A nose for trouble
MY DAD HAS been hit by a bad cold and the end of football season, which he calls “a one-two punch to his already fragile psyche,” so I am writing his column for him again on account of he just lies there on the couch all day, blowing his nose and praying for baseball to begin.
“Oooooo,” he moans.
“You OK, Dad?”
“Oooooo, I’m just a little sick,” he says.
“Don’t baby him,” says my mom, who has had a lot of experience with sick men. She says if you baby sick men too much, you just reaffirm their illness and they take longer to heal.
“Thank you, Mother Teresa,” my dad says.
“You’re welcome,” she says.
“Ooooooo,” he groans.
Just what I need, to be trapped in this house with a 175-pound cold germ. When I graduated college, I begged my dad to subsidize an apartment for me for a while, “You know, just till I get going in my new job.”
And he said that if he were going to subsidize an apartment, it would be for himself -- a father’s retreat, filled with all the copies of Sports Illustrated that he never gets time to read and his old Cheryl Tiegs posters.
“It would be like a sports bar,” he said, “but better.”
“What could be better than a sports bar, Dad?” asked my dopey brother.
“Pinball would be free,” explained my dad.
“Me go,” said my baby brother.
“Sure, you can all come along,” says my dad.
“Me too?” says my little sister.
“Of course,” says my dad.
Yeah, great. My dad, he’s got like this unexplainable Castro charisma that is only visible to dogs and very young children. In the meantime, I’m still living here at home with no prospects of ever escaping, other than a rushed marriage. And there are already too many of those in L.A.
“Dad, think I’ll ever get my own place?” I ask him.
“Not in this market,” he says.
“This house is too small,” I remind him.
“You know, I never noticed,” he says.
Oh my God, my dad has been in a really weird mood ever since January, when he accidentally ran over a neighbor’s discarded Christmas tree and got it wedged under his car for, like, three days.
Back and forth he went to work with this Christmas tree dragging under his car, like some incident in a John Irving novel, till he wrestled it out on account of it might catch fire and “who needs that, not me,” he said.
“Besides, suppose God saw this?” Dad asked as he pulled the tree out, one branch at a time.
“He’d think you were aiming,” my mother said.
Mom accused him of hitting the Christmas tree on purpose after spotting the Target bill on the counter, in what she called “a fit of post-traumatic Christmas syndrome.”
“It’d be just like you to lash out at an innocent tree,” she said.
“The thing rolled right out in front of me,” my dad explained.
“It was just a tree, Dad,” scolded my little sister, as if he’d mowed down Snow White.
Then there was that power outage a couple of weeks ago, followed by some problem with the septic system that my dad worked on for, like, an entire weekend, during which the showers and the toilets hardly worked and the baby learned his first curse word.
“Daddy,” I told him, “why don’t you just call the Roto-Rooter dude, like everybody else?”
“Have you seen our Target bill?” he said.
So there he was, down snaking out the drain pipes himself. I looked out the window once, and he was jumping up and down and doing his “Rocky” dance, which is what he does when he actually fixes something.
“Hey, Mom, Dad’s flipped out or something,” I said.
“No, he just fixed the plumbing,” she explained.
I guess, here in the suburbs, accomplishment is celebrated in all sorts of ways.
“So, Dad, can I shower yet?” I asked.
“Not yet, sweetie,” he said, and crawled back under the house with a flashlight and a bucket full of tools.
Dad says that his experience with the power outage, followed by this problem with the plumbing, has taught him a lot about how our family would react in times of real crisis. He says that incidents like this pay dividends in the future, if you’re wise enough to learn from them.
“Know what we need in our earthquake kit?” he asked my mom one day.
“Tequila?” she said.
“Handcuffs,” he said.
I think maybe FEMA could use a guy like Dad.
Chris Erskine can be reached at chris.erskine@latimes.com.
