Tales from the Dad Side (7 page)

“At least it didn't sink,” I said, flashing back to the Great Cow Pasture Disaster of 1967, another inglorious moment in our family history better left alone. We adjourned to the house, where my wife prepared a splendid meal of fried catfish that I had personally caught earlier that day at Safeway.

I Was a Teenage Bread Pirate

L
exus makes mustard?” I marveled at the high-end selection of foods as I put the jar in my cart next to the Rolex tomato paste. This was the fantastic gourmet grocery store where I'd gotten my high school freshman son, Peter, a part-time job. It was a monument to food, with live lobsters over by the Kobe beef, down the aisle from the high-end imported meats and cheeses, and with every variety of fresh vegetable and fruit, and desserts fit for a state dinner. My boy was hired as a stock boy, but at this swanky place, we dubbed him a “stock analyst.”

After his first eight-hour shift Peter reported that a high school chum saw him at work. “He said something like I didn't know your family was broke, putting the kids to work.”

“What did you tell him?”

“That you work in cable.”

In fact the job was Peter's idea because he wanted to make some money, and I wanted him to learn the value of a buck, so why not work at that store that sold monster shrimp for thirty-nine dollars a pound? Indeed, Peter learned the value of a dollar—that one buck could buy one-thirty-ninth of a pound of shrimp.

Two years later I persuaded my daughter Mary to apply for a job as a checkout girl at the same Gucci of groceries. On her first day, her first customer welcomed her to the world of work. “You are the dumbest person I have ever seen!” the shopper wailed at my honors-
student daughter when she was unable to scan, bag, and provide change as fast as a Ginsu knife salesman hopped up on Red Bull and absinthe.

Later an infamous titan of industry yelped, “Don't you dare, missy,” as Mary started to swipe his groceries through the checkout scanner. “The radiation from that will poison my food. Ring it up manually,” said the freaky Fortune 500 CEO. How did this dingbat make it up the corporate ladder? Usually companies don't hire a person for the corner office when he arrives for the job interview wearing a three-piece suit and a tinfoil hat.

Meanwhile her own classmates who'd seen her behind the cash register dissed her with “Nice bow tie, Mary,” a not-so-subtle reminder that she was somehow less of a person than they because she wore a uniform and they had the freedom to wear whatever slutty belly shirt they chose.

That town was a precious enclave of wealth, fame, and attitude, and while many were privileged, there was one customer who was always friendly and courteous and respectful of Mary as a person: a very famous rapper from Run-D.M.C.

He was the polar opposite of an alarmingly high number of customers who would say something mean or unkind. Every Sunday night when I'd pick her up after her shift she'd get into my car and break down in tears. We love the family that runs the place and I'd thought this would be a great job, but I had not factored in a few of the patrons who had her sweating like James Gandolfini on a Stair-Master. So we pulled the plug.

Getting my kids a first job at a grocery store was what my father had done for me, when he talked a friend into hiring me in my hometown of Industry, Kansas. Misnamed because there was no actual industry in Industry; apparently the town founders had figured that if they named it that, America's industrialists who needed to plunk their smokestacks somewhere would flock to our town, which they did not. Industry was small, and sleepy, a cozy hometown that was much like TV's Mayberry, without the crack law-enforcement team.

My place of employment was a shiny silver-painted Depression-era storefront on the main drag. It was a simple emporium featuring miscellaneous canned foods, starchy snacks, and every imaginable bug-killing concoction. The back wall had a free-standing deli case packed with freshly ground hamburger and various “lunch meats”: bologna; braunschweiger; and, from the
Who-Eats-This-Stuff?
category, headcheese, a vile amalgam of “head” parts harvested from the fatty noggins of barnyard animals that unwittingly volunteered for the job.

A small store required a small staff; we had a deli guy, a cashier, somebody to walk the bags out to the car for the old ladies, and a bookkeeper who'd balance the cash drawer at the end of the day. It was a four-person job, and I was all four of the people. I was also thirteen years old. Forget the child-labor laws designed to protect indentured children in overseas sweatshops from getting a dime a day to stitch soccer balls; I got a buck an hour, paid in cash at the end of the day, completely off the books because it was way south of the minimum wage.

