by Gary Paulsen
My father, of course, says it doesn’t matter that I don’t have clothes that make me fit in and help me be lookatable to Peg, that all that stuff is just for show and having it is like living on a movie set—all glitz and no quality. And what we’re about—again, according to him—is quality.
Here’s a good example of how my dad regards us and quality:
I decided that I wanted a good-looking, all-purpose bicycle. I had mastered two-wheelers when I was little and had even gone through a BMX phase, but I wanted a sleek twenty-one-speed touring machine that I could use for really going places. And, of course, for getting noticed and being more lookatable.
But they cost money.
Real money. Government-issued, legal tender recognized by and traded within a capitalist economy.
A new, relatively good, all-purpose, usable bicycle might go for several hundred dollars and, if you took a plunge in the deep end of the pool, could even run as high as two or three thousand bucks for a really sweet touring bike.
I didn’t want to go that pricey—which I naturally understood we could never afford—but I did want a nice, sturdy bike to go on some adventures this summer and ride to school next fall that would maybe help me take a stab at being accepted, or even just noticed, so I could at least try to fit in and talk to the other kids who hung around the bike racks before the first bell. And by “kids,” I meant Peggy. Because emerging from the school bus between a gaggle of geeks with their heads stuck in books and a bunch of hyped-up troublemakers was nowhere near as cool as the picture I had in my mind of pulling up to school on my new twenty-one-speed touring bike, casually leaning back in the saddle, riding no hands so I could give a cool nod and a jaunty wave to everyone milling around the front door. And by “everyone,” I meant, of course, Peggy.
But when I mentioned wanting a bike, my father set me down with a notebook, pencil in hand, and said: “Let’s jot down exactly what you are looking for.”
And even though I knew I was cooked, totally cooked, I said: “I know we can’t afford a very expensive—”
“Tell me what you want, or rather need, in a bicycle.” My dad is always reminding me to check myself: “There’s a difference between want and need, son. Make sure you always say what you mean there.”
“Tell me what it is you think you need,” he repeated, “and we’ll work it out.”
Which is what I had feared going into the conversation and, as I predicted, exactly what he eventually did. We, that is he, “worked” it out. With energy, not money.
Resigned to the inevitable, I wrote the list he wanted and handed it to him and then—knowing how flexible his timing can be and how pressing my need for a bicycle was—went on my way. I knew him well enough to be certain that he was never going to buy a bicycle for me and might even forget about the idea entirely. I turned my attention to figuring out how I could earn enough money at a job somewhere to self-fund a bicycle.
“You could sell a kidney,” Pooder suggested as we sat by the river trying to catch some catfish. “Rich people with a lot of money and bad kidneys are always spending fortunes for them, and you’ve got two. Or a lung. You’ve got two of them as well. Big money in kidneys and lungs. You read about it all the time.”
“What in the name of the printed word have you been reading?”
“Mysteries. And I see stuff like that on television. I watched a movie where some crazy man was running around knocking people out and taking their kidneys to sell to rich people. Guy carried a cooler with ice in it to keep the kidneys from spoiling. Said buyers like them fresh.”
“I worry about you, Pooder. All the time.”
He snorted. “I’m not saying we go around stealing them. Just find a buyer so you can sell one of yours. Get ten bicycles. I’m only trying to help out. I’ve even got a good little cooler we could use that I picked up at a garage sale.”
I studied him for a long time. He was smiling that little corner smile like he’s only half kidding—but then he’s almost always smiling—and it may have been that he was in a good mood because he’d just bought an amazing little drone, only slightly dented and missing the instructions, at another garage sale.
He said he saw it as an opportunity to set a new altitude record for a live frog.
“Thank you, Pooder, but I think I’ll pass on selling a kidney.”
And all this time, while we were fishing and stooging around with his drone, my dad had been off doing his dad thing—spending energy instead of money.
Out on the northern edge of town an old man named Oscar lives on a ramshackle piece of land that makes our place look developed and downright ritzy. I never heard a last name. People just call him Old Oscar. I’m not sure if anybody would spend enough time with him to get his last name anyway because he has apparently never discovered bathing. Or even washing. The smell he leaves when he walks by, followed, I imagine, by a greenish cloud filled with various insects, makes you think of old deserted pigpens and spoiled potato salad that’s been left in the sun for a whole weekend or raw chicken you forgot about in the back of the fridge. And I say this as someone who sleeps with a pit bull who smells like skunk. But he has ten or so acres of dirt and brush, and to call it a junkyard, or even a dump, would be shooting well below the mark because he never, absolutely never, throws anything away, and when people discovered that Old Oscar “kept” things, they started to bring the clutter they cleaned out from their basements or attics or garages to him.
Oscar always accepts whatever people want to leave, nods toward the rear yard, telling them to drop their stuff “out back with the other crap that sort of looks the same as what you’ve got there.”
