Chapter 2
Gracie was like a horse straining at its bit while they waited for the attendant to release the red chain that barred entry into Chuck E Cheese. Once she – and her father - were branded with their identifying marks, administered in the form of invisible ink via a stamp on the hand, the chain was released, and Gracie - beckoned by the sight of metallic, helium balloons - tore forth in the direction of the back of the restaurant.
"Slow down!" Coach Taylor called after her, but despite his booming projection, his voice was drowned out by the shrieks of countless children.
He had to weave his way defensively in and out of a stream of little chargers before he reached Gracie, who was grabbing a cup filled with tokens off a decorated table. "Gracie Belle! You can't just take that." He took it from her hand and set it back on the table.
"But I want to plaaaaaay!"
"They'll give it to you when it's time," he hissed.
He always hated correcting Gracie – or Julie, when she was younger - in public. He always felt watched. He could shout up a storm on the football field and feel just great, but have to tell one of his kids to behave in public…it was always kind of humiliating, and he didn't even know if this was the table where he was supposed to be.
"Excuse me, ma'am," he said to a harried looking woman who was muttering to her husband about there not being enough coin cups, "Is this the party for Emily Tanner?"
"The names are on the balloons!" she exclaimed testily, and then walked after her retreating husband, who seemed to be trying to escape her.
Coach Taylor looked up at the largest balloons at each table until he saw the name Emily written on one. He grabbed Gracie's hand and tugged her to the designated table.
"Tokens!" Gracie yelled as soon as they got there - right to the mother of the birthday child.
"Gracie!" Coach Taylor hissed. "You've got to be patient!"
The birthday mom smiled – a tight, forced smile. "We're going to give them out when everyone's here, sweetie," she said to Gracie.
"Tokens!" Gracie repeated.
The birthday Dad muttered, "That's not going to work, Elizabeth," and handed Gracie a cup.
"John!" the birthday mom scolded.
"Well it's true, Liz. I already gave out three cups!"
"Well if they use the tokens now, what are we going to do until the food comes?" The clearly annoyed mom asked.
"Well what are we going to do while we're waiting for everyone to arrive if we don't give out the tokens now?" the dad shot back.
Coach Taylor took a step away from the bickering couple.
"Sorry," the mom said. "You're Gracie's dad?" Eric nodded numbly. "Gracie and Julia are in the same pre-K class," she explained to her husband. Official introductions were made, and Eric realized Gracie had disappeared.
He went in search of her and found her climbing up a ski ball ramp to shove a ball in the circle marked 100.
"Gracie!" He put a hand down on the ramp and leaned forward and tried to grab her off, but he couldn't reach her unless he climbed up himself, which he wasn't about to do, so he just stood there waving and repeating, "Get down! Get down right now!" When that didn't work, he dug a hand into his hair and grabbed a fistful of strands.
"Another 100!" Gracie shouted. "How many tickets did I get?" She clomped down the ramp. He plucked her up and put her down and warned her not to do it again. As she ripped her reward tickets from the dispenser, he took a deep breath and reminded himself what his own reward would be. Just focus on that. Except he couldn't because Gracie had disappeared again.
When he found her this time, she was shoving tokens one after another into a slot on a machine. The tokens rolled down a ramp, landed on top of other tokens, and a moving ledged pushed in and out, teasing and tantalizing, promising to shove large number of tokens off the ledge into the awaiting pot below, but of course, not a single token actually fell. This was okay with Tami, was it? Training their daughter to gamble from an early age?
"Stop!" he demanded as Gracie grabbed another token and shoved it into the slot. "Just stop!" He grabbed her token cup out of her hand before she could waste anymore. He glanced at his watch. So far, they'd used up only 6 minutes of the 45 minutes of "free play" that would proceed the 45 minutes of pizza, cake, and other antics. He looked down into the token cup.
It was already empty.
/FNL/
Just to get through the rest of first half of the party, Eric fed a $5 bill into the token changer to get his daughter twenty more tokens, which Gracie blew through in nine minutes. Thirty minutes to go until pizza. He slid another $5 bill into the token changer. "Slow down this time," he said as the tokens began shooting and clanging into the slot below. "Play some longer games. Take your time."
Gracie grabbed a handful of tokens and tore off. Hastily, Eric collected the remaining tokens, surveyed the crawling establishment, and eventually located her. Or thought he did. It was another little blonde girl. When he finally caught up with Gracie, she was sitting on some bench in front of a camera. "Daddy, get in!" she commanded.
"Uh…no thank you."
"Daddy!" Gracie lowered her lips in a pronounced pout. "Don't you want a pictwer with me?"
Despite all his present agony, he smiled. God how he loved the way she said picture. She wasn't going to do that much longer. She was going off to kindergarten next year. He sighed and squished in onto the booth next to her and lowered his head down next to hers.
"Get ready!" said the overly cheerful, vaguely disturbing voice of Chuck E. Cheese. "Get set! Prepare to capture your memory!"
When the picture was dispensed, Gracie was biting down hard on her back teeth while smiling – her own, distinctive the-camera's-on smile - while Eric's eyes were rolled upwards. "Oh yeah," he said. "That's going right on the refrigerator." He looked up from the picture only to find that Gracie was gone again.
He found her trying to play whack-a-mole with her bare hands instead of the whacker thingy. She'd smack a purple mole down with her fist and yell "Owww!" every time.
