Uncle Jumbo's Playground

–Illustration by James Dankert

Last night was a train wreck all around. I drove down to my old home town, Blooming Void, to attend my 25th high school reunion. To be perfectly honest with you, I’m not quite sure what I was thinking.

When I got home from work I tried without much success to prime myself for the experience by taking a shower, blasting REO Speedwagon’s “Riding the Storm Out,” and running an electric shaver over my face while eating Captain Crunch out of a one gallon plastic ice cream bucket.

I have no business going to a high school reunion. The whole notion of a reunion implies that the reunited were, in fact, once united, that there was some sort of a union to begin with. I have known no unions. I was one of those bulky specters that haunt every high school hallway, I suppose. I did play baseball, but baseball at Blooming Void was right up there with the ham radio club (of which I was also a member) in terms of status or attention.

Blooming Void is a small town, despite which I would have a hard time identifying more than a handful of people from my senior class in the high school yearbook. Being naturally awkward and anti-social, I had few friends, and none of us were big on doing things. We mostly sat in our bedrooms or drove around in our cars making inane small talk on our CB radios (Jumbo’s handle: Hair of the Dog).

South of Lakeville I pretty much lost my resolve, and more or less made up my mind to avoid the reunion altogether. I’ve had quite enough disappointment and trauma in my life of late (thank you, Twins, thank you so very much).

When I got to Blooming Void I drove around town aimlessly for awhile (there is, really, no other way to drive around Blooming Void). I drove past the Elks Club, site of the reunion, perhaps a dozen times, listening to the Twins game on the radio. I told myself that if the Twins managed to take a three-run lead I would go to the reunion and celebrate in a desultory fashion.

By the sixth inning I was sitting at the bar in Glum’s, my favorite local watering hole, watching the game on the TV. The bartender was some vaguely familiar character, and he kept trying to make small talk with me. At one point he observed, “I think you were the first guy I ever heard make an armpit fart.” I guess, if nothing else, that’s a little something I can hang my hat on.

You probably saw the game, or listened to it. There was nothing to celebrate, nothing at all. Still, I sat there at the bar until the bitter end, drinking beer and eating Slim Jim after Slim Jim. I must have spent $20 on Slim Jims.

I ended up heaped on my mother’s living room couch at 1:30, nursing a sour headache. If you spend more than an hour in my mother’s house there is one phrase you are virtually guaranteed to hear, and that phrase is “What’s that smell?” I was awakened by those words at 6:30 this morning, squawked repeatededly from, first, the top of the stairs, then the kitchen, and, finally, inches in front of my face.

As my eyes slowly focused I saw my mother looming there above me. From the look on her face she could have been scrutinizing a mysterious and particularly disgusting species of insect.

“Good Lord, look at you,” she said. “Remind me: have you always been such a mess?”