It was my parent’s ritual. She would stand in front of him with her good scissors in hand, carefully evening the plain of his mustache, and they would both watch the coarse trimmings fall, glide past his polyester shorts and land upon his stubby, sneaker clad feet.

"Be careful," He would say. "I don’t wanna get any in my socks again."

"Maybe you shouldn’t wear such short socks," She would reply.

He would stare straight ahead, saying nothing, and then she would return to the trimming.

A Skewed Perspective of Normalcy,

Events 1-5

I was 8 and 1/2 years old in the summer of 1984. It was a time when the world was ablaze with Olympic fever, especially the west coast, which is where my family was living at the time. The crafty marketing team behind the Los Angeles Olympiad had come up with a bird for their mascot; a bulging, rotund yellow guy who was absolutely everywhere. Through the summer months, this little winged fucker served as a ubiquitous reminder that it was a voting year, so it was our duty as citizens of this country to tune in and watch the ol’ red white and blue get stomped in sporting competition again. We had a single glimmer of hope, however, in one of our sprinters. His name was Carl Lewis, and my father referred to him as "A little suspect, if you ask me." It wasn’t clear to me what he meant then, but looking back at the footage of Mr. Lewis, I don’t think he was referring to his chances in the 100 meter dash.

Anyway, as my 5 year old brother and I entered our neighborhood department store with our parents on a blazing hot afternoon in that magical summer, we were immediately treated to a table full of those little stuffed Olympic birds, corralled on an enclosed table. I mention these birds only because I recall them, not because they have any significance in this story. The same can be said for Carl Lewis. Forget that I mentioned them, it’s incidental.

Now, I must explain at this point that I was a little edgy about shopping with my father because we rarely escaped any store without incident. There always seemed to be some minor, ultimately harmless but nonetheless embarrassing incident that he and my mother would insist on recounting and dissecting on the way home. The upside of this particular trip (and specifically my age in relation to the time of the trip) was that I was still a few years too young to feel that being seen with my father was unforgivably uncool. For that realization to hit, I would have to wait for the golden years of junior high school, a time in which I would rather die than be seen in public with a mustached man wearing a sleeveless shirt . Something like that could socially ruin a 12 year old boy. As an 8 and 1/2 year old, I was comfortable to not only be seen with my father, but to be seen with him while he was wearing sunglasses in a department store. Ultimately, I don’t give a shit..

So, it must have been the beginning of summer because the lawn furniture was still situated near the front of the store, right where someone might walk in, see it, and make an impulse buy. My father, who had apparently sensed this shitty merchandise before we actually passed through the threshold of the establishment, targeted the furniture quickly and made right for the lawn chairs.

Now, the style of chair that he went for was the kind that, I’m not quite sure how to describe them, as I’m not even sure that they make them anymore. It’s kind of a white trash Freud’s couch sort of appliance. You can lay all the way down on them if you need to, or you can sit upright. It’s a flimsy apparatus, with some curved metal tubing for the frame and spaghetti straps of rubber plastic bridged across that frame to support the body of the person laying on it. Also, you can adjust the section that your head or maybe your feet are resting on. There are three sections, each equal in size, and the sections are adjustable by these wheels, these gears that have interlocking teeth that snap into place when you click them up and then back real quick. I know you remember these shitty poolside noodle chairs.

So, my father walked himself over to the display where all these chairs were folded in their most convenient storage positions, pulled one off the shelf, flipped out it’s little legs, and set it down in the middle of the main aisle entrance to the store. People walking by began to look back at him after they swerved to avoid him. He then folded out the leg and butt sections of the thing and sat down as he began to let the back section adjust to himself. He must have jerked it back too quickly because he ended up laying down more than he was sitting. To adjust this, he sat up partway, reached back, and pulled the back section upwards toward himself until it slapped him on the back. As soon as he felt those noodles hit his shoulder blades he let his weight rest fully on the back of the chair, not realizing that he had failed to clear his index finger from the exposed teeth of the gears.

Before the first drop of blood hit the linoleum of the floor, my brother and I were clinging to my mother, who had wisely positioned herself behind a large display of turtle shaped kiddy pools. I had noticed her scoping out shelter from the moment the chair had hit the ground. Having heard my father’s initial yelping, a man walked by, offered a handkerchief to help absorb some of the bloody mess, and my father squinted and ignored him. A crowd was gathering at this point, which was our cue to make for the front doors. We averted our eyes, remaining inconspicuous as my father shunned another do-gooder, a young employee frantically ripping paper towels from a roll.

When my father stood, clutching his blood drenched finger with his clean, useful hand, and exited the building muttering under his breath, we put our heads down and followed him to the parking lot. Luckily, we were parked near the front of the store, a result of my father circling the lot endlessly, scanning the lot for someone in the first four rows who might be loading their trunk. His flawless system had once again prevailed in less than ten minutes, and I was thankful for this as we started home. I sat quietly in the back seat, anticipating my mother’s recap of the events that had unfolded. She wasn’t quick enough. He beat her to the first punch, pointing his mangled finger over the steering wheel and towards the hood of the car, complaining that a bird had shit on it while we were inside.

We were never able to nail down where he came across it, and I don’t think any of us, especially my mother, wanted to know. It was a cheaply made orange mesh cap and on the front of it in poorly placed iron-on letters it said "You piss me off…..". Now, to my father this was funny. Really funny. But, like all complex tricks, this was only the set up. The payoff came suddenly and unexpectedly, with the punch line that was waiting patiently underneath the bill of the cap, just begging to be flipped and released. Here’s how it worked. He would stand still in front of his unassuming victim, poised with his hand on the bill, letting the initial message settle in, watching it marinate in their mind. Then quickly, unexpectedly, he would jerk the bill of the hat straight up and reveal what certainly no one could see coming. Hidden underneath that bill, in the same sprawling iron-on lettering, the hat read "You fucking jerk".

