DREAM ON, YOU MOTHERFUCKING MOTHER

Something’s wrong, here in the backyard. Is something bad about to happen?

Is it the clump of crows, pacing around at the far end of the yard? They take wee, careful steps, lifting their little feet in the air before setting them down, daintily, like ladies trying not to step in something disagreeable. Or, in their aimlessness—each crow has his or her own pointless prancing pattern, oblivious of the others—like dancers in an annoying postmodern performance. But the sound! The sound isn’t dainty at all! Like they’re being strangled, like they’ve got pebbles in their throats and are trying to hawk them out. Crow them out. Ghaghagh! Ghaghagh! A horrible sound, a sound that should belong to a garbage truck, not a creature of lovely Mother Nature.

A murder of crows, that’s what you call a gang of crows like this. It feels very Hitchcock-y here suddenly, very Tippi-Hedren-in-a-phone-booth-y.

Naw, the crows are often here, the creepy things. A bunch of thugs—just bullies, though, all ghaghagh and no bite. They never do anything bad, except exist.

It’s something else, something new. Something weirder. What could it be, here on this mild and sunny midafternoon?

*   *   *

Here is your old house, here the hammock slung between two sturdy pines, here the car on the patch of lawn where you always park it, here the big heap of dead leaves you raked seven months ago but have not yet dumped into the patch of woods behind the yard.

The car! The car is here. The car is never here. The car is never here because it is always on the road, being driven by you to take teenagers places—your own teenager, plus various others, for they travel in packs, wearing one another’s clothes and changing them constantly so that you are perpetually baffled; Andrea may be Emma and Emma may be Sarah. To Cumberland Farms for Slurpees, to RadioShack to replace yet another cell phone charger lost to the universe, out there with all the lost hoop earrings and the stray socks somehow lost though they were part of a clean pair only moments ago.

You are forever driving them to the beach, to the movies, to the thrift shop, to the volunteer job at the horse farm. To the ice cream store. To the drugstore, for twelve-dollar shampoo and for chewing gum. To the friends’ houses, where they will feast on nacho cheese Doritos until their fingertips are stained neon orange—you could find them in the dark by their fingertips!—and cut the legs off blue jeans to turn them into shorts so short they would be stoned in some states; to the drugstore, yet again, for conditioner and leave-in conditioner and something also for the hair called serum, which sounds both scary and disgusting; for Nair, and ladies’ razors (Nair and razors? Another mystery, lost to the universe), and for mascara and mascara remover and more gum. Always more gum.

But now it is different. Your own teenager is not yet in possession of the holy driver’s license, but the friends are, and now all you see is the dust behind the wheels of the friends’ parents’ cars as the children peel out of the driveway at ninety miles an hour, cans of AriZona iced tea the size of fire extinguishers in hand, off on their appointed rounds, for which they do not need you anymore.

They can do their work themselves now—buy the Slurpees and the nacho cheese Doritos, search for the lost lip gloss or stray Teva, left at someone’s friend’s friend’s house or maybe on some bench or other in town. Floating back to you from the car radio, at a volume that would make Helen Keller cringe, come the musical stylings of Nicki Minaj, Kanye, Lil Wayne. And of Mr. Kid Cudi:

Give a fuck about your lifestyle

Give a fuck about a motherfucking lifestyle

Toodle-oo, children! Have safe and yet motherfucking fun out there!

Kid Cudi is appealing, truly. His melodies are so beautiful, and the lyrics so plangent—“Tell me what you know about them night terrors every night”—and his voice is smoky, drowsy, almost postcoitally mellow.

And Kid Cudi is so right, really, so wise, about the whole lifestyle thing. Your lifestyle has been to drive the car. You are so accustomed to driving the car that you have this constant buzzing in your legs, starting in the very soles of your feet, from being welded these many years to the gas pedal. Like the thrumming car is inside you, like you are the car.

And now you have no lifestyle. You will have to get a new lifestyle, if you give a motherfucking fuck about it. And you do! Thank you, Kid Cudi, thank you for the admonition!

