by Greg Olear
The truth is, my kids could spend the next half-hour watching the South Park movie, and I wouldn’t mind, as long as I got to take a shower and they didn’t memorize the words to “Shut Your Fucking Face, Uncle Fucker.” If that makes me a shitty parent, well, alert Child Services. That’s U-N-C-L-E-Fuck-You. The number’s in the book.
ON THE TOILET, I FLIP YET AGAIN THROUGH LAST WEEK’S WELL-WORN Us Weekly—the new issue should arrive this afternoon; one of the (sad) highlights of my (pathetic) week—hoping to discover a page that I’ve missed during seven days of heavy bathroom perusal, but I keep coming back to the same full-page HOT PIC of Gwyneth Paltrow strolling down an unnamed London street, hand-in-hand with her two sickeningly adorable kids, that I’ve seen about a thousand times since last Friday.
Study these pages long enough, and you discover certain trends. For example: although there are a fair number of Tinseltown Ethans and Madisons, celebrities as a rule prefer outside-the-box names for their spawn. And if you read the tabloids as religiously as I do, you know that there’s a fine line between outside-the-box and ridiculous. Like, Nicolas Cage, who was rumored for years to be playing the eponymous role in a Superman movie, has a son named Kal-El—the Man of Steel’s name on the planet where he (and, by all indications, Cage as well) was born.
Kal-fucking-El!
Nicole Kidman and Keith Urban have a daughter named Sunday; she was born on a Saturday. Jenna Elfman has a son named Story. If Story grows up and has a son with the same name, the little guy won’t be a junior, but a Second Story; you might say Jenna’s getting in on the ground floor. Jason Lee’s little lad is named Pilot Inspektor. Spelling it with a “c”, one assumes, would just be too conservative.
“Dad-dy,” comes Maude’s trumpet-like voice, all singsong, “another Max & Ru-by!”
“Be right there,” I tell her, also in singsong. “I’m in the bathroom.”
The daffiest of all celebrity baby names, it says here, belongs to Paltrow’s daughter, Apple. Apple! Forget, for a moment, the fact that she’s named for a either a monopolistic corporation or a piece of fruit, or that the word itself is ugly; Apple’s old man—the father whose eye Apple’s the apple of—is Chris Martin, Coldplay’s front man, whose surname she shares. What that means is, Apple Martin is one “i” away from being a Happy Hour special.
“Another Max & Ruby,” Maude again demands, her tone less musical, more Mussolini.
My (long deceased) grandparents, born before Philo T. Farns-worth’s groundbreaking gadget, didn’t watch Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman and Murder, She Wrote on weekend nights because they enjoyed programs with strong female protagonists and commas in the title; those shows just happened to be on when I was staying there. They watched television all the time because, on some level, they were amazed that such technology existed. If you stop and think about it, TV is a marvel—a miracle, really—unthinkable to, say, Napoleon, who was chilling on Elba a mere two centuries ago, a blink of an eye in the history of humankind. My mother has a similar if less reverential relationship with the VCR (already usurped by the DVD player). You can watch movies without going to the cinema! You can tape shows, and watch them again! You can fast-forward through the commercials! This sense of astonishment explains why she and Frank, her husband, rent so many egregiously crappy movies (their Netflix queue is unspeakable). I feel the same awe toward the home computer, my portal to the wonderful World Wide Web. At thirty-six, I’m old enough to remember when computers were not ubiquitous, when correspondence was done by post, when classifieds and want ads were the primary means of communicating for-sale items and job openings and potential romantic encounters, when news came in fixed cycles, when the telephone call was not an anachronism, when you had to stop at a gas station to ask for directions, when you had to listen to the radio to hear that hit song you couldn’t get out of your head. Those analog days are gone. TiVo, Craigslist, Gmail, Facebook, GPS, YouTube, iTunes, and CNN.com have made moot the need to wait. Almost anything I wish to know can be found out in minutes, if not seconds, with a few keystrokes and mouse clicks. That actress looks familiar; what else has she been in? IMDB will tell me. What is Tupac saying in the last part of “Hit ’em Up”? A snippet in the Google search bar reveals the garbled lyrics (“My fo-fo make sho all yo kids don’t grow”). And if I want to compare “We Are the World” with “Do They Know It’s Christmas,” or revisit old SNL sketches, or listen to new bands before investing in the album, YouTube’s got the hook-up. To me, this is wonderful, in the pure sense of the word; the novelty might never wear off completely. But Roland and Maude have never known a different world. At a moment’s notice, they can watch what they want to watch, hear what they want to hear, read what they want to read, and the longest delays they have to endure are the (interminable) menu intros on the Thomas the Tank Engine DVDs. “Again!” Maude will demand when Little Bear ends, and I have to tell her that it’s regular television, not DVR, and therefore I cannot process her request. Which of course she doesn’t understand. Technology that seems magical to me is the norm for Roland and Maude, horse-and-buggy stuff, coal-powered machines. Our society places a premium on not wasting time. Almost every technological breakthrough in the last century is just another milestone in our eternal quest for instant, if not perpetual, gratification. Brave new world, indeed. How can I teach children born into such a you-snooze-you-lose world the virtue and value of patience? I’m not sure if I understand it myself.
