Ex-Dad snickered. “They have a lot of cute nicknames at this school, huh?”
“No, Tony. There’s nothing cute about this. It’s ugly.”
Ex-Dad turned to me. “Hey, David—what’d you do to become Stoopid?”
I shrugged. “Just some dumb stuff, I guess.”
“Like what?”
“I dunno.”
“Come on. I’m your father.” Technically, he was right, but he definitely wasn’t a dad.
“Tell me, son,” he said.
Yeah. He went there. He played the “son” card. And I fell for it.
“Well,” I said, toeing the grass, “one time, in kindergarten, I put a stick in the pencil sharpener because I thought it would be easier to toast marshmallows if the stick was pointier.”
Dad started laughing.
“It wasn’t all that funny, sir,” said Michael.
“No,” said Ex-Dad. “But come on—it was pretty stupid.”
Michael balled up his fists. His face turned purple. He couldn’t hold it in.
“David is not stupid, you snifflepiggle, frizzlegristle flufferknuckle!”
Ex-Dad cracked up. “That was hysterical, Pottymouth! Hysterical!”
He couldn’t stop laughing. He was doubled over, holding his sides.
In a graveyard. Right after my grandpa’s funeral.
I could tell Mom was as steamed as I was. She stomped toward her car as quickly as she could. “Come on, kids. Let’s go home.”
We hurried after her.
“You know, David,” Mom said through tightly clenched teeth, “I’m starting to remember why I couldn’t stand being around your ex-father.”
“Yeah,” I added. “Me too.”
Behind us, though, I could still hear Ex-Dad laughing his head off. “This is hilarious!” he cried to no one. “I’m sorry, but, come on, it’s priceless. Pottymouth and Stoopid!”
Yeah. That’s the guy who was supposed to be my dad.
Sharing Is Caring
About a week later, Ex-Dad sent Mom some of the money he owed her for child support.
Not all of it. Some. Still, I guess it was a start.
“And,” he told her on the phone, “I want to take David and his friend Michael out to lunch this weekend. Someplace special.”
“You do?” Mom was sort of shocked. Money in the mail and a free meal for the kids? How lucky could she get? I’m guessing she went out and played her lottery numbers that day.
“I shouldn’t’ve laughed at those awful nicknames those terrible kids at school call David and Michael. That was totally insensitive of me. I want to make it up to them.”
So Mom went ahead and said yes, and, on a sunny Saturday, Ex-Dad drove over to pick me and Michael up (in a car wrapped in a gigantic Big Bob’s Auto Barn ad).
Our special lunch spot?
McDonald’s.
“You guys grab a booth,” he told us. “I’ll grab us some grub.”
He went to the counter to place the order. Michael and I found a table near the window.
“This is pretty dinkatastic decent of him,” said Michael.
“I guess,” I replied. “But he didn’t ask either of us what we wanted to eat.”
Michael shrugged. “It’s all good.”
Ex-Dad came to our booth with a tray. “I got you guys fries,” he said proudly. “Large fries.”
He set the tray on the table, and, yeah, that’s exactly what he’d gotten us: one large order of fries, plus three dozen ketchup and salt packets.
“Help yourself to all the condiments you want, kids. They’re free. So tell me more about this Pottymouth and Stoopid business. What’s up with that?”
“What other kinds of dumb stuff have you done, son?” asked Ex-Dad, helping himself to one of our fries.
“I’d rather not talk about it.”
“Come on. Dads need to know what happens to their sons.”
“Well, there was the time Michael and I decided to have a snowball fight. In April. We used mud.”
Ex-Dad laughed. “That’s so stupid, it’s brilliant! Do you play any, you know, stupid sports?”
“Just Skateboardball, I guess. Some kids think it’s stupid.”
“We don’t,” added Michael
“Well, what is it?” asked Ex-Dad.
“This game we made up,” I told him. “It’s like basketball but with skateboards.”
