Tales from the Dad Side

by Steve Doocy

  “Whatcha doing?”

  I told him I’d decided not to finish it, because it was a stupid idea.

  “Lemme see that hammer,” he said, and in that magic dad way, he helped me put things back together on my raft and in my heart. “It looks seaworthy to me. Let’s plunk it in water.”

  Instantly I forgot my previous heartbreak and started planning the maiden voyage. Lazy rivers are in short supply in western Kansas, but there are plenty of cow ponds, and my dad secured permission from one of his farmer friends to float my boat. When we arrived I personally thanked the landowner for the use of his lagoon, and I quickly discovered why my father nicknamed him Van Gogh—the man could talk your ear off.

  Van Gogh, my dad, and I carried the raft from the trunk of my father’s T-bird down to the water’s edge. I just listened as the chatty farmer in the OshKosh overalls said things like “You can’t milk a donkey if you don’t have a pail.”

  Climbing into the captain’s chair, I firmly gripped my faux steering wheel as my father and the farmer pushed it across the muck into the pond. It was a flawless launch, until the raft sank.

  Not expecting a dunking, I was grossed out beyond belief, having just sucked the brown water from the cattle watering hole down my mouth and nose. My immediate damage assessment was that I’d sprung a leak, because that’s how a second grader thinks, but in reality there was nothing to leak. It was supposed to float because that’s what wood does—I simply needed more wood.

  “My first raft sank too,” my father lied. “Let’s tell Mom we hit an iceberg.”

  The farmer, my father, and I dragged the shipwreck from the muck and mire and brought it high enough up the bank to keep it from being a cow hazard. The last thing I remember Van Gogh saying after abandoning ship was “You can put wings on a sheep, but it’s still not a duck.”

  I’d loved the idea of building a raft as my father had, but there was a reason the world didn’t use that form of water travel anymore: it was tricky and dangerous, and the widespread construction of rafts was most certainly best left to disgruntled Cubans.

  From that day I became leery of any rituals from bygone eras that might have been popular once but, given advancements in science and recreation, were hopelessly outdated. “Don’t make any plans for Saturday—I’ve signed you up for the father-son fishing derby,” my wife informed me a generation later. Another time-consuming and quasi-dangerous throwback to the golden days, but my wife convinced me that if I didn’t give my son a taste of some he-man activities, he’d wind up an adult child with few pastimes aside from folding cloth napkins into rabbits and hats.

  When I was his age I loved to fish; my grandmother and I would spend hours on the banks of the Upper Des Moines, waiting for a nibble. I don’t know if she really liked the sport or just wanted to chain-smoke Camels. My father was in charge of our bait. The night before a fishing expedition, Dad would turn on the garden hose and soak the grass, and presto, half an hour later, we’d go outside with flashlights and simply pick up the night crawlers that were luxuriating on the cool damp grass. These gargantuan worms were so big that if the fish didn’t bite at them, one could just punch a carp and knock it out cold.

  When my wife signed me up for the fishing derby, we were living where king-size worms were in short supply. Plus, I was always iffy about using a spade in New Jersey. “It’s okay, kids, it’s only Hoffa’s toe.”

  I tried my father’s hose trick, but Jersey worms have an attitude and won’t come out of their holes for water unless it’s San Pellegrino. Instead, I’d have to actually dig down into our garden to locate one. How does grass grow on concrete? I wondered after I turned over about two Advils’ worth of dirt before I laid hands on half a worm, seconds after my shovel performed an accidental wormectomy.

  “Pick him up, Peter.”

  “Him?” My son was horrified that our bait had a gender. I reminded him that there were trophies involved, and he promptly deposited the mortally wounded half worm in our bait bucket.

  “Daddy, where are the fish?” was asked so many times in the derby’s first hour that at one point I turned to see if my son had recorded that query and was playing back a tape. I knew the problem was our lure: the bait had croaked on the way to the fishing derby.

