Tales from the Dad Side

by Steve Doocy

  “You don’t see that every day,” one of two dozen visiting priests said as my shirtless son speed-walked across the quad past their tour group. Surely they were thinking that he was a wayward young sinner who’d made many bad choices in life and that was why on this, the coldest day of the year, he was walking around with some devil-message chest tattoo. If he’d been strung out on heroin or a speedball, the priests would have stopped to straighten him out, but the free buffet lunch in the president’s conference room was about to start, and they didn’t want to miss the appetizers.

  “Now can I come in?” he asked the arena guard who’d shooed him away fifteen minutes earlier. The guard forsook his fire marshal threat, and surprisingly, Peter was admitted through a stage door, and found himself instantly the focal point of six thousand female Hanson fans.

  “Hey, come here,” a total stranger beckoned, turning his camera phone Peter’s direction. “I want a picture with the Almost Naked Hanson Fan.”

  As soon as they posed, a wave of applause swept across the giant room. Sensing that his audacious stunt was being warmly received, Peter shut his eyes and blew a kiss toward all, Sinatra style, and then took a deep and dramatic bow, and with that the applause crescendoed into a deafening tribute. Too bad it wasn’t for him.

  The Hanson brothers had entered through another stage door, and every set of eyes in the place was on them, not my son, who was basking in the applause. Returning upright, Peter saw that everybody in the facility was facing the other end of the stage, and he became as embarrassed as a person who was stripped to the waist could possibly be.

  Taking a chair, he was delighted to be inside with the pop idols of his childhood. After an hour his bliss turned to boredom. Hanson did not sing. They did not dance. His Magic Marker self-mutilation had gotten him a ringside seat for a mind-numbingly lifeless presentation about the accounting problems of independent record producing.

  MMmmm boring!

  Permanent black Magic Marker ink does not come off with a squirt of Neutrogena; two or three showers a day for a week and it was still visible on his rib cage. For a kid who’d grown up listening to Hanson, he’d moved on musically and was in fact a rap music aficionado, taking part in a weekly “rap-off” where he would compete against the other lyrical impresarios, many of whom were on the school’s nationally ranked basketball team. Imagine ten of the tallest young men on campus standing in the hall of a dorm, with a boom box rhythm track blaring as they all tried to outdo one another’s rhyming and rapping, and for some enigmatic reason all of the guys were shirtless. Apparently rapping was easier if the artist was not encumbered with a shirt that could ride up on his creativity.

  “Hey, Slim,” a future NBA multimillionaire asked, “what’s up with your chest?” pointing to my son’s torso, which still had the remnants of the Hanson ink. Peter thought the Lava soap had taken off the ink, and most of his skin, but to his chagrin it was still visible to the naked eye.

  “This?” he asked, pointing at what was left of the n in Hanson. “It’s a gang thing.”

  My son is six five, with blond hair and blue eyes, a guy whose belts have either lobsters or ponies on them; what gang could he possibly have belonged to, the Apple Dumpling Gang?

  “How’s your son loving college?” a university official asked me during his visit to my New York office. Usually that would be a proud parent’s chance to crow about his child’s achievements; I on the other hand felt like I was filling out a survey for J. D. Power and Associates and knew it was important to be truthful.

  “To be honest, he’s in a forced triple, a room that is dark and damp, next door to the laundry room, so every fifteen minutes when somebody’s white load is done it buzzes and wakes him up all night long. The room is also directly across the hall from the men’s restroom, a facility so ghastly that legend has it somebody from the class of ’03 died from some flesh-eating bacteria while flossing.”

  That was not the answer he was expecting. “But other than that, I bet he’s having a great year?” He should have stopped while he was ahead.

  “Actually, one of his roommates is up all night under his blanket talking to his girlfriend at another university on a webcam. So between the laundry buzzer, that odious men’s room, and the lonely guy making a booty call, my son has not had one good night’s sleep so far this year.” The college executive grimaced as if I’d just skied naked into a tea party with the pope.

