Hostile Encounters With Minors

I don't much like children, and children don't seem to care for me. I think a lot of my hostility towards kids is based around the fact that I shouldn't have to deal with children, and yet I still do. In fact, I have based my life up until this point around the concept of isolating myself from loud, noisy, obnoxious and, yes, smelly children.

I'm 26 years old, male and single. I work in a video store, but not a Blockbuster-style "family friendly" video store. Rather, I work in the kind of video store where Porno Holocaust and Images From a Convent are the hot rentals. Let me put it this way...Any customer is equally likely to hand you a copy of The Little Mermaid as they are Anal Sorority Fuck Kittens #6. And, if they do hand you Anal Sorority Fuck Kittens #6, you better get them #6, buddy, and not #5, or you'll receive a stern reprimand.

To me, that sounds like a lifestyle that's essentially kid-proof. I mean, yes, sure, there are situaitons where actually being in the same vicinity as someone under the age of 13 is impossible. You may, for example, be invited to a Bar Mitzvah or, worse yet, a bris. You may require emergency medical assistance and desperately need a hospital, only to find there are some children there.

Unfortunately, despite my careful planning, I have to deal with kids all the time. Young, loud, aggressive kids who don't respect my authority despite the fact that there's a solid chance they might not be able to beat me up.

For example, despite my fondest wishes, some children actually do accompany their parents or guardians into the video store, usually to loudly demand either Out of Print, unavailable Disney titles or programs with long, foreign-sounding names like Yuki Yuki Super Girl Action Hero Goyokin Fighting Squad X-4 (Ultra-Starburst Edition). Many of these boxes feature strange, hologramic cover art simulating the experience of doing psychotropic drugs with a talking robot.

What follows is a brief catalog of hostile encounters with the underaged. I offer it to you as evidence that children and the child-like should be kept away from me, preferably through the use of paralyzing darts or some kind of sonar technology.

1.

My apartment building sits opposite from another identical building. The two edifices are divided by a long driveway. Both buildings contain a surprising number of occupants - far more, I suspect, than the public housing code would permit. And these additional residents, being from a...let's say primarily Catholic background...happen to have a lot of children. A lot of children. A huge amount of children.

You remember old-school Nintendo games, where you'd be walking through the maze and you'd have to find the portal that spawned all the enemies, and you'd have to destroy that portal or else enemies would just keep coming out of it forever, no matter how many you killed? I think, secretly, one of those portals sits just beneath my apartment building, except instead of spawning bug-eyed turtles or little mushroom men, it spawns loud, hyperactive, screechy children with a penchant for lobbing tennis balls at or near my bedroom window prior to 7:30 a.m.

The children have claimed that driveway as their own, in a Spanish conquistador sort of way. Rather than a flag bearing the Queen's Crest, they have a multitude of bicycles, scooters, wagons, baseball bats and notebooks with messages like "Me Gusta Green Day" scrawled on the front cover strewn about haphazardly. It marks the territory the same way.

On one occasion, I was in my car, arriving home after a long day of work. If you can imagine the absurdity, I was actually attempting to drive the car down the driveway! What can I say? I must have been on angel dust or something.

I'm about a third of the way up the driveway, which is as far as I can go without physically ramming into small boys in glasses staring vacantly ahead. One of the boys yells to me, but I can't hear him, as I have the window closed. I always drive around my apartment building with the window closed for just this very reason, but in a moment of weakness, I lower the window.

"Don't crush the rocket!" the boy is yelling.

For the life of me, I can see no rocket ahead of me. I can't see anything ahead of me, except for an asphalt driveway and about 10,000 children.

"There is no rocket," I respond, not without hostility.

"Don't crush the rocket!," the boy yells louder.

At this point, mercifully, another child leapt into the scene and pulled Rocket Boy out of the way, allowing me to move the car a few inches further, in order that I should confront whatever surreal juvenile encounter awaited me next.

I later deduced, based on physical evidence left at the scene, that one of the building's actual residents had watered down the driveway, and that the kids had been playing in the ensuing gritty, gravely, wet junky mess. They had built something of a ramp with loose dirt and gravel, and I think this child was confusing the word "rocket" with the English word "ramp," a thing that might conceivably launch a rocket.

Unless, that is, he actually had some small plastic rocket there which I crushed while driving past. God I hope so. Serve him right, the little bastard.

2.

A couple comes into the video store with some frequency, accompanied by a horrible grubby little boy who I will refer to as "G." I hate G. I also hate his parents, who foist G on me with some regularity. G is the sort of child who insists on handing the clerk the money when he goes into a store, who simply must run up and down every aisle of the store on every visit, and who occasionally will enjoy a nice sit-under-the-bargain-racks-at-the-back-of-the-store-and-take-a-dump-whilst-no-one-is-looking bowel movement. And his parents are exactly the sort to condone such behavior.

One this particular occasion, G was seated atop the counter at the store while his mother was fumbling through her purse looking for a credit card. G shouldn't be sitting on a counter top. G shouldn't be sitting anywhere with any moving parts or things to pick up, ever, because G is an uncontrollable menace. Ideally, he would live entirely inside some sort of elaborate restraining device, a travel strait-jacket if you will, that would prevent him from wrecking havoc of any kind on anyone's work station.

Alas, such an invention does not yet exist outside of my imagination, so G was free to throw every item within reach around, pick up and plot down all the items necessary for me to conduct a relatively simple business transaction, and even (yick) touch me with his snot-covered hands that have been...well, that have been God knows where. G obviously has no qualms crawling along the video store's floor, which isn't exactly what I would consider sanitary, so who knows where else he's shoved his stubby limbs in the past 24 hours? And now they're on my person. Terrific.

At this point, G's mom begins to become frustrated with his constant squiggling, and says "Will you sit still! I'm trying to pay this man!"

