Mean Dads for a Better America

by Tom Shillue

  “You haven’t made out with anyone, have you, Shillue?” said Heyn.

  “No, not yet.”

  “We’ve got to get you a girl to make out with,” he said, like a doctor diagnosing a patient.

  “Yeah,” agreed Mitiguy, “You’ve got to have a make-out session. You need to get some experience. I had a make-out session with Mike Doherty’s cousin last summer in a hammock, and it was easy. You’ve got to do it.”

  “You made out with Mike’s cousin?” Heyn asked.

  “Yeah. We made out in the hammock for the whole afternoon. It was the same as going to bed.”

  “Maybe we can get her to make out with him next time she comes,” suggested Heyn, pointing at me.

  “No, she won’t come until the end of August, and when she does I’m going to make out with her again.”

  “What about MacPhail?”

  “Yeah, good idea. Definitely. MacPhail will do it.”

  Linda MacPhail. She was tall and pretty and seemed older than the other girls in our class, even though she was the same exact age. But it was really just because she carried herself with a lot of confidence. She had no problem talking with the boys, and this, combined with her good looks, made her seem dangerous. I sure didn’t think she would want to have a make-out session with me, even one arranged for purely educational purposes. Did people even do such things? Heyn and Mitiguy had seemed so matter-of-fact about the whole thing, as if it happened all the time.

  “I don’t know,” I said hesitantly.

  “Don’t worry about it,” said Mitiguy. “MacPhail is really advanced. She wears tampons, you know.”

  “She does?” asked Heyn.

  “Yeah, since Play Day last year.”

  The boys at school had some story they were always whispering to one another, about MacPhail having to leave Play Day because her shorts were stained or something—I didn’t want to know a thing about it.

  “I’m gonna call her and ask her to have a make-out session with Shillue. She’ll do it. I know it.”

  The following day Mitiguy told me he had arranged my make-out session with Linda MacPhail for that Saturday afternoon. It was to take place behind the Star Market, in the recycling bin, an 18-wheeler tractor trailer container that was filled with stacks of newspaper bundles.

  The recycling bin, with its many crevices and hiding places, was the perfect place for clandestine meetings. We had gone there once to divvy up the loot from a parking meter that Mitiguy had managed to break open using a loose cobblestone. The booty seemed huge, but I was a little uncomfortable with the way in which it had been acquired. Picking loose coins from a parking meter, which we did all the time, was one thing, but the cobblestone ratcheted it up into “illegal” territory. Since I had felt guilty about it, I didn’t want to just go out and splurge with the money. My idea was to bury all the money in the woods and, as the years went by, add to the stash little by little (not with other stolen money, but earnings from legit endeavors). Eventually we could use the accumulated fortune to pay for a trip to Florida after we graduated from high school. Heyn and Mitiguy thought we should immediately take the money to the Ground Round and use it to play Atari Games for the rest of the afternoon. They prevailed. A few hours after the parking meter heist, all the coins were gone, and all three of us were suffering from carpel tunnel syndrome from excessive track ball use.

  “Does MacPhail know it’s me she’s going to be making out with?” I asked.

  “She knows everything. I explained your situation,” said Mitiguy.

  I didn’t even know what my situation was. Why did I need special attention? Just because I didn’t agree that the best use of one’s time is to languor in bed all day with Farah Fawcett? I did, however, go along with the project. As intimidated and as confused as I was, I was thrilled by the idea of making out with Linda MacPhail in the recycling bin. And I couldn’t pass up the shot at a free lesson. I’ve always had a great lust for learning.

  “What should I do first?” I asked.

  “Don’t worry about it. She’ll know what to do. She’s advanced.”

  I didn’t ask Mitiguy what he meant, as it was probably all bluster. If he knew so much, why wasn’t he going to make out with her? I wasn’t sure if I was getting set up for a disappointment, or a prank, or worse. But I forged ahead.

  So on the fateful day, I pulled up to the recycling bin on my Schwinn. I could see MacPhail’s ten-speed already leaning against the side. I put my bike alongside hers and climbed inside. The air inside was hot and thick, nearly unbearable.

  “Hello?” I said.

  “I’m back here,” I heard from behind the stacks.

