The Voice of Reason: A V.I.P. Pass to Enlightenment (30 page)

While writing this book, I have been experiencing a prolonged tingling, an obvious byproduct of Bale’s do-goodery, and I want to let you know, dear reader, that every derogatory thing I say about you throughout this book is my humble attempt to make you better, make America better, and make the world a better place to live. I don’t expect anything in return, other than perhaps a small thank you, which you will write on the last page of this book in permanent marker. And don’t forget to include the “P,” which as you know stands for “Perfection.”

or the longest time my father thought I was on drugs. As I already mentioned, I didn’t do anything in my youth other than go to school, attend wrestling practice, do chores at home, and sleep, but my father was from a different generation. On Sunday mornings I would sleep in until nine or ten, and to my father, who had woken at the crack of dawn his entire life, sleeping so late was a distinct sign that I was doing heavy narcotics. He never told me so personally, but he told my mother. I would wake up way after everyone else had eaten breakfast, head downstairs, and my mom would say, “Your father thinks you’re on drugs.” It didn’t matter that I was a night owl and liked going to bed late on Saturdays, and it didn’t matter that I actually got a lot less sleep than my father. If I wasn’t up and ready to tackle the day before the roosters, there was a distinct possibility that I was hitting the crack pipe. Once I even went so far as to compare the number of hours that each of us actually spent sleeping. His answer: “That’s what a drug addict would say.” Anytime I missed a meeting, was two minutes late for something, or did a subpar job on some chore, it must have been for the same reason: drugs.

As you can imagine, whenever my parents went on vacation and left me at home alone, I went wild. And by wild, I mean I ordered junk food and shucked a few of my responsibilities around the house. Although I didn’t realize this until I was twenty, my parents always came home from vacation one day early. If they said they would be back on the eighth, they always came back on the seventh. They did this every single time, and I never caught on. This resulted in me getting caught in all sorts of mischief, but one time was particularly memorable.

I was seventeen, and against my father’s orders, I had used the twenty bucks he left me to buy a pizza. It wasn’t that he was against me eating pizza; he just loathed the fact that I always ate one or two slices, and then stuck the rest of the pizza in the refrigerator without bothering to cover it, rendering it inedible the next morning. My father did not like waste. The next mistake I made was that I had forgotten to feed the horses for a few of the days my parents were gone. This mistake was quite large.

At the time I worked for my father’s plumbing company, and a day before my parents were set to return from vacation, I was out on a job. I was fixing something under the sink when the homeowner told me I had a phone call. It was my father. Immediately the dried-out, barely eaten pizza flashed in my mind’s eye. Something else bothered me as well, and then I remembered the horses. Things like this had happened before, and they had led to volcanic outbursts, but this time my father was unbelievably calm. “I’m home,” he stated. “When you’re finished, I want you to come back and bring a shovel and a pick with you.”

Needless to say, I did not like the calmness in his voice.

That night when I got home, I was armed with a shovel and a pick. My father still did not say a word. He motioned for me to follow him, and we walked out into the neighbor’s field. Pointing to the ground, he said, “I want you to dig me a ditch six feet deep, six feet long, and three feet wide.” He didn’t say he wanted me to dig a grave, but he might as well have.

And so I started digging; for the next three days I dug. The ground was so dense and dry, each pick swing resulted in only a minor chip of dirt. My hands became a rotten mess of blisters, and with it being July in Oregon, the sun drained my body of fluids. I must have been in that field for thirty hours combined, and although I came damn close to finishing the ditch he had requested, on the fourth day he signaled me to back away from the hole and then filled it in with the tractor. It wasn’t until later that I discovered that once I had completely dug the ditch, he intended to build me a little bed inside it and have me sleep there for a week, subsisting on the dried-out pizza he had found in the refrigerator. He would have done it, too, if not for the blazing heat.

Just as with Roy Pittman, my wrestling coach, there was no room for excuses or irresponsible behavior in my father’s world. When he made a commitment, he showed up and did the job right. It didn’t matter if he was sick or hurt or tired. He expected the same from me. He expected me to do my absolute best with everything I touched.

A perfect example is when I lost my one and only wrestling tournament in high school. Afterward, he brought me home, pointed to a massive pile of rocks, and told me to move them across a swampy field. It proved to be the most torturous job of my life. I piled the stones in a wheelbarrow, but I couldn’t get more than a foot through the marshy terrain without the stones spilling back onto the ground. I would then have to reload them and push them another foot. When I finally completed the job, my father came out and said, “Good job. Now put them back where you found them.” I did, and we never talked about me losing the tournament again. I also didn’t lose another tournament until I was in college.

