JAWS

Yesterday James and I took our kid to KidsWorld which is a huge and elaborate wooden play structure at a park in my hometown that is absolutely crawling with kids and their overwhelmed exhausted parents. Places like KidsWorld are fun, for some, but I tend to think of them as a kind of one-stop shop for picking up a new virus and/or some kind of rash. And why does fun have to be so loud and sticky? (That’s what she said.) When we got there our kid handed James his prized stuffed animal—a benign and gentle looking pink and white baby beluga whale that he had named “JAWS”—for safekeeping, and took off. We sat down and I began to reminisce about how I used to frequent the play structure when it was first built thirty years ago, only when I went then it was always after midnight and I was there to drink and do drugs and graffiti and make out with like-minded degenerates. “I used to come here to drink and do drugs and graffiti and make out with like-minded degenerates and now look at me!” I said. James sighed, because he had heard it all before, and then he said “holy shit!!” and his whole body went suddenly stiff. His eyes had gone all buggy and he looked pale and alarmed. “What? What is it??” I said, but he didn’t answer. He was staring at a tall but normal-looking guy nearby. “I can’t fucking believe it,” he whispered, and I wondered if the tall guy was someone awful from a terrible time in his past that I’d never heard about because until this seemingly innocuous visit to an outsize wooden play structure it had been kept as a kind of dark, shameful secret. Was all about to be revealed? Who was James, anyhow? I started to wonder. I had thought, like a complete sucker, that I knew him, and now I was to be undeceived. The shattering truth will always out, I reminded myself. But I didn’t want it to out! I had been happily married, and now this. Why was I always being taken in? Who was this mysterious dad who had turned my husband into a pillar of salt?

“It’s Scott Aukerman!” Said James.

“Oh!” I said. “Never heard of him. Should I care?”

“You should definitely fucking care,” he whispered, still as still as stone.

I looked at the guy, a rather bumbling, tired-looking middle-aged dad chasing after his toddler.

“Okay. So who is he?”

But James wouldn’t, or couldn’t, answer.

I pulled out my phone to look him up. “Holy shit!” I said. “Oh wow. Oh shit.” This deceptively human-looking dude was none other than the host of James’s favorite podcast, not to mention one of the writers for Mr. Show with Bob and David. I myself am a huge fan of Bob Odenkirk, and we had every single episode of Mr. Show on DVD in the second drawer of the dresser under the TV at home.

“You should go tell him you’re a fan!”

“What? No, I can’t.”

“Why not? He’s not like super famous or anything. He might like being recognized. You could make his day!”

I looked at the not-super-famous-but-very-funny dad, wrangling his kid, and at James, who was still holding the whale.

“Just go over there. And bring the beluga! A middle-aged dad holding a beluga named JAWS can’t go wrong. Maybe he’ll like it! Maybe he’ll laugh and think you’re a funny guy and then you can say, actually, my wife is the funny guy; she wrote a funny essay about eating soup with Bob Odenkirk, and he’ll say no way you should send it to me and then you can send it to him and he’ll show it to Bob and then my dreams will come true! Because who doesn’t like soup?” I said all of this in a kind of frenzied whisper but James just shook his head.

“You might be right, but I can’t do it,” he said. He was truly star struck. I was surprised because I had never seen him like that before. I looked again at the guy, wishing he could know the effect he was having on a fellow dad at KidsWorld.

After a while, I gathered up my kid, and led James, still clutching JAWS, back to the car. Star struck or not, it was time to go home.

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