Half Cleveland Dad

Pleasures and Anxieties of Friendship

The pleasure of childhood friendship seems so intense.  Once you get in the groove with other kids, laughing and running and shouting, there’s no direction except to amplify the excitement and your synergies.  As you get older you learn to prolong the groove -- some of my best childhood memories are of playing street baseball as it got dark in the summer, all the kids shouting and making rules, and trying to keep it all going.

Although I don’t think the activity connected to friendship -- the “bonding” activity, I guess you’d call it (though I’d rather not) -- is important by itself, in my memory those activities are bonded strongly to the feeling of pure friendship. In the third grade I had a school friend named Mark.  His family took us to a baseball game his older brother was playing in.  Once the game started, Mark said, come on!, and ran toward the school buildings (it was a weekend, and the buildings were dark).  I ran after him.  Come on, help me carry this!  We hoisted a metal garbage can up a fire escape, maybe three floors up.  What are we doing, I asked.  We were winded.  Mark took a bunch of matches out of his pocket, and started lighting all the paper garbage on fire!  NOW!  THROW IT OFF!  Holy shit!  We threw that burning garbage can off the fire escape!  That was in Fresno, forty years ago, and at this moment I am remembering it with great fondness, and thinking, throwing a burning garbage can off a fire escape is one of the greatest things a kid could ever do, and it would be great if Sweet Potato could have that same experience!  But really what I mean is that I hope she has friends who make her world bigger, and surprising, and adventuresome, and fun.

***

I wonder when heartache becomes associated with the pleasure of friendship; that is, when does the break of friendship become an experience of pain, rather than just disappointment or a discontinuance of pleasure?  Then, when does a kid develop anxiety about friendship and acceptance?  That is, when do you begin to anticipate the disappointment or suffering of friendship before it begins?

After that it’s not long before your conflicting feelings of pleasure and anxiety are hyperaccelerated by unimagined but insuppressible sexual feelings and gender identity compulsions; then before long you’re at the age that I heard described recently as the “universal age of romance” -- 20.  The wildness of emotional pleasure and unknown dread can be destabilizing and full of suffering, and I worry about Sweet Potato, not a little bit because I also want her to be the kind of person who can throw a burning garbage can off a building for kicks, when, of course, it's the right time to do something like that.  20 is also a time of no parental access.  Not to mention that I may well have died of old age by the time Sweet Potato's 20.

My idea these days is that a kid has to understand her feelings in a broader context, fit them in the greater scope of the world, before having to go through the destabilizing age of puberty.  For instance, think of the way devout theists can understand their lives in a religious or hierarchical context.  They can go out and do rumspringa or something, and still find a way to hold it all together. 

But what can selfish, introspective, atheistic parents do for their lovely kiddo?  Besides talk and talk and talk too much?

Sex Killer

I ran into a woman I used to like, and we spent the morning in the park by the river.  We went back to her apartment in the Bronx, where she changed into a slender crocheted robe or tunic, over a thin cashmere sweater.  Seeing her in those clothes gave me a very open, warm, happy feeling.  We were having a cup of tea on her sofa, but I wanted to smell her closer and closer, and pretty soon we were doing that kind of make-out exercise where you’re shifting and stretching a little at a time, trying out different touches and different feelings.  She took off her top, and she was as beautiful as ever.  From the sofa we ended up on her rich carpet.  I was brushing my lips across her velvety clavicle and cupping my hand down her waist, anticipating her supple croup.  Her hip wasn’t quite where it used to be, though -- it was too high up.  And a lot narrower than it used to be.  I raised my head to look at her.  Luisa had turned into a small toddler -- maybe 18- to 20-months small.  Her top was still off, but now she was wearing some kind of Nickelodeon p.j. bottoms.  My hand was still near her bottom, so I touched it to see if she was wearing a diaper.  I felt funny, but I was worried about the rug.  Her adult voice transmitted into my head telepathically:  What’s the matter, baby?  I pushed myself up, sat on the rug, and grimaced at her.  The kid had kind of a colicky expression.  I shook my head and said to myself, this is the worst dream ever!

***

 

It’s hard to maintain an adequate adult relationship with a toddler around.  At this point in toddlerhood, Sweet Potato wants direct attention from each of us, and she sort of polices the attention flowing from Beeb the Mom to me or from me to Beeb.  When Beeb and I are alone and we try to have a conversation, we automatically have to cover our missed chores or errands first, then move on to updates about Sweet Potato to avoid blaming each other for nothing.  That’s why, lately, when Sweet Potato’s asleep or we have 10 seconds to ourselves, Beeb and I just try to do it.  I mean, do what we can.  You know, when two people are sitting next to each other on a bench, and they both reach down at the same time to pick up something one of them dropped, and jostle each other a bit -- that’s the level of carnal intensity we generally kick up.  But it’s friendly, and loving, and it beats the shit out of nagging each other about who's going to go to the basement and put the wash into the dryer.

