Tales from the Dad Side (11 page)

There was a big problem for a family man with a job as a traveling salesman. He was gone a lot. He missed a lot of school events, birthdays, and my entire American Legion baseball career. My mom hated it, and apparently so did he, because one day he announced that he'd had enough, and quit to do something he'd always wanted, carpentry work, which he taught himself thanks to some books at the public library. We were happy to have Dad at home, but also terrified that we would wind up in the poorhouse, as wards of the state, or shipped off on an orphan train for children of the unemployed. But he assured us we'd be fine.

We ate a lot of ten-for-a-dollar pot pies, and my mother learned how to stretch a budget because by the end of the week all that would be left in the fridge would be a loaf of bread and a pound of hamburger. She'd toast the bread, fry the meat, and make a surprisingly tasty gravy for what my dad said they called SOS in the army. Once midmeal I made the mistake of asking what SOS stood for, and much to my horror, he told me. The “on a shingle” part didn't faze me; it was the first
S
that scared me into eating just the toast and gravy, until my mother renamed it “chipped beef on toast.”

We did struggle when I was growing up. We never had a new car or a big house. But as kids we didn't know we were missing them, because everybody we knew was in the same boat. Looking back now I know that we were actually a poorer version of
Angela's Ashes
. Compared with us, Frank McCourt lived like Steve Forbes.

When I was in college I made up stories about what my dad did. I guess I was embarrassed by what other people would think. Now that I'm older I feel bad about that and know how unfair it is that some people look at a person's job as a yardstick of success. A doctor gets an automatic ten-yard advantage on the field of life over an auto mechanic regardless of the lives they've led. My dad has had a bunch of jobs over his life, never big jobs, to anybody but us. He never made a million dollars or did anything that would have had his
face plastered in
BusinessWeek
or on
Entertainment Tonight.
The closest thing to momentary fame happened when he visited me at Fox News.

I'd left him in the greenroom during our three-hour program, and he entertained the upcoming guests with stories about me that only a proud parent could get away with. During a commercial I walked by and saw he was regaling the actress Donna Mills with an apparently hilarious story. She was standing ever so close, and my father had a mischievous grin as the cute woman from
Knots Landing
hung on his every word.

I couldn't stop to talk; I was heading outside for an interview with football legend Joe Namath. The New York Jets' only Super Bowl–winning quarterback was mythical in Manhattan. During the interview passersby stopped until they were ten deep to watch Broadway Joe. Suddenly we were creating a security problem. The crowd was huge, and people were getting pushed into rush-hour traffic. Midway through our televised chat, a guy unexpectedly walked up and stood about six inches from Joe Namath's left arm. Normally our security detail would have stopped the man from getting on camera, but on that day they made an exception because the interloper was my father.

“Joe, that's my dad, Jim,” I broadcast as the camera panned over to see my old man with a big goofy grin on his face, practically standing on Joe's foot.

“Jim,” Namath started, “you must be proud of this boy of yours.”

“Why has your father hijacked the program?” the producer screamed in my earpiece.

“Dad,” I interrupted their chitchat, “is there
a reason
you stopped by?”

Two authentic NFL footballs were pulled out of a plastic shopping bag along with a Sharpie. “Joe, would you mind signing a ball for a church auction and another for my grandson?”

My father, the most honest guy I know, wanted them signed on television to authenticate to the bidders at St. Andrew's Catholic
Church that the ball was really signed by Mr. Namath, who was the perfect gentleman and scrawled his name and jersey number on it. Later the producer said the segment was hilarious. “Could your dad come back and do that again tomorrow?”

After the show I walked into the greenroom, and there were my dad and Namath laughing up a storm like a couple of frat brothers. It made me feel good that I could give my dad a chance to chew the fat with a bona fide football hero, who, I might add, seemed genuinely happy to share the couch with my father. One of our college-aged interns looking in would probably just see a couple of old guys sharing a laugh, but I saw two legends.

One guy made millions throwing a ball; the other guy never got that big break, didn't get to go to college, and worked hard and long until his back gave out. But his spirit never did.

I have had the pleasure of meeting and working with some giants of modern American history, but for heroism nobody ever got close to Jim Doocy, my biological father, a gentleman who once carried an autographed football on his lap across the country so he could present it to his grandson, who had no idea what a Joe Namath was.

The Joker Gene

T
he five-hundred-mile drive to Grandma's house in northern Iowa was mind-numbingly dull. My mother invented a time killer called “What am I thinking about,” which usually lasted ten minutes before my younger sisters lost interest because they didn't care what my mother was thinking about.

