Tales from the Dad Side (4 page)

Pondering the ramifications of a tainted permanent record forever haunting a person with its litany of juvenile indiscretions chronicled for posterity, I took the ultimate step in coming face-to-face with my own checkered past.

“Hi. I'd like to get a copy of my permanent record,” I told a woman who answered the phone for the Clay County Unified School District 379. I was prepared to demand access via the Freedom of Information Act, but the woman wasn't much of a stickler for bureaucracy, and within a week I was holding the much-feared repository of all bad acts from school, the grammar-school holy grail, my permanent record. The contents had been a mystery for three decades, and when I opened it I was instantly horrified. There they were—my pretty good grades, the total number of days I was absent, and
nothing else
. Where was the bad stuff? My single detention, turning the hall into a giant Slip 'N Slide, or the senior prank release of four chickens in the library. Where was the history of my hijinks?

The threat of the permanent record had always been a significant deterrent to keep us from doing something really stupid. “The permanent record is a myth from cartoons,” my daughter Mary informed me, and she was correct.

“Whatever happened to that lady in the one-room schoolhouse?” my wife asked one night when we were watching
To Sir with Love,
about the inspirational teacher. “Did you ever tell her thanks?”

Embarrassed that she'd meant so much to me when I was younger and yet I'd said so little since, a few days later I dropped a three-pager in the mail. About a week later I got a letter in exactly the same
penmanship I'd seen twenty years earlier. “Stephen,” she wrote, “I saw you on television recently and the word
media
is plural, and you've been using it incorrectly.” Although she was right, I was a little insulted that she was picking on me. But then I realized she was still teaching. “I know your parents are proud of your accomplishments, as I am. You have grown to be the kind of person of whom every parent and teacher dreams.”

I am covered with the fingerprints of Mrs. Lloyd and other teachers as well, like Mr. Denny and Ms. Chesser, Mr. Booth and Miss Corwin. I went through the list of every teacher for every grade as I flew back for my twentieth high school reunion. Before the half-hour slide show that would feature before and after photos illustrating dramatic hair loss and weight gain, I was situated at the bar with my best friends Bill and Gary. With a few giggles the absolute two cutest girls from my graduating class, who never spoke to me in school, sauntered up with a copy of our yearbook. The blonde started thumbing through it to what I imagined would be a mortifying photo of me—there were six in that annual alone. She flipped to the very back and revealed a single black-and-white photo held in place by yellowed tape: an archival photograph of a stunned 118-pound freshman wrestler caught from the rear and buck naked.

I was momentarily dazed. The brunette spoke in a hushed tone as if it might be illegal for thirty-eight-year-olds to be in the possession of the same kind of shot you'd see today on an Abercrombie & Fitch shopping bag. She whispered, “Nice butt.”

In appreciation of the compliment, I nodded, because when somebody's right, she's right.

Young Men in Uniform

E
arly I wanted to join the army like my father, but then I saw pictures of my uncle Phil in Korea and I wanted to be a marine, until I watched a movie where deeply tanned navy guys consumed beverages out of coconuts while native girls cooed nearby. Eventually I enlisted in the only paramilitary organization that would take a ten-year-old, the Boy Scouts of America.

I felt the urge to serve my country because the sixties were a scary time in America; college campuses were ablaze and the nation was at war. It was a time of free love and dope that could kill an elephant but not Keith Richards.

My father thought some marching and encamping would be good for me, so the second Tuesday each month he'd drive me after supper the five blocks to the University United Methodist Church at the corner of Santa Fe and Kirwin in Salina, Kansas. He'd watch me open the door, and then he'd wave good-bye as I descended the stairs into the world of scouting, where the motto was “Be prepared to sell stuff.”

“All right, men,” I remember my leader saying one night as he ginned up the crowd. “Let's get out there and sell this popcorn. It's a good product at a good price that's good for America!” And then we'd spontaneously burst into applause, as if we were listening to a Tony Robbins pep talk at Orville Redenbacher's world headquarters.

Some kids could count on their families to buy whatever the prod
uct was, but my family was always cash strapped, so I'd have to make cold calls to total strangers. We sold popcorn, candy, wrapping paper, (oddly) some wallpaper, lightbulbs, and once an artificial milk substitute from a Caribbean island that gave people intense abdominal pain. Back then nobody would have thought to sue the Scouts over any potential health hazards from shoddy products, because we were operating with the collective goodwill of a nation that believed it was buying things to finance our many good works. In fact, we were moving things that our ingenious leaders got by the gross at rock-bottom prices, resulting in a healthy profit margin. I have no doubt that if those guys were still Scout leaders, they'd have their boys selling cut-rate Botox and knock-off Kate Spade handbags.

For two years I was one of the troop's top salesmen, I had developed an irresistible sales pitch during our lightbulb promotion.

“Would you be interested in a three-way?”

