You're Not Doing It Right

by Michael Ian Black

  So she does. She spends several days painting the baby’s room by herself, while I stew in my office. I define “stewing” as playing online poker for ten hours at a time.

  Why am I being such a total prick?

  The only excuse I have is fear masquerading as denial manifesting itself as assholishness. If we don’t paint the baby’s room, maybe we won’t have a baby, and if we don’t have a baby, maybe I won’t fail at being a father.

  I blame Martha for my fear. She is the one who wanted this baby. She forced us to make this child. Why did it have to be now? Why couldn’t we wait a little longer? Why does everything have to be on her schedule? I feel unprepared and scared and rather than deal with my feelings I just push her awayawayaway. Maybe if I push hard enough she really will go away.

  “Yes, I know the smell of tuna makes you throw up, Martha. Does that mean I no longer have the right to eat tuna from a can? Are you going to take THAT away from me too, just like YOU TOOK AWAY MY FREEDOM?”

  It never occurs to me to ask if she is scared, too.

  About six weeks in, we’re in a dim examination room at the ob-gyn’s office. Her doctor is a middle-aged Pakistani woman who seems very capable. I base my assessment of her competence on the expert way she squeezes ultrasound goop from a ketchup bottle onto Martha’s belly.

  “This will be a little cold,” she says. And it is cold. She’s a very good doctor.

  The doctor picks up a flat white paddle and runs it over the goop. A maze of shadowy images flicker onto the ultrasound monitor beside us. We’re peeking inside Martha’s belly. It’s amazing and weird and kind of gross.

  “There,” the doctor says.

  On the screen is a kidney-shaped object the size of a grain of rice. It’s our baby. We can see something moving within. The heart, a tiny flickering strobe light.

  “Do you want to hear?” she asks.

  I didn’t know this thing has audio. Yes, of course we want to hear. She pushes a button on the machine and a wet whooshing pulse fills the room. Hwaah hwaah hwaah hwaah. Oh wow. It sounds like an underwater dance club in there.

  Why is its heart beating so fast? That’s normal. How does everything else look? Normal. Everything’s normal? Yes. Are you sure? Yes. We stare, mesmerized. That’s our kid in there. Or a tadpole. It’s still too soon to tell which one. But one thing is definite. In a matter of months, we will either be the proud parents of a baby or a frog. The doctor prints out a photo of our blob to take home. It doesn’t look like much, but we tack it to the refrigerator when we get home.

  In preparation for the baby’s arrival, I decide I need a new desk. No doubt this is due to a natural biological impulse common among expectant parents to start nesting. Why I feel the baby needs a giant old-fashioned government surplus steel desk for my home office is unclear, but that’s what my nesting instinct tells me to go out and purchase.

  Our new house is in Peekskill, New York, one of those always-dying, never-quite-dead Hudson River communities that used to manufacture things back when America did that. We bought our home there because it is the only community within an hour of New York City that we can afford. Among its many shortcomings is the fact that there are no stores in Peekskill that sell old-fashioned government surplus steel desks. I make some calls around the area and finally find a place that does in Poughkeepsie, about an hour north.

  Driving up there in my silver Volkswagen New Beetle (not a girl’s car), I lose the signals from my usual New York radio stations and have to scan around for another choice, finally settling on a random rock station called the Fox or the Cat or the Cobra or some other animal I do not associate with rock and roll. As I pull into Poughkeepsie, they play a song I have never heard before by a band I only know from their one previous hit, a band pretty much universally acknowledged to be shitty: Creed.

  I am not a music snob. If anything, my musical taste is bad by any critical standards. My favorite song of all time is “Come On Eileen” by Dexys Midnight Runners. A close second is “MMMBop” by Hanson. So I am not out there claiming any musical superiority, but Creed really does suck. Bad music, pretentious lyrics, and a messianic front man. Also they are from Florida. No good rock music has ever come from Florida. Undoubtedly, there will be legions of offended Floridian readers who think to themselves, What are you talking about? Such-and-such band is from Florida and they’re freaking awesome! No. Whatever band you are thinking of, if they are from Florida, they suck. Not as much as Creed, but they still suck.

