Tales from the Dad Side (13 page)

Health class had done my dirty work, covering first, second, and third bases and sliding into home plate. Later I remembered that my son had gotten an A in health class; maybe he could answer a few questions for his father, who was officially off the hook sex ed–wise for the rest of his life because our two girls would be the responsibility of my wife.

“What kind of birth control do you and Dad use, or are you in menopause?” My middle girl, Mary, asked my wife a litany of prickly questions each day after health class. Thankfully, when Peter took the class he never uttered a word about it, but his sister could not have been more different. Mary wanted her mother's take on family planning, organ function, and maintenance.

“My teacher says it's common for people to give their private parts nicknames. Do you and Dad have nicknames for your private parts?” An icy glare was her answer, and despite it being an inappropriate question to raise in front of her younger sister, she was not punished, because our family had just outlawed waterboarding. Meanwhile Sally, barely a teenager during that exchange, had no idea what Mary was talking about, but giggled because her sister said “private parts.”

In the upcoming year, our youngest child will be enrolled in that
infamous health class, where the coach indelicately explains the ins and outs of sex. Our first two children picked up their working knowledge of it that way, but in my heart I think it is still a parent's responsibility. That revelation came to me as I was driving Sally home from swim practice, when I announced a U-turn and pulled into our nearby Barnes & Noble, where, deep in the used-book bin, I found a thirty-five-year-old bestseller with a rubber tree on the cover.

“If you have any questions, ask Mom,” I said, handing her the Time-Life classic. “If you need me, I'll be at the Yankee game.”

Don't Fall Off That Volcano

M
y nine-year-old daughter had been gone thirty seconds too long, and I was pretending to listen to our tour guide but wondering what was taking so long. A landmark moment, it was the first time I'd ever let her go to the ladies' room on her own without me standing sentry in case there was screaming, so I could burst through the door for a rescue. But truthfully the only toilet sounds I've heard from my children are not the kind of noises you run toward.

A tug from behind, and Sally grabbed my hand and pulled me down close to her face to whisper, “Daddy, there was a weird old guy who talked to me in the bathroom.”

Weird old guy in the bathroom?

A moment ago I was worried that she'd been abducted, had her hair dyed, and been shipped off to Venezuela to be sold into some child-slavery thing, but that was my automatic worst-case-scenario fear. This was a real problem, and I hadn't been there for my girl.

“He jiggled the doorknob, and as soon as I opened the door he barged in. Daddy, I was scared.”

“Stay here,” I said, pushing her into the immediate vicinity of her mother, and I quickly rounded the corner to stand next to the restroom so I could lasso the sicko who had startled my little girl. The only reason I'd allowed her to make the fifty-foot trip down the hall and around the corner was because we were in the most secure of
fice building in the world. Inside I could hear the water running; in a moment he'd be out and I'd let him have it. I had waited for this moment twenty years guarding bathroom doors for my three kids. Standing vigil, I'd lost count of the number of odd looks I'd gotten from adult nonparents who wondered why that grown man was loitering outside the john. “Just waiting for Junior,” I'd say, and point toward the door.

Sure, Perv Griffin
.

Toilet sentinel is a father's job, and finally I had somebody who had done something that scared one of my children, and it was time for me to give him a piece of my limited mind. The doorknob turned and suddenly I was nose to nose with the scary bathroom barger-inner, Donald Rumsfeld.

“You're next,” Rumsfeld said with a smile as he walked past me.

Shell-shocked and flash-frozen like Lot's wife, I stepped into the restroom, which was within fifty feet of the Oval Office. Rumsfeld was obviously heading into a meeting with his boss, the commander in chief, and wanted to make sure he could listen to an hour of Crawford talk without having to excuse himself to the boys' room. Moments earlier I had been prepared to lecture him on bathroom etiquette, but he was the secretary of defense, so if I yelled at him we might return home to find smoldering rubble and the tail fin from a cruise missile.

After flushing the West Wing toilet with my foot, I vowed that this would be the last White House tour our family took on a full bladder. As I walked back, a random thought entered my mind. I'd been in the bathroom after Sally before, and I wondered whether, when Rumsfeld went in there, he was greeted with what the Department of Defense might consider nerve gas.

“Sally, I saw the man you were talking about. Do you know who he is?” I asked. She shook her head. Then I followed up with the more delicate question of air quality. “After your visit are they going to have to retile?” That was our family's way of gauging how long to wait before another human should enter the facility in question.

