The mall: widely known to be the nucleus of the bacteria that will one day erode the fabric of this otherwise stable Union. Yet that's exactly where I found myself that August day; with each passing step I raged against an immortal machine that tempted me with body sprays scented with papaya and walnuts, four unique Gap stores and kiosks which sell baby-tee's that read 'juicy' in sparkly pink glitter.
I waded my way through this capitalistic cesspool of cosmic chaos. Me. A man of nobility, restraint, of the highest ethical and moral purpose, a missionary crusading into the heart of darkness for the most sanctified of reasons: A child's birthday party. But before I detail my descent into perversity, it is important to first make clear one all-consuming, over-reaching absolute: Children are inherently evil. This is a known fact to anyone who has ever spent any time with, or as, a child. Quite simply, they lack the basic human characteristics that are required for a person to be considered decent under any set of unbiased calculations. They are devoid of culpability, conscience and consideration for others that don't in some way determine a direct pending need or desire for themselves. They are soulless anarchists. We tolerate them because there exists the potential that, after they cease to be children, perhaps they won't grow up to be the vile, contemptible assholes that they are as seedlings; but individuals with thoughts, feelings and considerations that go beyond the latest Disney concoction, the newest Madden and whether they should place that video, in which they and eight of their friends gang beat another child, on Youtube or Myspace.
And you may ask why I, who sees the truth of these demonic beasts, would willingly go to a den of iniquity whose very existence encourages their gathering? Because, you must pacify the pre-pubescent perverts in the pre-preparation that they don't perform patricidal plunder you in your sleep. Also — I have a niece. Amber. Whom I adore. Who also happened to be the child whose birthday party was in question.
There is a self-delusion that exists when you love someone. You think they are better than they are, that their potential is greater than it is, that despite how many times they have let you down, broken your spirit and left you on the side of the road bound, gagged and sodomized, that they will come through for you in the end. You are a fool. I was a fool. As much as I understood that Amber was this vile thing only capable of thinking in her own self-interests, that if it were between me and Nick Cannon, I would be dust scattered in the wind, I honestly felt that she would not choose a place to have a party, with the knowledge that her esteemed Uncle Poe would be present, that would be so intensely damning to anyone who already been through puberty. I thought this; I really did, as I strolled into a place known as Build-A-Bear.
The moment I walked into Build-A-Bear I could tell it was more than a store — it was a commune created to control and compromise the callow. Build-A-Bear was a cult. I watched as the children danced in a circle; perdition burned in their eyes, the blood of the initiated splattered on their faces, as they held up a totem to their new master. They were surrounded by faux-taxidermy animals that lined the walls like idols to fallen gods. Their plastic eyes scanning your soul for the slightest imperfection, the most nuanced weakness, so they may strike out and convert you to their bidding. This is what the inside of L. Ron Hubbard's brain must've looked like.
Amber stomped by me, a look of joy on her face so pure that it should be reserved only for infants and invalids. Behind her were roughly a dozen other girls in similar euphoria induced stupors, each of them singing an incantation of destruction.
Here a bear
There a bear
Everywhere a bear bear.
You're gonna have some fun.
A teenage girl, an employee for Build-a-Bear, and therefore an usher in this cultural apocalypse, led me toward my mother and two sisters. Their eyes showed intelligence and self-awareness; I was grateful for the company.
"What the hell is this?" I asked as any decent human being would. They didn't answer, so invested in the prattling of children overcome by this galactic imperial amalgamation of marketing and cutesiness. I hoped I wasn't wrong in my earlier assessment; that they weren't in the early onset stages of Mass-Build-A-Bearia. Their eyes and smiles lit up as Amber howled in the air, raising her savior high over her head, and dancing like there were no tomorrow. Then went back to her ritualized chant.
