Hearing the old man use these same terms made me wonder if this wasn’t all a ruse to get me to do some volunteer work for Kokomo County Pentecostal that summer. I thought of the old man’s non-gas-powered mower, the Character Developer, and its dull, rusty blades. I thought of Reverend Phipps’s lawn, teeming with weeds and insects. Deeply troubled in spirit, I decided to get some clarification.
“What kinds of things?”
“I don’t know!” my father said. “The Lord didn’t go into details, but that’s not important, son. What is important is that our time is coming! Our time to do something powerful! World-changing!”
What followed was predictable. Whenever the old man got the religious bug, he would do as most Pentecostals do when they get buggy, stuff like lifting his arms up high and praising Jesus at the top of his lungs, singing loudly and off-key, speaking in tongues, or hopping around the room like a bunny. And taking into account this wasn’t just any old pow-wow, but one to echo through the ages, my father decided to treat me to an unholy combination of all five: He lifted his arms; he praised Jesus; he sang loudly and off-key; he hopped like a bunny; he didn’t just speak in tongues, he shrieked.
“KEEVO-REEVO-TOOMIN-LOOMIN!”
Jarring. Not two days before, he had been cursing the Cinton brothers, the two twenty-somethings we shared a wall with who had supposedly allowed the fence separating our Lilliputian backyards to sag. My father had, at the time, referred to them as “buttfuckers.”
As in: “Looks like those buttfuckers next door let the fence sag.”
Now I can’t say for sure, but it’s doubtful the Cinton boys were buttfuckers. They seemed like the nice, normal, non-buttfucking type.
I just think the old man liked calling somebody a buttfucker.
5
My father’s Pentecostal ardor—stentorian, convulsive, unfathomable—jarred my mother as well and brought down another wave of reprimands along with a few violent thwacks on the wall for him to keep it down, prompting him to fire back with that passage of scripture where King David’s first wife had rebuked him for singing to God, and God, none too pleased with her comments, had made sure the mouthy little minx had zero children to the end of her days.
“Ha, like I’d let you get close enough to try again anyway,” came my mother’s voice from the back bedroom. I’d like to say right now, I’ve always taken after her.
Remarkably, my father seemed unaffected by my mother’s barbs for once and dismissed them with a wave of a hand and a chuckle as he took a seat on the couch next to me. “Frankie,” he said, grinning. “I’ve got something to show you.”
Brandishing the remote with an overwrought theatricality worthy of an out-of-work magician, he turned the television back on, and with breaking heart I saw the end credits to the bear cartoon scroll across the screen with no sign of TO BE CONTINUED to give me hope.
The bear battle was over. And if I had to go by how things stood before my father had mercilessly wrecked my birthday happiness, then there was no other conclusion to be reached but that the grouchy brown bears were the victors this time. For things to have ended differently, Proust would have had to rouse himself from beneath that tree branch, hunt down the grouchy brown bears, and get all the magic honey back in time for the credits, something that seemed unattainable in the allotted time and this made me heartsick. I hated the grouchy brown bears. They were jerks. They should never win.
Meanwhile, my father was fumbling with the remote again, anxiety once more overtaking him as he struggled to switch the TV to video mode. What he was about to show me was critical to his point, and he was terrified I would think this whole production ridiculous and that he was ridiculous for showing me. Given this added pressure, he was having trouble with the buttons. He pushed one after the other to no effect, and as sweat began to bead on his forehead and his lip quivered, my heart filled with malevolent glee.
Normally, a situation like this would have lasted quite a while—to the point where my malevolent glee would lose its luster and fade into an irritated boredom—but a quick, desperate grunt of prayer from the old man brought God—or dumb luck—to the rescue and he somehow mashed the right button, the VCR whirred to life, and the television screen abruptly filled with an enormous Pink Panther balloon floating high above New York City.
“Now watch this, Frankie. Just watch,” he said, and lo and behold I did.
The Pink Panther balloon floated away, followed by a Big Bird balloon. A Snoopy balloon came next, then a Snuggle Bear, before a bloated, dyspeptic Ronald McDonald finished off the series. As each balloon passed, the old man fidgeted in his seat, patted my back, and wheezy-hee’d.
I closed my eyes. Only my dad would record the Thanksgiving Day Parade. Only my dad would make me watch it on my birthday, which does not fall anywhere near Thanksgiving. Calling in every favor I felt God owed me, I silently begged Him to make the capricious VCR eat the tape as it once had my treasured copy of Raiders of the Lost Ark. If nothing else, I wanted it to make those squiggly lines.
“I SAID PAY ATTENTION, FRANKIE!”
I stopped praying and opened my eyes to fresh disappointment. Neither God nor the VCR had done my bidding. On the television now were about twenty-five Asian men and women, standing on top of one another in the form of an isosceles triangle.
“Lookie there!” the old man exclaimed. Then, whispering for some reason, “You know what that is?”
“A human pyramid,” I answered. This was now, without question, the worst birthday ever.