The halfway point was the Missouri River, which we'd cross on the triple-cantilevered Abraham Lincoln Bridge, as it is officially designated by the state of Nebraska. But we called it by the name of the town it sits next to, Blair, Nebraska.

“Fifty miles to the Blair Bridge,” my dad would announce when he'd see a road sign for the state line. Just that announcement would start almost an hour of anxiety because for a family from the country's most landlocked state, a triple-span soaring bridge was scary.

“Twenty-seven miles to the Blair.”

The closer we got to the bridge, the more the tone of Dad's announcements changed. First they were simply informational; then as we got closer things would get more foreboding. There was one more petrifying component to my dad's little soap opera; the bridge deck was made of a metal mesh that made an ominous sound as you crossed.

Mummummummmum.

The faster Dad drove, the higher the pitch, and the louder and scarier the sound the bridge sang to us.

AAAAAMMMMMMMMM.

“Three minutes,” he announced. “Hang on!” He started sounding like the NASA guy whose job it was to count backward: “T-minus one minute and counting…”

“Jim, stop it,” my mother said. He never did.

As the car angled up the long steep approach, my sisters and I would crouch down in the back so we didn't have to watch, and to this day I can remember closing my eyes and praying that it would be fast. Keep in mind, this was about the time the movie
The Poseidon Adventure
was in theaters, and our car flying into the river seemed as plausible as Shelley Winters hanging by a chandelier upside down in a ballroom as Maureen McGovern sang, “There's got to be a morning after…”

AAMMMAAAAHHHHHHHHHEEEEERRR.

The sound and the height combined to quicken our little hearts, but that was never enough for our dad; always midspan, at the height of our personal peril, he would swerve a little. On some trips he'd throw his hands up in the air like people on roller coasters do, steering with his knees. Of course we'd never see that, because our eyes would have to be pried open first.

“Kids, we made it!” he would announce with the same satisfied voice Chuck Yeager would use after a successful test flight of some eminently dangerous flying contraption.

In reality all that we'd done was cross a bridge that was probably thirty feet above the Missouri, which at that location was probably as deep as Paris Hilton.

The reason my dad did that every time we'd cross it was he thought it was comical, yet to this day his joke haunts us all. Today my sisters and I all get sweaty palms at the thought of crossing a bridge. Unfortunately for me, a really big one stands between me and a paycheck, the George Washington Bridge, one of the country's longest, highest, and ultimately scariest bridges. A bridge-fear expert once suggested I drive across it wearing a puffy orange Coast Guard-approved life jacket, which I did as a joke until the Port Au
thority police stopped me because they thought I was wearing a belt bomb.

Not long ago I asked my father if he realized that he'd permanently freaked out his entire family, and he played the humor card. “I was just trying to be funny.”

I said nothing, letting him twist a little.

“Listen, if I wanted to scare you, I would have worn shorts to the pool.”

My father was simply keeping up the time-honored tradition of the dad as tickler of the family funny bone. He has since passed down his big clown shoes to me.

After taking my kids to see the movie
Toy Story,
where Mr. Potato Head and Barbie come alive, that evening while tucking my four-year-old-daughter Mary into her bed I said, “Don't forget, toys really do get sad when you don't play with them.” And then I pointed around the room at the legions of mute toys waiting to play. A kiss good night, I turned off her light, and instantly forgot about my little joke.

Nine years
later, over dinner, Mary blurted out that when I told her toys got lonely unless she played with them, she started spending ten, fifteen, sometimes twenty minutes a night kissing each one. If she heard somebody in the hall she'd jump into bed, and when it was time to resume the kissing she'd forgotten her place and would have to start over.

“I was joking” was my only defense, but that did little to remedy my attempt at humor, which tortured her for years. She's now in college, and I believe she's over it, but if she needs to speak to anybody professionally, I'll get her some therapy as soon as Dr. Joyce Brothers opens an office at the Garden State Plaza next to the Sprint kiosk.

I would officially like a do-over on the
Toy Story
kissing incident.

Despite the fact that my own father's sense of humor tinged me,
for three decades,
he still makes us all laugh. My sister and her brand-new husband of five minutes were posing at the altar for their final wedding photographs when somebody noticed that my daughter
Sally the flower girl was making a strange sound. It wasn't exactly a hack, but more of a cough, short and wheezy. Initially it didn't register as anything other than a little bark until her eyes got glassy and we realized she wasn't breathing.

