Teens took my jetski

Teens took my jetski.  I left it idling by the dock at the inn because I was just running over to the grill to grab an ear of corn and all of a sudden I hear the engine go and I turn around and I see the teens jetskiing off.  I chased them down the beach but I could only go so far before they'd left the shore behind and I was just yelling into the cloud of black smoke that comes out the back when you accelerate too fast ever since I drove it onto a sandbar last year.  But they saw me chasing them so they turned around (two teen boys and a teen girl) and laughed and yelled at me and did a couple donuts.  They were still too deep to chase after but just shallow enough that I could make out their taunts.  I could have thrown a rock, but to what end -- dent my own jetski?

It'll turn up somewhere, in a couple days.  The last time it washed up on the beach six days later, tangled up in a water volleyball net, chassis cracked, sand pouring out of the exhaust.  I'd again left it idling, this time because Dana brought donuts to everyone out on the pier.  The teens don't care what reason you have for leaving your jetski unattended, they just pounce.  People tell me not to leave it idling in the water, but it wastes more gas, I've read, to shut the engine off and then turn it back on if you're only getting a donut or an ear of corn, and gas is expensive.  Well, actually, it's pretty cheap now, cheaper than it's been in years -- under two dollars!  The teens figure they're just stealing some yuppie's joyride, but I need that jetski to get to work.

I'm back working at the marina.  The lake has this eel problem, so my job is mostly untangling eels from the propellers of yachts, and scrubbing off the lake muck that gets smeared onto the yachts as they plow through the water.  I couldn't afford the car AND the jetski.  I had to pick one and I'm fine with my choice.  I live on one side of the lake, the marina is on the other.  The commute is shorter, or roughly the same.  Some things are harder with a jetski than with a car that I hadn't thought about.  Grocery shopping, is one example.  I can pretty much count on losing a bag or two into the lake every time I go shopping.  I tried buying a bag of "dummy groceries," figuring, I'm gonna lose a bag, may as well have it be a bag full of stuff I don't need like cat food and bean curds and root vegetables and those unscented religious candles they sell and stuff like that, but it's not so easy to guess ahead of time which bag is going to be the one to slide off so now I've got all these bean curds and some eel is "digging in" to my sirloin steaks 150 feet underwater.  So that's a challenge.  And when it's winter, I won't be able to go anywhere at all, so I'll have to quit my job, I guess, I'm just realizing.  But I'm in trouble there already, having missed so many days waiting for the teens to discard my jetski, I may have already been fired without my knowledge for all I know.

I want to make a bomb.  I want to leave it on my jetski and blow it up the next time it's stolen.  I want to watch those teens ride off, exulting in their theft and my oldness and lameness and stupidity, and wait until the moment their triumph seems to them assured and just blow them up.  I want to feel the warm tickle of liquefied teen on my skin like a hot summer mist.  I want all the other teens to be gathered on the beach, so they see their friends' beautiful heads pop off and land, still smiling, at their feet; I want to make those surviving teens come to understand that they can die too, and all their youth and sex and vigor means nothing against our old, brutal adult violence.  We invented that.

I told Dana this, and she just shook her head.  Teens are infinite, she said, and their knowledge is never passed to the next generation; they can only make the same mistakes forever.  She's right.  Because I was a teen once, and death touched me, and all I learned from it was, "but it wasn't me, and it never will be."  Though sometimes I wish it was me and not my slutty teen girlfriend who had that balcony crash down on her head, or that it was me and not the town bully who got drunk on his birthday and passed out and slept where a tractor would roll over him the next morning, or that it was me and not my brother who rode a jetski into unfamiliar waters and hit a rock and slipped under the waves; and that it was him and not me who clung to the side and had to ride home alone and tell his drunk of a father, who hardly cared, what happened -- I wish all this in just the same way the teens who steal from me hope that they drive it into some rocks or that I build a bomb and blow them up so their responsibilities are relieved of them and they can die the way they want to be remembered -- young and beautiful and moving away fast, with no eels ever to be untangled.