by Ben George
“Why didn’t you tell me that?” I said.
“I don’t know.”
“It could have saved me a lot of anxiety.”
“But what would you do without all your anxiety?” she said.
“Good point.”
We briefly discussed making Elijah pay me back for the toy out of his piggy-bank money, but we decided we’d had enough anxiety for one day.
I was listening to ESPN Radio because I needed another reason to despair about the collective intellect of humanity. The host, like most sports-radio guys, had many important things to say about morals and values. This particular rant involved “strong father figures.” When a professional football player is acting out and behaving like a prima donna, he said, you can be sure that there’s one common denominator: he didn’t have a strong father figure when he was a kid. Plaxico Burress, Vince Young, Terrell Owens, naughty Negroes all, had each lacked a father figure. Nothing against moms, the host said, but if you don’t have a dad around to lower the hammer and lay down wisdom, then you don’t have a chance in the real world.
Putting aside the passive-aggressive racism, there were many things wrong with this argument. Many people raised by single moms grow up with decent values. Also, you don’t make it to the NFL without some self-discipline. The fact that guys behave like babies once they arrive probably has more to do with their outrageous salaries, infinite opportunities to have sex with gorgeous women, and that everyone always wants to take pictures of them. I’ve never faced such temptations myself, but I’m sure I’d have moments of weakness.
As the shining opposite example, the host presented Sam McNabb, father of the Philadelphia Eagles quarterback Donovan, who had not only brought his boy up right, but had done it with a motivational-talk-ready parenting philosophy. Ages zero through twelve, according to Sam McNabb via Colin Cowherd on The Herd, are the “Intimidation Phase,” where you put the fear of God in your boys with your deep voice and imposing presence. The teenage years are the “Motivation Phase,” where you encourage them to excel, do their homework, and stay away from drugs. In the subsequent “Counseling Phase,” your kid learns how to be a man and to deal with disappointments.
This seemed designed to ameliorate the guilt of guys who give their kids a swat on the ass with a belt once in a while. Mr. McNabb also forgot to mention certain other phases, like the “Stop Trying to Lick Mommy’s Boobs” phase, the “Get the Hell out of the Bathroom While I’m Trying to Take a Dump” phase, and the “Don’t Smother the Dog with the Sofa Pillow” phase.
Fatherhood is about small victories and small defeats, incremental lessons in absurdity that add up to nothing in particular. Hopefully, in the end, the fact that I have been present nearly all the time while not being abusive will mean that my son can pay his rent on time, hold down an interesting conversation at a cocktail party, and have a freezer empty of human body parts. Whatever small tidbits of wisdom he absorbs along the way are just sauce.
For instance, one night Elijah asked me to teach him to play poker.
“The problem with poker,” I said to him, “is that it doesn’t work unless you gamble money.”
“What does gamble mean?” he asked.
“It means you bet.”
“We could bet M&Ms,” he said. “Lots of them.”
“We could,” I said.
“So let’s do it.”
“Let’s learn first.”
So I ran down the basic hands. I told him about pairs and two pairs, and full houses, and straights.
“You mean like two three four five six seven eight nine ten eleven jack queen king ace?” he said.
“Yes,” I said. “Except there’s no eleven card.”
“Oh right,” he said. “I forgot.”
“And then there’s the flush.”
“Is that when you flush your cards down the toilet?”
“No. It’s when you have all the cards in the same suit.”
“What’s a suit?”
I had to explain that. By then, dinner was nearly ready. But we had time for a few sample hands.
We played a modified version of Texas hold ’em, in that we kept our hole cards visible so I could advise him on whether to fold or stay in; if your cards aren’t good, I said, you must fold. Never gamble on a bad hand. At that moment, I realized that I was, essentially, teaching my son by using the chorus from a Kenny Rogers song.
He seemed to get the principle, so we hid our hole cards. I turned over the next three.
“Do you want to drop out, or stay in?” I asked.
“Stay in,” he said.