“Did she eat the flower bouquet?” No.

“Is she too young for the Heimlich?” Probably.

Somebody suggested we give her a drink, which seemed like a bad idea to me, and it was about that time that Sally started crying. She couldn't breathe, but she could cry, and she was simultaneously turning blue. For someone choking to death she was remarkably calm. As we stood there playing Twenty Questions, she started a series of gut-wrenching dry coughs until, just like a cat belting out a fur ball, she sent a projectile flying two feet straight out of her mouth. It wasn't a flower or a piece of candy. It was a quarter.

“Thank God she's all right!” the bride exclaimed, and this was followed by a round of “Amens.”

Crisis averted, my sister Ann the caterer asked, “Who wants cake?” and we adjourned to the parish hall. We were not inclined to blame whoever had left the quarter on the floor of Our Lady of the Immaculate Kitchen.

The next day Sally climbed up on my dad's lap. She seemed a little lower key because she'd learned a lesson: “Don't eat da money.” She repeated her new mantra to her grandfather. “Don't eat da money.”

“That's right, don't eat the money.” Then my father, Mr. Catskills, went back to work. “Sally, do me a favor. How about coughing up another quarter? Grandpa needs a newspaper.”

Driving Miss Doocy

S
ee, it's like a triple-legged
H
.” My father pointed to the top of the gearshift during my first driving lesson. The family car was a 1963 Plymouth Belvedere that my father had bought from a friend who had used it as a stock car. Most people get their first taste of the road in a vehicle that's “street legal”; I, on the other hand, learned how to drive in a car that had, next to the license plate, a parachute.

“It's a little souped-up, so let's take it easy,” my dad said after a thorough thirty-second orientation. When I turned over the ignition I immediately heard the deep throaty
lub-dub-dub-dub
of a 427-horsepower gas-guzzler modified to feature “double carbs,” which had nothing to do with the Atkins diet.

My father taught me the basic tenets of driving over half a dozen afternoons on little-used dirt roads where the land was flat and the cops were few and far between. In Kansas, if you were involved in some branch of agriculture, you could obtain a “farm duty” driver's license at age thirteen and a half, which was my age at that moment, so I applied for and got one. Being honest, to justify the license my parents made me find an actual farm job, which wasn't hard, because farmers were always searching for young men to work on impossibly hot days, slowly squeezing the life out of them.

One phone call and I had a two-dollar-an-hour job. But it did not require a license. I stood on a slow-moving hay wagon, grabbing hay
bales as they shot out of a baling machine. Halfway through the first day I pulled out a fresh bale of alfalfa that seemed
noisy
for hay. I thought the buzzing was the sound of a bee until I saw the tail of a rattlesnake. If the hay-bale hurl had been an Olympic competition that year, I would have advanced immediately to the semifinals. And folks wonder why kids leave the family farm for the bright lights of Omaha.

Seeing that I was freaked out, the farmer asked me if I'd like to change places with him and drive the tractor. My back was broken and I was thoroughly exhausted; when he offered to switch jobs I had the same sense of liberation that Jessica Lynch probably felt when those marines showed up and rescued her from that hospital.

“Do you know how to drive a hand clutch?” he asked.

“Sure do,” I said, having no idea what he was talking about, but how hard could it be? He could do it, and he clearly wasn't the sharpest tool in the barn.
(FYI: sharpest tool in the barn, the pitchfork.)

I climbed into the driver's seat and was suddenly presiding over the tractor, which was towing a baler and a hay wagon; I was the conductor of my first three-vehicle parade. The hand clutch did the same thing as a foot-pedal clutch, but they'd installed it up by the steering wheel, apparently just to make it more precarious.

“Just let the clutch out slowly,” the farmer told me as I maneuvered a hand throttle with my right hand, speeding up the tempo of the tractor, while slowly releasing the hand clutch in my left hand. With both hands busy, I theorized that drivers had to steer with their pelvis, the only available body part approximate to the wheel. The space shuttle had simpler controls than this contraption, which really was a slow-moving lawsuit: fifty linear feet of gas-powered mechanized hardware, dangerous and lethal, with whirling sharp parts and random yellow warning stickers—“To Lose Finger Touch Here.” Perhaps the danger level was why they had resorted to “hand clutches,” because after a few harvest seasons farmers had already lopped off their feet and legs, and hand clutches allowed them to continue to harvest crops while missing a limb or two.

“You can speed up a little,” the farmer yelled.

