Tales from the Dad Side (14 page)

“Because we're on a schedule we're going to have to average seventeen miles an hour,” the guide told us. “Everybody okay with that speed?” We all nodded our approval, except for a hesitant woman from Cleveland who'd ridden up the mountain next to me in the van. “I can't do that, that's too fast for me,” she said.

Why didn't they mention the seventeen-mile-an-hour mandate at the base camp or in the brochure? I wondered as the woman climbed into the chase vehicle, which had carted our bikes up to the top. Later I would learn that the woman was actually hard of hearing, and thought the leader said we had to average
seventy
miles an hour.

“Let's go!” the bike wrangler hollered, and my son led the way. As we started down it finally dawned on me what was so weird—it was my first bike ride
above
the clouds, where airplanes belonged. It was surreal, especially given my rusty bike skills, gas-fume delirium, and profound fear of volcanoes. Two minutes into the ride I made my first big turn and looked to the right only to notice that I was on a narrow ledge of asphalt atop a three-thousand-foot drop to certain death. Could somebody please remind me why I was here and not at the pool drinking a mojito?

We didn't have to pedal to go fast—the decline was so substantial that gravity did all the work, and the longer you went without using your brake, the faster you'd roll. I discovered that the hard way when I momentarily lost track of my paranoia and realized I was freewheeling about thirty-five miles an hour on a road that looked like it was a BMW test track. I was going way too fast for someone who last rode a bike thirty years earlier on Sunday mornings throw
ing the
Kansas City Times
into my neighbors' bushes. Impulsively I grabbed the hand brake and kept a constant pressure on it, slowing down to the approximate speed of those motorized carts the elderly use at the mall.

Riding the brake seemed like a nice alternative to zooming off the side until I nonchalantly turned around and realized that three feet behind me was the chase truck. My safety helmet had kept me from hearing its engine, and suddenly I realized that if I didn't fly off the volcano I would fall and get cow-catchered by the grill of a Ford Econovan.

At our water break the bike leader approached me. “You okay, chief?”

“Doing great!” I smiled back, when in fact I'd rather have driven upholstery nails into my shins.

“You've got to speed up or we're going to miss lunch.”

I was on vacation and yet some guy with a hula girl tattoo on his neck
whom I was paying a lot of money to
said hurry it up. The nerve. Then I looked over and my son was giving me a “You okay, Dad?” glance.

“I've just been sightseeing. I'll go faster because I'd hate to miss a lunch I've already paid for!”

We made it to lunch on time. In fact, I went so fast for the final ten miles that I was neck and neck with my son at the front of the pack—we were having our own personal Tour de France. I felt like Lance Armstrong, except for the Sheryl-Crow-was-once-my-girl-friend part.

We stopped at the Road to Hana at the edge of the Pacific to take a picture of two guys having one of their five best days ever. That day we saw the sun rise above the clouds, we traveled down a volcano, and we didn't die.

After that guy told me to speed up, I did, even though it was high and it was scary and there was a chance that one of us might get hurt. But standing there I realized that at that moment, life was as perfect as it gets. It was me and my boy slaying the volcano.

The only fear I had left came from knowing that our great day would not last forever, because the good stuff never does.

Then I thought practically for a moment and recognized that even if I rode off the side of that two-mile-high lawsuit, I would die in paradise. And if I went
Thelma and Louise
over the side of that volcano, I would easily be the lead story on the Fox News Channel for most of one or maybe two complete news cycles, and I might even get a chopper over my funeral procession, unless Britney Spears was getting a car wash at the same time.

From Tang to Tanqueray

M
y wife, Kathy, wiped a tear from the corner of her eye as she gazed at our daughter standing there in her imported Italian white lace gown and a flowing veil that cascaded down past her shoulders. I had a lump in my throat knowing what a big day this was and how things would change after she walked down the aisle. As the father I took my place next to my teary wife as Sally stood at the front of the church with a young man we barely knew. But that was okay—it wasn't as if she was going to marry the guy. It was her first Holy Communion and she was seven.

My practical yet very fashion-forward wife had purchased the aforementioned dress that week at Daffy's, where their slogan is “Clothing Bargains for Millionaires.” The clerk who sold it to her knew we weren't millionaires—my wife had a coupon.

Sally was not the only girl in what looked like a girl's size 6 wedding dress. They all wore one because first Communion was a big deal in our town outside New York. It was a Catholic version of a bar mitzvah, without the chocolate fountain.

“Like a shepherd…,” the choir sang as my girl led her classmates up to the monsignor, who lifted a host squarely in front of her face. “Body of Christ,” he announced.

