Bossypants (6 page)

The guys looked at him intently, then one turned to the other and said, “That is one boss, bold, bladed motherfucker.”

That’s Don Fey. He’s just a badass. He was a code breaker in Korea. He was a fireman in Philadelphia. He’s a skilled watercolorist. He’s written two mystery novels. He taught himself Greek so well that when he went to buy tickets to the Acropolis once, the docent told him, “

.” (It’s free for Greek citizens.)

Neighborhood kids would gather on our porch just to listen to him swear at the Phillies game.

(Andy Musser talked too goddamn much. Games were often “over” by the sixth inning. “This goddamn game is over. The sons of bitches choked.”)

When watching the Flyers, he would change the channel during commercials and he always knew
exactly
when to turn it back to catch the start of play. When my cousin marveled at this ability, my dad was matter-of-fact: “You just wait ninety seconds.” Isn’t everyone’s brain a Swiss watch?

Don Fey is a Goldwater Republican, which is his only option. If you’re Don Fey, you can’t look at Joe Biden and be like, yes, I want to be led by this gentleman with the capped teeth. You’re not going to listen to John Kerry pretending to empathize with you about the rising cost of your medications. You certainly aren’t interested in the “unresolved father issues” that rendered Bill Clinton unable to keep his fly closed. Don Fey is not going to put up with that. Don Fey is a grown-ass man! Black people find him stylish!

Don Fey has what I would describe as pre–Norman Lear racial attitudes. Once the Bunker family met the Jeffersons, every interaction between blacks and whites was somehow supposed to be a life-changing lesson, especially for the white people. My generation carries that with us, only to be constantly disappointed by Kanye West and Taylor Swift.

The twin house I grew up in was across the street from the border of West Philadelphia where Don Fey grew up. Don Fey certainly had friends of other races and religions. He has told me a couple times about the night he kissed Lionel Hampton. He was at a jazz concert as a teenager with an all-white audience. At one point in the show, Lionel Hampton would invite a woman from the audience to dance with him, but the white girls were all too scared to be seen dancing with a black man. To ease the tension, Don Fey jumped up and fast-danced with Mr. Hampton, at the end of which Lionel Hampton kissed him on the forehead to a round of applause.

Conversely, he would tell us things like “If you see two black kids riding around on one bike, put your bike in the garage.” This wasn’t racism; it was experience. Those kids
were
coming from West Philly to steal bikes. The social factors that caused their behavior were irrelevant to a Depression baby. When you grow up getting an orange for Christmas, you’re going to make sure the twenty-five-dollar bike you bought your kid doesn’t get ripped off.

Norman Lear might want us to take time to understand that those kids went to poorly funded schools and that their parents, while loving and dignified, were unable to supervise their children’s behavior because they were both at work doing minimum-wage jobs, but by then our bikes would be gone.

The late seventies were a dark time of “family meetings” about “tightening our belts.” The embarrassment of Watergate led right to the Iran hostage crisis. Three Mile Island was in our state. It was always “Day 27” of something in Beirut. There was an infestation of gypsy moths killing the trees in our neighborhood.

I can definitely remember a period of time when the gas crisis, the Carter administration, and

“Alan Alda’s bleeding-heart liberal propaganda” were starting to wear on Don Fey’s day-to-day dignity.

One Saturday my dad got it in his head that he was going to rent a rug shampooer at Pathmark and shampoo our carpets. He expressed this desire to my mother, who said nonchalantly, “Ugh, those things never work.” We still had a half-empty bottle of rug shampoo from the one other time he’d tried it. But Don Fey could not be deterred, and I, his faithful servant, went with him. We rented the shampooer, bought a new full bottle of soap, and loaded them into the back of the Catalina.

When we got home I was sent to play outside so my dad could shampoo the whole first floor. I barely had my
Star Wars
figures lined up in the patch of dirt by the basement steps also known as Tatooine when I heard a commotion inside. My dad was cursing. Objects were being rumbled around. I got an instant bellyache.

The screen door flew open. The two bottles of rug shampoo were slammed onto the back porch.

The rug shampooer came tumbling out the back door in a tangled mess.

“Your mother… is a witch!” my dad blurted as he came outside. He meant it literally. “She cursed me!” It would seem that the rented rug shampooer did not work. “The goddamn thing is defective.”

“Defective” was a big word in our house. Many things were labeled “defective” only to miraculously turn functional once the directions had been read more thoroughly. If I had to name the two words I most associate with my dad between 1970 and 1990, they would be “defective” and

“inexcusable.” Leaving your baseball glove in a neighbor’s car? Inexcusable. Not knowing that “a lot”

was two words? Inexcusable. The seltzer machine that we were going to use to make homemade soda?

Defective. The misspelled sign at the Beach Boys Fourth of July concert that read “From Sea to Shinning Sea”? Inexcusable. Richie Ashburn not being in the baseball hall of fame yet? Bullshit. (Don Fey had a large rubber stamp that said “bullshit,” which was and is awesome.) Was it too much to expect the rest of the world to care about grammar or pay attention to details? Shouldn’t someone at the Pathmark have to make sure that the goddamn rug shampooers are in working order?

He carried the defective shampooer down the back steps, the hose flopping around on purpose just to annoy him. There was sudsy water inside it, sloshing around, mocking his dream of an orderly house. “Son of a bitch!” As he backed our giant car up the fifty-degree incline of our driveway, scraping the bumper, he barked, “Get the bottle of soap. Come on.” I was going along for the ride back to Pathmark? Great. I looked at the two identical bottles of rug detergent on the back porch. One was new and returnable. One was six months old and half empty. But which was which? I couldn’t tell! They were opaque. I knew that word because I was in the Gifted Program, but it didn’t help me in that split second.