  I climbed up a steep hill of newspapers, across a short plateau, and then down a slight ravine to the back of the container, where Linda MacPhail was waiting. She was leaning against the wall of the container with her knees up to her chest, and had a newspaper behind her back to protect her from the scorching metal wall. She was wearing white jeans and a tank top.

  I was wearing a cotton football jersey with three-quarter-length sleeves and a pair of Sears Toughskins, those blue jeans that have rectangular plates of space age material stitched into both knees.

  Why am I still wearing Toughskins? I thought to myself. I’ve got to get a pair of regular blue jeans. Even J.C. Penney Plain Pockets had a higher status than Toughskins. She looked like she was seventeen. I looked like I was seven.

  “Hi,” she said.

  “How you doing?” I asked.

  “Good.”

  “You reading any newspapers?” I joked.

  “Not yet,” she said, laughing.

  “Are you going to play soccer this summer at Father Mac’s?”

  “I think so.”

  We talked about school and Father Mac’s playground for a bit, and my nervousness began to evaporate. I told her the story of our parking meter heist, and how we’d blown it all on video games; I complained about Heyn and Mitiguy for a while, and she complained about some of her girlfriends. After about half an hour, both of us were pretty well soaked with sweat, and Linda suggested that we should probably go outside. We crawled up and out of the bin, and when we got outside I noticed that her white jeans had black newsprint stains all over them. I didn’t say anything about the stains. The palms of my hands were black, too. It felt freezing cold outside, even thought it was late June, and probably in the eighties.

  “You wanna go for a bike ride?” she asked.

  “Sure.”

  As I pulled on my bike, hers came with it. My pedal was stuck between the spokes of her wheel, and I had to pry my Schwinn carefully apart from her ten-speed. Our bikes had been more intimate than we had.

  We rode up to St. Timothy’s Church parking lot, which overlooked New Pond. It was a great spot. I made up for my lack of a ten-speed by popping a few wheelies and doing some hot-dogging moves that could only be done on a two-wheeler with regular handlebars. At one point I got off my bike and chased the ducks into the water, which made her laugh.

  “You’re weird!” she said.

  I liked that.

  It was late in the afternoon when I rode with her back to her house, and we said good-bye without getting off our bikes. Neither of us had mentioned the original purpose of our meeting. But as I rode home, I remember thinking the day had gone pretty perfectly, even without the jetty and the Ferris wheel in the background. When Heyn and Mitiguy asked, I decided I would just tell them that we had made out and leave it at that. Nobody had to know the truth, and I didn’t want to spoil the good day I had with Linda by telling them.

  But she had laughed and said I was weird, which stuck with me. Maybe I’d be the weird guy. Maybe that would be my thing.

  NOTHING EPITOMIZED MY 1950S CHILDHOOD IN THE 1970s as much as Roll-Land, an old-fashioned roller rink that had operated for generations and remained largely unchanged from its earliest days. It was housed in an airplane hanger–sized building along “Automile” on Route 1 at the edge of town.*


  Roll-Land promised, as a banner inside proclaimed, “Leisure, Fun and Wholesome Recreation for the Whole Family” but Friday nights belonged to the junior high set. As young teens we would gather to skate, but mostly to socialize, and experience our first, tenuous interactions with the opposite sex. Raised up in a loft at the corner of the big wooden rink was a live organist who would accompany the skating on his Mighty Wurlitzer, playing everything from “Let Me Call You Sweetheart” to “Toot, Toot, Tootsie! (Good-bye).” That’s right, the entire Hit Parade. One side of the rink had turquoise melamine benches, and the other side had a snack bar that served burgers, dogs, pizza slices, and fountain sodas. Along the wall next to the snack bar was a line of pinball machines, which were usually monopolized by a group of toughs that looked like they were straight out of S. E. Hinton’s The Outsiders. There was a big sign on the wall that lit up skating commands, like ALL SKATE, COUPLES ONLY, RHUMBA, CHA CHA, and BOSSA NOVA. (The last few were of course used only for competitions.) On Friday nights, which was mostly all teens, the sign would display ALL SKATE most of the time, but every half hour or so, the COUPLES ONLY would light up, which was the signal for me and my buddies, who weren’t yet at the stage where we had coupled off, to skate off the rink and sit down on the hard plastic benches. The older teens would pair up, with the more serious, competition and skate-club skaters circling in their own smaller ring in the middle of the rink, where they showed off their moves while the love birds circled. For the weekend skaters and the seventh graders, we’d mostly use the time as an opportunity to get a slice of pizza or play pinball. There were a few adventurous eighth-grade boys who would ask girls to skate with them.

