Tales from the Dad Side (17 page)

“Hey, Slim,” a future NBA multimillionaire asked, “what's up with your chest?” pointing to my son's torso, which still had the remnants of the Hanson ink. Peter thought the Lava soap had taken off the ink, and most of his skin, but to his chagrin it was still visible to the naked eye.

“This?” he asked, pointing at what was left of the
n
in
Hanson
. “It's a
gang
thing.”

My son is six five, with blond hair and blue eyes, a guy whose belts have either lobsters or ponies on them; what
gang
could he possibly have belonged to, the Apple Dumpling Gang?

“How's your son loving college?” a university official asked me during his visit to my New York office. Usually that would be a proud parent's chance to crow about his child's achievements; I on the other hand felt like I was filling out a survey for J. D. Power and Associates and knew it was important to be truthful.

“To be honest, he's in a forced triple, a room that is dark and damp, next door to the laundry room, so every fifteen minutes when somebody's white load is done it buzzes and wakes him up all night long. The room is also directly across the hall from the men's restroom, a facility so ghastly that legend has it somebody from the class of '03 died from some flesh-eating bacteria while flossing.”

That was not the answer he was expecting. “But other than that, I bet he's having a great year?” He should have stopped while he was ahead.

“Actually, one of his roommates is up all night under his blanket
talking to his girlfriend at another university on a webcam. So between the laundry buzzer, that odious men's room, and the lonely guy making a booty call, my son has not had one good night's sleep so far this year.” The college executive grimaced as if I'd just skied naked into a tea party with the pope.

“Your son's story is proof we need to build more dorms.” He was right, and I nodded my approval. “That's why we're in the midst of our three-hundred-million-dollar-endowment drive.” He then pulled out an impressive presentation with my name personally engraved upon it and made a pitch to me as if I were buying a time-share. “Let me show you the difference you can make by joining the President's Club,” he continued, trying a new way of asking for thousands of dollars. Was he kidding? Was there a hidden camera somewhere? Apparently my son's “dorm of the damned” story was a useful segue into the importance of contributing more. At that moment I was spending on college almost fifty thousand dollars that year, and would be shelling out fifty grand more the next and the next and the next. Each year I was essentially buying a Lexus that I would never drive.

“I'd love to help, but I'm in cable.”

“Yes, we watch you every morning,” he said, figuring that since his cable bill was $125 a month, I was personally getting most of that.

Now that Peter is in his final year of college, I am amazed at how much he has grown. He's off campus in an apartment that his roommates have decorated with a poster of John Belushi from
Animal House
flipping the bird, opposite a poster of Will Ferrell lovingly holding a blow-up doll. One of his roommates is twenty-one, so it was certainly that kid's half-gallon bottle of vodka in the freezer, and the recycling bin was overflowing with his dead Coors cans.

“Did you see all those beer cans?” my wife asked in a panicked but hushed voice as we left at the end of parents' weekend.

“I did,” I said, completely calm, amazed at how much I'd changed in four short years. “Isn't it great—they're recycling!”

Mary, our second child, is now in college, and her first-day drop-off was just like our son's; after everything was unloaded from the
car, there were long hugs, and plenty of tears, and then the parents pulled out simultaneously for a titanic traffic jam where nobody was in a hurry to leave the children they'd raised. Every mom and dad and sibling looking straight ahead, crying. Kathy and I know for a fact that the hardest thing in the English language that a parent will ever say to a child is “good-bye.”

Now that we've installed a second child in college, I've had a chance to think back nostalgically to the seventies, when there were fewer diseases and lower drinking ages, and pants were supposed to be worn that tight. I remember leaving home that first day: I gave my mother and father each a squeeze before I climbed into my dangerously overloaded Ford Pinto and, with sufficient promises to call the instant I arrived, put the car in drive and started up the on-ramp of life.

I had put on the brave face, but I could feel real tears hanging off my nose. Pulling out, I stared at my parents in the rearview mirror; public displays of affection were rare, but there was my father with his arm around my mom's shoulders supporting her as she hugged him. I'd never seen them like that before, and never saw them do that again. Maybe that was how they used to embrace twenty years before, when they were first in love, and I was just a twinkle.

