So i wrote last week about how my Mom used to make my sibs and I stay in the world's cheapest motels when we'd go on vacation, and how that all finally ended when I was 20 and she nearly got me killed by having me run to a pay phone to report a drug deal in the next room over.
The funny thing is, now I'm planning to get away for a couple days with some buddies and what do we do? Surf the internet to find the cheapest possible hotel rooms. I swear to God, I need to break this cycle.
Anyway, my mom broke her need for putting us through cheap hotels for no reason in that summer of '90. A couple years later i finished college and moved to Chicago to study at Second City. So, by the time Christmas of '97 rolled around, my dad called and offered me a trip it seemed I couldn't refuse.
First of all, he wanted to have me come with him, mom, and by brothers Lud and Nick to Disneyworld, and he was actually gonna join us on that vacation, something that almost never happened. I always had the impression that Dad was happy to send us off on trips without him because getting away from US, even if it meant staying home without us, was the perfect vacation for him.
But this time he was going, and we were going to the Happiest Place on Earth. I should have known there'd be a problem though: We were going to all load up in a rented white van and drive out to Florida and back from Little Rock. This meant TWO days each way, with five grown adults stuck into one van.
"The van will be big. It's better than the station wagon," dad said, trying to calm my flashbacks from summer after summer in my childhood, in which my mom, two brothers, me and my sister wound up wanting to kill each other while trapped in a three-day trip from Little Rock to Cali.
So I said sure, I'm in. How often do you get a chance to see Disney World?
So I flew down to Little Rock, we loaded up in the van, hit the road, yada yada yada. You probably get where this is going as far as the road trip is concerned: We were cramped in and MISERABLE within 20 minutes. We couldn't agree on any of the music. My brothers took turns farting (and then hitting each other for farting), and I just endured it all silently in the back. My mom yelled about something nearly every three minutes and my dad silently suffered, which looking back might have been a sign that something was wrong: he had a heart attack and had six bypasses the following October. (He's doing great now by the way and I found my mom yelling to be funny - we're all good. Weird but good, now.)
We get to Disney World and have 3 days to spend there: one in EPCOT (the biggest ripoff in the world), one at Disney World (awesome) and one at DIsney-MGM Studios (Ok, I take it back about EPCOT: Disney-MGM is the crappiest place on earth). I should mention here that my brother Lud had a few interesting quirks that many years later were proven to be a form of autism: chief among them being the fact he'd get a song in his head and then sing or hum it CONSTANTLY.
So he had some dumb song in his head and was humming away all the way through the first two days and then into our final day, Christmas itself, at Disney-MGM. It was bad enough that we were just coming to realize how lame-o that part of the parks was; my brother providing his own bizarre soundtrack to our crushing sense of disappointment started causing my mom to lose it.
"Please stop singing..." "la de da de da, hum hum..." "PLEASE stop humming.." "da da da la de da..." "I really can't take it anymore, please stop..."
This went on for like an hour. On Christmas morning. The Happiest Place on Earth was turning into a powder keg. People were starting to stare at us in line at different rides and shows.
And then it happened, the moment that is seared in my memory forever for producing The Greatest Photo I've Ever Taken (now sadly lost, likely in my move to LA from Chicago). I will describe it to you in vivid detail, though, readers.
My mom's endless nagging finally, like the law of physics about an unstoppable force smacking against an immovable object, crashed hard into my brother's endless singing. One nag too many, and my brother...Finally. Stopped. Singing.
Mom kept walking a few feet ahead, unaware that Lud had finally shut up. My dad and Nick were also obliviously quiet. I was the only one to notice that Lud had frozen in place and looked like he was about to short-circuit.
But even i couldn't imagine what came next.
He ran up on my mom, reared his foot back, and...KICKED HER IN THE BUTT! She let out a shriek as her hands flew to cover her butt, my dad started freaking out in Polish (he's from Poland), and Nick turned around and smacked Lud in the back so hard that he doubled over in his own agony.
So while one brother was smacking the other, my dad was yelling in an unintelligible language and my mom was in shock with her hands over her butt, I pulled out my camera and caught this Hallmark moment while trying not to laugh. It's a glorious photo, or it was: just like Jesus has an anti-Christ, so this photo was the complete antithesis of everything good and holy that Norman Rockwell had to say about the American family.
And while i'm taking that photo, all of a sudden the Disney Secret Police come running from their hideouts and confront all of us.
"Excuse me, is everything OK?" said the goof in charge.
Yeah, terrific. Wanna see my Polaroid?
"We can't have you folks kicking and hitting each other in the middle of the Magic Kingdom. We've received some complaints."
Amazingly, we pulled it together. But how many of YOU have ever been threatened with removal from Disneyland??Needless to say, we never took a family vacation all together again.
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