Mean Dads for a Better America

by Tom Shillue

  The only time kids traveled on sidewalks when I was growing up was when they were with their parents. Sure, streets and sidewalks worked well enough, but we all understood that the best way to get from one place to another was through people’s backyards. All adults told us not to do this, but of course, it was unthinkable to take the long way when there was a perfectly good shortcut through someone’s yard. And, as far as childhood infractions go, this one was pretty minor so we pushed our luck. The path was often treacherous, with hazards included hostile homeowners, lacerating brush, and angry dogs. We were suburban explorers and every yard had its own personality. Some had lush green lawns that were always wet, having been freshly watered twice a day. Others were even more groomed, surrounded with flower beds. These we avoided because we knew they were maintained by finicky owners. We went for messy yards with old cars up on cinder blocks and refrigerators lying on their sides with the doors removed, into which we’d climb and pretend we were in a space capsule.

  One yard we visited frequently had a garden with all sorts of vegetables growing. I had no idea whose house it was. We’d crawl in on our hands and knees to avoid being seen, and locate the rhubarb plants. Then we’d pull a few up, pull the leaves off, give them a good wipe with our hand, and start munching. It was a deliciously sour taste, and my mouth waters just thinking about it. I know people usually take their raw rhubarb with sugar or honey, but I liked it right out of the ground. The taste went well with the stealth of the situation. Like most of our nefarious activities, we felt we were only forbidden in theory from eating whatever we wanted from someone’s private garden. In practice, we were kids, and so like rabbits, we were yet another natural pest that a gardener had to deal with.

  I remember Mr. Cohane, another fearsome old man, who passionately defended his property line, even though there was nothing there to protect—no flowers, no rhubarb, nothing. He looked like your average geezer, with white hair and horn-rimmed glasses, but he was not your run-of-the-mill “Get out of my yard!” type of old man, oh no. He was always in a tank top, with thick arms that had probably strangled Nazis to death on a beach somewhere. When he saw us cutting through his yard he would dart out on his back porch and shake his fist in the air. As we ran away, he’d always yell some detailed and creative threat, such as, “You see that barrel over there? Get a good look at it! I’m going to fill it with oil, light it on fire, and put you in it to die!” I’m not sure if he wrote those ahead of time or improvised them on the spot, but it always made us jump his fence as fast as we could into the Sullivans’ yard. They did have a black lab named Casey, but unlike most dogs, he was friendly and well fed. This was not the case with all dogs in our neighborhood.

  In those days, dogs had complete freedom to terrorize anyone who crossed their path, anytime or anywhere. There were no leash laws in Massachusetts, so if a dog caught you, he could do with you as he wished.

  “Stay away from wandering packs of wild dogs if at all possible,” my father once told me. And he said it as if it were common advice one would give to any child in the suburbs outside of Boston. But here is the reality: packs of wild dogs were quite common. I remember on several occasions rounding a corner and seeing a group of dogs running together in a surprisingly disciplined V-formation, like some dog version of West Side Story, looking for victims. I had seen them pull boys right off their bicycles and go to work on them, yanking their limbs in all directions. A boy’s cries yielded nothing; no one was foolish enough to enter that fray. You could only look on from a distance and say to yourself, I’m glad that’s not me. And chances are that when that poor kid returned home he would not be greeted with cries of “My God, my poor son has been attacked by dogs!” but rather with “For heaven’s sake, look what you did to your clothes!” The prevailing belief was that if you could not avoid the dogs, you were somehow responsible for whatever they did to you.*

  One Halloween I actually rang Mr. Cohane’s doorbell. All the other kids thought I was crazy, but I was really just showing off and didn’t think he’d open the door. He did, and to my surprise he actually had a smile on his face. “Well, hello, young man,” he said. “And what are you dressed as this Halloween, a hobo?” Yes, I was dressed as a hobo. Also known as a vagrant, tramp, vagabond, or any other pejorative for “homeless person.” Along with ghost, it was one of the most popular Halloween costumes in the 1970s, mostly because parents didn’t buy costumes, they made them, and both of those costumes could be made from the rags and hand-me-downs bin in the basement.

