The Suburban You (13 page)

One thing that you have “won” at this auction is a “tour of an auto-recycling facility” for five kids and their parents. You have won the right to pay $250 for this because absolutely nobody bid against you. You are drawn to this item because you imagine it to be a huge facility that melts down metal or whatever it is that is done to recycle autos. You have been on factory tours before; you have been to Ben & Jerry's to see how ice cream is made, to the Coors Brewery to see how beer is made, and to Ethan Allen, where you watched furniture makers turn canopy-bed posts. You expect the tour of the auto-recycling facility to be very similar to the other tours you have been on. They are well organized and professionally run, with fun take-homes for the kids when you leave. A lot of these tours are sanitized, insulating you from what really goes on, but despite that it should still be a fun outing.

At this auction, like many of the neighborhood-oriented auctions you attend, you will experience, as you have come to expect, seeing some of your neighbors involved in brutal bidding wars. They will compete with one another to “win,” and when they “win” they will have won the right to pay $6,000 for their kid and three of her friends to have a sleepover at the school with her teacher. Some overachieving bidder will “win” the privilege of paying $7,500 to play a round of golf in North Carolina (transportation
not
included), and another neighbor will “win” the $10,000 guitar that Bruce Springsteen supposedly played once in New Jersey. The “winners” are competing with their kids' schoolmates' parents (their neighbors) to see who can wake up tomorrow morning and feel like the biggest loser.

For the tour of the auto-recycling plant that you have “won,” you call up five of your kids' friends' parents and you get five easy yeses. Nobody asks for details, and that is a good thing, because the yeses may not have come so easily had your kids' five friends' parents asked a basic question, like where the facility was located.

The Friday before the Saturday you scheduled the tour, you get the address, which is on Ninety-fifth Street in the city, a neighborhood with which most of your kids' friends' parents are unfamiliar, because it is on the deep South Side of Chicago. It is a neighborhood that many people in your suburb have paid handsomely to move as far away from as possible. You call your kids' friends' parents with the address, an address that everyone recognizes as being on the South Side, but where few of them have ever been. At this point, those five quick yeses are all wishing they hadn't said yes so quickly. It is too late to back out now. Most of what everyone has heard about the South Side has to do with gangs, housing projects, drive-by shootings, crime, and poverty. It would be awkward to back out now, because everyone has already said yes.

You tell them that it is OK, it will be safe. “It is Ninety-fifth Street,” you say. “Ninety-fifth Street is busy and there is nothing to worry about.” Not that you know any of this, but you think that this “auto-recycling facility” will be a memorable experience that they would never have had otherwise, plus you want some company for you and your kid. “We will all be better off having seen this auto-recycling plant,” you say. “It will be a great experience for the kids.” You have just barely convinced your kids' friends' parents, who you can tell have all become suspicious of your parental judgment during these phone conversations. You get the impression that they would much rather be embracing diversity in your suburb, where there is none, than on the South Side of Chicago.

That Saturday morning, you load your kid into the car and start heading south. This will be a great family outing, you think. You have always wondered how cars are recycled. You arrive at Ninety-fifth Street and it narrows into a small street. On this street in this neighborhood, unlike yours, you will politely pull over to the side of the street when an opposing car is coming your way. You do not want to give anyone in this neighborhood any reason to get angry with you. It is quiet and desolate. You are expecting a big building with smokestacks and a large asphalt parking lot with a designated visitors' section. You are expecting that there will be men in white jumpsuits manipulating car-recycling controls. You expect that you will be directed to a viewing area behind some heavy-duty glass listening to a recorded tour or be escorted by an attractive, professional tour guide, like the woman who gave you and your family a tour of Ben & Jerry's in Vermont.

As you pull up to this address, you are puzzled, because there is none of this. There is a beaten-up trailer sitting on wheels that are fully deflated. The rusted and dented trailer looks like someone may be living in it. There is a weathered wooden fence, which in some sections is still standing. There is no parking lot. There is no specially marked “Visitors Park Here” section. You park on the street near the trailer. You are the first to arrive and you hope that your premium-gasoline-fueled German luxury vehicle will not go through some recycling of its own in the time that it takes you to tour this “facility.” You hesitantly approach the trailer and the door opens before you arrive. “Hi, I'm Tonya,” a friendly voice yells out. “Welcome to our auto-recycling facility.”

