with sweat but she refused to relinquish her grip on Timmybilly’s hand. She knocked over a display of George Clooney cookbooks, but she ran. She elbowed her way past a middle-aged woman in a large purple hat, and continued running. She quite possibly dragged her son through a potted geranium that someone had left in the middle of an aisle, but still, she ran.
It was important to get out of Plentystuff. It was important to leave this awful nonsense behind, this ragged, haphazard tapestry of a world where a toy was allowed to linger on a peg far beyond the point where it was obvious nobody would buy it. Even if it meant her nether-regions would be unclean on this night or the next, even if it meant that the security footage would end up on Youtube, she just knew that there was a pegwarmer back there in the toy aisle, and she had to get them both away from it before it was too late.
She only hoped she would make it in time.