Ex-Dad kept pumping us for more stories. When the fries were all gone, he splurged and bought us a refill. He also got us a McFlurry. One. With two spoons.
“So tell me about the science fair,” said Ex-Dad. “I hear you wrapped a corn dog in bacon or something.”
Since we were sort of stuck there, we told him all about the science fair disaster with the Zip Tray and the chili-cheese-bacon corn dogs. Then Michael rattled off a list of all the words he’d made up. After that, Ex-Dad told us a few stories about the jerks he had to work with at his advertising agency. It was pretty funny stuff.
“But don’t worry, boys,” he said with a wink. “One day, I’m going to shake the dust of that crummy little ad agency off my shoes and leave those hacks behind. You’ll see. I’m gonna hit it big, kids. I’ve got a few projects I’m shopping around right now. Just waiting for the right one to land on the right desk. I’ll be a bazillionaire.”
“Awesome,” I said. “Then maybe you could send Mom the rest of the money you owe her so she doesn’t have to work three jobs?”
“Sounds like a plan.”
Since all of a sudden he was acting like a semidecent human being who cared about me and Mom, Michael and I told him more stories. Before long, we were all laughing like crazy.
“A couple times,” said Michael, “I snagged the PA system and imitated Principal Ferguson’s voice. Once, I told everybody to go home early because zombie Martians had invaded! The whole school was halfway out the door before Principal Ferguson came running out of the staff bathroom with toilet paper stuck to his shoe to let everybody know the Martians weren’t really invading and didn’t want to suck everybody’s brains out of their ears with straws!”
“Hysterical,” said Ex-Dad. “You guys are amazing!”
I went ahead and told him some of the extremely stupid stunts I’d pulled over the years. “One time, I licked the flagpole in front of my elementary school to see if my tongue would get stuck. It didn’t. It was the middle of summer.”
We told Ex-Dad so many stories, he had to get us a McFlurry refill too.
Finally, maybe three hours after we ate our first french fry, Ex-Dad took us back to Mom’s house.
“We should do this more often,” he said.
As he pulled away, we could tell that he was laughing his head off again.
“Your ex-dad is actually kind of cool,” said Michael.
“Yeah,” I said. “Like an ice storm in Antarctica.”
But a little part of me couldn’t help hoping that maybe, just maybe, he’d start being a real dad and not an ex-.
TONY SCUNGILI
David’s “Ex-Dad”
Right after I saw David and Michael at the funeral, it hit me. This was a big idea.
A huge idea.
The biggest idea I’ve ever had in my life, even though it wasn’t actually my idea.
Actually, it doesn’t matter where the idea came from. Does anybody care where Hemingway got the idea for The Old Man and the Sea? Probably from an old man he knew. Or maybe the sea.
The point is—this idea was G-I-G-A-N-T-I-C!
It was also going to make me a millionaire.
All my life, I’ve been a frustrated novelist, a frustrated screenwriter, and a frustrated human being. Well, I was ready to say good-bye to writing cheesy ads for Big Bob’s Auto Barn.
So I took David and his friend—Martin? Matthew? Whatever—out for a nice lunch and grabbed a few more stories to use. They were walking, talking gold mines of funny stuff.
I pitched my big idea to the guys at the Cartoon Factory in Chi
cago. They looooved it, just like I knew they would. They said it was going to be ginormous!
They also said they would pay me a huge sum of money.
I liked when they said that.
Michael Nearly Gets a Sort-Of Girlfriend. Almost
I should mention that life wasn’t totally bleak for Michael and me. Every now and then, the clouds of doom over our heads would part and we’d actually see a ray of sunshine.
For instance, one day, Michael met this girl at the 7-Eleven. She was ahead of him in line at the checkout counter but she couldn’t make up her mind about what kind of gum she wanted.
“I can’t really chew it,” she muttered, her hand hovering over the display case. “Not for six more months. I’m just buying it and saving it.”
