LJ Idol Week 20: Boondoggle
They say there is one in every family. In ours, it’s my uncle.
I didn’t get very many actual real-life glances of the guy growing up. My parents claimed it was because he lived too far away, but I think they just didn’t want my siblings or me getting any ideas. Especially my brothers. They were very prone to bad ideas, and my uncle was one bad idea after another.
Or at least that’s how the rumors went. And there were a lot of rumors. One thing I have to say for my family is they like to gossip. A lot. And for a kid who made a habit of hiding in plain sight, well, let’s just say, I learned stuff that most people would be horrified to know I know.
But this is about my uncle.
For starters, you should know the basics. He’s the sixth of six boys, born when his oldest brother was turning twenty and the youngest at the time had just reached ten. My grandparents named him Benjamin Herbert Maurice Dover, after a whole bunch of obscure relatives, but with a name like that, you could probably accurately say he never really stood a chance. Not when the five that came before him were John, Jason, Jacob, Jerry and James. No one was making fun of those names.
But poor Ben Dover really did have the world against him. He was small and scraggly and left to his own devices for most of his early life. My grandparents were tired - having five kids can do that to you and, according to my uncles, they never really wanted the sixth one anyway but they got him and had to do something with him. Of course, that something was to let the maid and the butler and the other kids take care of him, and that’s never a good idea.
Poor Ben Dover saw the inside of every closet in that very big house he grew up in and probably the inside of every cabinet too. Often for hours at a time. My dad says they were just harmless pranks, but were they?
Maybe that’s why Ben Dover spent his early school years shoving other kids into the coat closet or throwing rocks through school windows or refusing to do any work whatsoever He was in the principal’s office more than he was in class, but my grandparents just figured there was nothing they could do, so they didn’t bother.
My dad took pity on his youngest brother the year Ben Dover turned nine. My dad, then twenty-nine, had his own apartment and a good job and a life hundreds of miles from his parents.
He took in his brother and let him stay in his extra room. I don’t know too many details about that time period - my dad doesn’t like to talk much about his youngest brother - but from what I can ascertain, it was a case of much too little, much too late.
Ben Dover didn’t care about things like school or grades or not being suspended. But he did care about his other talents - setting a trash can on fire in the school bathroom or drinking beer under the bleachers during recess. He also cared about climbing trees and jumping on to roofs and trying to break into cars.
It truly is amazing he didn’t end up in jail more times than he did.
Anyway, that arrangement didn’t last too long. Maybe about a year or two. But by then my dad had met my mother, and poor Ben Dover was sent back to parents who didn’t care about him in a house that wasn’t home to any of his other brothers anymore.
By the time he turned fifteen, Ben Dover had stopped going to school. Sort of. He apparently physically showed up every day, but he sat in the back of the class and napped or blew bubble gum, and some classes he skipped entirely to smoke a cigarette out in the parking lot.
My grandfather once said the whole town knew him as “the bum who wouldn’t amount to anything,” but I’m not sure if that was an exaggeration or not.
From here, it’s a little hard to know exactly what happened next. One day, during what would have been his senior year in high school, Ben Dover just didn’t come home. He left a note on the kitchen table saying “Bye!” to his parents, and that was it.
He moved in with some friends - or at least that’s the general consensus when this story comes up at family reunions - where he could spend his life doing whatever it was he did. Fooling around. Pulling pranks. Getting into trouble.
My grandparents sent him money, my father claimed once when I asked. I suppose it was the decent thing to do since they didn’t do much else for him, and when they died, he - along with the other brothers - had enough money to keep him sufficiently unemployed for life.
Now, if you recall, I didn’t get to really see my uncle much growing up. Maybe two, three times tops, and that was mostly in one-minute increments. He did send me a weed growing kit for Christmas one year, but my parents snatched it out of my hands before I could even properly open it.
But the year I turned eighteen, one of my dad’s other brothers, James, was killed in a car accident. Uncle Ben Dover showed up at the funeral.
He was dressed in a suit, topped off with a beanie and combat boots. I could barely concentrate on the service, I was spending so much time staring at my uncle.
Maybe he saw me staring. Maybe he just thought I was the only one who could recognize greatness. I don’t know. But later that afternoon, it was me he chose to talk to.
“You know, everyone’s wrong about me,” he said. He was on his sixth beer by then, and we’d already covered the basics like who I was and how we were related and how my father was “an okay person,” according to Uncle Ben Dover.
“I believe that,” I said, my eyes lighting up. All I had ever wanted - okay, maybe not all I ever wanted - was to hear the tales from my uncle himself, and now here was my chance.
“I’m super famous,” he told me.
“You are?” That seemed strange. I hadn’t ever heard of him outside my family. Maybe he had an alias?
“Oh yeah,” he said, stretching and tossing his beer can to the side. He gestured at me to hand him another one from the cooler beside me. I obliged. “It started the day I got so wasted, I pissed into a beer bottle, and then forgot I did and drank it.”
He snorted, loudly, and then followed it up with even louder cackles.
I stared at him in disbelief.
He calmed down and looked at me, almost bewildered like, as if he couldn’t believe I wasn’t laughing too. “It was at my gram’s funeral,” he added.
“Ewwww.” I couldn’t help it.
“Not ewww, darling. Famous.”
“That made you famous?”
“Yup.” Uncle Ben Dover stood up. “My friends call me Boon Dog. And my story is so cool, they named a word after me.”
I must have looked unconvinced.
“Look it up,” he told me.
That night I did. It took a while, but then there it was. His story, for all the world to see, typed up in Urban Dictionary: "You're such a Boondoggle, all you like to do is drink urine while staring at the dead corpse of your grandma."
The next day I saw my uncle again, for what would be the last time in my life.
“Did you find it, darling?” he asked me.
“I found it.”
He beamed. “Don’t ever let anyone tell ya you can’t amount to anything, kid. Because you can.”
He tapped his beer can to my water bottle and walked away, his head held high. I watched him go.
“You got it, Uncle Boon Dog,” I said softly, and then I pulled out my phone and opened the link. This I had to show my sisters.
Fiction. Except for the Urban Dictionary definition. That one is very true.
This was written for Week 20 of therealljidol. I hope you enjoyed it! If you would like to read more entries, you can head over here. Voting should come Tuesday night!