Fathermucker (18 page)

“I have to ask you something?” Vanessa's standing at the door, but lacks the initiative to open it. Her shorts are Richard Simmons–short—again, that should be sexy, but the sight of her beefy, overexposed thighs makes my skin crawl.

“Shoot.”

“I started a new hobby,” and her voice changes, as if the next word is from a dead language, an arcane reference a provincial rube like me couldn't possibly be hip to. “Smoking?”

“Smoking? Like, as in cigarettes?”

“Yes,” and she's surprised that I'm down with such subversive activities. I open the screen door to let her in.

“Okay . . . ”

“And I'm sort of into it now, and I'm wondering if it's okay to take like a smoke break while I'm here? I'll go outside, of course.”

“Of course.” I really need to find another babysitter. “But you're only here for a few hours. You don't think you could, you know, maybe wait until I get back?”

“I've developed a habit,” she says, shrugging. Now that she's standing next to me, I can smell the reek of cheap cigs on her clothes and frizzy dirty-blond hair. Sometimes cigarette smoke can be a pleasant, aphrodisiac scent. Not with her. My stomach lurches, the bad ham drowning in a sea of hot bile and Diet Coke.

“Well,” and I can see I'll have to punt on this afternoon, and post an ad at SUNY for a new babysitter ASAP, “you have to do what you have to do. Just don't do it in front of Maude.”

“Thanks.”

Clomp-clomp-clomp on the basement stairs—footsteps too heavy to belong to a barefoot three-year-old; Maude has returned to the basement and the Noggin programming; I can hear Moose and Zee, the cartoon station hosts who kill time normally reserved for commercials, singing about an aversion to candy corn—and Joe Palladino powers into the living room. “All set,” he says. “Give it a day or three, and those critters are
toast
.”

“Thanks.”

Noticing Vanessa, Joe flashes his most winsome smile, which involves a lot of yellow. “Hiya, honey.”
Honey?
And he wonders why he has to resort to Match.com in a town where the single-male-to-single-female ratio is so staggeringly in his favor. “Who's this?” he asks me.

“Vanessa, Joe Palladino. Our exterminator.”

“Paladin Pest Control.” He fishes around in his shirt pocket, produces a crinkled business card, hands it to her. “Call me if you're ever in need of my services.” He gives the last word an emphasis that's a bit too creepy for my taste, but I'm pretty sure the erotic subtext goes right over Vanessa's big-permed head.

“Thanks,” she says. “I sure will.”

“I'll be seeing you,” he says to me, but his wide arm gesture takes in the babysitter, too.

“Good luck with Felicia,” I tell him. “She sounds like a keeper.”

He's halfway down the front stairs before he realizes he never told me her name. I watch him stop in his tracks, consider backtracking to ask me about it, decide against it, and head back to his ORD.

The appearance of Joe Palladino has apparently sparked something in Vanessa's dim memory. “I was watching a show on cable television?” she says, “with my roommate? I can't remember the name of it. It's about this woman, this mother? And she lives in this great big house somewhere in like California I think? And she like deals in marijuana? Because her husband is dead, and she doesn't have a job? The guy, the big goofy guy from
Saturday Night Live
, you know, Hans and Franz? He's in it, too.”

“
Weeds
.”

Her eyes light up like I've just revealed to her a forgotten detail about her childhood, or disclosed one of her most precious and closely held secrets. “That's it! Have you seen it?”

“Once or twice.”

“Well, the woman on that show? The mother? She looks, I mean, she looks
exactly
like . . . ”—trying to recall the name; failing— “ . . . like Maude's mom. I was watching it the whole time thinking it was actually her.”