  “Your son’s story is proof we need to build more dorms.” He was right, and I nodded my approval. “That’s why we’re in the midst of our three-hundred-million-dollar-endowment drive.” He then pulled out an impressive presentation with my name personally engraved upon it and made a pitch to me as if I were buying a time-share. “Let me show you the difference you can make by joining the President’s Club,” he continued, trying a new way of asking for thousands of dollars. Was he kidding? Was there a hidden camera somewhere? Apparently my son’s “dorm of the damned” story was a useful segue into the importance of contributing more. At that moment I was spending on college almost fifty thousand dollars that year, and would be shelling out fifty grand more the next and the next and the next. Each year I was essentially buying a Lexus that I would never drive.

  “I’d love to help, but I’m in cable.”

  “Yes, we watch you every morning,” he said, figuring that since his cable bill was $125 a month, I was personally getting most of that.

  Now that Peter is in his final year of college, I am amazed at how much he has grown. He’s off campus in an apartment that his roommates have decorated with a poster of John Belushi from Animal House flipping the bird, opposite a poster of Will Ferrell lovingly holding a blow-up doll. One of his roommates is twenty-one, so it was certainly that kid’s half-gallon bottle of vodka in the freezer, and the recycling bin was overflowing with his dead Coors cans.

  “Did you see all those beer cans?” my wife asked in a panicked but hushed voice as we left at the end of parents’ weekend.

  “I did,” I said, completely calm, amazed at how much I’d changed in four short years. “Isn’t it great—they’re recycling!”

  Mary, our second child, is now in college, and her first-day drop-off was just like our son’s; after everything was unloaded from the car, there were long hugs, and plenty of tears, and then the parents pulled out simultaneously for a titanic traffic jam where nobody was in a hurry to leave the children they’d raised. Every mom and dad and sibling looking straight ahead, crying. Kathy and I know for a fact that the hardest thing in the English language that a parent will ever say to a child is “good-bye.”

  Now that we’ve installed a second child in college, I’ve had a chance to think back nostalgically to the seventies, when there were fewer diseases and lower drinking ages, and pants were supposed to be worn that tight. I remember leaving home that first day: I gave my mother and father each a squeeze before I climbed into my dangerously overloaded Ford Pinto and, with sufficient promises to call the instant I arrived, put the car in drive and started up the on-ramp of life.

  I had put on the brave face, but I could feel real tears hanging off my nose. Pulling out, I stared at my parents in the rearview mirror; public displays of affection were rare, but there was my father with his arm around my mom’s shoulders supporting her as she hugged him. I’d never seen them like that before, and never saw them do that again. Maybe that was how they used to embrace twenty years before, when they were first in love, and I was just a twinkle.

  I’d looked forward to that day of independence for a long time, and suddenly my good-byes were over, and I was on my way, and I felt like I had a hole in my heart. The oldest child, the one my father called five times a day to help him do whatever he needed, was suddenly gone.

  “That’s what you’re supposed to do,” my father told me before I left. “Kids grow up and they leave.” And once again he was right, because I never moved back.

  I hope that when they’re through with college, all of my kids m
ove back, either to live in our house or at least to live nearby. We invested so much time, patience, and chicken fingers in them; it would be nice to admire our handiwork without making an airplane trip somewhere.

  To sweeten the pot, I’ve told them they wouldn’t have to pay us rent, ever. Of course, if they wanted to take us out to dinner and then maybe to a show like one by the legendary performer Wayne Newton, we wouldn’t say no. All we’d need is twenty minutes’ notice, so I could shower, shave, and strip to the waist and scrawl in Magic Marker Wayne nipple to nipple, which I can do faster than you can say “Danke schoen.”

  21

  Pride

  Dad, Stop Pushing Me Around!

