I always thought he had fetal alcohol syndrome or something. His parents were perpetually drunk and sad. They had four slightly normal kids, and then they were cursed with him, and it ruined them.
Bobby Banona was his name. He was sweaty and dirty, and he had a body shaped like a pear that always smelled like feces. He wore thick glasses with stains on them and had a history of using people's towels to wipe his ass. This kid was all about shit and candy. Sugar in, shit out.
On Halloween he would tie a shirt around his neck, smear something black beneath his eyes (I shudder to think what that substance was) and pretend he was a superhero. But he was just Bobby Banona with black eyes and a shirt around his neck. Halloween night, he would start banging on doors early in the evening and double-back through the neighborhood, greedily snatching from any hand holding candy before the inch of glass that sat precariously on the tip of his nose. Whenever people were out of town, he would snap up the whole bowl of taffy they left out with a "One per person, please" sign. Then there would be a rainbow of high fructose corn syrup in his teeth for days.
My mother would only leave her children with the Banonas under the direst of circumstances. They were perfectly nice people, but were always drunk and chain-smoked so that my sister and I would vomit or have migraines when we came home. They would ply us with big chocolate bars we were never allowed to have. I was a hyperactive child and couldn't have sugar or corn syrup, because I came home from my first slumber party and first experience with Lucky Charms so sugar-crazed I broke a lamp. Sometimes my mother would allow me to have raisins. Even then I got hyper.
But at the Banona's house, my sister and I would sit on the ashen carpet of their living room and gorge ourselves. We would watch episodes of "The Munsters" with great hunks of Three Musketeers or Snickers in our cheeks trying to forget how scary the place was. We were like two horrified gerbils.
My sister remembers the "short bus" pulling up out front and Bobby Banona getting off and rushing inside excitedly. That was one of the nice things about Bobby, he was always in a good mood. He would come into the Banona house, hug Mrs. Banona as she took a big drag of her cigarette, and giggle. Mrs. Banona would then ask, "Bobby, how many erasers did you eat today?
Bobby: "Just two mom!"
"That's a good boy. Now go and get yourself a snack." And the snack was almost always something laden with high fructose and Red Number 7.
My sister began to think it was normal to eat erasers. She tried to do it one day, and that's when she discovered what "crazy" was, and became very frightened of Bobby Banona. My mother knew this. When my sister had tantrums, she would pick up the receiver of the phone and say, "I'm going to invite Bobby Banona over to the house if you don't stop screaming." This always worked.
One day, Mr. Banona had a heart attack. He had them all the time, and when this happened there was usually some brother or sister at theBanona house to watch Bobby . But this particular heart attack happened on a day the house was empty. Mrs. Banona took Bobby over to our house and my mother, with the closeted repugnance necessary, was sympathetic and agreed to take care of Bobby.
He came bounding in the house. My sister and I made a mad dash to the living room to pick up our toys and save them from Bobby's soiled embrace. He was distracted by a rainbow in the kitchen long enough for us to do this. When he got the living room, it was spotless, my sister sitting on the toy chest and saying, "We don't have any toys, Bobby. Yep, there are no toys in our house. Someone took them."
He looked pained until he saw our rocking horse. My father had built the horse, and we had named him "Simon." My sister and I protested, but Bobby was eighteen at the time and much stronger than we were. He jumped onto Simon. We were destroyed by the thought of Bobby Banona's crotch rubbing into our precious Simon, but there was nothing we could do. My sister pulled a few Barbies out of the toy chest, and I drew with crayons as Bobby rocked with glee. Every few minutes he would yell, "Whoo hoo!"
Whoo hoo! Whoo hoo! Whoo hoo! Whoo hoo!
A half hour passed, but Bobby never let up. He had probably eaten something sugary right before his mother brought him over. My own mother was in the kitchen defrosting Van DeKamps with a phone clenched between her shoulder and cheek.
"Oh my goodness, Gloria. Mr. Banona had another heart attack. That's the fourth one this summer. Those poor people."
My sister looked up from her Barbies with a pinched face. She sniffed a few times and then asked, "What's that smell?"
My mother has a finely tuned nose, so she was second to smell it. She dropped the phone onto the kitchen floor and came running into the room. She asked the same question, and this is when the smell hit me. Hit me like a sock full of rocks. It was like vomited carrots and rotting corpse. Bobby rocked on.
My mother screamed, "Bobby! What did you do?" He kept rocking, the rotten shit in his underpants smearing through the already unwashed fabric of his jeans and into Simon's pores. His ass became slippery as he rocked and yelled "Whoo hoo!," smearing shit into our precious horse. My sister began to c ry, as she is prone to do. Bobby picked up the pace, I'm not sure why, and his ass literally began to lift up and slap down onto Simon. The shit pants made a "splurt" sound upon impact. The smell of the Vandekamps added to the odor and it wasn't pretty.
My mother grabbed Bobby by the arm and pulled him off the horse. Bobby was strong, but when my mother is faced with a cleaning emergency/opportunity, she is stronger than an ox. She took him out back and sprayed his ass with various cleansers and the garden hose, while my sister and I delicately inspected the carnage left on Simon's back.
Though my mother would eventually make Simon hygienic again, riding him was never the same.
Both Mr. and Mrs. Banona died a few years after this incident. Bobby was placed in a Boys' Home, which he would bust out of every day. He would escape around 10am and then ride his bike, a battered thing with two crowbars wrapped with coat hangers for handlebars, up and down the main streets of town yelling "Whoo hoo!" until the police found and returned him. Sometimes there was shit in his pants, sometimes not.
Apparently Bobby wasn't a case of Fetal Alcohol Syndrome. He was a botched self-abortion, which makes the coat hanger bike rather ironic. Mrs. Banona got drunk one night and decided she wanted to stop at four kids. How fucked up is that?
She definitely paid for it, though. Paid for it with her life. I assume that wherever she is right now, she's enjoying her freedom, flushing a pack of cigs down a toilet in the clouds and yelling, "Whoo hoo!"
Posted by at 10:50 PM