Punk Rock Dad

by Jim Lindberg

  Not anymore. Now my evenings are spent corralling my three kids and begging, pleading, and outright threatening them into getting into bed and falling asleep. I don’t think in the ten years I’ve had kids that I’ve had one night where of their own volition my kids have said with a yawn and a stretch, “Night, Dad, I’m turning in.” No, to a young person, going to bed just means the fun of being a kid has to end for the day, and you are the person who’s putting a stop to it. They will use any means necessary to put off, postpone, and thwart my attempts to drive them into slumber. My kids have developed masterful skills at this, and although I face the same techniques of persuasion night after night, I still haven’t come up with a zone defense or man-on-man approach that makes it so that at eight o’clock I’m kicking back on the couch with a beer and a South Park episode. I used to look forward to my evenings, but now I dread them like they’ll be spent with a sadistic dentist.

  The process starts with their bath, which they insist on taking all together, three in the tub, which inevitably leads to a fight because someone splashes or dunks or kicks the other, and ends with one of them screaming that they have soap in their eyes. I pluck them out and towel them off and one of them will cry because they weren’t plucked out and toweled off first. This is always followed by an episode of nude gymnastics up and down the hallway. There must be something about being freshly clean that inspires kids to want to run and sing and do cartwheels buck naked. Next, of course, they’re told to quit goofing off and put on their pajamas. I can yell all I want, but somehow they always get sidetracked on the long walk from the bath tub to the drawer where the pajamas are kept and I’ll find them reading a book or playing a game with no clothes on somewhere. Then you yell again, and after about half an hour of trying, they’ve somehow managed to get the pajamas completely on their bodies, a process that should take less than thirty-five seconds.

  Now it’s brushing their teeth, using the toilet, and climbing into bed time. This should also take under five minutes but somehow they can’t find their toothbrushes, which is amazing to me since I can’t really understand how a toothbrush leaves the bathroom area, but they seem to do so nightly. I’m starting to think that sometime in the afternoon they go and hide them just to buy themselves some time later. They must also hide dolly and blanky at the same time because when we can’t find them, they instantly begin to go into hysterics at the thought that dolly and blanky could have somehow fallen into a bottomless void or wormhole in time somewhere.

  I take the two-year-old in first to try getting her to go to bed, but she wants me to find dolly’s “ba-ba” for her, which has been missing for a good six months, but all of a sudden she has to have it now and is whining and crying for it. So I tear apart the closets and toy chests until I finally find the right small pink plastic dolly bottle and as soon as she crams it in dolly’s mouth, now she doesn’t like the outfit dolly has on and wants “the udder one, the udder one!” Which “udder one” I don’t know, but she’s getting more and more frustrated because she didn’t get a nap today and she’s getting fussy and mad and crying since I can’t find the right outfit. She keeps freaking out until I scoop her up on my back and pretend to be a pony and crawl around on my hands and knees for what seems like hours because if I stop she’ll just cry “more, more” and so I just keep going around in circles and neighing and whinnying like a horse and eventually I coax her off with a sippy cup of milk and a promise that I will tell her all three of her favorite bedtime stories, Cinderella, Goldilocks and the Three Bears, and The Three Little Pigs. All of these stories I’ve forgotten most of the details to so I just make it up as I go along.

  “…but Cinderella couldn’t go to the royal ball because she didn’t have a dress.”

  “Why?”

  “Because she couldn’t afford one?”

  “Why, Daddy?”

  “Well, because she was on crack.”

  She really likes it when Goldilocks gets caught playing the PlayStation of the three bears, and instead of huffing and puffing, the big bad wolf cuts a giant fart and blows the house down. It’s really triumphant if I can work a real one up for the special effects punch line. This always dazzles her. She must be proud.

  When she finally passes out it’s time to coerce the older two to climb into bed and let me read them a story so they can go to sleep. We get into bed but the pajamas they’ve chosen are too hot or too cold or too constricting and need to be changed. Once they’ve settled down and have got up to go pee a hundred times and have everything they need, they insist I make up a bedtime story, but not the same one as last night, it has to include them and all their friends from school, and it has to be a wild adventure and a little bit scary, but not too scary, and it has to be funny and have a happy ending with them dancing with a prince, and it can’t be short, it has to be long and really good, and then pretend there was someone without a leg and that it got cut off somehow and now they have a wooden leg, and they’re an orphan.

  Eventually I’m not telling the story because they’re just going on and on about castles and royal princes and people getting their heads chopped off until finally one says, “Like that, tell us one like that.”

  I do this verbatim and tuck them in and kiss them good night, but if you think this is where it ends you are dead wrong. We’ve just gotten started. The next hour and a half will be full of all the reasons why one of them has to get out of bed and come into the living room and tell me why she can’t fall asleep, and that I need to check the closet for monsters, and there’s a weird noise coming from under the stairs, and she thinks she felt a spider in her bed, and she needs a drink of water, and her nose is stuffy, and what if you and Mom die, and where does God really live, and what does He look like, and is there a separate place for goldfish and hamsters and other pets in heaven, and isn’t it crowded then, and who cleans up after them, and it just goes on and on until we’re both so exhausted she just falls asleep in the hallway somewhere.