My father taught me values that are largely missing in today’s world. He was strict, yet he was also surprisingly lenient about me breaking certain rules. For example, one time I got into a fight with a buddy of mine in the school cafeteria. He ended up throwing a piece of food at me, so I sprung on him. I had never thrown a punch in my life, so I took him to the ground, controlled him, and then did my best to squeeze the life out of him. Neither of us got hurt.

We made up shortly thereafter and even finished lunch together, but then the teachers found out, and a short while later the principal pulled us into his office and called our parents. Now, my father didn’t miss work for anything. When he turned up in his work clothes, covered in glue and dirt, I knew I was in serious trouble. And of course the principal didn’t tell the whole story about how my friend and I had made up after the scuffle, and that no actual punches were thrown. She simply said that I got into a fight in front of the students, causing a massive disturbance.

My father didn’t say a word as we walked to his truck. As a matter of fact, he didn’t say another word until we pulled into the parking lot of a 7-Eleven. As I mentioned, I lived in the country, and there are no 7-Elevens in the country. So for me, 7-Eleven was the equivalent of Chuck E. Cheese to other kids. I thought maybe he would punish me by buying a bunch of treats and then eating them in front of me, but instead he said, “Let’s go inside. You can buy whatever you want.”

Alarms began sounding in my skull. What type of trap was my father trying to set? Hesitantly, I went inside. Again he told me to get whatever I wanted. Not sure if this was some type of test, I grabbed myself a Reese’s Pieces and headed toward the counter.

“Wait,” he said. I turned back toward him with wide eyes, waiting for the hammer to fall. “You sure you don’t want a Big Gulp?”

He stood there, waiting for me to get one. So that’s what I did—I grabbed a Big Gulp to go with my candy bar, certain that I would never get to sample the deliciousness of either. Again I started heading back to the counter, and again he asked me if there was anything else I might want. This was going too far! But he just stood there, waiting for me to gather more goodies. So I inched over to the counter and grabbed myself three or four corn rolls and a hot pretzel. With this, my father seemed satisfied. He paid our bill and we walked back out to the truck.

I didn’t dig into my treats right away. I held back, waiting for some speech about how I was a drug addict, which would quickly be followed by him reclaiming my goodies. But that never happened. My dad simply drove the truck in silence as I ate and drank.

Later that night, as I lay in bed wide-awake, I heard my father talking to my uncle on the phone. Instead of talking about how his lazy, drug-addicted son had gotten into trouble at school, he was bragging about how I had gotten into a fight. Right then I learned a very valuable lesson—I couldn’t slack on work or order a pizza that I didn’t finish or forget to feed the horses. But it was A-OK if I fought. Perhaps this explains a little bit about how I ended up in my current profession.

My father meant the world to me. He was strict and as tough as nails, but he taught me about what really matters in life. I remember the day my mother told me he had cancer and wasn’t going to make it. He didn’t want anyone to know, so when I was around him, I had to pretend that everything was all right. You can imagine how difficult this was. Finally, he decided to tell me on his own, but after talking it out, he immediately told me to get the heck out of the house. I ran outside, climbed into his brand-new truck, put my head on the steering wheel, and began to cry.

Engrossed in my own world of misery, I didn’t hear him come up to the truck. All of a sudden, I heard his voice in my ear. He didn’t say, “It’s going to be all right, son” or, “Make sure to take care of your mother.” Instead, he said, “I see you are admiring your brand-new truck.”

I pulled my head off the steering wheel, looked into his smiling face, and instantly realized what he was saying. We both began to laugh hysterically.

What a wonderful man. I love you, Dad. Rest in peace.

n fighting, as in all things, one of your most forceful weapons is your ability to bestow a false sense of security on your opponent. More than punching power that causes a man’s eyeballs to trade places, more than the reflexes of a greased-up French Canadian (and I mean this in a
very
generalized and nonspecific way), some of the greatest value in conflict lies in being able to feign so convincingly that the schmuck squaring off against you assumes victory before he has it. Then, while he is whistling “We Are the Champions” in some tinny, drunk dialect of Portuguese (another generalized, nonspecific example), you drop the act and hit him with everything you have. He will never see it coming; if you do it right, he will still be thinking about his victory meal when some bargain basement medic slaps him awake like a Victorian woman in the middle of a bout of hysteria.