Mean Dads for a Better America

by Tom Shillue

  I stared at them from behind my sunglasses. My face was flush, my head was warm, but it was a powerful feeling. My first thoughts, as I stood in that doorway, offer an insight into the way my mind worked: I had gone into school with the intention of having everyone look at me and think I was cool. Everyone was looking at me, but they thought I looked like a complete fool. And I, being so confident and with this amazing ability to shrug off criticism, remember thinking . . .

  “Halfway there . . .”

  You can’t buy that kind of confidence. You can’t learn it in a book or at a weekend motivational seminar. It goes deep. It’s in the marrow.

  Or, maybe, it’s something missing—some tiny little part, like a hammer or an anvil, or one link in the DNA chain that most people have. Overconfident people are missing that little voice in their head that says, “Don’t do that, it might not turn out well.” They go ahead and do it anyway and work out the details later.

  I call these preternaturally self-assured people dorks. I know that most people use names like nerds, geeks, and dorks interchangeably, as if they all describe the same type of person. They do not. Here’s how it breaks down:

  Nerds are aware of their social status and act accordingly. They become introverted, avoid sports, and, however reluctantly, gradually accept their lower social status.

  Geeks are nerds with a specific skill set, such as writing computer code, from which their confidence stems. They didn’t become confident until they started using their nerdy skills to earn a good living at a high-tech start-up, or as an in-demand freelancer with a massive hourly fee. Dorks don’t need such recognition; the high self-esteem is built right in.

  Dorks, just as I was, are just nerds with a lot of confidence. They refuse to assume their place in the social pecking order. Remember the nerdy guy in your high school who had no idea he was a nerd—he would walk right up to the popular kids at school and ask them, “What’s going on this weekend?” and did they “want to hang, chief?” That was a dork.

  I started out as a dork, but as I grew older, life slowly squeezed it out of me. I gradually became more conventional. The dork might have been gone, but the seed remained, and always will.

  One example of my pluck that I am especially proud of is illustrated in a story I’d like to share from Father Mac’s.* There were two pools in Norwood, Father Mac’s and our rival, Hawes. We just called them “pools” but they were full-service playgrounds and pools, courtesy of the local taxpayers, and the social hub of all summer activity in town. In pre–day camp and sleepaway camp America, this was how all the parents in town kept their kids busy until September. Theoretically both pools were open to everyone in town, but they were deeply segregated in practice. Based on your neighborhood, you were either a Hawes kid or one of the “FM Boys,” and the turf war between the two was surprisingly potent.

  “Fathuh Mac’s Sucks!” I would hear from a passing gang of bicycle riders. It was remarkable how we developed such fierce loyalty to our local pools at such a young age. And it never ended—even in high school, when all the kids in town were in the same building, playing on the same sports teams and sitting at the same lunch tables together. Once summer arrived, all bets were off, and a Sunni/Shiite-like divide once again ran through the town, turning friend into foe.

  At Father Mac’s, some kids had money and some kids didn’t, mostly based on age—the older kids had money from paper routes, yard work, or babysitting; some younger kids got money from their parents for the pool, but not me. If you did have any money, you had better keep it in the secret pocket of your bathing suit. Some kids left it in their sneakers while swimming, but that was a sure way to become the victim of petty theft—thugs and teenagers always looked in the younger kids’ shoes first.* Every day when the ice cream man would arrive blaring his familiar tune, the kids with the money would go running, and the rest would look on with envy. I’d run, too, but instead of joining the throng at the big window waving their wet bills in the air, I’d run around to the other side, pull myself up on the bumper, and yell through the driver’s-side window at the back of the ice cream man’s head, “Can I pick up trash?” I among a few of the other moneyless kids had learned how to make ourselves useful: the driver knew his truck was the source of most of the litter on the playground, so in the interest of being a good citizen and a champion of ecology, or, more likely, needing to remain in the good graces of the Norwood Department of Recreation to ensure his continued gold mine of a location, he would offer a free ice cream to diligent trash collectors.