An astonishingly high percentage answered in the affirmative before I would pull out my sales sheet, which detailed the exact specifications of our newfangled three-way intensity lightbulbs. While very successful, I never caught up to our leading salesman, who always beat me in total sales. I had no idea what he told customers, but I wouldn't be surprised if he said, “If you buy this wrapping paper, an orphan boy will finally get a much-needed Adam's apple.”

Our many profits were used to finance our monthly campouts and annual summer camporee. Officially the Scouts' mission was to build young men who would be trustworthy, helpful, courteous, kind, blah, blah, blah. The real reason I joined was to be given carte blanche to do dangerous stuff involving loaded rifles and flying axes, which occurred only when responsible mothers were at least half a county away.

This is living, I thought as I carefully trained the business end of the gun on my paper target at the base of a twenty-foot dirt hill that was the only thing stopping this pack of boys from slaughtering a herd of Holsteins.

“What are you doing?” a Scout leader screamed at my friend Phil
lip, who had accidentally waved a .22 in the general direction of the quartermaster, who got us a good deal on a gross of linoleum tile squares. “If you kill somebody, I'm going to have to fill out a form, and I hate paperwork, so cut it out!”

The guns and canoes were the two best activities and made all of my door-to-door glad-handing worthwhile; the rest of the time we did things like learn how to tie clove hitches and bowlines. The Morse code seemed useless, as we weren't heading back to the telegraph days anytime soon, and learning semaphore was absolutely idiotic until we realized we could send dirty messages by flag. We were, however, not good at that.

“Andrew just told me to ‘kiss his
a-d-d
'?”

“The
s
is tricky…”

Midway through our expedition they had a parents' day. When my mother asked where the ladies' room was located, my leader pointed in the direction of a ditch latrine. I thought she was going to cry. My father the army vet seemed satisfied that I was going two weeks without television while using toilet paper one sheet at a time.

“We had a tent like this in Germany,” my dad said, entering the canvas accommodation I shared with a panicky kid whose delicate gastrointestinal tract never adjusted to fried Spam or Old Trapper jerky.

“You got a dog in here?” my dad asked, which made me giggle, and I pointed in the direction of my roommate, who was outside showing his parents the tomahawk he'd gotten stuck thirty feet high in a cottonwood tree which he had to either retrieve or replace.

My father was quick to notice that I seemed to be the only kid at the entire camporee without a cot. I'd never asked my parents for one because they'd already bought me a new sleeping bag that year, and I didn't want them spending more money on me.

“I'm fine. I'll be home in six days,” I told my parents as they climbed back into their Galaxy 500 and went home. That night I developed an excruciating stiff neck for the sixth night in a row, so I wrapped my mess kit in a shirt and used it as an improvised pillow.

Early the next day we learned how to start a campfire without matches, and later we were exploding beetles with a magnifying glass when somebody called me out because I had a visitor. Walking to my tent, I wondered who it was—all of my friends were on the campout already. I pulled the canvas door back, and there, sitting down, was my father.
Uh-oh, somebody was dead.

“Sears was open,” he said as he swept his hand Carol Merrill–style the length of my new cot. “I got you the last one.” The fact that he had spent thirty of his hard-earned bucks on this made me feel special but a little selfish because that meant somebody at home was going without something.

“Dad, you didn't have to—”

“Stephen”—he always called me that—“I couldn't sleep last night knowing you had your head on dirt while your roommate, Sir Gas-a-lot, had a cot.”

My dad made a joke that accidentally rhymed. I gave him a hug, and as he walked back to his car, I suddenly felt like I'd drawn the card in Monopoly that said “Bank Error in Your Favor.” That night for the first time I was elevated from the rock-hard prairie floor on my brand-new cot, but now I had something new to deal with: the overwhelming smell of canvas. I now had the freaky sensation that I was trapped in a circus tent. The noxious fumes worked their magic on me and knocked me out about the time the coyotes stopped howling.

Those are the things I remember most vividly about my years in uniform. When in the second grade my son, Peter, brought home a note from school about joining a Cub Scout den, I insisted he try it. Pete loved the idea of having a uniform and eating out of little cans of potted meat, but as I learned shortly, much had changed in the thirty years since I'd worn the neckerchief. Let's start with his den leader, a wonderful woman whom we shall call “Mrs. Cuomo” because it was her name. She was a warm and engaging woman. But
she was not a man
. Sure, she could sauté and puree various traditional Italian family recipes and sew curtains with impossibly straight seams, but what
could she possibly teach these young men about ax handling and fish gutting?

“Dad, she's real nice,” Peter told me as I bit my tongue, knowing from personal experience that if a mother was present, no boy would ever take part in a longest, most disgusting belch contest. Mrs. Cuomo wasn't the only one. There were other nonmen.

“Nobody carves a pumpkin,” a volunteer mom warned us, “until every father signs a waiver.” She had prepared a quasi-legal document, handwritten on college-ruled three-ring-binder paper. It clearly stated that any injury incurred at her home would be the fault of the person with the knife, and not of the mother who made those knives available from her cutlery drawer. What had scouting come to? What had happened to the days when a boy and his dad could sit in the middle of the garage floor and carve gruesome jack-o'-lanterns while slicing off as many personal extremities as they wanted?

