Laid-Off Dad

Rock-and-roll ain't noise pollution

You don't have to be a city dweller to experience one of the lowest forms of human life: the Cranker. The Cranker is that specific species of miscreant who desperately needs to share his musical tastes with everyone within a half-mile radius, thanks to the awesome 1.21-gigawatt mega-woofers that make his axles sag with anguish. The kind of idiot who turns onto your street just as your toddler has finally passed out after three hours of molar-induced insomnia.

You also don't have to be a city dweller to know that fathers of young children don't get much of a chance to listen to their music -- the music they love, that they grew up on -- at full volume. Without the discomfort of headphones, which either dig into your ears or squish your head. These fathers basically have two venues: alone in the house (which occurs about as often as the Olympics); and alone in the car.

You see where this is going.

I was dropping off our umpteenth rental car the other night when I realized I had a little extra gas to burn and a little time for a joyride. And damned if the radio station started playing a block of serious kick-ass '70s rock, and damned if my thumb didn't wander on over to the "VOL UP" button (a miraculously standard feature on most steering wheels), and damned if I didn't lower the windows a bit to celebrate the end of a four-day monsoon. And damned if I didn't become that for which I have less regard than a dog turd on toast.

I admit this was something of a revelatory experience. Sure, the Cranker with the 1.21-gigawatts deserves to be pelted with rancid cantaloupes. But there is a separate underclass of Cranker who deserves a bit more tolerance. That poor soul might just be some new dad who conned his way out of the house and is remembering what it was like to be as young as his kids are about to be.

Dr. Darling and Mr. Nuts

"Terrible Twos" is one of the most glaring misnomers. Robert's twos were just fine, as were his threes. In fact, he's normally a great kid. We have funny conversations about all sorts of everything, peppered with expressions he's just picked up, like "How bizarre!" or "Where in the blue blazes are my sandals?" I can tell him that "GM" stands for "General Motors," and he'll say, "Wow, Dad. How come you know so much about cars?"

But when he's around his brother, especially in larger social situations, his need for attention becomes overpowering and he mutates into another being entirely. He bugs his eyes out, he clenches his teeth, his entire body goes rigid, and he starts dancing around the room like someone just shot his ass full of Tabasco sauce.

Then he says his brother's name about 200 times in a row, each time a little more sing-songy and distorted than the first, until it devolves into a string of high-pitched gibberish. And when you try to make eye contact and communicate to him that we don't appreciate this sort of behavior, he grins like a simpleton, makes a few fart noises, and then gives TwoBert's neck a quick yank before sprinting out of the room.

Robert needs to please grow out of this, please grow out of this, please grow out of this. ASAP. Otherwise I'll have to start a company that makes effigies of four-year-olds. Every venture capitalist with small children will want to back me.

Somnambular returns

I've told you of my supreme fatherly talent for making infants burp. Many men might be content with such a useful, singular skill. They might form a traveling gospel revue, inviting babies of every stripe to be held forth and freed of their insidious gastric bubblage.

But I am also known as Somnambular, Bringer of Sleep. When Robert was small, I was the one who got him to bed most nights, creaking in the rickety heirloom rocking chair my parents gave us. We don't have room for the chair anymore, so I use my new caress-and-lullaby (patent pending) technique on TwoBert. And oh, how it works. My record is 45 seconds, and when that happened I hung out in the room for a while longer, just so I wouldn't rub it in. Because my son will go to sleep for me and not for my wife, and it drives her up a tree.

This is where the wondrous power bites me in the ass.

The other night I was out for some beer and flesh-pressing during TwoBert's bedtime, and when I called in at 9:45 my wife announced that she had spent two and a half (two. point. five.) hours trying to get TwoBert to nod off. Later that night, when I got home, she struggled to an upright position and shot me a skunk eye that scalded my forehead. It appears that I now have a reverse curfew that prevents me from leaving the house until after TwoBert has passed out.

But who am I kidding? I still love it. Getting TwoBert to sleep is usually the highlight of my day. I watch his eyes flicker, and when sleep finally takes him I'll just sit and watch him breathe. It's such a calming experience, the perfect antidote for a stressful day.