Stacy is often mistaken for Mary-Louise Parker, or was, when we lived in the East Village. I understand why strangers, and why buffoons like Vanessa especially, insist upon a resemblance, but I don't really see it. Stacy's prettier, for one thing, her figure less waifish, her nose less
retroussé
, her voice less grating. Stacy is also five years younger, and looks it. If she has a doppelganger Parker, it's Posey, not Mary-Louise. But Mary-Louise Parker is what Stacy always gets, and this never fails to unnerve her, if not outright piss her off, because she
loathes
Mary-Louise Parker. Whatever regrets she has about her short-circuited acting career, she holds Mary-Louise Parker to blame. Whatever vile stew of negative energy that bubbles up inside her when she contemplates opportunities missed, roads not taken, chances lost, she directs at Mary-Louise Parker. Stacy is not by nature a vindictive person—she's
nice
, for lack of a more Kaplanesque word—but when talk turns to Mary-Louise Parker, oh brother, the claws come out.
I can't believe they gave her a Tony for that stinking turd of a performance
, she'll say;
and are we really expected to believe that she can do advanced mathematics?
, even though she never even saw
Proof
.
People think it's acting, but all it is is her trying to wipe that idiotic look off her face
, she'll offer, if anyone mentions the HBO version of
Angels in America
. And forget about
Weeds
. If Stacy were here now, she might bite Vanessa's head off for referencing the W-word. When
Us Weekly
ran the story about Mary-Louise Parker, then seven months pregnant, getting dumped by longtime beau and baby- daddy Billy Crudup, Stacy actually cackled. I mean, she sounded like the witch from
The Wizard of Oz
. It was enough to make me believe in demonic possession. As far as my wife is concerned, the Devil has a face, and it is the (comely) face of Mary-Louise Parker.

“Yeah, she gets that a lot.” I put my keys, my phone, and my wallet into their respective pockets. “Maude's in the basement. I'll be back by three.”

“Bye, Maude,” I shout down the stairs. Am I a shitty father for not going down there again? Screw it. My daughter's had plenty of time, quality and otherwise, with her old man today. “Vanessa's here. Roland and I will be back in a bit.”

Maude raises her voice to express her displeasure at this state of affairs, but before she can get into the meat of her argument, I'm out the door.

O
NE OF THE MOST SALIENT BENEFITS OF MOVING HERE FROM THE
city, where we paid $175 a month to Russian mobsters for the right to park our car in an ill-maintained lot, is that our driveway is enormous—plenty big enough to accommodate a Honda Odyssey, a beat-up pick-up, and Vanessa's gold Escort, and yet she's managed to park in such a way that it takes an extra five minutes for me to back out.

The clock on the dash, which runs a bit fast, reads 12:43. The first time all day I've been alone. I switch from the radio back to CD, and from the
States Mix
to what Stacy calls the
Testosterone Mix
. Jane's Addiction, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Metallica, Rush, Fugazi, Green Day, and my favorite song
du jour
, “Hit 'Em Up” by 2Pac & the Outlawz.

“Hit 'Em Up” must be the angriest song of all time. You know how Kurt Cobain is pissed off about being
alienated
, and Rage Against the Machine and Circle of Fists are pissed off at
the system
, and Metallica is pissed off at Napster? Here's why Tupac Shakur is pissed off: the Notorious B.I.G.
tried to have him killed
. Attempted murder trumps ennui as a reason to get one's dander up. What happened was, Biggie (allegedly) arranged for some goons to blast Tupac's car outside a Vegas nightclub. 'Pac took five bullets, but didn't die. Instead, he recovered . . . and then wrote a song about how he planned to exact his revenge. The rage is so evident in his voice, especially at the end, that he sounds like he's going to blow a gasket. It's awesome. It's also a catchy tune musically. And I really enjoy the irony of blasting it at top volume from a Honda Odyssey with a
MOMS ROCK!
sticker on the bumper.

The minivan rolls down Plutarch Road, and 2Pac rolls in his early grave. Heavy bass comes in, and I hit the gas until I'm doing fifty in a thirty-five—the Odyssey has sneaky torque—and I roll down the windows and bang my head to the beat. I rap along with 'Pac, my voice almost a scream, and it feels so good to let loose this way:

Shit.

I kill the stereo.

Now all I can think of is Chad Donovan, from the “West Side” of the United States, and
very
well-equipped with game, taunting me about fucking my—

I ride the rest of the way to Thornwood in silence, my mind so fraught with activity it's blank, like my old desktop frozen by too many open applications. I get there a few minutes early, so I try Stacy's cell. Straight to voicemail.

Then I call up our landline voicemail and listen to her message from this morning. It's all I can do not to read confession and guilt into her choice of words, her vocal inflections, her uncanny ability to call at the only time I was not able to get to the phone:

And this sends my overtaxed brain back to the world of Seuss, to the bedtime book I read Maude last night:

Friday, 12:58 p.m.