Leaving the magazine next to the his-and-hers bottles of Tums on the vanity, I go downstairs, fire up another Max & Ruby, check on the progress with breakfast—Roland’s eaten most of his bagel, Maude half of hers—and retreat to the bathroom to try again to shower. I need to shave—Maude told me so last night—so I’ll be in there a good ten minutes. With any luck, they won’t kill each other while I’m indisposed. Or if they do, it will be quick, painless, and easy to clean.
No sooner does the hot water jar me into some semblance of higher awareness than I remember that Roland’s class has a field trip this afternoon. Vanessa, our hapless but always-available babysitter, is coming at noon to stay with Maude—after the playdate at Jess’s—and I will be joining the Thornwood preschoolers for the annual foray to the pumpkin patch. Last month, when we went apple picking, pee-wee Zara Reid—whom Roland has a thing for, as best as I can tell; he tends to like littler girls—was accompanied by her notorious old man, erstwhile lead singer of the seminal D.C. punk band Circle of Fists. It was his incongruous presence at the apple orchard, in fact, that prompted me to pitch the interview to Rents in the first place. So Chris Keeslar’s note was well-timed. It may well be that I will encounter Daryl “Duke” Reid this very afternoon. And what better place to approach him about a parenting interview than a preschool field trip? He might not show, of course. But if he doesn’t come, his wife—the Québécoise model Céline St. Germain, whose Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue pictorial, although a good ten years old, remains the stuff of masturbatory legend—probably will. And I could ask her. Although frankly, Reid is less intimidating. Either way, better brush up on my Circle of Fists trivia before the pumpkin patch. I’m at best a casual fan; I only have the one album, the one with “My Heart Is Hydroplaning” on it, The Worst Crime, the same one everybody else has. I don’t know if I can even name a “classic” Fists song, one from the vault that predates their signing with Universal, learning how to actually play their instruments, writing melody lines with hooks. Talent and musicality are anathema to punk, and knowing more than three chords akin to selling out, so a generation of early Circle Jerks turned on the band when “My Heart Is Hydroplaning” came out. A shame, really. It’s a catchy tune, so much so that I find myself engaged in the time-honored pastime, singing in the shower:
You’re wet you’re wet you’re wet you’re wet
Cuz love love love is raining
Inside inside
I slip and I slide
Yeah my heart is hydroplaning
My face is full of lather
—or rather, the left half is; the right is already smooth, give or take a stray graying whisker—when the phone rings. No way to get it in time, not with the shave half complete, so I don’t try. But whatever momentary peace I’d derived from the gallons of almost-scalding water on the back of my neck evaporates, and the curiosity eats at me, and a I feel a tinge of distress who could be calling at this hour?, so I finish up as quickly as I can, nicking my upper lip in the process. Ablutions as unsatisfying as the previous evening’s self-generated orgasm. A cold shower of a hot shower.
Puddling water on the cheap hardwood floor in the bedroom, I check the message. Stacy, on the voice mail. Early in Los Angeles—half past four, there. Jet lag, five days in?
The recording begins with an intake of breath, as her messages always do, and then she speaks:
Hey, Josh, it’s me. Woke up really early for some reason, so I figured I’d try you before the day gets away from me. You’re probably, I don’t know, maybe you’re in the shower? That’s probably good if you are. Are you asleep? Shit. I hope you’re not asleep. No, it’s seven thirty there, there’s no way. Anyway . . . really miss you guys. It’s nice out here, but I really can’t wait to come home. It’s time. Too long, too long to be away. I’m going to try and go back to sleep, I think, so . . . yeah, I’ll just . . . I’ll call you later, okay? Hope the drop-off goes okay. Love you. Miss you. Bye.