  So I am driving through downtown Poughkeepsie when this song by Floridian cock-rockers Creed comes on the radio. The song is called “With Arms Wide Open.” It opens with these lyrics:

  Well, I just heard the news today

  It seems my life is going to change

  I cannot reprint any more of the lyrics here because I asked Creed’s permission to do so, but they refused my request. I’m not sure why, but I suspect it had something to do with saying how much they suck in the above paragraphs.

  To summarize, the song goes on to describe the narrator’s reaction to finding out he is going to be a father, a reaction infinitely more mature than my own. For one thing, he is going to greet the baby, per the title, with arms wide open, whereas I seem to be welcoming my own baby with arms resolutely folded across my chest. The song then discusses the “awe” the singer feels, his gratitude, and his fervent wish that the child grow up to be a better man than he himself is. I don’t know what kind of man Scott Stapp is, but I certainly hope his unborn child is a better singer.

  I am wholly unprepared for my reaction to this song, which is uncontrollable, sustained, violent weeping. Within seconds of registering the song’s subject matter, I am crying so hard I feel like I’ve just been punched in the tear ducts with a raw onion. The tears seem to come from a deep liquid reservoir somewhere near my solar plexus, some gland I did not know about that stores salt water by the gallon. All of this smirking detachment in which I have encased myself over the past few months is no match for the awesome power of Creed.

  I am crying so hard I have to pull my masculine automobile over to the side of the road so that I can sob without danger of driving into a tree. Thank God Poughkeepsie is in even worse financial condition than Peekskill; there is nobody on the sidewalks to see me hunched over in my front seat, arms crossed at midsection, holding myself into a solid shape so that I do not leak out of the car in a quivering protoplasmic goo. For long minutes, well after lead singer Scott Stapp has finished singing his stupid, pompous, corny-ass song that I love more than any song I have ever heard before, I sit in my car and cry.

  I am undone.

  At the time, I think these tears are nothing, a hormonal hiccup, a perfectly normal stress reaction. But now, years later, now that my son is ten, now that I have a daughter who is eight, now that I know fatherhood for what it is, I think that incident stemmed from something else. Or, actually, two things.

  The first is a deep recognition of time, the long stretches of time that have brought me here to Poughkeepsie, coupled with an unfolding future that extends to some distant dim place where my children will live, our children’s children will live, and on and on. And here I am parked outside a surplus office furniture store, one moment in a long series of moments.

  The second is recognizing that these tears are nostalgia in its deepest sense, the sharp pain of remembering and the equally sharp pain of hope. There is no word for feeling nostalgic about the future, but that’s what a parent’s tears often are, a nostalgia for something that has not yet occurred. They are the pain of hope, the helplessness of hope, and finally, the surrender to hope. That’s what parenthood is, ultimately, the hope of casting a message in a glass bottle into the sea with no sense of where it will end up. We have no control, none of us.

  Creed changed my life.

  After ten minutes or so, I pull myself together and go into the store to make my purchase. I drag the battered old desk out to the car and contemplate how I am going to fit this
thing into my Beetle. It is a battleship, far bigger than I expected. Too big for me to know how to deal with it. But here it is. But it’s what I wanted, and here it is. For half an hour, I struggle with the desk, lifting it a bit at a time. One corner, then another. First inside the car, then out. I wrestle with it and tear at it and unscrew the feet, and then the legs, and eventually I get the thing tamed. I secure it as best as I can with some old rope and start the long trip back to Peekskill, this monstrous weight threatening to tip me over. I drive in silence, radio off. I drive slow. We are pregnant and I have to get home.

  Baby.

  CHAPTER 9

  dead dad kid

  My own father seemed to know so much. He could operate a ham radio. He knew how to make corned beef hash. My brother and he once turned an ordinary block of wood into an excellent soapbox derby car. He was also very good at painting tiny lead figurines of wizards. From a kid’s point of view, it was a pretty impressive knowledge base.

