“Hairy eyeballs?”
“I think that’s allowable.”
“Hairy cow eyeballs.”
“Fish gut sandwich.”
“Bucket filled with cow poop!”
“Let’s make it cow tongues,” I said. “No poop. We need to expand the repertoire.”
“Oh, okay.”
“Can I wash your hair?”
“Sure, Daddy.”
“Thank you.”
“And thank you, dead monkey ice cream sundae with monkey eyeballs on top.”
FLATHEAD
Dr. Ferris was unavailable for my son’s six month appointment, which was too bad because Dr. Ferris was a master of his craft. He would walk into the office and it was like being greeted by a rock star. He’s here! At long last! Those two nurses who opened for him were okay, but now we’ve got the headliner! The boy would stop crying and Dr. Ferris would grab his feet and play with him and call him all kinds of crazy nicknames and, in three seconds, develop a bond with him far stronger than the bond I had with the child. If I grabbed the boy’s feet, he’d try to kick me in the nose. But when Dr. Ferris did it? MAGIC. Then he’d grab the shiny light thing doctors use and flash it in my son’s ear and ask, “Is there a little birdie in this ear? I think there is! Chirp chirp!” and the boy would whoop and wail and the scene in the room would look like the cover of an AstraZeneca quarterly prospectus. Secretly, I was kind of jealous of Dr. Ferris. I didn’t think I’d ever learn to be that good with children, not even my own. He also had fabulous hair. Dr. Ferris was good. Too good.
He was so good that his practice grew by the month, and getting appointments with him instead of one of his perfectly capable subordinates became more difficult. No one wants the B-lister at the doctor’s office. They want the star attraction. They want to be special enough to have Dr. Ferris be the one checking on little Sally’s vaginitis. But the man was unavailable one week when the boy needed a checkup, and so we had to settle for Dr. Dergan instead.
Dr. Dergan examined our son from head to toe, and we asked her all the usual questions. Do you have some kind of magic way we can get him to sleep better? His shit looks like it has pearls in it. Is that okay? Where does he rank on the height and weight chart? Is he taller and heavier and therefore better than all the other kids? Dr. Dergan answered our questions dutifully and then examined the boy’s head.
“Hmm. Looks a little flat in the back.”
“Excuse me?” I asked.
“Nothing alarming,” she said. Doctors will never tell you any symptom is alarming unless there’s an arrow sticking out of your chest. “Just a little bit flat. You might consider sending him to a specialist at Children’s just to make sure.”
She left, and my wife and I grabbed the boy’s head, scrutinizing it obsessively.
“I guess it’s kinda flat,” I said. I took my hand and slid it up from the back of his neck to the top of his cranium. “See how it doesn’t stick out after the neck? Maybe that’s what she’s talking about.”
“I don’t know. He looks fine to me,” my wife said.
“Yeah. I mean, he has HAIR. The hair sticks out the back. You wouldn’t even notice the back of his head.”
“You don’t think he has flat head syndrome, do you?”
We had heard about flat head syndrome, or plagiocephaly. Apparently, your baby can get a flat head if he lies down on his back for too long, which seems unfair since all babies lie down on their backs for hours and hours every day. Even worse, if you turn your baby’s head to one side to prevent a flat head and you keep it on that one side for too long, his facial features are in danger of growing into that side, giving him a sideways face and making him look like a goddamn mutant. This was supposedly a real threat, even though I had never seen a grown adult with his face growing out of the side of his head like Man-E-Faces from the old He-Man cartoons.
We arrived home from the doctor’s office with our son and I began freaking out that his head was misshapen and that I had no good method of preventing it, short of rotating him every five minutes like a chicken cooking on a spit. The doctor advised us to alternate between feeding him with our left hand and our right so that his muscles would grow in balance and he would be symmetrical. Ever try feeding a child with your nondominant hand? It feels like you’re feeding him with a cadaver’s hand.
