The End of FUN

by Sean McGinty

  “Great? It’s like a drug. He’s on it all the time. He wants me to have FUN®, too, but there’s no way I’m ever letting anyone mess with my eyes. They’re the only ones I’ve got.”

  “Me either,” said Evie. “FUN® is dangerous!”

  The tide had turned. Now it was my turn to take some abuse. Sam and Evie lectured me on the corroding forces of modernity and the value of everyday reality, and I gave them both the finger and told them they’d be having FUN® within a year. There was no way around it. In the same way that people used to swear they’d never get a television, or a cell phone, or a wristphone, or goggles, or whatever. It was only a matter of time.

  We blabbed for a while, and then it got late, and everyone was tired. Out of pride I’d decided not to ask if I could crash that night on their couch—I would wait for them to ask me. But they didn’t, and it got later, and finally I decided to leave. Before I left I got up and rifled through the drawers in my grandpa’s cabinet, just to see what was there. There wasn’t much. But in the bottom drawer, I did find something kind of cool. Two things, actually. A pair of old-timey snowshoes—the leather ones that look like tennis rackets—and this little silver harmonica.

  “I’m taking this harmonica. And these snowshoes.”

  “Go ahead!” said Evie. “Take it all! Drag the cabinet back to Sacramento if you want.”

  “I just want the harmonica and snowshoes.”

  “Take some cookies with you, too. I’m sick to death of snickerdoodles.”

  Sam wrapped me up a plate, and Evie reminded me to return the plate, and I ate almost all of them on the way home and fed the last two to Bones, who was curled up on my bed with my shoe. She ate the cookies, but she wouldn’t trade me a snowshoe for my Osmos™IV—she growled every time I went to make the swap. She did let me sleep on the bed with her, though, so that was good.

  “Sweet dreams, Bones,” I said.

  When I woke in the morning Bones was gone, and so was my shoe, and so was my dad.

  There was a note in the kitchen:

  Went on errand. Be back soon.

  Shovel the drive if you want.

  Do NOT touch the thermostat.

  I was kind of hungry, so I tried scrounging up some breakfast, but it was a pretty bleak scene. No toast, no orange juice, no eggs. Nothing.

  > how about yay! for naturebite™ energy cereal?

  “Yay.”

  But no, none of that, either.

  I took a bottle of ketchup, a box of taco shells, and a jar of unopened pickles, and combined these ingredients as best I could, but when I was done it didn’t look very appetizing, so I left it on the plate. I was hungry, but not that hungry. I was gonna have to get a little more hungry before I ate that thing.

  Alone in the empty house I wasn’t quite sure what to do with myself. I’m no amateur at pissing away a morning, but the present circumstances threw me off. The snow had left a strange silence and I felt uneasy in my old home. I got up to check out the record player—my record player, if you wanted to get technical about it.

  I put on a record and laid the needle in the groove. It had a cool sound—not so much the music but the fuzz and pop of the needle, like radio static. As I was listening to it, something occurred to me. A solution to a problem that I’d been turning over in my mind. I stopped the player and lifted the arm thing with the needle on it. It was a tiny, tiny needle, and it took me a second to figure out how to get it off the arm thing…and then I figured it out. I took off the needle and slipped it into my pocket.

  I was still sleepy, so I cranked up the thermostat and got back into bed, but just as I was drifting off, a phone began to ring. Dad’s phone. He’d left it on top of his dresser. I silenced it and got back into bed, and this time I fell asleep, or almost did, but not for long because then the phone was ringing again. No—more like buzzing. The doorbell. I let it buzz, but it kept on buzzing, so I got up to answer it.

  There was a woman standing on the porch. I didn’t recognize her at first because of the hat. Or actually, it was more like a bonnet: this gray-blue cloth thing, like what a Pilgrim might wear, with her hair tucked into it so that her ears stuck out in a nice way. In addition to the bonnet, she had on a long gray dress with an apron and lacy shawl thing. A strange getup, especially considering it had to be 10 degrees out, but she was looking at me like I was the odd one out.

