Sometimes when I am bored, I like to remember stories from my childhood, and think all the reasons I can blame my parents for fucking me up. I guess it relaxes me.
This one is for you Dad…
The summer before the 8th grade, my two best friends and I were supposed to go on a 2- week “Outward Bound” adventure. My mom was going to be spending the month at Midlebury college in a language immersion program, my brother was in Hungary, and the plan was that my Dad would have the house to himself while all 3 of us were gone.
You see my dad is a workaholic. But he is a professor not a businessman, so it is not the classic scenario of “hey honey I don’t have time for you because I am jet-setting to this meeting in Dubai.” He is often times still in in the house, but he just doesn’t have time for you because he is so lost inside the brilliance of his own mind.
His work is to think. My bedroom used to be right next door to my dad’s office growing up, and every night I went to sleep with the sounds of his “clickity-clacking” on the computer, furiously writing down all the thoughts he thought that day.
Soooooo… the night before I was supposed to go to camp, it was just me and my dad and my cousin who was staying the night. My mother and brother were already gone. I decided it was a good time to show my cousin how I had recently learned to do a backflip on the trampoline. We went outside and bounced for a few hours as dusk turned to night. I decided I would do one more flip before we went inside, and that is when it happened. We heard an earsplitting “snap” as I landed wrong on my ankle.
Toni: Uh oh. That didn’t sound good.
My Cousin Marta: It sure didn’t.
I went inside to tell my dad, and he accused me of lying. He said I was faking it so I didn’t have to go to camp. Now…. Did I want to go to outward bound? Not really. But my best friends were going and I wanted to be with them!
Toni: Dad… look at my ankle. It so swollen it is thicker than my knee?? How could I be pretending that?
Dad: Well then you did this on purpose!
Toni: Ummmmm… yeah. I don’t think I did.
Dad: Why don’t you sleep on it? I am sure it will be fine in the morning.
As I lay awake, unable to sleep from the intense pulsing pain, I began to think “holy shit… this shit is fucked up.”
Now I feel for my dad. He was looking forward to having the time to live inside his own mind. What was he going to do with a 13-year old gimp?
But the next morning my ankle was worse than before.
My Dad: I guess we should to go the hospital.
We got to the hospital and the Doctor came in to check me out.
Doctor: Jesus, Mary, and Joseph. This happened yesterday? Why didn’t you come in earlier?
My dad and I stayed silent for that one.
The Doctor told me I had torn my Achilles and that I need to be on crutches until it healed. He then gave me a prescription for codeine.
I guess this is when things started to get kinda weird. I was taking the painkillers, and then entered into a deep codeine-induced depression. I only ate frosting for 3-weeks, and sat on the couch and listened to JAMN’ 94.5 all day because we didn’t have a TV. It was then I realized that radio stations really only played a rotation of 25 songs. My dad and I will forever know every word to “Girl I Want to Make You Sweat (Push It Some More),” “Look At Those Girls with The Daisy Dukes On,” and “Do The Ditty” because of that fateful time. (Need I explain that all these gems were not so subtle euphemisms for gratuitous raunchy sex acts).
It was also during this time that I faced true loneliness. Because my dad worked all the time, and my friends were gone, I was just stuck – paralyzed by my situation. It forced me to to travel into the recesses of my own subconscious, and deal with the deep existential angst of the self. I also discovered that you can in fact survive on nothing but sugar and processed fat, but after awhile you may want to put the frosting in the freezer to change up the texture.
At some point we had to go to upstate New York to go to the Opera. My grandmother had invited my mom and dad, and I had to go in my mom’s place. Now maybe I was an uncultured teenager, but I thought the Opera was boring as fuck. Our seats were in the balcony, so I had to crutch up 1,000 steps to get there, and in order to keep my foot elevated during the 3-hour performance my dad had to hold my leg up inches from the face of the guy sitting in front of us. Then we went back to the hotel to watch a marathon of Sally Jessie Raphael – where we witnessed a lot of paternity tests and “bad girls” being sent off to boot camp.
So maybe this wasn’t an ideal couple of weeks for either of us. But I also think my dad and I learned a lot about each other and the world. Like how 13 year old girls probably shouldn’t take low grade narcotics, Daisy Dukes are a fine strategy for attracting gentlemen, and who the father was.