  It was a busy morning. My father and I had already been to Home Depot and the tile place, and now we’d pulled in for the last stop on our errand list, the grocery store. He had strained something in his lower back, so he got out of the car very carefully. Walking, he was so wooden that he made Al Gore look like Freddie Mercury.

  “We won’t need that cart, Dad,” I said as he slowly and carefully pulled a shopping trolley out of the cart corral.

  Suddenly he froze in place. I figured he’d pulled too hard and hurt his back. That was not the case. Like Indiana Jones finally eyeballing the lost ark, my father was staring at this line of a hundred shopping carts because on the front of each and every one of them was a full color photograph of his son holding high a piece of cinnamon swirl raisin toast while promoting the Fox & Friends program on the Fox News Channel.

  “Holy cow, that’s you!” he blurted out in the same jaw-dropping voice a person would use if he’d walked in on the family wirehaired terrier applying over the phone for a Visa card.

  The cart promotion ran three months and had ended the month before, but this store apparently hadn’t got the new Tropicana posters to paste over my face, so that was why I’d completely forgotten about it.

  “That’s a very good picture!” His voice was dripping with pride. I’d heard him sound like that only a handful of times: at my wedding, upon the birth of my children, and in high school when I pulled off a wrestling upset and pinned the scariest 118-pound man to ever wear a unitard.

  “That’s my son,” he announced in full show-off mode to the produce guy, who did not instantly make the connection that I was on the cart. So my father pointed at the cart, and back at me, just for the benefit of Mr. Arugula.

  “Dad, don’t,” I begged, knowing he would badger the man in the apron until the employee realized who I was and ran through the aisles of the store screaming, “The face on that shopping cart is ALIVE!”

  As a father, I understood the pride of my father, which he tried to explain away as something else. “Stephen, I’m just trying to get you a little publicity.”

  Okay, that was one way to spin it, or maybe he was fishing for somebody to say, “Oh, that young man on the cart is your son? Then you must be a really good father, to have raised a man who has nice skin and is not addicted to offtrack betting. I’ll call the Nobel Peace Prize people about nominating you as Father of the Year.” Next thing you knew, my father would be in Oslo chatting up Jimmy Carter types and eating pickled fish parts.

  Whatever his motivation, I made sure we speed-walked through the store. But my father still did his nonverbal best to get other shoppers to notice me. He pushed the cart directly at a person by the dairy case and at another in the breakfast food aisle kamikaze style so they’d get a head-on view of my picture, and then he veered away at the last possible second. Then he took a comical double take at my picture and then directly at me. Nobody said anything—they probably just saw a distinguished man in a Burberry trench coat staring bug-eyed at a blond guy walking briskly ahead of him.

  Probably some sort of a drug interaction, passersby would think, wondering if the younger man was a male nurse, just taking the older gent to the store for a field trip. “Must be from the bin if he’s so happy to see a cart.”

  With the three items I’d sought now on the checkout belt, I was ready to make this as quick as possible. Sensing I’d pushed his mute button, my father stood quietly as I wrote a check for the exact amount and scribbled our home phone on the memo line.

  “Check-cashing card,” the gum-chewing cashier announced.

  Shoving my hand in my pocket to pull out my keys, I instantly saw I had a problem on my hands—I’d inadvertently picked up my wife’s key ring, which did not have our check card on it. “I don’t have it. Can’t you use my phone number?”

  “Go over to the customer-service booth. They’ll look up your number.” The clerk then picked up a National Enquirer to read about the latest starlet who was playing hide the moussaka with some Greek shipping heir. “I’ll wait,” he said.

  Blood pressure rising, I felt thoroughly insulted. I’d been to that store once a week for the last ten years. As my annoyance morphed into rage, I blurted out something I’ve heard many other people say but I’ve never had the reason or the inclination to announce: “I think you know who I am….”

