May 26, 2008

DumbBaby Turns 13....(the night Mama D went batshit.)

In honor of DumbBaby’s 23rd birthday, I’m giving you this little gem. Chances are most of you who read this will say “Oh yeah…I forgot that happened,” because this story really did take a community to create into this solid ball of hype that still remains ten years later.

I know some of you all will remember because DumbBaby and I have some serious reoccurring characters in our lives. We have these friends we cant trick into not being our friends (this creep for example) they’ve stuck through the grade school years into the most current rendition of “Thus Far.”

Considering the piece of Daltronica I’m getting ready to spit to you, I’m surprised any of these people stuck it out through the next weekend, much less ten years later. Submitted for the approval of the Midnight Society, I give you “The Tale of The Kahlua and Condom.”

DB’s thirteenth birthday party had Douglas Middle School a’buzzin. Soundtracking was carefully planned into mixtape renditions of KC & JoJo with smooth transition into Sugar Ray to Adina Howard, with only minimal squeals from pressing pause. DB had the advantage because she had learned from my mistakes the past year- Don’t have your party the weekend of State Any Sport or else the boys aren’t going to make it, and don’t let The Dada and Mama D make 6 pounds of Manwich.

The weeds under the deck had been mowed, the camper trailer swept out and the trampoline hosed off. This was going to be the Ultimate Backyard Bonanza of 1998, no doubt about it. An expected 25 guests out of a class of 60 not including my two friends I planned to bring to roll our eyes and make the majority uncomfortable with our toocoolitudes. The big night rolls around, novice eyeliner jobs and boys with that reddish peely skin that never quite looks right, file into the backyard.

My friends and I took about 45 minutes of scoping out the seventh graders before sneaking into my room to have a séance.. Twenty minutes into our attempt to summon Kurt Cobain, DB shows up in my bedroom. Apparently, the kingpins to the DMS 7th grade Femme Mafia showed up together. We’re talking The Artists Formerly Known as “The Group” Katie, Michelle, and Tara. These girls gave handjobs, dyed their hair and had all smoked more than one cigarette collectively. They were edgy, scary and just all encompassing tweenaged bad girl clichés. They were the girls everyone wanted to be friends with and everyone’s mother hated.

Some how “The Group” had finagled their way into staying the night at square little DB’s post party all girl camp out in the backyard. DB knew this was bad news, but couldn’t wait to tell me: “Uhhhh…Ummmm tonight, the boys are staying down the street at Brady’s and we’re sneaking out to meet them at the Camel Humps.” The Camel Humps were a series of four wheeler tracks and ruts in the field behind our house. It was no place for a prudey 13 year old to be cavorting around with loose ladies and some random boys. “I’m not telling on you, but I’m just telling you, you’re going to get caught.”

This wasn’t so much gut instinct as it was common sense that Mama D would be sleeping with her bedroom window open and making period head counts through out the ordeal this evening. “Just don’t tell on us, okay?”

And I didn’t…the phone ringing at 3 in the morning did. Mama D catches the phone in the middle of the night to the tune of:

” Beck, I got 6 drunk little boys, bet you got 6 drunk little girls.” Kids down the street caved when they went AWOL for their head count then snuck back through the back fence smelling like Robert Downey Jr. It was in those few seconds that Mama D morphed into a ball of rage so sinister that the viens in her head and neck threatened to rupture and spray green venom all over everyone. She kept her cool until she had dragged every girl out of her sleeping bag on the trampoline and lined them all up on the couch while she pilfered through caboodles carriers and pillowcases looking for booze.

When Mama D. came back into the house having produced a bottle of Kahlua and a condom wrapper, even The Group looked terrified and started to squirm. I don’t know why, but for some reason the tirade of “What the hell were you thinking?” and “Where did this even come from?” is burnt into my brain as an image of Mama D in her flowery silk pajama set and sitting on a Velosa Raptor while the girls squirted tough tears and apologized all over themselves. I know this couldn’t possibly be true, but the dinosaur may have made the scenario of veins and rasps of “CALL YOUR PARENTS” seem a little more proportionate with the offenses. True to form, The Groups parents were so used to raising such darling little gems that they were all just pawned off onto whoever’s house had a parents who would drive to pick them up in the middle of the night.

After they had left, a still sputtering Marymo, Cort and DB sat sniffling and whining about how “The Group didn’t even let us go to the Camel Humps with the boys.” The Group had used DB and her geeky little friends as patsys to try to have sex in a field full of garter snacks and stray cats and to drink shots of Kahlua. Unfortunately, DB’s 13th birthday party was the talk of the town for weeks to come. Even the Home Ec teacher got in on asking DB if she could come over for some Kahlua some time. Quite literally, the whole town knew.

Mama D wasn’t the same after that and went to exhausting legnths to make sure we never had use for condoms or booze ever again. DB, Cort and MaryMo never seeing for a second that their cool quotient had been raised by several points, only the disgrace they had brought on themselves by being associated with a big, drunk seventh grade party they thought they could never escape…I guess they still really haven’t.