  “Peter, look over there in those cattails for another worm.” Ten minutes later he returned with a real squirmy one that he insisted he put on the hook himself.

  “Good job, Pete!” I said loudly enough for the father and son next to us to hear. They had demoralized us many times that morning because each time they hooked a tiny sun perch, they yelped as if they’d just reeled in another great white.

  “Be careful, that hook is sharp,” I reminded as he struggled to pierce the razor-sharp curve through the worm’s hind end. It was at that time that I first noticed the critter’s distinctive markings and coloring.

  “Peter, drop that thing! It’s not a worm, it’s a live baby water moccasin!”

  We don’t know who got the trophies, because we were in the emergency room making sure he’d not been injected with whatever factory-installed poison water moccasins have at the ready. In the waiting room I reminded myself that fishing, just like raft building, was an antiquated and dangerous leisure-time activity. Why would anyone subject himself to possible West Nile infection standing downstream from a leaking sewage-treatment plant? More to the point, why do people still fish today, especially if we’ve got Mrs. Paul out there somewhere reeling in the tilapia?

  That was the last time we took our lives into our hands and went into the woods. I’d like to think it was from the fishing, but I think my son freaked out after I walked in and saw him watching Deliverance. The closest we’ve since been to a campout was during an electrical storm that knocked out the power to our neighborhood grid and forced the family to gather around a hurricane lamp in the living room. The thunder in the background provided the perfect atmosphere for ghost stories. The kids had never heard the one about the couple on lovers’ lane who heard the radio bulletin about the guy with the hook for a hand who’d escaped from the mental hospital, and when they heard scratching on the side of the car they drove home, only to find the hook hanging on the door handle. I had goose bumps on my arms telling it.

  “Dad, I saw that on an after-school special.”

  An undaunted terror master, I moved on and explained how my father had built me a tree house when I was in fourth grade and I’d begged him to let me and a couple of friends sleep in the tree house before the end of the summer. Finally he said yes, and we camped out in the tree, until I woke up about three in the morning to discover I was alone because everyone else had gone home. It wasn’t an adventure without my friends, so I went in the back door of my house and fell asleep in my own bed.

  “When I went back into my house my dad heard the door close, and he got up to see what was happening. That was when he looked out and saw our weirdo neighbor who lived with five dozen cats climbing up the ladder.”

  They were speechless. Mission accomplished.

  “Dad, you never mentioned you had a tree house.”

  After two weeks of nonstop begging I built one. Safety was always an issue, so I used dinosaur-bone-size bolts to hook it to the tree so it would be able to withstand a category-three hurricane before I’d have to call my insurance adjuster, who would inform me that I could not file a claim for something that was illegally constructed in violation of every building code in my town’s big book of dumb rules.

  In a moment of absolute coincidence that shows that there is some sort of cosmic connection between fathers and their sons, during one of our final supply runs to Home Depot, my boy, Peter, noticed one particular option they were selling for tree forts that he wanted to install on his deluxe custom tree house. So I bought a sunshine yellow steering wheel.

  I wanted to tell him that I had built my own steering wheel once, but he’d think I was about to launch into another one of those sepia-stained stories about walking five miles to s
chool in the snow or writing with chalk on the back of a shovel, so I stopped and screwed the steering wheel to a beam next to the trapdoor.

  “Every boy should have a tree house,” I announced to my wife at its grand opening.

  “It’s too high.” She had a point—it was. In fact, at that moment it was by far the most dangerous thing on our property.

  I’d spent almost five hundred dollars on our backyard tower of terror, and after my wife’s pronouncement of danger, our children were programmed to think that if they fell out, at the very least they’d spend the rest of their lives in an iron lung parked in the living room. On the plus side, we were the only ones on the block with a tree house that required an oxygen mask.

  My son, for whom I built the high-altitude apartment, spent over the years a sum total of six minutes in the tree house, which averages out to about eighty-three dollars per minute of use. If I had it to do over again, I’d just give him a hundred-dollar bill and have him stand on my shoulders until the blood drained from my head and I wised up.