  “Arnold? What are you doing here? Where’s Jim?”

  Arnold? Oh, right.

  “Hi, Katie.”

  Again, I thought about telling her the truth, but then OTOH I was doing pretty well so far as Arnold, so why change it up now? Instead, I told her half the truth:

  “Yeah, um, Jim is my, uh—uncle. It was his dad who passed away—my grandpa.”

  “Jim is your uncle?” She gazed at me for a moment, processing the information.

  “That’s a cool dress,” I said. “Very retro.”

  “It’s from wardrobe.”

  “Never heard of it. Do they sell men’s stuff, too?”

  “Wardrobe—for the play. Don’t you know about the play?”

  “What play?”

  “Taming of the Shrew. They changed the final run-through time—didn’t he hear? He’s the only one with a key, and he won’t answer his phone. Right now as we speak twenty people are standing around in the snow in period costume.”

  “Wait. Slow down. My—Jim is in a play?”

  “Yes.”

  “Does he play someone in the play?”

  “Yes, of course. Tonight!”

  “Who does he play?”

  “I really don’t have time to discuss all this.”

  “And who are you? Is there like a Pilgrim in the play?”

  Katie drew the shawl thing tighter around her shoulders. Her eyes were all icy blue. “I’m the Shrew,” she said. “Where the hell is your uncle?”

  The truth is, I didn’t know. He’d just said errand. So I invited her inside. She could wait here in the warm. I had the heater going and everything. We could listen to Bob Wills on vinyl and snuggle together on the couch. I didn’t actually tell her about that last part, about the snuggling, but it didn’t matter. She didn’t want to come inside anyway.

  “Just tell your uncle to get his butt down to the theater!”

  She headed to her truck. Her hand was on the door when I called out to her.

  “Hey! Wait! You know those riddles you gave me? I’ve got two of them figured out already!”

  And the woman, the Shrew, Katie—she wheeled around, and it seemed for a moment like she was about to say something—but she didn’t. Instead, she got in her truck, slammed the door, fired up the engine, and went rolling down the street.

  Dad and Bones showed up maybe five minutes after that. I was sitting at the table contemplating my meal again.

  “The hell is that?”

  “Pickle taco.”

  “What’s wrong with cereal?”

  “You’ve got cereal?”

  “Of course.” He rooted around in the cupboard. “Or maybe I don’t. But here. I got you something else.” He dug into his pocket and pulled out a baggie of white powder, and I was gonna make a crack about it being cocaine, but then he said, “Baked fresh from the mortuary,” and I knew what it was.

  “Grandpa’s ashes.”

  “It was in the will, remember? He wanted half of him buried and half of him cremated and then shot out of a gun. And by the way, this is the last thing I do. I’m now officially done with the old goat. If you want to shoot him out of a gun, that’s on you. Here. Catch.”

  YAY! for color-coded triple-lock Ziplock® FreshLock™ locking zip bags, which may be tossed and dropped without bursting into a powdery cloud. I picked it off the floor and hefted the strange weight. Half of my grandfather. Weird. Then a question occurred to me.

  “Wait—so did the funeral people just, like, saw him in half?”

  Dad gave me his one look, the one that says, What are you, an idiot? “No—they cremated hi
m and then divided him.”

  “Oh.”

  He plopped down on the easy chair and grabbed his canteen. “Just gonna catch my breath, then I gotta get ready to go—got another little errand to run.”

  “Yeah, I think you may be a little late on that one.”

  I told him about the time change and the key situation, all those actors standing around in the snow, and he popped back out of his chair like a video in reverse. He ran around grabbing different things, swearing and cursing, and just as he was about to fly out the door, I reminded him I needed a ride to the train station.

  “Get your stuff, then!”

  “Well, I still got an hour.”

  Dad shoved some papers in a bag. “That’s OK! You can be early!”

  BOO! for that. Who wants to sit in the cold waiting for a train? I took my time packing, and my dad climbed up and down the walls like a mad spider, and then we got in the car. He backed it out of the garage and we got about three feet before the wheels started spinning in place. Right. The drive hadn’t been shoveled. He slammed the pedal to the floor and the car rocked and shuddered, and finally the old Mazda powered through the drift and went sliding into the street.

