Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, is like a lot of East Coast beach towns. There are bars and ice cream parlors and little tiny surf shops that people crowd into to soak in a little bit of air-conditioning and peruse T-shirts with tired Anchorman quotes. There’s a wide boardwalk that you can stroll along to gawk at all the white beach trash: four-hundred-pound people in tank tops, women with torso-length tattoos of the Pittsburgh Steelers logo, shoeless children, etc. The main attraction along this boardwalk is Funland, an amusement park with rides that vary in quality from “second-tier Six Flags ride that you get on because the roller coaster line is too long” down to “loosely bolted gypsy carnie death trap at the Allendale County Pig Show.” The kids were intent on going to Funland every day. They didn’t want to go to the beach. They didn’t want to sit in a restaurant and eat, like, food. All they wanted was Funland. Funland was the goal. Funland Funland Funland.
We arrived at my in-laws’ modest town house in nearby Dewey at around 4:00 P.M. I asked the kids if they wanted to go out for dinner.
“FUNLAND!”
I told them that it might be a little late for Funland, so maybe we should wait until—
“FUNLAND!”
“Well, what about the beach?” I asked.
“FUNLAND!”
“So, I guess you two want to go to Funland.”
“FUNLAND!”
“All right. Let’s go.”
My wife grew concerned. “Honey, it’s getting late for them.”
“Oh, come on,” I said. “We’re on vacation. We’re supposed to loosen up. Let them enjoy themselves.” Secretly, I had no issue with us going to Funland because there was an ice cream store a block away from Funland that had Peanut Butter Tastykake ice cream, and I wanted it. I wanted to swim in it.
We all hopped in the car and drove to the boardwalk. I found a parking spot that was roughly the same distance to Funland as the house we were staying in. I got the kids out and we began to march in the lethal July heat toward the park of their dreams. By the fourth block, the kids were noticeably dragging. My son asked me to pick him up. I carried him five feet and then put him back down because my back hurt. We passed by a row of shaggy rental houses, each one designed to house the maximum allowable number of drunken twentysomethings. I saw them all out on their rickety patios, blasting music and drinking cocktails out of plastic Solo cups. I used to do that sort of thing. God, that was fun. I wanted to run into one of the houses, down G-and-Ts by the fistful, do five bong rips, and then pass out on a filthy mattress in the basement.
My daughter caught sight of a giant dragon’s head rising over the houses and immediately screamed with joy.
“That’s Funland!” she cried out. “That’s the Sea Dragon!”
“Is dat Funlann, Deddy?” asked my son.
“Yeah,” I said. “I think we’re close, guys.”
We staggered into the park and both kids went sprinting for their preferred rides. The boy went with my wife over to a set of miniature cars that drove around in a tight circle, while the girl got in line immediately for the Sea Dragon: a giant Viking ship that went back and forth, higher and higher, until it was nearly upside down. It didn’t go all the way around, which was good. When I was a kid, I went to an old amusement park in Minnesota that had a ship that went all the way around. You could see the wallets and spare change and vomit raining down whenever it hung in midair.
I went to the ticket booth, threw down a twenty, jammed the ticket book into my sweaty shorts pocket, and rushed to join the girl at the front of the Sea Dragon line. We took a seat at the back of the ship (cost: five tickets each). I craned my head, trying to locate my son and my wife. But the ride started and I gave up my efforts because watching the girl’s face as we went higher and higher was such a joy. The ship cleared the rooftops and now we could see the beach, the ocean, and the surrounding towns. The higher we went, the harder she laughed. I made sure to play the victim for her.
“Whoa, hey!” I screamed. “You didn’t tell me it was gonna go THIS high! This is too high! GAHHH!”
“AHAHAHAHAHAHA!”
Sixty seconds later, the ship settled back down on the ground and the girl demanded another ride, and then another. There was barely a line at this point, so we were able to take as many consecutive trips as we pleased. By the eighth time, I was seasick and begged her to spare me from another ride.