  Some parents I know have kids who just put themselves to bed without any fuss whatsoever. They probably get to watch a lot of television. I’m jealous. We devised a plan where we set an exact bedtime and what needs to be done before this agreed-upon time, and if things are carried out properly, they are allowed a half hour of TV after dinner; if not, they get nothing. This usually works for a few nights, but then a basketball practice runs late or there’s a weekend sleepover where they stay up until midnight telling ghost stories and we’re right back at ground zero. Until they’re putting themselves to bed every night, I don’t see a lot of television in my future.

  At nine-thirty Jennifer gets home. I lie and tell her everything went fine and the kids went right to sleep. I grab a hat and a jacket, kiss her good-bye, get in the car, and drive off to Hollywood to play the show feeling like I should be back in bed myself.

  I usually get to a show about five minutes before we play and don’t hang around any longer than I have to. I’m not complaining, and certain people are going to read this and think I’m an asshole, but the whole preshow center of attention thing has become kind of a drag for me. Sounds stupid, I know, because why would you be in a band if you don’t want attention, but I’m jaded and lame now and that’s just how it is. There are parts of the whole show night interaction that I like a lot. I love talking to fans who are genuinely appreciative of our music and it doesn’t matter how many times you hear it, it’s great when someone tells you your music changed their life and is honest and sincere about it. I could hear that all night. I love seeing my friends who, year after year, come out and support our band through good times and bad, and it’s always fun to have your crew around, hanging out and laughing at each other. I like shooting the shit with people from other bands and crew guys and finding out where they’ve been on tour and where they’re going next, and what kind of guitars they play, and what music they’ve been listening to, and when they’re working on a new record. I also like talking shop with people from the label who work for the band
to see who they’re signing and who’s been fired or hired recently, but for all the great stuff around the show, there’s a dark side as well.

  When you’re a singer, or actor, or radio host, or even the guy announcing the local little league game, basically anyone who puts themselves out into the public eye, you unknowingly open yourself up to pointed criticism from everyone from your best friend to complete strangers. Someone with horrible beer breath will come up to you and say they love your band but they like the old stuff better and didn’t really care for the last few albums, and “what’s with the third song on the new album, that song sucks, and why don’t you guys play more like (insert stupid band here) and what time are you guys on tonight, and can I get a backstage pass for my girlfriend’s cousin, and are there any more beers in your dressing room, because I looked and someone already drank them all, and bro, could you get me a shirt for my little brother? He really loves you guys, but like I said, he wasn’t really that into your last record, either, and by the way, who did your last video? That thing was so gay! What was it even supposed to be about anyway? You guys should go back to playing super-fast like you did on your first album, and write more songs with words like ‘fight’ and ‘fuck’ in them ’cause that’s cool, like ‘fuck authority,’ that’s awesome. Yeah, dude, and don’t forget, backstage pass for my cousin and a shirt for my brother. Oh, and a hat for me, too. Thanks, bro. You rule.”

  I’ll meet ten people exactly like this on the way into the club, there will be twenty more in the dressing room drinking all our beers and eating our deli tray, and thirty more on stage drunk when we play. Some of them, and this is no lie, will come out onto the stage in the middle of a song while I’m singing and yell in my ear, “Dude, are there any more beers left? Hey, and play song four off the second album, I forget what it’s called.” If you’re physically unable to give them five extra laminates and a wristband for their girlfriend’s cousin, a shirt for their little brother, and a few dozen beers, and if you won’t party with them until dawn, well, then you’re an asshole and your last album sucked.

  What makes this irritating is that pretend you’re a regular Joe working at the bank or at a construction site, and all day long, from the moment you get out of your truck, a never-ending stream of various drunken people were all over you, saying you used to be a good bank teller but now you suck, and can you run over to the Coke machine and buy them a soda, and hey, why don’t you lend them your work belt because their girlfriend needs one, and bro, what about a free roll of quarters for their cousin, and would you please fill out the check slip the way they like it filled out instead of how you’re doing it, and “How come you put up dry wall like that, are you gay?” Imagine if that was what your day was like every day. You’d begin to hate some people and feel a little jaded, and you’d show up to work about five minutes before your shift and not hang around one second more than you have to. There are a lot of nice people in the world you’ll never meet, but the assholes will come up and prove it to you all the time.

