Raising Cubby (8 page)

Now that Cubby had surmounted the challenges of walking and running, he figured it was time to learn to fly. I had been an avid aeronaut myself, until a bad crash cured me of the habit at age five. Cubby didn’t have a jet pack or wings, but he did have me, and he was quick to seize the opportunity. He even had words for it. “Baby toss,” he’d say, raising both stubby paws as high as he could. That was a signal I could easily interpret!

I had never tossed him as a baby, because I took Little Bear’s warning about his fragile baby brain seriously. But now that he was a toddler, all bets were off, and I experimented with various tossing techniques, including the rocket launch, the sandbag toss, and the inverted rocket. His favorite was the sandbag toss, where he lay on his back in my arms, and I tossed him up and caught him in the same pose.

I had tossed our cat—Small Animal—in much the same way before Cubby was born. The cat liked to wrestle and play, and thought tossing was fun sometimes, but he bit me on other occasions. Cubby always loved flying. He never bit when tossed.

Rocket toss was where I lifted him under the armpits and
launched him straight upward. He liked that too, but not as much. I worried about it myself, because I always imagined shooting him up into the ceiling and having his head bang right through the Sheetrock. Being male, I probably overestimated my tossing strength.

He would laugh maniacally every time I caught him and zoomed him into the air again. It never occurred to him that I might miss, leaving him to go splat on the floor. I guess kids are trusting about that until the day you drop them. He would go up and down, squealing with delight, until my arms wore out.

“Come on, Dad. Toss me again!” Even with my muscles built up from months of practice, the sandbag toss remained very tiring. I couldn’t pause, even for a second. Cubby insisted on constant motion. The moment he hit my arms on the way down, he giggled and yelled, “Again!” and I had to shoot him back up into the air instantly, lest he howl with dissatisfaction. I was beginning to understand why people said parenting was exhausting.

Baby Toss became a regular activity for Cubby and me. We did it until he got too big to toss and catch reliably. “You can do it,” Cubby would say, but I wasn’t so sure. That was when we discovered the carousel game, where I took both his little hands in mine and whirled him around and around, lifting his feet off the ground.

He loved it, but Little Bear wasn’t so enthusiastic. “Don’t spin him too fast,” she would say. “You’ll pull his little arms right out of the sockets.” Hearing that, I had visions of myself, holding two arm stumps while my kid sat on the ground howling and wondering where his arms had gone. I don’t know why moms are so cautious. She wasn’t that way before he was born. Something must have changed with the arrival of the kid.

I’ve seen some pretty rough play in parks in my day, and I’d survived without any damage. When I was Cubby’s age, my Uncle Bob swung me so fast I flew right across the yard to land in a pile of leaves and straw. I never saw anyone’s arms come off, back then or since. Of course, it’s possible that those earlier armless kids were
too ashamed to be seen in public. I always heard there were strange children living in the Prodigialis family’s basement down the street when I was a kid.

When Cubby got a little bigger, he became too big to toss and too heavy to swing. Some dads would have given up at that point. Not me! That’s when we made the move to machinery. Our local playground had a parent-powered carousel he could ride, and I could spin it fast enough to twirl his head into next week. He liked that a lot. Sometimes we’d see other tykes there, and we discovered that they liked the carousel too. And I mean
really
liked it. They’d see me spinning Cubby and pile on with him. In no time at all, I’d have three or four laughing and screaming kids who kept yelling, “Faster, faster” no matter how fast I moved.

Other dads seemed more cautious around playground hardware. Sure, they pushed their kids on tire swings and encouraged them to crawl through giant pipes. But few tossed their kids in the air, or swung them till they flew across the yard, sliding like a ballplayer for home plate. Maybe the other dads were more sensible, but the kids I entertained truly squealed for joy, and hardly any of them ever lost an arm or head in the process. That just goes to show you: True playground euphoria requires a lot of energy and a dash of danger to achieve. I may have been a loser with the other kids when I was growing up, but I was a hands-down winner as an adult.

One of the signs that Cubby was getting bigger was that he claimed his own space. “My room!” he exclaimed proudly. His mom had spent a lot of time making it perfect, and it showed. The bed had nice soft sheets and a warm, tasty blanket. His toys were in a big box in the corner, except for his favorites, which covered the floor. There were even books and clothes, in drawers and in piles. The only problem was the monsters.

I don’t know why kids are scared of monsters, but every one I have ever observed has that fear. It must be genetic. I cannot recall telling Cubby to be scared of monsters even once. Yet he feared them, and I remember feeling the same way as a little boy.
There are things out there that eat kids
. You just know it.

I remembered my own fears of being eaten, and my parents assuring me that monsters were not real. It didn’t work. The problem was, my dad was a philosopher, and he relied on logic, which failed us horribly when it came to monsters. He had no answer to the monster paradox, which said: If monsters ate every kid they caught, there would be no survivors to tell us they were real, because the kids who knew the truth would all be in the monsters’ stomachs. I
concluded that kids who said there were no monsters were either hopeful or ignorant, and I believe Cubby came to a similar conclusion, thirty-some years later.

