The piñata

It's Dane's birthday today.  He's eight now, or six, or something.  It's on all the cards, I could look it up.

I didn't want to name him Dane.  I wanted Dan.  A nice, solid, normal name.  My wife, who wasn't my wife at the time, said she wanted something more unique.  I told her there's no such thing as "more unique," there's only unique and not unique, and if there are two of something, it's not unique.  She said, well, if that's the case then we'll name him Haoivjnasdlrigh2424 (she typed this, in an email).  Then she said I should have fucked a dictionary instead of her (this was shouted, not typed, later at breakfast).  Dane was a compromise.  I thought, at the time, that I wouldn't hate it, but I do, I really do.

He looks like a Dane too.  Icy blue eyes and an emphatic sweep of Nordic blonde hair.  He doesn't look a thing like me, or my wife for that matter.  Not that anything happened.  He just took all our greasy, mottled, recessive genes and built something better out of them.

It's Saturday so we had his birthday party today.  He invited a bunch of kids from his class, like 20 of them, along with the regular swarm of cousins and neighbor-kids.  I was in charge of the piñata.  My wife handed me the piñata and a big bag thing of candy and told me to fill it up.  This is all you have to do today, she said, so don't complain, which, I hadn't.

The bag was huge.  I thought, I don't want all these annoying kids to get all this candy.  What have they done to deserve it?  What pain have they lived through?  Had they been humbled by suffering into better, stronger people?  Nothing; none; no.  All they've done is live in their oblivious comfort, in a rotten, morally deformed country, their pristine hearts believing that pain and misery were things that happen to kids in places they donate their pennies to at Halloween.  None of them had even been alive for 9/11.  I'd been there -- I mean, in Connecticut.

The piñata was a donkey.  I was the one who picked it out.  Just your normal piñata.

I opened the candy bag.  I took out one candy thing, a Dubble Bubble, and put it in the piñata and sealed it up.  I hid the rest of the candy under a pillow on the couch.

The kids were already outside running around by the time I brought the piñata out.  They all stopped dead when they saw it.  Dane hadn't known it was coming -- he looked like he would burst with joy.  He ran over and grabbed my leg.  "Daddy, can we do the piñata now?" he asked.  I laughed and waved a finger at him.  "No no," I said, "the piñata comes last!"  I gave him a little wink.  "Besides, it'll be even more fun if you have to wait!"  He trotted off, disappointed, but quivering with specialness.

I hung the piñata on a branch of the biggest tree in the yard.  My wife kept trying to organize games and activities for the kids, but all they wanted to do was run around and scream and stand under the big tree and look up at the piñata. "Is it full of candy?" one of the younger-seeming ones, a girl, asked me.  "We'll just have to wait and see!" I said, and I patted her on her little head.

We'd set up card tables and folding chairs for eating cake and unwrapping presents, but everything kept tipping over on our uneven, gopher-chewed lawn, so I suggested everyone sit in the shade of the big tree.  They sat and ate their cake reverently, gazing up at the piñata like it was an icon.

Someone's parents came to pick him up early for some kind of skin thing appointment.  He looked at the piñata and burst into hopeless tears.  His mom asked him what was wrong and he couldn't even speak, so they just grabbed a party bag and dragged him away.

Finally, as I felt the momentum of the day begin to dip, and as my wife finally seemed to win some semblance of control over the group, I brought out an aluminum softball bat from the garage.  Everyone shuffled quickly to the tree.  I got down on a knee and showed the bat to Dane.  He grabbed for it, but I yanked it away.  "Be very careful when you're swinging this," I said.  Dane gave me a serious look, like he wanted me to know that he took the responsibility seriously.

I gave him the bat.  "Everyone stand back," I instructed.  "Now Dane, you get three swings.  If you don't break it in three, then it's the next person's turn."  He nodded.  "When the candy falls, grab as much as you can, but be careful of everyone else, and make sure everyone gets some.  No fighting and no trampling -- this is supposed to be fun, right?"  My wife smiled at me, taking charge like I was.  I stepped back and said, "all right, Dane, when you're ready."

He took one big whack.  "Whoooaaa!" everyone yelled.  He put a dent in the donkey's side but nothing more.  "Good swing!" I said, encouraging my son.  "Try again!"  He took a second swing, very quickly.  "WHOOOAAA!"  He got the foot, it was dangling.  "One more shot," I told him.  "Make it a good one!"  He gathered himself this time, took a breath.  He didn't want to give up the bat.  He swung so hard he came off his feet.  He caught the piñata flush and it burst right through the middle.

The one piece of Dubble Bubble fell to the flattened grass.  All the kids dived on it, instinctively.  One of Dane's older cousins came up with it.  Only after he stood and held the candy up did everyone realize that something was not what they expected.  They all looked up.  The piñata was ripped through, emphatically open, its emptiness ringing through the polleny air like a bell.  Dane forlornly poked it with the bat and the back half fell.  One kid got on his hands and knees and started frantically feeling around in the grass, like he thought the rest of it was there and invisible.

Dane looked up at me.  My boy's heart was broken.  The planes had flown into the twin towers of Trust and Innocence that once stood in his heart.  "Dad?" he asked.  I started to laugh.  My wife threw a plastic cup at me and cursed and stomped inside.

I told the kids the rest of the candy was in the trash.  They went digging through the garbage until their parents came and picked them up, one by one.

After everyone left, I took the candy out from behind the pillow -- no one had found it -- and walked down to the bridge at the end of the road and threw it all in the creek.

My wife called me mean and malicious and pathetic.  She said I'd ruined my son's birthday, for him and for all his friends.  Well, good.  Let them learn young that this womb of preadolescent love and coddling is not the world -- that the world and everything in it holds them in furious, pounding contempt.  Let their hate throb deep and red like a slammed thumb -- I volunteer to be its first object.  Let them learn now the lesson we try not to teach them -- that this world, this country, is hate to its core, and if they aren't prepared to meet hate with hate, then they'll end up like the rest of us, in our musty, too-big houses in our tedious, insipid, gopher-chewed little town, quietly obliterated.

Anyway the end result of all of it was, everyone's mad at me, and next year Dane's having his birthday at the mini golf course.