I stared at my son and I thought back to the time when I was waiting in line at a deli. The man in front of me was an attractive black man who happened to have the flattest head I had ever seen. It was stick straight in the back, and the crown of his head sloped up to it and formed a ridge at the back of his skull. He looked like a ski jump. I kept worrying that my son would grow up to be a ski jump.
“I still think he looks fine,” my wife said.
“Maybe his head is deceiving us,” I said. “Maybe it looks great to us because we’re his parents and our brains have warped the image. Maybe to everyone else he looks like, you know, a griddle.”
“I’m sure the neurologist will say he’s okay and that’ll be the end of it.”
I kept running my hands along the boy’s head, checking for imperfections as if I were a Third Reich phrenologist. I wanted to make sure there was adequate room for a fine brain that could perform math problems and come up with quick comebacks to dickish eighth graders. I put him down in the bouncy seat in the living room and my wife immediately chastised me.
“You can’t put him down.”
“I can’t?”
“The doc says you should try to hold him a lot. It keeps the pressure off his head.”
“But he’s heavy.”
“Just do it.”
I took him out of the bouncy seat and held him, and held him, and held him. It’s a fact that for every minute you hold a child, it triples in mass. By the tenth minute, I felt like I was holding up a truck. I had him against my body and the front of his onesie was soaked in my filthy chest sweat. I think he might have swallowed a chest hair.
“I can’t hold this thing any longer,” I told my wife.
“I’ll take him.”
“You’ll have to hold him all day, because I have a bad back.”
“Oh, that is so weak.”
“What? It’s true! I am medically endangering myself by holding that child aloft. And if I hold him for fifteen minutes and my spine breaks and you’re left without Mr. Handsome Helper . . . Why, you’re up shit creek, you are!”
My daughter walked into the room. “Can I hold him?”
“Oh, honey. That’s very sweet of you,” I said. “But, no, you’ll drop him on his face.”
“I looked up flat head syndrome online,” my wife said to me. “Do you know how they fix it?”
“No.”
“A helmet.”
“Oh, no. Not a helmet.”
“And they have to keep the helmet on for twenty-three hours a day.”
“Really?”
“Really.”
“Jesus.”
When your child is in danger of having a flat head, you quickly learn that the money-grubbing executives at Big Helmet have gone to great lengths to make baby helmets seem like a normal, even fashionable thing. The helmets we looked up online were all designed to look like skateboarding equipment, decorated with skulls and guitars and diamonds, all kinds of KEWL and XTREEEM shit that will help a parent think, This is cool and hip! rather than, GET THAT FUCKING HELMET OFF MY BABY.
I looked at my son and thought about what a helmet would look like on him. I thought about all the looks he’d get. We live in an age of remarkable sensitivity, where other parents go to great lengths to appear tolerant and accepting of ALL children, not merely their own. But deep down, we’re just as judgmental and catty a species as we were decades ago. The patina of niceness almost makes it worse. I thought about other parents looking at the boy—and he was such a be
autiful, sensitive little boy—saying something nice about his race car helmet, and then going home and spitting out their real feelings. That poor Magary boy, crawling around with a helmet on. I wonder if they’ll have to tether him to a post in the yard.
We drove the boy downtown to the big children’s hospital and the lobby was filled with kids in wheelchairs, kids balding from chemo, and numerous other pale kids with sickly eyes. It was like being inside every public service announcement ever created. I wanted to cry my eyes out after taking three steps inside. The hospital itself was a masterpiece of health care industry bureaucracy. They had a main reception desk that sent you to another reception desk that sent you to a third reception desk. The elevator had a button for the third-and-a-half floor. I wanted to push it just to see if floor 3.5 contained a secret tunnel into the brain of John Malkovich.
After spending ages navigating the labyrinth, we arrived at the neurologist’s office. He ran his fingers over my son’s skull—just like a Third Reich phrenologist would!—and performed a series of mental tests on him. He snapped his fingers to one side of the boy’s face and the boy’s eyes followed. Ditto the opposite side. He checked the boy’s ears. He pulled on the boy’s arms. Then he turned to us.
“Well, his head is a bit flat in the back. But the good news is that his mental faculties seem just fine. He’s not retarded or anything.”