There was one terrific fringe benefit: I could eat whatever I wanted. And the choice was always easy—this store featured Fanestil's, the filet mignon of boiled ham. For a kid who carried peanut butter and bologna on Wonder bread every day to school for lunch, Fanestil's ham tasted like a slice of hog heaven. Too pricey for my family to buy at a buck ninety-nine per pound, for the store's lone Saturday employee it was on the house. During my fifteen-minute orientation on how to operate the store, the owner suggested that I grab a bite during a slow time before or after lunch. “Just shave off two or three nice thick slices of whatever you like.”

“Okay. Where's the bread?” I wondered.

Pointing toward the bread rack, the owner instructed, “Take any kind you like. My favorite's Roman Meal.” And with that he pulled out a loaf of the rust-orange-wrappered bread, undid the twist tie, and stuck his hand in the bag. “I generally go about a quarter of the way back,” he said, pulling out two pieces. “Don't ever take the heel,
or whoever buys it is going to know that something's missing,” he added as he rewrapped it and replaced it on the shelf.

My first day on the job and I was learning the dirty little secret of small-town America's grocery stores—bread embezzlement. Apparently the owner had learned this trick from another shopkeeper, who reasoned that it was wasteful to open up a whole loaf, because by the time the single employee got around to finishing off a whole loaf, it would be as stale as a
Hee Haw
rerun. So the boss officially authorized me to be a bread pirate. It was the only store in America I knew of where bread was sold “as is.”

Later in high school I was lucky to get the best job in Clay Center, at a beautiful menswear store right on the courthouse square. The store's previous high school guy employee was graduating, and they needed a new kid who would invest every available nonschool hour there for two bucks an hour, which was double my grocery store loot. They also sent me to a menswear seminar in Kansas City where I sat in a room for an hour and was later given a certificate that said I was a
professional fashion consultant
. Years later my wife would ask me if things she was wearing matched.

“Well…as a professional fashion consultant…” and I'd launch into a theoretical discussion on aesthetics, making her wish she'd never asked me whether her stripes matched her plaids.

I was the only professional fashion consultant in my high school class. But there was a downside to being the youngest, limberest guy on the payroll—when Bob Finger, my boss, would point at a customer: “Steve, go size and fit that guy.”

“Size and fit” was what we'd do with formal-wear-rental customers as they tried on different jackets to find their correct coat size. Then, to calculate their proper rental pants, I'd measure their waist, and then I'd get down on hands and knees, take a deep breath, and measure the inseam, which was from about an inch off the floor northbound to the area where their pants stopped and
they
started, a task that still haunts me twenty-five years later.

“Hey, getting a little personal down there, Nancy!” one farmer said, and I instantly took a pledge never to get that precise again. Who cared if his drawers were droopy? I was a salesman, not a proctologist.

When I graduated, the staff of Summers Menswear threw me a party at the town's country club and presented me with the best possible gift, luggage, which I would haul around from place to place, job to job, for the next twenty years. During my college years I needed to make a lot of money over the short summer, so my father asked one of his friends to hire me at union-scale wages as a plumber's assistant. Plumbing was a highly mechanical and technical trade, and seemed daunting for a guy whose last job was akin to giving strangers a prostate exam.

The job site was a future assisted-living home, where I would be the second man on a two-man crew to install a quarter of a mile of black cast-iron drainpipe in the foundation. My boss was a plumber named Dick Landers, who upon my arrival handed me my own set of blueprints, which I unrolled and stared at blankly. I must have looked like a monkey reading a map.

“You've got 'em sideways,” my new boss told me, flipping them over and then giving me a general overview of what the blue lines meant. He knew I was clueless, but I was young and strong and he needed me to carry the cast-iron pipes. It was a collaboration of necessity, and barely into our first hour he revealed the absolute secret to plumbing.

“Here's all you need to know,” he said in a low voice, so eavesdropping electricians nearby couldn't hear. With seven words he was able to sagely sum up gravity and capitalism. “Crap don't run uphill, and payday's Friday.”