“Let me see your cards,” I said.
He had a queen and an ace, off-suit.
“Good choice,” I said.
We played through the hand. He didn’t win, but that was because of a bad draw for him, not bad decision-making. Then I dealt the next hand. This time, I asked him before the flop, “Stay in or drop out?”
“Drop out,” he said.
“Let me see.”
He turned over the cards: a nine and a four, off-suit.
“That’s a great decision,” I said. “I’m proud of you.”
Maybe we’ve already entered the Counseling Phase.
CANDY MAN
RICK BRAGG
We put in at Cotton Bayou, where the dark, brackish waters of the bays and inlets flow into the deep green of the Gulf of Mexico. It is not an idyllic, romantic place—no place dotted with $950,000 condos really is. But if you had a big enough Evinrude, and enough Dr Pepper, it could lead you to one. Still, in the early, early morning, when the only sound is the lap of the water on the docks and the soft click, click of crabs across the chert rocks, you feel like you are on the edge of something fine. And you are glad that you and the boy got up in the pitch black, to make it here in time to see a sunrise, to scramble onto a boat and head out into the Gulf in the general direction of Cuba, even though you know you will run out of Vienna sausages before you ever get so far.
I had always wanted to take the boy fishing in the Gulf, in the deep blue where, I once wrote, we would catch giant fish and talk about life. Instead, he sat in the front of the boat with his buddy, Taco—so called because the only sentence he muttered to me across three days was “I like tacos.” There, shoulder to shoulder, the spray whipping them with every bounce of the boat, they talked about whatever it is that thirteen-year-old boys talk about now, iPods or cell phones or whatever brain-rotting video game is en vogue, and I was left to talk to myself. My mother started talking to herself at fifty. I am forty-nine, but I already have long, long talks with myself, and sometimes I even make sense to me.
I never really wanted a son. Or at least, I thought it was better not to have one. I believed that it would be fine if my family line and name ended with me. It wasn’t any particular self-loathing, just the simple knowledge that we were prone to be drunks.
Not Faulkner drunks or Hemingway drunks, but mean and hopeless drunks, broken-bottle-fighting, wife-hurting, selfish drunks. My grandfather on my mother’s side was a fine man, but even he drank himself to death, smiling. My father drank himself to death on purpose, spinning the lid of a Seagram bottle instead of the cylinder on a .38.
I grew up with the music of empties clinking together as they rolled around in the backseat of a car that always smelled of stale beer, learned to walk with the rank smell of moonshine—a cross between skunk and kerosene—drifting from a can of paint thinner on the kitchen table. It wasn’t always that way—we ran from it when the three-day drunks escalated into monthlong drunks—but it still sticks in my mind.
I am not a drunk, but I could be, because the only time my mind has ever really been at ease was when I was pretty well half-lit. But that’s no sob story. I would be and could be a drunk, but I always had a lot to do, too much to do, so I chose not to be one. Maybe someday, when I am through with it all, I can finally be a drunk. We’ll see.
But I know I carry a gene in me—the drunkard’s gene—just
as I carry one for blue eyes. It would be selfish and foolish to pass it on. This may not be the exact science of it, what I believe. But that doesn’t change my belief in it.
So there would be no sons, could be none, and that seemed fine. I am not one of those scions of the Old South who would have cried over that, grieved over it. “Oh Lawdy, who will we give Great-Great Grandpappy’s saber to?” I’ve noticed that, at least down here, the more money a person has, the more he seems intent on an unbroken line, to pass it on.
But I guessed the liquor stores would just have to get by somehow without one more Bragg.
“You can adopt?” a well-meaning friend once half told, half asked me.
“Lord, what for?” I said.
If you can’t have your own boy, then why raise another man’s? I know the noble reasons to do it, but they plumb evaded me.
Yet here I stood with the wind and the salt and the water baptizing me halfway to hypothermia, alongside a boy who did not have a damn thing to do with me except that he came with the package when I married his mom.