I swear, he used the word “retarded.” I didn’t even know retardation was on the table before he mentioned it.
“You might want to think about outfitting him in a helmet,” he said.
“Does he really need one?” I asked.
“He’s borderline. But you have to decide quickly because after a certain number of weeks, the bones set and the skull’s shape is irreversible.”
“But he wouldn’t have to wear it for very long, right?”
“Actually, the general guideline is three to six months.”
“Oh Jesus.”
We left the doctor’s office.
“Can you believe he actually said ‘retarded’?” my wife asked me.
“I know! I wonder if he meant it medically. He seemed so casual about retardation.”
“Do you think we should get the helmet?”
I had no idea. I looked at my son and his head looked fine to me. Two ears. Two eyes. A mouth. A chin. It was a perfectly acceptable head. I thought about what an incredible pain in the ass the helmet would be if we chose to buy one. Twenty-three hours a day. Several months. God knows if the boy would be able to sleep with that thing on. I pictured nights of endless screaming, with my wife reduced to tears, trying to soothe the baby while it was dressed like a linebacker. And the cost! Baby helmets cost hundreds of dollars. I didn’t want the helmet because I didn’t want to deal with all that bullshit, which is an awfully selfish thing to consider when deciding on the future shape of your progeny’s skull. I imagined the boy turning thirty and having a ski jump head, all because I was too lazy and cheap and afraid of pitiful looks to strap a helmet on him for a few lousy months of his life, months that he wouldn’t even end up remembering.
“I don’t want to get him a helmet,” I said.
“Neither do I,” my wife said.
“He’s got a nice head.”
“He’s got a great head.”
“Yeah. What do doctors know about heads anyway?”
“I think we should check with Dr. Ferris, just to make sure.”
So we did. We got an audience with the big man himself a week or so later. We plopped our son down in front of him and he proceeded to make the boy laugh louder than I had ever made him laugh. That stupid awesome Dr. Ferris.
“Does he need a helmet?” I asked.
He looked shocked by the idea. “What? A helmet? Nah,” he said. “I almost never recommend the helmet. For the child to require a helmet, they have to be really . . .”
“Deformed?”
“The flatness has to be severe. I’m not sure a helmet’s all that helpful anyway.” He turned to my son. “Now who’s a big bruiser? IS IT YOU?!”
The boy squealed with joy, and over the weeks and months his head grew. It grew up and down and out and to the side, in perfect proportion. Soon it was a perfect little sphere smothered in blond hair. No helmet necessary. I look at that head now, and all I think about is getting my co-pay from those first two appointments back. Baby helmets are a rotten lie.
DUI
An old friend was in town and wanted to go to a baseball game, which presented me with a rare chance to get away from the wife and kids for an evening. Any time I’m away from my family for an extended period of time, I lose any sense of common decency and become a vile repository for booze and meat. It’s just ZOMG NO ONE WILL NOTICE ME EATING THIS FISTFUL OF BUTTERSCOTCH CHIPS. It’s a grotesque transformation. One time, I was away on business and I ate three dinners in one night, just because I could. I didn’t even enjoy the third dinner all that much. It was just piling on because I rarely had the chance to pile on, and piling on is fun, like when you empty the entire bottle of hotel shampoo onto your head.
I told my wife I was going out. Asked her, really.
“He’s only gonna be here one night,” I said. “It’s a special occasion.”
“That’s fine,” she said. “Just don’t get too drunk.”
“I won’t.”
“Seriously, don’t get too drunk. Because then you wake up at three A.M. to barf in the toilet and that makes me wake up.” My wife did not like having her sleep disrupted.
“Will you leave me alone? You can’t get on my case for drinking too much before I’ve even had a chance to drink too much. Stop ruining my one night out, lady.”
“Just keep it reasonable. Two, three drinks.”
