Spoiled Brats: Short Stories

by Simon Rich

  I tried to teach them “thank you,” the easiest sign I knew, just a touch of the left paw to the lips.

  “You follow any of that?” my father asked my mother.

  “No,” she said.

  My father laughed.

  “I can’t believe you spent five years on that nonsense,” he said. “What a waste.”

  “It wasn’t a waste,” I said defiantly. “I got to do all sorts of amazing things—things you wouldn’t believe.”

  He folded his flabby arms across his chest.

  “Like what?”

  “I got to go to the White House.”

  “What’s that?”

  “It’s where the president of the United States lives.”

  “You met the president?” my mother asked.

  “Well… no,” I admitted. “But I met his First Lady.”

  My father snorted.

  “That’s not the same thing.”

  “You know,” my mother said, “your father once met a celebrity. Honey, tell him about the time you talked to you-know-who.”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” he said, waving his paws around.

  “Please!”

  “Oh, all right. So one time, I’m in my tree, and Jane—”

  “He means Jane Goodall—”

  A whirring noise sounded in the clearing below. I looked down and sighed. Fitzbaum was already searching for my replacement. His truck was loaded with various testing apparatuses. I recognized a large plastic box from the day we’d met. It was a simple pattern-recognition test. You climbed inside and watched as three colored orbs lit up. If you hit the corresponding levers in the correct order, you won a banana. I could still remember how Fitzbaum had beamed when I solved it on my very first try.

  I heard some rustling in the trees around us. Dozens of chimps were balanced on high branches, watching Fitzbaum skeptically.

  “Here, chimpy, chimpy,” my old friend said, dragging the plastic box out of his truck. “Who wants to win a treat?”

  My father snorted again.

  “How hard could it be?”

  “Extremely hard,” I told him. “That test requires memory, dexterity, and problem-solving skills.”

  My father flicked his paw dismissively.

  “Any monkey can push around some levers.”

  “Oh yeah?” I said. “Then why don’t you try it?”

  My mother climbed between us, but I kept on going, pointing aggressively at his face.

  “If the test is so easy, why don’t you climb inside the box and show me how it’s done?”

  My father looked around. The entire tribe was watching at this point.

  “Fine,” he said, grinning widely so the other chimps could see. “No sweat.”

  My mother squirmed as he leaped out of the branches and landed with a thud beside the box. Uncle Mike cheered and the other chimps joined in. My father wasn’t the leader of our tribe, but he was a respected elder. I wondered if he knew what he was risking.

  “I’ll be back in a second,” he called out confidently. “With many bananas!”

  The tribe clapped and hooted as he climbed into the clear plastic cube.

  From the moment the lights started flashing, it was obvious my father was outmatched. He tried to put on a brave face as he randomly poked the levers. But, within a couple of minutes, his frustration grew obvious. He let out a roar, grabbed a random lever, and pulled it as hard as he could. I smiled to myself as he yanked uselessly on it, his broad shoulders shaking with frustration. Eventually, he had no choice but to give up.

  “Thing’s broken,” he muttered, avoiding eye contact with the crowd. I couldn’t help but gloat as he started to climb out of the box.

  “Not so easy, huh?” I said. He didn’t respond. It was around this time I realized he was stuck.

  “What’s happening?” he asked, his consternation giving way to terror. “What’s happening?”

  I climbed down to a lower branch to get a better view. My father’s stomach was wedged between two levers. His breaths were fast and shallow. Fitzbaum watched impassively from his truck, jotting down notes in his field binder.

  A crack of thunder sounded, and the tribe quickly dispersed. My father watched with fear as his friends and brothers fled.

  “How could you do this to him?” my mother shouted at me over the sound of pouring rain.

  “I didn’t do anything!” I shouted back. “He’s the one who wanted to try the box!”

  “He’s old!” she screamed. “Can’t you see that? He’s old.”

  Professor Fitzbaum cursed at the rain, hopped into his truck, and drove out of sight. My father sat shivering in the cramped plastic cube. The water was up to his ankles and rising.