I like looking at his beatific face, his wriggling nose, his twitching jimmylegs. If I'm in there long enough, I'll fast-forward mentally to his teenage years, when I might be looking over him just as I do now. I might come into his room some weekend morning, and he'll be out cold above his sheets, headphones in his ears. We'll be in the middle of some My-House-My-Rules vs. You're-Not-The-Boss-of-Me emotional turf war, and he'll have come home way too late, or been somewhere he shouldn't have, just to test his boundaries. I will marvel at him, at the headstrong young man he's becoming, and think back about these special months, back in aught-six, when I was the first person he saw every morning and the last he saw every night.

Then I'll wake his impudent ass up by sticking a clothespin on his nose, just to shore up those boundaries a little.

Kiss me, I'm garish

You may have noticed that the literary (!) content of Laid-Off Dad is now flanked by skyscraper ads on each side. This is because the good people at the federation innocently (!) double-booked my skyscraper space. Normally I would have rejected the second ad, since my official policy is to confine advertorial content to the right-hand column. However, since we are voluminous consumers of the baked beans and the public TV (several buckets and hours, respectively, per week), I said What the Hell.

Rest assured that when these ad campaigns elapse, the look of this site will no longer make you want to rub your eyeballs with 40-grit sandpaper.

No more than usual, anyway.

How perfectly goddamn delightful it all is, to be sure.

[Note: This is somewhat of a dyspeptic rant. Proceed with caution.]

When I moved here, Union Square was a drug-infested cesspool that ordinary people avoided at night. Stuyvesant Park teemed with crackheads and hookers. When my car was close to being called up to Car Heaven, I'd park it overnight on the street and find cigarette butts ground into the dashboard the next morning, evidence that someone had popped the lock and napped in my back seat.

The ideal neighborhood in which to raise a family, n'est-ce pas?

Ha, but what I haven't told you about is the incredible metamorphosis the area has undergone since the Union Square BID rode into down in a cloud of hoofbeats. The park now has several gleaming corporate franchises lining its perimeter, its playgrounds and dog run are overrun with gleeful beings, and I could walk across it at 3 a.m. with C-notes cascading out of my cargo shorts in complete safety. This is mostly a good thing.

Throughout this tectonic shift, there was one little slice of ordinary that persevered -- the Gramercy Park Hotel. My wife and I used to hang out in the faded elegance of the hotel bar and drink cocktails, and her parents used to stay there (and gain access to the park) when they came to see the grandkids. The rooms were large and clean and decorated with a fusty, Old World charm that had gone a bit threadbare from years of benign neglect. The hotel was an Automat among restaurants, quirky and anachronistic, and a beloved institution that deserved a better fate than this.

Today I wandered into the new GPH, which recently re-opened after it was stripped to the studs and renovated. The web site calls the decor "Haute Bohemian," which is fop-speak for "Postmodern Incoherent Smugfart-o-rama." I was instantly reviled at all the visual affronts, and when I tried to take a few pictures, my camera threw up. (Then each droplet of vomit rose up from the little puddle, and threw up.) Dozens of spindly obeisants with waxed necks and 2% body fat glided across the marble floors, proud to be part of such a luxury outfit that offers $24 Mohitotinis and a two-room view of the park for $700 a night.

So over 15 years, the hookers and homeless have been pushed out and replaced by hordes of supercilious Eurotrashbags. I'm trying to decide if this is an improvement.

The CONE OF UNCERTAINTY!

I don't like posting pictures of my kids on the Internet. I've had pictures stolen before, and I've seen too much about predators and freaks -- some of whom seem straight out of Central Casting -- to expose my children to the nefarious, the felonious, and the libidinous. How do you folks with Flickr accounts do it? Seriously. Tell me.

[I'm not kidding about that Central Casting angle. Somebody called up looking for a guy who looks just like Tooms, the creepy dude who eats livers in one of my favorite "X-Files" episodes.]

If you, too, are overwhelmed by uncertainty (and that uncertainty is, for whatever reason, cone-shaped), who better to rely on that this demonstrative, diminutive weatherman? If your area is destined to be icky and/or beset by farts, you can tune in to the Channel 24 meteorologist for the latest in IckyFart Triple Doppler technology.

Anniversaries

Three years ago today was the Blackout That Ate the Northeastern Seaboard. (Here's a post from the old site, and here is a laughably bad Photoshopped image that some no-talent wag slapped together.) We actually came through it pretty well, after we stopped crapping our pants about al Qaeda and learned it was just a few pinheads in Ohio.

