How to Train Your Dad

by Gary Paulsen

  But imagine my horror when my father took his toolbox and started on the Harley’s fuel system. I can’t count on baby cats to fix all the problems my dad causes with his fuel-system tinkering.

  “Isn’t that sacrilege?” Pooder said when I told him my dad was working on the Harley.

  “Sacrilege?” I said, wondering where he found that word and whether he was now wanting to become a pastor or some spiritual leader because I didn’t think I could handle a Pooder who went around testifying and singing uplifting songs and badgering me to confess my sins so I could walk free in the light of forgiveness.

  “Yeah. You know. For him to work on a Harley like that. Aren’t they already, well, perfect? And if you mess with them, aren’t you committing a form of sacrilege? A violation of concept?”

  “It’s what he does,” I said, shrugging and thinking I’d have to find out what Pooder was reading because he was using a lot of new big words and seemed to know what they meant, and I wanted to rule out the worry that he’d found religion. “Since it doesn’t interfere with my retraining concept, I’m going to leave well enough alone.” I threw my own use of the word concept in there so he didn’t think I was completely ignorant.

  Except, of course, I was totally ignorant of what was about to happen.

  But sometimes ignorance is bliss, and so, for a brief, happy time, SP worked on the Harley fuel system and wasn’t out doing things that ruined my life with embarrassment; life was pleasant, and Carol, who’d managed to annihilate a skunk and something that might have been a gopher—it was so hard to tell what the leftover bits had once been that I called her Wood Chipper for a few days—left my right eye alone.

  But nothing good lasts forever, and so my happy time drew to a close. There came the moment when Dad finished working on the Harley and started the motor.

  It had been loud when CB brought it over. Like a machine gun, as I said before. But now, with my father’s Secret Knowledge Work on the fuel system, now …

  The Harley produced a sound that seemed to come from inside my own body, my own soul. A deep, resonating, thudding roar like thunder right after a lightning bolt hits a tree nearby. A ground-shaking, pulse-changing explosion that went in my ears and rumbled around in each cell of my being and came out of every pore of my body.

  A Harley turned loose.

  My father was sitting on it. He saw me and yelled over the engine roar: “GET YOUR HELMET AND COME FOR A RIDE!”

  I think that’s what he said. I was reading his lips because there was no sound but the Harley. And I’ve got to be honest, for just a beat, I thought of refusing him because I was a little afraid of getting on what now seemed like a wild beast.

  But the part of me that had apparently been created without self-preservation instincts, which was proof positive I was my father’s son and Pooder’s best friend, took over and thought, if I didn’t get on the bike, if I didn’t do this one thing, and I eventually became an old man, would I not wonder all my days what it would have been like if I had gotten on the bike?

  And so, I got my helmet, which was an old football helmet from a garage sale that had BRONCOS stamped on the side of it, clamped it on my head, and straddled the bike on what I learned later was called the sissy seat. Wearing pink bibs and a football helmet, I recklessly yelled into my father’s ear: “Let’s go!”

  It turns out I was not ready for anything that happened next, which was all right because I don’t have a good, clear memory of the next three and a half minutes.

  Which, coincidentally, was the precise length of the ride.

  I remember looking down and back as my dad cranked the hand-throttle and gave the bike gas. I could see jets of flame a foot long blow out the rear of the exhaust system, and I thought, Wow. Just that. Wow. Fire.

  I didn’t think Harleys were supposed to shoot fire out the rear like that.

  The motorcycle leaped forward, roaring as the tires caught the gravel driveway and screeched down the length of it—approximately a hundred and fifty yards—where the drive curved away from the river and cut into the main road.

  I don’t know how fast we were going as we neared the end of the drive and approached the upcoming bend, but I vaguely remember realizing there was no way we were going to make the curve.

  I felt my father’s body stiffen in terror-shock-fright at the sudden raw power and drastic acceleration of the motorcycle and I knew in an instant that his control of the bike and ability as a driver were nowhere near enough to combat the speed and power of the bike as we hurtled toward a turn we couldn’t possibly handle.

  The bike powered straight ahead, thundering through time and space, soaring off the end of the drive, propelled into the air, clearing the riverbank neatly—as if my father had planned it—in a perfect parabolic curve, before crash-landing with a giant splash in the middle of the river—both still sitting on the seat, Dad clutching the handlebars, me clutching Dad.

  As might be reasonably imagined, the bike did not float. (Pooder wants me to remind you that I already told you that Harleys weigh between five hundred and forty and nine hundred and five pounds.)

  The plunge paralyzed us—half surprise and panic, half shock and horror—and we were sucked down, some fifteen feet or so, to the riverbed by the weight of the motorcycle.

  Before I could kick loose, I’m pretty sure I swallowed close to a gallon of muddy river water and mother earth only knows how much turtle poop.

  But in seconds (which felt like days as my life flashed before my eyes), our survival mode kicked in and we broke free of the sinking Harley’s suction and struggled to the surface, before clawing our way back to the muddy riverbank where we dragged our way out of the water and lay sputtering and gasping in the thick grunge.