Here's what I'm able to glean from the rest of his Wikipedia page, which I printed out this morning, and which now rests on the steering wheel, and which I'm forcing myself to read to get my mind off the topic of Chad the Cad:

After forming in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, in the late eighties—back when Greenpoint was still Warsaw West and not yet Hipster Central—the band moved to Washington in 1989 and was a major player in the renascent punk scene there. Their debut album,
3301 Waverly Drive
, was released in '91 on Dischord Records. Their sophomore effort,
Saved By Demon Song
, featuring “Crystal Meth, Dance of Death,” a minor hit on college radio, came out to much fanfare in 1993, leading to a deal with I.R.S., which put out the band's commercial magnum opus,
The Worst Crime
, in 1995. “My Heart Is Hydroplaning,” reviled by many fans as a “sell-out” track, enjoyed considerable play on MTV and rose to #34 on the
Billboard
chart in November 1995, and is often used in movies and TV shows (although you never hear it on the radio). The three-piece band broke up in 1997 after the death of drummer Bernie Mash in a drunk-driving accident.

Reid occasionally tours with other disbanded D.C. punkers, most notably the legendary Ian MacKaye, but has not released an album since 2003's mellower solo effort,
The Dark Undone.
He was engaged briefly to actress Rose McGowan, who ditched him for Marilyn Manson. He lives in New Paltz—in one of the mansions in the shadow of the Ridge, is what I've heard—with his swimsuit-model wife and their two children.

There are two more pages—early life, early career—but it's time to fetch Roland.

The Thornwood classroom is cozy—too small, really, for the twelve students and three teachers it contains at any given time. To the right as you enter are the cubbies, crammed into a narrow corridor that fills up like a rush-hour subway platform when the kids arrive or depart. There are three tables—Rectangle, Square, and Circle—where the children take their lunch, and shelves teaming with art supplies, puzzles, toys, and games. In the back corner of the room is a padded mat, the stage for the daily soap opera that is Circle Time. The walls are adorned with various collections of art projects, handprints and snowflakes and the like, and on the back wall, a collage of the students' names (twenty total, counting the part-time kids: Tucker, Tyler, Taylor, Walker, and Parker; Aidan, Ethan, Jaiden, Jayden, and Hayden; Jake, Max, Olivia, Isabella, and Emily; Reeve, Caleb, Joey, Zara, and Roland). The trend in the twenty-first century is to name your kid for an obsolete line of work. A
walker
, for example, was, in a certain part of Great Britain, the same thing as a fuller: a dresser of cloth (cloth had to be trampled upon in cold water, hence
walk
). A
reeve
was a kind of steward; a
tyler
, a maker of tiles. Will preschoolers of the twenty-third century be named Webmaster, Shortstop, Cashier, and Coldcaller? Time will tell.

When I get to the classroom, the kids are all sitting on the floor in a sloppy semicircle around Mrs. Drinkwater, with Roland occupying the lap of Lenore (Roland prefers to be cared for by beautiful people; hence his unvarnished disdain for Vanessa). As the parents begin to make their entrances, chaos reigns, the kids popping out of position, exclaiming “Mommy! Mommy!” or “Daddy! Daddy!” while Mrs. Drinkwater, Lenore, and another aide, Irene, struggle to maintain control.

No sign of Daryl “Duke” Reid or his knockout wife, but Zara is here, tucked away in the Circle Time corner, hiding behind the pleats of Mrs. Drinkwater's long skirt. Zara's long brown hair is cut in crooked bangs over her eyes, revealing an elfish-looking face and small but shiny brown eyes. She's wearing a blue-on-blue Hanna Andersson dress, white leggings, and Dora the Explorer sneakers—not at all what you'd expect of the child of a punk god and a model—and she can't weigh more than forty pounds. She looks a little bit like Pinkalicious, of the eponymous children's book.

Usually Roland mentions his classmates only as part of an indistinguishable group. “I want to see my friends,” he'll say. Or, if I asked him whom he played with that day, he'll reply, “Friends.” “Which friends?” “All of them.” Rarely does he talk about any one individual. The exception is Zara. He seems to genuinely like Zara. Like, romantically. Once he told me, “I like her even more than Cleveland,” which, for him, was quite the confession.