She giggled. The British torched the White House once, so I was happy to hear Sally answer in the negative, because she was our one child who had the uncanny talent of turning a respectable restroom into a hazmat scene.

Mothers mother, fathers fret. I worry about my kids all the time. Will somebody bother them in the bathroom? Will they grow up happy? Will they make the team? Can I afford their college? Will they marry somebody who surfs the Net without pants?

My friend Jeisohn told me, “My father was soooooo worried when I was a teenager that I might be gay.”

This was apparently a common worry of some fathers. Another acquaintance told me that when he came home with an earring, his father's body went limp. “You know, son, the only ones with earrings are gays and pirates,” his father said. “So there better be a boat in the front yard.”

Meanwhile Jeisohn's father worried that his son would grow up a homosexual. “He wanted to toughen me up, so he sent me for the summer to work on a trawler.”

When he arrived dockside, the captain assessed his seaman skills and then assigned Jeisohn to breakfast duty, where he would operate the toaster, and when he wasn't lightly browning, he'd be tanning on the bow of the boat while the fishing was going on in the back.

His father wanted to get his son's thoughts off of men, yet he'd inadvertently marooned him in the Mediterranean on a small ship watching sweaty shirtless sailors flex and strain hours on end, dragging heaving nets of seafood onto the boat. It was perhaps the
last
place on earth his father should have sent him, considering Father's concerns. So did the summer toughen him up? Absolutely—he eventually became a logger in the Pacific Northwest and dressed in lumberjack shirts from the Bob the Builder collection.

Just kidding. He moved to New York City to be a hairdresser.

Worry is in the DNA of dads. It's a natural thought process that starts when the nurse makes the inky footprints of the baby, and doesn't end until they toe-tag the father.

I was driving somewhere one night when Harry Chapin's “Cat's in the Cradle” came on the radio, the song where the dad laments after his son has grown up that his boy never calls or visits because when he was young, his dad was too busy to play with him, and now the old man is alone.

Listening to Harry's sorry saga, I wondered whether I'd spent enough time with my son, because later that month he was moving to college. I had to make sure our last few days together would be something that he'd never forget.

“Peter, we're going to bike down a volcano!”

I knew when he heard “bike down a volcano” he envisioned the two of us on NASA-engineered carbon fiber mountain bikes wearing asbestos space suits careening down the side just as the volcano blows sky-high chunks of magma the size of Volkswagens.

Flying low over the Pacific on our final approach it was hard to miss Mount Haleakala—it makes up 75 percent of the island of Maui. The name Haleakala is Hawaiian for “house of the sun,” but they should really call it “house of the early wake-up call” because to make sure that we were up at the top in time for sunrise, the bike tour company picked us up in a van at our hotel at one thirty in the morning. I had been sound asleep nine minutes before the annoyed hotel operator told us to get the hell up.

To wake up I sucked down a double espresso mega mocha venti Coolatta that my wife insisted I consume, so that I was completely coherent when I had the boy in my control, because our son was our financial future, and I wasn't supposed to let anything bad happen to him, because one day he would be a prosperous businessman who'd reward his parents with a luxury retirement villa in Provence, since they had sacrificed so much. I'd carried my lunch every day to work for thirty years, and his mother had bought off-the-rack Ann Taylor when she really wanted Prada. Nothing would happen on my watch to our future gravy train.

We arrived at the volcano bike base camp in the middle of the night, where thrill seekers were issued all manner of lifesaving safety
equipment. We would be personally outfitted, as soon as we signed waivers that said if we were killed our heirs would not sue the bike company that had made our tragic deaths in paradise possible.

“You didn't designate a next of kin,” the kid with the earring in his eyebrow reminded me as he pointed me to a blurry line on the living will and organ-donor form.

For the first time I realized that despite the glorious color photos on the Internet, there was an actual danger component to riding down a volcano; after all, when you ride the teacups at Disney World they don't first make you fill out a form giving away your spleen.

At approximately three thirty in the morning we had left the base camp and were approaching the entrance to the volcano road. We'd been in Maui for days and never actually seen the top of the mountain, because it was so incredibly high that there were always clouds surrounding the peak, which added to the mystery. In the dead of night the only thing you could see was whatever the headlights carved out straight ahead. I could not see how far down the cliffs went, so I figured the federal government surely would not let the general public mount a volcano unless it was completely safe, and I convinced myself that barely beyond my view were huge safety nets, just in case.

“Anybody ever go over the side?” I asked the driver.

