Fathermucker

by Greg Olear

  The hamster spins in the wheel of my aging laptop, and Outlook finally opens. Unlikely that I’ve gotten any notices since I last checked, what, six hours ago . . . but no, I’m wrong. Not one but two new messages. Two! Jackpot. The first one is . . . an offer for c!@lis? Jesus. How does this shit make it through the spam filter? And why? Does anyone really open the e-mail, or, God forbid, click the link? Let me rephrase: is anyone stupid enough to click the link? Odds are, this isn’t a legitimate offer for knock-off Cialis, but a Trojan horse virus from some bellicose Bulgarian computer programmer, some rogue Russian cyberterrorist, al-Qaeda online. The Biblical tale of Judith, reenacted virtually. An offer of e-sex yielding only e-STDs. The thing is, I don’t want Cialis, generic or otherwise. I’d be more interested in the anti-Cialis, the un-Viagra, a magic philter that compels the snail to retract into its shell, that transfers the frequent flier miles of my carnal desire to other, more useful, accounts. Origen, call it. Wisest philosopher in all of history. Now this is enlightenment: lust is a waste of time.

  Lawrence Richards Lawrence has been to Des Moines on the Cities I’ve Visited travel map.

  I can’t think of a less interesting piece of information to share.

  Christine Rowan needs a sublettor at her UWS apartment for January, February, and March.

  Ah, to sublet that apartment! To return to the city! Upper West Side, Upper East Side, Red Hook, Bed fucking Stuy. Anywhere but here. Just me and the undersized refrigerator like the one in my apartment on Twenty-Eighth Street that froze its contents solid in a few hours. That made Diet Coke cans explode. That laid waste to yogurt. Would have to bring Steve with me, though, to ward off the mice. Maybe New York is not such a good idea. There are no snakes in Ireland, they say. Is there a place on earth devoid of mice? Antarctica, maybe? Greenland? Death Valley?

  Meg Stein Knudsen became a fan of Deborah Schneer for Ulster County Judge.

  Updated a minute ago. Not quite six a.m. She’s up early. And Meg is not a morning person. Which, coupled with Soren’s drunk-dialed update, can only mean one thing: trouble brewing chez Knudsen. Juicy gossip for later, perhaps?

  Behind Door #2, an electronic mail message from . . . Christine Keeslar? Holy shit. Christine Keeslar is the editor-in-chief of Rents Magazine. Rents, a slangy truncation of Parents. I pitched her a story a few days ago—a stay-at-home dad’s take on playdates, I think it was . . . or maybe a memoir on why we decided not to circumcise our son, despite pressure from my mother and the medical community. I’ve pitched her so many stories, I’ve lost track. Freelancing is the only way I could possibly eke out a living up here without going back to school. In typical me fashion, I’m trying to jumpstart my freelancing career at the exact moment when half of the country’s seasoned journalists have all been laid off and are doing the exact same thing. How does Eugenia Last put it on her website? Psst . . . the Secret to Success, Wealth, and Happiness is . . . Timing.

  I don’t know why I bother trying; it’s not like Christine Keeslar bothers with rejection letters. So far, she’s just ignored my e-mails. And I certainly didn’t expect her to acknowledge my existence this time. What the hell did I even pitch? I honestly can’t remember. Elimination communication? Free-range parenting? My short-term memory is fried. I blame the kids.

  Hi, Josh.

  We’d love to run an interview with Daryl “Duke”Reid. Will be interesting to get his take on parenting, as he seems an unlikely candidate for Father of the Year.

  Keep it to 500 words. We need it by November 14, and we can pay $300. Please let me know if you accept.

  All best,

  Chris

  Christine Keeslar

  Editor-in-Chief

  Rents Magazine

  Oh, right. Daryl “Duke” Reid. Now I remember.

  November 14. My thirty-seventh birthday. A little gift from the gods! Take those two stars, Eugenia, and stick ’em where the sun don’t shine.

  I write back at once, something to the effect of Thanks, I accept, looking forward to working with you. While the e-mail constitutes good news, for sure, this particular rose at my doorstep comes with a fresh thorn of a problem: how to get access to Daryl “Duke” Reid. Just because he lives in New Paltz and both of us have kids at the Thornwood Education Center doesn’t mean he’ll grant me an interview. Or acknowledge my existence.

  But hey—at least I know WHAT’S ON YOUR MIND:

  Josh Lanksy Rents Magazine accepted my pitch!