Immediately I followed my captain's order and throttled up to four miles an hour. As I made a three-quarter turn the farmer pointed to the starboard side in the direction of a twenty-foot-wide swath of grass that I'd simply missed.

“Back up!” he yelled. I immediately throttled down the gas, pushed in the brake and the clutch, and finally disengaged the power takeoff to the baler. The whole shebang stopped. “Can you back up?”

“Sure,” I lied.

Backing a tractor is one thing, but a tractor with two other things hitched behind it is something that causes professional drivers with twenty years of experience to lie on the floor in the fetal position screaming, “Don't make me, don't make me!”

If I told him I couldn't do it, I would relinquish my seat on the tractor and have to lift another ton of hay bales, so using the wisdom of a thirteen-year-old, I thought, How hard can it be? I shifted into reverse gear, gave it some gas with one hand, and then slowly released the hand clutch with the other, but because I was looking backward, I got mixed up. Within seconds the tractor jackknifed over the baler and I heard the nauseating sound of sheet metal ripping and factory-installed rivets popping. The trailer hitch was pretzelized, and the power takeoff had flown off and hurled in the direction of the rattlesnake hay bale. It was like a Lee Marvin film, although if it had been a movie, the thing would have killed the snake family, but during the editing stage PETA would have petitioned to have the producers take out the pain and suffering of the rattlesnake and replace it with something made of tofu.

His agriculture armada destroyed, the farmer issued a brief statement. “I think we're done for today.”

I never told my children about that John Deere disaster. However, long before the kids were ready to drive I taught them all an important lesson regarding handicapped parking spaces.

After one of my wife's knee surgeries she got a temporary handicapped hangtag courtesy of those bighearted bureaucrats at the Di
vision of Motor Vehicles. Three years earlier our golden retriever, Charlie, had shot out of the house like a blond bullet and jumped up at my wife, spinning her around with such force that the torque of the abrupt turn shattered her kneecap. Never once a complainer and certainly not one to get rid of the dog, over time she'd have five surgeries and then a total knee replacement. It was awful. On the bright side, with her temporary handicapped pass, she could park closer to the mall door than any of her friends, because she'd spent more time on crutches than Evel Knievel.

Heading to Christmas-shop at Target, where we would purchase large quantities of quality American products at reasonable prices, she asked me to park in a handicapped spot, but they were all taken, so I headed toward the door where I would drop off her and the kids. Then I spotted a shopper with absolutely no visible physical problem practically skipping back to his car in the handicapped section. Clearly he was physically perfectly fine, and really should have been ashamed that he was using sick Aunt Thelma's parking tag. Just as he pulled out of his spot, as I inched toward the opening, the same kind of van as in the Cheech and Chong movies careened around the corner and lunged to a stop in the spot.

“
Hey!
That space belongs to me!” I barked, and then backpedaled. “I mean, that's your mother's space.” Nothing agitates a mall crawler more than having a good spot snatched away. Then I made a snap decision; I parked the car right there in traffic and bolted out the door to give the handicapped-parking thief a lecture.

“What are you doing, Dad?” the kids asked, but I was single-minded as I walked toward the van, which had no handicapped plate, no official state hangtag, no permit, just a bumper sticker that read “I'm Not Gaining Weight, I'm Retaining Food.”

This should be good, I thought. My kids will see me sticking up for their mother. With the bass line of a Marilyn Manson song thumping from the van, when the driver saw me in his rearview, he lowered the volume and his window, and I was face-to-face with a midforties guy as something that smelled like incense rolled out. “Hey, buddy, these
spots are here for people like my wife.” I pointed toward my bride, who gave a little nod, and suddenly I was Lancelot, defending the honor of my Guinevere.

“Your
wife
needs it?”

“She does, and she's got the parking hangtag,” I said, pointing to the red-and-white placard bearing the international symbol for “Park Close to the Store.”

“Too freaking bad!”
he blared, his surly demeanor having instantly metastasized into naked anger. He then pivoted in his seat commando style and reached down to grab what the sinking feeling in my gut knew was either a sawed-off shotgun or an RPG launcher.

“Your wife needs it? Well have her talk to my little friend!” he spat in my direction.

He was aiming it squarely at my chest. Please tell me I'm dreaming, I prayed as I stared down the barrel of a prosthetic leg.

“Tell your wife I got here first, and possession is nine-tenths of the law!”

Horrified, speechless, and suddenly humiliated, I wondered, Where is his handicapped tag or permit? “I am sorry, sir, please accept my apologies.”