Most of the time, other activities like eating, sleeping, or making demands on parents distracted him. Those times, monsters were forgotten. Then there would be the moments when he was alone, in a reflective mood, and monster thoughts would come to the fore in his little brain. If he thought about them too long, he’d get scared. When that happened we knew it, because he’d come running. “Mama! Dada! Monsters!” He would leap into his mother’s arms, where he was warm, safe, and protected. She would reassure him and pat him gently on the back. After a moment, he would usually settle down and return to his Legos and other amusements.

I watched that happen time and again. Sweet as it was, I thought it would be better if he learned self-defense. Mom agreed. She knew she would not always be there to protect him, and he needed to be able to resolve monster scares on his own.

She filled an empty spray bottle with colored water. “This is monster spray,” she said as she handed him the bottle with the greatest of gravity. “Keep it with you, and spray anywhere you think there might be monsters. They hate the stuff, and will always run away.”

“But if they don’t …” She gave him a plastic Wiffle Ball bat. “If you see any monsters, whack them hard with this.” Cubby put the bat next to his bed. He went back to his Legos with a newfound sense of security. It was amazing, the way that tyke accepted whatever his mom told him, as if it was The Word.

A few weeks later, I decided to test Cubby’s preparedness. Placing a blanket over my head, I crept around the corner from our room to his. Poised in the doorway, a shapeless blue blanket mass, I growled. Softly, but with menace and conviction.

Cubby turned around. “Hey,” he yelled, but I didn’t answer. I wasn’t sure if he recognized me, so I just growled in return. In the
blink of an eye, Cubby spun around, grabbed the bat, and began pounding the blanket as hard as he could, all the while yelling at the top of his lungs, “Mama! Monsters!” It was shocking how hard and fast that tyke could swing a bat. I threw the blanket off, stunned, and he whacked me square on the head. Then he did it again, either before or because he recognized me. Quick as a flash, he dropped the bat and ran past me into the living room, yelling, “Mama! Save me!” He leapt into her arms as I rounded the corner to see her laughing.

“Very good, Jack. You defended yourself and the monster just turned out to be Dada.”

What could I say to that?

I didn’t growl at him very often after that, and he didn’t whack me with the bat.

Cubby continued to get bigger and stayed healthy. That was good, but it also meant a never-ending stream of new expenses as Cubby outgrew one thing and needed another. He was nothing like a dog, which was practically set for life once you got it a food dish and a blanket. Kid ownership is expensive. Before Cubby was born, we had purchased nesting materials, and that was costly enough. After he arrived, there were new bills every day. Little Bear nursed him, but her milk alone wasn’t enough. There were baby foods to buy, too. Then there was the Stork Diaper Service and an endless array of clothes. There were objects to stimulate his growing brain—mobiles to hang overhead and chunky rubber things to grab and chew. This list of baby paraphernalia kept growing, with no end in sight.

Seeing all that, I redoubled my efforts to make money, and it began to pay off. Though I wasn’t restoring many cars, my ads were bringing in service customers, and the money was enough to support us. The bank account stopped its alarming downward spiral. Now I just needed to reverse the trend. I began to think I might actually pull it off.

Just then, my business partner decided to pounce again. “I’ve been thinking,” he said. I had learned those words always presaged something bad, and this time was no exception. “You’re doing pretty well out there in that shop. I think it’s time you started paying me some rent. You can give me a few thousand every month, starting next Monday.”

I could almost feel my blood pressure rising. I had to earn back the money I had lost and pay rent on top of that. It was becoming clear that the big loser in this arrangement was me, and there was nothing I could do. Nothing except make money for him and keep a little for myself.

So I came up with a plan, which I prayed would get me out of the hole I’d gotten into. It was time to revisit the business of selling cars. That was where the real money could be made. I was making fifty- and hundred-dollar profits on service jobs. If I was smart, I could make ten times that on a single car sale. That became my goal. I used the credibility I was building in my service department to sell cars in a nontraditional way.

“If you want a late-model Mercedes,” I told people, “I’ll go to the Mercedes-Benz auction and find the one that’s perfect for you. You pay me a six-percent commission, just like a real estate agent. I’ll buy you a better car than you’d find at any dealer, for a better price. You’re hiring me to be your expert.”

In those pre-Internet days my idea took off. Soon I was buying five, ten, and even twenty cars a month. I wasn’t worried about finding buyers for my inventory, because everything I bought was presold. Customers loved the transparency of my system. If I paid ten thousand for a car, they paid me ten thousand six hundred. There was no fear that they’d paid too much, or that an unscrupulous salesman had taken advantage of them.

I made fifty thousand dollars selling cars that first year. That was when the next problem surfaced. My partner announced that I had to pay back the money I’d lost “after taxes.” So making back
a hundred grand was not enough. I had to make back two hundred grand. A year before, I’d have been crushed, but now I saw a light at the end of the tunnel. Unfortunately, the better I did, the nastier my so-called partner became. There were days I just cringed going to work, he was so venomous and ugly. He could not stand to see my business take off, as his own company withered and he got older and sicker. He was a mean, bitter old man.

He lurked in his office, looking out over the parking lot. Whenever he saw the chance, he’d charge out and belittle me in front of customers. “Move that car,” he’d bark. “Get that oil off the ground.” I don’t know what he thought he was doing, but my customers came to see him as an arrogant bully, and they wondered why I put up with him. I just kept my mouth shut. I knew I was winning. Slowly but surely, I was building a bank account and planning my escape.