Things That Don't Work

Things that don’t work have a tendency to be charming, and occasionally might produce a humorous situation. There was the killer toaster that never turned off unless you unplugged it. And the leaky kitchen sink that explosively blew water out of every orifice except the faucet itself. The kids howled about that one. But then the water got turned off and it didn’t do it anymore. There were six of them and some cousins, but the original set was Paul Junior, Axel, Andrew, little Alan and baby Ashley.

Since they went to school when they felt like it, there was no dearth of opportunities to find other things that didn’t work at which to laugh and laugh. Being poor in this part of town lent itself to the funny and sad; things like one-eyed dogs, random Chicago Bears blankets used as curtains, relatives losing teeth in fantastical ways, weird pieces of debris that got stuck to a long unbathed baby sister, the antics of drunk and insane kinfolk, and clothes with holes in the armpits and crotches. Because they had never experienced comfort or an innocent and genuine sense of joy, laughter was safety. They laughed as much as they could, even if it was at the expense of their meth-addicted aunt, who talked to stumps and looked like the poorly-pasted dancing Halloween skeleton little Alan brought home from Head Start.

Paul Junior was eleven. And at eleven he was able to fully comprehend that there were people someplace who lived in households that were not funny. There were kids in the town, mostly on the north end, in whose existences everything worked, sisters were clean and adults never acted in pathetic and amusing ways. Children here developed normally. They were not born with chemical substances coursing through their systems, and their parents did not allow them to pick at scabs. They were never threatened by murderous toasters or kitchen sink geysers. They did not live with six and some cousins.

Although he knew he wasn’t entitled to it, there was a part of Paul Junior that wanted such a clean and humorless life. But there was somehow a larger part of him that meant more and felt better laughing at Andrew with his kicked-out leg stuck in the rotting side of their front porch.