  My friends and I used to talk about doing this, even dare each other, but we never acted on it. We’d use the COUPLES ONLY time to do the more accepted form of flirting—hovering near the girls and behaving in an obnoxious fashion.

  At that age the boys were beginning to experiment with rudimentary, entry-level flirting by turning their teasing energies, usually reserved for each other, onto the girls. One of the pranks that boys always pulled on each other was to push a kid’s face into the water bubbler when they were taking a drink, so they’d get water up their nose. Kathy Doucette was a tough girl, generally considered “one of the guys,” and at Roll-Land one night John Plath tried it on her. But he pushed her face right into the spigot cover and suddenly her lip was split open and blood was all over the floor. So much for entry-level flirting. Plath, ever the gentleman, gave her the Molly Hatchett T-shirt he had on under his flannel shirt, and she held it to her face until the bleeding stopped. After that incident, among my peers at least, the water bubbler gag was pretty much retired. What a dumb gag that was anyway.

  Boys were so obnoxious in their attempt to “impress” the girls. They’d walk up to them and unzip their hoodies, or pull the hood over their head and yank it down over their eyes. The girls would laugh it off and try to be a good sport, but you could see it in their faces—they were barely tolerating the borderline harassment. But it was either that or stay home on a Friday night, which many girls did, and they were probably happier for it. I’m sure I engaged in my share of obnoxious behavior as well, but I also wanted to do things the right way. Roll-Land had this whole system set up and I wanted to take advantage of it. I mean, there was a huge sign on the wall that said COUPLES ONLY that was just waiting for me to put it to use!

  Eventually, I got up the nerve to ask a girl to skate with me. It had taken me almost a year of Friday nights, but I had found my moment. She was a dark-haired beauty who I had never seen at Roll-Land before. I was admiring her as my friends and I passed her in the rink. Then the COUPLES ONLY light appeared, and I knew I had to act. We skated to the benches, and her group was positioned right next to ours.

  “You want to skate with me?” I asked her.

  “I will, but you have to skate with my friend first,” she said, pointing to an overweight, lonely looking girl on the end of the bench. “No one ever pays attention to her.”

  “OK,” I said. It seemed like a pretty good bargain. We skated down to her friend.

  “Julie, he wants to ask you something,” she said to the chubby girl. Then she turned to me and said, “What’s your name?”

  “Tom. Yeah, hi. You want to skate?” I asked Julie.

  “OK,” Julie said.

  I took her hand and we went out on the rink. It was the least crowded skating I’d ever done—there was only a handful of couples skating. It was an entirely new experience for me. Sure enough the organist started playing “Somewhere My Love” (Lara’s theme from Doctor Zhivago), one of his romantic COUPLES ONLY favorites. As we came around the first time, my friends Heyn and Mitiguy were leaning over the railing hooting and hollering.

  “A-ROUND and a-ROUND!” Mitiguy yelled at me as I skated by. He was making a fat joke. The girl could surely hear them. I felt bad for her and annoyed with Mitiguy for being such a jerk.

  “Don’t worry about those guys,” I said.

  “It’s all right.”

  Something gave me the impression that Julie was used to guys like Mitiguy.

  We went around the rink together several times, with Mitiguy yelling out some stupid, mean phrase each time we passed, things like “Fat chance!” and “a-ROUND the world in eighty days!” While I knew the guys were teasing me as well as Julie, I wasn’t going to feel embarrassed for myself. I was out there doing a COUPLES ONLY skate, and they weren’t.

  I said to Julie, “I’m gonna skate with your friend, too. All right?”

  “OK.”

  We skated off and I let go of her hand and rolled alongside the original dark-haired girl.

  “Thank you,” she said.

  “What’s your name?” I asked.

  “Noel.”

  “Like No-elle?”

  “Yeah, like Christmas.”

