Yawn by Mary Mann

Author:Mary Mann
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

5

DRUNK WITH HAROLD HILL

My grandma’s house was where I learned the phrase “The idle brain is the devil’s playground,” not from my grandma herself but from The Music Man, one of the six VHS tapes she owned, which my sister and I watched over and over to while away the time as the adults talked. Unstructured time like ours was dangerous, warned Harold Hill, the titular Music Man, in the form of a song sung to the concerned parents of River City. From playing pool on a sleepy afternoon it was a slippery slope to drinking and smoking, to gambling on horses and staying up all night with loose women (though Hill never actually says the words “slippery slope,” maybe because The Music Man is set in 1912 and whoever was in charge of historical accuracy flipped through the OED and found that the use of “slippery slope” in phrases such as “he is on the slippery slope toward a life of crime” dates only as far back as 1951, the same year the United States passed the Boggs Act to levy maximum criminal penalties on drug smugglers).

“Trouble!” my sister and I chanted along with Hill, “with a capital T and that rhymes with P and that stands for POOL!”

The “idle brain” line wasn’t nearly as catchy, but it stayed with me enough that it came back to me at a sleepover when I was a preteen and we watched Idle Hands, a movie about a lazy stoner whose hand goes on an independent killing spree. Trouble, with a capital T … Recently the line came back to me yet again, as if activated by a switch, during a very dull day working the polls for a local judgeship election. I’d bought a pick-four lottery ticket at the corner bodega over my lunch break, and the world-weary cashier who slowly punched my numbers into the machine used the time while I waited to warn me that playing the lottery “leads to trouble.”

Everybody else working the polls had bought lottery tickets too; it was all we’d been talking about over the course of a long, slow day spent defending democracy for nobody in a high school cafeteria without cell service. “It’s a nice way to pass the time, having a dream,” one of my fellow workers had said, and I thought about repeating this to the cashier but instead opted for the more prosaic. “That’s okay, thanks. I really only play it when I’m bored.”

“Even worse,” he said, shaking his head with disgust. Then, as if nothing had happened, no judgments made or fates decreed, he tore my ticket off the machine and passed it across the counter with an impassive “Good luck. Next?”

I didn’t take it too hard. I should have known better than to mention I was bored. I’ve met so many people who are infuriated by the very word. They hear it as laziness, indifference, or entitlement—and sometimes it is used to mean those things. “Bored” is a

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