Fathermucker (7 page)

Two minutes later, the patter of tiny feet, and I feel Maude standing by the side of the bed.

“Daddy,” she asks, with almost comic politeness, her voice containing a slight Continental lilt, “would you please help me pyoo-pee?”

Thus continues the shitty morning.

Friday, 8:42 a.m.

T
HE USUAL CHAOS, GETTING THEM INTO THE CAR
. C
HECK THAT,
the
minivan
: an '07 Honda Odyssey, Bali blue, leased before fall of Lehman and the global economy and therefore overpriced at $389 a month,
MOMS ROCK!
bumper sticker just below the left rear tail-light (as if driving a minivan were not sufficiently emasculating), the whole of the floor from cockpit to hatch strewn with Cheerios, Late July cheese crackers, Veggie Booty, cold French fries, old gum, desiccated pieces of bagel and crusts of bread, straw wrappers, lollipop wrappers, gum wrappers, yellow-and-orange cheeseburger wrappers, the dried-out husks of juice boxes and Poland Spring bottles, spent Diet Coke cans, used napkins, used Kleenex, used baby wipes (used on dirty faces, not dirty behinds), used socks (Old Navy or Circo, snowflaky in their stubborn inability to find a match), pennies, nickels, dimes, quarters, Chuck E. Cheese tokens, mud, sand, pebbles, rocks, crumpled pages from Lego catalogs and real estate leaflets, torn-off pages of the original copy of
A Field Guide to American Houses
, forgotten Happy Meal toys, lost Lego bricks, and countless smaller particles of indeterminate origin, and the interior giving off an odor, faint but foul, best described as a Mayor McCheese fart. And that's just from the past week; I spent forty-five minutes vacuuming the car out last Friday.

So: the usual chaos, getting them to the
minivan
, to the impossible-to-be-more-appropriately-named Odyssey. Fifteen minutes or so to cool them both down, Maude locked in her room, banging on the door, yelping like a caged animal, Roland in my lap in the glider, both of them crying for their mother. I squeezed him to calm him, balance out the sensory input. Like wrapping him in a blanket to set the heat at a more constant rate. Then, when we finally made it downstairs, Roland put on Maude's shoes, and Maude put on his . . . and then mine . . . and then Stacy's knee–high snow boots. All of which is funny enough, downright adorable if you're in the right mood, a low-grade Mack Sennett act—certainly they both found it riotously funny—but not when I've been up since five and I've still somehow managed to be late getting out the door. When they finally have the proper footwear on, Roland decides that he's hungry, even though he's already eaten an entire bagel, half a box of dry cereal, and a good pint of milk. When I turn my back to fetch two bags of Pirate's Booty—a snack food manufactured by Robert's American Gourmet that is said to be healthy but could, for all I know, contain some highly addictive chemical compound whose eventual release into the bloodstream of children across America will herald the initial phase of some nefarious plot to take over the world; it is
Pirate's
Booty, after all—Maude's done something to spark Roland's wrath. I'm not sure what, but it could range from hitting him to pushing him to standing there minding her own business, as Roland's fits are Pompeian in both their unpredictability and their fury. So they're both upset, again, and the Pirate's Booty, booty though it may be, isn't sufficient treasure to console them, so I have to break out the big guns to lure them to their carseat confinement.
Who wants a lollipop?
Like an incantation, a magic spell.
Dum-Dum-bledore.
No more tears. They're in the back now, strapped in, slurping hypnotically. Too much sugar for the morning, yes, but once the boy is at school, it's not my problem. Roland flips through the “car copy” of his
Field Guide
—the aforementioned remains of the first purchase of said book—and Maude clutches tightly her precious stuffed froggie, a glazed look on her face.