  We’d run around the playground picking up every scrap of litter. Despite a national shaming campaign against “litterbugs,” most people in the 1970s were still content to toss their wrappers on the grass next to them. Some of the kids who were familiar with our routine would wait for us and dismissively throw their refuse at our feet as we came around. I welcomed it, though, because the more trash we brought back to the truck, the more likely the driver would be to continue our scheme. Once we delivered the trash, we could choose any of the first-tier treats as our reward—a Push-Up, an ice cream sandwich, a Fudgsicle, or a Nutty Buddy. It may be, to this day, the most satisfying job I’ve ever had.

  If you were a kid with money and wanted to splurge, there was the flashy, oversized, red, white and blue Bomb Pop, which took advantage of our bicentennial pride. Walking around with the biggest, most patriotic refreshment on the playground was a way to bask in the greatness of Liberty. Think about what a testament this was to our preeminence as a nation: American children refreshed themselves by sucking on huge frozen bombs.

  There was also the Good Humor Triumvirate, consisting of the Chocolate Éclair, Strawberry Shortcake, and Toasted Almond bars. These high-priced adult ice cream bars would sit untouched unless everything else in the truck was gone. They had too many layers of complexity to them, like a gourmet dessert-on-a-stick, and were not well suited for the playground. Kids didn’t need that kind of subtlety while playing.

  Father Mac’s had its own culture. There was a list of fairly typical rules posted on the fence: no spitting, no cannonballs, etc. But there were also many unwritten rules. For instance, boys were not allowed to use towels to dry themselves. Toweling off was for girls. Guys had to drip dry. Any boy over six or seven years old who used a towel was a real sissy. I learned quickly not to even show up with one, lest it be soaked and used as a weapon against me.

  As long as you didn’t use a towel, you could dry off however you liked. One acceptable technique was to use the bathhouse wall. The dark-green paint absorbed the sun all day and got superhot, so the boys would line up with their backs to the wall, then flip themselves over like sausages and do the front. The wall stayed warm until the early evening, so late in the day when the air got cooler it would really come in handy. Some breezy nights late in the summer you could see a long line of boys with blue lips, shivering and fighting for wall space. They’d hug it tightly, and press their cheeks against it. Why this ritual was considered more manly than using a towel I’ll never know.

  When my friends and I were feeling adventurous, we would ride our bikes to Hawes pool for a swim. Ostensibly it was to do something different and break up the normal routine, but we were obviously courting trouble. It was the excitement of going into enemy territory. When we arrived on the grounds it was like Wyatt Earp walking into Dodge City. The Hawes kids would stare at us. They thought we had a lot of gall to just show up at their pool and act as if nothing was amiss. They would mutter under their breath, but they couldn’t do anything while the lifeguards were watching. So right after we were done swimming, we made sure to get right on our bikes and pedal out of there fast. Sometimes we’d discover that a few of the Hawes kids had left us a message, like a set of bent spokes to ride home on.

  The Hawes pool kids were intimidating, but looking back, Father Mac’s was probably the tougher pool. There were certainly a lot of young punks that hung at Father Mac’s. At “the wall,” a horseshoe-shaped structure with
two high rectangular pillars at the entrance to the playground, brothers Billy and Dicky Barrett would hold court and improvise hazing rituals for the new arrivals. One that I remember (because I’d fallen prey) went this way: From the top of one of the pillars, Billy would drop a dollar onto the grass. Dicky would notice from the other pillar.

  “Hey Billy, you dropped a dollar! Hey kid, pick up that dollar, would you? It’s right there on the ground!”