“I’m not joking this time,” I said. “I’ll die if we do that again. I have vertigo now.”
“More, more, more!”
“I’m gonna switch with Mom and she’s gonna take you. She hates rides like this, so you’re probably gonna end up playing in the arcade. Can you deal with that?”
“Okay.”
We went in search of my wife and found her watching my son whiz around on the giant swing. After a mere half an hour at Funland, our clothes were soaked through with sweat and the children could barely keep their heads above their necks. But children will never readily acknowledge their own tiredness. Nothing pisses them off more than telling them, “Hey, you look tired!” They’ll claw your face off if you tell them that. It wounds their pride. You just have to let them run themselves ragged until they collapse from near-fatal levels of dehydration and exhaustion. My kids wanted to stay at Funland, so I cut them a deal.
“Listen,” I said. “One more ride, and then we go home for French fries and ice cream. I’m not even gonna pretend that you’ll eat the other things I put on your dinner plate. Just fries and then ice cream. Deal?”
Both nodded their heads vigorously. The girl took off to the arcade with my wife and I went with the boy to find his own last hurrah. Toward the back of the park, behind a small track where little trucks scooted around for the relatively high price of three tickets, there was the Jungle: a massive, Rube Goldberg–style obstacle course where kids entered through one cube and battled through a series of rope bridges and slides and ball pits and ladders until they emerged out of another cube six months later. It was cool as shit. I wanted to go into it myself. You weren’t allowed to wear shoes inside this toddler matrix. You had to place them in a little cubby and then let your parents watch in horror as your feet grew blacker and blacker with each progressive step.
I looked at my son. He was three years old. A robust three. A remarkably stubborn three. There wasn’t a trace of insincerity to him. I looked into his big Tweety Bird eyes and knew that he was going into this thing whether I liked it or not.
“I don’t think I have enough tickets for this one,” I told him.
“I wand to bo in dere.”
“You sure you can handle it?”
“Wes!”
“All right. Last ride.”
I plunked down the tickets, slipped off the boy’s shoes, and watched him burrow into the entrance. He climbed up through a plastic flap to the second level of the Jungle and jumped into a plastic ball pit. The balls were ancient. You could see the geologic buildup of dried snot that had accumulated on them over the course of time, layer after layer of petrified boogers. He struggled to wade through the pit, as if trapped in quicksand. I shouted encouragement to him: “You’re okay! You’re doing just great!”
But that was merely a taste of what the Jungle had in store for him. After the ball pit, he had to climb up another level. The cubes were just high enough for this to be a struggle for him. I watched as he reached through the plastic flap and tried to pull himself further up. It took him a while and I offered him a way out by shouting, “You can turn around! You don’t have to do the whole thing!” But he ignored me and pressed on, hoisting himself up and coming to a long rope bridge, with an opening between each step wide enough for his entire leg to fall through. The boy stepped cautiously as older kids swarmed around and past him, and he looked genuinely surprised that none of them stopped to help.
Ever cross a rope bridge with no shoes on? Don’t. The rope dig
s into your arches and you quickly find yourself in agonizing discomfort. I could see it in my son’s face as he walked gingerly across. He knew he had gotten in way over his head. Now he was beginning to cry because he hated the Jungle and there was no way out of it. It was his own private ’Nam. I kept waiting for a ten-year-old to grab him and scream, “You know where you are? You’re in the Jungle, baby! YOU’RE GONNA DIEEEEEE!”
There were only two ways out: down the way he came, or up several more levels to a tunnel slide that would bring him, conceivably, back down to the exit without much fuss (or pudding). But the climb up to that slide now appeared as daunting as summiting K2, and I begged my son to turn around.
“It’s not worth it!” I shouted.