  But he wasn’t the best father. Not because he didn’t love us, but because he simply didn’t know how to be around kids. He wasn’t socially adept with adults, either, but with children he was hopeless. He didn’t wrestle or make dumb faces or play catch. A popular activity when we visited my dad on the weekends? He would hand my brother and me each a plastic bucket and tell us to go outside and pick the rocks out of his lawn. Once, he bought me a baseball mitt for my birthday, which I loved except for the fact that I am a lefty and he bought me a right-handed mitt. It seemed equally possible to me that he was either unaware that baseball mitts came for both righties and lefties, or that he did not know I am left-handed.

  Here is how he died: one night, the police find him pulled over in his car on the side of the highway. He’s unconscious with a head injury, the apparent victim of an assault. They think it occurred in the parking lot at Rutgers University, where he is taking night classes to get his master’s degree. He is thirty-nine years old.

  He is brought to the hospital, where doctors perform emergency brain surgery. My brother, Eric, and I aren’t told until the following day, after he is out of immediate danger. I don’t remember who took us to visit him a couple of days later: Mom or his second wife, Beth. My parents have been divorced for seven years, and their relationship is terrible. So it was probably Beth.

  I do remember how frail Dad looks. His head is shaved and a long crescent-shape scar circumnavigates his skull. He seems distant and foggy, and we don’t stay long.

  A few weeks later, he is out of the hospital and home for the holidays. Beth gives him teddy bears that Christmas. Lots of teddy bears, including a baseball cap with a teddy bear sewn onto the brim. The cap covers the scar, although I would have a hard time determining which looks worse, the scar or the hat.

  Over the next few months, his recovery is slower than expected but he does not seem to be in any danger. Then one morning, we’re asleep in our bunk beds. It’s early, a school day. I hear Mom come into the room. “Boys, wake up,” she says. My eyes open. She’s standing beside our bunk bed where she can see us both. She is unhesitant: “Your father died last night.”

  She says it quick, almost blowing the words out with her breath. He was readmitted to the hospital … an infection in his leg … they gave him a medicine he was allergic to … it said so on his chart … an accident … “I’m so sorry,” she says, and I can see her struggling to retain her composure for us, but she can’t hold herself together. She begins weeping huge, convulsive sobs, then collapses onto the floor, falling to her knees so that her face is level with mine in the bottom bunk. She is crying so hard she is struggling to breathe. I have never seen her like this. “I’m so sorry,” she says again and again. She runs from the room, leaving Eric and me alone.

  The news is so swift and shocking that I cannot process it at all. Above me, I hear Eric begin to cry, and after a moment, I start crying, too, because I don’t know what else to do. Crying seems like the appropriate response and I am still young enough, twelve, that I can summon tears without too much effort. As we lie in bed, I wonder if I will have to go to school today. No, no school today or for the rest of the week. When Mom calls to tell them I won’t be coming in for a while, I ask if she can tell them it’s because I’m sick, and not because my dad died. “Can you tell them I have tonsillitis?” I ask. Mom gives me a strange, perplexed look, like I just levitated. She doesn’t understand why I wouldn’t want to tell people the truth. She doesn’t understand that dead dads are embarrassing; they attract unwanted attention. When I return to school, I am afraid people will stare at me and point: “There goes the kid with the dead dad. Hey, Dead Dad Kid!”

  People make fun of me enough already because I am younger than everybody else in my class, and because all my close friends are girls, and because I once gave a speech for sixth-grade class president wearing a rubber Alfred E. Neuman Halloween mask. (I did not win.) For years afterward, people mockingly called me “Alfred.”

  So I don’t really need any additional attention.

  “What about appendicitis?” I ask. “Can we tell them I have appendicitis?”

  “We’ll tell them the truth,” she says.

  I hate the truth.

  She takes Eric and me to work with her that day because there is nowhere else for us to go. She and Elaine own a small stationery store in an indoor flea market, selling personalized stationery, greeting cards, and novelty items like giant plastic Budweiser bottles that people use as savings banks. I hate working there.

  The day passes in a haze. We don’t talk about Dad. We don’t talk about anything. Instead we perform our normal store functions. For Eric, that means being helpful. For me, that means stealing money out of the cash register. I routinely steal quarters from my mother’s store to use at the arcade, which may at least partially explain why the store ultimately fails, and definitely explains why I ultimately become very good at the game Time Pilot.