I am one hundred percent certain that every time Pooder mentions buying something at a garage sale, he means he found it in Oscar’s yard. He only pretends not to love Oscar’s heap of stuff because he knows how I feel about my dad’s being Oscar’s number one customer (see old truck, page 6, sump pump, page 7, deep freezer, page 8).
“Oscar’s got mountains of stuff that people don’t want anymore,” Pooder said, reluctant to give up the kidney-for-sale suggestion so quickly and reminded of another source of kidneys as we watched my dad unload a box from the truck after visiting Oscar’s place, “so I have one of those feelings that if we dig deep enough in one of Oscar’s piles, we might find a kidney the rich people didn’t get to yet. Won’t be any too fresh.”
Because Oscar is very old and has been doing this for his whole life, there are huge individual piles scattered around the ten or so acres—one of cooking pots and frying pans, another of stoves, ruined water heaters, a tower of old dishwashers, more than a few hideouts for stray cats (so you can pick yourself up a new pet at the same time you go looking for a spare part for your dishwasher that leaks), and near the end of the yard, an enormous tangled mess of discarded bicycles stacked up over thirty feet high.
So.
My father adores Old Oscar and his piles of junk. They fit in perfectly with my dad’s philosophy of spending energy instead of money, and to illustrate how handy my father thought Oscar and his wealth of supplies (that’s what he calls it, not a junkyard, not a dump, not a potentially hazardous hoarding situation, a “wealth of supplies”) could be, he virtually rebuilt the truck we owned—the “classic”—from the ground up with what he sourced from Oscar’s heaps. It is important to repeat at this time that, although the truck ran perfectly, didn’t use much oil, and started on a dime, it looked—going now by Pooder—like only slightly warmed-up crap.
I’m not being mean; that’s the right word.
Crap.
Because the only thing Oscar has more of than junk is rusted junk. And Dad is more impressed with function than form; he says it doesn’t matter what it looks like as long as it works. That’s important to remember for later. It’s also important to keep in mind that form over function is what gets you lookatable if you are twelve going on thirteen.
On the back of our property, we have an old machine shed that my
dad turned into a workshop where he works on what he calls his “projects.”
He’ll go in there alone and disappear for hours, creating and rebuilding things that he thinks will make our lives better.
He came out once with something like a double-powered super-blender that sounded like an F-16 jet fighter taking off because he wanted to make “healthier” peanut butter from raw organically grown peanuts “in only seconds.” The first time he used it, he forgot to hold the lid down and it blew loose and we spent hours trying to scrape the peanut butter off the ceiling (the stains are still there; Dad calls them an authentic kitchen aesthetic and won’t paint over them). And Carol, who happened to be in the kitchen at the time, still doesn’t enter that room without growling at the blender, and she won’t even get close to a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. This, I should point out, from the exact same dog that shreds and eats skunks, and, by the looks of her scars, came out the winner in more than a few fights (probably other dogs, Dad says, but could even be bears, maybe a honey badger or two; that part of town, anything is possible) and therefore fears nothing on earth.
Pooder thinks that my dad is not quite normal and more along the lines of a quirky mad scientist, but he “honors the dedication and mission focus he applies to the execution of his goals.” (This was during Pooder’s I-want-to-be-a-SEAL-team-member phase, which lasted until he tried to do a hundred and sixty-five pushups after reading that’s what SEAL-team members do just to warm up for a big day of land, sea, and air special ops, including but not limited to secret insertions and dangerous extractions of high-value enemy personnel and terrorists around the world. Pooder lay on the ground in a puddle of tears and spit moaning—only he called it a manly whimper—for nearly an hour after only sixteen attempts. After he was done dry-heaving, he decided that maybe being a Navy SEAL wasn’t enough of an intellectual challenge for him and that maybe he’d do better as something like an electrical engineer or a professor of linguistics instead.)
Right after I gave Dad my list of what I wanted, no, needed, in a bicycle, Pooder and I started to do experiments with his relatively new drone—although the less said about that the better, except to say the frog probably achieved something close to terminal velocity when his little harness broke at three-hundred-eighty-nine-and-a-quarter feet (still ten-point-seven-five feet on the right side of the law, drone-altitude wise, that is, the government’s rules about flying frogs being harder to pin down), and we later referred to this experiment, with downcast eyes and our hands over our hearts, as the “gravitationally induced high-velocity frog measurement.”
We were pretty well occupied taking notes and making plans for more successful—and by that I mean less lethal to amphibians—flight attempts. I insisted that we only practice on inanimate test subjects from here on in, and Pooder reluctantly agreed. Mostly because he was despondent about the destruction of the drone, pieces of which we collected as we were hurrying to clean up the frog guts in the yard before Carol got to them so we could properly mourn and respectfully bury what was left of our late lamented aerodynamics test partner. But I couldn’t help but notice that my father had more or less disappeared.
Of course not being a “complete dolt” (borrowing again from Pooder’s British phase) I had a pretty solid idea of what my dad was doing, especially since we noted he was spending a large amount of time going back and forth between Old Oscar’s yard and his own workshop, and the sinking feeling in my gut was proof enough that it had to do with an upcoming bicycle for me.