  When the unsuspecting kid bent down to pick up the dollar, Billy, who had been saving up a substantial lugie in his mouth, would spit on the back of his head. All the other kids would laugh, because they had all been victim to it in the past. And then Billy would stretch his hand down, and the kid would actually reach up and give the dollar back! You would think they’d walk away with it as payment for their humiliation, but that never happened. They knew they’d been beaten. Billy and Dicky were troublemakers, but they were nothing compared to the really bad kids at Father Mac’s. I’d never seen them anywhere else in town, not church, not school; it was as if they existed only in the summer and only at the pool to terrorize the weak. They would hold court daily in the bathhouse, these huge hulking giants of teenage humanity who were able to grow a mustache at age ten. The inside of the boy’s bathhouse was only about eighteen feet across—a long eighteen feet to travel. One rarely got through without some type of interference. They would sit wedged into the open stalls laughing and joking with each other, then pounce when you walked in, whipping you with a wet towel that had been twisted into a rattail. Man, those welts burned.

  If I had to endure today, as an adult, anything close to what I experienced on a daily basis during those summers, I would be an unhappy man. Life would be simply intolerable. But constant harassment was just an accepted part of life as a kid. I wouldn’t complain or ever think to mention it to any adult. “How was your day?” my mother would ask. “Pretty good,” I’d answer, when in fact I’d just been waterboarded in the bathhouse showers by a gang of hairy teens.

  One day when I showed up at the pool some of the toughs were in the bathhouse. Of course I didn’t have a towel with me, not wanting to open myself up to ridicule, but I moved through as quickly as I could anyway. As I passed them one of them yelled “It’s Tommy Shit-lue!” I kept my head down and exited into the pool area. I could hear their laughs echo from inside the bathhouse. “That’s his name now! SHIT-LUE! Ha-ha-ha!”

  I knew one thing—that Tommy Shitlue was not going to be my name. I didn’t go in the water. I stood there in the sun-warmed puddle on the concrete deck and thought about what I should do next. I couldn’t go squeal to a lifeguard, that would only make things worse. I wasn’t about to go back in that dark, wet bathhouse and confront them. So, I reached down deep into my reserve of overconfidence, where I kept my pluck. Two girls walked by on their way into the girls’ side of the bathhouse, and I decided to improvise. In an over-the-top carnival barker voice I bellowed, “Hello there! I’m Tommy Shit-lue!”

  The girls looked confused and hurried away, but I could hear the tough guys quiet down on their side of the bathhouse wall. They were listening. Someone else walked by, and again I yelled, “My name is Tommy SHIT-LUE! At your service!”

  Three more girls came out from the bathhouse on their way into the pool. “Hello there!” I hollered. “Tommy Shit-lue. Glad to meet you! Tommy Shit-lue, nice to see you! Tommy SHIT-LUE! That’s my name!”

  By now some kids were starting to gather to see what was going on. A lifeguard also came over to see what the commotion was all about, and I quietly told him it was nothing and decided to go for a swim. By then the tough guys had left the bathhouse by the other door. They had heard me using their name for me at the top of my lungs and thought they were somehow going to get in trouble for it. But I never said a word about them to the lifeguards.

  And as for that nickname, I never heard it again. As I think back on my response, I realize I didn’t come up with it all by myself; it was a little modification of my mother’s “punch him back” technique. I didn’t want to give them the satisfaction of upsetting me. And as she also used to say, “Nobody can make you feel bad without your permission.” Call it pluck, call it overconfidence, call it being a dork, call it being quick on my feet—I’m just glad it worked. It wouldn’t be the last time.

  WHILE MY PARENTS WERE BOTH ON THE SAME page as far as faith and moral absolutes were concerned, they had vastly different styles. Where my dad was strict and intimidating, my mom was more artsy and slightly detached, probably because she spent her days at home caring for five kids. It would take a lot of energy to be as intimidating as my father all day long. He only had to muster it after hours, and on the weekends, so he could afford the energy to blow up when angry and present that generally scary figure that the other kids in the neighborhood ran away from when he appeared. Mom had to take a more 360-degree approach, lest she burn out too fast. Another reason she never hovered over us too much, beyond the fact that helicopter parenting hadn’t been invented yet in the 1970s, was that she was always busy with her own projects. My mother’s arts and crafts would become obsessions, and, like Picasso, her creative life was marked by distinct phases. There was her scrimshaw period, her painted-rock paperweight period, her calligraphy period, her industrial knitting machine period, and her soap-making period, to name a few.

