Somebody in the comments reminded me about the Flour Baby Story. You ask about the Flour Baby, you get the Flour Baby. I’ve been meaning to take another look at this one anyway… and, whaddya know?, I don’t like the way I wrote nine years ago. But that doesn’t mean you won’t!

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Dial-An-Anecdote
November 20, 1999

When I was a senior in high school, I was the chauffeur in a one-car carpool. I drove a 1989 Dodge Colt, a wheeled red jelly bean most notable for the half-dozen occasions on which friends of mine– and not many of them, mind you– lifted it up and moved it, sometimes without my knowledge, sometimes at my request. (Ever parallel park so tightly that you just can’t get out on your own?) Into this slight Tupperware roller skate three or four younger fellows from my neighborhood would cram for the daily 40-mile round trip, paying me a king’s ransom in gas money they got from their moms at the end of every week. Usually, it was a very jovial ride home, especially after Knuckles, a vain primping used Kleenex of a kid, got his own set of wheels. Or maybe he was the manager of the wrestling team or a football tackling dummy or something. I forget. The important thing was that he wasn’t in my car anymore.

Unfortunately, this created a vacancy in the back seat which was occasionally filled by Drew. Drew, though he didn’t ride with us often, was easily fifteen times more grating than Knuckles. He made Knuckles look like a shrinking violet. Chris Farley was Woody Allen compared to Drew. Even now, when I type his name, I’m rewarded with a stabbing pain in the temples.

I’d known Drew in grade school, when he was in my little sister’s class, and he’d never gotten on my radar as anything but a nice kid. As far as I can tell, his chief problem in high school was that he was a freshman in a car full of juniors driven by a senior. We were upperclassmen, and yet we didn’t pummel him (initially). He was a feral animal; our kindness excited and confused him. A stiff breeze excited and confused him.

It was like transporting a chihuahua raised entirely on Pixie Sticks and Dexatrim. Drew’s methods of fitting in and joking around with his carmates included calling them names, elbowing ribcages, taking tone-deaf jibes at anything anyone expressed an opinion about, yelling directly into people’s ears at top volume as a “joke,” and most venally, lunging into the front seat to change my radio stations. There are former acquaintances of mine who walk this earth without hands just for trying that from the front seat, and none of them ever knocked my car into neutral on the highway.

Yes, that happened. And not once.

The thing Drew found hilarious, more than anything on earth?: our anger. Oh, it was his sustaining tonic.

Frankly, it was a long enough commute without him. That car felt like Das Boot even when everyone in it understood personal space.

One day, after a long and joyous respite, Drew joined Brian, Matt and I once again with a passenger. He threw his bookbag in my trunk/hatch/shoebox and piled into the backseat with a bag of flour. Naturally, the flour was wearing a diaper. It had a face. It was smiling at me in the rearview mirror. Its skull said “STAN.”

There was a pause.

“Hey there, Drew,” I said. Just knowing that he was getting in my car had already made me preemptively tired, but I rallied my patience as best I could. “Aren’t you going to introduce us? Who’s this Stan, the happy incontinent flour bag?”

“This is Matt Bell’s flour baby.”

The pause was longer this time.

“I see.”

Satisfied with the amount of information he’d provided, Drew leaned between the seats and started scanning the dial for some Paula Abdul.

After feeling some swats with real sincerity and passion behind them, Drew sat back down and explained that one of the freshman theology teachers had decided to teach the 14 year olds to keep an eye on their sperm by showing them what a pain in the arse it is to take care of a baby. Instead of the traditional fragile baby surrogate, an egg, the teacher had settled on personalized bags of flour. (A superior choice, if you ask me; like babies, flour can survive the occasional accidental dropping. Plus: no morbid baby-frying parties at the end of the project.) Stan the Flour Bag’s father was a football player, and since being caught stuffing your baby in a locker resulted in some extremely severe penalty that the teacher couldn’t have possibly carried out, possibly involving a firing squad, Stan’s dad needed a babysitter during practice. The father, having the mental capacity of a football player, decided that Drew would be an excellent nanny.

The ride home was typically unbearable. Hurricane Nitwit bounced around the back seat, jabbering and yapping and thrashing like an epileptic. About five miles in, his jostling became too much and Brian shoved him. Lapping up the attention, Drew elbowed him. We were headed for Cuban Missile Crisis territory; I could see in the mirror that Brian and Matt were going red in the face. I was looking back to shout, “Stop touching him! Stay on your side of the car!” like a soccer mom when suddenly everybody got very still.

“Oh, s***,” said Matt, without the luxury of asterisks.

“What?” I said. “What ’s***’?”

“Jim?” said Drew meekly. “Jim? Stan… Stan is bleeding.”

I made a noise like a chicken laying an egg and flailed my arm behind my head in a vain effort to grab Drew’s spiked hair and scalp him with my bare hands. In crisis mode, Matt and Brian had become a flour baby EMT unit, applying pressure to the wound and trying to hold the growing tear together as spilling flour turned my car into a giant hourglass.

“Hold it… dammit, hold still!”

“You’re making it worse! You’re making it worse!!”

“Do you have any Scotch tape?!”

“Oh yeah, I always have Scotch tape in my car! It’s in the glove box, underneath the glitter glue and safety scissors, you little nutsack!”

“Well, I don’t know!”

“Ack! What the hell are you doing to my backseat? It looks like a drug deal gone bad! I hope you know your way home from here, genius, because so help me God–!”

Drew made a last desperate effort to quell the flour, and with a mighty POOF my car looked like a steam room, full of puffy white clouds and hacking coughs. My passengers looked like the Ghostbusters after their climactic battle with the marshmallow man. If Brian had not taken action at that exact moment, it would have been Drew, not Stan, who needed to be contained in a bag. At that moment, however, the juniors had an epiphany.

Matt and Brian took one look at one another as the human pastries they now were, simultaneously said “oh, to hell with this,” and grabbed Stan by the face while I rolled down the window.

Several more ounces of Stan ended up in our laps during the ensuing struggle, as Drew, meek for the first time in a year, pitifully cried out, “He’s a football player! He’s a football player!” Stan dangled out the window like an action hero for a minute, spewing a white trail that made it look like the poor man’s James Bond smoke screen. A fellow motorist honked in appreciation from behind us.

And then it was over. Stan hit the shoulder of the highway like a dunked basketball and burst in one last apocalyptic POOF, leaving us to somberly ponder what we had just done as we caught our breath between the hysterical gales of laughter. Except for Drew, who sat in horrified silence trying desperately to preserve a mental picture of Stan until he could get to the grocery store for a bag of flour. I was told later that neither the father nor the theology teacher ever noticed. (Even if the teacher had noticed, the football player earnestly believed that he was doing a good job, since Drew wisely never told him what happened. Plausible deniability.) Every day for the rest of the year, we would slow down on the way home and look over at Stan’s decaying corpse. One day, a road crew cleaned him off the highway. We learned a lot about ourselves that year.

Why am I thinking about this story?

Just now, my friend Joe called as I watched TV. My spirits leapt; my other plans having mysteriously vanished, I was eager to do something.

“What are you doing right now?” he asked.

“Nothing!” I said. “Nothing at all! What’s the plan?”

“We’re on our way to a play. Could you tell my girlfriend the flour baby story?”

So I did. They thanked me. They hung up. That was all they’d wanted. They called me up to tell the story, and that was pretty much it. I never did end up going anywhere.

I think I should start charging.