  “Do something!” my mother yelled at me.

  I hopped off the tree and galloped across the clearing.

  “Dad!” I shouted. “If you suck in your stomach, I can pull you out!”

  “Go away!” he screamed. “I don’t need your help! Get out of here!”

  The rain intensified, and my father started whimpering. The water was past his knees. I looked at my mother. She was jumping up and down in a panic.

  I reached for my dad’s paw, but he swatted me away. His eyes were wild, his movements frenzied. He was totally disoriented. The water was almost at his waist by the time I figured out a plan.

  “Dad!” I shouted over the sound of falling branches. “I’m hungry.”

  He didn’t respond, but he finally stopped thrashing.

  “I’m hungry,” I repeated. “I never ate dinner.” I took a cautious step toward him. “I wish there were grubs I could eat.”

  My father’s breathing slowed.

  “There are grubs everywhere,” he said.

  I poked at the muddy ground, feigning confusion.

  “I’m not good at it,” I said over the sound of howling wind. “I need help from an expert—someone who knows about grubs and about shit.”

  My father’s expression brightened.

  “I can help,” he said.

  “Really? You wouldn’t mind?”

  “Nah,” he said, his posture straightening slightly. “It’s no big deal.”

  “Great! Suck in your stomach, and I’ll pull you out.”

  “What?”

  “So you can help me.”

  “Oh.”

  He sucked in his gut and I heaved on his arm, dragging him out of the box. He immediately thrust his paw into the ground.

  “The trick is to reach down to the bottom. See?”

  He pulled out a grub and handed it to me.

  “Thanks,” I said. I forced a smile and shoved the wriggling creature into my mouth. “Mmm. Delicious.”

  “Want another?” he said.

  “Um… sure.”

  He reached back into the mud and pulled out a whole handful. I swallowed them as quickly as I could.

  “You’re good at hunting grubs,” I told him. “I’m really impressed.”

  “I guess I’m okay at it,” he murmured.

  He beat his chest a couple of times. At some point, it had stopped raining.

  “Come on,” he said. “I’ll groom you.”

  “You don’t have to groom me.”

  He ignored my protests and squatted down behind me. I looked up and saw my mother looking down at me from a tree. She scrunched up her face as if trying to remember something. Then she thrust out her left paw and raised it briefly to her lips.

  THE TRIBAL RITE OF THE STROMBERGS

  “Hmm.”

  “What?”

  “Not sure about qat.”

  Jeremy looked up from the board with shock. His father had never questioned any of his words before. The old man’s lead was usually so big that he let Jeremy put down anything he wanted—proper nouns, abbreviations, even the occasional swear word.

  “It’s a type of plant,” Jeremy said. “I learned it on Words with Friends.”

  “What’s that?”

  “It’s an app.”<
br />
  “Hmm,” his father said.

  Jeremy folded his arms and smirked. “You’re welcome to challenge it.”

  His father picked at a loose wooden button on his cardigan.

  “That’s all right,” he said, flicking his wrist. “I’ll let you have it.”

  Jeremy grinned. His dad only had five tiles left and they were obviously doozies. He couldn’t remember a game ever being this close. He’d come within ten points once, during college. But his father had just had his gallbladder removed and was woozy from a host of strong narcotics.

  “Are we allowing foreign words?” his father asked.

  Jeremy raised his eyebrows. Foreign words were never allowed. His dad was the one who’d taught him that rule.

  “Of course not,” he said.

  “Hmm,” his father said. “Then I guess… I’ll pass.”

  They both glanced at the score pad. “Dad” was still ahead, 252–239. But “Jerm” was about to end the game.

  “ ‘Ta,’ ” he said proudly.

  “What?”

  “ ‘Ta,’ ” Jeremy said. “T-A. Like goodbye.”

  He slid his final tile into place, a T before the A in qat. He’d set it up and things had played out perfectly.

