Tales from the Dad Side (3 page)

“Let's go,” my buddy announced as he and my boss handed the valet the keys. Suddenly paralyzed, I could not in good conscience party with my pals while the mother of my child was two miles away in a lonely semiprivate hospital room with bad lighting, strung out on intravenous drugs and delusional that the bogeyman was going to stop by after visiting hours. There was one other major reason I was uneasy getting out of the car: they'd brought me to a strip joint.

“I came here when my son was born,” my friend divulged as he paid whatever it cost to see people naked. “When they find out you're a new dad, lap dances are half price!”

The way he said it, it sounded like an unbeatable deal for the value-conscious porn addict, which I was not. However, it was the end of a very long day, and while my wife rode the storm with the benefit of an epidural, I was thirsty, and there was absolutely positively no way she would ever find out. I thanked my boss for paying the cover, which I knew he'd eventually expense as a business lunch with the sports guy.

Inside it was very dark, and the music volume was set to
melt eardrums
. Aside from our new-father fiesta, there were guys at three or four other tables aimed in the direction of an abandoned stage. The waitress stopped by to take our drink order, an amiable girl who wore a junior college cheerleader uniform that was three sizes too tight and way past anything comfortable. The only one who could pull off wearing that size in public would be Polly Pocket.

“What are you drinking, guys?” she screamed over the music in a voice at a volume one would usually associate with an airplane evacuation.

Despite my plan to have a single highball, I was told there was a two-drink minimum, so I ordered a double vodka, which was actually a sensible selection as it was not only pure alcohol, but it could be used as an antiseptic, which could be useful in that disgusting hell-hole of a club where a sane person would flush with his foot.

Just as the watered-down cocktails arrived I heard the police siren.

Uh-oh.

Simultaneously a door flew open and the room was filled with red flashing lights. My first time in a strip joint was the night of a police raid. Tomorrow the
Washington Post
would run a photo of me being led out with my hands over my face, under the headline “TV's Father of the Year,” opposite a picture of my one-day-old boy being held by my future ex-wife, who'd been sitting up bug-eyed all night, with a frying pan in hand waiting for the evildoers to take our baby. From the perp-walk photo the new dad would appear to be sporting a skillet dent in the forehead.

When in mortal danger one either puts up one's dukes or runs. It's called fight or flight. I'm a flighter, opting for an immediate evacuation, and was surprised that my friends weren't ready to run. Instead, they were clapping—what were they, members of the Police Benevolent Association, happy the cops were about to take us downtown?

Scanning the room, I saw that nobody was leaving, and curiously, there were no uniformed officers in the room. The siren was actually the intro of an Ohio Players song, and the lights were just part of the show. No police. I was momentarily convinced that karma was punishing me for being there. Add my hyperactive imagination, fueled by exhaustion and straight vodka, and my mind played a funny trick on me. I had punked myself. Thankfully, that night at the strip joint there was no bust. Allow me to rephrase that—I didn't have to make bail.

In an ironic turn of events, the first performer was costumed as a registered nurse. Looking exactly like one of the two dozen angels of mercy I'd met that day, this Florence Nightingale was swinging a stethoscope à la Mae West's feather boa. What a multitasker—not only was she an exotic performer, but with her diagnostic equipment she could detect mitral valve prolapse.

As she tossed her hat with a big red cross on the front into the front row, and long before she was able to gyrate out of her hospital whites, I excused myself from the table, but my companions didn't care; they were, after all, devoted lovers of live theater.

Looking for the restroom, I found a deserted backroom saloon that had a couple pay phones and an odd feature for this type of business, a salad bar. Momentarily questioning who in his right mind would eat that stuff considering all of the germs and bacteria and belly button lint floating around, I spotted some of those little Chinese corns that have been a weakness of mine since college. Picking up a styrofoam plate and a plastic fork, I loaded it up with the second pair of salad tongs I'd seen that day.

It was delicious, but then again I was starving. I nonchalantly dined on a plate and a half of salad parts, and when I returned to the room the nurse was gone and a French maid was on the catwalk. I suspected this was a maid who did not do windows, but did everything else.

“I have got to go,” I barked on my return, but my companions were oblivious. As I left to hail a cab, they remained visitors to Silicone Valley.

