Daddy Don't Hit Me - April 3, 2007

By BC Woods

by bc woods"BC! Hide me! She's coming after me!" It was Dude, my best childhood friend. He had entered the room like a frazzled explosion, panting hard enough that a booger stuck on the end of one of his nose hairs was pistoning in and out of his right nostril faster than a hummingbird's heart. Clothed only in a pair of sweat pants, loosely tied sneakers, and a t-shirt so long that it looked like a tunic, he looked like he had to flee a house fire in the middle of the night clad only in what he had on. It was typical Dude.

Before Dude's growth spurt hit him at the end of the eighth grade, his head was tragically out of proportion to the rest of his body, making all of his expressions larger and more epic than those of other children. At that moment, he wore a mask of pure horror. There was no force in the universe that Dude feared more than his mother.

His panting wasn't all from horror. Due to the strange architecture of his house that placed a door between each and every room, whenever he got into trouble Dude would simply enter into a circular loop, running from room to room until his mother's pack a day cigarette habit would no longer allow her to pursue. Occasionally, she was able to hide behind a coat rack and clothesline him, but Dude was starting to become too clever for such tricks.

"Okay, what did you do this time?" It could be anything with Dude. He possessed the same savant talent for destruction and mayhem that some children had for calculating prime numbers. Before the age of fifteen, he twice ruined his living room carpet with chocolate explosions, cracked his skull open four times while trying to break something other than himself, and magnificently lit his sister's room on fire while trying to see what garbage bags looked like when they melted. My father was still furious at him for breaking all the windows in our garage, and I still bore a grudge from the recent semi-accidental murder of several of my pets.

"DUDE!" No matter where he was, or what he was doing, upon hearing his mother shout his name, Dude would do two things: gasp, and then straighten his back as though he was trying to go to the bathroom. His mother had learned to shout his name with a semi-mystic aura. Whenever she screamed it, it seemed like a disembodied Yeti's voice. His shock temporarily paused the wild flapping of his booger.

"BC! We gotta figure out something, she'll kill me."

"What did you break?" I asked, mostly bored.

"You know I didn't mean to!" he replied passionately. Hearing nearby footsteps he lurched toward me, reaching out his handsf and pleading.

I looked at the clock and took him by the hand, trying to calm him down. "Okay, Dude go out and hide in the front yard behind the hedge. My mom will be here in the station wagon in a few minutes. I'll distract them as long as I can. You know the lock in the trunk is broken right?" He nodded, heard his mother climbing up the stairs, and took off running.

Eventually, his mother peeked her head into the room. She scrutinized every nook and cranny, trashed his room like a member of the secret police tossing a dissident's apartment for evidence. She fumed for a moment before she even acknowledged my presence. "BC, have you seen Dude anywhere?" her voice was always sweet when she spoke to me.

I turned away from the television, shook my head, and hoped that she wouldn't press the issue any further. Dude was such an odd little boy; it really wasn't his fault he got in so much trouble. She left the room, cursing under her breath.

His name wasn't "Dude" of course. A debilitating speech impediment that made him pronounce Kristopher Braden as "Kwistophuh Bway-dun," coupled with the fact that we were living in the early 90's, and that Saved by the Bell was the most popular show on television, caused everyone including himself, to call him "Dude." The name had stuck to him so long ago, that everyone had almost forgotten it wasn't his true name. In fact, only after undergoing extensive speech therapy was he even made aware that his name was, in fact, Kristopher. He was ten years old before he stopped writing "Dude Braden" on his homework assignments.

For half an hour, his mother worked herself into a lather, tossing every room in the house in search of him. Of course her fury would last for hours after she finally found him, when she realized that she had destroyed the entire house in search of him. "Oh, I'll find you! DUDE! You have to eat sometime! Do you hear me? DUDE! Stop hiding!"

When my mother finally pulled up it was a surprising relief. While Dude's mother never yelled at me, no one really likes to be around a screaming adult. She came into the house. She and Dude's mother commiserated on how hard it was to raise their respective children, which I could count on them to do for ten minutes during any run-in with one another. Leaving them to this conversation, I went outside and found Dude hiding behind the hedge where I had sent him.

"I told you to go to the Station Wagon."

"What am I supposed to do there?"

"Hide yourself under my dad's cover-alls, of course."

"What for?"

"Think about it: your mother isn't at my house. When my mom stops to drop me off before going back to work, you can just jump out of the back and we can play Power Rangers all day."

"What about Gay-wee? How will I get back?" Sometimes I thought it was pretty damned awful for Dude that everyone in my family had an "R" in their name.

"He'll be asleep. He'll take you home when he wakes up, and by that time your mother will be so worried that she'll forget to be mad. Come on."

Opening the trunk of the station wagon was easy, due to the fact that Dude had broken the lock to it some months prior. After throwing some cover-alls over him, I jumped into the passenger side seat, buckled my seatbelt and waited. At this point in my life, I had become perfectly comfortable pulling off these kinds of scams.

"BC, where is your mom?" Dude stirred under a pile of my father's dirty cover-alls.

"Shush! Wait till we're at my house."

My mother finally exited the house, assured Jeanie that she would find Dude again, and made her farewells.

"Do you know that Dude broke his mother's favorite plate?" she asked, buckling her seat belt.

"No, Mom."

"Thank God he isn't coming over today. That boy is pure hell-spawn." She started the car, pulled out of the driveway and began the ten minute drive home.

I smiled at the trunk, and whispered: "I know, Mom."

Several hours later, after Dude had climbed out of the trunk and had been playing Power Rangers with me for several hours, Jeanie finally got word of what had happened to her son.

I had assumed she would be so happy when she finally found him that she would forget to be angry. However, when I heard her scream "DUDE!" from halfway down the block, I realized I had been horribly, awfully wrong.

AUTHOR'S NOTE: In exchange for letting me write this piece about him, and for giving me his input, Dude has requested that I let everyone know he gets laid all of the time now.