You introduce yourself and your family and let Tonya know that you are the first to arrive. Over the next fifteen minutes, your kids' friends and families gather, each one as curious as you about what condition their European cars will be in when they return from this “facility” tour, for which you are responsible. They, like you, are probably wondering where the “facility” is, because the only thing that looks at all like a facility is the beat-up trailer that Tonya walked out of fifteen minutes ago. No one is smiling and no one has thanked you for inviting them.

Tonya assembles the group and tells everyone to follow her into the recycling facility, which to you looks like something that you would call a junkyard. The “recycling facility” is a lot the size of half a football field. Covering the ground are metal scraps, glass shards, car parts, doors, engines, engine parts, transmissions, lots of oil and grease, and some stripped-out car shells that are strewn about but that appear to be ready to be “recycled.” Tonya explains to all of the kids how they get the cars, strip off all the parts that can be resold, then crush what is left of the cars, to be hauled away and melted. She asks who would like to crush a car and five hands instantly shoot up.

On her walkie-talkie, she calls the forklift operator, Jim. The arrangement is this, Tonya explains. Each kid will drive with Jim in the forklift. With Jim, each kid will select a car that they want to bring over to the hydraulic press. With Jim, they will insert the car into the press, sandwich it between two massive slabs of steel, get out of the forklift truck, and press the two buttons on the hydraulic press, which sets the top slab into an unstoppable downward motion, crushing the car shell.

“Who would like to go first?” Tonya asks. Five hands shoot up, more quickly than before. Jim pulls around in the forklift and takes the first kid. They do just as Tonya described. Over the next hour and a half, five kids have crushed five car shells as flat as a pancake.

You leave wondering what your car is looking like and you are relieved to know that it is just as you left it, as are your friends' cars. Your friends thank you profusely for inviting them on this outing, a facility tour that they will never, ever forget.

You leave Tonya knowing that you will never “win” anything cooler at any school benefit in your life.

Teach Your Son About Sex

Your son is in second grade and you are in New York City on a business trip with your friend-boss and two other colleagues. You have left for New York on a Monday and are planning to return Tuesday evening.

You have not thought yet about having any discussions with your children about sex, because you think that they are just way too young. You, for instance, have never discussed this topic with your parents, nor do you think that you have even said the word “sex” around them in the forty-four years of your life. Growing up, you would have never even considered asking either of your parents about sex. Why would you? With Billy Semitini's
Playboy
stash, who needed to ask their parents anything?

You and your wife have a much different relationship with your kids than you had with your parents. You are both very open with them and there are really no topics that are off limits in your house. In this regard, your household is much more like the household that your wife grew up in than yours. You and your wife agree on this, like you agree on many core philosophical issues. You and your wife even have almost the exact same tastes in houses and artwork, in that you can predict with great accuracy what she will like in art and houses and that her preferences in both will be entirely in line with yours.

You call home on Tuesday morning, after you and your friend-boss have taken a run in Central Park, showered, gotten dressed, and eaten an overpriced breakfast at the Essex House, one of your preferred hotels in New York, because it is close to Central Park and to the New York Athletic Club.

You are standing in the lobby waiting for your small group of four to gather, and while you have a minute of downtime you figure out a way to fill it, another trait that has been passed along to you from prior generations. You call your wife. “Hi, honey, how is everything going? I am just calling to check in,” you say. “Well, everything is going OK, but you won't believe the conversation that Blake and I had this morning.” You love to hear about your son's discussions and you ask your wife, excitedly, what they were talking about.

“Blake asked me where babies come from,” your wife says. “What did you tell him?” you ask curiously. “Well,” she said, “I read an article that I think was in this week's issue of
People
.” “
People
magazine?” you ask, astounded that anyone with a college degree would cite that publication as an authority on any topic. “What do you think I meant?” she responds back. “Sorry, honey, I wasn't thinking.”

“Well, this article in
People
indicated that if your child is inquiring about sex you should be straightforward with them and give them enough information to satisfy their curiosity. You do not want to erode your credibility with your kids,” she says authoritatively.

At this point, you wonder how much curiosity your son had and how extensively your wife satisfied it, and to what extent she did not erode her credibility with your once-innocent son. “So what did you tell him?” you ask, accepting the fact that there is absolutely nothing you could possibly do to turn around this series of surprisingly premature events. “Well, I did what the article said,” she says. “And how did you interpret that article?” you ask, expecting the worst at this point.