  Within seconds, Meg Stein Knudsen, Jessica Holby, and Gloria Gallagher Hynek all LIKE THIS.

  WE MOVED HERE DURING BUSH’S SECOND TERM, WHEN TENSIONS between the Blue and the Red were at their peak. We didn’t know a single person in New Paltz, but we moved here anyway. It was a long time coming. When we lived in the East Village, Stacy and I, like most New York City Bohemians (or wannabe Bohemians; New York hasn’t been a true boho town since the heyday of the Yiddish theater on the Lower East Side; thirty dollars hasn’t paid the rent on Bleecker Street in my lifetime, Paul Simon), operated under the assumption that, with the possible and debatable exceptions of Los Angeles and San Francisco, the part of the United States extending beyond a twenty-mile radius of Union Square was populated in the main by subliterate, slack-jawed, Walmart-shopping, country-music-listening, Jesus-loving, gay-bashing hicks. The old saw about what happens when you assume applies here. Kingston, the artsy Ulster County seat, is Williamsburg without the hipsters, and the eighty thousand people who flocked to Central Park to see Garth Brooks a few years ago were not all from out of town. There are cool people beyond the boundaries of Manhattan, just as there are plenty of New Yorkers, Lord knows, whose coolness is in short supply (we have a name for them up here, über-urbane urbanites who assume the rest of us are rubes: citiots). We just didn’t acknowledge this when we lived there.

  Or maybe we did, and chose to ignore the signs. In order to accept the dreary and oppressive conditions of life in Manhattan, or even Park Slope or Astoria—in a city where five million dollars is not enough to buy an apartment all that much bigger than the one you live in—you need to drink the Big Apple–flavored Kool-Aid. You must bow to the false idol that is the god of Gotham. As Born Agains evince a faith in Christ’s salvation that borders on the delusional, so a not terribly successful screenwriter-cum-HR-generalist and a not terribly successful actress-cum-marketing-manager who pay two grand for six hundred square feet of squalid living space five elevatorless flights above the ground-level grime must rationalize this prohibitive expense by believing absolutely that New York is an Artist’s Paradise, and the rest of the nation so many benighted circles of Limbaughian hell.

  It took the birth of our son for us to see things for how they really are, to recognize that the Empire State emperor was, and always had been, butt naked. In just six weeks—six cold, dead-of-winter weeks—we went from We could have two kids in this apartment to Let’s get the fuck out of here. Roland was born on Christmas; by Valentine’s Day, we were househunting in New Paltz. The charms the city offered, so alluring to us as childless thirtysomethings—conveniently placed casting calls, movies opening two weeks earlier than anywhere else, the theater, fine dining, the only-in-New-York personalities teeming into the IRT, the ability to drink copious amounts of alcohol without having to worry about driving home—held no appeal for us as new parents. To raise kids, you need space, safety, good schools, fresh air, and a roomy car, none of which are readily or cheaply available in Gotham. When you’re wearing your infant son in a Baby Björn, the only-in-New-York subway lunatic becomes not so colorful.

  My friends were stunned when I relayed the news. We’re moving to New Paltz, I told them, my group of New York drinking buddies, a hodge-podge of comrades from high school, college, and the city, loosely affiliated by a bi-monthly beer night. They didn’t get it. Noo Yawkers never do, especially residents by choice rather than birth. I should know; I was just as gung-ho once, the notion of escaping just as unfathomable to me. Why would anyone want to leave nirvana? Asid
e from, you know, the crime and the grime and the mice and the noise and the price tag and the claustrophobia and the all-permeating negative energy, the volcanic Bad Vibe that seems to seep up from the abysmal warren of overheated subterranean tunnels. The snow doesn’t stick on the streets of New York . . . because it’s so close to Hell. I could have told my friends I was leaving to enter rabbinical school; they wouldn’t have been more shocked. They were still in Lady Liberty’s dastardly and delusional thrall.

  And none of my city friends had—or, indeed, have—kids. Some of them aren’t even married. It’s impossible to adequately convey to someone on the outside the radical level of change that takes place when you cross that threshold from childlessness to parenthood, especially to someone living in the bubble of arrested adolescence that is the East Village. Every aspect of your life is altered, forever. It’s like pre-9/11 and post-9/11. Nothing—nothing—remains the same.