  Tree houses, rafts, and fishing are charming things our parents did once upon a time but should now be verboten. I think it’s time to cut the cord on obsolete outdoor activities. If it doesn’t have an Underwriters Laboratories tag on it, don’t use it. We simply aren’t the same people we were two generations ago. Just ask a seventh-grade boy his impressions of Huckleberry Finn.

  “Huckleberry…that’s a new Tazo at Starbucks, right?”

  This past weekend my wife, Kathy, and I were walking in our backyard and came to a stop under our long-abandoned tree house. “One of these days I should probably take that down.” Initially dangerous, it was presently full of dangling tree branches, making it even more hazardous. It was sun baked and faded; the only piece still in good shape was the still bright yellow steering wheel on the side of the tree house.

  “Maybe you could drive it into somebody else’s tree,” my wife said, smiling.

  “At least it didn’t sink,” I said, flashing back to the Great Cow Pasture Disaster of 1967, another inglorious moment in our family history better left alone. We adjourned to the house, where my wife prepared a splendid meal of fried catfish that I had personally caught earlier that day at Safeway.

  6

  Jobs

  I Was a Teenage Bread Pirate

  Lexus makes mustard?” I marveled at the high-end selection of foods as I put the jar in my cart next to the Rolex tomato paste. This was the fantastic gourmet grocery store where I’d gotten my high school freshman son, Peter, a part-time job. It was a monument to food, with live lobsters over by the Kobe beef, down the aisle from the high-end imported meats and cheeses, and with every variety of fresh vegetable and fruit, and desserts fit for a state dinner. My boy was hired as a stock boy, but at this swanky place, we dubbed him a “stock analyst.”

  After his first eight-hour shift Peter reported that a high school chum saw him at work. “He said something like I didn’t know your family was broke, putting the kids to work.”

  “What did you tell him?”

  “That you work in cable.”

  In fact the job was Peter’s idea because he wanted to make some money, and I wanted him to learn the value of a buck, so why not work at that store that sold monster shrimp for thirty-nine dollars a pound? Indeed, Peter learned the value of a dollar—that one buck could buy one-thirty-ninth of a pound of shrimp.

  Two years later I persuaded my daughter Mary to apply for a job as a checkout girl at the same Gucci of groceries. On her first day, her first customer welcomed her to the world of work. “You are the dumbest person I have ever seen!” the shopper wailed at my honors-student daughter when she was unable to scan, bag, and provide change as fast as a Ginsu knife salesman hopped up on Red Bull and absinthe.

  Later an infamous titan of industry yelped, “Don’t you dare, missy,” as Mary started to swipe his groceries through the checkout scanner. “The radiation from that will poison my food. Ring it up manually,” said the freaky Fortune 500 CEO. How did this dingbat make it up the corporate ladder? Usually companies don’t hire a person for the corner office when he arrives for the job interview wearing a three-piece suit and a tinfoil hat.

  Meanwhile her own classmates who’d seen her behind the cash register dissed her with “Nice bow tie, Mary,” a not-so-subtle reminder that she was somehow less of a person than they because she wore a uniform and they had the freedom to wear whatever slutty belly shirt they chose.

  That town was a precious enclave of wealth, fame, and attitude, and while many were privileged, there was one customer who was always friendly and courteous and respectful of Mary as a person: a very famous rapper from Run-D.M.C.

  He was the polar opposite of an alarmingly high number of customers who would say something mean or unkind. Every Sunday night when I’d pick her up after her shift she’d get into my car and break down in tears. We love the family that runs the place and I’d thought this would be a great job, but I had not factored in a few of the patrons who had her sweating like James Gandolfini on a Stair-Master. So we pulled the plug.

  Getting my kids a first job at a grocery store was what my father had done for me, when he talked a friend into hiring me in my hometown of Industry, Kansas. Misnamed because there was no actual industry in Industry; apparently the town founders had figured that if they named it that, America’s industrialists who needed to plunk their smokestacks somewhere would flock to our town, which they did not. Industry was small, and sleepy, a cozy hometown that was much like TV’s Mayberry, without the crack law-enforcement team.

