There are many more differences.
I hear about kids who painstakingly choose their clothing. Cooper has favorite colors and superhero shirts, sure, but comfort is his criteria and he doesn’t give a crap about coordinating. It is my duty to let him express himself his way, so I gulp a little as he romps out of the house in plaids mixed with checks and stripes and Spider-Man socks and Velcroed sneakers on the wrong feet because “I like them that way.”
Danny and I have always put looks before comfort. Danny is a button-down, dress-shoes man and has never left the house without checking his hair at least three times; then he continues to monitor it in any and every reflection or slightest facsimile thereof: a storefront window, a hubcap, a puddle. I swear I once saw him spit in his hand and gaze into it, tilting his head for adjustments. I admit that if I have no plans to leave the house, I don’t care what I look like and have gone for days without seeing my face. However, I weigh myself at least twice a day, no matter what, and even when alone, I wear heavy luggish boots because they add two inches to my height and allow me to buy jeans longer than my legs, which gives me a better line. I feel happier when I feel thinner and I am much more pleasant to be around.
When I was doing Grease on Broadway, I wore a cinch corset under my skintight, black-and-white, horizontally striped Lycra shirt to smooth the slightest side bulge that might’ve pooched over my high-waisted jeans. It didn’t matter that I couldn’t breathe. It mattered that I was V-shaped.
I considered having ribs removed.
I like clean lines and clean rooms and clean drawers. Cooper makes enormous messes, emptying bins of die-cast cars, action figures, minuscule pieces of Legos, and collected rocks, acorns, and dead leaves.
When I was his age, my toys were categorized and color coded.
Cooper loves firemen, policemen, football players, paramedics, and wrestlers—any man in a uniform.
So do I, but for different reasons.
He talks of blood and bones and guts and boogers. His figurines engage in battle, and the fatality list is long. Detailed explanations of appendages severed with knives and saws and lasers and axes abound. We don’t watch violent TV shows nor do we have any remotely weaponlike objects, except for a water gun, which we renamed a “water-blaster.”
I brought up my concerns at a preschool parent coffee. The girls’ parents were clueless, as their little princesses were already painting in oils, publishing short stories, and crafting. They did have guns—hot glue guns. The boys’ parents, however, nodded in exhausted agreement. With seemingly no influence whatsoever, the boys’ expertise in savagery is something they just . . . know. No one knows how they know, but they know—as if they receive secret messages from an alien informant through a frequency that only four-year-old males can hear. Like those dog whistles, inaudible to humans, but containing pertinent, violent information. We agreed it’s part of their Neanderthalic DNA . . . unless they like to play a lot of dress-up and their favorite song is “Defying Gravity,” in which case it’s another kind of DNA. Cooper is among the rescuers, soldiers, explorers, hunters, gatherers—with just a smidge of potential serial killer.
“I’m gonna cut off his head and the blood is gonna spill out everywhere all over everything!”
Apparently that’s all quite normal for his age. It was also normal for Jeffrey Dahmer.
Danny laughs. I pretend to.
Once, during a family trek up the trails of Griffith Park, recent rains had left the paths and porous bluffs in partial ruin. There were gullies and chasms and mounds of soft dirt lying at the foot of root-exposed summits. Danny and Cooper found long sticks and bludgeoned the vulnerable walls, watching them crumble onto the path like Zeus on a bender. “BAM!” “KAPOW!” “ZONK!”
I desperately tried to stifle my tongue, but after fifteen massacring minutes, I finally blurted out in a calm but pointed tone, “Cooper, do you know what erosion is? It’s when weather breaks down the hill, gradually destroying it for us and everyone who wants to come here. Forever! You and Papa are not helping. You are doing more damage than a tsunami. Please stop tearing down the mountain.”
Danny and Cooper rolled their eyes in unison as if to say, “Daddy spoils everything.”
I tried to redirect his interest. “Cooper, come over here and look at this black beetle. Notice how, when I put a stick near him, he turns around and raises his bottom in defense. He is planning to either sting or spray his attacker. Isn’t the insect world amazing?”