  Our house was decorated with my mother’s oil paintings, scenes of nature—a pumpkin patch, a snowy cornfield, or a grove of birch trees. She went off to art class one evening a week with other Norwood housewives, women who today would probably be employed in the world of art, design, or fashion, but with big families to care for, had only enough time for art as a hobby.* My Mom did her best to make it more than that, and would display her work for sale at local art shows. Soon, though, she grew tired of oils and switched to another medium.

  When I was very young she was still in her charcoal period, and we would all have to go to art shows while she did while-you-wait portraits, two dollars for black and white, or four dollars for color pastels. Her clients mostly consisted of parents forcing their kids to sit for a portrait, which was difficult for them, as you might imagine. She had to get the kid’s happy expression down first, as it would inevitably change to an impatient scowl. We couldn’t even sit still to watch them. The Shillues would all run off and play, then check in on the poor victim and my mother’s progress later.

  The portraits were very labor intensive, and she wasn’t able to do that many in a day at a show—so being an entrepreneur at heart, she was always looking for a craft that she could mass-produce to drive up her profits. After a trip to the beach where my sisters had collected a bag of smooth rocks, my mother was so inspired that she confiscated the rocks and decorated them with paints and nail polish. She made them into little creatures like ladybugs and frogs, even buying googly eyes to glue on. Well, these delightful paperweights sold like hotcakes at the art shows! She even thought about going into the paperweight business and trying to mass-produce them, but again her artistic restlessness took over, and she switched to her next medium. A few years later, an enterprising ad agency executive name Gary Dahl created the pet rock, a plain rock with no decoration at all except for the googly eyes. He caused a national sensation and made a million dollars with what appeared to be a Junior Varsity version of my mother’s paperweights. You can imagine our frustration as kids, but my mother shrugged it off.

  Interspersed with her visual art were many crafts. The soap-making project was one of her most earnest, because she was able to combine two of her passions: craft-making and money-saving. In the spirit of Laura Ingalls, she began making her own bars of soap using lye and leftover cooking fat, pouring the mixture into tin molds. She strained the fat as best she could, but little bits of bacon and beef always remained. Although the bars didn’t lather much, they did have a nice exfoliating quality. We complained that her bars smelled less like soap and more like whatever we had eaten the week before, but she persisted. She would chan
ge her formula slightly and make her soap bars more fun by using old make-your-own Popsicle molds that were shaped like cartoon characters, but that failed to make Mom’s soap any more appealing. For that entire year, the whole family smelled like meat, but from my mother’s perspective, she didn’t purchase one bar of soap from the store, so it was worthwhile. My dad never complained, as he appreciated his wife’s eagerness to stretch his paycheck and probably didn’t mind smelling like smoked shoulder at the office, as it gave him something to look forward to when he got home.

  After the meat soap it was back to art. Since her previous project involved materials from the seashore, she moved on to the next logical medium: scrimshaw. A great tradition among the seafaring men of old, scrimshaw is of course the art of drawing directly on the bones and teeth of whales. It combined art, history, and what I’m beginning to suspect was my mother’s real passion: harvesting animal by-products.

  We had a traditional dining room with a large dining table in it, but it was never used for meals. The room was always covered with my mother’s projects, and the house was brimming with refuse and odds and ends. Was my dad happy with the house always in a state of artistic disarray? I don’t know, but I never heard him utter a word of protest. And there was nothing he could do about it anyway, as he had married a woman with an artistic heart and no one was going to be able to keep her from her work.

  Our home’s rather “lived-in” feel wasn’t only because of Mom’s many projects. The ability to keep a tidy home slowly eroded with each child. House Beautiful was surrendered to Kids Plentiful. Only the moms who prioritized neatness above all other virtues could keep their homes tidy, and we all knew who they were. When I entered their homes, it was amazing—they looked like the sample rooms from a furniture store, or a complete showcase showdown, “New living room!!!” from The Price Is Right. Their rugs were vacuumed in rows—you could see the diagonal parallel vacuum lines on the carpet.