Now two or three drinks is a ridiculously low maximum, one I would surely surpass before the first inning. But I agreed to the limit anyway, even though I had no intention of holding myself to it. I figured that was one of those lies that came standard with a marriage. The wife tells the husband not to drink too much even though she knows he will, and the husband agrees even though he knows that she knows that he’s gonna do fifty shots of Jameson the second he’s out the door. It’s like a running joke. Good one, honey!
“And try to come home at a reasonable hour,” she said.
“I will.”
I had a habit of pushing curfews. If I said I was gonna be home at ten, that usually meant I came home at eleven. A lot of times, I would call from the bar at ten to say I was “gonna be home soon” while trying to squeeze in one more drink. It wasn’t because I wanted to stay away from home. I loved home. It was because I was out, and sometimes dads feel the urge to maximize the “freedom” because who the hell knows when you’re gonna get another night out. Could be next week. Could be 2035. One time, I got home at 11:00 P.M. and my wife was dead asleep and I cursed myself for not staying out later since she wouldn’t have noticed. I could have spent another twenty minutes at the bar, staring at the TV! Dammit!
So I went to the game to meet my old friend—along with a handful of others—and I drank. There was a rain delay, so we went to one of the stadium bars and I drank even more, staring out the windows and watching the entire span of the Anacostia River outside get pounded with fat raindrops. Each beer tasted better than the last. I had so much fun drinking during the rain delay that I was legitimately disappointed when play resumed and I had to take my seat again. Why are we ruining this fun conversation by watching a baseball game?
The game ended and we went to another bar and I drank more beer because the beer was still making me happy. Then I put in the obligatory phone call home.
“Where are you?” my wife asked.
“I’m coming home soon! Love you! Super love you!”
“Are you drunk? You’re drunk.”
“Drunk with LOVE.”
“Just come
home soon.”
“I’ll be right there. Honest.”
I drank one more round before deciding that I had pushed the limits far enough. Fathers are like children in that they’re always scheming to see exactly what they can get away with. I think a lot of men get married so that they’ll have someone around to rebel against. Once you get out of school, there are no more parents or teachers to defy. Who’s left? The old ball and chain.
Prior to the game, I had parked my car at the Metro station and taken the train into town. My reasoning was that this allowed me to drink all I pleased since I had such a short drive home. A mile, perhaps less. I was taking public transit 80 percent of the way to the stadium. Who gave a shit about the other 20 percent? It wasn’t drinking and driving. It was drinking and parking. That’s the kind of mentality you develop when you start habitually drinking and driving. You excuse your behavior at every possible turn because it seems so reasonable. You get comfortable with bullshitting yourself.
One of my friends offered to give me a ride from the bar downtown and I took her up on it. I told her to drop me at the Metro station and I’d take my car back home.
“I can just take you all the way home and you can get your car later,” she said.
“Nah, nah,” I said. “I want my car.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yeah. I want my car.” I didn’t want to get up in the morning and explain to my wife that we had to drive back into town to fetch my car because I was too shitfaced to drive it home that night. Driving it home drunk was easier. Better.
Reluctantly, she took me back to my car and I hopped in, driving away drunk from the Metro garage like I’d done before. A few minutes later, the sirens flashed in my rearview.
• • •
The first time I ever got into a car with a drunk driver was when I was seventeen. I was working as a table runner at this Austrian restaurant up in northwest Connecticut. The head chef was a dictatorial bastard with a comical Teutonic accent. All the girl waiters had to wear tight dirndls, which was both demeaning and kind of hot. All the guy waiters had to wear black bow ties (clip-on) with white dress shirts and cheap black sneakers that became filthy by the end of every shift, with potatoes and other food scraps mashed into the treads. After the shift ended, the waiters and waitresses would pool their tip money together and go get shitfaced at one waiter’s house. After working there a few weeks, I finally got invited to one of these after-parties. Once there, I drank so much that I threw up in my lap. I wiped myself off, returned to the party, and ended up in a car with four other people and a guy named Scott who was driving drunk back to his house. This was late at night, deep in the rural Connecticut woods, where the roads twist and turn and there are no streetlights or house lights anywhere and you feel like you’re driving through some kind of endless black cloud.