McDonald's PLayPlace

Berwyn, IL

In high school, I worried that my friends and I had normalized vomiting. It was occurring every time we hung out: a friend would puke in some antique vase or unused aquarium (they never puke in the sink or toilet; it’s always the biggest vessel in your house not connected to plumbing). And it was odd to me, that none of us found this odd.

Years later I had a kid and learned we were mere amateurs. I discovered that there is no wino, no hopeless barfly, no troubled celebrity, that will ever puke more than the average toddler. Kids puke constantly. And that’s because—at the end of the day—kids fucking party. You have never, even at the height of your college-years confidence, shown up to a party with a fraction of the nerve that a kid does. A child will walk past a dozen adults, all looking for hugs, and say, “I have no memory of you,” then reach the end of the room, turn and ask, “So where’s this bouncy house?”

My kids will run up to me at a party and say:

“Hey, my best friend...um, I forgot their name…” (it’s someone they met ten minutes ago), “but…well, they want to come over some time so I need to know where we live.”

“We live in Oak Park.”

“What? I thought we live in America?”

“Oak Park is a city in–” and before you can explain further, they interrupt: “Hmm, that’s weird,” and they hold their stomach for a second—and that’s all the warning you will get, a momentary rub of the stomach— and then they let loose and vomit like a garden hose set to “JET.”

Once you are past your first kid, you learn to recognize the twitch, the warning—the way a mongoose knows when a snake is about to strike—and you get out of the way, or you pick up the kid and point them away from the carpet and furniture, almost like they’re a blender that’s running without its top on; you are redirecting the stains to a preferred, cheaper place.

When kids are done vomiting, much like a drunk, they show zero remorse. A few seconds of silence will pass, then they will break the tension with something along the lines of:

“I may have had too many brownies.”

“How many did you have?” you’ll ask.

“What comes after ten?

“Eleven.”

“I had two elevens.”
 

On this occasion, my family was visiting from Ohio and due to a nearby factory fire our house lacked power for several hours. We took the kids to a McDonald’s with a PlayPlace for breakfast to entertain them while we waited for the zoo to open. The adults were mostly occupied with using the restaurant’s Wi-Fi (since we had not been online for half a day due to the power outage) when we heard it: a child’s shriek, the grossed-out kind that usually means that one of these families is going to leave a lot sooner than they were planning.

“Oh my God,” yelled one of our kids, “I can’t believe you just did that, right there! Of all the places!”

We looked up and saw kids jumping out of the play structure (which seemed about three stories tall) like their lives depended upon it; as if they were leaping from the burning wreck of the Hindenburg.

“What’s going on?” my sister asked.

“John just took a shit in the attic of the playground!” her oldest answered.

Somehow, kids know to wait until the most public moment possible to reveal that they know a particular swear word. They never let the word slip privately in the car; it’s always when your boss or three generations of your family is visiting that they decide to debut a new vulgarity.

“What?” my sister replied.

“‘Shit,’” her youngest explained, “it means ‘feces.’ You might know it as a”—(and here he changed his voice to impersonate an adult)—“‘bowel movement.’”

“I KNOW WHAT IT MEANS, CONNOR!”

By this point the besmirched John had now descended, at his own leisurely pace, and alighted on the ground.

“John, what happened?” someone asked.

“That did not go like I planned,” he answered, gesturing back toward the top of the playcenter, and then began the lizard-legged walk of a person who has just made a great mistake.

“Jesus,” said his dad.

We looked into the corner of the playcenter where a McDonald’s employee, who was sweeping the floor with a broom, had overheard everything. We gave him a kind of “What’s the protocol here?” look, and, before we could even form a question, he announced, unsolicited: “I make seven dollars an hour.”

This is one of my favorite dead-end job responses: when someone asks you to go unreasonably past the requirements of your job, and you immediately silence them by letting them know your salary.

“Jesus!” my brother-in-law murmured again. This is something my dad would also do when one of us upset him profoundly: he would stare into the distance, repeating “Jesus,” every few seconds, almost like he was reviewing every decision in his life that led to him hearing the news he was presently hearing.

“Hey!” my sister screamed, breaking him out of his trance. Her and my brother-in-law then exchanged that chilly glare you see couples do after one of their children has done something horribly disgusting; that piercing, contemplative glance you trade, attempting to recall who dealt with the last such incident or who—in general—has to debase themselves most often for the kids. Because, if the answer is, “I did the last one,” or, “I do this stuff all the time,” that means the other person is about to climb up a playcenter designed for people a third their size, to clean up their kid’s diarrhea.