  The actual show itself goes well except a fight breaks out in the front row and some guy gets about three golf ball-size lumps on his head from this dude who looks like a cage fighter let loose from the county jail that very afternoon. The lighting guy thinks he’s in Studio 54 and he’s running crazy pulsing strobe lights and colored lasers all night like we’re playing at a rave instead of where we are, which is East Hollywood, and he has a fifty-thousand-watt spotlight, like from a lighthouse, trained on me and blinding me in the eyes the whole time, and the best part, some clown is intermittently spitting on me from the front row. He has apparently confused me with someone in the Sex Pistols or UK Subs who sees this gobbing custom as a visceral appreciation for my fine performance. I see it as fucking incredibly gross and almost want to pull a Celine Dion and walk off stage. If you were walking down the street and some guy spit on you, either you’re going to break his face or call the nearest cop and have him arrested for assault, but at a punk show it’s considered a compliment. I could jump in after him and do an Axel Rose and have him sue me for my house, but at a certain point you think, I’m forty years old, I just put my kid to bed a half hour ago, I’m really not in the mood for a brawl in the mosh pit right now.

  This spitting episode brings up another unfortunate misconception about punk: the gross factor, and no one has propagated this myth further than our guitar player. His milieu, however, is vomit instead of spit. He likes to cram his finger down his throat and throw up on people. This stunt is incredibly funny to him and gets great big belly laughs each of the three hundred hilarious renditions of the story are told from those who are entertained by this type of thing, but I imagine for the barfed upon as opposed to the barfer, it’s less amusing. There’s adolescent humor and then there’s punk humor, which is apparently several levels down on the comedic evolutionary scale. Scatological tales, booger eating, and vomit are the tools of the trade for some of these punk rock jackasses who make some of the preschoolers I know look like models of stately class and maturity. Some people have confused the rebellion and social anarchy championed by punk as a carte blanche to act like Neanderthals and morons, but then again, I just told a story to my two-year-old that had me farting out the ending.

  So I try to avoid the spitter’s area of the crowd and we play the rest of the show, the kids go nuts and crowd surf and sing along, I play so hard and freak out that I sweat through my clothes and come off stage soaking wet, because, regardless of how jaded I am, I still believe in this shit. I believe in every word I sing, songs about feeling powerless against a world seemingly bent on self-destruction, about not fitting in with the perfect people constantly judging me, about wanting to leave regrets behind and live life deliberately and clinging to some small bit of hope that things could somehow change for the better even against mounting evidence to the contrary, and hearing this and feeling the same way, the crowd responds and sings along with us and it devolves into a writhing mass of humanity and we have that great cathartic release of pent-up aggression and frustration with the psycho world closing in around us, and that one moment reminds me of why I do this, why I put up with all the bullshit and criticism and maniacal guitar players and people wanting to package, market, and sell the last bit of dignity and self-respect I have left, and it’s because it tells me I’m not alone in feeling this way and maybe that’s what might make it okay, but the second the last chord is struck, I’m done. I’m my real self again, and I’m in the car and back on the freeway before most of them have left the building.

  I come home and just want to watch some Conan O’Brien and go to sleep because my voice is already starting to feel hoarse and my muscles and bones ache and it’s only the first show, so I go into the living room and lay down on the couch and wait for the buzz of the show and the ringing in my ears to subside so I can drift off and get some rest and then do it all again tomorrow night and every night again for the next three weeks. All of a sudden I hear a faint, “Daddy?” It’s daughter number one, the drama queen. It’s nearly two o’clock in the morning. What could it be now? A monster in the closet? A vampire under her bed? Another four years of a Republican-led Senate?

  “I want some water, my throat hurts.”

  I get her the water and usher her back to bed, but she reappears by my side a few moments later.

  “Daddy, I just can’t sleep. I don’t know what it is. I don’t like my bed. My brain won’t go to sleep.”

  I get insomnia too but after putting her to bed for three solid hours earlier I know she’s tired and it’s just her will toward dramatics that’s moved her out of her bed and into the living room to interrupt me and my Conan time. About three more times I have to put her back into her bed and lay with her but she keeps shuffling back in a few moments later. Now she wants more water and keeps saying her throat feels funny and she’s shivering. I offer to give her some cough syrup, or a throat lozenge or even a warm brandy and a cigarette, anything to get her back to sleep, but she keeps g
etting out of bed and going into the bathroom and drinking water.

  At this point I should have known better that it wasn’t her throat that hurt. She’s always had this pathological fear of throwing up ever since she had one bad case of the stomach flu when she was younger, where she threw up so much she had to go to the hospital, an experience that apparently left her emotionally scarred and scared to death of vomit, her own or anyone else’s. If anyone pretends to be sick, or feigns being about to hurl, even on TV, she’ll clasp her hands to her ears and run screaming hysterically from the room, thinking it’s contagious and she’ll soon start barfing too. It’s funny to everyone but her. Once her teacher was pregnant and had morning sickness and every once in a while would put her hand to her mouth and run to the door. My poor daughter would jump down and hide under the desk like it was an earthquake drill.

  Sure enough, she goes to the bathroom and pretty much the moment I start to think, “Hey, maybe her throat doesn’t hurt, and her stomach’s upset, but she doesn’t want to admit it because why else would she be out of bed at two in the morning,” is right when I hear her first beginning to throw up into the sink, and then on the floor and the cabinets, the toothbrushes, the washcloths, the Sponge Bob nightlight, everywhere. She’s basically projectile vomiting her hot dogs and cottage cheese all over the entire bathroom.