I'd looked forward to that day of independence for a long time, and suddenly my good-byes were over, and I was on my way, and I felt like I had a hole in my heart. The oldest child, the one my father called five times a day to help him do whatever he needed, was suddenly gone.

“That's what you're supposed to do,” my father told me before I left. “Kids grow up and they leave.” And once again he was right, because I never moved back.

I hope that when they're through with college, all of my kids move back, either to live in our house or at least to live nearby. We invested so much time, patience, and chicken fingers in them; it would be nice to admire our handiwork without making an airplane trip somewhere.

To sweeten the pot, I've told them they wouldn't have to pay us rent, ever. Of course, if they wanted to take us out to dinner and then maybe to a show like one by the legendary performer Wayne Newton, we wouldn't say no. All we'd need is twenty minutes' notice, so I could shower, shave, and strip to the waist and scrawl in Magic Marker
Wayne
nipple to nipple, which I can do faster than you can say “Danke schoen.”

Dad, Stop Pushing Me Around!

I
t was a busy morning. My father and I had already been to Home Depot and the tile place, and now we'd pulled in for the last stop on our errand list, the grocery store. He had strained something in his lower back, so he got out of the car very carefully. Walking, he was so wooden that he made Al Gore look like Freddie Mercury.

“We won't need that cart, Dad,” I said as he slowly and carefully pulled a shopping trolley out of the cart corral.

Suddenly he froze in place. I figured he'd pulled too hard and hurt his back. That was not the case. Like Indiana Jones finally eyeballing the lost ark, my father was staring at this line of a hundred shopping carts because on the front of each and every one of them was a full color photograph of his son holding high a piece of cinnamon swirl raisin toast while promoting the
Fox & Friends
program on the Fox News Channel.

“Holy cow, that's you!” he blurted out in the same jaw-dropping voice a person would use if he'd walked in on the family wirehaired terrier applying over the phone for a Visa card.

The cart promotion ran three months and had ended the month before, but this store apparently hadn't got the new Tropicana posters to paste over my face, so that was why I'd completely forgotten about it.

“That's a very good picture!” His voice was dripping with pride. I'd heard him sound like that only a handful of times: at my wedding,
upon the birth of my children, and in high school when I pulled off a wrestling upset and pinned the scariest 118-pound man to ever wear a unitard.

“That's my son,” he announced in full show-off mode to the produce guy, who did not instantly make the connection that I was on the cart. So my father pointed at the cart, and back at me, just for the benefit of Mr. Arugula.

“Dad, don't,” I begged, knowing he would badger the man in the apron until the employee realized who I was and ran through the aisles of the store screaming, “The face on that shopping cart is
ALIVE
!”

As a father, I understood the pride of my father, which he tried to explain away as something else. “Stephen, I'm just trying to get you a little publicity.”

Okay, that was one way to spin it, or maybe he was fishing for somebody to say, “Oh, that young man on the cart is your son? Then you must be a really good father, to have raised a man who has nice skin and is not addicted to offtrack betting. I'll call the Nobel Peace Prize people about nominating you as Father of the Year.” Next thing you knew, my father would be in Oslo chatting up Jimmy Carter types and eating pickled fish parts.

Whatever his motivation, I made sure we speed-walked through the store. But my father still did his nonverbal best to get other shoppers to notice me. He pushed the cart directly at a person by the dairy case and at another in the breakfast food aisle kamikaze style so they'd get a head-on view of my picture, and then he veered away at the last possible second. Then he took a comical double take at my picture and then directly at me. Nobody said anything—they probably just saw a distinguished man in a Burberry trench coat staring bug-eyed at a blond guy walking briskly ahead of him.

Probably some sort of a drug interaction, passersby would think, wondering if the younger man was a male nurse, just taking the older gent to the store for a field trip. “Must be from the bin if he's so happy to see a cart.”