The next morning at six I was at the hospital, where I found my wife rocking our baby, her head twisted uncharacteristically to the left. I estimated she had a three-Tylenol stiff neck. “I haven't had a second of sleep and I'm dying for a bath,” she said, carefully handing me the boy. “What did you do last night?”

“Not much, just headed home,” I replied, which was technically true. I did go home, and I didn't do much else, unless you counted eating a salad teeming with
E. coli
in the back room of a notorious
burlesque theater. Completely truthful,
to a point,
I had that same nauseous feeling one has after a Steven Seagal film fest.

Around noon our friend Tommy Jacamo from the Palm restaurant, where we'd gotten engaged, brought my wife a lobster that was exactly the same weight as my son, seven pounds eleven ounces, which at that place would have cost eighteen thousand dollars, plus parking. By the time the lobster carcass was sucked clean, I was helping the new mom remove the napkins I'd festooned around her neck when my friend whom I'd left at the strip joint twelve hours earlier materialized at her door with a wrapper full of grocery-store flowers. A lovely thought. He then sweetly offered an unparalleled compliment to a mother who'd just gone through over a dozen torturous hours of delivery and a sleepless night in a scary metropolitan trauma center.

“What's with the kid's hair? You're both blonds. He looks Cambodian.”

A wonderful bedside manner. He was the kind of person who really needed sometimes to edit his conversation but did not, which was evidenced by the next thing to spill out of his yap trap.

“Did you tell her about the strip joint?”

“Strip joint?”

“He's kidding,” I guffawed, knowing that he would instantly gauge from the nervous yet brazen tone of my voice that this was a third-rail topic that must be derailed at that exact moment.

“The fancy one up from the Safeway.”

Luckily for him we were in a hospital, so in a few moments after I'd choked the life out of him and left his body near a Dumpster out back, somebody in a white coat could revive him, as long as he had a valid Blue Cross card in his pocket.

“Are you telling me…” I could tell by the tone of my wife's voice that this would be the mother of all butt chewings. “While I was here after fifteen hours of labor on the hottest day of the year staying conscious so nobody would kidnap our baby,
you were at a topless joint
?”

“It was bottomless, too,” my soon-to-be ex-friend chimed in. “But he didn't stay for that.”

What was he doing? Was this a hidden-camera segment for
Montel
? This must have been what it was like on that mountain with the Donner party at the moment they realized that they had limited buffet options. “If you're not using your fingers…can I snack on your index?”

An unhealthy period of quiet swept across the maternity ward as he tried to change the subject, rapping his fingernail on the side of the plastic see-through bassinet, trying to wake up our son. Luckily, our blue baby with the thick black hair was a very sound sleeper. Sensing that his work destroying our family was done, my friend left.

“She wasn't really mad, was she?” he asked a week later.

“Not at all,” I snapped back as I stared at his rib cage, trying to use mind control to stop his beating heart. In reality, she was hurt, but she had a 7-pound baby to tend to, and a 170-pound bigger baby to train. For that next year, I always wondered whether she'd memorized Raoul Felder's 800 number, occasionally dialing it for practice.

While it's easy to become a dad, the simple act of a birth does not make you a father; that is something that is learned along the way. Intelligence does not equal wisdom. It's been twenty-some years since that night, and considering the emotional blowback, I can honestly say I have not been to a strip joint since, and I've got the single-dollar bills to prove it.

My friend was never invited to share the miracle of my two daughters' births. Mary was born on November 1, All Saints' Day, which I have a feeling God had a hand in. According to what I've read on Craigslist, that is one of the hardest days of the calendar year to book a lap dancer.

Our final child, Sally, was also born in July, and within an hour of her arrival, her brother, Peter, and sister, Mary, were in the room, singing “Happy Birthday.” Mary was a typical three-year-old, mesmerized, paying rapt attention to the new baby for almost a minute,
and then bored silly. She must have thought she was at a restaurant: “Me use potty?”

She excused herself to the private bath, and a few minutes later, after some suspicious giggling, the door swung open, and there she stood naked. We knew it was an attention-getting reaction to the new baby, but it was also really cute. That was around the time U.S. House Republicans had something called the Contract with America. “Look at the nudie,” my wife said, laughing. “She's a regular
Nudie
Gingrich.”

