Fathermucker (3 page)

And then,
story of my life
, I wake up. Or rather, am woken up.

“States!” comes the voice from the baby monitor, holding out the long
a
as if singing. “Daddy! I need my states!”

I squint at the clock: 5:03.

Jesus Fucking Christ.

I must have fallen asleep, mouse soundtrack or not. The way I feel—hung over, but without the preceding alcoholic reverie; headache, dry mouth, general lethargy—I almost wish I hadn't.

“States!”

I drag my ass out of bed and haul it up the stairs. Our house is a Cape Cod, with the master bedroom at ground level. Both kids sleep on the second floor, separated by a tiny hallway and bathroom; the noise doesn't travel much from room to room, and Maude has slept through fireworks displays, but I hustle anyway so she doesn't wake up. One kid this early I can handle. Two? Please God no. I burst into my son's bedroom.

Roland sits on his bed, legs crossed like an Oxford undergraduate's, his left foot rotating like a ceiling fan in one of his
Lamps Plus
catalogs, reading a thick grown-up architecture tome I bought him last year at Barnes & Noble,
A Field Guide to American Houses
(which
American Libraries
hails as—get this—“the definitive field guide to American homes.”). His hair, now at the midpoint between the white-blond he was born with and the sandy brown it will one day become, and cut in the pixieish style popular in our crunchily hip town, poofs up to such a degree that his (handsome, much more so than his old man's) face appears too small for his head. The light by the door is on, as usual—he won't sleep without a light on anymore; monsters—but the pendant light over the bed (a present for good behavior) is still off, so he's reading small print in the dark. Spread out in front of him on the bed is an oversized Rand McNally road atlas of the United States. What he likes to do is cross-reference; he matches the location of the houses in the
Field Guide
(as he calls it, with emphasis on the second word)—Cleveland, Ohio; Louisville, Kentucky; New Albany, Indiana; Rolla, Missouri—to the respective dot or yellowed area on the roadmap.

He won't turn five for two more months.

Littered about the room, among pages torn from the
Field Guide
and various lighting catalogs and maps, as well as countless pieces of myriad toys—Lincoln Logs, Tinkertoys, Legos, bristle blocks, Trios, Thomas tracks, Thomas engines, Playmobil accessories, and a few neglected dolls we got him to encourage pretend play—are foam-rubber pieces from a giant puzzle of the United States (for purposes of scale, Wyoming is about the size of a Pop-Tart). Roland is obsessed with states in general, as evidenced by his cross-referencing game, and these states in particular. He plays with them as if they're dolls—“What are you doing there, Connecticut?” he'll ask. Texas and Alaska, I notice, are now stuffed into the bedroom of one of his dollhouses. He sleeps with the states at night, like Maude does with her stuffed animals. On those rare occasions when he actually assembles the puzzle, he insists on placing the states in alphabetical order—Alabama is first, then Alaska, and so on—and he'll often stack them that way. He knows them in that order because my sister sang a state song for him, two months ago, that rattles off all fifty in alphabetical order. She couldn't have sung it more than a handful of times—she was only up for the day—but he knows it cold. He never gets the order wrong, never even pauses to think about what comes after Delaware.

“Some of my states are downstairs,” Roland says, by way of greeting. His eyes are aimed in my general vicinity, but he's not really looking at me. “Louisiana, West Virginia, Maryland, California . . . ”

Florida. That's what comes after Delaware: Florida. There are no “E” states.

“And this was worth waking me up for?” I say this for my own benefit; he doesn't pick up on sarcasm. One of the useful symptoms of his complaint, for a father who likes to crack wise—I don't have to worry about him catching on.

“Maude brought down Maryland,” he informs me. “I brought down Louisiana and California. Then Maude brought down West Virginia.”

“I have to get my coffee,” I tell him, tiptoeing my way across the tornado's-been-through-it mess of his room and flipping on the pendant lamp. “You have to put the light on when you read, okay? It's bad for your eyes to read in the dark.”

If he hears this, there's no indication. “And the states!” At last he looks me in the eye, although there's something ever-so-slightly off about his gaze; making direct eye contact for him is the equivalent of me holding a difficult yoga pose. “Bring the states, you stupid Daddy.”

I should probably reprimand him for calling me stupid, but he doesn't really mean it, and I'm too tired, and anyway, he's not exactly wrong.

“Relax, would ya? Keep it down. I'll bring the states, I'll bring the states.”

I go back downstairs to the living room, where, in a sloppy half-pile on the couch, I find California, Louisiana, West Virginia, and Maryland. I bring them back to his room, where I leave Roland, now quiet and clam-at-high-tide happy, with fifty-four puzzle pieces (forty-nine states plus five Great Lakes; Massachusetts went missing last week, probably due to his habit of hiding pieces in his room and promptly forgetting where he's put them). My brain attempts to formulate a joke about how, since my son is such a “statesman,” that must make me a Founding Father, but without the caffeine, it just won't come.

T
HE WORST PART ABOUT WAKING UP LIKE THIS IS NOT BEING ABLE
to lie in bed for the nine extra minutes alarm clocks allocate for snoozing and reflect on my dreams. While my dream life, as mentioned, is about as rich and fulfilling as my sex life—so much for compensation—if I'm not consciously aware of what my subconscious was working out when I pass from one state to the other
I couldn't pee because the urinal was in a little room with a four-foot ceiling and I couldn't stand up, right, now I remember, let's move on
, I am left with the naggingly unpleasant sensation that I've forgotten something important, and, often, a headache that all the coffee beans in Colombia can't dislodge.

