u s e y o u r h a n d s

Doesn’t everyone, from time to time, have the urge to drive their car off a cliff? Even if you’re not suicidal, don’t you just want to take the plunge, Nestea-style, into the ground, or the ocean? Wonder what your hands would do during the fall. Hold the wheel? Flail?

When it hit, Sal felt like those iPod commercials where the posters dance. Or maybe that crazy Bjork video with spontaneously choreographed dances. Anyway, just after he turned the lock that morning, before he hit the sidewalk, the earworm struck.

Sometimes it’s a song, sometimes just a phrase. Yesterday, it was “made in the U.S.A.” But today, it was that “jump motherfucker jump motherfucker jump” song. Sal tried to keep his lips from moving, but the line was infectious. He muttered it under his breath as he stolled to the train stop. His footsteps fell in time to the beat. “jump motherfucker jump motherfucker jump.”

He even kept the beat on the train, tapping his fingers against the support pole. Sal’s lips kept moving and he increased his volume ever-so-slightly. By the third stop, Sal’s words were audible to those immediately around him. And then there was the bouncing.

After the fifth stop, Sal was jumping, singing the words so half his train car could hear. They stared. And then the girl next to him caught the worm. She knew the song and started jumping, too. Then another man, two more women. A girl halfway down the car put down her RedEye and thought it might be one of those flash mob things she’d heard about.

More and more passengers began chanting “jump motherfucker jump motherfucker jump.” Maybe some couldn’t really understand the words, just regurgitating the sounds of the syllables, but they all yelled and jumped hard. The train rollicked.

Sal reached his stop and got out. Gradually, everyone calmed the fuck down.

Wendy and I have a piece about the American Girl store on Gapers. Check it.