“It's people like you,” he shrieked, but I'd stopped listening to the words and it came out just blah, blah, blah. It was a cockamamie idea to approach him in the first place, so I stood there and took my medicine like a man. Eventually he ran out of steam and I returned to our car. From watching their official male role model get chewed out by a guy with high blood pressure and a factory-built limb, my observant heirs learned that day that only a nincompoop approaches a total stranger in New York State and asks him to relinquish a primo parking spot.

My son, Peter, was an eyewitness to that event, and I knew he would not repeat the mistakes of his father, who was in charge of the family motor pool and driving lessons. A veteran of stock cars and farm implements, I wanted to instruct him just as my father had done for me; however, state law said that every student driver had to
spend six hours scaring the daylights out of somebody from a professional drivers school, not a blood relative, so my wife enrolled him for the mandatory three sessions. Upon successful completion of the class, Peter received a nonbinding, nonlegal, nondriver's certificate that was also good for 10 percent off at Jiffy Lube.

Assured that he was fully prepared for his upcoming DMV road test, I discovered during a practice joyride that despite the certificate and the three-hundred-dollar price tag, little attention had been paid to things like those red octagonal signs, one of which my son drove past at twenty-five miles an hour.

“Stop sign!” I yelled in a scary loud voice that I'd promised I'd never use, but did because I thought we were going to die.

The driving school had been a motorized babysitter at fifty dollars and fifty miles an hour. Since it had not worked, I happily resumed the role of family motor pool instructor. Following in my father's footsteps, I first quietly described where we would go and what maneuvers he'd work on (K-turn, parallel parking, merging). Once in motion, Peter almost instantly put us in peril, and again I was screaming like somebody who just discovered he'd consumed half of a dachshund smoothie.

After a month of neighborhood driving, he was ready for highway action. Near a mall I had him pull over and park at an IKEA store, where we celebrated surviving the drive with a fat-free yogurt. Ready to return home, we'd just exited the parking garage when he got a look of terror on his face—this would be his first time merging onto a very busy highway where cars were zipping by at sixty and better. Peter was edgy; I was positively damp. Waiting for ten, fifteen, thirty seconds for a clearing in the traffic that never came, he looked in his mirror and screamed.

“BUS!”

I turned and indeed a huge one was bearing down on us and in a split second would rear-end us into the highway traffic for instant and painless unscheduled deaths.

“Let's go,” I firmly commanded. “Now, Peter!”

The blood had drained from his face just before we heard
the noise
. In the movies this is what Bruce Willis always hears just before his vehicle is totaled by an assassin/monster/asteroid. There are few things as terrifying before impact as the sound of an air horn.

HONNNNNNNNNNNNKKKKKccchhh!

We would soon be dead, and the papers the next day would let the world know that we had shopped at a cut-rate Swedish furniture store. Why couldn't it be outside of Saks Fifth Avenue?

SSSSSSQQQQUEEEKKKkkkkk…

The air brakes, combined with some tread left on the bus tires, competently stopped the Metro vehicle a safe five centimeters from our rear bumper. Because I was in the backseat observing the driver, I turned around to give the uniformed state employee the stink eye. The New Jersey Transit driver in return glared back at me for having the audacity to stop between him and his union-mandated coffee break.

“PETER, LET'S GO!” You could hear the capitalization in my voice. “
NOW!”

He nudged the gas and we lurched out into traffic, the bus passed us within ten seconds, and I spotted his number next to a “How's My Driving?” sign. I didn't call to complain, because in reality, I'd lost most of my voice and needed a lozenge.

Despite expensive driving-school lessons, a semester of high school classroom work, and my own personalized instruction, I sensed Peter's chances of passing the fast-approaching test were grim. He, however, was an optimist and had already made plans for his eighteenth birthday. First he'd ace his driver's test at the DMV, and then he'd drive directly to the one place he had apparently dreamed of driving up to, flaunting his newfound independence: Taco Bell.

“Gordita to go, my fine man!”

Finally, late in the afternoon, with his still-warm laminated license in his pocket, he was planning to drive a carful of friends to see the Dave Matthews Band in Camden, New Jersey, which for several years had the distinction of being the most dangerous city in Amer
ica. That was his plan. That didn't happen. By a quarter after eleven on his eighteenth birthday, he'd already flunked his road test at the DMV, when he ran a stop sign and then exceeded the test track's posted speed limit, causing the examiner to mumble what sounded like a Hail Mary.