  We skidded to a stop in front of the Amtrak station. Dad threw me out of the car and shoved my bag in my arms.

  “Take care. Have a good trip back. Keep up on your schoolwork.”

  Standing in the snow in my dad’s moccasins, I realized something. “Crap! My shoe!”

  But he was late and he didn’t want to drive me back to the house and he was already getting back in the Mazda.

  “Keep the moccasins and I’ll mail you the shoe later! I really gotta go, OK? Say hi to your mom and what’s-his-name.”

  He left me in the station in the freezing cold, and I wasn’t happy about it. All these questions kept rushing through my mind. Did I want to leave home again just like that? Did I really want to go back to the hivehouse? What about the inheritance? What about that book, True Tales of Buried Treasure? What about Look behind the portrait of Mary? Maybe there was another portrait. Maybe I could find it. Maybe there was a whole mother lode of money and treasure just waiting for me. And then everything would be OK. I could pay back my dad and get out of FAIL and everything would be cool. It seemed like a reasonable solution.

  Also, I really wanted to see some more of Katie in that pioneer dress.

  I got to the theater early—and a good thing, because the place was already filling up fast. I spotted Sam and Evie in the front near the fire exit and slid into the open seat behind them and gave my sister a punch in the arm.

  “Surprise!”

  “What are you doing here?” she said.

  “How come no one told me about the play?”

  “I forgot. Maybe because I was busy fighting off a deadly disease.”

  Yeah, right. Clearly what we had here was another family conspiracy. Because Dad acting in a play? This was a noteworthy event. Everyone’s got a failed dream, and my dad’s had nothing to do with the theater. It had to do with being the drummer in a famous rock band. Which, except for the famous part, he’d already pretty much accomplished most of it—the drinking, the carousing, the sleeping with skanks, the shiftless lifestyle, and the inevitable bottoming out. But thespianism? This was new. I scanned the playbill.

  Christopher Sly the Tinker…James O’Faolain.

  And further down:

  The Shrew…Katarin Ezkiaga.

  My sister nudged me. “But really—what are you doing here, Aaron?”

  “What’s a tinker, like a gnome?”

  “A repairman. Why are you still in town?”

  “I gotta take care of some stuff.”

  Just then the lights began to flash, and an announcement sounded over the speakers.

  Audience, please silence your devices as the Silver Sage Players of Antello Community College now invite you to join them for a rollicking journey of intrigue and hilarity…William Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew, set in a 19th-century mining town!

  The lights went out, and the curtains opened upon a dark stage. A single spotlight appeared, and into this light stepped…my dad.

  He was dressed like a cowboy: hat, boots, faded slacks, and one of those blowsy tunic things that can also be used in medieval and pirate productions. Also, for some reason, he had a snare drum hanging from his neck. As he began to speak, I felt my grip tighten on the armrests. Here he was, the same man I once saw finish off three bottles of wine at a Christmas party and pass out in the backseat of the wrong car, now standing with his arms upraised, orating in Elizabethan English.

  “I am Christopher Sly,” he said, I mean orated. “Call me not honor nor lordship. I ne’er drank sack in my life. Never ask me what raiment I’ll wear, for I have no more doublets than backs, no more stockings than legs, no more shoes than feet; nay sometimes more feet than shoes.” With a flourish he lowered his hands. “Am I not Christopher Sly? Old Sly’s son of Burtonheath, by birth a peddler, by education a cardmaker, by transmutation a bear-herd, and now by present profession a—”

  And here the adaptation diverged slightly more from the original because (as I learned later) Dad had requested a change to his occupation—and apparently the Silver Sage Players were so hard up for male actors that they agreed.

  “Now a tinker and wandering percussionist!” he proclaimed. “Just ask Marian Hacket, the fat ale-wife of Wincot, if she know me not.”

