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Dear God, please bless us with a Build-A-Man shop someday.
“Oh my God!” Ben shouted as we rounded a bend and passed yet another strip mall.
I knew instantly what he was so excited about. It was our old stomping ground. Fun Escape. Back when we were in high school, this was the place to be. It was brand new and during our senior year, we’d all rushed over to the trailers set up out front to inquire about jobs. Most of us, us being all the people we hung out with, were hired on the spot. We were bubbly, cute, and legal to work.
Fun Escape was a giant indoor
amusement park of sorts, attached to a movie theater, and filled with several popular fast food joints, a giant jungle gym, a huge arcade, bumper cars, mini-golf, and tiny-bowling (tiny bowling sounds better than mini bowling, plus I didn’t want to use mini too many times in the same paragraph…fuck, now I’ve used it twice more just explaining all this). Every kid under the age of twelve celebrated a birthday there in ‘96. Wow, 1996. Those were the days, and Fun Escape was the place to be.
I’d been a birthday party host. This meant no matter the mood I was in or how hungover I might have felt, I needed to put on a smile and prance kids around the park before taking them upstairs to the party rooms where I’d lead them all in the usual sing-song and cake tradition.
The party rooms were also a private hideout for employee hookups too.
“I have so many fond memories of that place,” Jill said from the backseat.
She’d been my boss when I worked there. What a fucking joke. If you knew how many times I had to bail her ass out of trouble because she stumbled in either drunk or high from a wild night…man. I was kind of the unofficial boss without the pay that goes along with the job. I think it was Jill’s hardcore hookups that led to my sexual curiosity and openness.
I can NEVER tell her that. She’d never shut up about being my sexual Yoda. She’s already joked about it a few times but I never admit she’s right. Yes, she was the Jedi master of the cuntal arts. Is cuntal a word? Ha, we just made it one! Add that to the book, Webster!
Webster. Why, whenever I see a dictionary, do I imagine some little eight year old named Webster driving his family batshit crazy? Like he’s sitting there making up words and shit. Like, “Hey mama, I got another one. Insidious. I think that word means stealthily treacherous and deceitful. Like my sister, Annie, and her insidious plan to cover up that hickey.” I imagine mama saying, “That’s nice, Webster. Why don’t you write it in a book, dear?”
Sorry, you know me and my tangents. Ok, back to my story. So Jill was probably more excited than Ben and me when we drove past Fun Escape. I was surprised she didn’t get pregnant working in that place. For a whole year she dated the owner’s son. By dated I mean she fucked him whenever he wanted and used his money wisely.
I’ll never forget the time I went to double check the party rooms and heard a gruff voice whisper, “Sing it for me, baby.”
Then, through pleasurable moans and grunts, I heard Jill singing the song I’d begun to hate.
“Hap…py…birth…day…ohhh…ohhh fuck…Happy…birrrrr…birrrthday…to…you.”
His name was Jonathan and I remember because it took her like thirty fucking seconds to finally spit out his name. Apparently he was hitting it pretty hard. Don’t ask why I stuck around for over thirty seconds. I was both enthralled and horrified. Hearing them fuck made me horny as hell, but thinking of the fact that I’d have to serve birthday cake to kids the next morning seemed, well, unsanitary.
The rest of our old town looked pretty much the same. It was early on a Friday so the kids were all in school and the adults were mostly working. I realized how much the people had changed when we stopped for gas on the way to the hotel.
I stepped in to pay and found an overweight, balding, greasy guy behind the counter. He stared at his register and then glanced up at me with his head still down, double chins on full display.
“That’ll be thirty-two dollars. Exactly.”
A spark of recognition crossed his features and he tilted his head to the left like a confused puppy who couldn’t figure out if he liked the snack I held in my hand or not.
“Mandy?” he said. “Mandy Young?”
“Heyyyy….” I said, fishing through my memory of the morning’s peruse through my old high school yearbook. I had no fucking clue who the guy was.
“Come on,” he said. “Roy. Roy Brady?”
Roy Brady? The hot hunk from the football team? The one I was infatuated with through ninth and tenth grade but finally gave up and decided to date within my means? That Roy? This guy? No fucking way.
“Roy!” I said as if I’d spotted him, the love of my life, on the other side of the airport.
He threw his arms open and leaned forward, bumping his belly against a display of tobacco chew cans, spilling them onto the counter and over to the floor. I opened my arms and leaned in to meet him halfway.
“You are so…fucking hot,” he said. “Wow. Man…people change, don’t they?”
Still a douchebag. Nice.
Suddenly I didn’t feel so bad for not remembering him and not liking him once I did. I backed away from his clench and touched his arm gently.
“They sure do,” I said. “How have you been?”