  “Challenge,” his father said.

  Jeremy laughed. “Seriously?”

  “Challenge,” his father repeated, his voice gruff with frustration.

  Jeremy shook his head in disbelief. They’d both been using ta for years.

  “Okay, fine.”

  He cracked open the Scrabble dictionary and showed his father ta.

  “Here’s qat, too,” he said, flipping back a few pages.

  His father scratched his scalp. He was still up eleven points, but they hadn’t yet accounted for his remaining letters.

  “Come on,” Jeremy said. “Let me see ’em.”

  His father reluctantly turned over his rack. He had mostly vowels, predictably, three As and an E. But one tile stood out, like a clump of gold in gravel: a jagged, ten-point Z.

  “Yes!” Jeremy shouted, banging his fist against the table. “Holy shit, I can’t believe it!”

  He subtracted his dad’s tiles from his score, added the amount to his own, and scribbled down the final tally.

  Dad: 238, Jerm: 255!

  He tore off the sheet and pocketed it. He couldn’t wait to show it to his fiancée. She’d read his dad’s textbook in college and considered him a genius. Her mind was about to be blown. He was posting a picture of the board to Instagram when he noticed that his father was undressing.

  “Dad?” he said. “What are you doing?”

  “I knew this day would come,” he said. He stripped off his shirt and knelt on the ground, his naked arms stretched out in supplication.

  “Club me to death,” he begged. “And eat my body.”

  “Dad…”

  “Eat my weakened body,” his father said. “For I have become too old to live.”

  “Dad, come on,” Jeremy said. “It’s just one game. It doesn’t have to be like this.”

  But he knew there were no alternatives. The Stromberg family had been practicing this rite for generations. He himself had witnessed his mother shove his grandmother onto an ice floe. They were on a ski trip in Vermont, and his grandmother had forgotten the name of the actor who played Frasier.

  “It’s not a big deal,” his mother said through sobs. “Everybody forgets things sometimes.”

  The old woman shook her head stoically.

  “Bathe me in sacred oils,” she commanded. “And cast me out to burden you no more.”

  They’d fed Aunt Susan to a horse in Central Park when she was only fifty. She’d promised to get her niece a summer internship at Bravo. But, when she called up the producer she used to date, he told her he was no longer with the network. Layoffs were looming and he’d taken a buyout. Susan was floored. She’d had ins at NBC for as long as she could remember. She’d dated assistants in her twenties, writers in her thirties, and executives in her forties. Now she didn’t even know anyone who worked there.

  “It’s okay!” her niece insisted, as little tears formed in her eyes. “I don’t even care about TV! I just wanted an excuse to live in New York this summer—”

  “Feed me to beasts,” Susan interrupted. “For I have outlived my purpose.”

  Grandma Edith had walked off a cliff on Thanksgiving after accidentally calling her granddaughter’s black boyfriend Barack.

  “It’s no big deal,” said the boyfriend, whose name was John. “I’m not offended.”

  But it was too late. Edith had already put on her New Balances and headed for the rocks.

  Uncle Mort had taken the rite just two weeks ago. He was making some coffee for his daughter when a fuzzy voice blared from his dusty Dell computer, “You’ve got mail!”

  “Oh my God,” his daughter said. “You still have an AOL account?”

  Mort’s wrinkled face flushed with shame.

  “You’ve got mail!” the voice repeated. “File’s done.”

  Mort nodded once at his daughter, and she knew without asking what he wanted her to do. She led him quietly out of his house and drove him through Boca, to the ocean. He kissed her on the forehead and then marched into the surf, his chin held high, proud to be leaving the earth with dignity.

  Jeremy didn’t think that his father, though, was anywhere near that stage. He wasn’t young, of course. But he was still pretty vibrant. Just last year he’d published his ninth book. Sure, it wasn’t his most original work. (The Journal of Anthropology had called it a retread of Tribes, his one bestseller, now out of print.) Still, it was a real book, with footnotes and a cover and everything. So what if nobody wanted to buy it or read it?