  My father, gagging on muck, rasped: “You know, I don’t think I did that exactly right.”

  GUN, SQUIRT, ONE EACH

  Turns out we weren’t motorcycle people.

  Dad borrowed a wrecker with a massive hydraulic lifting arm—it shows the strength of his bartering system that he could “borrow” a wrecker—and after many fruitless attempts, we finally snagged the bike with a grappling hook and dragged it out of the mud and lifted it out of the river.

  Because the motor had been running hot when it hit the cold river water, the engine block cracked. Then, too, hooking and snagging and clawing at it with a grappling hook until it came loose from the mud didn’t help the frame and suspension much, and by the time we got it out of the water and back in our yard, the Harley—the beautiful, perfect, powerful Harley—was totaled.

  “It’s like modern art,” Pooder said, trying to find something positive. “Like somebody’s make-believe sculpture of what a motorcycle should look like. You know, if you threw one at King Kong and he squished it in a massive hand. Makes good experimental lawn art. You could put it out front there and plant some flowers in it and people would think you meant it to be a unique yard feature. Good conversation starter. Just keep adding new pieces to it from time to time—say, you get what’s left of that football helmet bronzed and put it on top—and when I finally get some fame going and people are so interested in me that they want to know all about my best friend, too, you could charge people to see it. Pick up some good coin…”

  My father, however, didn’t want to have anything more to do with the motorcycle.

  Usually an outcome like this would inspire him to get back to work, repair it, make it better, retrace his steps, and work out the bugs, but not this time.

  He was done with the Harley, and he used the wrecker to lift it up and put it in the back of the truck, which we then drove to Old Oscar’s. Where he dumped it and left it. Done and gone.

  But even out of sight and out of mind, the Harley seemed to have a lasting influence on Dad. And not for the better.

  I think he viewed it as a failure, and to make up for his disappointment in his own skills, he apparently mentally resolved to rack up as many successes as he could.

  He (and by h
e, I mean Dad, Carol, and I) absolutely attacked garage sales, and read and followed up on ads touting “barter-for-goods” in the free local shopping flyers. I was so busy doing two negative reinforcements followed by one positive attempt that the whole time became a bewildering blur and I hardly had the energy at night to log my attempts and their subsequent outcome in my notebook.

  The puppy-food brochure assured me that persistence and patience were everything, so I stayed the course, as best I could.

  But then something happened that was so socially devastating that … well, you’ll see. Pooder says this is what’s called building suspense and that every good book should have some.

  It was getting toward the end of summer, and the market in town was bursting with new produce. Which meant the dumpster in back of the store where we got food to feed the pigs seemed to almost explode with battered and wilting vegetables and bruised fruit and all kinds of other surplus potential pig food like marble rye bread and expired tubs of yogurt and freezer-burned frozen pizzas.

  On one trip, as we pulled around and parked the truck in back of the store, we found a hog gold mine. There were thirty pounds of containers of whipping cream, close to forty pints of slightly spoiled strawberries, and eleven outdated angel food cakes.

  It was a full load by itself and we hurried to get it in the truck and then rush back to the pigs. We ripped open the containers of whipping cream and poured them in the trough, dumped in the strawberries and stacked the cakes on top. The effect was immediate. The pigs literally submerged their heads in the cream, hunting berries, raising at intervals to get a breath and slurp down a large chunk of cake before ducking back under, snort-snuffling and bubbling and chewing in ecstasy.

  There’s nothing as joyful as a feeding pig. You can take my word on that one.

  We were dumping the last batch of treats, hurrying so we could get back to the store for another load of dumpster goodies, when I stepped wrong, tripped, stumbled, and fell headfirst toward the trough full of cream. As I was falling, I tucked and rolled, twisting away from the trough, so I landed on the mucky ground.

  I hoped what I fell in was mud, but I am not that lucky and the smell quickly indicated that it was way more than wet dirt. As Pooder tells me several times every day he comes over to our place, there is very little on the planet that stinks worse than pig poop.

  Since we were aiming to make another run back to the store to get a load of vegetables before they were taken away by the garbage truck, my dad said I didn’t have time to shower and change clothes. “Just do a quick rinse with the hose at the side of the pigpen, give yourself a good shake, and with the windows of the truck wide-open, you’ll be air-dried by the time we get to town.”

  I was, of course, wearing a pair of pink bibs and the pig poop didn’t “hose off” like magic, and I started to kick up a fuss about changing because I didn’t want to wear pig-poop-saturated pink bibs into town, even to go dumpster diving, but Dad was freaking out about losing our “window of opportunity.”

  “We don’t want miss a whole load of good veggies,” he said. “Pigs can’t live by cake and cream alone—we have to balance their diet. Nobody will see you. It’ll be fine.”

  I had, over the last week, worked in the garden without a hat, and my nose and the tops of my ears were badly sunburned, which gave me a purple-nosed, flopping-red-ears disaster fashion look, and to cap it off—no pun intended—I was wearing the big straw hat.

  With the see-through green visor in the front.