With the three items I'd sought now on the checkout belt, I was ready to make this as quick as possible. Sensing I'd pushed his mute button, my father stood quietly as I wrote a check for the exact amount and scribbled our home phone on the memo line.

“Check-cashing card,” the gum-chewing cashier announced.

Shoving my hand in my pocket to pull out my keys, I instantly saw I had a problem on my hands—I'd inadvertently picked up my wife's key ring, which did not have our check card on it. “I don't have it. Can't you use my phone number?”

“Go over to the customer-service booth. They'll look up your number.” The clerk then picked up a
National Enquirer
to read about the latest starlet who was playing hide the moussaka with some Greek shipping heir. “I'll wait,” he said.

Blood pressure rising, I felt thoroughly insulted. I'd been to that store once a week for the last ten years. As my annoyance morphed into rage, I blurted out something I've heard many other people say but I've never had the reason or the inclination to announce: “I think you know who I am….”

The clerk looked up, scanned my face, shook his head no, and returned to the
Enquirer
. Getting more steamed, I knew that if he ever planted that nose of his in
TV Guide
instead of that tabloid crap, he'd know I was on global television at least two hours a day, the host of the number one cable morning news show, the guy Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert skewered on a nightly basis. I was no fringe character known as Lonelyguy49 on the Internet with only seven Facebook friends; I was on the number one cable morning news show on the planet. Gosh darn it, I'm the host with the toast!

“I come here all the time. You've probably seen me on television,” I said in a cheery voice, trying to be pleasant although I really wanted to clunk him upside the head with my two-pound London broil.

“I don't have a TV,” he said. “Do you want me to call a manager?”

And then, like so many times before, my father intervened to help his struggling son. “Give him a break. He works here.”

“No he doesn't,” snapped back the cashier. “He's on TV.”

“I thought you didn't watch,” I interjected.

“Well, if he doesn't work here,” my father observed, “then why's he on
your company cart
?” It was a Perry Mason gotcha moment as the guy in the paper hat examined the ad and then turned toward me.

“How'd you do that?”

“Doesn't matter. You're going to take his check and we're going to leave,” my father instructed like a hypnotist would say, “and when I snap my fingers you'll have no memory of what just took place.” And that's exactly what happened. The cashier took the check and we left.

I felt a little bad that I'd given my dad a hard time about my picture on the cart; he was simply doing what all parents love to do, brag on their kids. Their pride is a triumphant validation that they did something right while raising us. There are few times in life as satisfying as when you realize that a parent is proud of you. It feels great when you're twelve years old, and even better when you're fifty.

“Dad, none of that would have happened if you would have paid the twenty-three bucks for me,” I said halfway through the parking lot, and then I abruptly realized I was alone. My father was standing back at the cart corral using a ballpoint pen to pry my picture out of the black plastic frame.

“I'm taking this home,” he said, rolling it up treasure-map style.

If the cart police took inventory that night, three pictures were MIA. Incidentally, I don't take my father to that store anymore; while there is no statute of limitations on pride, there is one on vandalism, and until it runs out in eighteen months, we'll have to double-coupon elsewhere.

Daddy's Mascara Is Running

M
y daughter Sally has already made it clear that when she is a billionaire, she will sequester her mother and me in a three-bedroom villa somewhere on the fifty-acre, five-star resort she's going to own and operate with Barron Trump, the Donald's son, who is currently under five years old. I believe Sally really means it, so I have taken her pledge as an opportunity to spend whatever money I have saved for retirement on Sudoku books.

The desire to somehow repay your parents is universal; it's an urge that goes back to when Noah was in third grade. “Someday I'm going to get you a
big boat,
” he promised his beaming parents. Unbeknownst to them, they'd one day share it with barnyard animals.

When I was Sally's age, I dreamed of saying thanks to my parents with a new car or a big house, but my first full-time job paid four dollars and ten cents an hour, and on that salary all I could afford was a board game, which meant I'd have to think less yacht and more Yahtzee!