Choose me
Stuff me
Stitch me up
Clearly, the children's undeveloped minds were already reprogrammed by this deluge of cuddly, catastrophic mirth: these diabolical familiars in the guise of fuzzy stuffed animals that each of them carried like nervous mothers holding their newborns for the first time. I'm positive Amber and her coven growled at me in between their doctrinal recitation; bearing teeth covered in foamy saliva. It was as if they could smell the dissent on me. They knew that I would not be ensorcelled by the witchcraft of the Bear.
Love me
Dress me
Fill me will love
You'll never be alone
My mother's boyfriend marched around the children. On his best of days he was a vacant entity, but I'd hoped that if any day, today, he would be my source for inspiration, my reason not to succumb to the tide that was washing over my head, but even he was chanting the same gospel as the children. Blaspheming his traditional Christian views by snapping picture after picture of the heretical machinations being performed, in public, under the guise of fun. He roared great and loud and I knew then that it was true — The Bears could congress with adults as well.
I looked over to my family, against every piece of evidence that was presented to me up until that point, I hoped to see a similar look of anger, vitriol and fear for the salvation of existence itself, but no. Instead, I saw smiles.
"Am I the only one paying attention to what's going on here? This is really quite disgusting, I hope they aren't giving out kool-aid." I said. Each of them looked at me in that same way that you look at the crazy man on the street who screams about black helicopters and nanomachines that are injected into the water supply. "This is a cult!"
"You're being unreasonable," I was told.
Unreasonable? Me?
I was the last strain of righteousness in a world Slouching Toward Bethlehem. I was Martin Luther. I was Thomas Paine. I looked at each member of my family and inspected them closely. Their pupils weren't dilated, no excess drool was frothing from their mouths, they were, more or less, normal. But how could any adult, regardless of the reason, who was willingly spending time in a store that shoved cotton in the asses of bags of synthetic fur, be considered normal? Was spending hundreds of dollars on said synthetic cotton bags what passed for normal in this dimension? Wasn't that the very opposite of normal? No, they were infected by the Bear too. I was the only one left and made my independence known.
They looked at me in the way they often looked at me; when they can't possibly see how wrong they are being, but I can, and they know it, but lack the verbal capacity to put it into words. Though I, of course, had no such qualms. It was normal; I was used to it. But today, for some odd reason, it infuriated me.
"Don't you see? These beasts. These bears. They're demons sent to inconspicuously infiltrate our homes and kill us in our sleep and they're using the children, the dim-witted sycophants that they are, as sleeper drones and co-conspirators!" I said, calmly, as I recall.
There was a writer, I don't remember whom, who said that "in a sane world madness is the only freedom" Well, you'd think I was Jean-Jacque Rousseau judging by how they looked at me. But how could I be mad? The children were currently trying to figure out the best name for their new, "pet." Why? So the Bear facilitators could give them a birth certificate. A legal document. For a goddamned stuffed animal? And I'm the mad one?
Ayo, Amber's mother, turned to me and said, with the reproach and agitation you reserve for a toddler who has been naughty, "If you were going to act like this why did you even come?"
Why did I come? Amber is my niece. Yes, she's self-absorbed, self-obsessed, cries over everything, and I do mean EVERYTHING, she once literally cried herself to sleep at IHOP over not getting a packet of grape jam. She's helpless, and weak, and in a lot of ways she is everything my mother and sisters taught me to hate about women. But still, she's my niece and I've been to every one of her silly birthday parties before this: churches, amusement parks, Chuck E Cheese and the year before, oh dear God the year before, there was an actual tea party. A tea party. With a tea mistress and doilies and finger sandwiches and ridiculous decorations that I helped set up! Did I lunge myself at the poor, unfortunate soul in the giant rat suit; my hands and teeth clutching at his synthetic cotton? Did I take flame thrower and machete to the frilly doilies that blotched out my site, setting them a blaze as I laughed and laughed and poured a tea kettle upside down, on top of my head, so my face and clothes were covered in boiling water? No! I smiled and handed out presents and quietly wished I was dead. And now she has the nerve to ask me why I bothered coming? This is who I am. If she doesn't like it, why does she ask me to come? Fuck her.