And, of course, I overstep my bounds. Thinking that the woman is being unreasonable in chastising a boy who clearly lacks any form of impulse control on any level, I blurt out "Maybe he shouldn't be up on the counter at all!" A bit louder than possibly I should have.

Let me tell you...The rest of that transaction was tense...

3.

The other night, my friend Cory and I went to Westside Pavillion to see Capote. It's a 9:50 show on a Friday evening. Neither of us had hot dates this week because Cory was exhausted from his long week and I meet zero women my age in the video store where I spend all my time. Zero. My co-worker, who shall remain nameless, meets about five Bond films worth of available women a week. Me, I got nothing.

Anyway, Cory and I are about to enjoy the 800,000 trailers for films about quirky romances involving plucky, bookish women who don't think they'll ever land a man that will proceed Capote when we realize a couple has brought a baby into the theater.

And I don't mean a toddler or an immature man. A baby. A little baby in a stroller. Into a 9:50 Friday night showing of an R-rated film about brutal murders and their aftermath. How appropriate.

I seriously for a moment thought, "They must just use a baby stroller to carry around valuables. Maybe she has shoulder injuries that prevent her from carrying a purse and he refuses the indignity of a fanny pack. That must be it. Because that can't be their actual live offspring in that carriage. That would be far too inappropriate."

But, no, it was a baby. Fortuntaely, the baby sat quietly for the first half of the film. Then it babbled for a while. Then it kind of half-cried. Then, I think the prolonged sitting in a dark room full of strange noises and shouting while being ignored by both parents shocked the baby into a kind of stupor that allowed us to enjoy the rest of the film unimpeded.

I contented myself with the following notion:

That baby will one day grow into a person, and a lot of people wind up having that "what was the first movie I ever saw in a theater?" conversation. I know mine...A re-release of Disney's Robin Hood. Maybe not one of the greatest Disney films, but one that will always hold a certain degree of fond recollection for me. Also The Sword in the Stone, because I had it on VHS growing up and watched it over and over and over and over again to the point where I remember all the words to every scene.

Anyway, if that baby ever asks his parents, they surely won't tell the truth - that they snuck the poor child into a late show of the Phillip Seymour Hoffman biopic about Truman Capote, thus potentially traumatizing the poor boy for life. They'll probably make up some bullshit, whatever kids movie comes out in another year or two. Ha ha, you little bastard! I know more about your early mental development than you ever will!

4.

Work starts at 11:30 a.m. The time is now 11:24. Do I have time for Coffee Bean? Hmm...Well, it is Sunday, and the roads are pretty clear on Sundays, so let's say it's only 3 minutes to work. If I leave right this second, I get there at 11:27. Let's say coffee takes, on average, 6 minutes from entering the shop to exiting with the hot beverage...Even figuring extra time waiting to access the sweetner/stirrer area or a possible queue to order my Regular-sized house blend, it's still going to be only 11:33 or 11:34 before I actually arrive at the store. That's an acceptable amount of lateness! Let's do it!

One problem...I can't even get to the counter to place my order, thus setting in motion the chain of events that will lead me to leave the coffee house and get to work. It is being blocked by a woman and her two horrible horrible children.

This woman has not just a stroller for her young child, but an entire mobile playset accompanying her other child, who's around 5 I would guess. I'm serious. This thing is a massive gadget on four big black wheels, a roving plastic monstrosity that takes up approximately the same amount of space as a Toyota 4-Runner. Only this is noisier.

So this behemoth, more mobile home than toy, is blocking one aisle completely. That would be the aisle generally reserved for, you know, the people wanting to actually order and receive coffee and coffee-related beverages (and, sometimes, if they are feeling a bit peckish, chocolate croissants).

The other aisle, the aisle generally reserved for people who have received their delicious drinks and pastries and want to leave, is also inaccessible. This houses a screeching infant in a stroller, who is taking up the majority of the woman's attention. So much attention, in fact, that even my repeated "ahems," foot-tappings and even "Excuse me's" went completely unheeded.

How to proceed in such a situation? What do I do next? As I see it, my potential respones boil down to two essential options:

(1) Admit that, as a man, I have been thwarted by a woman and two children. Leave the coffee shop in shame. Go to work without a caffeinated beverage, blaming your puffy eyes and poor attitude on exhaustion.

(2) Push this hag and her rotten spawn aside, and venture forth to coffee.

Let's say no more than I opted for the latter choice.

Okay, I'll say some more. I didn't actually push the hag. Rather than attempt to push aside the enormous playset, and probably breaking either it or some vital bone in my leg in the process, I thought to pass the woman and her stroller. I began my attempt with a move I can only describe as "a sidle." I sidled up to this lady and tried to, in essence, swing my ass around in order to get past her.

My ass, regrettably, is not as small as it could be. It ran into the wall. Now, I was in kind of a spot. I was pressed against this woman, who up until this moment had not even heard me or realized I was trying to get by her. I could have backed up, just given up on the maneuver at the halfway mark...but this was specious. Think about it...If I didn't try to get past, it might appear that I had just walked in off the street and pressed my body tightly against a mother attending to her young child. Not good. You can get 8 months in Chino for less.

No, the only way to go was to forge ahead. Mercifully, Mom got the idea. "Oh, excuse," she said and sort of meekly pushed forward herself and her stroller so I could get by. Ordering my coffee, I felt a fleeting moment of embarrassment and shame at my behavior, barging ahead and knocking this woman aside just so I could get some coffee and get to work 1 minute earlier. I mean, let's face it...If I were truly serious about arriving promptly when expected at work, I would have left the house with more earlier, giving myself more time. Or I would have just skipped the coffee.

Nah, fuck her. I didn't tell her to breed.