  As he delivered these lines he tapped out some grace notes on the drum. He played softly, as background music, but his eyes twinkled under his straw hat with the very real threat that at any moment he might rest one foot upon the little prop fence and take one of those phrases and bust it open into a red-hot ten-minute solo performance of “Wipe Out.”

  But he didn’t. Thank God for that. Just as I was sort of getting used to seeing him up there, the scene ended and Dad exited stage left—or was it right? Depends on your perspective, I guess. Anyway, he was gone, and the lights brightened into a harsh 19th-century sun, and some other actors wandered onto the set—but not Katie.

  It was a typical old-timey Western town, the kind where each business is helpfully labeled with wooden signs above the door: SALOON, FEED STORE, HOTEL, BANK, BROTHEL. All of it rendered in convincing enough detail: weathered siding, silhouettes in the lamp-lit windows, hitching posts out in front. But for some reason the buildings were smaller than life-size—like maybe eight feet tall at most—and as a result the actors appeared to be standing a far distance from the town—in a field perhaps, or on a very wide road. For this reason and others I had a hard time following the action. A lot of the jokes went over my head. I lost track of the plot.

  Look, William Shakespeare is The Man—that’s what the teachers keep telling me. But The Man can be a little, you know, rambly at times. I have a hard time believing even the Elizabethan audiences could always keep up with him.

  But when Homie™ popped up in my face asking:

  > yay! for taming of the shrew complete abridged version from elegant glenn® shakespeare library?

  I was like, “Yay! Yay!” just to get it out of my way, because suddenly the play had changed: just as it was really beginning to get away from me, just as I was starting to get bored and confused, and right before Homie™ popped up to ask me about Shakespeare—just before that—there was a sound of thunder and Katie, aka Katarin, aka the Shrew, entered from stage right, or left, or whatever it was—stomping onto the stage in her bonnet, dress, and cowboy boots—and suddenly the whole thing made sense again.

  Time slowed to jelly, and I gazed in wonder at Katie and her arms and her belly and her Shrewness and beautiful monstrosity. That dress. It was a cool dress, but that wasn’t it. It was Katie in the dress. She was like a beautiful monster in it, stomping across the stage, kicking over fence posts, raging in her bonnet. What a show! She was somebody else, and yet she was more herself than I’d ever seen before—not that I even actually knew her, but her performance made me feel like I
did. Which is the whole point, right? She was the SHREW.

  As the play continued, time started to accelerate until it was shooting forward in a blur—Acts II, III, IV, V—the whole thing colliding in a glorious finale with Katie standing center stage in a brilliant spotlight to deliver her final speech:

  “Why are our bodies soft and weak and smooth,

  unfit for toil and trouble in the world,

  but that our soft conditions and our hearts

  should well agree with our external parts?”

  That’s the Bard for you. Smooth body. External parts. Soft conditioner.

  > yay! for pantene® spasoft™ moisturizing conditioner original boy_2?

  “Yay!”

  Good work, Shakespeare. I mean, nice job, man. I couldn’t have put it better myself. I stood with the others and clapped, cupping my hands just slightly for maximum acoustic effect. I’ve never been so turned on by a dress in all my life.

  Afterwards, I headed outside to wait for Katie. I hid behind a truck and scanned the lot. Five minutes later, I saw her walking in the snow. Long black peacoat, red scarf, jeans, and carrying what appeared to be a Hula-Hoop. The plan was for me to appear casually out of the darkness like the lead in one of those old black-and-white detective films, but when I stepped out from behind the truck, she let out a yelp and clutched the hoop to her chest.

  “Jesus! You scared the shit out of me!”

  Which—not quite the effect I’d been hoping for.

  “Hi! I was just—is this your truck?”

  “Arnold? What are you doing here?”

  “I came to see the play. Which was awesome. You were awesome. I wanted to tell you how awesome you were. You literally destroyed the place. Is that a Hula-Hoop?”

  “No, it’s a set of golf clubs.”

  “Ha. Right!”

  “I use it to relieve the jitters before I go onstage….What are you doing here?”

  “Well, like I said—you know, I came to see you. And, uh, my uncle. In the play. But mainly you. That dress was amazing, by the way.”