Suburgatory

by Linda Keenan

  When this reporter corrected Bohrman’s pronunciation of “Ayn” (he was calling her “Ann” rather than “Ein”), Bohrman paused for a moment and said, “The liberal elitist media is the reason I’m on leave in the first place, instead of back in school where I belong. But I take solace and get my drive from Rand’s own words: ‘The question isn’t who is going to let me; it’s who is going to stop me.’”

  “I’ll tell you who’s going to stop him. You’re lookin’ at him,” said Superintendent Phil Troutman. “But of course, the union will try to save him.”

  Doesn’t Bohrman see the irony that a union—a collective organization loathed by many Rand believers—is making sure he is still getting paid and will try to fight his dismissal?

  “Oh, not at all. Being in the union is in my rational self-interest.”

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  Dad Confirms Child’s

  Worst Fears in Life

  Suburgatory, USA—A dad who works as an actuary can’t resist ghoulishly confirming his child’s worst fears in life, in what’s been described as perhaps the worst bedtime tuck-in talk ever captured on video.

  Joe Gardner’s wife Cherie surreptitiously recorded the incident with the couple’s ten-year-old son, Andrew, and is about to post it on YouTube.

  “Why would I put this horror show with the two people I love most in the world up for all to see? I’ll tell you why. Joe is the greatest, most wonderful dad, but he doesn’t believe me when I tell him that he is surely scaring the living shit out of our child, not to mention destroying his dreams and ambitions. And I need the rest of the world to tell him he’s out of his mind and needs to stop,” said Cherie.

  Joe tried to defend himself. “What can I say? I’ve always had a weird talent for doom even as a child. Lady Gaga’s right: I was born this way. I’m not ashamed! Then when I kicked ass in math, well, doom + math = boom! I’m an actuary! I love my job and yes, I do want my kid to know what disasters he really has to fear in life and what he doesn’t.”

  “But honey, you’re also a dad, and you should be saying to him, these terrible things will never happen,” Cherie said.

  “Actuaries never say never. You should know that by now, Cherie,” Joe responded.

  Exasperated, Cherie loaded the YouTube clip and played it. Then she pointed her finger at this reporter. “You tell me how crazy this is.”

  Joe: Bedtime, Polar Bear [Andrew’s nickname]! How was your day?

  Andrew: Great, Dad! We did a unit on space in school. It was soooo cool; I think I want to be an astronaut. My teacher thought that was great.

  Joe: Well, it’s a really cool field that’s for sure, but you should know the odds of becoming an astronaut are 13,000,200 to 1. The odds are better at becoming President. But you know, that’s a real long shot, too. That’s 10 million to 1! Probably better to think a little more practically about things to do with your life.

  Andrew: Oh.

  Joe: Hey, Mom said you looked a little freaked when that thunderstorm came through this afternoon.

  Andrew: Well … a little.

  Joe: Listen, Polar Bear. Daddy knows more than anyone about whether you should worry—it’s what I do all day long at work. I’ll tell you whether you really have to worry a lot about lightning. Compared to other stuff that can kill you, the answer is no. I mean, you have a way way higher chance of dying in the car on the way to school! Or in the bathtub right there [pointing to the bathroom]! And not by drowning, but by falling; so try to keep your feet steady in there, buddy! Ha ha ha. Heck, even the lawnmower’s way more deadly than lightning. You know what’s weird?

  Andrew: What, Dad?

  Joe: You’d think your risk of dying by chainsaw would be higher than dying by the lawnmower but, well, you’d be wrong—lawnmower wins! Maybe we shouldn’t talk about all this.

  Andrew: No, tell me, Daddy.

  Joe: Well you always hear that the most dangerous thing you do is get in the car every day and that’s true, no doubt about it. But while the chances are very high that you will be in an accident at some point, the chances you’ll die in that accident are pretty low. Lower, in fact, than the chances of being murdered! Lower even than the chances that a catastrophic asteroid will hit the Earth! Which sounds crazy, but boy when you crunch the numbers, it doesn’t start looking so unlikely. Those big scary Hollywood movies? Well, they may not be so far off.

  Within just a half hour of the YouTube clip being up, comments began to appear: “Douchebag.” “You are one sick and scary bastard.” “So, I can’t get pregnant and this psycho gets to be a parent?” “Paging protective services!”

  With that last comment, Cherie quickly took the clip down, but not before saying to Joe, accusingly, “You see?????” Joe, looking deflated, said he would go check in on Andrew to see if he was OK.

  Joe: Bear, I’m so sorry for our little talk tonight. So, so sorry.

  Andrew: Why, Daddy?

  Joe: Well I guess I sort of told you to forget about being an astronaut and then I talked about all that awful stuff that can happen.

  Andrew: It’s OK, Dad! I wasn’t scared at all. I thought it was so cool! I can’t wait to tell the boys all that cool stuff at school! Especially that death by chainsaw part!

  Joe: Well, don’t scare them too much. And you can be an astronaut if you want to be. You’re my best boy. You can be anything you want to be.