And I knew that, somehow, I had won. I didn’t deserve to win. But I did.
Past the age when most sensible men become a father, when it was almost too late, I got this boy, like a prize in a cereal box. It hits me, now and then, and it hit me hard as I watched that boy cast his bait fish into the blue, as his face shifted from stern concentration to something like pure joy.
He pulled red snapper and Spanish mackerel from the saltwater like they were waiting in line down there to jump on his hook. Taco was catching them, too, but for some reason he was also catching some of the oddest creatures I have seen this side of Animal Planet, so they had to stop and examine them.
“Dude,” one would say.
“I know, dude,” the other would say.
I think they also discuss world peace and global warming this way.
And I laughed out loud.
“I caught bigger fish,” I bragged.
“I caught more,” my boy said.
“I caught weirder ones,” Taco said, and we allowed as how, yes, that was true.
And later, after the boys had talked about how this was the best fishing day in the whole world, my boy asked me what I thought about it all, because he believes that, because I am a writer, I should always say something profound.
“I think,” I said, “that if a frog didn’t have legs, he’d bump his ass when he hopped.”
The boy snorted and I think some Dr Pepper came back up through his nose, and he laughed for five solid minutes. And though it wasn’t exactly what I had in mind, it was a conversation about life, wasn’t it, kind of?
“Tell your momma that,” I told the boy, “the next time she starts spoutin’ on about what she thinks.”
He tried to do that, but he is thirteen and has the attention span of a tick on a hot rock.
“I believe…,” his mother started one day, not long after.
“You know what I believe?” he piped up.
“What?” she said.
“I believe that if a frog didn’t have an ass, he’d bump his…no, wait, that wasn’t it…”
And she looked at me, knowing.
I could lie.
I could say what a hard and thankless and even odious job this is, to help raise another man’s child.
I could whine. I could resent his very presence, and complain of the extra weight I am forced to carry through this life, while another man skips childless through his middle years, free, leaving me to explain to the fruit of his loins why it is unwise to run out into traffic, and unacceptable to stick your face all the way into a plate, to suck up a string of spaghetti.
But even though I complain, a lot, about the fact that he sometimes seems subhuman—mostly when he has a fork in his hand—and the fact that his bathroom is a Superfund site and the fact that he likes to adorn the TV room with noxious sweat socks, it all comes down to a simple truth.
I could call him a gift, if I was a prissy man.
I could call him a godsend, if I was a religious one.
What he is, is my great good luck.
Well-meaning people like to tell me that I was a father waiting to happen, that I have a lot to give. But I don’t buy it. I am not a good and unselfish man who believes that he has something deep and profound and fine to share with this boy.
No, we just live together, just live, and every damn day some little thing happens that makes me glad we stumbled across each other in the imperfect world of broken marriages, fractured futures, and mislaid plans.
I am probably unfit to be a real father.
I was single and childless for so long that I turned dangerous irresponsibility into art.
I am the man who once heated a can of peas on the stove—not by putting the can into a pan on the stove, but by placing it on the electric eye and turning the knob to H. When the paper began to burn off, when the Jolly Green Giant began to writhe in flames, I figured they were pretty well done.
I am the man who cut his own hair for twenty-five years, looking, at various times, like a sheepdog, a Beatle, a medieval monk, a cockatoo, a scrub brush, Sergeant Carter, a prickly pear, and the lead singer for REO Speedwagon.
I am the man who still believes that a fistfight is a logical and reasonable outcome to any disagreement between people of the same sex, who once lost a stand-up fight to a man about as big as my leg, and who challenged a tow-truck driver to a duel, and then wished he hadn’t.
I am the man who patched a leak in a Porsche’s fuel line with a Bic pen and a drinking straw and then sold it to a friend, the man who fell overboard in the middle of a pitch-black lake during an alligator hunt, who flipped a convertible at a hundred miles an hour in the middle of an illegal drag race, who stole two women from the same man.