 

So the other afternoon Sweet Potato is taking a nap, and Beeb and I are on our bed, reaching that stage in middle-aged foreplay where the woman complains, no! no! no! I have to keep my hiking socks on!, and the man is wondering what's happening with his boner -- when, BAM!, Sweet Potato wallops open our door like a cop, and starts saying You keep dis doah OPEN! Ahh dehr way! You unnah-stehn me? OKAY?  You keep dis doah OPEN!  Doan khose it!, and when I look up, she’s got a very dark expression on her face, and though it would be inaccurate to say she fills the doorway, her presence is tightly focused:  she’s got a powerful, braced stance, with her right leg anchored forward and her right arm out, sort of the stance you used to see in publicity photos of football players in the era of leather helmets.  Beeb is so flustered, pulling the covers up to her chin, she says, Okay!, and Sweet Potato just glares at us like she's the dad! 

 

I walk Sweet Potato back to her room, wait for her climb back into her fire truck bed, and rub her back so she can get on with her nap.  She needs a lot of assurance that we will keep our door open; she worries about being locked into places by herself.  She also asks, why you dewing some-ting widt Mah-mee?  I say I was rubbing Mom’s back, too, so that everyone could take a nap.  Which, of course, is how it all ends up.

Where Babies Come From

Like everything about being a parent, it’s a cliché:  I can’t believe we got a baby by doing it.* 

It’s not just the amazement of thinking of Beeb’s lady parts before and after conception, gestation, and childbirth (....), but thinking of Sweet Potato as the culmination of a lifelong interest in ladies and their special parts.  I mean, that’s what happens, right?  It's a whoa-dude cliché.

I mean, the whole unfolding of the compulsion and mystery -- from grade school crushes to dances to the weird smell of naked-girl b.o. in the car to the first luxurious time waking up together to the unexpected primacy of selfishness to pop music to stupidity to learned kindness to anger to buying stuff together to failure and art, the all of the all of it -- it seemed like a desperate grab at a phantom of moving sand, trying to grab it as it poured away; but now the chase has vanished somewhere and the sand isn’t pouring away so quickly, and now there’s Sweet Potato running naked through the living room shouting I’m pee-in’! and so I’m grabbing her and holding her over the potty and wiping her leg and wiping the floor and changing my clothes while getting late for work and wondering about dogs and apes and seahorses and the continuum of sex and love in other animals, not just the homo dorkus americanus, and thinking, was that what it was all about -- and I mean all of it, man: the confusion, the worry, the posturing, the math, the poor systems, the terrible blankness and terrible nowhereness (and I’m not even mentioning Beeb’s whole side of the all of the all of it) -- about making a baby?  About making this baby, our beautiful Sweet Potato?  So wasteful, and misleading, and ridiculous, but great, too.  It's not a cliché to me; or, maybe, it's just the right cliché for me; or, maybe, it's good that it's a cliche -- comforting somehow, because if it was happening just to me I'd just about go jump off a bridge.

____

* You know, we didn't just bone in private -- we had top-notch medical help in having a baby:  I took a lot of iron supplements for a month, to boost the ferric content in my guys, and then did Beeb the Mom-to-be-we-hoped while she was kneeling inside an MRI machine.  The machine created a magnetic field around her ovaries that zapped my spooge into place.

The Prometheus of Sex

When I was in the first and second grade we lived in a subdivision in Fresno.  There were a lot of kids on my street, and one evening (it was always summer there) five or six of us were riding our bikes in a circle playing a game.  The game was, someone would introduce a bad word, and the rest of us would shout it out:  Hell!  HELL! HELL! HELL!  Damn!  DAMN! DAMN! DAMN!  Fuck!  FUCK! FUCK! FUCK! (we stayed with Fuck for a while because it was exciting to shout it!) FUCK! FUCK! FUCK!

 

So there we were, riding in a circle, shouting Fuck and laughing and trying to be, you know, proto-cool, in that grade school way, when the oldest kid (fourth grade?) said, hey do you even know what Fuck means?  It’s when your dad puts his penis in your mother’s vagina and pushes it in and out! 

 

I tried to picture it, but it didn’t make sense.  It was totally idiotic!  Why the fuck would my parents, or anyone, do anything like that?  The kid was still talking about it, and I said, no way would my dad and mom do that, stupid!  The others also began to challenge him, and the mood of the circle, uh, darkened.

 

In short, we ganged up on the older kid, knocked him off his bike, and beat him up as best we could.  I was in there, hitting him, and saying, you can’t say that about my mom and dad!  He was scuffed up pretty good and crying a lot. 

 

Today I remember that poor kid as the Prometheus of our street.  He brought us knowledge and was destroyed.  I hope he’s happy today and getting laid like crazy. But, you know, probably, he's not.