  Andrew: I don’t want to be an astronaut anymore. Dad?

  Joe: Yes, Andrew?

  Andrew: What are my chances of becoming an actuary?

  In a flash, Joe went from looking chastened to elated. He gave Andrew a bear hug and said, “Chances are sky-high.”

  SHOUT OUT

  Message to Husband:

  Stop Getting Boners When I Cook

  Beatrice Mathers is a mom and corporate lawyer who lives on Thomas Street.

  I take to the Shout Out today, as a proud feminist married to a husband who I thought was a proud feminist, too. Except now the only time—and I’m not exaggerating—the only time he gets a boner for me is when I’m in the kitchen.

  When I was a girl, I remember watching the classic ’70s horror movie The Stepford Wives, and being disgusted that the men were massively turned on by the fantastic cooking of the sexy domestic robots they had created. “She cooks as good as she looks” is the line I remember best.

  But I don’t have one of those suburban body-snatcher husbands, right? Or do I? My husband Bill is my own private Dennis Kucinich.
Most of his friends are women, half of which are lesbians, and there is the guy from high school who got a sex change but still likes women so she’s now a lesbian, too. All are welcomed in the warm embrace of our anything-goes, super-liberal home. We’ve been together for nearly twenty years but didn’t get married until I was eight months pregnant, and when we did it was at the Justice of the Peace and I wore a stained chambray maternity jumper (gay men everywhere are weeping at this). My husband got really sad when feminist Bella Abzug died, cried during the Harvey Milk movie, and once told me he didn’t care if I ever shaved.

  And yet as soon as our son was safely swaddled in our first suburban home, he seemed to forget that I used a microwave almost exclusively when we lived together for the three or so meals a week I ate at home. Back then, “cooking” meant using the stove top to boil water. Now, I quickly saw that it was here, in the kitchen, that he was most attracted to me. Those times when he remembered when I was a real professional kicking ass on the job? Oh, that’s nice, honey. But put me in front of the stove endlessly stirring some chocolate pudding? Watch out, Daddy’s zooming in like a predator drone to sex me up! “Woman, why don’t you go in the kitchen and make me a sandwich.” That was now my life, not a joke. (OK, apology break here to Bill for serving up my own steaming pile of hyperbole. He would never, ever say that to me, and not because I would lacerate his genitals, which I would, but because he’s not a caveman. That said, you can damn well bet that he’d still love that sandwich, and love me a little more because I made it for him.)

  The problem for wives, of course, is that a woman who achieves at work can be an absolute flop at homemaking. Not me, of course (cough, splutter). And we are often blindsided, left to wonder if we really knew our husbands and whether they ever valued us for what we are truly good at: Working in a goddamn office, dumbass! What do you think I went to an Ivy League school for? To flip your fucking pancakes? The fact that it isn’t intentional makes it even more insidious, as if even an enlightened man like my own can’t resist the siren song of sexist expectations. Bill said it feels completely natural and instinctual that he has this attraction to my domestic side. Yeah, well, my talents in the domestic arts feel about as natural to me as a pair of silicone double-Ds. Oops, gotta go, almost dinnertime. Now, let’s see, was that bean burrito supposed to be nuked for a minute thirty or two minutes?

  Asperger’s Dad Unlikely

  Sex Symbol at School Pickup

  Suburgatory, USA—A dad with undiagnosed Asperger’s syndrome has become an unlikely sex symbol for the moms in the Walker School pickup line, because of his candor, weight-lifting regimen, and “special interest” that is unusually appropriate for socializing with other moms.

  “How do we know he has Asperger’s?” said Lindsay Cooper. “Gee, I don’t know, maybe because these days every one of us either knows a kid with Asperger’s or has one ourselves? Trust me. We know it when we see it. And with Mark, we like what we see.”

  Mark Toomey works from home as a computer programmer and so is more available than his wife to pick up their children from school.

  Beth Barton describes him this way:

  “He’s hot, he’s blunt, he’s emotionally unavailable, and, well that’s like a triple whammy turn-on. Oh, and you heard about his awesome ‘special interest,’ right? And don’t forget those rock-hard abs,” said Barton.

  Part of Toomey’s never-changing routine is intensive weight-lifting. “Ladies, guess who was at the pond last week. Oh. My. God,” said Melissa Bandar to the other moms, while smiling and nodding. They joined her, smiling and nodding.

  But the ladies say his looks come second to his “thrilling” and “provocative” honesty. Bandar said, “One time he walked right up to me, while I was talking to someone else, and he just blurted out, ‘You have the most beautiful breasts.’ Then he immediately looked worried, and I wanted to touch him on the arm, but you know, I know he flinches a bit, so I held back. He was so cute. He said, ‘I’m sorry, I don’t have much of a filter, do other people tell you that you have beautiful breasts?’ I said, ‘Not enough of them, honey!’”

  Geri McGovern had her own sizzling encounter.