  “Why don’t you step inside and see what we’ve got for you.”

  I did what he said (he was an adult) and stepped inside, then I turned to see my friends running along to the next house. They had written me off. He brought me into his dimly lit kitchen and told me to sit at the table. There didn’t seem to be any Halloween candy anywhere. He went into his pantry and I heard shuffling. “Now let’s see what kind of a treat we’ve got for you back here!”

  I was thinking he must be putting the famed razor blade into an apple. But I didn’t do anything, I just sat there waiting. He came out of the pantry holding a jug of apple cider, and poured some into a small Styrofoam cup. “Do you like cider?” he asked.

  I took the cup, lifted up my mask, and started to drink.

  “I love cider,” he said. “Yes sir-ee, I’ve always loved cider.”

  As I drank I could see through the cider that there was something at the bottom of the cup, something round, and dark. Mr. Cohane had put something in the cider! He was poisoning me! But for some reason I kept drinking. When the cider was nearly gone I noticed there were three pennies at the bottom of the cup.

  “THAT’S FOR YOU TO KEEP!” he bellowed.

  I carefully sipped the rest of the cider and shook the wet pennies into my hand. “Thank you,” I said, and he walked me to the front door. When I caught up to my friends I told them I got three pennies from Mr. Cohane, and they were jealous. What I didn’t tell them was the plot of the horror movie that I had just experienced. I guess because I’d never seen one, it was hard for me to tell truly terrifying experiences from regular ones. I used to wake up in a cold sweat replaying that scene in Mr. Cohane’s kitchen, even long after he had passed away.

  Funny thing is, I’m pretty sure it was all a joke. As menacing as Mr. Cohane was, with the palpable flashes of anger and intricate death threats, I’m sure he was just a nice old man trying to have a little fun with the neighborhood kids, in his own weird way. But he had no idea how scary he was to us, and never once said, “I’m joking,” so we took everything he said seriously. Oh well—too late now, I’m scarred for life!

  Mr. Buck on the other hand, was the quiet, careful dad—a little too careful. One time his son Warren got a bunch of neighborhood boys together—me and my brother, along with John Sullivan, Kevin Sullivan, Joey Reichart, and Chrissy and Scott Sullivan (those last two were actually related) and built a sprawling fort in the Bucks’ backyard. It had five rooms! We slept out in it for a week. It was, up to that point in my life, the most fun I’d ever had. Come to think of it, I’m not sure if I have to add the “up to that point.”

  The fort was situated deep in the bramble of their yard, far away from their house, and the first night we were sleeping out there, I heard footsteps in the middle of the night, and I could see the beam of a flashlight shining through the gaps in the plywood of the fort. It was Mr. Buck checking up on us, to make sure we were safe. What a worrywart! I thought to myself. What does he think is going to happen to us . . . we’re in a fort! Truth be told, whatever danger we were in didn’t come from the outside. There were so many rusty nails sticking down from the ceiling it should have been called “Fort Tetanus.”

  Our week of camping bliss came to an abrupt end when Warren came to our yard and told us that his dad had dismantled the fort and taken all the wood to the dump. He claimed that it was a “liability.”

  “What does that mean?” I said.

  “He says he could be sued
if someone got hurt.”

  “Sued? What does that mean?”

  I honestly had never heard the word. It wasn’t a litigious time in America. I think the only person who sued anyone in the 1970s was Ralph Nader.

  Mr. Buck was just being careful. By today’s hovering-parent standards, he was doing the bare minimum. But for us, that was too much. Cautious dads were no fun.

  *

  Still, there was a big difference between the bizarre, buckshot terror of a Mr. Cohane and the more focused authoritarianism of a Mr. Shillue. Kids still feared my dad’s wrath more, because men like him, family men, were more respected in the neighborhood.

