Twelve minutes later you stand there with sweat pouring down your brow and your face contorted into a bleak mask of Halloween terror—lips pursed, teeth grinding—and you finally break down and go to give them a nice hard whack on the ass and guess what—you miss because the human amoeba has somehow swaggled its ass out of your aiming area.
That’s when you snap. You start chasing them as they slither and slather down the hallway—aiming and whacking and missing by so much your arm almost flies out of its socket.
And if you find yourself lucky enough to make some good, solid, sudden hand on ass contact—guess what again?
It works.
It sends a blood-rushing, breath-stopping shock right from their ass up into their elbows and out of their wickedly wide-open eyes. First there is a moment of absolute silence and then—of course—they start to cry. That’s the key moment—when they squinch their eyes tightly shut and begin to howl you gotta grab ’em before they begin the amoeba dance again. Grab ’em and whack ’em a second time and carry them off to bed. This, of course, is all based on the fact that the tantrum has occurred in the private inner sanctum of your own home.
Because if it happens in public? All bets are off. You get a kid who wants to pull The Jellyfish Move in a store or in a restaurant or God forbid out on the sidewalk and pushes you to the point where you have to whack him or her on the rear end? Get ready for almost every passerby to call you out as a bad parent or to shun you like you bear a scarlet letter on your chest or to beckon a nearby officer of the law and claim themselves a witness to child abuse. And once a kid realizes you can’t get away with hitting him or her in public? Those tantrums will happen over and over until the toy or piece of candy or place they wanna go is handed over in a split second. They will cry and kick and jellyfish their way to every little thing they want.
And you deign to tell me they are angels.
You dare to call them cute.
Hugs not drugs?
Bullshit. I say drugs. Drugs with a capital D and plenty of them. Drugs in all kinds of colors and flavors. Foolproof kid-type drugs that look and taste like candy and ice cream so they greedily suck them down like the one-way elves they are and end up getting knocked on their self-centered pink-cheeked hair-free little asses.
They wanna use the dreaded Jellyfish Move and become immobile unassailable amoebas? Good. Let’s ply them with sweet-tasting sugar-coated chemicals that will make them pure putty in our nonsilly gi-normous parent hands.
We owe it to ourselves and all the innocent, childless people on planes, trains and other forms of public transportation.
CHAPTER 3
PLEASE DRUG YOUR CHILDREN
I know I know—you find it distasteful and dangerous and just plain wrong. Give drugs to my kids? you say, What kind of a mother/father do you think I am? But what you are really worried about is this: how can I do it and know for a fact that my kids won’t slip into a coma and somehow send me to prison for life when all I really wanted was some peace and quiet.
Hey—calm down. It’s fine. Better than that—it’s legal. Besides—it’s not like you’re asking them to teethe on a lead paint-covered choo choo train outsourced by Toys R Us from the bowels of China. These are good, solid, FDA-approved American drugs. The very same ones you take yourself in big tired parent-type doses.
Slip the little brat a simple shot—NyQuil actually comes with an actual plastic shot glass—of a basically harmless and not to mention very patriotic over-the-counter medicine that will not only taste good but within fifteen minutes have him or her sound asleep and dreaming about sugar plums. Or video games. Or high school shooting sprees—whatever the hell it is that children dream about these days. Meanwhile, you and your better half can tear each other’s clothes off and have at it or just sit down in front of the TV and absolutely ignore each other while watching some good old-fashioned American-style sex and violence.
Now if you find yourself still hung up on a morals hook here—let’s get very specific. We all know that a completely exhausted kid is a kid who still has at least two or three hours’ worth of kicking and random screaming left. And the final stretch of random screaming is often the worst—it’s the Daytona 500 of guttural effects. After nine o’clock at night—when a kid gets on that endless crying jag treadmill—you will hear sounds emerging from the tiny beast that even Bigfoot would run away from.
I’m talking noises coyotes can’t even make. Forget howls. We’re talking yowls. Yelps. Caterwauls. Peals of terror so highly pitched that entire shelves full of glassware may explode—not to mention synapses in your own brain.
So if you don’t relish the idea of shopping for new dinner plates and coffee mugs while one side of your face is frozen and you are dragging your limp left foot behind you—give the little shit a dose of NyQuil. Or Benadryl. Two great forms of morphine in a bottle that has been so watered down you don’t need to have a discussion with a doctor to get it. Just walk into any drugstore or pharmacy and pick up as many bottles as you want. And stop worrying about the side effects—that’s why they make CHILDREN’S NyQuil and PEDIATRIC cough medicine. Smaller doses for smaller kidneys and smaller brains.
