Fathermucker

by Greg Olear

  “I mean it,” Meg says. “You and Stacy, you have it easy. Or as easy as you can have it, when you have kids.”

  She’s serious, I realize. Meg really thinks Stacy and I are . . . are . . . shit, I can’t even think of an example of a solid couple. Barack and Michelle Obama? Ari Gold and Mrs. Ari? Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes? She must not know about Stacy’s affair. But I decide to press her, carefully, just to double-check.

  “So you don’t think she’d ever cheat on me?”

  “Stacy? No way. I mean, anyone might be tempted to cheat, in the right situation, but unless she’s trapped in the trunk of a car with George Clooney, I’d say you’re safe. Why? Do you think she’s cheating on you?”

  “No,” I tell her. This is the truth. I don’t think she’s cheating on me—and the fact that Meg is in the dark about the supposed infidelity is welcome news; if Stacy’s L.A. trip were a Chad Donovan booty call in disguise, Meg would know—but I can’t say for certain. And until I can kill him, the Headless Whoresman will ride on.

  “Hey Meg . . . what’s the deal with Sharon Rothman?”

  No sooner does the question escape my lips than a wasp—one of the last remaining wasps of the season, the lone-wolf Rambo who didn’t get the memo that the summer is over, that autumn is here, that he should hole up in whatever papery flophouse wasps hole up in for the winter—flies out of a nest somewhere in the woods and stings Beatrix on the cheek. The poor girl starts wailing, and Meg and I, our moment of fun ruined, jump to our feet and hustle the kids out of the sandbox, which is a lot harder than it sounds, because none of them is wearing shoes, and no one, not even Beatrix, wants to leave. Meg consoles her injured daughter, I help the others find their footwear, and, pell-mell and tumble bumble, we make for the safety of our cars.

  “Is she allergic?”

  “I don’t know. I sure hope not.”

  “Are you okay to drive?”

  She laughs. “Alas, yes.”

  The corporate-bald dad and his son pass us on the sidewalk, although he doesn’t so much as glance at me. I’m as invisible to him as I was to Lady Godiva. The boy is half-running to keep up with his old man’s Midtown Manhattan pace, and looks distraught, as if his father might tire of him, release his hand, and leave him behind. “Godzilla two, Mikey zero,” the corporate-bald dad boasts, lording his hollow victory, in a game of his own invention, over his overwhelmed three-and-a-half-year-old, who, although the dad might not realize it, is on the brink of tears.

  I install the kids in their carseats—Roland first has to sit in Maude’s and get a rise out of her before moving, the same “game” we play every time we get into the minivan—and take my place behind the wheel. I put on my seatbelt. I fire up the engine. I watch Meg’s SAVE THE RIDGE Jetta drive away.

  Her VW has already disappeared around the corner before I realize I forgot to ask her for Sharon’s number.

  Friday, 3:41 p.m.

  THE STATES MIX STARTS SKIPPING. WELCOME TO THE H-H-H-H-HOTEL Cal-cal-cal-cal . . .

  “It’s broken,” I tell Roland. “We have to listen to something else.”

  “Wah!” he cries.

  “I’ll make a new States Mix when we get home, okay?”

  We’re driving around now, listening to music, killing time, the Odyssey cruising south on 208, toward Gardiner. I’d stopped at Dressel Farms, where the Port-o-Potty is still operational, and took a leak. Was leaving two children unattended in a locked automobile for three full minutes a violation of federal, state, and local law? I don’t know, but I couldn’t take them with me, nor was holding it an option. It was Port-o-Potty or empty Poland Spring bottle; should I have whipped it out in the minivan? I think not.

  “Wah!”

  “If it’s broken, it’s broken. There’s nothing I can do.”

  Here’s my plan for the rest of the day: When we get to the light at Ireland Corners, I’ll bang a left on 44/55, and another left on Ohioville, just before the Thruway overpass, and take that to 299, thus completing a big backroads circle—then head over to Pasquale’s, a souped–up pizza joint at Cherry Hill Plaza, near Meg’s house. I’ll fortify my meatball hero with a mug of beer, and possibly two (the Mother’s Little Helper talk with Meg was inspiring). Then we’ll go home, watch Noggin for an hour or two, and, with any luck, put the kids, and this wretched day, to bed.

