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Kids and Loathing In The American West (#tune)

We were somewhere around Salt Lake on the edge of the desert when the sugar began to take hold. I remember saying something like "You didn't eat ALL the jelly beans did you..." And suddenly there was a terrible shriek from the back seat and the two kids were at it swooping and screeching and diving around trying to kill each other in the back of the car which was going about eighty miles an hour with the windows rolled up to Boise. And a voice was screaming: "Holy Jesus! What are you, goddamn animals?"

Then it was quiet again. My husband had taken his sunglasses off and was peering into the rearview mirror to facilitate the reconciliation process. "What the hell are you yelling about?" he muttered, staring at the kids before putting his wraparound Spanish sunglasses back on.

"Never mind," said the kids. No point in me mentioning to my husband that wouldn't get any of the jelly beans he bought. The poor bastard would see they were gone soon enough.

It was almost noon, and we still had more than a hundred miles to go. They would be tough miles. Very soon, I knew the kids would be at it again. But there was no going back, and no time to rest. We would have to ride it out.

In preparation for this trip and to keep things smooth in the back seat, I had spent nearly $300 on extremely unhealthy snacks. The trunk of the car looked like a gas station convenience store. We had two bags of Doritos, seven varieties of crackers, five sticks of beef jerky, a half-sleeve of Oreos, and a whole galaxy of multi-colored candies, gum, mints, gummies...and also a quart of Gatorade, a quart of lemonade, a case of carbonated water, and box of Twinkies and two dozen individually wrapped string cheese sticks.

All this had been rounded up the night before, in a frenzy of high speed shopping all over town, I picked up everything I could get my hands on. Not that we needed all that for the trip, but once you get locked into a serious snack collection, the tendency is to push it further than you should.

The only thing that really worried me was the box of Twinkies. There is nothing in the world more helpless and irresponsible and depraved than two children in the depths of a backseat Twinkie binge. I knew they'd get into that rotten stuff pretty soon. Probably at the next gas station. They had sampled almost everything else and now–yes it was time to open the box of Twinkies. And then do the next hundred miles in a horrible, slobbering sort of spastic stupor. The only way to manage the kids once they've gotten into the Twinkies is to do up a lot of the string cheese–not all at once, but steadily, just enough to maintain the focus at ninety miles an hour through the desert.

"Man, this is the worst way to travel," said my husband. He leaned over to turn the volume up on the radio, humming along with the tune...