Hit Me With Your Best Shot

Early evening in mid-January; it was cold outside, the wind was blowing, and the walk from the parking lot to the automatic-opening doors of Target left the skin on my face pink and covered with icy precipitation.

Inside the store, I remembered that I wasn’t there to shop. I was only there to kill a portion of time in my lonely day. I went to the café (café because I was in Target and is the café in Target really a café?) and bought a cinnamon pretzel and a cup of coffee, then settled at a small table in the corner.

Sitting there, squinting under the fluorescent lights, I watched the shoppers pass by. My pretzel was stale. I started to wonder why so many of my days ended up like this- me, sitting alone in the café of some bookstore or bad retail store eating unsatisfactory pastries. Why I barely spoke to my mother, or why I seemed to have very few friends, and how things got like this in the first place.

I drifted away from my thoughts and back into reality when I noticed an elderly woman sit down with two young boys sit down at the table next to me. The woman looked like she could be close to seventy-years-old, if not older. She was short, standing somewhere near five feet tall. He face was fat and her hair was short greasy, gray, and parted in the center. There were liver spots on her wrinkled pale face and her noise was not unlike a bird’s beak.

I didn’t think anything of them at first but then I started to overhear their conversation. Looking back, it wasn’t really a conversation. The grandmother broke into the song “Hit Me with your Best Shot” only, she didn’t sing the whole song, just that line, “Hit Me with your Best Shot” over and over again, and she wasn’t singing the tune of that song. Just a tuneless line, “Hit Me with your Best Shot” and she held on to the “O” sound for a long time, so it was “Hit Me with your Best Shoooooooooot” without a tune.

Normally, when I am in situations like this, I try not to look and this occurrence was no different. But I had a hard time believing that others weren’t looking up from their tables trying to figure out if the woman was crazy or not.

Her grandsons were a different story though. They couldn’t have been more than five-years-old and were not fazed by their grandmother’s behavior. The boy with lighter hair looked at her and said,
“Grandma, you love that song, don’t you?” And she perked up and said, yes, she did love that song.
While the three of them sat at the table, the boys ate lollipops. They were the lollipops that were colorful and a foot or two long and the candy spiraled down the stick. After her rendition of “Hit Me with your Best Shot,” the grandmother broke into her own version of the pop song from the 1950’s, “Lollipop.” One can only imagine that this was brought on by her grandsons’ snacks. Her version of “Lollipop” was the word, ‘lollipop’ sung a few times, followed by some mumbles in place of lyrics, and ‘lollipop’ yelled a few more times.

When her grandson decided he was finished with his lollipop he headed across the room, while his grandmother watched, and threw out his half eaten lollipop. Upon his return to the table, his grandmother asked him,
“Did you just throw out your lollipop?”
“Yes,” he replied
“Well why on earth,” she trailed off, seemingly outraged by what her grandson had done, and then continued, “but why, don’t you want it, I could wash it off for you,” she said in all seriousness.
“It was too big,” said the boy, his mouth stained green and red from the aforementioned lollipop.
“Do you want me to get it,” she asked again.
“No,” he replied nervously, and beginning to stand up, his grandmother said,
“All you have to do is wash it off…”

Maybe sensing some desperation, the other grandson spoke up,
“Grandma, have you ever had diarrhea?” And his grandmother sat down in her chair and smiled a most bizarre smile,
“Well, yes. I have had diarrhea,” she exclaimed.
“Yeah, me too,” said her grandson. He continued, “You know, I was watching a movie, and it happened someplace far away, in England, I think. And this guy had diarrhea. But in England they have these things, and when you have diarrhea, you sit over it and it shoots water up into your butt and cleans you up! I think it is called a butt cleaner.”
“Really,” asked his grandmother who was visibly amazed.
“Yep” said her grandson.
“Well, I would love one of those,” the woman said excitedly.

At this point in time, I couldn’t take it any more. Instead of joining in and saying,
“Actually, they are called bidets, and I happened to use one the last time I was in Paris. It was interesting if not strangely enjoyable.” But I refrained from it. I buttoned my coat and pulled my collar up to protect my neck from the cold. I walked out the door into the cold evening and recalled all of my problems. Then I remembered that I knew the proper name of the “butt cleaner”, and things could be far worse.