Why do you think they make these products in kid-friendly flavors? To make it easier to get it down their goddam gullets, that’s why. Hey—I think they should chock these products full of all the vitamins and daily nutritional supplements every kid is supposed to ingest on a day-to-day basis and make them taste like every type of food kids love—cheeseburger flavor, Chicken McNugget flavor—pizza, popcorn, fudge—you name it. That way we could feed and drug them at the exact same time and keep them under control for the first three to ten years of their uncivilized, unruly, bad-smell jammed little lives—just long enough for us to get regular sleep and enough free time to do what we want—travel and watch football and read and jerk off. Then—once the rules have been ingrained in their thick-and-only-getting-thicker skulls—we slowly wean them off the baby drugs and up onto the adult doses of antidepressants and alcohol and recreational drugs we adults need just to get through life as it has to be lived.
Now maybe it’s the product names that are putting you off. Maybe it’s the ny in NyQuil or the dryl in Benadryl. That’s a pretty easy fix. Would you like it better if we called them LoveQuil and BenAsleep? Or even better maybe QuietQuil or PeaceQuil. Or just cut right to the chase and name them after what YOU have to gain from putting them into a parent-induced mini-coma: Sexadryl.
When I was a kid—oh yeah, there are definitely gonna be a lot of those types of speeches in this particular chapter—my parents gave us whiskey when we were sick. First sign of a cough or a sniffle or a sneeze or a sore throat and they got a nice hot toddy down your throat. Hot toddy being a cute kid-friendly name for Irish whiskey heated up on the stovetop. Two minutes later we were fast asleep. Supposedly fighting off the onrushing effects of the flu. I don’t remember whether my parents tricked us into drinking hot toddies even when we weren’t feeling sick but hey—that’s another positive example of just why you should be drugging your kids. Twenty, thirty—even forty-five years later they won’t remember a goddam thing.
Although I do bloody well remember getting whacked on the ass by my parents and the reason I remember was because it hurt. And whatever it was I had been doing wrong—lying, cheating, stealing, biting, whacking—or all five things at approximately the same time?—I stopped doing right away once they whacked me.
I also have a scar worth about a hundred stitches on my left arm that runs from the bottom of my palm all the way up my wrist—halfway to the elbow. How did I get it? Fooling around with my older brother in front of a glass door in the kitchen of our apartment. He went one way and I threw a left jab and my left arm went right through the door.
By the way—you can go through a glass window or door and not really do any damage—it’s when you pull your appendage BACK THROUGH the same glass window or door that you get cut. You also bleed—a lot. I don’t even know how many s
titches that gaping hole required but you know what? I never punched my way through a glass door again.
Once, in the living room of our apartment, my brother and a gaggle of cousins convinced me to wrap a towel around my neck like a cape and pretend I was Superman, which I did. Then they convinced me to stand on the back of the couch and pretend it was a window ledge on The Daily Planet building, which I did. Then they convinced me to jump from the window ledge over the coffee table (which was doubling as a newspaper truck parked in front of The Daily Planet building) and save Lois Lane (my cousin Betty Ann) from the clutches of the bad guy (my brother Johnny, of course). Needless to say, that was the day I learned that I couldn’t fly. I landed on the edge of the coffee table, taking several stitches in the face. Did I ever try to fly again? Nope. Done deal. The quick trip to the emergency room, the blood, the pain, the giant numbing needle in the lips—more than enough to convince me I was born an earthbound creature.
The same theory works with any other form of pain for kids—burning a hand on a stove, getting your tongue stuck to an icy mailbox or a frozen fencepost—feel it once and you never wanna feel it again. It’s human nature. I’m sure Jimi Hendrix made a mental note never to puke in his sleep again right before he choked to death.
You have to hit kids. You have a responsibility to do so. Just to show them who’s in charge and to remind them that there are boundaries that need to be respected.
Besides—when they are very very small they have diapers on—which means their asses are padded and pretty much pain proof. As they get older and lose the diapers they may actually get used to the ass whacking and become somewhat immune to the pain. That’s when you have to change it up a little.
CHAPTER 4
I HAD SEX WITH KATHIE LEE GIFFORD (AND SHE WAS AMAZING)
Just wanted to make sure you were still paying attention. If you went right from the table of contents to this chapter—you screwed yourself.
Because I didn’t sleep with Kathie Lee Gifford. But in the first chapter of this book—“Why Everyone Hates Us”—I mentioned you by name.
So anyways—back to raising kids:
I called my mom just now to gain her perspective on what is necessary in terms of hitting or not hitting children. Let me describe her to you: if you put Mary Tyler Moore, Mother Teresa and Joe Pesci in a blender, set it on high and let it mix up to a fine, thick chocolatey shake—out would step my mom. She’s eighty-one years old but looks like she’s sixty, has the energy of someone in their early forties and will kiss you one second, kid you another and threaten to kick your ass the next. I love her. For many reasons. Some of which you are about to witness:
[the phone rings several times]
Hello.
Hey Ma.
Johnny?
No. It’s Denis.
Oh, Denis. (laughing) How are you?
I’m good. Hey Ma—
Mrs. Timmons died of cancer.
Who?
Mrs. Timmons, down the street. Remember I think you and Tommy Barolli egged her house one time?
That wasn’t us. I told you—
Dead as a doornail. Smoked four packs a day. Same thing with Mr. Willoughby from up on Edlin Street. He had horrible cancer.