  A moment of great dramatic tension would occur every day at about 5:30 p.m. That’s when my father would pull in the driveway and step out of his Dodge Dart in one of his business suits. He had two: a brown one, which he paired with a yellow shirt, and a gray one, which he wore with a blue shirt. I never saw him in any other combination. Throughout his adult life he stuck to this simple rule of men’s haberdashery. He liked hard rules and distrusted salespeople and magazines, so I’m sure he came up with it himself, thinking, It works, damn it. Don’t let The Bastards tell you otherwise.

  For as long as I can remember there have been bastards after my father. Who were these bastards, I wondered, and where did they sleep? And why was it their life’s mission to prevent this God-fearing father of five from pursuing happiness?

  I didn’t know what The Bastards looked like, but over the years I’ve kept a running tally of all the things they are responsible for. Here are just a few:

  Preventing a man from making an honest living

  Writing textbooks that contained more “Socialist Studies than Social Studies”

  Taking us off the Gold Standard

  Creating the CD format just to make a man’s entire LP collection obsolete (“Pretty soon they’ll make those obsolete too. Mark my words, they’re doing it as we speak.”)

  Trying to get everyone hooked on Lipitor

  Canceling Colombo, Gunsmoke, and Barney Miller several seasons too early.

  There was usually a group of boys playing in our yard when my dad got home, and when the Dart pulled into the driveway, all of them would immediately flee. They wouldn’t even wait until he got out of the car. They would just bolt through the hedges, which drove my dad crazy.

  “Damnit! Stay the hell out of my hedges!” he’d yell every single time.

  Oddly, excessive concern for his hedges was the reason he was yelling, and yet his yelling was the reason the kids were always running away through the hedges . . . the very definition of a vicious circle. Neither party was really aware of the reasons for the other’s behavior. My brother and I, the only two who understood, were not about to step in and mediate like a couple of diplomats—it wasn’t our place. It was just too complicated to try to explain my dad to our friends. And there was really no compelling reason to do so. My dad never held us accountable for the behavior of the other kids.

  That was the really good thing about my father, and something that other kids didn’t understand. It was typical parental behavior to remain polite and civil in the presence of your kids’ friends but to then let loose the fire and discipline when you got your children alone. That was not my dad’s M.O. He had a very strong sense of right and wrong, but didn’t care much for decorum or social niceties, so he was willing to blow his molten, ashy stack in the direction of anyone who crossed him, no matter whose son you were. But once blown, it would stay blown; he would never save it up for us after hours. We never bore the brunt, so to speak.

  All of the neighborhood kids assumed that any guy who was that scary outside of the house must be a real nightmare behind closed doors, and so they thought my brother and I were an unfortunate pair. However, that was not the case. My dad was absolutely consistent and predictable. We knew the things that were liable to set him off, and thus we skillfully avoided the bulk of his wrath.

  It was all about patterns. You just had to stay clear of him in the immediate period after he got home from work—as he checked the mail, got the domestic news report from my mother, and then went upstairs to change out of his suit and into his khaki pants and sneakers combo. After this nightly clothes-changing routine (picture the opening scene of Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood, if Albert Finney were playing the title role) things eased up considerably. Then my mother got a little food into him, and he was as tranquil as a basking shark. His favorite dish was smoked shoulder.

  “Ah! A shoulder! You’re beautiful, Rosemary! Beautiful!” After wafting the smell from the pot, he would try to smother my mother with kisses as she shooed him away. The sight of my dad, this formidable man who struck fear into the hearts of all the neighborhood boys, begging for my mother’s unreciprocated affection in front of the stove every night formed all of my ideas about love and marriage.

  Then I would sit across the table and watch my dad contentedly gnawing on the shoulder like a bear, and picture the day I would do the same.

  *

  When I climbed into bed at night I had a routine. When everything was quiet except the crickets, I would sit up, crook myself into the window next to my bed, and look out over our yard. There were a few streetlights along Lincoln Street, but our backyard was completely dark. I’d look in the direction of the elm tree and wait, sometimes for what seemed like a very long time. Then, not always, but most nights, I would see it: the tiny orange glow would appear out of the darkness and grow brighter. It was the tip of my dad’s cigar as he took a slow drag. When it reached its brightest, it would illuminate the bottom of his face and the underside of his brow for a second or two, and then die back down, and I’d sit and wait for the next glow.