“Well, I told him that Mommy and Daddy hug in a special way, and when we do we make a baby.” That sounds pretty good, you think to yourself. “What do you mean ‘a special way'?” Your wife goes on telling you of your son's response to her explanation. “Well,” your wife goes on further, to do her best to abide by the authorities on this topic that
People
magazine has endorsed, “Daddy puts his penis into Mommy's vagina and then Mommy gets pregnant and has a baby.”

You could imagine your son at this point in the conversation, which took place an hour earlier, listening more attentively than he has ever listened to anything in his entire life.

“You told him that?” you ask. “Yes, I wanted to be honest with him. But I did a really smart thing,” she adds. “I told him not to tell any of his friends, in case their parents do not want them to know about sex at this age.” “Good call,” you say. “Was that in the
People
article, too?” you add sarcastically.

Your three colleagues are assembled in the hotel lobby at this point and they are ready to go. “Honey,” you say, “nice job with being open and forthcoming. I have to go now. I love you.” She concludes the conversation, saying proudly, “Mark, the eagle has landed.”

You hang up and your friend-boss asks what is going on. You tell him that you left your son yesterday a boy, and that you will return to him tonight a man.

You arrive home that evening and you greet your wife and daughter, who are in the kitchen. “Where is Blake, the man?” you ask, inquiring as to the whereabouts of your second-grade boy. “He is upstairs in his room reading.”

You go upstairs to greet your son and to make sure that he has not grown a beard or something since you saw him last. “What are you reading?” you ask him. “A book that Mommy got for me at the library.” You look at the title, which you recall as
My Body and Me
, and your son has the book opened to the page where a cartoon drawing of a naked girl is in front of him with call-out captions describing the various features that your wife had, earlier that day, articulated to him with great clarity. He smiles at you and you run downstairs.

“Why did you get that book for Blake? Wasn't your conversation with him graphic enough?” you ask. She tells you that the
People
article said that you should get age-appropriate books that the kids can understand to reinforce discussions you may have with them about sex.

That night, when you are putting your son to bed, he asks you, just after you finished saying a prayer (a Catholic one) with him and as you are about to leave his room, “Daddy, can you and Mommy show me how you hug in that special way?”

Go to the Beach

You live a few blocks from the lake. In fact, you paid more than anyone would guess for your house because it is so close to the beach, one of the nicest beaches around, and you try to go to the beach as often as possible all year round. One day, when you were in Santa Monica, you even told your friend-boss and a colleague that you thought your beach was nicer than the Santa Monica beach, and you meant it. They laughed at you.

School ends and you go to the beach with your family one Saturday. Your son has just completed his first year of Spanish with Mrs. . . . well, you are not quite so sure what her last name is, because after an entire year of Spanish your son admits to you that he has no idea what her name is. You cannot believe this and it disturbs you. “How can you not know your teacher's name after spending an entire year with her?” you ask disappointedly, a question to which you will get no response that you can understand.

While you have never met your son's Spanish teacher, your son has pointed her out to you on two occasions, and one thing you do know about her is that she did not grow up in some white-bread suburb, like you and many of the people you know. How do you know that? Well, for one, she has an accent. Second, she is exotic-looking. You have noticed her at the kids' soccer games, and, come to think of it, so has every other dad. She wears skin-tight clothes all the time. She has long black curly hair and a perpetual golden tan. In your mind, she is from Buenos Aires, Rio de Janeiro, or somewhere where people seem wonderfully exotic to you, are not afraid to wear skin-tight clothes, and speak English with wonderful accents. Each time you see her, the song “Girl from Ipanema” pops into your head. She is tall and tan and young and lovely, and, like a samba, she sways so gently when she walks. You have also heard a lot of “ahhhh”s as she goes walking by. You know your son's other teachers by name, but not his Spanish teacher. You head down to the beach that Saturday afternoon. You approach the gated area, where a high-school kid, who has scored the best summer job there is, is supposed to check your beach pass. The relaxed pass checker is sitting in a chair under a large sun umbrella and does not acknowledge you or your pass, except to say “Cool” as you walk by. You walk past him, assuming that means that you are OK to do so. You are sure that he lets anyone go into your suburb's restricted beach, which you are paying the highest taxes in the country to enjoy.