  New Paltz? Why there, of all places? That was the next question, once it sunk in that I wasn’t pulling their collective leg, that my intention to skip town was sincere. Start with this: a rare combination of affordable houses and nationally ranked schools. Vibrant, activist, communal community. Top-notch restaurants. Plus, this is a college town—SUNY maintains a campus here known for its fine arts program—and college towns always have a youthful energy. But the clincher was that, at the time, then mayor Jason West, of the Green Party, was performing same-sex marriages at Village Hall, in blatant disregard for state and federal law. We figured that any town whose mayor could so audaciously, and in our view so heroically, champion gay rights—heck, any town that installed a member of the Green Party in City Hall to begin with—must have a low hick-factor.

  And so it does. In New Paltz, pretty much everyone drives a Subaru with at least one sticker of leftist sentiment crookedly festooned to its bumper. This is a bluer locale than even Manhattan, which is, at last, a city of bankers. Where better than Crunchtown to wait out the last days of Bush-Cheney? To wit: in the election returns last November, Obama smoked McCain by 5,360 to 1,274. Had Gore gotten anything close to those results in a few precincts in Florida or Ohio, the world would be a vastly different place.

  But it was not to be. The alternate reality where Gore takes the White House feels as distant and foreign as the alternate reality where Stacy and I are childless residents of the East Village. The former never existed, thanks to the Supreme Court; the latter may as well not have.

  “DADDY,” COMES MAUDE’s STENTORIAN VOICE FROM THE MONITOR, just as I’m about to step into the shower, “I want to watch TV.” She has the personality of a despot, at times, and the voice to match.

  Although Maude speaks well for a three-and-a-half-year-old—her prosody and vocabulary are excellent—she resists dropping the vestigial whine of her toddlerhood. Daddy, I want to watch TV is delivered in a voice halfway between a baby’s bawling and the King’s English, as if her native and preferred tongue, Crying, manifests itself in an accent she can’t quite shake, like Keanu Reeves trying to play an Englishman in Bram Stoker’s Dracula. As with Reeves, the effect is grating.

  Another facet of Maude in the morning: she doesn’t wake up gradually. When she comes to, she’s as alert as I would be after three cups of coffee. She’s like a laptop on sleep mode—flip it open and the applications are still running, Firefox displaying the Facebook feed, iTunes paused in the middle of “Rehab,” unfinished Solitaire game going: just how you left it. If you tell Maude before she goes to bed that she can have a lollipop if she has a good night’s sleep, the first thing she’ll say when she opens her eyes ten hours later is Where’s my lolly? Nothing gets past her—nothing. She could work the homicide desk with McNulty and Bunk. This is in stark contrast to Roland, who will put a Lamps Plus catalog on the table in front of him, pause to look out the window, and then start crying because he can’t find the Lamps Plus catalog.

  I jump back into my sweatpants and run up the stairs. By now, Maude’s whine-accented speech has reverted to outright crying, and Roland is banging on his door to get out (we have these child safety thingamajigs on the knobs so they can’t open their doors, or the lunatics really would run the asylum). I open Roland’s door, switch off his noise machine—he bounds into the hallway—open Maude’s door, switch off her noise machine, and scoop her up.

  “Daddy,” she says, and her eyes meet mine so directly, her gaze so intense, she may as well be trying to hypnotize me, “I want to watch TV.”

  “Good morning to you, too. What do you want to watch?”

  “Ummm . . . ummmm . . .” She does this a lot, filling in the space as she decides.

  “Yo Gabba Gabba!?”

  “No! Not Yo Gabba Gabba! I don’t want to watch Yo Gabba Gabba! ever again.”

  Kids have no concept of time. Ever again, forever, yesterday, tomorrow, last year, next month—none of these terms have any real meaning to a child, especially a three-year-old. Sometimes you can use this to your advantage. Sure, you can say, we’ll go there tomorrow. Or, We’ll buy the new Lego set next week. So few arrows in the parental quiver—important to use the full comportment of weaponry at your disposal, however meager their power (and however deceptive their advertising).

  “But Daddy,” says Roland, “I want to watch Yo Gabba Gabba! What’s for me? What’s for me?”

  “We’ll watch something you both want to watch,” I tell him.

  This isn’t good enough. He spins around, rage ruddying his cheeks, and swats at me with both arms. “No! I don’t like that. I don’t like sisters. I don’t want Maudes. No Maudes allowed here. I’m mad at her!”

  He swoops by her like a bird of prey, arms extended, smacking her on the head as he races by.

  “Roland,” I holler. “Stop it. Jesus Christ.”