  My place of employment was a shiny silver-painted Depression-era storefront on the main drag. It was a simple emporium featuring miscellaneous canned foods, starchy snacks, and every imaginable bug-killing concoction. The back wall had a free-standing deli case packed with freshly ground hamburger and various “lunch meats”: bologna; braunschweiger; and, from the Who-Eats-This-Stuff? category, headcheese, a vile amalgam of “head” parts harvested from the fatty noggins of barnyard animals that unwittingly volunteered for the job.

  A small store required a small staff; we had a deli guy, a cashier, somebody to walk the bags out to the car for the old ladies, and a bookkeeper who’d balance the cash drawer at the end of the day. It was a four-person job, and I was all four of the people. I was also thirteen years old. Forget the child-labor laws designed to protect indentured children in overseas sweatshops from getting a dime a day to stitch soccer balls; I got a buck an hour, paid in cash at the end of the day, completely off the books because it was way south of the minimum wage.

  There was one terrific fringe benefit: I could eat whatever I wanted. And the choice was always easy—this store featured Fanestil’s, the filet mignon of boiled ham. For a kid who carried peanut butter and bologna on Wonder bread every day to school for lunch, Fanestil’s ham tasted like a slice of hog heaven. Too pricey for my family to buy at a buck ninety-nine per pound, for the store’s lone Saturday employee it was on the house. During my fifteen-minute orientation on how to operate the store, the owner suggested that I grab a bite during a slow time before or after lunch. “Just shave off two or three nice thick slices of whatever you like.”

  “Okay. Where’s the bread?” I wondered.

  Pointing toward the bread rack, the owner instructed, “Take any kind you like. My favorite’s Roman Meal.” And with that he pulled out a loaf of the rust-orange-wrappered bread, undid the twist tie, and stuck his hand in the bag. “I generally go about a quarter of the way back,” he said, pulling out two pieces. “Don’t ever take the heel, or whoever buys it is going to know that something’s missing,” he added as he rewrapped it and replaced it on the shelf.

  My first day on the job and I was learning the dirty little secret of small-town America’s grocery stores—bread embezzlement. Apparently the owner had learned this trick from another shopkeeper, who reasoned that it was wasteful to open up a whole loaf, because by the time the single employee got around to finis
hing off a whole loaf, it would be as stale as a Hee Haw rerun. So the boss officially authorized me to be a bread pirate. It was the only store in America I knew of where bread was sold “as is.”

  Later in high school I was lucky to get the best job in Clay Center, at a beautiful menswear store right on the courthouse square. The store’s previous high school guy employee was graduating, and they needed a new kid who would invest every available nonschool hour there for two bucks an hour, which was double my grocery store loot. They also sent me to a menswear seminar in Kansas City where I sat in a room for an hour and was later given a certificate that said I was a professional fashion consultant. Years later my wife would ask me if things she was wearing matched.

  “Well…as a professional fashion consultant…” and I’d launch into a theoretical discussion on aesthetics, making her wish she’d never asked me whether her stripes matched her plaids.

  I was the only professional fashion consultant in my high school class. But there was a downside to being the youngest, limberest guy on the payroll—when Bob Finger, my boss, would point at a customer: “Steve, go size and fit that guy.”

  “Size and fit” was what we’d do with formal-wear-rental customers as they tried on different jackets to find their correct coat size. Then, to calculate their proper rental pants, I’d measure their waist, and then I’d get down on hands and knees, take a deep breath, and measure the inseam, which was from about an inch off the floor northbound to the area where their pants stopped and they started, a task that still haunts me twenty-five years later.

  “Hey, getting a little personal down there, Nancy!” one farmer said, and I instantly took a pledge never to get that precise again. Who cared if his drawers were droopy? I was a salesman, not a proctologist.