Roland, noticing me, bursts forth from Lenore's clutches and takes a long detour around the room, bouncing off classmates and parents alike, until he barrels into me with such force he almost knocks me over. “Daddy!” he says. He wouldn't be more excited if I'd rescued him from Gilligan's Island.

“Hey, Roland. How's your day?”

“Oh, it's a pretty great day,” he says, without much conviction. If I repeat the question, in fact, there's a good chance he'd say the opposite.

Mrs. Drinkwater, now standing on the chair that she'd been perched upon—she's too matronly to actually sit on the floor—announces that it's time to go to the pumpkin patch. We shouldn't drive caravan-style, she says, because it's not safe. There are printed directions if we don't know where to go. Please be careful exiting the parking lot.

A cascade of overstimulated kids and overwhelmed parents flows out of the undersized classroom, trickles down the undersized hallway, and bursts into the undersized parking lot, with its oversized minivans and SUVs and tripped-out trucks with oversized names like Armada, Avalanche, Sequoia, Galleon, many of which sport the red-blue-and-yellow “puzzle” ribbon proclaiming
AUTISM AWARENESS
. (Are the ad men just fucking with the auto execs with these big, unwieldy names? A Chevy Avalanche? Really? What's next, the GM Asteroid? The Honda Rigel? The Chrysler Obama's Socialist Government?)

In the mass exodus I lose sight of wee Zara Reid, and her famous father is nowhere to be found.

W
HEN WE LIVED IN
N
EW
Y
ORK
,
THE WEATHER WAS AN AFTERTHOUGHT
. If it rained and you were caught without an umbrella, you bought one for three bucks from the Somalian immigrant who materialized out of the subway exhaust with a cardboard box full of knock-off Totes. Spring and fall were interchangeable; winter was sometimes too cold, summer sometimes too hot; but that was the extent of it. One of the selling points of upstate, for us, was
communion with nature
. We wanted to be aware of the changing seasons. To chart the phases of the moon. To live off the land. To breathe in air that wasn't polluted by bus fumes and Ground Zero smoke.

We were, in retrospect, idealizing Mother Nature, that fickle little whore. Here is a summary of the seasons of New Paltz, New York:

Winter

Snow removal becomes a major operational expense. Heavy sleet storms knock down branches, causing frequent power outages—dangerous, as the furnace starter runs on electricity. Kids need coats, hats, scarves, mittens, boots, so getting out of the house becomes more difficult. The flu runs rampant in the preschool.

Spring

The flora and fauna come back to life . . . and so do the bugs, especially the mosquitoes, but also wasps, yellow jackets, horseflies, and gnats, so you can't sit out on the porch, or go down to the swings.

Summer

Kids go in and out of wet bathing suits, the metal carseat fasteners are hot enough to brand cattle, and every time you hit the playground, the kids must be slathered in sunscreen like so many spareribs in BBQ sauce. Bug-life tapers off a bit, but bees and wasps ascend to rule the yard. Thornwood is closed for several weeks, so there's no childcare break.

But the fall! O, but the fall is sublime! The foliage morphs from ubiquitous green to a broader palette, browns and yellows and oranges and reds, and the bugs fall dead, and the sun's rays lose their ability to broil your skin, and it's too chilly to swim, but not chilly enough to stay indoors. Football and basketball begin their seasons, and baseball ends. School starts. The Pickle Festival comes to Rosendale, and the New Paltz Halloween parade is one of the year's highlights. A popular fall activity for tourists and local yokels alike is picking fruit at the orchards. Apples, peaches, nectarines, cherries, blueberries, pumpkins—you ride a tractor out to the trees, fill plastic bags with nature's bounty, and head home never wanting to eat another piece of fruit again as long as you live.

Meadow Hill Farms is in Highland, the next town over, a ten-minute ride from Thornwood. Roland spends his ten minutes flipping through the “car copy” of his
Field Guide
and commanding me to repeat-play “Hotel California,” his current favorite of the tracks on
The States Mix
. The political signs change, I notice, as we cross Black Creek and leave New Paltz.