Over the next three months, with some days north of one hundred degrees, we finished the job. It was one of the most personally satisfying things I'd ever done. The two of us plumbed eighty-four units. Some days when my boss had an errand to run, I did the master
plumbing myself. I'm sure that was against the rules, but who cares now? That was almost thirty years ago. When I'm back home I sometimes drive by that place, where I have not seen a sign saying “Elderly and infirmed forced to evacuate due to hideous plumbing malfunction,” so I guess we did a good job.

I had a lot of manual-labor jobs, each uniquely challenging and requiring a different skill set. My father wanted me to learn to work with my hands, just as he had, giving me something to fall back on if my dream of becoming a world-famous cardiac surgeon didn't pan out.

My wife and I thought that aside from having regular after-school jobs, it was important that the kids help someone other than themselves. Peter worked at Camp Sunshine with the disabled, as did Mary, who in her senior year in high school took her sister Sally with her twice a week to read homework assignments to a pair of severely vision-impaired children.

Just like my father, I nudged my kids into getting jobs and seeing the real world with their own eyes. Of course times had changed; I never had to work a newfangled checkout scanner that poisoned fifty-dollar-a-pound Kobe beef. But my kids never learned how to pilfer Wonder bread two slices at a time. My now college-aged son, Peter, has graduated from the grocery and has since worked two summers at a prestigious law firm on Wall Street, where he spent more money on parking and the ferry than I made in two weeks at his age.

“Today this skinny contortionist bent over completely backward until he had his feet by his ears!” my son said, recalling a street performer he'd seen at the South Street Seaport. He told me the story as enthusiastically as he'd reported on the guy he saw on Comedy Central who had gas to the tune of the
William Tell
Overture.

“Then the contortionist, with his feet by his ears, walked over and put himself in a one-foot-by-one-foot glass box.”

“Wow, did you tip him?”

“Dad, I'm saving for college,” he said apologetically, “so I pretended I didn't speak English.”

Trying to amass his fortune. One day he'll make the connection that just like him, that performer was trying to make a living. Eventually he'll drop a buck in his box, as long as the contortionist isn't in it. Personally, I would have given the guy a ten, because with him bent over backward, feet at his face, measuring his inseam would have been a snap.

I'm proud of the fact that my kids got a head start on their peers in the world of work, and one day when they're a bit older I will reveal to them the final piece to the employment puzzle they'll need to know to survive the real world of work. It's something I've applied to every job I've had since I wore a hard hat.

“Kids, listen up…. Crap don't run uphill, and payday's Friday.”

My children will then sit there for a moment to contemplate the hugeness of this thought and how they could apply it to their own situations. Then my youngest daughter will bolt from her seat and scream toward the kitchen, “Mommy! Daddy said ‘crap'!”

My Father Is Martha Stewart

E
very year my friend Rich Collier won the science fair, but he had help from his father. His dad, Chet, was a television executive who would personally order the carpenters at
The Mike Douglas Show
to build whatever Rich wanted, and they did. Who knows? I might have gotten a science scholarship if only my father had run
The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson
.

Fathers are the default parent when a school project involves elbow grease, duct tape, or power tools that could result in the loss of a pinkie. But I didn't want to be the typical dad, and when my son Peter was in grade school, I wanted him to do the work himself unless he needed help. A second-grade assignment arrived at home to “diagram the atom,” and he immediately waved me away. Instantly proud of my four-foot Bob Vila, I didn't see his final product until back-to-school night. His mother and I reveled in the way our son cleverly depicted the atom's orbit with licorice whips and how the neutrons, protons, and electrons were dramatized by gumdrops and jellybeans. It wasn't so much a science project as a vending-machine explosion.

Hoping to catch some other parent's envious glances at my boy's handiwork, I let my eyes drift down the display to compare my son's work with his classmates'. One seven-year-old had a model of the atom's orbit built from construction-grade copper pipe. It cleverly used a toilet float ball as the nucleus. The copper alone would have
cost over a hundred dollars, before labor and parts and attitude. The boy who built it was coincidentally the son of a plumber.