I automatically felt obligated to add to her joke. “And you know what Nudie Gingrich's Contract with America is…a chicken in every pot and a
pole
in every bedroom.” My wife guffawed momentarily until she made the connection that this was not the first time her husband had been in the presence of a naked person on the birthday of one of their children.

Suddenly angry for the 19,300th time over the infamous strip joint incident of 1987, she launched into an uncomfortable recitation of the facts.

I am never going to live this down, I was thinking to myself, when a lightbulb went on over my head, and I realized that having your wife repeat the same thing over and over again is exactly what happens when a guy marries Chatty Cathy.

Don't Eat the Paste

D
uring the midsixties there was a popular hit that seemed to be on our AM radio whenever Paul Harvey was not. Sonny Bono's then wife Cher sang:

“Gypsies, tramps and thieves…”

However, the first fifty times I heard it I could have sworn she was singing:

“Gypsies, tramps and Steve's…”

As a Steve myself, that got my attention, and suddenly I was hooked on the lyrical wisdom of Mrs. Bono.

“I was born in the wagon of a traveling show,

My mama used to dance for the money they'd throw.
…”

Oddly, I felt a kinship to Cher, and her song was my anthem.
My
father was a traveling salesman, and by the time I was fourteen we had moved seven times. Nobody threw money at my mother, but she did dance whenever Johnny Mathis would sing on our Magnavox Astro-Sonic stereo. Once when I heard Cher starting that song on the car radio I said to my mom, “Listen, it's about us!” After one chorus Mom was wincing. I was an innocent second grader who didn't realize that the song was about a family where the father was a bootlegger and the mother was a hooker.

“Stephen James!”
Mom started her song review. “We're not Gypsies or tramps, we're Swedish!”

Had our family been affluent I probably would have been shipped
off to St. Xavier's School for Troubled Boys and Wayward Pets. She just shook her head; it was neither the time nor the place to explain ladies of the evening or something even more incomprehensible, Cher.

The fact that we moved around was challenging—just about the time I'd get to know a few kids, my father would get transferred to another territory, so I was the perpetual “new boy.” My dad suggested I volunteer for various after-school events. When nobody else in Miss Perseghal's class would agree to appear as Christopher Columbus at a schoolwide assembly, I raised my hand, and soon I discovered why nobody else was interested in the part—a lengthy script had to be memorized and there was a costume. The school wardrobe mistress felt that Columbus was the ultimate swashbuckling adventurer who much like the host of
Dance Fever
should wear an extremely revealing pair of gold leotards. At one point during my single public performance I noticed a little giggling and immediately attributed it to my Italian accent, which was less Genoa and more Chef Boyardee. Slowly I shifted back to my normal speaking voice, but the twittering continued, so I paused for a moment to peer over my scroll and noticed that nobody was looking at my clown-sized funny hat as I'd imagined; instead, they were all checking out my shiny tights. Drawing the curtain on their peep show, I promptly lowered the scroll I was reading to below the belt level to conceal my southern hemisphere.

Luckily we moved later that year and I was at a little schoolhouse on the prairie that seemed like it came straight from an episode of
The Waltons
. It was an honest-to-goodness one-room schoolhouse, where every student regardless of age or class was in the same room. Three first graders, two second graders, one third grader, three fourth graders, and two sixth graders, eleven in all—it was a multiclass casserole. I was the oldest boy student stuck in a room with a bunch of little kids just at the time I was starting to notice the ladies. There was only one girl my age, cute as a bug and smart as a whip (back when bugs and whips mattered), and she was certainly girlfriend material,
except for the overarching fact that my potential dream date and I shared a classroom with two of my sisters, who'd hang on every one of my dreamy glances in the direction of the girl in the training bra.

Flirty glances, however, were not allowed in the one-room schoolhouse. The staff made sure of that. We had a teacher, a principal, a nurse, a janitor, and a phys ed instructor, five people all jammed inside the five-foot two-inch frame of Mrs. Hazel Lloyd, a grandmotherly sixty-year-old career teacher who'd spend a portion of the morning with each student issuing various assignments, until 11:45
A.M
., at which time she'd disappear.