She called, what, five minutes ago, so it’s probably okay to call back, but before I can dial, Maude summons me again—“Daddy! Another Max & Ruby! Another Max & Ruby!”—and I’m back to the basement, still in my towel, to play yet another new episode, or, rather, an episode they’ve watched a million times but not yet this morning (they didn’t finish the last one; it was rejected as too familiar). What can you do. At least those rotund rabbits are enhancing my children’s understanding of INTER- and INTRAPERSONAL DYNAMICS.
Then Maude says she’s hungry—in her whine-infused accent—and I come upstairs to find a banana, and I’m just about to peel it when she starts wailing, and when I get back down, now wearing only boxer briefs, Roland is on top of her, and they’re wrestling on the sofa, what probably began as play fighting—both of them like physical contact; Maude like a power forward who bangs under the boards, Roland delighting in the tactile stimuli until all of the sudden it becomes too much and his faulty sensory processing systems overload—and I have no idea how this started, or who started it, or why, and it’s a good fifteen minutes before I can separate them and restore order, and by then, it’s too late to return Stacy’s call.
While this is all happening the episode plays on a loop on the TV, the insidious theme song burrowing its way into the recesses of my brain:
Max and Ruby . . .
Ruby and Max.
Max and Ruby . . .
Ruby and Max.
Max and Ruby . . .
Ruby and her little brother Max . . .
(The melody is almost as inventive as the lyrics.)
TIME WAS, MY INTEREST IN MY APPEARANCE WAS MORE THAN cursory. Not that I was ever a clothes horse, but there was a certain artsy look I tried to cultivate. In New York, this was easy to achieve; I simply wore the customary East Village uniform: black shirts, black sweaters, black Doc Martens, (not black) jeans. However hackneyed the ensemble, my clothes communicated what I wanted them to communicate, namely, Please do not mistake me for a banker, stockbroker, or lawyer. When we moved up here, where no one would ever mistake anyone for a banker, stockbroker, or lawyer—even Gloria’s husband Dennis, who is a lawyer, dresses like a high school English teacher—I resolved to “go native,” as it were, and began wearing say it ain’t so colors. Black, after all, is for the clergy, and, for obvious reasons, I felt a priestly look would be inappropriate attire for someone who spent the lion’s share of his time with small children. When Roland was still an infant, I took a trip to Woodbury Common, the celebrated outlet mall, and splurged on new shirts, new jeans, new sneakers, new Doc Martens that were brown, not black; hanging all the bags on the handle of Roland’s Maclaren stroller until the damned thing threatened to topple over. Notwithstanding the stray online T-shirt impulse-purchase, I have not expanded my wardrobe since. For the last four years, I’ve pretty much punted on fashion. There’s just no point. We seldom go out, and what’s the use of blowing fifty bucks on a swanky DKNY shirt if the principal activity I’m engaged in while wearing it involves wiping someone’s ass? I have a pair of jeans that I wear every day. This is not an exaggeration—I wear the same pair of jeans every single day, only changing to sweatpants during the fortnightly washing. I think they’re stylish, these jeans, as they sort of look like what the dudes from The Hills wear in the Us Weekly layouts, but I have no real way of knowing, no touchstone of chic. What I do is, I pair those jeans with a T-shirt—I have a drawer stuffed with them, most procured from that vaunted boutique of cutting edge couture, Target—and if it’s cold, as it is today, I first throw on a lined long-sleeved white undershirt. In the summer, I substitute shorts for the jeans, and brown Crocs for brown Docs. This combination is what I’ve worn for probably 1,585 of the 1,600 days we’ve lived in New Paltz. Carson from Queer Eye would take one look and turn into a pillar of salt.
I’ve just pulled on today’s T-shirt—a blue-on-blue number bearing the inscription NEW JERSEY: THE ALMOST HEAVEN STATE over a line drawing of my home state, which I bought to honor my son’s latest obsession, and also because the indeterminate irony of the sentiment amuses me—when Roland meanders into the bedroom, running a Matchbox car along the wall as he walks, and stands at attention next to me, or as close as he can to attention, which involves a considerable amount of spinning, rocking, and the making of odd hand gestures. He comes up to my belly button, tall for his age.
“Daddy,” he tells me. “I’m bored of watching TV.”
His gaze meets my own, but unlike his sister’s, there is no intensity to it. His eyes look like mine must look when I’m getting my hair cut, and my glasses are on the table next to the brushes and combs, and the cute stylist pauses in her ministrations to offer some pithy comment, glancing at me in the mirror, and I direct my myopic gaze to where I think she’s looking, but I am physically incapable of making genuine eye contact.