  “But Daddy,” Roland says, “I want music.”

  I switch over to the radio.

  . . . true love won’t desert you . . . you know I still love you . . .

  Journey? Fucking Journey? You’ve got to be kidding me. Why are they still playing Journey on the radio? Why do I hear Def Leppard at least four times a week? Can we all agree to have a moratorium on AC/DC for the next year? Seriously, guys—I’ve been shook all night long long enough.

  I know there’s good music out there; it just never gets played on the radio. You’ll hear three minutes of white noise before you hear, say, “Chicago” by Sufjan Stevens, my pick for best song of the last decade. Radio stations either play tried-and-true hits, like “More Than a Feeling” or “Fly Like an Eagle” or (please shoot me) “Radar Love,” pre-packaged tween-marketed acts, or, worst of all, the slick studio work of an alumnus of that staggering monument to mediocrity, American Idol. Even a legitimate rock star like Daryl “Duke” Reid gets very little airtime. You never hear Circle of Fists on the radio, even “My Heart Is Hydroplaning,” which was clearly written with a general audience in mind. And Reid is that rare commodity in today’s music scene, a guy who actually makes enough money from his art that he doesn’t have to hold down another job. Radio has gotten so bad, so predictable, that when I hear a song from the eighties that I didn’t particularly like at the time—“I Want a New Drug” or “Let’s Hear It for the Boy”—it just about makes my day. The (guilty) pleasure I got last week, in hearing that crappy Huey Lewis song . . .

  And yet, loath though I am to admit it, there is something magical about Tom Petty, and Led Zeppelin, and my dad’s favorite, the Rolling Stones, and the other perennial classic-rock greats. Regardless of how you feel about “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction,” it’s a song that everybody—and I mean everybody—knows. There are African bushmen, there are Papua New Guinea primitives, there are aliens with radio scanners on Alpha fucking Centauri, who try and they try and they try and they try and still can’t get none. Mick Jagger and Keith Richards are human synapses through which music and mass adulation are exchanged. How exhilarating it must have been to have purchased Let It Bleed at the record store the day it came out in 1969 (as my father did), put the needle to the record, and listened with astonishment to the opening strains of “Gimme Shelter”! What a powerful communal experience that must have been, to have bought the album on faith, without hearing a note, and been rewarded with such aural sublimity.

  As great as Sufjan Stevens is, his melodies are not in that stratum, and probably never will be. Not everyone knows “Chicago,” just as “My Heart Is Hydroplaning,” cult hit that it is, is just that: a cult hit. New music is about the long tail. Niche markets. Small audiences. That’s why they keep playing the Stones on the radio—there just aren’t any new bands who can fill those blue-suede shoes. The wattage of Radiohead, Coldplay, Green Day, even U2, all pales in comparison to such incredible starpower, like so many yellow main-sequence stars next to Betelgeuse (or Beatlegeuse, as it were)—and besides, none of those acts is exactly new. Who’s going to seize the mantle from Mick and Keith and John and Paul? The fucking Jonas Brothers?

  I’m contemplating the death of the rock star, connecting the dots to the decline of Western civilization, when I pass yet another cop on the side of the road, this one hiding behind a billboard for State Farm Insurance. Instinctively I pump the brake, but there’s no need: it’s fifty-five on 208, and the needle’s on forty-five as I pass him.

  Nevertheless, he pulls out behind me, tires squealing, and flips on his takedown lights, the red and blue streaming menacingly off my rearview. I hit the brake,
jerk the minivan to the side of the road. He comes up behind me slowly, ominously. Something about the tableau of aggressively macho cop-car detaining passively effete minivan suggests a prison tough about to make a bitch of the new inmate who just dropped the shower soap.

  “Daddy,” Roland says, “why are we stopping?”

  “We got pulled over,” I say. “By a police officer.”

  “But why?”

  “I honestly don’t know.”

  State troopers all look the same. Lean frame, ramrod posture, mirror shades, Stetson hat, narrow mustache, shiny boots. Is there some sort of internal memorandum that instructs them to dress like Tops from gay bondage porn?