The popularity of pirates among the preschool set
a bottle of rum to fill my tum
baffles me. Sure, the eyepatch and Jolly Roger and squawking parrot and the “ahoy, matey” accent have obvious
that's the life for me
appeal, as does the swashbuckling strut of the well-mascara'd Johnny Depp. But pirates are thieves, pillagers, vandals, murderers, outlaws—
I jumped aboard a pirate ship and the captain said to me
the baddest of bad guys. Thomas Jefferson's administration waged war against pirates; Obama's has contended with them as well; still they troll the
this way that way forward backward over the
Somali coast. Yet somehow (the peg leg, perhaps?) the notion persists that pirates are cute. Three-year-olds take up the skull and crossbones for Halloween, and the winsome visage of Jack Sparrow winks from lunchboxes the world over. Two hundred years from now, I wonder, will there be a
Serial Killers of the Caribbean
ride at Disney World? Will our children attend masquerade parties in rapist costumes? Tasteless jokes, horrible even to contemplate. And yet pirates—for whom murder is part of the job description, and rape a reward for a hard day's work—are
over the Irish Sea
let off easy, their abominable behavior tacitly condoned. Never mind that walking the plank is the original form of waterboarding.

“Music!” Roland orders, and I feel the staccato kicks of his feet on the back of my seat, like a massage chair eight settings too strong.

“Is that how we ask? And stop kicking me.”

“Sorry,” he says—the correct rejoinder, but he inflects it as if he were telling me to fuck off. This is part of his complaint; for all his 800 Verbal vocabulary, he has difficulty with linguistic subtlety. He can come off rude, but the truth is that he doesn't know any better. The easier-said-than-done trick is to not take it person-ally when he's mean—he doesn't
intend
to be rude; he legitimately can't help himself. “Daddy, I have something important to tell you. Daddy . . . can we have music please Daddy,” he says, with emphases on the wrong syllables.
Can
we
have
music
please
Daddy
. He often sounds like a bad actor, like Keanu Reeves in
Point Break
:
I
am an
FBI
agent
.

(I have Keanu on the brain this morning. I think it's because there's a picture of him in the
STARS: THEY'RE JUST LIKE US!
section of
Us Weekly
—disguised by a baseball cap and a full dark beard, he's purchasing DVDs at a West Hollywood Best Buy—that I've been flipping past all week.)

“Yes,” I tell him. I turn on the stereo.

“States!” Roland cries.

I know what he means, but I press him. It's good for his development, to make him explicitly and politely
ahem
state his needs. “I don't understand you.”

“I . . .
want
. . . STATES!”

“You mean you want
The States Mix
?”

“Yes.”

“Then say so.”

“I . . . want . . .
The . . . States . . . Mix.
”

“Please, Daddy.”

This time he yells each word with equal emphasis: “
I . . . want . . . The . . . States . . . Mix . . . please . . . Daddy!
”

Not perfect, but as good as I'll get under the circumstances. We're already late, and I don't want him screaming his head off all the way to school.

The States Mix
, as the name suggests, is a compilation of songs in which one or more of the fifty states are prominently mentioned in the lyrics. It was harder to compile than you'd think—in pop music, cities tend to be referenced more often than states; California and New York are over-represented, and, owing to my HR background, I sought diversity (although I don't think Roland cares); furthermore, some obvious choices—“Mississippi Queen,” “New York State of Mind,” “Carolina in My Mind”—flat-out suck. After some tweaking, here's what I put together:

I'm starting to tire of many of the songs on the
States Mix
, especially the Steve Miller. But, while some might argue otherwise (and argue convincingly, if not incontrovertibly), three minutes of Steve Miller is preferable to the same time allotment of a loudly displeased Roland.

The first track begins with the familiar guitar riff, and when I'm told to
Turn it up
, I do. Thornwood is a fifteen-minute ride from our house, give or take; we usually arrive during the dueling guitar outro of “Hotel California.” If we're running late—caught behind a school bus, say—I skip past the Charlie Daniels (a song I used to play all the time at parties in college, but which I never want to hear again as long as I live) and the Hank Williams, Jr. (ditto). Unlike most of these tracks, C of F's “Pigsknuckle, Arkansas” grows on me the more I hear it, and Roland finds it incredibly “silly”—a word he employs when his feelings about something exceed his precocious lexicon—that the gruff, scowling baritone raving about hard love is his friend Zara's daddy.