Some couples fight about this but not my wife and I. We have a floating agreement that because of the people I surrounded myself with during my twenties, my skill set for solving issues of bodily mistakes is uncommonly well-developed; that I am to puking what Liam Neeson’s character in “Taken” is to hostage situations, and therefore I handle all child-related biological disasters. I do it so regularly that I am often called upon to walk other dads through it. And so too in this case. “I’ll help,” I told my brother-in-law as he started to plan his ascent up the playcenter, adding, “but first we need to grab a lot of napkins.” And I picked up a nearby napkin dispenser.

“Good idea,” he said.

“And a garbage bag. The trip down will be a lot easier if we have a garbage bag.”

I began climbing up while my brother in law took the mostly empty garbage bag from the nearest bin and joined me.

At which point a different McDonald’s employee opened the door, and, seeing us start our ascent, admonished us: “No one above the age of twelve in the playcenter, gentlemen!”

“Let them go,” said the seven-dollar-an-hour broom sweeper. “Trust me.”

We showed the new employee the napkins and garbage bag we were holding and they immediately put it all together and waved us on.

We had worried that it would be difficult to reach the top—that there would be a tube or web of netting we couldn’t fit past—but we scaled it easily. The architects at McDonald’s had clearly accounted for such eventualities; realizing that the entire structure would have to be incinerated within forty-eight hours if they didn’t make all spaces large enough for adults to enter for when a child inevitably relieved themselves inside. I wondered how many generations of playcenters existed before this adjustment was made?

We reached the top and began dealing with the situation. From down below, we heard my sister ask, “Is it going to be...easy to clean up?”

“No one shits themselves with a dry, solid poop, dear!” my brother-in-law screamed back, as though to convey: “No, it is not looking easy up here at the summit.”

We cleaned it as best as we could, descended with the trash and, as we reached the bottom and exited the playcenter we noticed all eyes upon us: the two McDonald’s employees, my sisters, my wife, and some new lady and her two kids, who had also been forced to seek refuge under the Golden Arches due to the power outage.

“Is it cleaned?” my sister asked my brother-in-law.

“We should leave a tip,” was his answer. Which everyone correctly understood to mean: that top floor is still disgusting and it’s going to take more than two dads with napkins to solve it.

The new lady was the first to react, grabbing both her kids by the arms and yanking them back towards their car, snapping, “This is why I never go to McDonald’s!”

My sister looked at the employees, who would probably have to sort out the rest of it, and came closer to us, asking, “What’s the appropriate tip for this kind of situation?”

“All of it,” my brother in law answered, “all the cash we have. They have to get a mop to the top of a jungle gym.”

 

W e left McDonald’s and were heading back to our place, wondering who should stay home with John while the rest went to the zoo.

“Why?” John wondered. “I feel fi ne now. I just needed to poop.”

This is the area where the analogy of kids acting like drunks does not align well because, unlike drunks, kids return to being totally normal after shitting or puking all over a room. It’s miraculous, as though they expelled a demon from their body with the food. My kids will pace around whining at a party—“When are we going to leave? Do we even know these people?”—then puke into a piano, and when I rise to apologize and leave, they quibble:

“Whoa? Why are we leaving? I’m having a great time!”

“You just threw up into a piano!”

“I feel great now. And dad, the correct word is ‘vomit.’”

Kids will go to a party, have a dozen fights with other children about toys, fall off a table, get sick from the food, and their fi rst question at breakfast the next day will be, “When are we going back there? Th at was a blast.”

 

After the McDonald’s debacle, we went to the zoo, John included (and, indeed, he was fine for the rest of the day). As none of us wanted to deal with traffic and parking, we took the train, which excited the kids. When the train arrived, we entered and my sister’s youngest boy immediately ran up to the first pole inside the car, stuck his tongue out and licked that metal pole— on a Chicago public train that runs twenty-four hours a day—from top to bottom.

I have been at sporting events where a grotesque injury happened and the crowd groaned; I have been at standup shows where the performer seemed to get each audience member laughing at the same cadence; but I have never heard a more uniformed response then when my nephew licked a pole on a crowded CTA Blue Line car. It was a guttural, Jungian, shared, “UUUGGH!” You know that strep test, where the doctor shoves a long swab down your throat until you choke? It was like a hundred people got a simultaneous strep test.

My sister cried out: “God! No! COONNNOORR!” Believe it or not, this happens a lot with kids, where you disagree with their actions so deeply that you find yourself screaming the name of your god before you get to “NO!” If my Catholic parents were disgusted enough with what I was up to, they may even get to all three members of the Trinity first:

“What? Jesus! Are you dangling your brother out the window? Holy Ghost! God dammit, NO!”

We found some seats and sat down. Everyone was looking at us, holding back laughs. My brother-in law obviously felt the collective stares, because he said, loud enough for the entire car to hear:

“I wish I could say that was the grossest thing one of my sons did today."