  “I know you’re upset,” Jeremy’s father said. “But you have no choice. You must perform this holy rite.” He rooted around in the living-room closet. “Where is that thing?” he muttered, rifling through a stack of old squash rackets. “Ah.”

  He handed his son an oblong slab of wood. The club had been in the Stromberg family for years. It was by far their most ancient possession, even older than the George Foreman Grill.

  Jeremy held the club up to the light. The bulbous side was stained with horrible reddish streaks. He looked back at his father and saw that he was kneeling on the rug, his balding head bowed toward him.

  “Congratulations on beating me in Scrabble.”

  Jeremy clenched his fists with anger.

  “Why didn’t you use your Z earlier? You played aero—that could have been zero!”

  “What’s done is done.”

  “I’m sorry,” Jeremy said, his eyes already glossy. “I didn’t know what I was doing.”

  “Yes, you did,” his father said.

  Jeremy let out a sob as he raised the club over his head.

  DISTRACTIONS

  “Who cares what Sparklegum12 thinks?” Kayla said. “He’s just some random moron on the Internet.”

  “It’s the very first comment,” Gabe said. “As soon as people finish the story, they’re going to see that comment and it’s going to bias them.”

  He clenched his fists.

  “It’s going to bias them,” he repeated.

  “People love your story,” Kayla said. “See? It’s got four stars.”

  “Three and a half.”

  “Why can’t you just be proud of yourself? It’s the Synecdoche Review. You’ve been submitting there for years.”

  “I’m never submitting there again. First they make me change the ending, then they water down the opening paragraph, then they post a nasty comment at the very top of the comments, to make sure people hate the story because of the comments!”

  He glanced at his MacBook and gasped. His half a star had vanished. He was down to a mere three.

  “Fucking fuck!” he shouted.

  Kayla sighed as Gabe paced around his studio, waving his arms at the ceiling.

  “It’s unbelievable! They always find a w
ay to fuck me, every time.”

  “Who’s ‘they’?”

  “The whole fucking literary establishment! They hate that I’m trying to do something new—it terrifies them! I’m sorry I didn’t go to Iowa! I’m sorry my stories are actually original!”

  He stopped pacing. At some point during his rant, Kayla had put on her coat.

  “Where are you going?” he asked.

  “Home,” she said. “I thought we were going to cook lasagna and have sex. Instead, you threw a tantrum for three hours about a story in an online magazine that nobody even reads. I’m hungry, I’m tired, and I want to go to bed.”

  He reached for her arm, and she shook him away.

  “I’m sorry that Sparklegum12 disliked your story,” she said. “I’m sorry you can’t finish your novel. I’m sorry you’re not some famous celebrity writer. It doesn’t mean the whole world’s out to get you.”

  “You’re right,” Gabe said. “I’ve been acting crazy tonight.”

  “It’s not just tonight.”

  “Who are you calling?”

  “A cab.”

  “He’s onto us,” Kayla whispered as she ran out of Gabe’s building, her iPhone pressed tightly to her ear.

  “We know,” said the voice on the other end.

  “What do I do?”

  “Just get here.”

  Kayla scanned the street. There was a phone booth on the corner of Myrtle and Bedford. She ran inside, dialed the secret code, and sank into the depths of Brooklyn.

  She emerged minutes later in a torch-lit hall a hundred feet below the borough’s surface. The council was already assembling. Kayla bowed with deference as they took their places on the dais. The bottom row was reserved for the editors of prestigious literary magazines. Above them sat representatives from all the major American publishing houses. On the top tier sat members of Congress, titans of industry, and the president of the United States. A giant flag hung behind them, featuring the association’s logo: a picture of Gabe’s face, bisected with a diagonal slash.

  Kayla took a seat in the gallery, next to one of her fellow agents.

  “Nice work with that comment,” she said.

  “Thanks,” said Sparklegum12.

  “Is he here yet?” Kayla asked.