The big kids were passing him and he hated the idea of looking like the one kid who couldn’t handle what the Jungle was throwing at him. He kept climbing upward. He slipped out of view for a moment and I couldn’t pinpoint his location. I was afraid the Jungle had swallowed him whole. I imagined a trapdoor hidden inside the maze that sent unwitting toddlers down to a special carny dungeon, where they would be set aside for meat. Then he emerged out of a tunnel and was nearly as high as the Sea Dragon at its peak swing. But he couldn’t see the tunnel slide. He didn’t know there was a way out. He grabbed the netting and began crying loud enough for everyone to hear.
“DEDDY!”
I went over to the Jungle’s operator, a sixteen-year-old who almost certainly took the job strictly for weed money.
“Is there any other way out of this thing?” I asked.
He shrugged. Actually, to call it a shrug is an insult to shrugs because the garden-variety shrug takes at least some physical effort. He just shrugged with his face. I looked at the entrance of the structure and I tried to see if I could fit through the flap to get to my son, but it was hopeless. Only a very small Chinese acrobat could have contorted himself into such a tight space. I backed away from the Jungle and stared up at the boy, who was still crying.
“Okay, be cool!” I shouted. “I’m gonna talk you down! But you have to do exactly as I say. Okay?”
“Oat-kay.”
I assumed the role of police negotiator, talking a suicidal man off a ledge. “There is a slide that will take you down to me. Just follow the big kids.”
The boy ignored my advice and swam against the current.
“No, no, no!” I shouted. “That’s the wrong way!” I wanted to prove to everyone around that I was an excellent negotiator. But my son continued back where he came from, fighting back tears along the way. He didn’t want the big kids to see him crying anymore. I changed course and started guiding him through the way back to the entrance, even though he clearly knew where he was going. He lowered himself back down through a handful of cubes.
“There’s a rope bridge coming up. You’re going to have to cross it,” I said. He arrived at the bridge and while the big kids didn’t help him across, they at least had the common courtesy to get out of the way. Usually, big kids just run through smaller children as if they’re blocks to kick over. He went across the painful steps and paused once in a while to look at me, his face hot and swollen. I wanted to pole-vault up to him and kiss every part of his head, but I was helpless to aid him. He’d have to make it on his own, and I would have to watch the struggle unfold in real time.
He got to the end of the bridge and then lowered himself down to the second level. “Yes, yes!” I said. “Keep going! I believe in you!” Exhausted, he came to the ball pit and fell into it, like a triathlete collapsing at the finish line. This final obstacle was nearly too much for him. It was Shackleton’s trek across South Georgia Island. But now he was low enough that I could speak to him directly through the netting.
“You’re almost there. You can do it, little guy. Get up and wade through those balls. Wade, damn you!”
The boy slowly picked himself up and carried himself across. There was a final hole to fall into and as he slipped through the flap down to safety, I scooped him up and wrapped his legs around me and tucked his big blond head into my neck and kissed him over and over again.
“You’re all right,” I said to him. “You’re safe now, fella.”
He was stuttering through tears. “D-d-d-d-deddy, I wand to bo home.”
“We’re going home right now. I promise.”
Just then, my wife showed up with my daughter. The girl stared up at the Jungle and shrieked with delight.
“I wanna go in THAT!” she said.
My son saw the look on his sister’s face, then wriggled out of my arms and seemed to find a second wind, looking as if we had just arrived at Funland this instant. I knew what he was gonna say before he even said it.
“Don’t say it,” I begged him.
“ME TOO!”
Shit.
PIZZA NIGHT
We made pizza every week because the two kids subsisted on Kraft Mac and pizza and virtually nothing else. You can do everything right and still not succeed in getting your kids to eat properly. You can cook all your own meals. You can avoid McDonald’s and warn the children that eating at McDonald’s will make them fat and diseased. You can threaten to withhold dessert if they don’t eat half a zucchini cube. You can do all those things and still end up with a child who refuses to eat anything other than chicken nuggets assembled from fire-hosed penis meat.
