Soccer Dad

Soccer Dad & the People in Your Neighborhood
By Jesus Jones

I was cruising the west side of town around 10 p.m. singing to myself a twisted variation of Operation Ivy’s Knowledge. See, my friend Jason and I invented this fun-for-the-whole-family game in which you take a song and change the lyrics around to make it a song about anal fisting. Anal fisting, to us, is pretty much the epitome of hilarity. So, instead of “All I know is that I don’t know, all I know is that I don’t know nothin’,” I was singing (falsetto-style) “Grab the lube and fist my anus, grab the lube and fist my anus, honey.” A 12-hour taxi-driving shift sometimes requires such frivolity.

So I get a call to The Raintree Apartments in Rose Park. Upon arrival, there isn’t anybody in sight, so I park and decide to wait for three minutes. “Weeeeeeee’re too tight to get inside, but with some lube the tightness will subside!!!” About 20 seconds before the allotted three minutes expired, and as I was about to shift to a butchered rendition of the Bee Gees’ “How Deep is Your Love?” (use your imagination), out staggered a woman with a drunken, sideways shuffle. With a profound slur, she instructed me to take her to an address a mere five blocks away. Goddamn lazy humans.

We pull up to the house and she tells me to wait, that she’ll be right back, that she “gots to do some spyin’.” Oh, Jesus. I watch her stumble up to a window and start peeking. Within seconds, a curtain opens to expose her nonsense and she runs back to the car as fast as the liquor will let her. The person in the window is obviously shouting obscenities, but I can’t hear it. She tells me to step on it ’cause we have to go pick up her “real boyfriend” from work now (that last dude was just “some scrub”). As we pull up to her boyfriend’s place of employment, she tells me that she has to go inside and get him, but that she’ll give me a deposit to wait. She digs around in a monstrous plastic Family Dollar bag and promptly pulls out five rolls of pennies.

“Here ya go, honey,” she says. “I’ll be rights back. Doncha be goin’ nowheres.”
“No problem,” I say.

I watch her walk into the building and then I just hit the gas- an old-fashioned, cruising-State-Street-on-a-Friday-night-’cause-I-totally-suck peel-out. Good times. I weigh the pennies in my left hand and try to come up with a good use for ’em. And then it hits me.

I turn left onto Fourth West, pass the Gateway, and turn right onto Second South. Sure enough, there’s a gaggle of homeless people milling about the shelter. I drive by really slow, roll down the window, and huck the five rolls as hard as I can onto the asphalt-the clink/clank/shatter was glorious. And then, in true Pavlovian form, a real-life bum’s-rush takes place. And as I watch the cars and the vagrants shout and honk at each other in the chaos in my rearview mirror; a lovely tune comes to my lips, (not quite as high as Andy Gibb, but …) “HOW DEEP IS YOUR FIST? … How deep is your fist, how deep is your fist … are you up to the elbow????”