I worried a bit when I saw the flash-glow of the wire-feed welder coming through the small windows. He had an uncanny ability to start unintentional fires with that welder. But no flames erupted, so I didn’t bother him (but I did pull the refurbished fire extinguisher out from under the sink and had it ready just in case). And, again, given that our idea of time was as different as our take on high-living funds, I knew better than to count on him to create a bike in time to impress Peggy so there was no need to check his progress.
I focused instead on looking for a part-time job and wound up mowing a few lawns and cleaning out garages. But they didn’t lead very far in terms of swift wealth accumulation, and when I tried getting work at some fast-food places, it turned out I was too young.
Pooder said that was outright age discrimination and we should organize a march. When I explained that two people didn’t make much of an effective protest movement, he said we should post things on social media and the bulletin board at the supermarket to get more people involved in lowering the legal hiring age at fast-food places.
I hated to point out, but I knew it wouldn’t cross Pooder’s mind, that if we undertook that endeavor, I’d never become more accepted at school because then I’d be known as the maniac looking to undermine federal child labor laws. He looked so heartbroken at his flawed idea that I cheered him up by telling him that when I applied at the place where they deep-fry chicken, an employee on break out back of the place told me that it was too bad I wasn’t going to get hired to work with him because then I’d never know how cool it was to dip something other than chicken in batter and stick it in hot grease. I shuddered to think what else he might have deep-fried and tried to put the whole thing from my mind, but Pooder immediately started making a list of possibilities given that I had met the fry guy in the alley by the dumpster.
Which is when I quit listening but not before coming to the decision that I probably wouldn’t be eating much deep-fried fast food in the future, not that I ate much anyway (my dad, you know) whereupon (word from Pooder’s phase when he thought he might become a high-priced lawyer or a Brit-forensic-scientist-slash-detective) Pooder said: “We have to go back there.”
“And what Kentucky Fried reason would that be?”
“To find out what, exactly, he stuck in the grease.”
“Are you completely insane? Best-case scenario is that, while he didn’t mean chicken, he was still in the realm of food because I’d heard about people who deep-fry candy bars and toaster pastries. Only he did not look like he had a sweet tooth, he looked like a worst-case-scenario guy who girls get warned about in PE class when they do self-defense. Believe me, you do not want to go back and try to finish that conversation.”
At which point Pooder stood up straight, took a deep breath, and flat-out pontificated (good word there, from when Pooder thought he might enter politics and give lots of speeches):
“You know what Socrates said.”
“Socrates?”
“Yeah. You know. The Greek philosopher. Born circa 470 BC or so—”
“Socrates? You’re quoting Socrates?”
“Exactly. And the quote is, ‘The unexamined life is not worth living.’”
He raised his finger in the air (probably holding a beat for the applause because he said that every good politician knew how to “dangle the sound bite”—his phrase, not mine—and give the crowd a chance to roar its approval) and then held my gaze (eye contact being key to a trustworthy civil servant). “So you absolutely need to go back and find out what this forward-thinking, deep-frying fast-food entrepreneur stuck in the hot grease because, you know, you absolutely don’t want this information to become part of your unexamined life.”
“Still passing on that, Pooder. Absolutely.”
“Then the only other thing worth our time and energy is to find out what your dad is doing back in his shed.”
As if either of us didn’t know exactly how my dad was “working on” my request for a bike.
A BICYCLE FROM HELL
Of course there was never any doubt about how my dad was going to procure a bike for me. If it wasn’t for Pooder, I probably wouldn’t have pushed the envelope and—a few weeks after I gave him my wish list—asked my dad to show me what he’d been working on.
But Pooder was curious, and my dad said he’d been about to come get me anyway.
Using stuff from Old Oscar’s junk piles, my father had been making me a bicycle with what Pooder calls his �
�simply classic mission devotion and intense creative drive” and energy—instead of money—and put together what my dad called “the bicycle to end all bicycles.”
Not “a” bicycle but “the” bicycle. I perked up a little there because I wanted to get “the” girl and not “a” girl with this new bike I was about to see.
As part of the lead-up to his reveal of the bike, Dad told us he had dug through Oscar’s piles until he located “the best of everything. I was looking for quality, boys, not just functionality.”
I had my doubts on that one, but I could tell that I stood alone in my opinion because Dad and Pooder were positively glowing at the unveiling of the finished product. Literally, an unveiling. My dad yanked a paint tarp off the finished product with what can only be called a flourish.
Pooder clapped.
My dad, I swear, wiped a tear away.
I bit my tongue and did some deep-breathing exercises.
“Even if you had the money to spend and bought all the parts brand-new instead of scrounging for free bits and then refurbishing them,” Pooder said, studying my dad’s work, “the end result might not have been half as impressive.”
“And this original creation,” my dad announced as he helped launch me on a wobbly test ride around our muddy excuse for a driveway, “is of far superior quality to anything mass-produced for a bland herd of mindless consumers.”