One time, I bought my daughter a cheeseburger and begged her to eat it, to just take one bite, and when she did take a nibble I was THRILLED. I was ecstatic over her eating a cheeseburger, which is stupid because a cheeseburger is pure shit. The bun is shit. The patty is shit. The cheese is shit. Every element of it belongs to the FDA-labeled Shit Group. But it was something different, and I had reached a point where anything different was acceptable. She spit out the bite. I ate the rest of the cheeseburger because I’m a responsible person and I owed it to all the starving malaria babies of the world.
Pizza was the one thing that we could eat regularly as a family without me worrying about the kids being ungrateful little bastards and literally bursting into tears at the prospect of eating a nice meal that dared to include things like rice or steak. It was the most reliable way to avoid dinnertime confrontation, with the children angrily pushing their plates away and me getting pissed at the kids for pushing their plates away. Pizza was the uniter. Pizza kept us together.
So I threw myself into making the best homemade pizza I possibly could. None of that “put some Ragú on a Boboli shell” crap. No, no, if I was making pizza at home, it was gonna be BADASS. I tried making my own dough, which caused the whole house to smell like a warm yeast infection. Then I experimented with store-bought dough and found that Safeway’s was the best. I learned how to stretch the dough without tearing it. I would dust the counter in flour and let the wad of dough fall away from its plastic bag and plop down onto the counter. Then I would push the dough down and work it with the butt of my palms, taking special care not to press down too hard. Then I would pick the dough up and let gravity stretch it out some more, running the edges between my thumb and forefinger all the way around and getting it so thin that it was practically a sheet of molecules. I pictured myself as an Italian immigrant running my own pizza parlor in some nameless section of Queens, yelling at neighborhood kids to stop playing stickball outside my storefront. Yousa kids-a, stop making-a trouble. It’s-a me, Mario!
I found all the best ingredients to use on top: San Marzano tomatoes pureed in a blender, fresh mozzarella cheese, dried oregano, freshly grated Parmigiano-Reggiano (not that Kraft garbage that comes in a green can), torn-up basil leaves, pepperoni, and a little drizzle of olive oil. In time, I became a master pizzaiolo. I would go to pizza restaurants and immediately declare the pie we ordered stale dogshit compared to my own. I dreamed of celebrity chefs coming to my house and pronouncing my pie the finest in the world. How does he do it using only a gas oven? I became unreasonably excited
whenever Pizza Night came around. I would spend the workday brainstorming new toppings. What if I put an entire Caesar salad on top of a sausage pizza? Would that be so wrong? The idea of making pizza and seeing the kids actually enjoying it and me drinking an entire bottle of wine and eating half a bag of pepperoni while cooking it brought me to near-autoerotic levels of anticipation. Pizza Night was king.
One day, I came back from the store with all the pizza ingredients and I walked in on the kids watching TV.
“Do you know what tonight is?” I asked them.
They kept staring at the TV.
“It’s Pizza Night, people!”
Both kids screamed out “YAY.” My daughter jumped up and did a little dance.
“Yes, yes, that’s it!” I cried. “DO YOUR PIZZA DANCE.”
“Can I help you make the pizza?” she asked.
“Uh . . . are you sure?”
“Yeah.”
“Yeah, of course you can.”
“Cool!”
I grabbed my dirty Minnesota Vikings apron and preheated the oven to 450 degrees. The girl ran to her little play kitchen and grabbed a plastic toy rolling pin.
“I’m gonna roll the dough!” she said.
“Yes, you can help with that,” I said. “Now the important thing to remember is to not tear the dough. If we tear the dough, then Pizza Night is ruined forever.”
“Really?”
“No. Just don’t rip the dough.”
“Okay.”
I floured the counter and let the dough plop down. The girl pulled a little wooden ladybug stool up next to me and jammed her rolling pin into the mess of dough on the counter.
“Wait!” I said. “You have to flour the pin!”