Why didn’t I pick them both up to see which one was heavier? Why didn’t I just bring both of them?
I would never be placed in the Common Sense Program. My dad honked the horn for me to hurry up. I grabbed a bottle and dashed for the car.

We rode in tense silence to the Pathmark. And, by the way, I get it now. I’m a working parent and I understand that sometimes you want to have a very productive Saturday to feel that you are in control of your life, which of course you are not. Children and Jimmy Carter ruin all your best-laid plans.

And then your wife casts some sort of evil spell?! Inexcusable.

I followed my dad as he stormed into the Pathmark to explain to them what kind of a country America was supposed to be. He took the bottle from me to put it on the customer service counter, and his face went red at the weight of it. I had grabbed the half-empty one.

And here was the indignity of the 1979 economy—we couldn’t afford to waste the three dollars.

Sure, once the Internet boom came in the nineties we’d all be throwing out half-full mouthwash because we wanted to try the new cinnamint flavor. We’d buy chamomile tea at Starbucks and not finish it. But not Don Fey. Not in 1979. He was going to have to drive home again and get that other bottle to return it. “Wait here,” he said in a strangled voice.

He left me at the end of the No Frills aisle. I stood there, fighting back tears, pretty sure that it was illegal to leave your nine year old at Pathmark. Unfortunately, I was wearing a red polo shirt and shorts. With my short haircut and doughy frame, no fewer than three old ladies mistook me for a stock boy. “Young man, where are the plums?”

I only hope that one day I can frighten my daughter this much. Right now, she’s not scared of my husband or me at all. I think it’s a problem. I was a freshman home from college the first time my dad said, “You’re going out at ten P.M.? I don’t think so,” and I just laughed and said, “It’s fine.” I feel like my daughter will be doing that to me by age six.

How can I give her what Don Fey gave me? The gift of anxiety. The fear of getting in trouble. The knowledge that while you are loved, you are not above the law. The Worldwide Parental Anxiety System is failing if this many of us have made sex tapes.

When I was a kid there was a TV interstitial during Saturday morning cartoons with a song that went like this: “The most important person in the whole wide world is you, and you hardly even know you. / You’re the most important person!” Is this not the absolute worst thing you could instill in a child?

They’re the
most important person? In the world?
That’s what they already think. You need to teach them the opposite. They need to be a little afraid of what will happen if they lose the top of their Grizzly Adams thermos.

Don Fey is from the Silent Generation. They are different from their children. They cannot be

“marketed to.” They don’t feel “loyalty” to Barnes and Noble over Borders. If you told Don Fey that you never go to Burger King, only McDonald’s, because you “grew up with the Hamburglar,” he would look at you like you were a moron.

When my face was slashed, my dad held me on his lap in the car to the hospital, applying direct pressure with the swift calm of a veteran and an ex-fireman. I looked up and asked him, “Am I going to die?” “Don’t speak,” he said. So, yeah, he’s not the kind of guy who wants to watch people eat bugs on
Survivor.
It’s so clear to me how those two things are related.

My dad has visited me at work over the years, and I’ve noticed that powerful men react to him in a weird way. They “stand down.” The first time Lorne Michaels met my dad, he said afterward, “Your father is… impressive.” They meet Don Fey and it rearranges something in their brain about me. Alec Baldwin took a long look at him and gave him a firm handshake. “This is your dad, huh?” What are they realizing? I wonder. That they’d better never mess with me, or Don Fey will yell at them? That I have high expectations for the men in my life because I have a strong father figure?

Only Colin Quinn was direct about it. “Your father doesn’t fucking play games. You would never come home with a shamrock tattoo in that house.”

That’s Don Fey.

Climbing Old Rag Mountain

Let me start off by saying that at the University of Virginia in 1990, I was Mexican. I looked Mexican, that is, next to my fifteen thousand blond and blue-eyed classmates, most of whom owned horses, or at least resembled them.

I had grown up as the “whitest” girl in a very Greek neighborhood, but in the eyes of my new classmates, I was Frida Kahlo in leggings.

For many people, college is a time of sexual experimentation and discovery, and I am no exception. After a series of failed experiments with Caucasian men, I discovered that what I am
really
into is Caucasian men.

And I mean
Caucasian
. Maybe it’s my way of rejecting my Hellenic upbringing, but I like ’em fair-skinned with old-timey manners and some knowledge of fishing. If I’m honest with myself, I can admit that I’ve known this ever since I saw Larry Wilcox ride a motorcycle—on the back of a flatbed camera truck—down the Pacific Coast Highway. I like white boys.

This worked out perfectly for me in college, because what nineteen-year-old Virginia boy doesn’t want a wide-hipped, sarcastic Greek girl with short hair that’s permed on top? What’s that you say? None of them want that? You are correct. So I spent four years attempting to charm the uninterested. (It was probably good practice for my future career on a low-rated TV show.) I couldn’t figure out how to play it. I couldn’t compete with the sorority girls with their long blond ponytails and hoop earrings. I tried to find the white-boy-looking-to-rebel, but I wasn’t ethnic enough to be an exciting departure. I wasn’t Korean or African American or actually Mexican. I was just not all-the-way-white.