by Jim Lindberg
So with all this dysfunction in my past and the economic needs of raising a kid, I started wondering if I’d be up to the challenge. Yes, I would be, I decided. There wasn’t really a choice unfortunately. I’d have to become superdad. I’d work hard, be involved in my kids’ upbringing, and deliver beat downs to anyone who looked crossly at them. I would go on tour, play shows, and then come home and tuck the kids into bed at night and clear the monsters from their closets. I needed to go into warrior mode. Armed with the love and trust of my devoted wife, and a few cases of baby wipes, I’d be able to get through anything. I’d teach my kids to be upstanding little warriors of their own, but ones who listen to Iggy Pop and read Nietzsche and Voltaire. It won’t be easy, but dads have been succeeding at it for years, and for some reason keep doing it with alarming frequency, so it couldn’t be all bad. The kids might hate me from age ten on, no matter what I do, but one day they might have kids of their own and realize what a hero I was. Either that or they’ll wait to find out what I plan on leaving them in my will, and if I haven’t spent it all on college tuition, new bicycles, and therapy, maybe then they’d finally appreciate me.
STORY OF MY LIFE PART 2
The year that I found out I was going to be a dad for the first time turned out to be the most tumultuous of my entire life. Two of the small underground bands we’d played shows with for years, Green Day and The Offspring, suddenly blew up and started selling millions of albums. Our insular little underground punk scene was the subject of magazine cover articles about “The Year Punk Broke,” and all of a sudden we were all put under music media industry scrutiny we never asked for. We had started out as a small punk band with no plans for the future other than to play to a few friends at backyard keg parties, and now there were record labels and agents expecting us to sell millions of albums. There was also the pressure from our fans and critics from the punk scene not to sell out. For our part, we just wanted to play music and have a good time. We went into the studio and recorded a new album, wondering where the hell this was all going to take us.
After our third album was released and we were beginning to settle into a routine of writing albums and recording and touring, amid the newly expanding independent punk scene, we started noticing that Jason was having more trouble shutting the party down when the tour was over. Coming from a one-square-mile party town that drinks more Budweiser per capita than most small countries, it was hard for us to notice when one of us was developing a problem. When Jason did finally agree that he needed to get some help dealing with it, he called me and said he was glad he’d made the decision to go in for treatment and that the people there had convinced him that he wouldn’t live long if he went back to drinking like he had been. He was anxious to get back to writing songs and touring with the band, and I never heard him sound happier.
The problem was that none of us in the band were A.A. counselors and didn’t know how to deal with his problem, and going right back on the road with everyone drinking and partying every night turned out to be the last place Jason should be. It wasn’t long after our first tour out that he fell back into his old ways. It was incredibly hard for us to understand because he was such a fun-loving guy, no one wanted to bring down his good time, but since we were worried about his health, we decided that he’d have to either agree to quit drinking again for his own good, or go home and deal with the problem. We all thought we were doing the right thing for him. The next day he packed his bags and a cab picked him up and took him to the airport.
We got our friend Randy to fill in for him on bass and went out on the Warped Tour for the first time, hoping Jason would get the help he needed. I’d figured when he was ready he would rejoin the band, and we’d move Randy over to second guitar and everything would be back to normal. We’d never been doing better: The punk scene was alive and vibrant again with more and more bands popping up every day, and I was looking forward to having a kid soon and starting a family of my own. Everything was looking up.
We were out on the road on the Warped Tour one night when I decided I’d better call Jason and check in with him and let him know that as soon as he felt ready, he should come back out on the road with us and start writing songs again. Then we’d be back touring and having a great time just like always. It was late and I couldn’t get to a phone, so I decided to wait until the next day for our day off when we’d get to a hotel to call him. When we pulled up to the hotel the next evening, Fletcher came onto the bus while we were sitting around gathering our stuff, waiting to be checked in, and told us that Jason had been found dead of a self-inflicted gunshot wound.
