He Pukes, He Scores

My son has a friend who's father has some serious connections.  Not only is he connected in the music world and the entertainment industry, he's extremely connected in the sports world.  So, when the father told me he was going to take a few of his son's friends to a Yankee game, complete with locker room meet and greet, I was thrilled.  I hate the Yankees but, a chance for my boy to meet Mo, Jeter, A-Roid et al is fucking cool.

Add to the mix, the guy's new wife is hot.  Megan Fox hot.  She's actually been stopped on the street by people thinking she's Megan Fox.  She's so Megan Fox hot that she's playing Fox's sister in an upcoming movie.

So, how did my son manage to destroy these connections in one fell swoop? 

He puked.



The father, not being allowed to enjoy his son's birthday parties, thanks to a somewhat ugly relationship with his ex, decided that, as a precursor to the aforementioned baseball game, he'd take a couple of his son's friends out to dinner.  The location?  Max Brenner's Chocolate Bar.  This is a restaurant where everything is covered in chocolate.  The nanny dropped my son off for the dinner and the kid's parents invited my daughter to stay as she is friends with the older sister.  I was tasked with picking them up at 7.

This was a great opportunity for the father to hang with my son, see that he's a real baseball fan, a down and dirty boy and, perhaps, see that his son's best friends run the gamut from sport loving boy (mine) to tie wearing nerd son of lesbians.  The birthday boy leans a little towards the girlie so, I'm thinking, the father is going to see my son as a great asset, someone to help steer his son towards more boy like endeavors.

At ten to 7 I walk into the restaurant.  I am directed towards the stairs and told they are all upstairs.  I put one foot on the stairs and look up.  Walking towards me is my son, a sullen expression on his face.  He's holding hands with the hot wife.  She's got my son's shirt balled up in her other hand.  She gives me a half smile and I ask what's wrong.

He threw up, she tells me.

She says she's taking him to the bathroom to clean him up and I tell her that I will take care of it.  She says she's got to go clean herself up anyway as he did a large portion of the puking onto her.  She was extremely cool about it.  Were it me, I'd have puked back.

Together, we walk towards the bathrooms.  The kid stinks.  It's horrible.  Vomit is my kryptonite.  I cannot handle it.  I've mentioned this before.  If a kid throws up in my home, and I'm alone with them, we clean up the kid and leave.  I cannot handle mopping up that slop.  It's just not possible. 

So, with my stomach doing flips, I enter the bathroom and start wiping off the puke.  It's on his hands, arms, shirt, shorts, legs, in his crocs, his butt (he must have sat in it) and, somehow, on his eyelids and lashes.

It's like he threw up in a small cube, the puke ricocheting off the sides, back, onto him.

I do my best to mop and wipe and soap and wash, all the while, trying not to breath.  I take a breath and get back to work.  Little bits of putty colored goo is everywhere.  I take off his crocs, rinse them out, larger chunks are stuck in the shoes.  I am now picking them out with my fingers, pulling out these long, gooey strands of used food.  I accidentally breath in through my nose and that's that.  I'm in the bathroom, heaving.  My son is standing at the sink, silent as could be.  He's clearly shaken by the whole incident.

I finish puking and get back to cleaning him up.

He tells me he didn't eat more than two bites of chicken but, he tells me, it might be the chocolate milk and lemonade he had before dinner.  He tells me that Brad, the boy's father, told him drinking chocolate milk and then lemonade would give him a stomach ache and probably make him vomit.  The then tells me that, while the step mother was busy taking care of him, the dad was saying "I told you this would happen."

The guy's a dick.  We've all known that.  Even before he divorced his first wife, his actions were always of the huge rectal fissure type so this really comes as no surprise but, still, my son is 4, he puked, he doesn't need a grown man doing the neener neener and making it worse.  I promise myself not to say anything. 

I clean the boy up as best as possible and tell him we're going to try and get a cab driver willing to take his smelly ass home. 

We walk back towards the table, my son is soaked from vomit and water and he stinks.  Fortunately, the chocolate smell is as strong as the vomit and nobody notices.

The step mom is coming down the stairs again, bringing her stepdaughter to the bathroom.  She stops to check on my son.  She's genuinely concerned.  A nice touch from a young woman who can only be with the tool she married for his connections to the entertainment industry. (the guy once asked me if I had any clients looking for movie financing so that he could get her a role in their movie).  Then we walk over to the birthday boy and the father to apologize and thank them for the dinner.

I tell the father that he's not sick but he does seem to have a fairly overactive gag reflex and whatever it was that he ate must have set him off.  The father, snidely, says "thanks for the heads up."  Then he adds, I told him that he shouldn't have had the lemonade after drinking the chocolate milk.

That's it for me.  Fuck the Yankees.  Fuck the meet and greet and fuck this guy.

I look the guy right in the eye and say "I'm guessing that, as a result of your divorce, your parenting skills are not quite as honed as someone who lives with their kids all the time so I'll let that slide and pass along a little advice.  Rather than point out that something is going to make a kid puke and then let them go ahead and do whatever it is that you know is going to make them puke, in the future, you tell them that they cannot do whatever it is they want to do.  You are an adult, they are kids.  You know better than them and, therefore, you need to guide them towards the proper choices.  Playing I told you so is childish and only makes the kid feel even worse."


Then I wished his son a happy birthday, grabbed my foul smelling son, his foul smelling bag with the foul smelling shirt in it, grabbed my daughter and left.

We managed to get a taxi fairly quickly.  The game plan was to have my daughter hop in first and immediately roll down the window.  Then I'd jump in, followed by my son.  My daughter has the same issues I have with the smell of puke so keeping them as far apart as possible was a necessity.  I'd already emptied my stomach so there was only the fear of dry heaves for me.

We get into the cab without a hitch.  My daughter is riding like a fucking Labrador, head out the window, enjoying the clean air.  I'm sitting next to my son, praying to the gods that the driver makes all the lights.  If he doesn't, he'll get a whiff of my son and we'll be out on the street again.

We make it most of the way without hitting a light and then, 5 blocks from our building we hit the bridge traffic and we're fucked.  The inside of the cab begins filling up with the stench of vomit.  It reeks.  The driver and my daughter are now sitting with their faces as far out of the cab as can be without putting their lives in danger.

The driver is a saint.  He clearly knows that my son is the source of the smell and, yet, he says nothing, other than some Arabic into his head set.  I'm sure he was saying "this fucking kid puked all over himself and now he's stinking up my car" but he did not complain to us, nor did he ask us to get out.

We get to our building, I pay the man the fare and a very big tip and we're home.

I'm dreading the clean up to come.  Stripping the boy, rinsing the puke covered clothes and bathing him are not high on my list of things I want to do so, when we walk into the apartment and see my wife standing there, waiting for us, I'm beyond relieved.

A couple of hours later my wife gets a phone call from the step mom.  She's calling to inquire about my son.  Is he ok, did we get home ok, is he sick, she was so worried etc.

My wife tells her he's fine, he's been taking antibiotics for two weeks now and they are rough on the stomach and he's got the overactive gag reflex to begin with etc and she thanks the step mom for being so kind, so caring. 

Then the step mom apologizes for her husband's reaction.  She says he's not great at these things and his handling of the situation was horrific.  My wife lies and says she doesn't know what she's talking about.

As I'm tucking my son in for the night he gives me a kiss and thanks me for cleaning him up.  I tell him it's what fathers do.  As I walk out of the room he says "next time, I'll puke on the dad because he wasn't nice about it."

I plan on being there for that one.