And the sad thing is, most of the time I was sober. I have been to church three times, if you don’t count funerals; I have driven a million miles without tags, licenses, or brakes; and I believe that cream gravy is a vegetable and that majorettes are a sign God wants us to be happy.
What I had never done is doctor a cold, or meet with a teacher, or do any of the others things—which, truthfully, would have bored me unto death—that real fathers do.
I never wanted to be judge, jury, and executioner to a boy. I never wanted the moral authority, which, of course, I had no currency to buy, anyway.
But a stepfather, now, a stepfather is no one’s judge.
He’s more like a paralegal.
He knows some law, and can even quote some law, but nobody really gets nervous when they stand before a paralegal. And besides, everyone knows who the high court is.
She, the mother, not only knows the law, she rewrites it, twists it, spindles and mutilates it, and we best just by God live with that or we boys, stepfather and stepson, will suffer. But worse, she expects me to be like her, solid and thoughtful and mean as a striped snake, but mostly she expects me to be that most hated of all things.
Mature.
The worst it got was last Halloween.
The woman has a sickness for holidays. It takes her three weeks to decorate a Christmas tree, and she leaves it up until Easter. At Halloween, she and the boy covered the yard with ghoulish decorations, fashioning a grave in the shrubbery, a giant spider web in the magnolia tree, and lights everywhere. The worst of it was a gruesome, battery-operated specter that screamed and clicked its teeth together whenever anyone triggered its motion sensor. She hung it from the light fixture in the doorway, so that every child—every child—would set it off.
“You have two choices,” she told me the evening of October 31. “You can either take the boy trick-or-treating, or you can stay here and pass out candy.”
Passing out candy meant that I was in charge of the candy. That would be like being in charge of majorettes.
“I will be the candy man,” I said.
But she could drain the fun out of anything.
“If you are in charge of handing out the can
dy, you can’t do anything else,” she said. “You can’t be distracted, and most of all…LISTEN TO ME…you cannot, cannot cook. No cooking.”
“OK,” I said.
“And watch the dog,” she told me. The dog is a big, stinky, neurotic product of the union of a black Lab and a traveling man, and likes to bark and growl menacingly at chipmunks and toddlers, but has never bitten anything except fleas.
“OK,” I said.
Now go away, I thought.
She and the boy—at least I think it was the boy, since he was dressed as a grim reaper—left to beg for candy, and I settled in. I had a remote control and a giant pumpkin full of Butterfinger miniatures. I sat down and searched for educational programming, or anything with fangs and cleavage.
It went well. The doorbell rang every five minutes. I handed out gobs of candy, and ate only one candy bar per dispensation. Then I got hungry. A grilled cheese would be nice, I thought.
What happened next was not my fault. I never should have been left unsupervised in the first place.
The grilled cheese was toasting nicely when the doorbell rang. I went to hand out candy, which took only a few minutes, but long enough for the grilled cheese to catch on fire. This alarmed the dog, so she was already pretty well on edge when the doorbell rang again. She began to bark and growl. Then off went the fire alarm, which I tried to disarm, but it was too high to reach. I ran to get a stepladder but it was in hiding, so I grabbed a broom and ran back to the foyer, where the dog was all but running in circles, the smoke was roiling, and the alarm was chirping. The children at the door, knowing that this was a gold mine for candy because of the excessive decorations, jabbed the doorbell every other second, and it was more than I could stand. I beat the hell out of the smoke detector, but they must make those things pretty good, because even as the plastic flew around the room the WHOOP, WHOOP, WHOOP screamed into my skull. As I swung at it, I triggered the motion-activated ghoulie, which began to laugh manically.
Then I snatched open the door. The children took one look—at me, at the big dog with hackles raised, at the swinging ghoulie—and backed away. It would have been a better story if they had screamed and run for it, but I guess the draw of the candy was still strong, even in the din. One little girl’s face clouded, and I’m pretty sure she went home and cried.