We flew home and attended the memorial service in a daze. Sitting in the bleachers at the local baseball field where we all played as kids, listening to friends and family talk about what a great guy he was, none of it seemed real. We went back out to the Warped Tour and played to a huge crowd feeling like our hearts had been ripped from our chests. I didn’t feel like we should continue playing, as Jason was the soul of our band and the reason I’d joined the group, but we didn’t know what else to do, so we just kept going. I didn’t have time to stop and process what had happened. At the same time I was dealing with becoming a father for the first time, and all these conflicting pressures and emotions felt like they were closing in on me. There were times when I just picked up my guitar and played until my fingers bled.
Probably the only thing that got me through it was knowing that in a few months time, I was going to be starting a family and that I had to be ready for it, even if inside it felt like everything was spinning out of control. Sometimes I imagined that being a parent would be the easy part, and that dealing with everything else would be what made it overwhelming, but there was no time to focus on that. I had to somehow prepare myself for what I was heading into, even though at the time, I had no idea.
I HATE MY SCHOOL
After going through everything that had happened since Jennifer and I first found out we were having a kid, it felt like we would have to be ready for anything once it started getting closer to our actual due date. I had to admit that I knew very little about childbirth beyond what I’d seen on phony television episodes and what I remembered from my high school sex ed class. Like most things in life, I planned to just fake my way through it and hope for the best. The trouble is, without advance warning, some guys could find out what the word “episiotomy” means and have a total freak-out because some pretty heavy stuff goes down in there. I wanted to get as many facts and as much information as I could going in so I didn’t blow it by seeing something unexpected and end up puking all over the delivery room.
These days you can’t change the channel without coming across one of those Live in the ER cable TV programs that take you up close and personal for an actual birth. When it comes time for the baby to come out and things start stretching out to insane proportions I usually panic and change the channel. When the baby starts crowning, it can pretty much blow your mind completely with how intense, noisy, and messy it is. It isn’t pretty, let’s just put it that way. Sometimes you hear people talking about how beautiful and wonderful childbirth is, like the baby just arrives on a blanket of gossamer angel wings with harps playing in the background. I guess I can see some beauty in the delivery process in an abstract, theoretical kind of way, but otherwise it can be kind of graphic and horrific for first-time dads. Knowing my propensity to get a little nervous around blood and gore, I decided that I would stand above my wife’s shoulder and take in the whole spectacle from above, unlike some guys who get right in on the action and squat down there next to the doctor like they’re Mike Piazza waiting on a curveball. For everything else, I could watch as many shows and read as many books as possible, but to get all the necessary information explained in detail, I knew we were going to have to take a birthing class.
Lamaze classes were ridiculous. Mary and I didn’t buy into it at all, and we thought the other couples were lame. We knew that the minute it got rough we’d say “Drugs, NOW.�
� and that would be the end of it. We told the people in the first class we planned on naming our daughter Elvis. It was clear from the outset that we were the classroom flu. We spent the rest of the classes proving we deserved the honor.
—Tony Cadena, The Adolescents
When we were pregnant with daughter number one we decided to take the Lamaze class the hospital offered that met one night a week for a month. This was our first experience being around other parents and we felt all weird and uncomfortable and out of place because we aren’t really the type of people who enjoy sitting around in circles and talking about sexual reproductive organs and telling intimate stories about ourselves with a bunch of complete strangers. I was terrified I would be put on the spot by the teacher and mispronounce some part of the female anatomy and have to explain to the class what a “labia majora” or “mons veneris” was and where it’s located.