This morning, in particular, I'd like to process my dream. Who was the woman in white? Why were we at Meg and Soren's house? Wherefore the fixation on the garter? And, most importantly, what does it all mean? If I were still seeing Rob, I'd bring this to the next session, but if there is to be a next session, it will be next month, next year, next decade, some magical time when the Lansky ledger is back in the black—and frankly, when the Lansky ledger is back in the black, I don't think I'll be needing therapy. No, I'm on my own with this one.

Josh's Law of Dream Analysis, which stunning accuracy belies its illicit birth as a dormroom joke, goes like this: if your dream is about sex, it's
not
about sex; if it's
not
about sex . . . it's about
sex
. Because, you know, your subconscious likes to fuck with you. But Josh's Law does not apply here. My subconscious is not fucking with me this time. Sex is as sex does. The cigar in this dream, Dr. Freud, is just that: a big fat Romeo y Julieta maduro clamped between the yellowed and feral chompers of Fidel Castro. The cigar is a cigar.

Soren Knudsen
can't remember last night.

He updated his status at 4:08 a.m. EST—a little over an hour ago. Already he can't remember? How much hootch did he drink?

Ruth Terry
great article

with a link to Bob Herbert's latest
Times
diatribe.

I'm gonna go out on a limb here and predict that Bob Herbert is grousing about Republicans.

Gloria Gallagher Hynek
and
Brady List
are now friends.

Here's what you're in for, Brady List, whoever you are: liberal use of the
LIKE
button, oft-shared YouTube links to grainy live sets by unloved grunge bands, and frequent updates involving Haven that speak of the towheaded lad as if he were the Messiah. Enjoy.

In addition to tending to the insatiable needs of two preschoolers (sippy cup of watered-down apple juice, Z-bar and/or bagel with cream cheese, Noggin On Demand) and a vociferously greedy and shrill cat (Friskies Buffet, release into the pitch-black yard), the following elements comprise my pre-dawn hours: coffee, Facebook, fetch the newspaper (if it's there), horoscope, more coffee, e-mail, glass of water, bathroom, more coffee, bagel, another glass of water, Facebook, e-mail, bathroom, shower. The order sometimes changes, and the shower is often sacrificed for expediency, especially when Stacy is away, as she is, for the fifth
Fifth! The very word screams for hard liquor
morning in a row. But coffee is always first. Coffee is paramount. When parents pray to the God of Easy Mornings, the burnt offerings are roasted coffee beans.

Ceramic tiles cold on my bare feet, I scoop the ground manna into the Proctor Silex, pour the water (the dishwasher attachment doohickey saves me the trouble of first filling the pot), hit the magic button. There is a timer mechanism, but any time I've tried to use it, I've set it for the wishful-thinking hour of six o'clock, only to have to start it manually well before that; setting the timer on the coffee maker is the wake-up equivalent of mentioning a no-hitter in the seventh. I stumble into the bedroom, fall into my faux-leather desk chair, and return to the laptop.

Outside the window, a black abyss. Only my faint reflection in a pane well-fingerprinted by tiny hands. Steve is still asleep, curled into a ball—a hairball, if you will—at the foot of the bed. The mice, mercifully, have moved on. Through the baby monitor I can hear, in the “East Wing” of the upstairs, Roland banging around with some or other toy, probably his Thomas tracks, judging by the clatter and the proximity to the microphone; in Maude's room, all quiet on the Western Front. I should probably jump in the shower now, while I have a fighting chance, but no, not without the coffee.

Unless you have a Sibylline personality disorder, how can you beat someone else in solitaire? It's been a while since I took French, but doesn't
solitaire
imply
solitude
? Isn't the point to beat yourself? (Right-click, hide updates from Three Towers Solitaire. I'm a big fan of the
HIDE
feature, a huge concession in the historic treaty that ended the
Mafia Wars
.)

Eugenia Last is a syndicated astrologer. In the picture they run with her column in the
Poughkeepsie Journal
—which won't be deposited on my driveway until six thirty or so; I'm on her website now—she is attractive, with long, kinky blonde hair and the Slavic features (wide, flat face; tiny eyes) she shares with Debbie Harry, Neko Case, Michelle Pfeiffer, and my friend Meg. Eugenia's New Age bona fides are impeccable. Every morning, she offers up her oracular wisdom, and, while lesser pliers of the zodiacal trade fall wide of the mark, damn if she's not bang-on most of the time. When Eugenia Last proclaims a five-star day, the heavens will smile upon you . . . but if she metes out the minimum two, you'd best go back to bed.

Raising the ceramic chalice of the Mud of Christ to my unworthy lips, I take my first sip of coffee—a perfect blend of Fair Trade Organic Kenyan Gold, light cream, and Splenda, in a well-stained Clifford-the-Big-Red-Dog-sized World's Greatest Dad mug—scroll down the page, and receive cyber-auspices from my kinky-haired prophetess:

Okay, then. A suck-ass blurb
and
two stars. For the third day in a row, I might add. Fucking bonanza. On the plus side, both Roland and Maude (and Stacy, because the two ladies in my life are both Virgos) have four stars. Twice my celestial bounty. Perhaps their luck will rub off on me? If not, there's always
the sun will come out
tomorrow, which, after three two-star days in a row, is almost guaranteed
bet your bottom dollar
to yield five stars. All I have to do is survive today, and I'll be alright.
It's only a day away
.