As you enter the beach, you visually scan the shorefront for a place to set up. Your son, horrified, tells you that he sees his Spanish teacher. You are impressed with his observational skills; from where you are standing, the shore is at least seventy-five yards away and many, many people are standing there. You are amazed that your son is able to identify his Spanish teacher out of the huge crowd.

“Where is she?” you ask somewhat curiously, because you are interested in knowing the people who are influencing your child when you are absent. “There she is,” he says. “She is the one standing up.” You look to try to identify a woman who is standing up and you realize that half of the three hundred women at the beach on this first hot day after school has been let out are standing up. His clue does not help you. “Blake,” you say, “there are at least a hundred women standing up by the water. Could you be a little more vague, please?” He laughs at your request and says, “Are you blind, Dad? She is the lady with her butt sticking out.”

Sure enough, among more than three hundred women enjoying the beach on that Saturday, there is one who is different from all the others. She is wearing a bathing suit that you are sure was not purchased anywhere in your suburb. It is a bathing suit that is not the kind that conceals one's butt. It is a very nice bathing suit, you think, one that you wished more women, a select group, who patronize your beach would embrace. It is a bathing suit, you notice, with one little strap, you imagine—because you cannot really see it—a little wider than the width of kite string, that seems to disappear somewhere in her buttocks. It reappears when it attaches to another string, about the same size, which encircles her waist. You detect another two straps of the same dimension, one going around her back, the other disappearing behind her long flowing dark hair. You are amazed at your son's power of observation and, at this point, yours. You and all the other dads on the beach today will set a new suburban standard in embracing diversity.

“So, that is your Spanish teacher?” you ask, becoming more interested in your son's foreign-language studies than you have ever been. “Yes, that's her.” At this point, she has turned around to reveal a tiny equilateral-triangle patch that covers a small but important section of her frontal region, well below her navel, that you assume to be attached to the kite-like string that has disappeared into her buttocks. There are two similar triangular patches, about the same size, which you can only describe as tiny, concealing a small portion of her ample, well-rounded breasts.

“Blake,” you say, “could you please introduce Mommy and Daddy to your Spanish teacher? What is her name?” you ask. “I have no idea, Dad,” he responds. You remember that your son does not know her name and again you are appalled that he spent two mornings a week for the entire school year with this woman in a classroom of eleven kids and has no idea what her name is. It is unlike him, as he is usually very good with names and frequently helps you out with recalling a name that you have forgotten.

Excited to share his academic interests with his parents, your son escorts you over to this woman, after you force him to do so against his will. You are with your son, your daughter, and your wife and you are excitedly on your way to meet your son's Spanish teacher. All of your neighbors will be so impressed with how interested and involved you and your family are in your son's schooling when they see you engaged in a discussion with her on the beach.

You are now within talking distance of your son's Spanish teacher and she sees your son. “Roberto!” she exclaims. “¿
Como estas?
” Your son, whose field of vision at this point is about parallel with his Spanish teacher's lowest triangular patch, cannot think of a suitable response to this foreign-language question in any language. You decide to pitch in and help him out. “
Estoy muy, muy bien
,” you say, speaking better Spanish now than you ever have in your entire life.

Lucky you and your family talk with her for a few minutes after she introduces herself to your entire family as Reneta Quesadda. What a memorable name, you think. How could your son, or anyone else, for that matter, not remember that? What is wrong with your kid? you think. She tells you that she has enjoyed having your son, Roberto, which you think is an unusual derivative of Blake, in her class. You respond, “Not as much as he enjoyed having you as a teacher,” but you are thinking, Not as much as I am enjoying standing before you right now.

During your conversation, you have difficulty maintaining eye contact with your son's Spanish teacher, as does everyone on the beach. You are severely distracted by three undersized triangular patches and a few disappearing and reappearing kite strings. This suit, you think, is an engineering marvel. Before leaving, his teacher makes your son sing a little Spanish song with her, where at the end she gestures to him by thrusting her lower triangular patch toward him a few times while clenching her outstretched fists and pulling them toward her. While your son is horrified that he was made to do this little song with his teacher, who is thrusting her pelvic region at him while standing on the beach, you are more motivated now to learn Spanish than you have ever been in your entire life and ask if she could teach you the song. At which point your wife indicates to you that you had better go now. “We are meeting the Millers,” she tells you, a fact that you were not aware of until now, “and we are running late.” You give your son's Spanish teacher a big adios, and as you are walking over to meet your friends your son asks, “Dad, what did my Spanish teacher say her name is?” “I have no idea, Roberto,” you respond.