  My heart is an 808 drum as I roll down the window and kill the engine. My morbid fear of cops rivals my musophobia in intensity. Cops bring out the Kafka in me. I must have been Jean Valjean in a past life. I can’t even bring myself to watch movies about men sent to prison for crimes they didn’t commit; I get too upset. In the Name of the Father? No, thank you.

  For the sake of the kids, I try and remain calm. Like K. in The Trial, I’ve done nothing wrong. Forty-five in a fifty-five is not a ticketable offense. Even at the end of the month, when quotas must be reached.

  The cop takes his sweet-ass time coming to the window. He ambles over all bow-legged, like he’s wearing chaps. O, the repressed homoeroticism of the policeman’s lot; O, the unrepressed sadism! He doesn’t take off his mirror shades as he peers into the window—rude, if you ask me—gruffly requesting the usual documentation.

  “What seems to be the trouble, officer?” I ask, as pleasantly as possible.

  “You were speeding, sir.” He talks like Friday on Dragnet, so much like the stereotypical, no-nonsense cop that it’s a self-parody. I resist the urge to laugh.

  “Daddy,” Roland says again, “why are we stopped?”

  “Hold on, Roland.”

  “I clocked you at sixty-eight.”

  There is no way I was doing sixty-eight. No fucking way in hell. “Really? Are you sure?”

  This is not, evidently, a prudent question to ask a policeman. He interprets my genuine puzzlement as belligerence, collecting my license and registration with stony silence, and ignoring the two kids in the backseat.

  “I don’t mean to question your authority or your judgment or anything like that,” I tell him, trying to keep my voice pleasant. “It’s just that I drive this road every day, and I don’t like to go fast. My daughter won’t let me.” I gesture to the back seat, but he continues to ignore the kids. “And I’m not in a hurry. Quite the opposite, in fact. I mean, is it possible your radar gun isn’t calibrated correctly?”

  Again, not a savvy question to ask. Already he doesn’t like me; now I’ve questioned his cop instincts, his ability to read a fucking speed gun, and his dislike has blossomed into full-blown hatred.

  “This isn’t the place to discuss that,” he tells me, his voice even more robotic than before. “We’ll talk about it in court.”

  “I’m sorry, but, I mean, I just don’t understand how it’s possible that I was doing seventy.”

  “I didn’t say you were doing seventy,” he says. “I said you were doing sixty-eight.”

  Okay, then.

  He ambles back to his car, my license and registration clenched in his fist. I turn around and check on the kids. Roland is perusing his new floor-plan book. Maude is slurping on her passie, her sippy cup in hand. They seem calm enough.

  Personally, I think he should have a bit more sympathy for my plight. He should at least acknowledge the kids in the back—I don’t want their first experience with a police officer to be this unpleasant—and, I mean, come on now. I’m a dad in a Honda Odyssey with a MOMS ROCK! bumper sticker, chauffeuring around two little kids on a workday. I’m not a drug dealer. I’m not a tailgater. I’m not a drag racer. How fast could I have been going if my speedometer read forty-five when I passed him? I’m not the menace to society; I’m the one he’s supposed to protect from the menace to society! Let me off with a warning, Officer Stalin, and be on your way.

  But then, he’s a police officer, and that’s what police officers do: they assert their authority, like the schoolyard bullies they once were. They get off on their power. If the Tuckers and Joeys of the world manage to stay on the straight and narrow, they wind up driving patrol cars. This joker probably has just as little respect for me—a man, in a minivan, with two kids, on a workday!—as I have for him.

  Five minutes into whatever it is he has to do with my license and registration while I’m parked on the side of the road, and his cruiser is fishtailed into the southbound lane, fucking up traffic in both directions—five minutes, it must be said, of stellar behavior from the Lansky kids—Maude spills water on her pants and starts bawling. The white stopper thingy fell out of the sippy cup lid—maybe the lid itself is cracked; one of the green ones is, I now recall, and her lid is green—to disastrous effect. What I need to do is comfort her, dry her off, and change her pants. But I can’t do that without getting out of the minivan. Is it legal for me to get out of the car? I don’t know. But he didn’t tell me not to.

  I open the door and step onto the gravel on the side of the road. I look behind me, where the trooper sits in his Crown Vic, its lights spinning their bright carnival colors onto the road, and gesture to the side of the Odyssey, so he knows where I’m going. I don’t want him to be surprised, come at me with his weapon drawn. I walk around the back of the minivan, open the big side door, and start to dab up the wet spot on Maude’s pink pants.