Clearly thinking otherwise, the old man turned off the TV again and took my hands in his. He then proceeded to share, wildly and stutteringly, the following information:
Family trees are like human pyramids. Every bloodline, with each added member, helps build a progression that eventually leads to one man, who goes on to become something special and great. For instance, there have been many Washingtons, but only one George Washington. There have been many Newtons, but only one Sir Isaac Newton. And as the human pyramid ends with one person climbing on the backs of others to reach the pinnacle, where they stand alone, so does this one great man flow through the blood of those who came before him to emerge as the best of his ancestry.
“What about the girls?” my mother interrupted from down the hall again.
My father snorted and kept going.
This is not to say, he said, that those leading up to this great man are without value. Without their blood being passed on, there can be no great man, just as there can’t be an apex (my word not his) to the human pyramid if one of those Chinamen (his word not mine) in the middle decides to jump off.
This is why the Bible dumped all that ink on genealogies. Everyone, not solely the great man himself, shares in the glory, and soon, my father said, the glory due our family will shine forth like a blaze in the darkness once the Great Horvath comes into being.
The old man’s voice was now crackling like popcorn being stepped on. He was squeezing my hands harder than I would have liked, and I found myself a little unnerved by what I was hearing, even more so by the tears in his eyes. Nobody wants to see their father cry. It makes you feel unsafe.
“I have sacrificed everything, all the plans I had, for you, son,” my father said. “To keep our human pyramid going. I never told you this before, but I could have been a football player. I was wiry, I was mean, and I had the will and determination necessary to do harsh violence to any and all who would oppose—”
“Violence? All you did was kick the ball, Robert…”
“And why should that make any difference, huh?” my father yelled back in the direction of my mother’s all-wise, all-knowing voice. “In case you didn’t know, Little Miss Butkus, a field goal kicker is every bit a football player, and you need as vicious a mindset for that position as you do for any of the others!”
The old man paused here, bracing for another scathing r
ejoinder or perhaps Ye Olde Hurtling Shoe. When nothing came, he lowered his volume.
“Anyway, I had the talent to be pretty good, Frankie. I could kick the ball through the uprights most of the time, even make a tackle or two if everything went to heckity-heck in front of me, but the Lord pulled me aside one day and commanded me to stop with all the kicking.”
“Oh, so that’s what it was,” my mother said. “And here I’ve been going around thinking you stunk and got cut from the team.”
Ho boy. That did it. My father breathed in sharply but did not exhale, offered me a small but painful smile, stood, and stomped down the hall. Then, from the depths of my parents’ bedroom:
“HEE!—that was the Holy Spirit speaking through the circumstance, working a miracle. You—HEE!—know that, Margaret! That’s the only rational explanation for how bad I kicked—HEE!—during tryouts!”
“I wouldn’t say that’s the only rational explanation, Robert...”
“OH YEAH? WHAT WOULD BE, WOMAN?”
“DON’T YOU CALL ME WOMAN!”
“WOMAN WOMAN WOMAN! BIG FAT—HEE! WOMAN!”
Confident this was the beginning of a protracted row, I reached for the remote. The bear fight might be over, but there were other cartoons. The teen weasel rock band show maybe. That one wasn’t so bad.
Alas, Mick Badger didn’t get through the first verse of “Beast of Burden” before the old man reemerged, snatched the remote away from me, turned off the TV, grabbed my hands again, and resumed weeping (and wheezing).
“Hee!—son, despite what your unbelieving mother might think, Je—hee!—sus told me to stop playing football and keep my body safe for the family I would have someday. Kicking field goals was my great love and I—hee! gave it up for you. I didn’t even realize why I was doing it other than the heavy hand of God telling me it must be so. But today He has finally told me why and He wanted me—hee! to share it with you, because you, son, are very important.”
6
Okay, I’ll admit. The old man had me with that one. I liked the idea of being very important. To be honest, I had been convinced of it for some time already. This is why I had such admiration for Proust the Bear. He was better than the others of his species, and I thought I was better than the others of mine.
That I had yet to demonstrate a hint of any Proust the Bear qualities was beside the point. Deep down I was something special, and now, for the first time, I realized I wasn’t the only one who believed this. My father did too.
He believed it so much he was in tears.
I’m not ashamed to say my own eyes welled up at the thought of someone else getting so emotional over how amazing I was, but it’s okay for kids to cry. It’s also okay for kids to hug their fathers.
As we held each other, the old man laughing and sniffling and I laughing and sniffling along with him, neither of us said a word. The father made complete by the son and the son by the father, a beautiful thing.
I only wish I could have left it at that. At the no words said, at the beautiful thing. Let it be a silent, sacred moment we would always remember and draw strength from. Perhaps, like my face smashed in the couch cushions, my life would have gone in a different direction had I let that moment be, but a thought kept nagging me that I should get just a smidgen more reassurance, in the off chance this really was about mowing lawns all summer.
“So you really think that?” I said, pulling back from my father’s embrace to gaze hopefully into his dribbling eyes, my voice raspy, my nose leaky.
“Think what?” he said.
“That I’m the Great Horvath?”
The old man let go, his face scrunching up again. He seemed frustrated, severely disappointed, and betrayed all at the same time.
“Haven’t you been listening to a word I’ve been saying?” he said.
For once, I thought I had.