We had joked earlier that because she had always been the family rebel with a devil streak, the instant she got her first Communion, the church would be hit by a lightning bolt, or an IRS audit.

“Amen,” she said, crossing herself.

She turned toward us in the first row, and I gave her a little thumbs-up signal to let her know how proud we were. That was when we realized she wasn't returning to her seat. Instead, she kept walking toward the Eucharistic minister holding up the gold chalice filled with sacramental wine, which seemed a little adult for second graders, but because our church didn't ask for a photo ID there was no stopping her.

Barely four feet tall, hands folded together in prayer she gave the minister a nod that a bartender might mistake for the
hit me
look. A symbolic tiny taste is all one is to take, but to me it looked like she was chugging it.

“Amen,” she said, returning the chalice after becoming the first member of our hypochondriacal family ever to drink the Communion wine during the cold and flu season.

Sally had been first in line, and the priest had told everybody to follow her, so when she ad-libbed and went for the rosé, everybody followed in her revolutionary footsteps. After her holy swig heard round the parish, she turned and gave us a little
mmm-tasty
smirk and then led her second-grade classmates back to their pew.

My wife and I were shell-shocked; she'd never had any form of alcohol before—we had been absolutely vigilant about booze, even though other parents were much less restrictive. I was at a backyard party where one father was laughing it up about how the previous Friday night as he was presiding over the family bar he'd built in the basement he asked his fourteen-year-old son, “What'll it be, Frankie?”

The boy, who at that moment was wearing a
SpongeBob Square-Pants
T-shirt, had a very un-Nickelodeon answer: “Dad, gimme a Jack 'n' Coke, twist of lime.”

Does that sound like the first drink a young man would order? Shouldn't it be a beer or Cold Duck? And who before the age of twenty has ever ordered anything
with a twist of lime,
other than George Clooney? My gut told me that was not his first drink nor
even his second, and that kid would be blowing a Breathalyzer number into the turpentine zone by the time he was shaving.

One night we went out for a meal at a local Italian restaurant and spotted a neighborhood father having dinner in a corner booth with his son. The mother and daughters were out of town, and it was a guys' night out. It was a bring-your-own-bottle establishment, and after the waiter uncorked a bottle of red wine, he first poured the father a glass and then filled a full tumbler for the seventeen-year-old son, in our state where the drinking age was twenty-one. If the dad let the kid drink openly in public, what was he doing at home, Jell-O shots off the dinette set?

Kathy and I were horrified, but then again we were raising our children in a zero-tolerance household. “This fruitcake has real rum in it!” My son giggled, taking another big bite.

Wasn't fruitcake how Joplin got hooked? Isn't it a gateway baked good? First they buy some online at www.boozyfruitcake.com, then they're skipping school to score some on the street, and next thing you know they're drinking Benadryl from a boot. My parents never served fruitcake, not because it was an intoxicant, but because it had the consistency of cat litter.

My wife and I'd heard horror stories from various deans of admissions who said that when kids made the transition to college life, if they'd had a taste in high school, being around the stuff in college was no big deal, but once those like my son, Peter, who'd lived a monastic high school life, got to college, they went crazy, and by noon the second day their clothes would stink of Colt 45 and there was a better than average chance that the night before they did something stupid that they'd not remember until the DVD release of
Freshman Without Pants
.

With less than a week before Peter started college, I worried about his transition from Ovaltine to high octane. He would promise not to touch the stuff, but once he arrived in his ivory tower the peer pressure of a cute premed student in a belly shirt with a funnel would surely short-circuit his—any young man's—common sense. That's
when I made the decision that I would be there for his first drink, just to make sure nothing happened. But I couldn't follow him around campus, because that would make him look like a daddy's boy, and the last thing he needed was for his new friends to think that he was our poodle.

This brainstorm or alcohol epiphany occurred halfway through our final vacation of the year, which would end in three days with him going to college. The last thing I wanted my daughters to see was their father plying their brother with moonshine, so I got somebody else to do my dirty work—the Walt Disney Company.

Four days earlier when we checked into the resort I saw a very famous entertainment TV reporter in the lobby, who asked me if I was there for the junket. When I told him that we were simply on vacation he revealed that Disney television was flying in reporters from across the country for a party to mark the DVD release of the show
Lost.
Being a world-class gate-crasher, I twisted some arms, and being a media member, I got my son and me invited. It was past eleven that night when we arrived, the party was deep in a jungle and featured a huge plywood cutout of the
Lost
crew's crashed plane with smoke billowing out of engine number two. Amid the chaos was exactly what you'd expect to see next to the wreckage of an airliner that just ditched in the Pacific, go-go dancing flight attendants.