I was saved from having to answer that, the most ridiculous of questions, by Amber, who waived something in our direction. Ayo, like the good little marionette every decent parent becomes when they have children, went running after her master. I stormed out of the temple of hell. My mind raced. What was I doing here? A grown man with still some semblance of self-respect shouldn't be here. The savage fiends diddling over their grotesque little Monchichi's was one thing, my family willingly vanquishing any sense of moral propriety they had in order to keep the little bastards happy was another, but I was a different story entirely. I was better than that. I didn't belong here. But because I loved this little girl I'd found myself at the 9th circle of Hell, in the Satan's mouth, frozen and burning all at the same time.
Amber, the cause of all of this, called me over and I, like the broken damned that I was, obeyed. She started talking about whatever nonsense 'tween girls talk about. She held up the stuffed cat and told me her name, which I don't remember, because it's a stuffed animal and the only thing sillier than naming a stuffed animal is remembering the name of someone else's stuffed animal; but it wouldn't surprise me if the cat's name was Pyewacket.
Amber smiled, her transparent joy was sickening to behold. She then held up an outfit which I also don't remember, see above.
"Uncle Poe," she squeaked. "Can you buy this for me?" I looked at the pink, frilly thing in her hand and swallowed back a ball of bile.
"What is it?" I asked.
"A dress," she squeaked out.
"Why does your thing need a dress?"
"In case we go out," she said. I laughed, you had to admire the gall of the little girl. I looked at my niece for a moment, and thought of how after she cried herself to sleep over the grape jelly, five minutes later she was laughing and acting as if she hadn't just embarrassed herself and her family in a public restaurant. Nothing seemed to stick to her, like life was incapable of getting to her. I remembered when I was like that, and how long ago that seemed. So for a moment, I considered the request. Honestly. But then I looked at her again: that stupid, arrogant, idealistic look of joy plastered on her face and the price tag that read $20 for the dress for a stuffed animal. Then I thought of those other girls inside Build-A-Bear; their minds already warped forever by that sanctuary of commercialized comfort, their souls and freedom forfeit forever. And I knew what I had to do.
I asked her if I could hold the cat, maybe even using the cat's name. I can't recall. Then curiously, she hesitated. While I don't know for sure, I like to think she sensed that I meant harm to that ridiculous thing in her arms. Regardless, possibly because my niece really was that dumb, or, despite her instincts, she trusted her Uncle Poe, and maybe because those two things, in this instance, were one in the same, she handed me the stuffed cat. I held it up like I was somehow appraising the craftsmanship of this fine work of art. I looked down at my niece; her big brown eyes were wider than usual, exposed somehow, her little hands reached out, anxious to have her birthday present back. I smiled. Then I threw down the cat and stomped on its head.
I'd be lying if I told you that at the moment I felt the fluffy flesh of the cat sink against my foot I didn't feel good. That something right had just happened in the world and I was the cause of it. When I lifted up my foot from the cottony skull of the beast and looked at my niece, I was amazed: The girl, who cries about everything, didn't shed a tear. Her cheeks puffed out like a balloon filled with helium, the same way it always does when she's angry, but she did not cry. Amber just looked down at her cat; the frayed white fur was browned now, a deep smudge desecrated it in a way that no manner of cleaning could fix. Amber picked her cat up, tried her best to brush away the pebbles of dirt, and without looking back at me, lurched away.
"Sorry!" I yelled back after her. But she paid me no mind. For a few moments after I watched her. She went back to her cult, to her friends, to her family and while she played and laughed and sang those ridiculous Build-A-Bear songs, she did so without that look of joy. That look of joy that I so loathed that I felt the need to take away, even if it was for her own good. And in doing so, maybe, just maybe, I like to think, made her a better person. Even as I made myself a worse one.
Poe Johnson, if that is his real name, did his undergrad at University of the Arts in Philadelphia, where he currently lives. At the moment, he's a full-time MFA student at Rosemont College. Over the last year, he's spent more time being investigated by the government for various positions than actually working. This is just how he likes it.