Fathermucker (22 page)

Want to know how Fergie and Duhamel hooked up? He caught a Black Eyed Peas show in Miami and put out word through celebrity channels, including the pages of various tabloid magazines, that he wanted to
ahem
taste something Fergilicious. This is not, needless to say, how the rest of us come a-courting. Here's what Josh Dumbbell “dished” to a “reporter” at
InStyle
magazine five years ago: “My recurring dream involves the lead singer of the Black Eyed Peas. Oh, my God, I've got the biggest crush on her. God, is she hot!” How can a marriage that began like
that
possibly stand the test of time? I mean, plenty of people are hot. Anne Coulter is hot. That doesn't mean I want to marry her. Let's just say that I don't envision Josh and Fergie as the latter-day Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward.

But here's why the headline is so jarring: Fergie's real name is Stacy Ann Ferguson, which also happens to be my wife's full maiden name (and why she can't use it at SAG). Not only do Josh Duhamel and I share a first name, we were also born on the exact same day: November 14, 1972. I'm possessive about both my name
and
my birthday, so right off the bat, I don't like the guy. Throw in that he's not only an enviably handsome dude, but the sort of enviably-handsome-dude-who-knows-he's-an-enviably-handsome-dude, stir in his lackluster IMDB page (
Win a Date With Tad Hamilton!
,
Las Vegas
,
Transformers I
and
II
), sprinkle in the fact that he escorts Fergie to exotic beach locales where he
knows
paparazzi lie in wait like piranha, Nikons at the ready, and as his hard-bodied wife reads YA paperbacks and works on her tan, Josh Duhamel—or
J.D.
, as his friends call him; because Josh isn't a cool enough name for this big swingin' dick—breaks out the oils and brushes, and a fucking
palette and easel
, and starts painting a fucking
seascape
, right there on the beach in the Bahamas, or whatever
Girls Gone Wild
hotspot they've chosen for their little getaway, because, he's, like, an
artist
, you know? . . . and it's sort of impossible not to fucking loathe the guy. I mean why is
he
always in the magazines? Who gives a rat's ass about
him
? And then we find him porking—excuse me;
allegedly
porking—a stripper.

The kids are quiet; too quiet. When I glance in the rearview, both Roland and Maude have their fingers up their respective noses. They're really going at it, excavating like seasoned archeologists. As a parent, I'm supposed to discourage this. Nose-picking is not something that's smiled upon in civilized company. But how logical it must seem—no; how logical it
is
—to insert an index finger in the index-finger-sized hole at the tip of your nose, inside which there is a fingertip-sized ball of goop that needs removal! How unnatural, to check that very sensible and biological impulse! And yet I somehow have to explain to my kids that this is something they shouldn't do.

Ah, fuck it. Let them pick. At least they're quiet. I'll just pretend I didn't notice.

The
Us Weekly
cover is a bad omen.

Josh and Stacy.

Cheating shock.

Somewhere Eugenia Last is laughing.

INT. SOUND STAGE, LOS ANGELES – DAY

STACY sits on a bench, reading a script. She's reading for the part of Slut #1, so she's dressed scantily. We see her mouth some of the dialogue silently. Then, JOSH DUHAMEL, an impossibly handsome movie star, rounds the corner. He's wearing a black leather jacket, black V-neck T-shirt, black jeans, and hasn't shaved in two days.

B
OUNDED BY
V
ILLAGE
H
ALL
, S
T.
J
OSEPH'S
C
HURCH, THE
SUNY campus clocktower, and a row of modest houses on Mohonk Avenue, Hasbrouck Park occupies a single block of sodden land a short walk from the center of town. There is a gazebo, and a rugged baseball field, and a rudimentary basketball court, and a wide expanse of wet, clover-strewn lawn, which is the setting for, among other municipal events, the annual Pride Day festival. In the southwest corner is the playground: swing sets, seesaw, sandbox, and the highlight, a vast splintery wooden maze of stairs and slides and turrets and blind alleys and chainlink bridges approximating a castle keep, complete with its own fence, which kids love because they can easily hide from their parents (and parents fear for exactly the same reason). If it hasn't rained recently (Hasbrouck is sited in a marsh area, and takes weeks to dry out after a big storm), and if it hasn't been defaced by teenagers and SUNY students (all those kid-tested-mom-unapproved hiding spaces make it an ideal spot for drinking, smoking, fucking, vandalizing, urinating, and vomiting, so before you unleash your children, you have to check for spent beer cans, cigarette butts, used condoms, curse words scrawled on wood in black Magic Marker, piss stains, and puke), and if it isn't recess at Mountain Laurel (the local Waldorf school, a veritable
madrassa
of fundamentalist crunch, doesn't have its own playground, instead dispatching its student body to the public park every school day after lunch: sad-faced, long-haired, grass-fed seventh and eighth graders in organic-cotton tie-dye shirts, running roughshod over the wooden castles built for younger children, reveling in a schoolyard kingship that will end once ninth grade rolls around, and the bigger, meaner, street-smarter New Paltz, Kingston, Highland Central, or Rondout Valley high schoolers beat them up and steal their hippie lunch money), and if it isn't too crowded (Roland especially can be unpredictable if there are too many other kids around), Hasbrouck gets my vote for best playground in the area, narrowly edging out Majestic Park in Gardiner (where, on the weekends, you can watch the bright parachutes of thrillseekers from Skydive: The Ranch falling softly back to earth). This late in the afternoon, this late in October, the playground is almost deserted.

