The studio apartment was tiny, compressed, like the life my stepdad, Jim, was trying to hold together after the divorce. Just enough room for a couch, a TV from Uncle Francis, and a couple of patio chairs. Jim worked the graveyard shift at the post office, and he carried the aura of a man you just didn’t cross. Discipline was an unspoken agreement in that house. But for all his hard edges, he was a good man, trying to keep three boys alive while getting his soul drained by an exhausting job.
It was a Saturday night. The only light was the flickering glow of the TV. Saturday Night Live was on—Belushi and Aykroyd, back when they were gods, going full throttle. My little brother Nicky and I were on the floor, mesmerized. The old man was in the next room, trying to bank a few hours of sleep before heading out to the grind. We kept the volume low, a quiet conspiracy to stretch the night a little longer.
And then, in a moment of pure, vacant mindlessness, my hand drifted to my nose.
Before I knew what was happening, I’d dislodged a masterpiece. One of those deep, hardened, prehistoric boogers that had probably been calcifying in my skull since the Reagan administration. It was massive. Sticky in some places, dry and crumbly in others.
And, like the absolute degenerate I was, I popped it into my mouth.
The second it hit my tongue, regret slammed into me like a freight train. I snapped back to reality, disgusted with myself. I had to get rid of the evidence, and fast. That’s when I glanced over at Nicky. He was sitting there in a trance, mouth slightly open like some slack-jawed yokel watching the spaceships land.
A stupid, perfect idea formed in my head.
I rolled the booger between my fingers until it dried out a bit, took careful aim, and with a single, fluid motion, I flicked it.
I watched, a silent god, as it sailed through the dimly lit air like a tiny, disgusting meteor and landed, square and true, on his lower lip. He didn’t notice. For a few glorious, perfect seconds, it just sat there, clinging to him like a war medal.
And then, in slow-motion horror, his tongue flicked out. A delicate, exploratory lick. He registered that something was there. And before his brain could stop it, he pulled it in. And chewed.
Time stopped. I waited for the moment of realization.
And then it hit him.
His entire face twisted. His eyes went wide with a sheer, unfiltered terror. And he screamed. It wasn’t a normal scream. It was the high-pitched, bloodcurdling wail of a child who has just discovered that monsters are real, and one of them is his own goddamn brother.
He lunged at me, all fists and flailing limbs, tears streaming down his face as he gagged and sobbed and threw wild, rage-fueled punches at my chest. I was laughing so hard I couldn’t breathe. I was dying, right there on the floor.
That’s when the bedroom door slammed open.
There stood my father, a postal service werewolf, half-awake and fully pissed-off, his hair sticking straight up. His eyes darted between the two of us—the sobbing, furious little brother and the older one doubled over in a fit of uncontrollable laughter—and he didn’t need a single goddamn explanation.
He moved with the speed of exhausted justice. SMACK. An open-handed slap landed on my arm. SMACK. Another one landed on my brother’s. Just like that, order was restored.
“Turn off the damn TV and go to bed!” he barked, before stomping back into his room and slamming the door.
We sat there in the dark, the TV screen fizzling out, both of us fuming for completely different reasons. My little brother kept wiping his mouth, over and over, as if he could scrub the memory away. I tried—I really tried—to stop laughing. But every time I pictured the look on his face, I nearly lost it all over again.
For days, he wouldn’t talk to me. He’d watch me like I was a predator. I couldn’t even look at him without smirking. Years later, he’d bring it up, shake his head, call me a sick bastard, and pretend it wasn’t kind of funny. But he knew. He knew it was legendary.
My dad never mentioned it again. But looking back, I realize his anger that night wasn’t just about being woken up. It was about control. His life was a mess. A divorce, a shitty job, three boys he had to raise on his own. He was trying, really trying, to keep the chaos from swallowing everything whole.
And yet, in that tiny, overcrowded apartment, the chaos always won.
But here’s the thing: as much as I gave my little brother hell that night, as much as my dad probably wanted to strangle us both—we were laughing. Even in the mess, even in the exhaustion, even in the daily struggle of a broken family trying to figure out what the hell to do next…
We still found time to be stupid. To be kids.
Even if it came at someone else’s expense.
Author’s Note:
My thoughts are this: that story isn’t about a booger. A booger is just the delivery system for the punchline. The story is about the kind of laughter you can only find when you’re living in a shithole.
Think about it. There’s no money, no hope, you’re living three-deep in a cramped apartment with a father who’s half-dead from exhaustion. Life, by all accounts, is a goddamn tragedy. And right in the middle of that tragedy, you create this perfect, stupid, grotesque little moment of pure comedy. Your brother’s scream of absolute horror… and your uncontrollable laughter.
That laughter isn’t just you being an asshole kid, though you were. That’s the sound of survival. It’s the sound of a spirit that hasn’t been completely crushed by the weight of it all. It’s finding a flower growing on a pile of shit and laughing at the sheer, beautiful absurdity of it.
And your stepdad’s part in it is perfect. He doesn’t lecture, he doesn’t reason. He just storms out like a bear woken from hibernation, delivers two swift, economical slaps to restore order, and goes back to his cave. It’s the reaction of a man so far beyond tired that justice has to be efficient. He wasn’t being a tyrant; he was just a man trying to get enough sleep to go back to the post office and pay for the roof over your goddamn heads.
So yeah, my thoughts are this: that story is a portrait of a real family. Not the bullshit “Leave It to Beaver” kind they sell you on TV. The real kind. It’s ugly, it’s broke, it’s dysfunctional, it’s full of petty cruelties.
But it’s also alive. There’s laughter in that shitty little apartment, even if it’s at your brother’s expense. And in a life like yours, that kind of laughter is more precious than gold. It’s proof you were still kids, not just casualties of a war you didn’t start.
