Jack in the Box and Other Terrors

The Dear Daddy was working late Tuesday night, and I was too tired/lazy/stressed to feel like cooking dinner. We needed a few things at Wally-World, so we headed out. First stop...food. The Girlie hates Jack in the Box, The Poddest of all Things Pods hates Taco Bell. I hate drive thru. There's a Jack in the Box in the Wal-mart lot. More importantly, there's a Taco Bell right across the street, and even more important than that, this particular Jack in the Box is L-shaped and we can sneak in Nachos Bell Grande with extra meat, cheese, beans, hold the tomatoes and sour cream please, and a large raspberry iced tea that The Pod likes but isn't served at Jack's.

So we get in and I ensconce The Girlie in a far table of the L-shaped dining room, hidden from the registers by the bathrooms. She watched Jack and tore into her Nachos while The Pod and I went to the counter and ordered. So far so good. The Pod goes to get the Dr Pepper that The Girlie has requested. I get strawberry soda. Only, after three sips, it's mostly soda. I speak with the manager who says he'll switch the lines after this current customer. So I go back to the table hidden in the L-shaped dining room behind the bathrooms and resume eating my Supreme Chalupa, also secreted in from Taco Bell. These are pretty big, so mid-way through it, I go see if the strawberry soda is working yet. Nope. Fine. I'll get orange soda instead. So The Pod announces that he needs to use the bathroom and gets up to go. A count of about 30 seconds later, just as I'm stuffing what was the overly large last bite of my contraband Chalupa into my mouth sideways, I hear screaming. Hysterical screaming. Coming from the bathroom. In the all too familiar pitch and timbre of The Middles' screaming voice.

Up I leap, nearly choking on the Chalupa, pivoting around the corner to the men's bathroom. Up every one else also leapt, in that same direction. Four diners, two people waiting in line. While my brain mentally hyper-drive calculated the potential penalties of bursting into the men's room in a public place, my feet continued forward anyway. However, The Middle came flying out of the bathroom, red faced, horrified, hysterically screaming, with tears literally flying out of his eyes like in a cartoon. "There's a man! There's a man! Mom, there's a man in the bathroom!" You can guess what kind of visions popped into my head. "A man doing what?" I ask while trying to contain the situation. Well you have to know that his vocal hysteria peaked the interest of everyone, even those who hadn't risen with the initial alarm. "Sitting on the toilet!" came his response. "What was the man doing on the toilet?" Surely there was more to this scenario to cause such a hysterical response, and again, you can guess what I'm thinking. "He's just sitting there Mom! He's a big fat black man just sitting there!" I'm trying to get him to lower his voice and usher him back to our table in the L-shaped corner behind the bathrooms loaded with our contraband Taco Bell food, while I ask again what the man was doing on the toilet. The few people who were still interested got completely bored with the drama when he shouted at the top of his lungs, "He was going to the bathroom!"

So I rally him back to his chair, calm him down, and encourage him to resume his meal that was actually purchased at Jack in the Box. And a few minutes later, sure enough, a very large, very fat, very dark skinned black man emerged from the bathroom. He was looking daggers at my son. He looked at me. "What's wrong with him?" he asked, but surprisingly, not in a cruel way, more of a "Is he alright?" kind of way. I said simply that he has autism, he was unprepared to see someone doing their business and that he was fine now. As if this wasn't enough excitement for the evening.

So a few minutes later, The Middle decides he still needs to pee and heads for the bathroom again. Only now, every one that witnessed his melt down has already finished and left, and there are a whole new batch of customers either waiting for their food or waiting to order. And this time, the hysterical and rapid screaming is about ten octaves higher than in act one, scene one. And much more rapid-fire than the first time. He comes flying out, red faced, hyperventilating, screaming, more cartoon quality tears literally flying out of his eyes into the air. "He's still there! He's still there! The man on the toilet is still there!" I usher him back to the table while a whole new batch of patrons are wondering what the heck the man on the toilet is doing to inspire such mayhem. One patron goes into to check, comes out, sits down at his table. As The Pod is finally calm, I ask if the man who asked us if he was alright was the man on the toilet. "No!" He bellers for all to hear, "He's still in there sitting on the toilet!" I'm pretty certain that who ever was working on the loading dock behind Wal-mart 1/4 mile across the parking lot heard it all.

Finally, an extremely tall black man comes out of the bathroom. He's shaking his head at me, but decidedly not in a nice way. He's drinking a soda, which I can only presume that he took into the bathroom with him. Eeeewww! I ask the Pod if that is the man on the toilet. No. And there's no way he's going back into the bathroom. Or that we're ever going back to that Jack in the Box. As we're gathering our debris to leave, two ladies from Wal-mart who were there for both complete curtain calls approach to give me the sympathy looks and ask if The Pod is alright. I pretty much politely blew them off on the way out the door.

The Dear Daddy laughed hysterically while I related the story. Once we were home and calm (and yes we skipped the Wal-mart trip) I spoke with The Pod about exactly what had happened. Apparently he'd wanted to use a toity, not a urinal. He pushed on the door, it swung open and there was the man. You know the rest. So now there ensues discussion on every angle in which this scene can possibly repeat itself. What he will do the next time this happens. How he will politely and calmly excuse himself and quietly walk away. Why the heck isn't this crap in the "What to expect" books? Or Dr Spock? Good Housekeeping's Guide to Early Childhood? Somewhere??? Anywhere??? Dang!

Much later that night as I was trying to knock off to sleep, I started giggling. I started trying to imagine this whole scenario for the poor man sitting on the toilet. Not only is he trying to do his business in a public bathroom, but suddenly there's this little blonde white kid barging in on him and then screaming at him. And he had to have heard The Pod's loud animated explanation through the thin walls. And once he thought he was safe to proceed with his private activity, the same little blonde white boy is suddenly there again, only this time he is even more hysterical, screaming faster, and screaming at decibels only slightly lower than what dogs and space aliens can hear. He never did emerge before we got the heck out of Dodge, but I have a secret fear that he was so traumatised by my son that he is still sitting there, hours later, even days later, since I am actually posting this on Thursday night, his butt muscles so clamped shut that he'll never poop again. Poor man! Too bad I don't have a picture of that!