“What'll it be?” the bartender asked as we both looked at the thematic drink menu. Earlier I had told Peter that I wanted him to have his first taste of firewater in front of me and that he should choose any drink he wanted.

“I'll have the
Lost
Luggage,” my son said, and I squinted to read that that was a cute name for Red Bull and vodka. Thank goodness he didn't ask for a Jack 'n' Coke, twist of lime; if he had I would have immediately placed him under hut arrest. I knew he ordered it only because he'd never had a Red Bull, and because it was already 11
P.M
., I told him to pick another.

“You pick,” he told me, which was my chance to regulate his alcohol intake.

“He'll have the Plane Crash Cosmo.”

Not quite twenty-one, he was not of legal drinking age; however, at six feet four inches tall, he was certainly of legal drinking height.

“There you go, guys,” the barkeep said, sliding two drinks in our direction. To be honest, after years of standing on my soapbox, reminding my children of the evils of alcohol, it felt downright surreal that I was standing under a banyan tree two miles from where my wife at that moment was in our room watching the second rerun of
The O'Reilly Factor
as our only son sucked down an honest-to-goodness top-shelf cocktail.

“Whatdaya think?”

“It's good” was all he said after he inhaled it in a single slurp. He had obviously never had clear alcohol before, because nobody aside from a guy with a blindfold on a firing line could down something that toxic, that fast.

He put down his empty martini glass as I nursed mine, and we went to chat up the stars of the show, which I had never seen before. By the way, Matthew Fox was a very nice guy. An hour later I insisted that Peter have another drink, and he did.

Slurp.

At last call, before they closed the rain forest, he had one final aperitif. I'd wanted him to get a taste of alcohol before he went to college, and I'd accomplished that goal; however, after three very strong drinks I realized there was one tiny problem with my 160-pound baby—he was still shockingly sober.

I thought by now he'd be bent over behind the ukulele stand puking his guts out, getting a taste of the aftereffects of cocktailing; instead, he seemed absolutely fine. Had he developed an alcohol resistance after drinking all through high school, and we never caught on, because he wasn't slurring his words, not bobbing or weaving? In the hall outside our rooms, I made a tactical decision right then that we would not be discussing my little social-engineering experience with my wife, his mother.

“Let's keep this our little secret.” He nodded, and we closed the door on my misguided night out with the boy.

The next morning around nine as we were leaving for our all-you-can-eat breakfast buffet my wife announced reveille, and within a few minutes Mary and Sally appeared, smoothing their hair down atop their heads.

“Where is Peter?” my wife inquired. When told he was still in bed, my wife walked to their door and demanded, “Peter, we're going, get up.”

“I'll be right there,” he groaned in a voice that was slow and raspy.

“We're going down to breakfast. Meet us there,” she said, and then turned to me. “I think he got too much sun.”

If she only knew.

Half an hour later, Peter dragged his carcass to the breakfast table; the whites of his eyes were the same color red as a Campbell's soup can. At that moment he needed to soak his entire face in Visine.

“Can I get you a plate for the buffet?” the waiter asked.

“No…thank…you,” he mumbled while shielding his squinty eyes as if somebody were arc-welding at the table.

As my wife worried that he'd gotten too much sun, I sat there basking in the glory of my experiment, because my son had not only tried his first cocktail, but got a deluxe taste of Hangover City, all while supervised by his father, who'd been there just in case. As for my wife of twenty-something years, because I'd plied with a bevy of beverages one of the children she'd kept tightly under her wing every day of their lives, I did not tell her what I'd done for one calendar year, when the official statute of limitations on stupid ran out.

If you're shocked at my methods, don't be. When I was a teenager I was legally drinking at eighteen because back then it was the drinking age. If I did it, why couldn't he? Ultimately that one-night experiment was a success that changed his life. He told me three years later he'd never again had so much as a sip of clear alcohol since that night, because he'd seen what trouble it could lead to. Mission accomplished.

While I personally indoctrinated my son, I don't think I'll have to do the same with my youngest. After her Holy Communion sip she went to a party at a friend's home, and while running willy-nilly inside a rented Moon Bounce, she abruptly ripped her brand-new Italian embroidered Communion gown from Daffy's.

“My mom's going to be mad. Could you say you did it?” she asked the hostess, who informed her that she certainly would not.

Realizing her rambunctiousness could have been the direct result of losing control while under the influence, Sally made a vow that day that she would never drink wine again, because of what it did to her, and because it tasted like medicine. She hated medicine. We were also lucky our church used value-priced wine in a box; she might have gone Drew Barrymore if our parish could afford something that came with a cork.