Monster

The last couple times I took my boys to the playground, there was this guy there. He looked harmless, nice even, a baseball cap, jeans, T-shirt. He could have been my age, maybe ten years older or ten years younger—his long, untended beard made it hard to guess. While my boys hit the slides, the swings, and the monkey bars, I’d sit, let them do their thing, on hand in case they fell or decided to wander off. The guy with the long beard, though, he was all in, rotating kids on the little merry-go-round, refereeing games of tag, and playing this game he called “Monster” where he pretended to be a zombie and stalked the kids, who laughed and scattered from his plodding with crazed bliss. He was Dad of the Year, I had to admit, at least until the third time we saw him, the third day in a row, the time he arrived on his bike, executed his all-star routine, then told everyone good-bye and rode off. Mr. Dad of the Year, older-or-younger disheveled me, the king of the playground, didn’t have any kids.

My wife didn’t think this was strange. Charlene freelanced, writing articles and editing newsletters out of our house. She hadn’t been near a slide since our oldest boy, now eight, exited infancy. Playgrounds were my groove, what I did with the boys so she could have an hour or two of quiet. I’m not saying my wife’s unperceptive or short-sighted, but I presented this information, she processed it, and her answer was, “Maybe you should play with the boys more, leave your phone in the car?” I don’t know where this was coming from, if Charlene had some hidden camera at the playground, but ouch. It wasn’t the jab at me that hurt so much as she couldn’t see how completely strange it was, a grown man playing with kids at a playground when he didn’t have any of his own. For a reasonable comparison, I brought up Chuck E. Cheese, where you absolutely cannot enter unless you have a kid—their way of keeping out the snatchers and pedophiles. Charlene pointed out that Chuck E. Cheese is a private business and the park is public, that this guy had every legal right to be there. “Maybe his kid died or ran away or something, and this is how he heals,” Charlene said. “Poor guy is probably in pain.”

~

I took the boys to a different park the next day. This one was the other side of town, a playground with a bigger climbing wall, two tornado slides instead of one, an admittedly better attraction serving a higher tax bracket. The boys’ eyes almost outgrew their heads, the equipment that much better—they both yelled, “Yay!” as they sprinted into the bowels of recycled milk jugs. Before I sat down, I did a walk-around to make sure there were no hidden hazards, though I doubted this class of people would tolerate such laziness. I’d just about finished my lap when I happened upon this mass, squatting next to a squiggly ladder, counting out loud and covering his eyes. He raised his voice, emphasized, “Twenty!” and sprang upward: It was the guy. A dozen toddlers and tweens had vanished, hiding from this weirdo, who found them all, one by one, pointing and hollering, “Gotcha!” Each child erupted from hiding, feigning disappointment, though it was clear they liked being found, enjoying the fundamental pleasures of the game. By the time the man was counting again, my own boys were scrambling, desperate to find cover. My little one ran right past me, exasperated with nervous joy, and when I grabbed him and told him it was impolite to join a game to which you were not invited, he pulled free, instructing me to let go because I was going to get him caught. I took a step back, heeding that warning as if it were an order, and watched in near-terror as this freak of a non-parent stalked my children. He found one inside a connector tube and the other beneath a ramp, pointing to them and shouting his signature “Gotcha!” as they tittered like idiots.