“Oh, really.”
“And what shall I do now?”
We have the same conversation every morning—repetition is key for Roland; once something works its way into his routine, the habit becomes difficult, if not impossible, to dislodge—so I know where he’s going with this, but I try and draw him out, have him articulate his needs explicitly, rather than in this indirect way, despite his employment of grown-up words like shall, that frustrates his ability to get what he wants. Roland often speaks in riddles, coming off like a pre-K sphinx.
“I don’t know. What would you like to do?”
“Something else,” he says.
“Like what?”
“Something that begins with ‘c.’ ”
I pause, pretending to contemplate this. Part of the game. “Cat? You want to play with Steve?”
A broad smile breaks across his face. He really is a handsome devil. He’s got that going for him, at least. “Nooooo.”
“Car? You want to ride in the car?”
“No. It starts with ‘c’ and ends with ‘puter.’ ”
“Cat-puter?”
“No!”
“Car-puter?”
“No!”
And I pretend to have an epiphany. “Ohhhhh. You mean the computer?”
“Yes!”
“Okay.”
We go back in his room, and I set up the old laptop. Roland and I used to peruse the real estate websites together—he likes looking at pictures of the interiors of houses, especially if chandeliers are involved—and one day I got so bored of this that I showed him how to click around. Teach a man to fish. The first day, I had to help him every few minutes, but by the second day, he’d gotten the hang of it. The third day, I went to check on him, and found him o
n Google, his Field Guide to American Houses open on the desk next to him, trying to type “Louisville” into the search engine bar (there are a number of lovely old homes in Louisville; it’s his second favorite city after Cleveland). He also enjoys surfing through the various lighting sites—Lamps Plus, Shades of Light, Capitol Lighting, and so forth—and checking out the torchières and the floor lamps, the sconces and the accent lights.
“What do you want to look at?” I ask him.
“I don’t know,” he says. “You pick.”
He says this, but I know he knows what he wants; he just won’t come out and tell me.
“Lamps?”
“No. No lamps.”
“Houses?”
“Okay.”
I go to the real estate subsection of pluggedincleveland.com, and click on the SHAKER HEIGHTS link. Presto, rows and rows of listings, in neat little boxes, each box a portal to dozens of images—enough to keep Roland busy until it’s time to go to school. The flip side of Asperger’s: if he’s doing something he finds “interest,” as he puts it, he’ll amuse himself for hours. Sitting down, his ass halfway off the chair, he falls under the spell of the photographs of dining rooms and master baths, eat-in-kitchens and finished basements, and I leave him in peace.
ROLAND PLUGGED IN TO CLEVELAND, MAUDE IN THE BASEMENT with her animated bunny chums, I have a moment to relax. I’m sprawled on the bed, a beached starfish. All I want to do is surrender to the Sandman’s call it’s a Sandwoman, not a Sandman, and not a call but a siren song, she’s Salome dancing the dance of the seven veils, half-naked and writhing on a pole, her heart-shaped ass plainly visible behind the gossamer, primped in a gesture of promise, anything I desire, anything at all, to lure me to the Land of Nod, but I can’t, because if I fall asleep now, only to wake ten, eleven, twelve minutes later, the fatigue will be worse, if that’s possible; the aching in my bones will intensify, the dull headache cavalry stampeding in the space behind my eyes will magnify, the nausea will become unbearable, and I cannot fathom how anyone, surgeon, midwife, mother offering newborn child her chapped nipple, can function under such dire conditions without breaking down and falling apart sooner or later I can’t go on I must go on I will go on but I do understand, with hi-def clarity, the efficacy of sleep deprivation as a method of torture, the hard-on it gives Dick Cheney, because if I were an al-Qaeda operative at Gitmo—me, Josh Lansky, how I feel at this precise moment—and some G-man in mirrored shades entered the oubliette and promised me twelve hours of undisturbed sleep if I named names, names would be named, habib; every last name I knew, one long litany of guttural utterances, of Abduls, Muhammeds, and Ibrahims, of Osamas, Khalids, and Anwars, and when every last morsel of so-called intelligence was extracted from my weary head, I would lay it on the pillow, or the cold, pig-blooded cement floor, and Allahu Akbar resume relations with Salome the Sandwoman, who after all is not unlike one of the virgins promised me in my thwarted martyrdom, and I would sleep soundly and without remorse, al-salatu khayru min an-nawm be damned.