So luckily, the wife of one of my best friends was also pregnant and they signed up to take the class with us, which was great because we were then able to make sarcastic comments under our breath and giggle like schoolgirls whenever the teachers said things like “scrotum” or “vagina” or showed a slide of any of those things to the class. The class went well until about three-quarters of the way through when the nurse is having the women try different positions for pushing during labor. Most of them are well into their second or third trimester and look like they’ve just swallowed some type of dodge ball accidentally. The lights in the room are darkened to set a tranquil mood, and everything is very quiet as the men all pretend to murmur encouraging advice and count off for their wives just like it’s the real thing. The nurse tells the women to roll over on their sides and try a new position, and starts saying in a quiet, soothing voice, “Just relax, mommies. Relax your body in between contractions and catch your breath. That’s it. Good. Relax. Give her encouragement, dads. Tell her what a great job she’s doing and how much you love her. That’s it. Count for her, dads, help her out. Relax, ladies.” Just when the room was so peaceful and quiet you could only hear the barely audible humming of the fluorescent lights above, suddenly I’m startled by a loud blast of flatulence right next to me as my friend’s wife accidentally lets rip a powerful fart that splits the still classroom air like a rifle shot in the woods.
There’s absolutely no chance everyone in the room, hell, the whole hospital floor, didn’t hear it. To her credit, the stoic and professional nurse didn’t miss a beat, but she couldn’t ignore it, either. “That’s totally normal and common to let out a little gas in this position, just everyone continue to relax. Relax and breathe. It’s nothing to be concerned about.” My friend and I couldn’t take it, though. First, he started to giggle, and then the whole class joined in. He said, “Honey, I think you’re relaxing a little too much!” We still laugh about it to this day, and I promised my friend’s wife I wouldn’t put it in the book.
BABY-PROOFING
Once we had separated our anxieties into manageable sections we could stress about one at a time, we had to start getting the house ready for our new arrival. When you are about to have a kid, people will always ask you whether you’ve baby-proofed your house yet. It seems to me this should mean you have made sure there’s no way any crazed babies could break in and steal all your pacifiers and blankies. We spent a lot of time going around the house and covering sharp corners, plugging outlets, and putting safety latches on windows, doors, cabinets, drawers, and cupboards, anything that could slam shut and squash little fingers, even our toilets. We put smoke alarms and carbon monoxide detectors in every room and set the temperature in our water heater so that it couldn’t exceed 120 degrees so we didn’t accidentally poach the poor kid. Over the years, with three kids, we’ve become so paranoid that we look at everything in our household as a potential lethal weapon, and my wife goes into our kids’ rooms multiple times during the night just to make sure they’re still breathing.
The next step was to set up a room for the baby to sleep, play, and crap in, and my job, of course, was putting all the baby furniture together. For some reason most cribs are made in Scandinavian countries that use only their own unique brand of hex head tools, and they usually give you about half the nuts and screws you need to put the thing together. The directions consist of little minimalist line drawing pictures of disembodied hands assembling the hex heads and locking bolts in areas that look nothing like what’s in front of you. I sweated through the mind-numbingly difficult task of assembling the damn thing with its thirty million hexagonal nuts and bolts in the living room only to realize that once it was put together it wouldn’t fit through the bedroom door. Later on I discovered that it wouldn’t fit through the bedroom window, either. Over the years I’ve found that when assembling any piece of bedroom furniture or complicated toy for my kids, I need to factor in a good three extra hours, accounting for several breaks to go into the garage and drink beer and curse at Swedish furniture makers.
TIME HAS COME TODAY!
I was sound asleep one night because everything was ready to go and I could sleep well knowing we were prepared and so I was dreaming about surfing in turquoise blue water off an island somewhere in the South Pacific and the Sports Illustrated swimsuit girls were on the beach waving to me, but oops!, one of their tops just accidentally popped off, and the sun was out and warming the little beads of water on my back, and I was ecstatically happy, and then suddenly, one of the swimsuit girls had Jennifer’s voice, and she’s yelling, “Jim! Jim! Wake up!” Then the light popped on in the bedroom, and I sat bolt upright in the bed and tried to figure out what the hell was going on. My eyes started to focus and I could see my wife standing in the hallway in her nightgown with a pool of clear liquid on the floor between her legs. “What the hell? Did you just piss yourself?”