  On our way home from work, we stop at the video store. Mom tells us we can pick out whatever movie we want. We choose The Blues Brothers, which is rated R. Normally we are not allowed to rent R-rated movies, so I am a little nervous as we hand it to her. She glances at the box, but doesn’t say anything. Awesome. A small, shameful part of me begins to see an upside to Dad dying. For the foreseeable future, it seems like I will get away with whatever I want: skipping school, R-rated movies, maybe even the Holy Grail of childhood contraband, sugar cereals. Our cereal cupboard is normally filled with high-fiber, lesbian-friendly cereals like Product 19 and Special K. (Yes, there are lesbian-friendly breakfast cereals.) Surely a boy who has just lost his father is not to be denied a box or two of Frosted Flakes in his grief. Surely not.

  Even as I am having these thoughts I am aware what a horrible person I must be. Who thinks like this? Who thinks about using the death of a parent as a means to get sugar? As it turns out, me. I do that. Why do I not feel tormented with grief? Isn’t that what you’re supposed to feel when a parent dies? Am I defective? That first day, I honestly feel like getting to miss school and watch The Blues Brothers is a pretty fair trade for losing my dad.

  The next morning, Mom takes us suit shopping for the funeral. We go to a local store—Von Goodman’s or something—and when the salesman asks if we need help, Mom tells him the whole story: dead father, funeral, suits. I am mortified. She forces me to try to on several bunchy outfits before we (she) finally settle on a somber navy blue jacket and pants, white shirt, new black dress shoes, clip-on tie. Eric is dressed almost identically. We look like a couple of junior Jehovah’s Witnesses.

  “You look stupid,” I say.

  “You look worse,” he responds.

  “You look like a retard.”

  “You look like a gay retard.”

  Touché.

  We have nothing to do before the funeral two days from now, so we sit around the basement by ourselves watching game shows and soap operas. We don’t talk about it. Anyway, what is there to say?

  “It sucks that Dad di
ed.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Can you turn The Price Is Right on?”

  “Sure.”

  I keep flashing back to an incident that happened a year or so before, when Dad was dropping us off at home after one of our weekends with him. He was not a demonstrative man, and it occurred to me that I couldn’t remember him ever telling me that he loved me. I didn’t doubt that he did, but he’d never said it, and I had never said it to him. So I decided to tell him I loved him. I’m not sure why I felt the need to do it at that moment, but it seemed important.

  I waited for Eric and Susan to get out of the car, and when they were clear, I gathered up my courage and blurted out, “I love you, Dad.” Then I ran from the car, up the sidewalk, and into the house. If he responded, I never heard. That’s what I keep thinking about in the basement as Rick and I watch The Price Is Right on TV, the big Showcase Showdown wheel spinning on its axis around and around and around.

  I’m nervous about the funeral. I’ve never been to one and I don’t know if I’m going to have to look at Dad’s dead body or not. What if I don’t want to? What if I cry a lot and everybody looks at me? Are people allowed to make fun of you at a funeral? Also, will there be food?

  The next day, our stepmother, Beth, picks us up, and we drive with her to the funeral home, a saggy old Victorian house near the highway. Inside, the place suffocates from wood and carpet. A long hallway bisects the building leading to several viewing rooms, which, I think, is also what they call them in adult video stores. Beth asks if I want to go into the viewing room where they’ve got Dad.

  “In a minute,” I say, taking a seat on a bench in the hallway. She and Eric walk into the room together and I sit by myself. I do not want to go in—absolutely do not want to go. It’s going to be creepy and I do not like creepy things. Even Scooby-Doo stresses me out.

  There are a lot of people milling around I do not recognize. Work friends, maybe. People he knew from his neighborhood. My aunt Jane is also there with our cousins Michelle and Robyn. Our grandfather whom we rarely see is there. He doesn’t say much. He doesn’t cry, doesn’t hug me or even shake my hand. All in all, he seems remarkably unperturbed. He lives another twenty years, but I never see him again.