Don Henley has just sung about the Mercedes-Benz and the pretty, pretty boys for the second time when we pull into the driveway, which, in keeping with local custom, is half a mile long, crooked, unpaved, muddy, and rutted with potholes as wide and deep as medicine balls. A well-tanned white guy with dreadlocks looks up from the sprinkler system he's tinkering with and gives us a little wave as we drive by. I wave back, and thus do not see the pothole, which appears to be the work of a meteorite. The minivan lurches down and then back up, but the tire holds its integrity. Roland grouses from the back seat. “Ayyyyyyahhh,” he whines.

“Sorry,” I tell him, using the diversion to kill the Eagles.

“Daddy,” he says. “Music!”

“We're
here
, Roland.”

“Music!”

“Fine.”

I turn the CD player back on and make a hard left. There is no parking lot
per se
, just a clearing of trampled grass and dirt among the apple trees, where many of the ginormous vehicles from the Thornwood lot have clumsily reassembled. I park my Odyssey next to a Ford Excursion with a
YANKEES SUCK
sticker on the rear panel. (Red Sox fans are some deluded motherfuckers. Yes, the Yankees suck . . . and the earth is flat, Stephen Hawking idiotic, Taylor Swift overweight, Glenn Beck sane.)

I liberate Roland from his carseat and pry the
Field Guide
out of his hands. As I set him on the uneven surface, a burnt-orange and refreshingly bumper-sticker-free Nissan Murano screeches to a stop in the “space” next to my minivan. In the back seat is a brown-haired girl who looks like Pinkalicious. In the driver's seat, black wool hat pulled down to his thick but well-kept eyebrows, is the unmistakable figure of Daryl “Duke” Reid.

I'm seized with panic. Although I have volunteered myself to engage him, Reid's celebrity intimidates me. I don't want to come off like one of the madding crowd of Circle Jerks who emerge when he appears for breakfast at the Bistro (see how they drool). And, I mean, what if he's not in the mood to acknowledge my existence? But then I tell myself that he and I are both here for the same reason: to collect pumpkins that we will bring home, carve, and leave on our front steps to rot. We're both dads. We have common ground. And it's not like I'm asking him for a spare kidney. He might
want
to appear in
Rents
.

But there's more to it than starfuckerphobia. If Joe Palladino, our timepiece of an exterminator, represents the moribund model of masculinity, Daryl “Duke” Reid epitomizes the avant-garde ideal. He is the sort of man I aspire—or, more accurately, aspired—to become (but without so many tattoos). He's successful, he's beloved, he's famous—not Obama famous, but famous enough—he's respected, and above all, he's a dutiful dad who makes a living through his art. By any measure, he's living the dream. How can I not simper in the face of this
we're not worthy
paragon?

I came close. That's the part that's so frustrating. I sold a film script. Not many screenwriters can make that claim. I won money from a game of chance that stymies almost everyone. But that's all I did. Three-of-a-kind on the slot machine, the clang of coins cascading into the plastic tub, a nice haul, but hardly the life-altering jackpot I was hoping for.
You're so talented, Josh
, my mother assures me (she's Jewish; this is part of her job description).
Every day I thank God for your talent
. I don't share her gratitude. Talent is like a lottery ticket: if it doesn't pay out big, it's just a tease. Is it better to be talented and broke, or a rich hack? The young aspiring artist would hold with the former, but anyone over the age of thirty knows better. I should have gone to fucking law school, like my mother wanted.

“Look, Roland,” I tell my son, as I fight off my urge to run for the hills. “It's Zara.”

What I'm hoping will happen here is, Roland will notice Zara, wave at her, and the exchange will give me an excuse to wait for Reid to get out of the car so I can say hello, assuming my nerve has been sufficiently worked up by then. But the boy is having none of it. He's still in architecture mode, his mind far away, puzzling over the intricacies of Shingle and Stick, French Eclectic and Gothic Revival, dormers and cornices and gables.

Head in the clouds
is the Asperger's cliché, but with Roland, a better analogy is that he's underwater, swimming contentedly around the fishbowl of his mind, like one of those large aquatic mammals that only has to come up for air every two hours. He's dimly aware of what's happening above the surface, but does not try to engage, any more than a dolphin would interpose in a conversation between two Sea World employees. Unlike the dolphin, Roland's
capable
of interaction; he just doesn't want to interact most of the time, because in social situations, like a dolphin on dry land, he's out of his element.