  “One time I was sitting next to him while waiting for Carter to get out of physical therapy. We were talking about our pasts and he just abruptly launched into this little speech about puberty: ‘Do you remember when you were a teenager and you just had that surge of sexual hormones, and you could just feel that sexual drive coursing through your veins, pump pump pump, like you didn’t really know what you needed but whatever it was you really really needed it?’ By the time he was done, oh God, I was seriously breathless.”

  His candor and unusual talent for detail and memory also make him an incorrigible gossip, which the moms love. Said Bandar, “He’ll always remember which parent was shit-faced at the school benefit or the time he noticed that Gina’s skirt had changed between drop-off and pickup and the whiff of cologne on her, which he said he knew was Karl Wagner’s [not Gina’s husband]. He’s like the Sherlock Holmes of gossip!”

  But McGovern doesn’t think he’s a gossip, exactly. “You know I was thinking about it and he’s not really a gossip because to be a gossip you have to know you’re not supposed to say something, and say it anyway. But Mark, he doesn’t know he’s supposed to zip a lip. So he’s totally blameless shoveling all that great dirt at us. And we lap it up.”

  But perhaps Toomey’s most unlikely selling point involves his “special interest,” which is an obsession with a single topic: Oprah Winfrey. While Winfrey’s show has ended, she is still a subject of fascination to the moms at pickup, who grew up watching her.

  “He’s like a walking Oprah bible. He can tell you what the audience got at the “Favorite Things” episode—every single year they did it. He knows every detail behind the Tom Cruise couch-jumping thing. But the best is that he has a spreadsheet that tracks public records and the fates of everyone who has ever appeared on the show. So you want to know whatever happened to that horrible crackhead mother or the Klansman who came out as gay, he might just have it. Oprah shoulda hired that guy,” said McGovern.

  While Toomey will tell you anything you want about Oprah, he is not forthcoming emotionally, which is typical for many with Asperger’s. This hasn’t deterred the moms. “Oh, no way! He maintains the mystery,” Bandar said. “You know,” she added, “he has a lot of trouble, no surprise, with eye contact. But when he does make eye contact? It’s like a few seconds of pure magic.”

  And what does Toomey say about all this? He shifted a bit uncomfortably and didn’t look this reporter in the eyes, but said, “I haven’t had it so easy my whole life making friends. My wife saved my life but next to her, these moms are the best things that ever happened to me. Well, them and Oprah.”

  Woman with Eating Disorder

  Considers Meth

  Suburgatory, USA—A church drug-awareness program has backfired in spectacular fashion for a mom who has long battled an eating disorder.

  Janet Gosling attended a session on drug addiction in the community, which included a harrowing anti-drug photo collection called “Faces of Meth.” It shows in frightening detail the physical toll that meth abuse takes on a body, tracking mug shots from habitual users over time.

  “Now, ladies and gentlemen,” said session leader and police officer Bill Barry, clicking through the befores and afters. “As you can see, meth simply ravages people who once had bright futures and leaves them diminished and often deformed.” There were audible gasps in the room.

  Gosling was one of those gasping, but not for the reasons Barry intended. Gosling has long wrestled with an eating disorder and body image dysmorphia, which she actually considers a “gift” from what she calls “thin God.” Janet sat with her friend Debbie Flander.

  Debbie: Oh my God. Nasty.

  Janet: Right … yeah … wow. Um … but … look how thin that one got.

  Debbie: But Janet, she has sores covering her face. Oozing sores.<
br />
  Janet: Oh yeah, I guess that’s bad but you know, there’s always a product for that. Try laxatives and see what that does to you—that stuff is poison. Works like you wouldn’t believe, but you end up dribbling poop uncontrollably. This cop should be talking about that stuff.

  Barry clicked on the “before” image of another abuser.

  Janet: Look at that fatty! She musta been 135 pounds. No wonder she felt the need to abuse drugs.

  Debbie put her hand to her forehead as Barry clicked on the “after.”

  Janet: Now look at that. See, she’s totally normal now.

  Debbie: Janet, she looks like a zombie ghoul about to come and scoop out your brains for breakfast.

  Janet: Oh, I think these people are so amazingly high that they don’t even remember what breakfast is. Imagine that.

  Barry described the woman’s fate. “This abuser lit her trailer on fire when her home meth lab exploded. She lost everything.”

  Janet: Well, at least she can go buy some new “thin” clothes! Debbie, stop it, I’m just kidding! I mean, sort of?

  Barry chose a final woman to illustrate meth’s degrading effects. She now suffers from so-called “Meth Mouth,” in which the constant use of meth causes catastrophic effects to the oral cavity.

  Janet: Look at how sculpted her face is now! She started out looking like Rosie O’Donnell and now she looks like a thinner Maria Shriver! So dramatic.

  Debbie: Yeah Janet, a toothless, wild-eyed, sore-scratching Maria Shriver.

  Janet: You know, bulimia rots your teeth, too. It gives you horrific breath and burns up your GI lining. We all pick our battles in this life.

  As the presentation ended, Janet went up to thank Officer Barry for his outreach and said, “Which parts of town are known for selling meth? I … I … really want to make sure I keep my kid away from those places.”

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