  The clerk looked up, scanned my face, shook his head no, and returned to the Enquirer. Getting more steamed, I knew that if he ever planted that nose of his in TV Guide instead of that tabloid crap, he’d know I was on global television at least two hours a day, the host of the number one cable morning news show, the guy Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert skewered on a nightly basis. I was no fringe character known as Lonelyguy49 on the Internet with only seven Facebook friends; I was on the number one cable morning news show on the planet. Gosh darn it, I’m the host with the toast!

  “I come here all the time. You’ve probably seen me on television,” I said in a cheery voice, trying to be pleasant although I really wanted to clunk him upside the head with my two-pound London broil.

  “I don’t have a TV,” he said. “Do you want me to call a manager?”

  And then, like so many times before, my father intervened to help his struggling son. “Give him a break. He works here.”

  “No he doesn’t,” snapped back the cashier. “He’s on TV.”

  “I thought you didn’t watch,” I interjected.

  “Well, if he doesn’t work here,” my father observed, “then why’s he on your company cart?” It was a Perry Mason gotcha moment as the guy in the paper hat examined the ad and then turned toward me.

  “How’d you do that?”

  “Doesn’t matter. You’re going to take his check and we’re going to leave,” my father instructed like a hypnotist would say, “and when I snap my fingers you’ll have no memory of what just took place.” And that’s exactly what happened. The cashier took the check and we left.

  I felt a little bad that I’d given my dad a hard time about my picture on the cart; he was simply doing what all parents love to do, brag on their kids. Their pride is a triumphant validation that they did something right while raising us. There are few times in life as satisfying as when you realize that a parent is proud of you. It feels great when you’re twelve years old, and even better when you’re fifty.

  “Dad, none of that would have happened if you would have paid the twenty-three bucks for me,” I said halfway through the parking lot, and then I abruptly realized I was alone. My father was standing back at the cart corral using a ballpoint pen to pry my picture out of the black plastic frame.

  “I’m taking this home,” he said, rolling it up treasure-map style.

  If the cart police took inventory that night, three pictures were MIA. Incidentally, I don’t take my father to that store anymore; while there is no statute of limitations on pride, there is one on vandalism, and until it runs out in eighteen months, we’ll have to double-coupon elsewhere.

  22

  Emotion

  Daddy’s Mascara Is Running

  My daughter Sally has already made it clear that when she is a billionaire, she will sequester her mother and me in a three-bedroom villa somewhere on the fifty-acre, five-star resort she’s going to own and operate with Barron Trump, the Donald’s son, who
is currently under five years old. I believe Sally really means it, so I have taken her pledge as an opportunity to spend whatever money I have saved for retirement on Sudoku books.

  The desire to somehow repay your parents is universal; it’s an urge that goes back to when Noah was in third grade. “Someday I’m going to get you a big boat,” he promised his beaming parents. Unbeknownst to them, they’d one day share it with barnyard animals.

  When I was Sally’s age, I dreamed of saying thanks to my parents with a new car or a big house, but my first full-time job paid four dollars and ten cents an hour, and on that salary all I could afford was a board game, which meant I’d have to think less yacht and more Yahtzee!

  My father was the one I wanted to take care of first. The hardest-working man I’d ever seen, he sometimes worked two or three jobs to support us. Never spending much on himself, he made do with whatever he had. He was a handy man who never once called a plumber or an electrician or a carpenter when something at our house needed fixing, because he’d figure out how to do it himself. His only lament: “I could do this better and faster if I had the right tools.”

  My first payday was on a Thursday. The next day I walked into the Topeka Sears store, where America shops for its parents, and found exactly what my father had dreamed of for years: a three-horsepower, ten-inch radial arm saw. A mechanical cutting marvel, it also came with an automatic brake that would stop it in a flash, which was good because it was treacherous. I learned how much so from my wood-shop teacher when I asked him how many dowels to put in the side of a project, and he shouted “Five” over the buzz of a table saw and for emphasis flashed his open hand my way with every finger and thumb standing up, all three of them.