Ten years ago this week, I went into my then-office to say goodbye to my then-friends before I headed out on a five-month trip to Asia. I was tying up some loose ends--picking up a paycheck, that sort of thing--when my boss introduced me to the new temp in the corner. She was sitting with her back to me, shuffling through what was probably the most menial job they had to give her, and when she half-swiveled around I said hello to about a third of her face.

A year later, she told me she remembered wondering who that self-satisfied putz was. A year and a half after that, she married me.

Happy Tenth Meet-aversary, sweetheart. You are the generator that powers the beacon that lights the power outage of my heart.

Brine and dandy

Recently, when I was browsing in our local Health and Beauty Emporium (we're home now -- did I mention that?), I saw an antiperspirant product that incorporates essence of cucumber. I wonder: If you slather that stuff on your pits in the morning and are physically active all day, do you end up smelling like pickles?

The best laid hacks of mice and men

Whoever said that men should be distant and aloof and never show affection for their children never saw these cheeks:

Whenever I hold TwoBert, and he sits in the crook of my arm and throws his little arm over my shoulder, his cheeks are right there, at lip level. What am I supposed to do, ignore them? Impossible. His cheek-allure is powerful enough to qualify as a Fourth Law of Motion.

A few months ago, TwoBert began taking these kisses for granted. At first he just leaned in, cheek first. But now, if the kiss does not arrive soon enough for his liking, he gets impatient and head-butts me in the mouth. He now has the idea that the best way to express good will toward your fellow man is to bust his lip open.

This is what I call a "Parent Hackfire," when you employ a strategy with the best intentions and end up with bloody gums.

To wit: TwoBert's favorite thing to eat is still Whatever I'm Eating. And last week, during the Hot Hot Heat, he demanded a sip of my Newcastle Brown. The obvious move was to let the boy 1) take a pull, 2) recoil in bitterness, and 3) toddle off to harrass someone else. Except that he liked it. A lot. So much in fact that whenever I crack one he bee-lines straight to me and starts whining and groping in that annoying, 15-month-old, hey-I'm-a-person-not-a-larva sort of way.

I am a "kind drunk," in that whenever I'm loaded I start telling people how much they mean to me. So I don't think it's a good idea to let the boy drink all the beer he wants, because it's likely he'll lavish so much affection on everyone he sees that no one will leave the room with intact bridgework.

So let's recap: Thanks largely to my parenting influence, my toddler son has developed passions for kicking, head-butting, and English ale. I suppose he can look forward to a promising career on the terraces of the English Premier League.

Surlyburly

What sort of man willingly leaves 65 and breezy and dives into three days of 100-and-fuck? A devoted father, that's who. Enduring a heat wave like this would be hard enough without knowing that, so very recently, I was a tourist yokel shivering in short pants.

Now that the light bulb in God's EZ-Bake Oven has finally dimmed, we are emerging from our slack-jawed torpors and considering all sorts of wacky, life-affirming activities. Like venturing outdoors, and speaking in complete sentences.

'Twas not always thus. The in-laws have a couple of ACs in strategic places, so the six of us often found ourselves in the same room, staring at the same grimaced faces, grunting at the overfamiliarity and resisting the urge to squeeze ourselves into the fridge. Tempers have flared, garments rent, teeth gnashed. Not our finest hour. (Relived in a constant loop, 72 times.)

There have been two saving graces; the first is our new rental car, a total Grey Poupon wannabe. It is one bad-ass vee-hicle, and we have dubbed it the Bontley, because it desperately wants to be either a Bentley or a Bond car. Black leather seats, fake burled walnut, all that crap. It is also bulletproof and shoots Stinger missiles from its headlights.

The second is the local children's science museum, which is totally cool. (And by "cool" I mean Super-Nerdy-Goobertastic.) It has a perpetual motion machine, giant Tangrams, water tables, an optical illusion center, and on and on. It also has a station that lets you perform a fake weathercast in front of a green screen. Robert got up there and, as sure as I'm sitting here, he started waving his arms around and said, "This area will be icky, and this area is all farts." I was laughing so hard some guy offered me his inhaler.

In keeping with this theme, we also found a Human Noise Piano that plays sniffles and burps and farts instead of notes. I think we were there for about 45 minutes, annoying the hell out of the staff at the cafe next door. But oh, how we needed it.

We had been cooped up, roasting, making our own gravy, and snapping at each other like cornered coyotes. And nothing takes the edge off the dog days, I've learned, like using a keyboard to belch Chopsticks.