“I'm not losing my house if you lose a finger!” she said as I briefly contemplated giving her one.

My wife, Kathy, also got in on the action; whenever Peter would earn a merit badge or change rank, she would be charged with sewing it onto his uniform. Much of America had since abandoned home sewing machines, so she'd stitch the thick rubber and cloth badges on by hand. Just to puncture a needle through the patch was an arduous chore. She'd labor over a merit badge for an hour and was never satisfied by the end result, which seemed lopsided or crooked, but you didn't hear that from me.

When she asked one of the other mothers her secret she was told that everybody took the uniforms to a local tailor, who'd charge twenty dollars a badge. “You've got to be kidding me.” On principle we never paid to have anything sewn on a uniform. Peter, on the other hand, was just so proud to be a Scout, he didn't care that his bear badge was stapled to his shirt.

While much of the Boy Scout program had changed and was now infiltrated by women, one annual event remained predominantly male: the pinewood derby. When I was a kid the Scout leader would
hand everybody a cardboard box that had a long hunk of white pine, four silver nails, and a set of four black plastic wheels. My dad and I would talk extensively for about ten seconds and then he'd carve on it and then weight it with his Pitney Bowes postage meter until it was close to the maximum limit.

On race day, boys and their dads congregated in the church basement, where you could instantly gauge who had assisted in the construction of the cars. Most were done by Dad, but others were positively primitive because they were built by the boys themselves or in some cases with the help of their mothers, who were good with an iron but iffy with a coping saw. Just before my first derby race my father asked if he could make a final inspection of my car. He flipped its wheels up and squirted a little gray goo around the wheels.

“What's that?”

“Graphite,” he said in the same hushed tone you'd use while purchasing performance-enhancing steroids at the Summer Olympics.

“What does it do?” I hushed along.

“Reduces friction.”

I had never heard of graphite, but I could tell that if he was whispering and squirting it in the wheels after the car had been eyeballed by the judges, there was a chance this was taboo. I had the feeling that in a moment an official in kneesocks and with pasty white legs would disqualify me, and I'd feel the same kind of shame my friend Ted felt when his grandmother with glaucoma used her medical marijuana for brownies at a church bazaar. They sold out at fifty bucks a pan before the police arrived.

“Hi, Mr. Doocy,” my friend Curtis said as he walked up moments after my car got juiced.

“Hi, Curtis. Where's your dad?” I asked.

“He had to work.” His father was a delivery driver who had very long hours, which explained why his car was little more than the original hunk of wood with the wheels pounded into the sides and a number 7 hand scrawled on the side in ballpoint pen.

“Good job on your car,” my dad said, in a way that I could tell he really meant it.

“Curtis, let me see your racer.” My father was whispering again. “Is it okay if I lube up your wheels a little?” Curtis nodded, and four short squirts of the magic powder went directly into his wheel wells. I felt so proud of my dad, who was sharing our secret weapon with my pal.

“Third race, cars on the ramp,” the Scout leader announced. Curtis, my friend Chris, and I carefully installed our racers at the top of the twenty-foot track.

“Three, two, one, race!”

A lever was thrown that let the cars freewheel down the plywood. The whole race took less than five seconds: the winner, by a substantial margin, was the unpainted car with the number 7 on the side. Yes, thanks to my father's generous offer of a friction-reducing squirt of graphite, my best friend, Curtis, beat me by a mile.

For many years people have mulled over what really happened that day in Dallas in 1963, what they found at Roswell; in my head I've pondered, Would Curtis have won without my father's help?

When my own son asked for help with his wooden car I discovered that just like the recruitment of women into the ranks of the Boy Scouts, the craft world had modernized the pinewood derby industry, and a shockingly wide array of stuff was now available on the Internet. Precarved car bodies, special 1.8-gram wheels, and “synthetic weight” to give the car that the kid didn't carve enough critical mass to win the race. If a parent was going to forgo the carving and sanding and painting part, and just buy a premade car, why not buy a trophy?

“We're doing ours the old-fashioned way,” I told my son as I almost instantly gouged a Stanley carving tool about a half inch into my thumb. The blood loss was immediate and made a bloody blotch that was impossible to sand out of the surface of his vehicle.

“Can I try to carve a little?” Peter asked.

“Let Daddy do it. I'm old and don't need all of my fingers.”

Our car was complete after three hours and one knuckle Band-Aid. A week later in the middle-school cafeteria it was derby day. Peter walked around with his car in a shoe box to minimize the chance that he would knock the front end out of alignment. Many cars were like ours: classics carved by father and son. But there were a number that looked like they were made from the same material usually reserved for NASA's Saturn exploration vehicles, stamped out by a computer, airbrushed, and even lacquered by a professional in Taiwan—they were works of art. If this had been an egg competition, their prefab cars were Fabergé, ours deviled.