A girl named Tiffany used five tandem Lite Brites to depict the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram, which shows the temperature of the stars. Her dad was a government astronomer for NASA.

Then it occurred to me: the kids in Peter's class didn't do this work, their fathers did, and that was cheating! The dirty little secret of grade school is that every day of every week, homework arrives, and fathers adjourn to the garage to build their child a good grade. A bit rattled by my son's project, which looked so…childlike, I pledged, “Next time I'm helping him…whether he wants help or not.”

A lot was on the line. If I didn't help him with the projects now, he wouldn't get into a good school or get a good job, so he couldn't help me out later in life, which would mean that penniless and deep in my eighties, I'd have to open a roadside souvenir shop where, curiously, I'd develop the accent of a Louisiana catfish wrestler.

“Build the solar system” was his next homework project. I immediately started planning. “How do you want to do it?” I asked Peter as he excitedly briefed me on his master plan to use flimsy construction paper as the background and depict the planets with ballpoint pen and ho-hum crayon illustration. He was describing a well-intentioned piece of scientific garbage that was a one-way ticket to a career collecting tolls on the Garden State Parkway.

“Hey, buster, I told you last time, we don't take Hardee's coupons!”

“Peter, that's a
very
good idea,” I said, “but how about if we do it this way…” and off I launched into my plan B, which would involve X-Acto knives, actual electricity, three trips to the hobby store, and enough airplane glue to sedate Jimi Hendrix.

“What if they find out you did it?” my little innocent boy asked.

“Peter, it's still your project. I'm only helping.” And with that I dismissed him so that I could concentrate on his handiwork. I'd inherited the do-it-yourself spirit from my father, who during my 4-H years would design and build various projects for the county fair that
would win purple ribbons and a trip to the state fair, so I credit my father for giving me the “crafty gene.”

“Dad, that's sweet,” Peter said when he first laid eyes on his finished project.

Styrofoam balls were scaled in size to the planets: Jupiter big foam ball, Venus little ball, Neptune mediumish. The planets were correctly airbrushed and then suspended with black wire hangers that kept them hovering a few inches above a huge three-by-six-foot piece of museum-quality black foam core. To add drama, I'd taken two strings of miniature Christmas lights and poked the heads through the foam to depict the Milky Way. It was stunning and the only science project that year that had a huge carbon footprint, which back then was what I thought you left after walking through a Boy Scout campfire.

Peter dragged it through the door of his classroom, and his teacher exclaimed, “Oh, that's wonderful!” Three days later the grade arrived home, and happily I got an A+. Did I say “I got”? I meant
he got
an A+. I just supervised a bit, if anybody's asking, but may I remind you we're not under oath here?

Such a dramatically large and scientifically accurate representation, Peter's solar-system project was permanently displayed in the library. A year later when a well-intentioned janitor tried to dust it, he accidentally knocked off Pluto, sending it rolling off to a fate unknown. The planet's disappearance led some of the more uncouth children who apparently had planet confusion to remark to my son, “Hey, Peter, what happened to
Uranus
?”

That solar system would remain on display for years as a testament to the fine work the students at this school were churning out on a daily basis. HA! Teachers know exactly who does the big projects. If one day a kid turns in an assignment with pipe cleaners and Popsicle sticks, chances are he got help from his parents when the next week he drags in an actual working heart bypass machine.

“Brandon, where did you get the idea to build that?” his teacher might inquire. An immediate and awkward silence is followed quickly
by “Upon advice of counsel I shall not answer that question on the grounds that it would violate my Fifth Amendment rights.” Not only is his dad a doctor, but his mother is a lawyer, and they have a joint subscription to
Martha Stewart Living
.

Maybe with my first child I overdid it. I would not make that mistake with Mary. When she brought home a social studies assignment with a selection of projects, she had the choice of constructing a wigwam, Conestoga wagons, a tribal headdress, or one of several lanyard-based knotting items. We selected the absolute hardest project possible, a scale model of a Viking ship. Three days and four trips to Home Depot, and the fleet of one was done.