With a sigh heavy enough to indicate not only the loss of the will to stand but to live, the old man dropped back down on the beanbag, wearily looked at the ceiling, and ran his fingers through his thinning hair. “Son, come on, it should be obvious,” he said.
“That I’m Him?”
“Oh lordy, Frankie, please don’t do this,” my father said, casting sad eyes on me, his voice full of pity. “Of course you’re not.”
PART THREE
“If that ass-fart baseball team is the reason this all goes to shit, I swear to Christ I will fucking kill you.”
1
We’re out of the car, Sparky and me. A few minutes ago he woke from a short nap, and as he cleared out the cobwebs with a long stretch and a series of yawns, we listened to the radio.
It seems he doesn’t suspect a thing. Why we’re here. What’s at stake. Or he’s doing a fantastic job of pretending. You never know with kids, especially this kid.
But he can suspect things all he likes so long as he doesn’t try to do anything about them, and even if he does—ruling out the use of some kind of heretofore unknown supernatural strength—I’ll tie him up and throw him in the trunk.
It could be the boy is aware of this contingency, as he has started singing again, perhaps in an attempt to weaken my resolve.
Poop and pee
Poop and pee
I like to poop and pee
“Ohmygod, did you hear that?” a pimply teenage girl asks another as they pass by my singing son on the sidewalk, laughing. “What a little creep!”
“I know!” her friend says, jeering at us over her shoulder. “I mean, seriously. How old is he?”
Having said those lovely things, the girls are gone, across the street and into an ice cream shop, their comments a little blindside swipe of undeserved cruelty that’s knocked Sparky off course. He’s hung his head and stopped singing.
I’d kinda like to go after those girls. Not because I think they’re at all wrong in their observations, but so I can inform them that in addition to it being none of their damn business what my son sings, they should understand that what he sings is for their own good (and everybody else’s), and might very well be one of the biggest reasons why they get to go on scarfing down waffle cones and sprouting zits for the foreseeable future.
And that isn’t just something to say, either. I’m not lying. The song is absolutely necessary.
2
When Sparky was younger, he was acutely anal retentive. This goes back as far as I can remember, all the way to his first Christmas.
As he grew up, the wife and I discovered that a trip to the bathroom produced in him feelings akin to a dentophobe on their way to a root canal. Why this was the case was nothing the wife and I could figure out. It was nothing we did on purpose, I assure you, but for some reason Sparky found toilets and toilet paper and all that flushing to be too horrible, and so just held everything in until he couldn’t. As you might imagine, this resulted in many disgusting accidents. I was always buying him new underwear, pants. On the regular I’d find poop smears on the couch, pellet-sized poop balls going up the stairs like a trail of breadcrumbs, little gifts around every corner.
In the end, and not without much debate on the issue, the wife and I decided to do something about it, and not just for the sake of our carpets or my beleaguered gag reflex. This something we decided to do was a self-help program that Social Services provided at taxpayer cost: Dr. Decorum’s Behavior Module #4.
Dr. Decorum has a whole series of these things, and they range from such indispensable topics as how to not beat the shit out of animals or people of different races, sexual orientations, and religions; how to refrain from trashing the planet; how to eat and drink without being a slob; and last but not least, how to go to the bathroom.
The secret of Dr. Decorum’s modules is the songs. They are short, cheery, and chant-like. They tend to get in your head and stay there.
In regards to Module #4, there are two parts. The first is for
those children who are severely anal retentive and hate to go the bathroom to the point of risking their mental and physical health. Some child psychologists believe prepubescents who are too anal retentive can express fastidious, exacting, malicious, and repressed tendencies to the point of becoming a sociopath or a schizophrenic down the road. Not to mention refusing to go to the bathroom is not good for you. That stuff is supposed to get out.
The song on the first part of the module is the one Sparky took a liking to and still sings to this day:
DR. DECORUM: Alllllllllllright kids! You know what time it is?
KIDS: What time is it, Dr. D?
DR. DECORUM: What time is it? Why, it’s time for the Poop and Pee Song!
KIDS: Hooray!
DR. DECORUM: And a one and a two and a three...
EVERYBODY:
Poop and pee
Poop and pee
I like to poop and pee
The second part of the module is for those who are extremely anal expulsive: kids who have a penchant for going to the bathroom anywhere and everywhere and way too often. These children oftentimes have a fixation with fecal matter, and just as often are extra disorganized and messy. The same child psychologists from before believe that if a boy or girl becomes too anal expulsive, they are far more likely to cultivate appetites for reckless behaviors and develop attention disorders, in addition to maintaining poor hygiene throughout their adult lives.
(Also, they could still go schizo.)
To clarify, the idea is to not just get the stuff out, but at the proper time and in the proper receptacle. It’s all about balance.
The second song is almost identical to the first, with one small, yet vital, change:
DR. DECORUM: Alllllllllllright kids! You know what time it is?
KIDS: What time is it Dr. D?
DR. DECORUM: What time is it? Why, it’s time for the Poop and Pee Song!
KIDS: Hooray!
DR. DECORUM: And a one and a two and a three...
The Antichrist of Kokomo County Page 4