"Use this," Eric insisted, trying to hand her the whacker thingy – club? Was that what it was called? But she just kept doing it with her fists and screaming Owwww! He dropped the club and thrust both hands into his hair, leaving it to speak his mind when his hands fell loose.
"Only ONE!" Gracie said in pronounced disbelief when the game was over and the machine dispensed but a single ticket. "That's not right! Damn ref!"
"Uh…Gracie…"
"Damn ref!"
"Shhhh!" he said, putting a hand over her mouth. "Don't say that. Where'd you get that language?"
She wrenched herself free from his hand and took off again. He made his way through the flood of children, the blinking lights, the sounds that were making his hair move almost of its own accord. He found her trying to play one of those car games. Her butt was all the way on the very edge of the seat, and she was leaned back, gripping the steering wheel, and looking up, but she still couldn't reach the pedal. "Push it for me, Daddy!"
"Scoot over then," he said, but she wouldn't let him sit next to her.
"Just push it!" she insisted.
So, finally…he did. He pushed the pedal with his hand. On his knees beside the car. Feeling like a fool.
When it was finally time for pizza and all the kids and parents were summoned via loudspeaker to re-gather in the party area, and Gracie had taken her seat at the decorated table, Eric glanced around. An instinct for preservation led him to gravitate toward the only other father at the birthday party – not the birthday dad, who was busy snapping pictures of his daughter with a man dressed in a creepy mouse suit, but the one other father.
The other twelve parents were all women, and, as far as Eric could tell from what he'd overheard, they were having some kind of survivor's competition, trying to determine which among them should take the crown for having endured the strangest, longest, or most violent childbirth. There were other laurels being awarded as well: mother to have surmounted the most trying potty training campaign, mother who was forced to wake up earliest in the morning at the behest of her children, mother who had to clean up the largest quantity of wall graphiti art.
Eric came to where the other dad was leaning back against the table of a booth, hands crossed over his chest, staring vacantly in the direction of the giant, continuously circling TV screens, which had played one particularly annoying song (that is to say, even more annoying than the other annoying songs) at least fifteen times since Eric had set foot in the place.
"Eric Taylor," Eric said, extending his hand, "Gracie's father."
The man, blinking as though arising from a deep daze, shook his hand. "Jacob Jameson. Jake's father."
"Nice to meet you, Jacob."
The men stood silently beside one another for a moment, leaning back, arms crossed. Eric lowered his head in a posture of weariness and despair.
"I'll let you in on a secret," Jacob whispered.
Eric raised his hung head and turned with a slightly frightened look toward the man. He wasn't used to men he'd just met offering to share their secrets.
"They have beer."
Coach Taylor's ears perked up. "Say what now?"
"Beer. It's not officially on the menu, but they have it. You have to ask for it at the counter, directly, and they only allow you a maximum of two twelve-ounce cups. But they do have it." He jerked his head subtly toward the table behind himself, like a drug dealer gesturing a customer to follow him. Eric looked down and saw the empty plastic cup, the thin film of whitish brown foam at the bottom.
"Thanks for the tip, Jacob." Eric emphasized the man's name because it was his habit to repeat a person's name at least once or twice when he was first introduced. It helped him remember. "Think I can sneak…"
"Oh, yeah. I'll keep an eye on Gracie for you if you keep an eye on Jake for me when I go back for my second. Which one is her?"
Eric pointed to Gracie, who was now dancing in front of the TV camera, her image being projected on the screen. At least she wasn't "shaking her booty" at the moment, as a neighborhood kid had taught her to do – oh, shit. There she went. Right on the big-screen TV. Eric marched down between the tables, removing one child from his path, and grabbed Gracie away from the cameras. When he got her onto another activity, which was sitting down because the cake was coming, he headed for the front, nodding conspiratorially to Jacob on his way.
It took a while, but Eric returned with his cup of beer. He leaned back against the table again. "Your turn," he said. "Which one is your son?"
"The one who's licking icing off the tablecloth," Jacob said, without batting an eye, and then he disappeared to obtain his own elixir. By the time he got back, Eric was already done with his first and immediately left to secure his second. When he returned, the two men stood side by side, numbly sipping their beers and watching the cake plates cleared away. "What the hell is that?" Eric asked as the birthday girl approached and entered what looked to be a teleportation machine.
"When's the last time you went to one of these Chuck E Cheese parties?" Jacob asked.
"When my first daughter was seven. She's nineteen now."
"Ah…well this is new since then. It blows tickets all around, and they have – I don't know – maybe two minutes to catch as many as they can."
Eric heard the whirr of the machine and watched the tickets fly up.
"Can I do that next year? Can I? Can I?" Gracie asked, running and clutching him by the leg, which caused him to spill a third of his last ration of beer. "I want a Chuck E Cheese party!"
"We'll discuss it later," Eric insisted. When the birthday girl came out of the tube-like contraption, clutching a total of only six tickets in her hands, and crying, absolutely weeping, downright bawling, Eric said, "Gracie, get your goody bag and let's go."
Gracie surprisingly didn't protest. She grabbed a bag from off the table and took off running. He soon realized why she hadn't protested – she wanted to go to the prize counter to redeem her own collected tickets. So he spent the next twenty minutes with one hand lodged deep in his hair, trying to explain to her why she couldn't get a 500-ticket prize with the 127 tickets she'd earned, or two 100-ticket prizes, or even three 50-ticket prizes for that matter. In the end, she finally left with two tootsie pops, a roll of Smarties, a Chuck-E-Cheese press-on tattoo, and a kazoo.
It was the kazoo that finally did him in.