“Mary…come look,” I announced with the tone of a proud father who'd just given birth to a 737-toothpick ship.

She'd assumed that like her older brother her only involvement in her school project would be dragging it from the car to the classroom, but I wanted her to actually do something, so I explained that she would have to paint it. I'd laid out the brushes and a smock, and opened a window for proper ventilation. How hard could that be? With my apprentice now in charge, I adjourned to the kitchen for a cup of coffee and then read the paper to see what I'd missed over the long weekend while I was in dry dock.

Returning to marvel at her progress, I was expecting to see her use the horsehair hobby brush with small strokes, carefully applying paint with the light touch of an impressionist. Instead I witnessed her pouring a river of paint directly out of the can and letting it pool on the deck of the ship.

“WHAT ARE YOU DOING?” I yelled in capitals.

“It's how they paint M&Ms.”

But we weren't building M&Ms, we were in the shipbuilding business, and now the ship I'd spent my entire week's allotment of nap-time on was a gooey gloppy mess. I caught myself yelling a little and had to remind myself that it was her project, not mine, and rather than say another cross word I'd have shot staples under my fingernails.

“Daddy, I'm sorry.”

“No worries, it looks great,” I said as I flipped the ship over and drained a pint of paint. Once dry you could not tell it had once been through a Benjamin Moore hurricane. To christen it she wanted to use the Swedish version of her name. Sitting at the family computer in the kitchen with her mother, Mary Googled “Swedish name for Mary.” Within one second there were over thirty-nine thousand hits, and most of these Swedish Marys were pictured naked, interacting with men who doubtless answered to Sven, for three dollars and ninety-five cents a minute. Without mentioning what she'd seen she made a spontaneous change.

“Let's call it the
St. Lucia,
” which she hand-lettered on the bow. It was fine with me because I love Lucy. She got an A on the project.

At the end of the line of my parental duties with my third and final child I came to the realization, as all fathers eventually do, that while my two eldest children got great grades, they might not have learned much from their projects, because their type A father had done all the work. Last chance I would take on the role simply of a creative consultant: if something needed to be cut with a saw or other power tool, I'd happily do that; otherwise, throughout her entire grade-school career she did it all.

On Sally's back-to-school night we beheld the projects by Sally's class. Several looked like they'd been purchased outright on the Internet; one was quite possibly produced by Industrial Light and Magic. Amid the smoke and mirrors was Sally's, a replica of the
Discovery
space shuttle. She had done all the work and it looked like it. Posted at the bottom was her grade: A+.

Sometimes it takes raising a couple of kids before a father figures out how to do it right. With our first two, I did the hard work; with my last girl, she did it herself, and today she is the handiest of my children. Every trip to Lowe's or Home Depot, she'd ride shotgun, and anytime the mom needed a small home repair or something restored to its original position, Sally would do it. And here's the proud
part: she learned how to do all of that stuff by watching me, just as I learned watching my dad.

Every teacher in America can spot a father's fingerprints on his children's work, and I think the reason they don't bust us is because they know in the long run it's good to have kids and parents collaborate. On our final back-to-school night, I pulled aside my youngest daughter's teacher and asked how she was doing.

“Nobody tries harder, and nobody is sweeter than Sally.” It was the kind of report every parent dreams of hearing.

A moment later a school administrator wandered by to chat, and I pointed to my son's legendary solar system still on display.

“It has withstood the test of time,” they said, beaming, even though we both knew they'd been passing my work off as that of a typical fourth-grade student for years.

Pointing to the missing planet, I asked, “By the way, did they ever find Uranus?”

There was an immediate eruption of laughs from the other nearby fathers. The administrator, showing he could not only take a joke but give one, handed me an official detention slip that indicated I was to report after the event to the cafeteria. As a local taxpayer who needed his beauty sleep, I certainly did not.

However, had I gone I could have chatted with other detained parents, taking great satisfaction in knowing that while we were all a little older and grayer, we could still do grade A work on the fifth-grade level.