  I wondered why my dad liked to sit out there in the dark, under that elm tree all by himself. Was it fun? Why would a man like to sit in the dark and not talk to anyone?

  Now I get it. I do the same thing. (Not the cigar, of course; I’d like to, but with all the New York City regulations I’d have to walk too far from my apartment to actually enjoy it.) When I get home from work late at night, everyone is asleep, and I do the city version of my dad’s ritual: I’ll pour myself a drink and sit in the window of my apartment and look out at the dark cityscape. I’m the man of the house, and everything is quiet. There is something wonderful about the noise and chaos of a busy home, but to appreciate it you need some quiet time, some alone time. I may not have understood it, but I appreciated my dad’s solitude, even back then. Now I know it was a way for him to savor his place in the world, his role as a father, as a husband, and as the mean dad in the neighborhood. He needed a chance to look out over his kingdom and be satisfied.

  AS I’VE MENTIONED, MY MOTHER HAD A PHD IN TRITE aphorisms. One of them was “Find a penny, pick it up, and all the day you’ll have good luck.”

  I took that to heart. I would keep my head down everywhere I walked, looking for my day’s luck. If I found a dime, it was miraculous. Thrilled, I’d shout, “Ten days of luck!” I had an old-fashioned ceramic pig where I saved all my coins, but it had no opening on the bottom so the coins were essentially trapped. The idea was if you wanted to get at the loot, you had to smash the whole thing, so you’d be more likely to save up for something special. But my older sister Kathy showed me how to get the coins out by sticking a butter knife through the slot and shaking it upside down on the bed. How did older sisters know so many valuable tricks? Especially since Kathy had no older siblings to teach her?! It remains a mystery to me, to this day.

  One hot day in the summer between kindergarten and first grade I took a butter knife and poked out what seemed like an obscene amount of money onto my bed. I filled my pockets with coins and decided I was going to go to Father Mac’s pool, the local neighborhood hangout, and splurge on some treats courtesy of the ice cream man. I tried to be discreet as I walked downstairs past my mother, standing in the kitchen. I felt like a scarecrow stuffed with dimes and nickels instead of straw, and must have been walking bowle
gged to prevent any jingling. This caused my mother to ask the obvious question: “Tommy, do you have money in your pockets?”

  I didn’t bother lying because my mother was clairvoyant and superhuman, and had the uncanny ability to call me on a lie as I was telling it. Of course, I probably had several obvious tells that could be read at ten paces by anyone over the age of fifteen, but my mother was the only adult I had attempted to lie to, so rather than consider that I might be a terrible liar, I credited her with mystical powers.

  I emptied my pockets on the table, which revealed that I had seventy cents.

  “Seventy cents! Where are you going with seventy cents?” she demanded.

  “Father Mac’s.” I hadn’t really counted the change. Even I was shocked at the amount I’d been carrying.

  “Put that money back in your bank. Was it for the ice cream man? You don’t need to spend money on him. I’ve got Popsicles.” By “Popsicles,” Mom meant that she had poured powdered drink mix into the ice cube trays and stuck toothpicks in them. My mother didn’t need store-bought items when there was a perfectly good replacement at home. If she could make it herself, she would.

  So when I suggested I supplement my piggy bank by selling lemonade, she indulged me. A penny saved was a penny earned, but an earned penny was even better than that.

  I set up my stand with great care. The night before, I prepared the lemonade from a powdered mix that we had in the pantry. It was about a year old and dried out, so I had to crush the clumps of mix with a fork and stir vigorously once I added the water. I made several batches and put them in the fridge overnight. In the morning I filled our big orange plastic cooler jug—the kind that had a spout on the bottom. That way, I could easily serve my customers directly from the jug and didn’t have to worry about pitchers and other messy things like that. We had plenty of Styrofoam cups; in fact, several sleeves had been in our back-hall cabinets for what seemed like years. As you may be gathering, Mom liked to hang on to things. You never knew when you might need them for things like, well, a lemonade stand.