The Times That, Like, Try Teens’ Souls

Yep, Dad went off the deep end again, so Mom says, “You write his column this week.”

“Again?”

“Honey,” she says to me, “how much worse could you do?”

Anyway, we’re up here on vacation, in a cabin in the woods, which is really no place to bring kids from Los Angeles. Last night, I stepped on a cold penny in my bare feet and jumped about a mile.

“What’s wrong?” my mom said.

“Something bit me,” I said.

“A penny?”

You get the idea. I’m a teenager. Believe me, this is no place for teenagers.

My dad acts like it’s all great and everything up here. He calls Lake Tahoe his “golden pond,” whatever that means.

Yesterday, he goes, “Hey, how about a nice hike?” like it’d be some big treat or something.

“Come on, you guys,” he says, but we just sit there on the couch, studying our elbows and stuff.

“OK, I’ll go by myself,” he finally says with a shrug, then puts on a hat and 14 layers of sunscreen.

“Hey, Thoreau,” my mom says to my dad.

“Huh?” Thoreau says.

“Take a cell phone,” she says.

And off into the woods goes Thoreau, white as frosting and carrying a cell phone and some bug spray. You could almost hear Mother Nature laughing.

Twenty minutes later, he’s back.

“I think I heard a bear,” he says, all out of breath.

“You sure?” my mom asks.

“Or my stomach was growling,” he says. “Either way, I knew it was time to come home.”

Here’s a tip: Never go into the wilderness with my dad. Never. I swear, he’s like on drugs or something.

Mom says it’s on account of the altitude and the fact he’s paying, like, $200 a night for this dumpy cabin, with the chipped dishes and the basic cable.

Oh, did I mention the night crawlers in the refrigerator? That’s right, we have live bait in our refrigerator. Right next to the butter.

“Mom, we’re white trash!” I scream one morning.

“We’re not white trash,” my mom says calmly.

“Well, we do prefer domestic beer,” my dad points out.

“We’re white trash!” my little sister yells proudly.

She’s, like, the worst of them, my little sister. She just follows my dad and brother around like they’re gods or something, doing everything they do, scratching herself and belching, all the bad habits she can get.

Dad is always telling her how it’s not healthy to swallow your own gases, so off they go, belching and talking about fish.

It’s so embarrassing. You know that fishing book “The Old Man and the Sea”? That’s my dad, except he never catches anything. It’s almost Biblical.

At least Hemingway caught something now and then. Plus, my dad only knows about a hundred words, including grunts and cuss words.

Do you know one night up here I beat him at Scrabble? He gets like 80 points on his first word, using up all his letters and stuff, then starts horsing around, so I end up beating him by one single point.

“ Abalone shouldn’t be allowed,” he says, challenging one of my best words after the game is over.

“Why not?”

“It’s a proper noun,” he says.

I swear, it never stops. One day, he makes us all go with him to a place where they used to film this TV show called “Bonanza” from, like, a hundred years ago.

So Dad starts talking about how he’s got a lot of cowboy blood in him that’s wasted on mowing the lawn and going to Home Depot all the time.

“Shoulda been a rancher,” he says.

“Beef?” my brother asks.

“Poultry,” my dad says.

“Poultry?” my brother says.

“I love a good chicken,” my dad says.

Oh, my God.

Then he starts telling my brother about “Bonanza.” According to my dad, it was all about this father and his sons, including this one dude named Hoss, who was always asking, “What do we do now, Paw?”

Over and over. “What do we do now, Paw?” According to my dad, it was a big hit show. Obviously, you can see why.

Plus, the whole time we’re there, my dad is whistling the theme song from the show, making my mom and me totally nuts.

“What do we do now, Paw?” my brother keeps asking my dad for days afterward, and they grab their fishing poles and off they go with my little sister carrying the container of worms. Good riddance, I say.

One day we rented a ski boat, which in Lake Tahoe costs a gazillion dollars and makes Dad grimace, like he just got another splinter in his toe.

It was the best, though. Mom and I just sat in the front of this really nice boat working on our tans and waving to the college guys, while dad drove us around the lake.

“Can you do my back?” my dad says, holding up the sunscreen.

“Not in a million years,” Mom says.

“Come on,” he says.

So my mom goes and puts sunscreen on his back, and says something about “too bad Agent Orange doesn’t make a sunscreen,” and Dad says, “What do you mean by that?” And mom says, “Your back could use a good defoliant, that’s all.”

“I’m very hormonal,” he says, trying to make a joke of everything.

“You get hairier every year,” Mom says as she works on his back.

“Thank you, Bambi,” my dad says.

Bambi. That’s what he calls her up here in the woods. I think the altitude makes him do it. Or the Bloody Marys.

“Who’s Bambi?” my little sister asks.

“Your mother,” he says.

“I love Bambi!” squeals my little sister.

“Me too!” says my dad.

Oh, my God.

Chris Erskine’s column is published on Wednesdays. He can be reached at chris.erskine@latimes.com.