“Let's go, children,” she'd announce, and we'd file into another part of the school, where she'd be wearing an apron and a ridiculous hairnet so she could personally sling state-mandated starchy lunches. Before we'd adjourn for recess in the gym, where her high heels had left a thousand black scuff marks under the basketball hoop, she'd call us around the piano and we'd sing a song that the kids of all the ages knew, which meant it was usually about a dog or a cowboy, or the dog of a cowboy. Hazel Lloyd could do everything and knew everything in the world. She was like
Parade
magazine's Marilyn vos Savant, in sensible shoes.

She was the greatest educator I'd ever had, and I was sad to leave when it was time for junior high and high school. My only constant friend at both of those schools was my pal Alan Elsasser, a powerfully built athlete who convinced me after football to go out for the wrestling squad. The workouts were exhausting, and our opponents were literally bone breakers, but the traumatic part was that as a wrestler I was suddenly back in tights. A shade over six one, I wrestled in the 118-pound division. I was the boniest kid on the team. I was Kate Moss before Kate Moss.

One night after practice I was the last one in the shower and completely alone as I got cleaned up.

“Hey, Slim.” I turned to see who was quietly standing behind me and was shocked to see not a teammate or coach, but a photographer from the school newspaper who an hour earlier had taken our
official team photo. Why was he in the shower aiming a camera at me? I was naked!

Click
.

“Don't worry, I don't have film in it.” He grinned. Had I been wearing pants I might have walked over and inspected the camera, but I was bottomless and didn't feel like frisking the photographer, so I took him at his word. The next day twenty-five eight-by-ten black-and-white glossies of a very surprised skinny boy were taped to a single row of lockers near the school entrance. The entire student body was able to see my entire student body.

Rather than confronting the kid with the camera who took the shot—he was in fact twice my size—I pretended it never happened. I never told my family about being literally caught with my pants down. Of course if that happened today, if photos of a bare-naked minor were circulated at a public school, that place would be raided faster than you could say “Geraldo Rivera.”

I sometimes wondered whether that episode was why I had a recurring dream of arriving for class amid a wail of laughter.

“What's so funny?” I'd demand to be let in on the joke.

“You came to school naked, again.”

I had that dream for at least ten years after I graduated from college. Inexplicably, sometimes I dreamed I wasn't just nude, but sitting in a see-through aquarium being pushed through the school in a shopping cart. Eventually I just regarded it as some post-traumatic stress craziness and classified it as a dopey dream. Curiously, the worst part about showing up for school naked was no pockets—where does a guy keep his protractor?

Fast-forward a generation, and my wife and I made a pledge to try to keep our children from going through the school shabbiness we'd experienced. Because I'd lived in so many houses in so many towns, I made a vow to give our kids some stability and never move from our house, because we always wanted them to know exactly where home was.

There are few things harder for a parent than sending his or her
five-year-old off to school, except maybe a colonoscopy, although they both require ample sedation. I was at work when our eldest went to school on the first day, so my wife chronicled it with photographs and videotape, and when she realized “They don't have seat belts on the bus!” she and the neighbor lady hopped in a chase vehicle and tailed the bus, “just to make sure it went to the right school” three blocks from our house.

While a parent's anxiety is palpable, our son, Peter, didn't wait for weeks or months to let his apprehension build to a crescendo. He freaked out the first day before lunch.

RRRRIIIINNNNGGGGGGGG!

“Who's in trouble?” my son asked his kindergarten teacher as she picked up a ringing egg timer. Peter sat there with the panicked look of somebody caught halfway down the sheet rope in a prison break.

“Nobody…yet,” she said with a laugh, compounding his confusion. Some kids are terrified of Santa or, for good reason, clowns; Peter had a childhood fear of egg timers. Whenever his best friend Phil got in trouble, Phil's mother would twist an egg timer for an appropriate length of punishment and sentence the boy for that amount of time in the dreaded time-out chair. Name-calling got five minutes, wire fraud ten to twenty.

When my son heard the egg timer he assumed somebody was in trouble and about to be marched over to the time-out chair. His kindergarten teacher had decided that the class would color for exactly ten minutes, and to be precise she started an egg timer. My son was almost done with his coloring assignment when time ran out halfway through his blue period.