My father was the one I wanted to take care of first. The hardest-working man I'd ever seen, he sometimes worked two or three jobs to support us. Never spending much on himself, he made do with whatever he had. He was a handy man who never once called a plumber or an electrician or a carpenter when something at our house needed fixing, because he'd figure out how to do it himself. His only lament: “I could do this better and faster if I had the right tools.”

My first payday was on a Thursday. The next day I walked into the Topeka Sears store, where America shops for its parents, and found exactly what my father had dreamed of for years: a three-horsepower, ten-inch radial arm saw. A mechanical cutting marvel, it also came with an automatic brake that would stop it in a flash, which was good because it was treacherous. I learned how much so from my wood-shop teacher when I asked him how many dowels to put in the side of a project, and he shouted “Five” over the buzz of a table saw and for emphasis flashed his open hand my way with every finger and thumb standing up, all three of them.

I drove the ninety miles to my parents' house and unloaded my surprise with no fanfare. I'd quietly clued in my blabbermouth sisters, and my payback was set.

“Dad, come here!” I hollered toward the garage, and when he arrived in the living room our entire family had gathered in a semicircle around something bulky under a blanket. “I gotcha something.”

I'd seen that semigoofy grin of his many times in the past when we'd make similar presentations. We didn't have much disposable income, and he insisted we not spend any money on him, so we'd wrap up and give him something that he already owned. That's right, we invented regifting.

Another recycled something was surely what he thought it was until he tugged off the blanket to reveal the most expensive Craftsman radial arm saw I could afford. It would take me three years to pay it off, but it was worth every single minimum payment due.

“Oh, Stephen…,” was all he said before his eyes got glassy, then wet, and as he pulled the saw across the deck toward him, a single tear rolled right off his face onto a sticker warning to pick up severed fingers when you were done woodworking. That was a milestone; it was only the second time I'd ever seen him cry. “Thanks,” was all he could choke out.

Scanning the room, I saw that my mother and four sisters all had tears in their eyes too.

Twenty years earlier, we were driving through Grand Island, Ne
braska, on the hottest day of the year, and the engine fan chose that day and time to unbolt itself from the motor and spin directly into the radiator, resulting in a yellow-green gusher of steam and anti-freeze that literally hit the fan.

“You're looking at three hundred,” Mr. Goodwrench flat out told my father, who'd struggled to come up with the money to cover breakfast that morning at a greasy spoon near Omaha.

“Well, I have to get these kids home, so you better fix it,” my dad said with a sigh, and the guy in the coveralls turned to repair our radiator. My father walked outside the radiator shop and stood under a big oak, probably to figure out how he'd pay for this, because he didn't have that kind of money. That was at a time when people didn't have any credit cards; he had only a wad of cash that after a week visiting his family was down to mostly fives and a few tens.

My mom fished a couple of nickels out of her purse and told my sisters to buy some sodas. They were giddy at the prospect of spending hours in an unfamiliar place with thirty thousand dirty things to stick in their mouths. They repeatedly asked my mom to use the filthiest washroom I'd ever seen, which in my second-grade imagination was littered with the carcasses of the health department inspectors who'd keeled over when exposed to a biologically infectious urinal cake.

My dad looked so lonely under that tree, I walked out to see if he wanted a sip of my Dr Pepper. I said something about how hot it was as I walked up behind him, but he didn't turn toward me, which was weird. So I took another step and stood in front of him, where I noticed to my horror that he had a couple of big tears hanging on his chin. When he turned toward me, I snapped my head away, ashamed that I'd barged into his private moment. He put a hand on my shoulder and said, “Don't worry. It's going to be okay.” I wasn't worried, because my dad always took care of everything, but now seeing that the strongest man in the world could cry like everybody else, I didn't feel so good.

“Let me have a sip of that,” was the last thing I heard before he
drank my Dr Pepper dry. The car was fixed later that day, and we drove home. Forty years later my father told me what happened that day; he explained to the mechanic that he didn't have the money, but he promised he'd send him a check when he got home, which he did because a promise was a promise.