The hat was securely kept in the trunk of his car, and usually after four or five beers he would unveil it at a party, a wedding, or any other gathering where it was extremely inappropriate. He’d walk the perimeter of the get together, the orange hat terribly offsetting his semi-formal dress, his head tilted slightly downward, hoping someone would comment so he could give them the old one-two fliparoo. If they played along, there was always the cackling laugh that followed. Usually not from the person who was standing in front of him, but from somewhere deep in his own belly. Haaaaaaaaaaaa. He started to think he was the only one who got it.

The hat was having a great run, even meriting its own corner in the trunk. Then, the night before we had planned a party with my mom’s side of the family, the hat disappeared out of the trunk of our car. My father was shaken, and we told him he must have left it at his brother’s wedding, which we had attended the week before.

I grew up not knowing that dressing rooms were a part of buying clothes for a man. My father never used them, never even looked in their general direction. His wardrobe consisted of two main staples when I was young: coaching shorts, which are tight little polyester numbers with occasional stripes up the side; and pocketed short sleeved polo shirts, with the pocket placed on the left breast to hold a pack of cigarettes. It was these that he would try on in the department stores right next to the rack, removing the shirt he was currently wearing and replacing it with the new shirt taken from the rack. This too, didn’t really strike me as odd until junior high, when I was shopping with a friend and his parents and his father used a dressing room to try on a shirt. So, I thought to myself, this is normalcy. Anyway.

He didn’t see why he should have to go to the dressing room when he wasn’t taking his pants off. Fair enough, but even so, sometimes when he did have to take his pants off, he would simply find a corner that was obscured by a rack of clothes and try the pants on there. Occasionally during these forays, he would ask my mother to stand in front of him while he dropped his green coaching shorts, hoping she could block any potential voyeurs who might be wanting to check out a man wearing nothing but sneakers, jockeys, and a polo shirt with a soft pack of Barclays in the pocket. It is also possible that he hoped she could block the view of the store’s employees, a part of the corporate monster that insisted that he keep his pants on. Yes, those clerks were always pleased when they spotted a petite woman with two children trying to obscure a man dropping his pants in the back corner of their sporting goods outlet. They were even more pleased when these displays didn’t end in a purchase of the publicly tried on item.

My father felt that my brother and I enjoyed going to the health club with him when we were in grade school and junior high. We had never expressed any interest in accompanying him, nor were we in bad shape, but he was insistent anyway. On these trips, after we would play racquetball and watch him lift weights for 45 minutes, we would all go into the shower room, wash off, and return to our lockers to put our street clothes on. A simple enough procedure for most, but my father’s methods were recognizably abstract. It involved first putting on his sporty half socks, followed by his specified "non-work-out" cross training sneakers. After this, he would remove his blow dryer from his duffel bag and cruise back to the other side of the locker room to comb back his part-in-the-middle hair. Strolling up the middle of the locker room, his fatherly member swinging back and forth, holding the blow dryer like a gun in his right hand, he looked like something out of a bad gay cowboy movie. When he reached the sinks, he would stand in front of the mirror in only his shoes, his dick pressed against the formica of the bathroom counter, and he would smooth his hair back with his Goody plastic bristled brush.

Why he chose this method was extremely unclear to my brother and I. We had always put our socks and shoes on last, and so had everyone else we had ever seen. On top of that, this was the mid-eighties and I don’t think I could have fit my jeans over my sneakers if I wanted to. To my father’s credit, he was extremely consistent because he would remove the clothes in the same order in which he had put them on, until he was left standing only in the shoes and sporty socks, his dad dick dangling, it’s one eye looking down at those socks and wondering why they were still there when the pants had come off so long ago.

I was 13, it was my father’s fortieth birthday party, and my mom had done our house up with black balloons and all these banners and plates reading "over the hill" which had stick figures of men in wheelchairs careening down a straight line hill at alarming speeds. All of his friends showed up, and after cutting the black frosted chocolate cake that read "sporty at forty" (which somehow involved miniature inedible goalposts), it was time to open the presents.

Halfway through the process, someone (thankfully I’ve blocked out exactly who it was), handed him a dainty box that was obviously very light, and asked him to open it. He pulled the ribbon, took the top off the box, and what he removed was something that I had never seen before and hope to never see in my anyone’s hands again. He carefully raised up a pair of g-string underwear that had a black nylon tube sticking out of the front, obviously meant to encase the previously mentioned dad dick. Placed above the tube were two googly type eyes that were sandwiched between two flappy black ears. What he was holding was elephant faced, male thong underwear.

I was in awe, having never even considered such a thing. My father was beside himself, realizing that finally, after all these years of receiving gifts of shirts with sleeves and no pockets in the front, he had finally lucked into something he could use. He held the underwear up with both hands, stood, draped them across his face, and did a small dance. The crowd around him cheered and guffawed. When I turned to look at my mother she was standing in the corner, obviously taken aback, looking at me and waiting for my reaction. I did my best to look puzzled.

Later on, my dad opened another present, a tank top that had some sort of tropical scene on the back of it, and someone in his gallery of friends said "Hey, that’ll be good for showin’ off your muscles!"

My father turned to the man, not skipping a beat, and said "Yeah, but I’ll have to wear the elephant trunks to show off my biggest muscle."

I sat silent, wondering how he planned to get those dainty drawers over his sneakers without damaging the face of that poor, poor elephant.