You could dump the dead leaves in the woods finally. Not that much of a lifestyle, but it’s a start. You dump the leaves, but it only takes thirty-seven minutes. It feels virtuous to have done it, though. Maybe this is your new lifestyle, being a handyman, caring for the property so badly neglected during your driving years. You patch the screen in the screen door, superglue the loose linoleum tiles in the bathroom. Really, that’s all there is to do around here, all a handyman can do. The other home improvements, those various odds and ends the old house could use—new wiring, new roof, new boiler, new plumbing—require professionals, and funds you do not have in your lifestyle. Nothing wrong with this old place that $200,000 couldn’t cure.

It is surely time to pick up some cash to cover these little extras. You could do that now, with all the time you aren’t spending driving the motherfucking car. The list of your talents isn’t too lengthy, however. You do an excellent imitation of the Lollipop Guild’s portion of “Ding Dong! The Witch Is Dead”—you have the Munchkins’ quivering voices down pat—but it’s not really a living.

Also, you’re good at Marco Polo, the water game, particularly in the role of Marco, suggesting you have some talent in echolocation. Maybe you were a bat in a previous life. Hard to monetize this talent either, though.

You could enter an adult spelling bee and win a cash prize. You have always been an excellent speller, almost freakishly good, practically famous for it.

You are forgetting that your spelling talents have diminished in the last few years. Something has happened to your brain. Here’s how you spell cheese now: cheeze. And all the s’s and z’s are a problem, not just cheeze. Realise? Realize?

Quick: How do you spell that flowering bush you’re looking at, here in the backyard? Rhododendrun. Rhododendrin. Rhododendron. Motherfucker!

You could invent things. Maybe Kid Cudi would help you finance them. Kid Cudi is a dreamer—“I’m that man on the moon, I’m up up on the moon,” he croons in another tune; he pronounces the words “I’m up-pup-pon the moon” so it sounds like a gentle children’s song—and he is off drugs now and feeling very purposeful and positive, you read that in a magazine. Kid Cudi could bankroll your dream of manufacturing small paper towels on a roll that would fit niftily in a purse or pocket, so that when you knock over your cup of coffee at a meeting or drop a shrimp ball on the carpet at someone’s cocktail party, you could clean it up without having to make an ass of yourself. Or your other dream, this one more ambitious, of a cloud sweeper, for anxious hosts and hostesses of outdoor weddings and other events: essentially a small plane with a snowplow-style shoveler up front, to continually push away pesky rain clouds during the festivities. Kid Cudi might really go for that.

Maybe then Kid Cudi, flush with your newfound friendship, would sing a rap that you have written the words to. He would write the dulcet, irresistible tune and sing it in that smoky voice that would make it sound like he was singing about something naughty:

I found the package of Double Stuf Oreos

You thought you lost

All up under the shit on the floor of your room

Your motherfucking room

Under three wet bathing suits and all the legs of the jeans you cut off

And some empty cans of cherry Coke

And a copy of Cosmo and some

Gum you chewed

You gotta clean up this crap

So you can lie down on the floor again, which is where you study, which you are supposed to be doing, for

The SATs, the motherfucking SATs, so nasty and

Yet so necessary

And the song would be a huge hit with the grown-ups and the young people alike, and you could pay to fix up your old house, which should be fixed up because of all the time you will be spending in it, now that you are not driving teenagers around all the time.

Hark! A crunch of gravel, and music from the car radio even louder than before, so loud the awful crows finally fly away in a panic, pure earsplitting, throbbing vibration—like an instrument of torture, or some new kind of civil defense alert designed to send the neighborhood population fleeing from their homes, hands clapped to their ears, straight into the nearest shelter before the bomb or poison gas hits. The teenagers have returned.

It is time, now, to set aside the afternoon’s dreams. To say goodbye, in the soft light of dusk, to Mr. Kid Cudi and your shared dreamy selves. Now is the time for the teenagers’ Nairing of the legs and the ripping open of the Doritos bag and the trillionth viewing of Friday the 13th and the quest to come, sure as the motherfucking sun will set, for the lost something or other.