  “Get back in the car!” Officer Stalin’s shouting into his CB radio mic, and his voice blares through the PA. “Sir, get back in the car, now!”

  “My daughter is screaming,” I respond, raising my voice so he can hear me, but careful to keep calm, to not swear. “She’s upset.”

  “I don’t care,” comes the blaring voice. “Get back in the car. For your own safety!”

  I don’t see how it’s unsafe for me to be here on the gravel, what with the entire bulk of the minivan—not to mention his own fishtailed cruiser—shielding me from the actual road. A road that is not exactly the Santa Monica Freeway when it comes to traffic.

  “Now!”

  I do what he says. But before I get back in, I shout, “You’re making a three-year-old cry! That’s unconscionable!”

  Back in my seat, I’m trembling. My fingers are shaking so bad I can barely keep them on the wheel. How I managed to engage the cop without dropping an f-bomb is beyond me. I didn’t think I had this much self-control.

  “Sorry, Maude,” I tell her. “You just have to wait.”

  So Maude is crying, and Roland is yelling at her to shut up, and I have so many conflicting emotions surging through me—anger, frustration, humiliation, indignation, more anger; basically, I feel like I’ve been violated—that I want to rip the steering wheel clean off and throw it like a Frisbee through the fucker’s windshield. Which, now that I mention it, is the sort of thing Roland, whose interior monologue is devoid of neuro-typical censorship, says all the time when he gets this mad.

  This is the state of things when Officer Stalin finally returns to my front window, his mirrored shades giving him the look of that shapeshifting cyborg from Terminator 2. Again, he ignores the crying three-year-old and the irritated four-year-old, and speaks in the same robotic tone: “It’s unlawful to leave your vehicle during a traffic stop. In addition, raising your voice at a state trooper constitutes disorderly conduct. That’s an arrestable offense.” He gestures back to his cruiser. “I have it all on videotape.”

  Arrestable? Really? I can already see it on the AP wire: FATHER ARRESTED FOR GETTING OUT OF HIS CAR DURING TRAFFIC STOP TO TEND TO CRYING DAUGHTER. That would trump the story about the mother in Texas who was arrested in front of her kids, taken away in handcuffs, for not wearing her seatbelt. I’m Facebook friends with the editor of the national desk at Fox News, who I know from my days in HR, and if the whole you-only-get-one-phone-call
business proves true, she’s my one call. On the other hand, getting arrested is probably not the best recourse right about now. Nothing good could come of that. So, humiliating as it is, I go into groveling mode, which is what the sadistic fucker wants—to break me, to make me cry uncle, to apologize even though I’m not in the wrong. Quite like the prison shower rapist. “I’m sorry, officer. I was only trying to help my daughter.”

  Still he doesn’t acknowledge Maude’s crying, which has subsided to mucousy grunts and sniffles. Instead, he says, “The best way to help your daughter is to stay in your seat during a traffic stop, especially on a busy road such as this. You could get hit by a car, and then she’d have no father.”

  There’s a better chance of me being struck by lightning—that actually happened last year, to a man in Highland, the next town over; a father of two, my age, outside in a sudden storm, struck dead by lighting—but I don’t press the point.

  “Maybe your daughter was crying because you were so clearly irritated when you were detained,” Officer Stalin continues, returning my license and registration with a little white print-out that is, in popular parlance, the ticket. “Maybe she was picking up on your cues. You’re her role model, remember. You have to be a good one.”

  My cell phone, on the passenger seat, picks this moment to ring. The ringtone is called Old School; it sounds like a rotary-dial phone from the fifties, something from a film noir. I ignore it.

  What I should do now is end this conversation. Apologize one more time, and be done with him. But I can’t seem to let it go.

  “She spilled water on her pants,” I tell him. I’ve managed to conceal the boiling rage in my voice, but I still sound shaky. “That’s why she was crying. They were fine until then. They’re little kids, and they’ve been sitting back there for a long time.”

  He doesn’t like this. Again, he takes this as an attack on his competence. “You’ve been here for the eight minutes necessary to process the paperwork,” he tells me, “and not a minute longer.”