December 25, 1997, I was with my wife and kids at our home in New Jersey when the phone rang at 4
A.M
. It was my sister. My mom had died. On Christmas. I jumped out of bed and packed a bag, and Kathy booked me a flight. Because Christmas was always supposed to be the happiest day on the calendar, the one day our kids looked forward to all year, my wife and I sat in the dark waiting to wake them up, and then videotaped them running down the stairs to see what Santa had left. I was on the airplane flying back to Kansas before Kathy explained what had happened. Never in their lives had my children known a person who had died. When my wife and kids flew out for the funeral, my littlest one's, Sally's, only funeral experience was from watching Princess Diana's on television.

“Why isn't anybody throwing flowers?” Sally asked as the hearse solemnly pulled away from the church. They threw flowers for Diana, why not Grandma?

My mom's funeral was the first time my children ever saw me cry. As I started writing this story, I remembered the times I'd seen my father cry, and thought about how composed I'd always been around my own children, trying to maintain a sphinxish manner when dealing with sad matters. Driving to the grocery store with Sally who was now a high school freshman, I asked her how she'd feel if she ever saw me crying again.

“Whaddaya mean
if
?” she said.

“Really? When?” I was suddenly defensive, knowing nobody had ever given me a radial arm saw.

“At the movies.”

She'd hit paydirt. Sitting in the dark, it was easy to get caught up in a story. Those Hollywood screenwriters knew exactly how to push
my buttons. So I asked
what
movies, expecting her to say
Schindler's List
or
Steel Magnolias
.

“The
first time
?” She paused for a moment, and I could see she was rewinding something in her head, probably remembering how I was overcome by the raw emotion of
Dying Young
or
Titanic
.

Her answer was accurate and devastating. “It was
A Bug's Life.
”

In my own defense,
A Bug's Life
is a heartbreaking movie when the little ant needs help to keep his ant farm from being wiped out. Then Sally added a coda. “Actually, Daddy, you cry at
all
the movies.”

“Like…?”

“Like
Finding Nemo, The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast.
” I was surprised she had a Roger Ebert–like list at the ready of her dad's favorite tearjerkers. Who wouldn't cry at those Disney classics that feature an orange striped fish trying to find his dad, a mermaid who combs her hair with a fork, and a beautiful ingenue who talks to candelabras?

It was now official—I was a softy. Later that night at dinner, I asked my entire family if, aside from at the movies, they had ever seen me cry, because nobody had ever said a word.

“Every Sunday,” Mary, the high school senior, announced, which made me wonder, Sunday? The only thing we did every Sunday was church, and while there were a couple of hymns that got me every time, we didn't sing “Amazing Grace” every week.

Seeing I was struggling, Mary solved the mystery: “Sunday nights,
Extreme Makeover: Home Edition
.”

Until that moment, I had thought any sentimentality I'd done was in private. But apparently if there's even a whiff of something emotional, my entire family sneaks a glance my way to see if the show has officially risen to the red-eye level, like a Hallmark ad.

Real men do cry. In the movie
Ocean's Thirteen,
two of the con men, played by George Clooney and Brad Pitt, get weepy as they watch an episode of
Oprah
when she builds a house for a family who has nothing, exactly like my favorite show. Finally, I had something
in common with Clooney and Pitt, aside from us all being international sex symbols.

I've evolved to the point where I think it's okay to show humility and humanity. Feelings are the only things that separate us from the animals. Surprisingly, my own kids are not weepers. I could go through a half box of Kleenex watching an
Old Yeller
marathon, and my children's only reaction would be, “That dog didn't really die, did it? It's just a movie, right?” Once assured that the dog, a member of the Screen Actors Guild, was just playing dead, they'd adjourn to the kitchen to toast the dog's continued good health with snacks. I could remind them that the movie was made fifty years ago and the dog has been dead since the 1960s, but I would never rain on their parade.

Meanwhile, my wife, Kathy, is much more evolved than I. When I asked Sally what made Mommy cry, it took her most of a day to remember the first time she saw my wife shed a tear.

“
The Country Bears
movie.”

Thank goodness, somebody stable was on hand to wear the pant-suit at our house.