“Whatever,” said the ever-helpful slacker dude behind the counter, who was busy fiddling with his phone.
“What flavor is the one with the blue and pink wrapper?” asked the girl.
“Gum,” said the guy.
“What about that green one?”
“Gum.”
Michael decided to jump in and help. “The blue and pink one tastes like birthday cake. And that green one’s wasabi-flavored. Completely scorched my postnasal drippage.”
The girl looked over at him. “This one says it tastes like papaya-mango-boysenberry-mint. Is that a good thing?”
“Totally,” said Michael. “Boysenberry sounds kind of weird but nice, huh?”
She grinned and said, “You’re kind of weird and nice too.” (Okay, that’s what Michael told me she said.)
When she smiled, Michael noticed something: her mouth was full of braces.
The girl’s name, Michael discovered, was Emma, even though nobody at school called her that. “They call me, let’s see…” She started ticking off the names on her fingers. “Metal Mouth, Brace Face, Cheese Grater, Train Tracks, Barbed Wire…”
Michael couldn’t believe his ears. Not only was this girl talking to him like he was a normal person, but one of her nicknames (Metal Mouth) was pretty close to his.
“I wish I could still chew gum,” she said.
“I have an idea,” said Michael. “Why don’t I buy the gum and chew it for you? I can tell you what it tastes like.”
“Really? You’d describe it?”
“Yeah. They say I, uh, have a way with words.”
So every day after school for, like, a week, Michael and Emma would try out a new pack of gum. Michael would chew it and then use his made-up words to describe it.
“This one is puckerfully fruitatious,” Michael would tell her. “This one is zingtastically faceblastastic.”
Michael was really happy. He had a new friend who just happened to be a super-nice (and cute) girl. They even hung out together at school.
Then Emma found out that Michael was actually Pottymouth.
“That’s you?” Emma gasped. “Eww! I can’t believe I let you contaminate my ears.” She crinkled her nose like she could smell his foul language. “Everybody says you’re disgusting and evil.”
“Well,” said Michael, “those are the same pooperrific people who call you Metal Mouth.”
“So? My braces are coming off in six months. There’s no way to fix what’s wrong with your mouth. My life’s not nearly as suckerrific as yours. Thanks for helping me see that.”
“You’re not welcome. Have a really nice, fun hicklesnicklepox life, Emma.”
And once again, the clouds closed over our heads and started dumping buckets of rain.
Excuuuuuse Me for Living
Speaking of girls, I met one too.
Kind of.
I went to the movies by myself. I’d saved up the money for a while, ever since I knew this film was coming out. Michael usually goes with me but this was during his gum-describing days with Emma so I was flying solo. And since it was a Saturday afternoon, Anna was busy studying at the public library. (Nobody made fun of her there.)
Anyway, I was sitting in the darkened theater, all alone, snug in my seat, waiting for stuff to start blowing up on the screen. I crinkled open the bag of microwaved popcorn I’d snuck into the theater because, come on, who can afford to buy the stuff they sell at the concession stand? At a movie theater, you can buy food-court-quality nachos for the price of a whole meal at a real Mexican restaurant. In Mexico.
I was munching away, enjoying the trailer for a new animated movie about flying pigs made by “the gang of knuckleheads at the Cartoon Factory,” this super-popular cable channel all the kids at school love. The stuff they put out is laugh-your-butt-off funny.
Anyway, I was just about settled in when somebody scooted up my row and accidentally stomped on my foot.
“Oops,” she said. “Excuse me.”
I looked up.
It was an extremely cute girl. Plus, she had to be rich. She had half of the concession stand cradled in her arms.
After she said “excuse me,” she added, “my bad.”
Then she sort of squinted at me. My heart kind of leaped in my chest. I started wondering: Is this girl going to become my Gum Girl?
Would I start hanging out with Miss Toe-Stomper?
Could I describe different flavors of microwaved popcorn to her?
