How to Lose a Good Babysitter

I think I was nine when we got our first guy babysitter.  Up until them it was always some dumb girl who we didn't like, especially if she wore too much perfume.  David usually caught the brunt of the cheek pinching and the hugs.  Blech!  Marc and I usually holed up ion our room playing Star Wars or Transformers or something.  But when Mom and Dad got Tyler to come over, the games began, and I mean in a serious Calvin and Hobbes sort of way.

I remember him teaching how to blow up or G.I. Joes so their body parts flew apart whether you shot them with rubber bands or bottle rockets.  We’d roam the neighborhood playing capture the flag or smear the queer way past dinner and way into the dark.  But he always got us in bed before the parental units returned.  I remember listening from my bed as he would scramble to clean up the typhoon that was the kitchen or eliminate the evidence from the ice cream fight.  He was cool…until the one day he vowed never to come back.

Our neighbor, Doug, who was in tenth grade, just like Tyler, was jealous—I believe because he was never asked to watch us.  I could write a whole chapter on the reasons Mom never though twice about him, but that’s another story or seventeen.

We were coming in from a snowball fight, or massacre rather, and we were brewing up some hot chocolate.  Tyler had to run to the can, and that left me, Marc, David, Doug, and probably a few other local stray kids huddled around the table.  Doug was feeling malicious and asked what was in our fridge.

Before we could reply he had whipped open the door and started hauling out all types of hot sauces and other liquid condiments and started pouring them into Tyler’s mug.  Pickle juice, Tabasco, gravy.  They all went in.  We boys were trying not to gag as he stirred them in smoothly.  I had no idea how Doug was going to get Tyler to drink it because instead of a nice, rich dark cocoa color, it looked like mud—not good mudball fight mud, but the sick, greenish-grayish stuff that slucks your shoe off and reeks of stale diapers and eggs.

To answer my question, Doug whipped out a handful of marshmallows from the top of the cupboard—how he knew they were there I’ll never know—and covered the top of Tyler’s sludge as well as all of our cups.  To the innocent observer, it looked like nothing was different.

As soon as Tyler returned, he grabbed the mallow-topped mug and threw most of it down the hatch in one swift action.  His eyes bugged before he spewed the nastiness across the table.  He stuck his head under the faucet, trying to flush the taste out of his mouth.  He hung there for a good minute or two before he stormed out, chasing Doug.

David, Marc, and I sat there ogling, wondering what to do.  Like Sally and her brother watching Cat in the Hat and Things One and Two, we were helpless to the situation—innocent (or not) bystanders to the horrible fall of our favorite babysitter.  When neither one came back immediately, we went upstairs and plugged in the Nintendo.

Tyler showed up a while later, but he didn't even come upstairs.  I assume he stayed until my parents came home.  I think he even cleaned up the kitchen, but he never came back.  I don’t think he ratted out Doug, although I’m fairly confident he delivered a good thrashing.  I never saw the two of them together again.