Cooper crouched down to get a closer look.
“Maybe he’s just gonna fart.”
I try to encourage creativity over destruction. I once used his Magna-Tiles, Lincoln Logs, Legos, and blocks to build a four-bedroom, three-bath dream house with gardens, a spacious kitchen with an island, a media room, a pool, a four-car garage, and a gift wrapping room, stocked with tiny rolls of real paper and ribbon. Eight seconds later, Cooper bombed it with a “meteorite” pillow followed by the proclamation “Everyone is dead.”
This behavior is so far away from my boyhood that I cannot relate. However, if I make the stretch, in the same way that Cooper can fashion a gun out of anything—a stick, a piece of cardboard, an apple core, a used tissue, bent and formed with the epoxy of fresh snot—I can walk into any kitchen, be told there is nothing to eat, and find enough stuff to make a scrumptious four-course meal that could be photographed for Food & Wine magazine.
Cooper and I do share a love of fine cuisine and I would define him as a miniature foodie. He has never met a calorie he didn’t like. He partakes in all cultures: French, Latin, Indian, Moroccan, Thai, Chinese, Italian (not spaghetti and meatballs—osso bucco with gremolata). He doesn’t like indigenous British food, but then no one does, not even the British. He loves sushi. Steamed mussels. Burrata with heirloom tomatoes. Pomegranate sorbet. He has a rare passion for raw oysters with just a touch of lemon. He loves tapas and is particularly fond of manchego-stuffed dates wrapped in rasher bacon. He has been known to request balsamic vinegar and can tell the difference between Himalayan and Mediterranean salt. This is due, in some part, to the policy in our house since he graduated from pulverized carrots and gooey oatmeal to real food: Eat what I make or starve.
Children’s menus in all restaurants offer the same things: hot dogs, mac ’n’ cheese, spaghetti, chicken nuggets, and grilled cheese. Kids seem conditioned and enabled to avoid real food. We don’t order from children’s menus and I have explained to him that chickens don’t have nuggets. There is no part of a chicken that is considered a nugget. I tell him, “Don’t ever order a meat that you can’t trace to an original body part.”
But sometimes I think it’s all for naught. Truthfully, Cooper could eat potato chips and waffles at every meal and be happy. His palate is not so sophisticated as it is driven by his endomorphic need for food. While I strive to cultivate his appreciation for varied cookery, which is artfully served on white mini-ceramic plates that match our larger versions (never plastic for dinner), there are personality issues that make me fear he will one day drink Coors from a can.
For instance, he is quite fond of the words “fart” and “penis” and is obsessed with asking us to smell his feet. He thinks belching is the highest form of comedy.
I make up songs with inner rhymes:
Cooper is a super trouper,
A loop-the-looper, a sometime blooper,
Hula-hooper, secret snooper,
And he makes me laugh!
“Now your turn—make up a verse!” I say. Cooper responds with:
Cooper is a pooper and he has a stinky butt.
Boy, is he a boy. And Danny loves it. At heart, Danny is a boy too. They have their own language. They wrestle, smash toys against walls, smash themselves against walls, belch, fart, and hike. They are magical together, and it relieves my concerns around Cooper being an only child.
More than once, they have entered the front door after one of their “adventures” with the singsong announcement “Da-ad! Don’
t worry, we’re oka-ay!” so that I am not shocked when I find them muddied and bloodied from that slip down the hill that was “a little steeper than we thought.”
But with me, the apple seems so far from the tree. From a different orchard, even.
As my criteria for things in common widens with desperate necessity, I realize we do share an unnatural love for chocolate, but I don’t think it’s something we will look back on as a bond. If he didn’t like chocolate, I would consider it an aberration much greater than his fascination with blood and gore, and I would send him to a psychologist. I don’t trust people who don’t like chocolate or people with very thin lips, which often go hand in hand.
And books—we both love books. He’s a bit of a research freak, like me, and wants to know about everything, but with a particular interest in knights and volcanoes and dead skin cells.