No, her water just broke in the middle of the night and now without warning my new life as father went from one of theory to one of practice to the real damn thing and my blood pressure instantly went up about 20 percent and hasn’t gone back down ever since. I immediately jumped out of bed and started freaking out. Jennifer told me to calm down but I couldn’t so I looked around for the bag we’d packed for the hospital, put on my pants, wiped up the mess on the floor, left food out for the cat, and tried to find the keys for the car, and I was doing all these things at the same time so I’m doing them all badly. She was completely calm during all this, which for some reason really pissed me off because I’m not calm at all, and her telling me to be calm is just making me that much more not calm. I finally get everything in the car, called my parents to let them know we’re going to the hospital, and then peeled out of the driveway, down the road to the rest of my life.
On Valentine’s Day morning at 2 A.M., with my wife sitting on a towel in the passenger seat beside me, I sped through the empty streets of the South Bay and pounded the steering wheel frantically at red lights, finally making it to the doors of Little Company of Mary, the local hospital where I myself had been born decades earlier and where I had been stitched up and treated for various broken limbs, puncture wounds, and food poisonings my whole life. Little Company is a Catholic hospital with sisters and nuns in full head dress roaming the halls, and with statues and paintings of the Virgin Mary solemnly staring down at you everywhere as you pass by. Because our baby was coming out a few weeks premature, when we came rushing in I was tense and worried and agitated and wanted everything as soon as possible, and the lady registering us could probably tell just by looking at me I was going to be a stage-5 stress case the whole time.
When we made our way up to the labor and delivery floor and were meeting the staff for the first time, the head nurse also looked at me a little weird. I suddenly realized how I must have looked at the moment. A few weeks before, I had tried to dye my hair bright red with some vegetable hair dye I got from the local punk store, but I don’t think I left it in long enough because in places it had kind of faded into this gross brownish pink color. I hadn’t shaved recently and had the rem
nants of a scruffy beard, and I looked down and realized that I was still wearing the Dead Kennedys shirt I wore to bed that night. I’d always actually admired JFK, but to people not in on the joke, especially those who were around to witness the event on television, wearing a T-shirt making light of an assassinated president pretty much singles you out as a commie-loving flag burner. As she was checking us in and taking our information, the matronly head nurse asked what I did for a living. I cleared my throat and answered that I was the singer of a band called Pennywise. Being my grandmother’s age, and from the looks of her, probably not a huge fan of underground skate punk, she, of course, didn’t recognize the name and just kind of smiled and said, “Hmm, never heard of it.”
Apparently she must have gone out and asked a candy striper about our band and been filled in about how we’re this messed-up group of psycho freaks with a guitar player who throws up on people because she came back to the desk with a dismissive smirk on her face and a negative air about her, like all of a sudden she was dealing with monsters from another planet, or draft dodgers, or at least someone whom she knew shouldn’t be allowed to be giving birth in the hallowed halls of Our Little Company of Jesus, Mary and Joseph, Super Duper Religious Hospital. She hated us and soon she would be helping deliver our baby.
In Lamaze class we learned that we should ask for the “good room,” but I didn’t see how it was possible that there could be “good” rooms and “bad” rooms in hospitals. Was one rarely cleaned and infested with plague germs and tumbleweeds, with rusty water dripping from the light fixtures like something out of an old Hitchcock movie, while another was like a spa resort at the Ritz-Carlton? Just by asking for this room, was it like saying the secret password, and they automatically give you a nudge and a wink and begin to treat you like visiting royalty? Because if this wasn’t the case, the head nurse who hated me and my Dead Kennedys shirt was definitely not going to be giving us delinquents the good room. No, we’d be giving birth to our spawn of Satan in a remote Siberian outpost wing of the hospital with nothing but a pan of cold water and some salad tongs.