Pointing dead ahead he said, “Actually, a couple from Germany missed that corner,” and then he made a gesture with his hand flying straight away from his chest followed by a nose-diving gesture punctuated with a splat sound he made with his mouth that sounded like somebody just had gas, which woke up Peter.

“Don't worry, though,” he assured us. “I haven't lost anybody since Tuesday.” It was a Wednesday morning.

After a forty-five-minute climb up the volcano we pulled into the parking lot at the summit. Ten thousand twenty-three feet above sea level, and according to the dashboard thermometer it was thirty-five degrees outside.

“If I'm on a flaming volcano, why am I freezing?” inquired my son,
who was probably expecting a molten crater of fire where the locals were about to throw a virgin into the abyss.

The doors to the vans were closed to keep the warm air in and the cold out, but after about fifteen minutes the smell of exhaust fumes was so thick, I could feel my brain stem throbbing, and I worried that when it was time to bike down, I'd be so high I'd say, “Time to fly…,” and forget to take that left turn like the German tourists and wind up in the big schnitzel stand in the sky.

“Let's get some fresh air,” I said to my son, who would have preferred to lose a few million brain cells stewing in the warm truck fumes, rather than traipse around a volcano top with his old man. “Watch your step out there,” the guide told us. “We had a guy fall off the face in April…. They only found his shoes.”

The summit in the pitch black was as dark a place as I'd ever been in my life, a fact not lost on the federal government. Years earlier Uncle Sam's scientists had calculated that because this volcano summit was located above one-third of the atmosphere, and the air was clear and dry and still, and there was virtually no light reflection from major cities, this was the best place on the planet to see things at night, so they'd hauled in the world's strongest telescopes and pointed them mostly at the stars, although supposedly one was constantly trained on a Honolulu high-rise popular with Swedish flight attendants.

Not only was it dark, it was dead quiet, the kind of scary silence in movies just before the
T. rex
leans out from behind the palm tree and eats the cave girl.

We huddled for an hour, until an eerie glow grew in the east; then we moved toward the volcano rim, waiting for the official sunrise. One hundred and seventy-five tourists marveled at the most magnificent daybreak on earth staring directly at the solar fireball. Many probably took that moment to contemplate their place in the universe; I simply wondered what permanent damage I was doing to my retinas. Exhausted yet exhilarated, I stared directly at the solar fireball like a beagle reading the
New York Post
. To celebrate future
glaucoma and the long-awaited sun, the tourists spontaneously burst into applause.

“What'd ya think?” I asked my son.

Standing on the crater's edge bathed in a glorious golden glow far above the Pacific was as profound an experience as any I'd had in my lifetime.

“It's nice. Can we eat?”

Above the clouds, two miles in the sky, our fast-food choices were somewhat limited.

“At the first Taco Bell, we'll do the drive-through,” I promised, knowing that would be as likely as finding a bookish intellectual at a monster truck pull.

The first three packs of bike riders had started their downhill trips and we were next, so we started queuing up on our state-of-the-art volcano-riding bikes. As I screwed on my safety helmet, I came to the scary realization that the three shots of espresso with a plain coffee chaser, combined with having sucked down the exhaust of idling buses for an hour and a half, had made me absolutely dizzy. I might describe it as feeling “high,” but I might one day run for elected office, and I'd hate to have this come back to haunt me, so “dizzy” is as far as my campaign strategists will allow me to go.

I added my occasional vertigo to the equation and was confident that sometime in the next ten minutes a man with a stethoscope would be loading me on a medevac helicopter for the trip to some nearby tropical hospital, where a nurse in a muumuu would ask the doctor how he intended to remove the macadamia nut tree from my large-intestine area.

Initially I thought somebody at the top would yell, “Let's ride!” and we'd take off like a chuck wagon race, but because the paved road was only one lane in each direction, we would have to bike down single file. We gathered in a semicircle while our guide gave final instructions and made riding assignments. My son was the youngest rider and wound up with the pole position; I'm sure our guide thought my boy was good at bicycling, but in reality the longest ride
he'd ever made was from our house to the Dairy Queen, and we'd gotten so winded, we'd pushed our bikes uphill, and the Dilly Bars had wound up a puddle of chocolate goo.

“Chief,” the tour guide addressed me, “you're riding last.”

Perfect. That was the safest slot, I figured, and if bicyclists started careening off the road, I would safely brake to a stop and wave hysterically to an orbiting NSA satellite to stop intercepting Michael Moore's cell phone calls and send an ambulance.