And we do love playing out wild, ridiculous stories and characters in imaginative situations, although Cooper has most of them end up with casualties. Cooper “Tarantino” Harris-Jacobsen directs with meticulous, seemingly scripted detail and many retakes. “No, not that way, Daddy. Go out the door and come back in and die. Slower.”
It’s not that we don’t have a good time. We laugh a lot. And I am astonished by his infinite mind and freaky memory and extensive vocabulary. He uses words like “exasperating,” “transformation,” “paleontologist,” and “cinematographer.” The word “awesome” was used only once, as it is strictly forbidden in our household. I explained, “The aurora borealis is awesome. The Grand Canyon is awesome. A gummy bear is not awesome. Getting a parking space near the entrance of Toys“R”Us is not awesome.”
After a series of stinky-butt and amputation references, I am mollified by phrases like “It’s spring so the jacarandas will be blooming” or, to our talking GPS, which we named Shirley, “Shirley, we’re almost home so we are no longer in need of your assistance.” And when he says “Please turn off your cell phones and unwrap any hard candies before the performance,” I wipe a prideful tear from my eye.
Still, I look for any potential pea-to-pod-ness, and one night I thought I’d hit upon something.
In addition to an obsession with dinosaurs, Cooper loves animals of the current, Cenozoic period. He has lots of stuffed bears and tigers and alligators, which he animates with distinct personalities. And he loves dogs. He loves dogs. It occurred to me that if I shared my history with animals, it would give us another common passion.
At bedtime, after reading The Courageous Captain America for the seven thousandth time, after which I wanted to stab out my eyes with an ice pick, I said, “Cooper, you know Daddy loves animals like you do. I’ve had so many different pets. Would you like to hear about them?”
“Yes, Daddy. What kind of pets?”
I had him! I started at the beginning:
“When I was a baby, Nanaw and Bubba got a little white poodle for our family named Jimmy-John.”
Cooper thought that name was very funny.
“Jimmy-John liked to have his tummy scratched.”
“What happened to Jimmy-John?” Cooper asked.
I hadn’t thought this part would come up. Jimmy-John was only with us for a year when he got a rare cancer and died.
“Jimmy-John had to leave us . . .” I stuttered, “but we got another dog right away. His name was Duke.”
“Where did Jimmy-John go?” He wouldn’t let up.
“I think to another family that needed him more. But then we got Duke! Duke was a mutt. A crazy brown big dog that”—jumped the fence and never came back. Shit!—
“. . . visited us for a while and then went on an adventure.”
I remembered we got two more dogs that we also named Duke, both of whom escaped and were never seen again. We just kept replacing the dogs but maintained the name so as to live in denial and not have to fix the fence. I skipped the extra Dukes. I didn’t want him to think we might replace him with another Cooper.
There was also a psychotic beagle we named Columbo because he had a slightly wandering eye like Peter Falk. He yelped and yapped fourteen hours a day while constantly racing the length of the backyard fence. He couldn’t jump over it, but his OCD pattern soon created a balding runway that became a dusty trench deep enough for him to crawl under it. My father fumed and steamed. “That goddamn fleabag’s days are numbered.” One day, Columbo was just gone. No explanation.
Next came a scroungy mutt called Furfy, whose name I really wanted to share with Cooper because it was so funny, but I didn’t know how to explain that she bit the mailman and my father drove her to a wooded area twenty miles away and abandoned her there. Or that she somehow miraculously returned to us months later, exhausted and mangy and pregnant, and bore a litter of equally scroungy puppies, all of whom were suspiciously given away in one day, along with Furfy. I suspect my father actually crossed the Oklahoma border this time.
“Then we got Noni,” I said, skipping to a dog I could talk about. Once again, Cooper laughed at the name.
Even though we’d had Jimmy-John and Duke and Duke and Duke and Columbo and Furfy, Noni was the first dog around long enough for me to develop a real relationship. She didn’t jump fences or yelp or bite mailmen. Hers was the name I used when asked to create a stripper name, which is based on your favorite pet and the street you grew up on. I would be Noni Washington. Great stripper name. Or it could be a prostitute name, but it sounded more to me like a heroin-addicted lounge singer with sleepy eyes, who wore dulled lamé tunics with sporadic wiry threads popping up here and there, and seams stretched beneath armholes and at the hips. Noni Washington would kick off her shoes and sing songs of unrequited love and pain and torture and misery and despair. I could actually picture myself as some version of Noni Washington in the future. And it wasn’t bad.