  My swearing has increased both in frequency and severity with each day of Stacy’s absence. Today’s over-under on “F-bombs With a Child in Earshot” is five. Especially if we drive around a lot. The whole “blinker” concept is not much known in these parts.

  “Stupid Christ,” he shouts, as I suppress giggling at his botched attempt to swear. Then he gets one right: “Stupid Daddy.”

  Ignoring him—this is, after all, not unusual behavior—I turn to Maude. “LazyTown?”

  “No. I want to watch . . . ummm . . . Max & Ruby.”

  Figures she’d pick the show I dislike the most. That’s her job as a kid, right, developing tastes antithetical to mine? Rankling my sensibilities? I shudder for the teenage years. I really hope the whole tattoo fad is done by then. “Does that work for you, Roland? Max & Ruby?”

  He lets out an exaggerated sigh, but calms down, like a possessed villager post-exorcism. “O-kay,” he says.

  Catastrophe averted.

  “Let’s go down. I’ll make bagels.”

  “I don’t like bagels!”

  NOGGIN, THE MORE OR LESS COMMERCIAL-FREE CABLE STATION programmed for little tykes it’s like preschool on TV, in an apparent attempt to assuage your guilt for plopping your pride and joy in front of the zombie box, displays, before each offering, info-graphics that extol the educational virtues of the show you’re about to suffer through.

  Max & Ruby, for example, which concerns the diurnal goings-on of a pair of corpulent bunnies, a bratty two-year-old (the former) and his prissy seven-year-old sister (the latter) who doubles as his de facto legal guardian, enhances preschoolers’ understanding of INTER- and INTRAPERSONAL DYNAMICS.

  LazyTown, featuring the athlete/superhero Sportacus, Iceland’s second most important export after Björk, enhances preschoolers’ understanding of KINESTHETIC SKILLS and awareness of HEALTHFUL BEHAVIORS.

  Yo Gabba Gabba!—the title refers to the incantation D. J. Lance Rock, the orange-garbed host, intones at the top of each episode to bequeath life to his five deformed playthings—enhances preschoolers’ SOCIAL SKILLS and SELF-AWARENESS and uses interactive games to expand their MUSICAL and KINESTHETIC SKILLS.

  And Olivia, a show about a family of
pigs whom I can’t tell apart, and who look, to my jaded East Village eyes, like the blown-up photographs of late-term aborted fetuses the pro-life crazies used to wave around at tourists in Washington Square Park . . . Olivia, for the love of God, enhances preschoolers’ understanding of the CREATIVE THINKING and imaginative PROBLEM-SOLVING that support imaginative play and the development of INTER- and INTRAPERSONAL AWARENESS.

  I’ve heard the porcine program also turns loaves into fishes and helps O. J. find the real killer.

  There is a pervasive belief among parents, particularly crunchy parents, which constitute an overwhelming majority in New Paltz—mommies who subscribe to both Mothering magazine (Judgmental Mothering, as Stacy calls it) and the doctrinaire philosophies therein; mommies who eschew diapers for Elimination Communication; mommies who practice Attachment Parenting; mommies who “fight through” a baby’s natural instinct to wean and continue breastfeeding until Little League—a tenet clung to with such zeal that it may as well be a Zen koan, a papal bull, a lost commandment, that TELEVISION IS BAD. High-fructose corn syrup for the eyes. Unfiltered Luckies for the brain. KILL YOUR TELEVISION is a popular bumper sticker around here, and an even more popular sentiment. TV, or not TV: that is the question. When chatting casually on the subject with other Hudson Valley parents, I find myself qualifying, if not outright apologizing for, our decision to let our kids watch TV. If I permit such deleterious activity, you see, I must at least recognize its inherent and unequivocal evil. (Tacit disapproval is still disapproval, and often harder to counter than the explicit variety.) So, the obligatory caveat: I don’t think kids should watch adult programs, commercials especially, and I don’t think they should spend all the livelong day in front of the boob tube. But I don’t see the harm in my kids catching a little Noggin while I gird up for the grueling day. It amuses me to wonder, when Roland wakes up particularly early—four o’clock, three thirty early, as he occasionally does; Asperger kids require less sleep—how these über-parenting zealots would handle him, without the Athenian aid of the TV. What would these Kill Your Televisionaries, what would Gloria Hynek, do with Roland? A fucking craft? She would sit and make beaded fucking bracelets with my boy for the three hours till the sun came up? Really?