  And because Dad drove the truck, which had no air conditioning, with windows open and a fast wind blew through the side from the little butterfly windows at the front of the door-windows, I had needed to rig up a quick chin strap to hold it on my head and all I had was a piece of orange-colored baler twine.

  Pink-bibbed, poop-covered, straw-hatted, red-eared-and-nosed—your basic complete clown costume—headed for the dumpster riding shotgun in a beat-up, more-than-half-a-century-old truck next to a pit bull that kept smiling at me while she studied my right eye.

  Totally cool.

  But my dad was probably right—nobody would see me.

  This is probably a good time to introduce a new character to the story we’re putting together here. Her name is Marge. She is an elderly woman who roams around town and the nearby countryside calling herself the “Video Reporter.” That means that she went looking for interesting things to record with her phone and then edited stories—hard-hitting news packages, if you will—before pitching them to the local news station. Most of her stuff never saw the light of the television studios, but …

  You already know where this is going, don’t you.

  I noticed her truck in the parking lot in front of the store—an older Toyota with flowers and strange lightning bolts painted on the side—and, if I thought about her at all, I assumed she was shopping for groceries.

  But no.

  Without our knowledge or consent or permission or approval or legal waiver, she took several videos of us, apparently shooting from around the corner of the store, and sent them into the news channel with a color commentary voice-over:

  “Showing how to live in a completely green, sustainable manner, a local family gathers unwanted food to feed themselves and livestock. A father-and-son duo prove it can be done.”

  And there I was, in all my glory, rooting around in the dumpster, featured as the human interest slot of the evening news.

  At five o’clock, six o’clock, and, in case you missed it, again at eleven. And, because that’s how these things go, all over the TV station’s multiple social media platforms as well.

  In living color.

  Let me repeat the image in case it’s faded from your mind.

  Red nose, folded-over red-tipped ears, mud-and-poop-covered pink bib overalls, and a straw hat held down by a tightly tied, frayed orange piece of baler twine, grabbing armloads of what can only be called sloppy trash out of a dumpster accompanied by a pit bull who did notice that she was being filmed and was, I swear, giving her best and brightest smile for the camera.

  Look, I know it’s not completely my father’s fault. He didn’t know that the sniper-reporter would catch sight of us and see the newsworthy aspect of our endeavors; it’s not the type of thing, I admit, that anyone could predict and then avoid.

  But all of this is, in a very real way, directly due to his actions and philosophy about not using money because that’s where the ridiculous clothes I had to wear came from. Pooder pointed out that I ended that sentence with a preposition and I should have mentioned that the clothes were beside the point and that the dumpster diving was the primary source of humiliation for me.

  So it was not entirely, but mostly, my dad’s fault. Even so, I was the one who got inundated by the storm of emails, subject line “Bin Boy” and “Trash Warrior” and “Garbage Guy,” because my dad doesn’t even have email, does he?

  My father’s only comment when he saw the news clip and the social media posts and the emails: “Good coverage, accurate take on our quality example of sustainable living. We are so ahead of the curve on this one. Just watch, we probably kicked off a new trend.”

  “Excellent pictures,” Pooder said the morning after what he called the news breakout. “Marge must have done some updating on her video app. I could easily tell it was you. Heck, it even shows your eye color and some of the lower cheek pimples.”

  Oh good, I thought. Pimples. Why not? I mean, I understand it’s not like I started on a very high social plane, but this did it: I was socially ruined. As in, was it possible for me to move alone to another country and get a new name? That kind of ruined.

  “It could be worse,” Pooder said.

  “How?”

  He opened his mouth to explain, instantly realized he couldn’t, and immediately changed course. “Here’s how you handle this: Just own it. Put out a statement that you were having a bad-clothes day because what’s the point of wearing nice clothes when you dumpster dive for pig food,
and then people won’t think you’re completely fashion-handicapped. Problem handled.”

  Put out a statement. Right. Then I did something I’ve never done before—I walked away from Pooder before he could figure out a way to make this debacle part of his future plans to make some good coin.

  And so.

  Back to the pamphlet.

  Which said—not quoting, but another paraphrase here—that if the subtle negative approach to positive reinforcement didn’t prove successful, it might be wise to go to a more physical negative concept.

  They said to try a squirt gun with water.

  And do it hidden somehow so that if the SP started to do something incorrect, say mess on the floor, just squirt him, or her, with water when SP wasn’t looking. So the SP will simply be confused and bewildered by the sudden drops of water seemingly out of nowhere and his attention will be distracted momentarily so you can run something positive into the situation in that moment.

  Which sounds pretty uncomplicated except that the pamphlet writer wasn’t constantly being observed by a pit bull named Carol, who was already suspicious of me and probably certain I had somehow wrecked the Harley that she seemed to think was on loan from CB, whom she loved.

  And it turns out she had a thing about guns. Which I did not know at the time, but will now never forget.

  I bought a package of small plastic toy squirt guns, so tiny that one of them would almost totally fit in my hand and pocket and they were in fact pink—which was good because I didn’t want anybody to mistake them for a real gun that I might be seen aiming at my father now that I was a talking point around town. I filled one with water at the kitchen sink when Dad was outside, and started to put it in my back pocket.