“Noni was a sweet dog,” I said to Cooper, snuggling close to him. “And she loved to chase cars and she slept in the garage . . .” Damn it!
Once again, this wasn’t going well. What decent person would let his dog chase cars? Noni had, indeed, been run over several times, suffering broken bones and hemorrhages and everything but death. As a result, she had a noticeable limp and always veered to the left. She had to aim right to go straight. I didn’t want to portray myself or Cooper’s grandparents as irresponsible, or as people who kept their dog in the freezing garage in the winter with a metal pan of ice-capped water. If Noni was thirsty, she had to lick her water like a Popsicle from November to March.
I changed gears.
“One time I found a baby bird that had fallen from its nest and broken its wing. And Nanaw and I mended the wing and made a nest in a shoe box and fed it oatmeal and worms until it was big and strong enough to fly away. When living things can’t help themselves, we help them.”
“What was the baby bird’s name?” Cooper wanted to know, hoping it was also funny.
“Um, Harold. The bird’s name was Harold.” I paused for a giggle. “And every year Harold returned to our house and sang on our windowsill.”
Now I was just making shit up.
I flashed on the number of creatures who hadn’t made it. And the animal cemetery across from our house under a streetlight at the top of the woods. Dozens were buried there. Not only family pets—any creatures, critters, varmints, or strays that we found—birds, squirrels, rats, snakes, an opossum, an armadillo. Anything dead. If the area were ever excavated, one would think the Pol Pot of the animal kingdom had stormed Sand Springs.
I held a funeral for each animal and was obsessed with ceremony. There were songs and eulogies and robes draped from bedsheets. Tears were shed. Memories of beloved pets were shared and unfulfilled lives of strangers were mourned.
“We never knew his name. But this snail brought happiness to our neighborhood.” I’d gathered other snails and placed them at graveside, and when they drew themselves into their shells, I imagined them weeping.
Flowers were laid and crosses were planted. I decided the armadillo was Jewis
h so I built a crude pine box, chanted the Mourners’ Kaddish, tore my shirt, and sat shiva.
I fast-forwarded.
“When I was fifteen and I moved to my own apartment, I couldn’t have a pet and I was so sad.”
But I did have a sort-of animal mascot. I lived in a nondescript suburb of St. Louis off I-44 that had no road signs or any indication that it existed. You had to live there to know it was there. Driving home from work, I often missed the unmarked turnoff and had to backtrack, slower, to find the narrow gravel road that led to my tiny apartment. A couple of weeks into the summer, as luck would have it, a dog was run over on the shoulder of the highway at that exact intersection, and the carcass became my landmark: Dead dog—Turn right. The dog was never removed, and as it rotted in the equatorial heat, the corpse finally decayed into a discolored oily spot, which I still relied upon as my marker: Dead dog oily spot—Turn right. If not for the poor animal, I might have gotten lost, run out of gas, and wandered on foot along I-44, only to be hit by a car and become a discolored oily spot landmark for some other geographically challenged traveler. I was glad the dog was dead.
I skipped that story.
I also skipped the one about the winter I returned to Sand Springs and, late one night, skidded on a sheet of ice in front of our house, unsuccessfully avoiding a cute little cottontail bunny. I sprang from my car, slipping and sliding, and found the poor thing panting its last pants, the steam of its body heat rolling up like a funeral pyre, all eerily lit by the glare of my headlights. I lifted the limp ball of sticky fur and placed it gently in the snow as if that would help. It sank into the drift and its crimson blood seeped into the ice like a carnival snow cone. The rabbit died almost instantly, probably hastened by the shock of freezing snow after being plowed over by my beat-up Gran Torino, which I knew only as “my red car.”