A
COP IS PERCHED ON THE SIDE OF THE ROAD, NEAR THE AUXILIARY
firehouse on Henry Dubois Drive, camouflaged by political signs: a Dodge Charger'd leopard poised to pounce. Thirty-five in a thirty, failure to yield. SUNY campus police, looks like; you can tell by the orange detailing on the car. State troopers, technically. My hearts skips a beat—although I'm a law-abiding citizen and have never gotten a ticket in my life, police officers tend to dislike me, and the feeling is mutual—but I'm well under the speed limit. Lots of cops in New Paltz, surfeit of boys in blue: campus police, town police, state police, DEC, Ulster County Sheriff's Office, and I've even seen state park rangers in their white SUVs, now that the Walkway Over the Hudson's opened in Highland. With respect to ratio of number of patrol cars to population density, the Village of New Paltz might be the most overpoliced municipality this side of Singapore. There are days when driving through town feels like passing through a checkpoint on the Gaza Strip. Although when some tardy student is tailgating you on a slush-strewn street, behind the wheel of a fiberglass deathbox not equipped with all-wheel drive, yammering on her cell, that's when the pigs are taking a powder. Or a powdered donut, as it were.

As I pass him, taking care to put both hands on the steering wheel, a wave of lightheadedness comes over me, along with the dull timpani roll that is the crescendoing overture to a Mahler symphony of a headache, and I realize that, in my haste to rally the troops, shower, mainline caffeine, and manage my e-mail, I've neglected to eat so much as a Clif Bar.

So once again, for the
shit
fourth morning this week, I pull into the McDonald's. Although
mea culpa
I enjoy their fare, I'd rather go somewhere else, believe me. Oh, to sit and savor the breakfast special at Main Street Bistro, to banter with Carly, the hip waitress who calls everyone
hon
, and sip cup after cup of burnt coffee! But the genius of McDonald's—and any Fortune 500 company whose workforce comprises mostly minimum wagers is, undoubtedly, genius—is that they equip the place with a drive-thru window. Before I had kids, I thought drive-thru windows were for gluttons too lazy to drag their fat asses out of their fat-ass SUVs. Now I understand that they are intended for parents, who can quickly procure McNuggets, ketchupless cheeseburgers, Apple Dippers, juice boxes, kid-sized cups of ice cream, even
toys
, without having to de-carseat their young charges and navigate them through the perilous parking lot. One day, as God is my witness, when my kids are older and can make their own culinary decisions, I will make the healthy choice and eschew Big Macs and Quarter Pounders with Cheese for the “afforda-bowl” at Karma Road, the vegetarian place where the ice cream parlor used to be. Never again, for the remainder of my (compromised because of so much McDonald's food; there's a reason they call the goop they fry the fries in
shortening
) life will I introduce this processed, saturated-fat-filled, cholesterol-loaded, super-fucking-delicious crap into my digestive system. In the meantime, however, I view the Golden Arches as a temple of miracle and wonder to which I make frequent pilgrimages—Lourdes with
special sauce lettuce cheese pickles onions on a sesame seed bun
.

It's the same woman manning the drive-thru window. She works the breakfast shift, I guess. I'm a regular here, but she never seems to recognize me, or if she does, she pretends not to. Not that she's unpleasant, or even cold; she's all-business, no-nonsense, good at her job, a job I had in high school, a job whose duties involve doing six or seven things at the same time, as rapidly as possible, without fucking up, a job that is, for all its lowly societal status and meager pay, difficult. I admire her work ethic: the fluidity of motion as she takes my ten-dollar bill with her left hand and hands me my Diet Coke and straw with her right, the smart efficiency with which she returns my change, the crispness of the fold when she seals my bag, the curt-but-not-rude way she wishes me a good day, as if she'd love to stay and chat if there weren't two guys in hunting gear in the Durango behind me waiting on their Sausage McMuffins with Egg.