The spot on Mohonk with the busted meter is open, so I park there, saving myself a dime. My mother would be proud. Meg's green Jetta—she has one bumper sticker,
SAVE THE RIDGE,
in big red letters on a white field; Save the Ridge was a big deal when we first moved here, an ultimately successful grassroots movement to stop a cabal of nature-raping developers (a group said to include Robert De Niro, a Hudson Valley weekender, whose alleged involvement evaporated his reservoir of local goodwill) from erecting houses on Shawangunk Ridge; in New Paltz, we're big on
saving
things—is two spots ahead of me, left wheel jutting out a good half-foot beyond the yellow line. The twins play on the seesaw, although they seem more intent on climbing it than achieving any semblance of balance. Meg leans against the fence, zoned out, her iced Starbucks almost done.

“Sorry,” she calls, killing the iced latte with a final slurp of the big green straw. “I should have asked if you wanted one.”

“I'm good,” I tell her. “It's the time of day where I generally switch from caffeine to alcohol. Let me unleash the monsters.”

Roland has not yet mastered the ability to unbuckle himself from his carseat. He could probably do it, if he set his mind to it, but he'd rather just wait for me. He can be lazy that way. If he were a sultan of old, he'd have no problem being ferried about on a pillow-strewn sedan. I take him out first, because he sits behind me, and then fetch Maude, who, by the time I get to her side, is bitching about not being the first one out of the car. They scamper down the little hill to where Beatrix and Brooke are taking turns slamming the seesaw as hard as they can onto the ground. The wooden plank is splintered, and looks like it might split in half, which, I suppose, is the goal.

“How was the rest of the playdate?” I ask, but before Meg can answer, Brooke decides she wants to partake of the sandbox, and the twins take off, running away from us and into the playground proper. Maude follows them as fast as her stout little legs can carry her, which is pretty damned fast for someone two-and-a-half feet tall. Soon, both of the kids will be able to outrun me. What will I do then?

“But Daddy,” Roland says, tugging at my sleeve. “I don't want the sandbox. The sandbox is
too boring
. I want something that interests me.”

I know he means the swings, so I suggest the swings, although I don't want to be stuck at the swing set.

“Swings. Yes, swings would be fun. Come on, Daddy,” giving me another tug. “I need a little push.”

The main problem with Hasbrouck Park—other than the aforementioned soggy ground, lack of shade, overgrown Waldorf kids, penchant for overcrowding, and SUNY fratboy vomit—is that the wooden fence partitions the swing sets from the rest of the playground. If you're here with two kids, and one of them wants to use the sandbox and the other wants to swing on the swings, you can't tend to both of them, unless you're that creepy guy on
Heroes
who can be in two places at once.

“Why don't we do the sandbox? Or the castle?” I try and infuse my voice with enough enthusiasm to change his mind. “
I
know! You can do the slides!”

“No,” he says. “That's
too boring
. Swings!”

“Damn it,” I mutter.

He laughs gleefully. “You said a bad word, Daddy.”

“It's okay,” Meg tells me, moseying toward the sandbox, which rests in an enclosure within an enclosure, surrounded by wooden planks, and is the best place to ensconce the kids if you want to hang out with another grown-up. “I'll watch her.”

“You sure?”

“Maude's a snap.”

So I head with the boy over to the swing set. Seven of the eight swings have wet mud beneath them; the only one suspended above a giant puddle is, of course, the one Roland decides to use. I somehow manage to persuade him to try a different one, and after a few false starts—“No, Daddy, you pushed me
too hard
! I want a
little
push!”—we fall into a pleasant rhythm, punctuated by the high-pitched squeal of the rotating chain.

Across the soggy field, over by the gazebo, three SUNY hipsters toss around a Frisbee. A couple huddle on the low bleachers behind third base, sharing a cigarette; I'm pretty sure the woman is Wendy, the manager at McDonald's, in street clothes—this constitutes a celebrity sighting, of sorts—but she's too far away for a positive ID. In the playground proper, on the other side of the wooden fence, a father—shaved head (corporate shaved, not punk-rock shaved; the shiny pate of a vain captain of industry), clunky rectangular glasses, well-pressed lavender dress shirt, face you want to punch, barks into his cell phone while his son, who is three-and-a-half, tops, and desperate for his old man's attention, climbs up the slide. The corporate-bald dad (is he from New Paltz? Not many guys like that up here) is facing me, his back to the slide, and doesn't see the kid come
this close
to falling. The sandbox is beyond the castellated turrets and out of my line of sight, but Maude has a way of making her displeasure heard, so I assume she's fine.

“You okay, Roland?”

When he doesn't answer, I ask again. He's off in La-La Land, swimming in the vasty Asperger's deep. I know he's happy, soothed by the swing's rhythmic sway, and that makes me happy, too—this, right here and now, may well be the most relaxing part of my day—but then I start to worry that I'm not doing enough, not engaging him enough, not trying hard enough to draw him out of the watery depths of his mind. I need to check in. To be sure. Especially after the incident at the farm. So I ask a third time.