Is there good cancer?
That’s not funny, Brian. Quit that smoking.
It’s Denis, Ma.
I know who it is. Uncle Jerry’s got terrible pain in his back again God help us that that’s not some kind of tumor or something and do you remember Jimmy Hanrahan used to work with Daddy?
Big Jimmy?
Yes. The father.
Yeah.
He has brain cancer.
From smoking?
No—he never smoked. Never drank either. Straight as an arrow Jimmy Hanrahan.
What about Little Jimmy?
The son?
Yeah.
Oh God. He died last year. Terrible cancer.
So—is there a difference between the terrible cancer and the horrible cancer?
(stop making fun of me) Denis.
(still making fun) Ma.
What are you calling for?
I’m just wondering—when we were kids—how often you and Dad used to hit us.
(suspicious) Why?
I was just curious.
Well—your father one time when you kids were small Johnny forged his name on some paper at school and the nuns called up about it and I told Daddy that you know he had to set an example with all these kids because this could be the beginning of some bad behavior here so we got all you kids gathered up in the hallway and he took Johnny into the bathroom and I think he used his belt but anyways he gave him a good couple of whacks in the bathroom with the door closed and I think the message got across and that was that.
I remember that.
You do? Well then I guess it did what it was supposed to do. Kids are the house that they come out of Denis—whatever goes on inside that house that’s the way the kids’re going to behave when they go out into the world.
Dad used his belt—what would you use when you hit us?
Whatever I had in my hand. I dunno. I really had to hit you and Betsy. The two of you—you two were always getting into some kind of cadology.
Okay.
Okay?
Okay, Ma.
That’s it?
Yup.
You know Brian Leary hasn’t had a cigarette in almost fifteen years now?
I know.
He rides bikes all the time in races.
I know.
Okay then, honey—thanks for calling.
Okay, Ma.
Bye.
CLICK.
(Let me just take a moment here to note: the word “cadology” was one my mother threw around the house on a daily basis. Cut the cadology, knock it off with the cadology, yer not kidding anyone with that load of cadology—these were just a few of the variations we heard throughout our lives. We just assumed it was an Irish word. My parents had learned Gaelic when they were in school and my father was very fond of the word “ammodon”—our spelling—which as far as we could tell was Irish for asshole or jackass because everyone he referred to as an ammodon was, in fact, an asshole or a jackass or a clear combination of both. Cadology sounded like it was connected to science and maybe a behavioral science but that would seem out of character for my mom. After this conversation with her I looked it up in an online dictionary. Nothing. So I tried the big giant hulking eight-pound Webster’s dictionary I keep at my feet when I’m writing. Nothing. Now I am beginning to believe my mother just made the word up—a pleasant and lilting term she decided to toss around perhaps just as a way to confuse us. I check Merriam Webster Online. Nothing. I Google the Google Thesaurus. Type in “nonsense.” Cadology does not come up. I change the spelling—codology. Merriam Webster Online—nada. Big Hulking Eight-Pound Webster? Nope. My Irish-English Dictionary? Not a chance. English-Irish? Forget it. Irish-English and English-Irish Online? Not there. I even went to Encyclopaedia Britannica—which is a goddam encyclopedia from fucking BRITAIN—where they pretty much invented words. No codology. Finally I call my sister Ann Marie and get her husband Neil—who I will speak further of much further on—and he says that my Ann told his Ann that I’m working on the book but that reminds him about my cousin Ann who we have to call Nancy because there are too many Anns in the family on this side of the Atlantic but anyways Nancy whose Ann ran into my cousin Betty Ann who was talking to one of my Aunt Anns in Ireland and she had just used the term “codology” in reference to her daughter Ann’s baby Mary Ann and that’s the point at which my head almost exploded. So Neil went to a website called World Wide Words while he was telling me this because he said whenever my mother uses a word that he doesn’t know he skips all the normal sources and goes right to this place and sure enough—there it was:
Codology.
H. V. Morton in 1930 wrote that codology was “a science unknown to us in England which involved individuals or entire villages perfo
rming a joke, hoax or parody at the expense of an Englishman. Derives from the term ‘cod’ which is Irish for ‘bunk.’ ”
So it was, in fact, a science. A science of bullshit that my mother was clearly trained to identify and defame. Goddam those British bastards. If they had never invaded Ireland then the villagers would never have had to come up with what was essentially a clever game to employ when wishing to evade questioning and the giving up of important information and it wouldn’t have been handed down from generation to generation so my mother would never have witnessed it being used as a child and therefore become privy to all the nuances and tricks and nervous tics and tells involved in the process of putting one over on somebody else and I, most importantly of all, would have gotten away with a lot more shit. Other favorites of hers included rigamarole, hooliganism and cahoots. All three of which—along with codology—were fired at us, I realize now, whenever we did try to lie, cheat, steal and/or bullshit our way around her set of rules. Dammit. She knew what she was talking about. Okay—back to the beating.)
Why We Suck Page 6