Go Kayaking

You have a friend, Bob Lauter, who organizes treks to the North Pole and Antarctica for a living and who also arranges two-week-long kayak trips from Greek island to Greek island. Locally, he teaches classes using his own kayaks, and he has a lot of them. He frequently brings his kayaks to your beach in the summer, transporting them on large, specially made trailers. You think how you can use his skills and his toys to your benefit.

His kid and your kid play together. You invite his son, who, by the way, at two years of age was the youngest person ever to travel to the North Pole, to be in your Cub Scout den.

Throughout the year, your den engages in various activities that the dads arrange. Your den is a dads' den, which is different from when you were a Cub Scout. When you were a Cub Scout, moms ran the show, and you made Popsicle-stick birdhouses and stuff like that. Not your den. Your den goes rock climbing, gets behind-the-scenes airport tours, goes on long hikes, swims, plays dodgeball, goes on bike rides, builds and launches model rockets, goes on fishing expeditions, goes sailing and kayaking—stuff like that. The dads' activities are all good, and there is pressure on each dad to come up with something that will outdo what other dads come up with, because, you all realize, you are in competition with one another, even though it is Cub Scouts, no one will ever acknowledge that fact.

Summer is approaching, and you ask your Antarctic traveler friend if he would be so kind as to coordinate a kayak trip for the kids. Without hesitation, he says yes. You cannot believe that you have a guy like this in your kids' life. You and your den are very fortunate. You agree to meet at the beach, and when you arrive you notice that there are more people there than are in your den. These are all people who live in your suburb and this outing will be even more fun than you thought.

Your real-estate partner, Joe Sclafanni, shows up with his kid. They are not in Cub Scouts. Joe is one of your best friends; you talk once or twice a day and you laugh together about the problems that you have to deal with in your buildings and the personalities of your tenants. You get into a blue kayak that your son selects, because blue is his favorite color, and your friend Joe and his son select a green kayak based on the same principle. There are thirty or so people occupying twenty or so kayaks, and two instructors. One instructor will take the “advanced” group, the group where you and your son place yourselves, because you have gone kayaking before. Your friend Joe and his son join the “advanced” group as well, along with a few others who perceive themselves to be advanced. The word “advanced” scares many away from joining your group, because, compared with your guide, who for the past twenty years of his life has been taking groups of adventurers for month-long kayak trips in the Mediterranean Sea, you are all beginners. The difference between one group and the other is more a function of how the participants perceive themselves than anything to do with skill level. Of one thing you are sure: anyone with a vowel on the end of their last name will end up in the “advanced” group.

Your “advanced” group starts off. Your mission is to paddle to the next suburb to the north, the suburb where your friend-boss lives, the one where the median values of homes are $400,000 higher than in the suburb where you live. You look forward to seeing how the richest neighbors of yours spend Saturdays at their beach.

You and your friend and your respective kids are paddling along. It is relaxed and it is fun. Before you know it, the pace picks up a bit. Not that either you or your friend initiate the quickened pace. It just seems to happen. Within a hundred yards of the launch, you are paddling as hard as you can. Your son asks you to slow down but you do not. Your friend Joe's son asks him the same question and his son gets the same response that your son has just gotten: “Paddle faster.”

What has happened is the inevitable: you are in a race. You have not articulated that thought, nor has your son. Neither has your friend or his son. But everyone knows it. You know that he knows that you are in a race, because he, like you, has a vowel on the end of his last name. Having a vowel strategically located as the last letter of your last name means that many things you do turn into a competition, even though others around you rarely see it that way. Like many things, because you are a man, and because you have a vowel at the end of your last name, there is no reason to talk about this recent development, this two-kayak race you are in.

You and your son are going all out. So are they. You know your destination because it has been called out by your instructor when your advanced group first assembled. It is a long way off. This is a distance race. Pace yourself, you think.

Your son slacks off a bit, and you “encourage” him as best you can. You remember that you are on a Cub Scout outing and this is supposed to bring you closer to your son and his friends. As the den leader, you should be setting the example. You should be exemplifying courteous, kind, cheerful, and reverent. You know this in your head, but you do not have time for example setting and bonding, because you are in a race and the outcome of this race will determine something more important than setting an example.