To her credit the teacher later diagnosed a little anxiety and called him up to her desk to talk privately. As she explained how the timer helped her manage time, he was half listening, half exploring the off-limits region of the teacher's desk. In particular his eye was drawn to a row of shiny cans stacked on shelves next to the story corner. After the timer talk he politely asked what the cans were, and she glanced over and said, “Oh, that's my special protection.”

Unable to read the label, from one of his Berenstain Bears books he recognized a single word on a can:
net.
He then deduced as any five-year-old would that it was some sort of protective aerosol net from the labs of Spider-Man. Suddenly my son was panicked by the prospect of not finishing assignments on time—when the buzzer went off, the teacher would unholster a can and ensnare him in a liquid net and then drag him down to the principal's office, where he would be forced to sit in a corner until he could correctly name the state capital of Rhode Island.

“Rhode Island City?”

When he got home and was asked for a first-day review, he gave the teacher good marks, and then, over chicken-fried chicken, almost as an afterthought, he revealed, “She's got cans of protection.”

Protection in a can?

Clearly his teacher had tear gas in class. Having promised I would not be one of those buttinsky dads, I followed my wife's sage advice not to complain immediately. Instead, I waited to voice my concerns at our first parent-teacher conference.

“Are you out of your mind having Mace around children?” I flat out told her thirty seconds after cooing, “So nice to meet you. Peter simply adores you.”

“Mace?”

“Peter told me you have some sort of aerosolized weapon.”

“I wouldn't even know where to buy Mace.” She sounded so innocent, but don't they always, the superguilty?

Pitiful getting caught red-handed and then lying directly to me at our first face-to-face. As she yammered and stammered I looked over her shoulder momentarily and noticed a stuffed tiger just like the one my father had brought back from the army. It sat next to a shelf that had four gleaming cans of industrial-strength Aqua
Net.

Protection in a can.

She wasn't packing poison gas; she had been talking about extra-super-hold unscented aerosol
protection for her hair
. Slowly my eyes returned to the teacher's head, and indeed she had an inflexible bee
hive that would surely remain in a fixed position during a subtropical cyclone.

“Mace, schmace,” I blurted out, trying to change the subject. “The main thing I wanted to address is the egg timer.”

She was surely relieved that I was no longer accusing her of warehousing a weapon of mass disruption, but I knew in my heart that she would forever quietly categorize me as some nut dad who spent nights listening to Art Bell on the radio while waiting for the day that scientists could perfect a robot wife that was affordable and reliable.

“I've always used it, but from now on, I'll make sure he knows the timer is about to ring, so it doesn't scare him.” I was delighted to hear her say that, and true to her word, he was not petrified again during that year, when she went through enough hair spray to carve a quarter-mile-wide hole in the ozone over Helsinki.

The egg timer and Mace case illustrate how as a father I made it my job to protect my kids, regardless of reason. When I was in school my teacher asked my parents how they felt about in-class discipline, and my father told them it was okay with him to spank me if I was asking for it. How quaint. If a kid got a dose of discipline today with a school paddling, before the kid's butt cooled down, there certainly would be a caravan of live trucks outside the school and Shepard Smith demanding to know, “Was there screaming?”

Okay, so corporal punishment has been banned, but why has common sense also gone the way of the passenger pigeon?

“Excuse me,” Sally asked her science teacher during a discussion on cloning. “Is it Dolly llama or Dolly the lamb?” An innocent question—she had a general idea that there was one of both; one was a cloned critter, the other a picture in Richard Gere's wallet.

“Miss Doocy, a public school is no place to poke fun at a religious leader like the Dalai Lama,” the teacher said. “You're trying to be funny. I've seen your father, and you're a family of jokers.”

For the record, we may be jokers, and we also have a riddler in the family, but when did every harmless ad-lib become a potential
three-day suspension? The Dalai Lama versus Dolly the lamb scandal earned Sally some stern words from a humorless administrator, and her parents were paralyzed with fear that a notation of “religious intolerance” would be placed in her permanent record.

“Don't worry about that,” the principal assured us, which only made us positive they'd already written those exact words in big red block letters across the top of her transcript, making it impossible that she'd ever be elected pope.