by Steve Doocy
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.
2
School
Don’t Eat the Paste
During 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 beehive 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.
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 y
ears 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.
3
Duty
Young Men in Uniform
Early 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.