  “I never heard that as a name before. You want to skate?” I asked.

  Just then, the ALL SKATE sign lit up.

  “Whoops. Maybe next time,” said Noel, and off she went skating onto the floor. I’d missed my chance.

  But I had held up my end of the bargain, so I waited for the next time COUPLES ONLY flashed on the sign and I looked for Noel, who seemed to be avoiding me. I found her lingering near the pizza window with her friend.

  “Can we do that skate now?” I asked her.

  “OK.” I waited until we got to the entrance and then took her hand. I was actually relieved that I had had the warmup with her friend, so I wasn’t self-conscious. I was getting pretty good at COUPLES ONLY.

  Nevertheless, when we came around, there again were Mitiguy and Heyn still hooting and hollering. This time the organist was playing “In the Good Old Summer Time,” but my buddies were singing “Rock-a-bye Baby . . . !” and making a cradle-rocking gesture with their hands. I didn’t get it. When I came around again, they were still at it. “When the bough breaks, the cradle will fall!”

  When the ALL SKATE came back on, I let go of her hand and we skated off the rink.

  “They’re in sixth grade!” yelled Mitiguy when I rolled up. He and Heynzy had spoken to Julie and asked what school she and Noel went to. Turns out, they were sixth graders at St. Catherine’s. That’s why we’d never seen them before. I had thought they must be from a different town, but it turns out, they were still in elementary school. And the guys were trying to make me feel bad about it. What were the rules for this kind of thing? Lots of guys dated younger girls, right? And I wasn’t even dating; I was skating. And those guys should have been cheering, not jeering. Nevertheless, it would take me a while to work up the nerve to ask another girl to COUPLES ONLY skate with me again.

  The skating rink became the epicenter of our social life during those early teen years, as we moved our focus from go-carts and baseball to raven-haired girls and, well, for me, more raven-haired girls. In eighth and ninth grade, we moved on to Saturday-night gatherings at Papa Gino’s, with girls at one table and boys at another, boy
s being loud and trying to be noticed, and the girls playing coy and being stingy with their attention. Occasionally one of us would stop by to see what the girls were playing on their mini-jukebox. Gradually, we boys stopped being obnoxious and started being nice, and we found it worked. I see middle school kids out at the mall now, and not much has changed. As radically different as my early childhood was from the kids’ of today, I think there is something universal about the early-teen years. Even with Snapchat and instant messaging, and teens being more sophisticated than ever, there is still no substitute for these kinds of coed hangouts where kids awkwardly test the waters with each other. Of course, they probably don’t do a lot of roller-skating to Perry Como songs, but the other stuff is pretty much the same.

  MY PARENTS WERE DEVOUT CATHOLICS, BUT MY SIBLINGS and I all went to public school. Tuition was the deciding factor for many large families, as it surely was in our budget-conscious home—the idea of paying property taxes to fund public schools and not making use of them would have kept my folks awake at night. Another major factor for Mr. and Mrs. Shillue was that they didn’t trust the Catholic schools of the 1970s to hold firm to the doctrine of pre–Vatican II Church that they held dear. My mother would rather I get that important doctrine directly from her. Those modern schools would never deliver the right and true Catholicism. All the Catholic kids in Norwood public schools (that is, 90 percent of the school) had to go to CCD* after school one day a week, but most of my religious education came from car rides with my mother, where she would explain the mysteries of our faith, the miracles of the saints, and the power of the Holy Rosary. I would come home from CCD and have my lessons retaught by her. I can remember one lesson in particular that set my mother off. The assignment was to “circle all examples you see of people committing a sin” on a workbook page that featured pictures of various people, some doing obvious good deeds and some obviously sinning. One illustration, however, featured a kid sitting under a tree doing nothing but, apparently, daydreaming. When we reviewed our work at the end of class, the nun pointed out the one we had all apparently gotten wrong: the child who was doing nothing was clearly “sinning” because he was doing nothing. His was a sin of omission: wasting time is a sin when you could be helping others. This then led to discussion about various ways that we could help others in our community, instead of daydreaming. I found the discussion interesting enough that I mentioned it to my mother after I got home. Her emphatic response surprised me: “That lesson is wrong, and sitting around doing nothing is absolutely NOT a sin.”