Would she go with me to the Cartoon Factory’s flying-pig movie when it came out?
But then the mystery foot stomper’s eyes adjusted to the darkness. She saw who the foot she’d nearly crushed belonged to.
“Oh. It’s you, Stoopid. Why did you try to trip me with your stupid foot? I can’t believe you’d try something so dumb. Is this your stupid idea of a joke?”
What? It was like we were suddenly in a movie scene, one she was making up, and I didn’t have the script.
“Usher?” she cried to the guy working his way up the aisles with a swinging flashlight. “This immature boy tried to trip me with his big stupid feet.”
My imaginary romance was even shorter than Michael’s. The usher shone his flashlight in my face. “How stupid can you be, kid?” the usher asked.
“You have no idea,” said the girl as the usher hauled me out of my seat. He didn’t even want to hear my side of the story, aka the truth.
Two minutes later, the guy in the red blazer tossed me out a side exit, yelling about no refunds. I ended up in an alleyway. It was raining.
And then a passing garbage truck splashed wet gutter slush up on the sidewalk.
Yeah. Those rain clouds were finding all sorts of new ways to dump on me.
DONATELLA SCUNGILI
David’s Mom
I just want to say something about David and Michael.
Albert Einstein was one of the smartest men who ever lived. But he nearly flunked out of school, probably because none of his teachers knew what to do with him. The same way they don’t know what to do with David and Michael.
Anyway, Einstein apparently once said, “Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.”
My son, David?
He’s that fish.
The History of Failure
You might think that, after our experience with the school science fair, we’d stay away from any and all activities with the word fair in the name.
You’d be wrong.
Michael, Anna, and I had this awesome idea for the school’s history fair, so we went ahead and did it. Actually, it’s called History Fair: Parade of Time, and all the students are supposed to dress up as their favorite historical characters, march into the auditorium, and take turns making speeches about what made them famous.
Anna came up with the idea for our historical figures—two guys that Michael and I had never heard of.
“Exactly!” said Anna. “Our project will focus on history’s underdogs, the ones that time has forgotten. The quiet people who actually made history while other, louder people made all the headlines and grabbed all the glory. Let’s hold up the people who did brilliant things but e
nded up shoved off to the side because the spotlight was hogged by somebody with a much bigger mouth.”
I think she was sort of talking about us. How we might be smart or talented but nobody would notice because they were too busy making fun of us.
Anyway, we all worked together on our script and costumes.
For the history fair, we were going to go as Henry Woodward and Mathew Evans, two inventors from Canada who nobody (including us) had ever heard of before. Michael and I found some fake fur coats and floppy-eared hats at a thrift store and watched a lot of hockey games to work on our Canadian accents. Part of the costume was also this huge lightbulb we’d found in a dumpster behind the novelty shop at the mall.
So who were Woodward and Evans?
In 1874, these two Canadians filed a patent for an electric lightbulb made out of a glass tube with a chunk of carbon inside that was connected to two tiny wires. That’s right. They were the guys who actually invented the lightbulb, not Thomas Alva Edison.
There was only one slight problem: Woodward and Evans were totally broke. So they sold their lightbulb patent to Thomas Edison.
The rest, as they say, is history.
Edison put their pieces together, built the first electric lightbulb, and hogged all the credit.
“So, you hosers,” I said to the crowded auditorium in my best Canadian accent (I had no idea what a hoser was, but Google said it was a Canadian thing). “The next time you flip on a light switch, be sure you say thank you to Woodward and Evans, eh?”
“And forget that flufferknuckle Edison, eh?” added Michael.
A couple kids in the audience coughed.
One guy shouted, “Stooooopid!”
The panel of judges barely paid attention to our presentation. One even went out to use the bathroom while we were onstage. He must’ve figured anything created by Pottymouth, Stoopid, and Anna Britannica would be a waste of his time. And guess who came onstage right after us?
Pottymouth and Stoopid Page 5
