A Bad Idea I'm About to Do Read online

  “I don’t know, man,” he said. “Is it really worth it?”

  I jumped off the bench and threw my hands wildly in the air.

  “SHOT CLOCK,” I screamed. “REF! WHAT ABOUT THE SHOT CLOCK!”

  The ref ignored me.

  “Why won’t you pay attention to the FUCKING SHOT CLOCK?” I shouted.

  “Dude,” Gavin said. He shook his head, imploring me to calm down.

  I stared at him with steely resolve before turning back in the ref ’s direction.

  “Why do we even HAVE a fucking SHOT CLOCK?”

  The ref blew his whistle.

  I am the only player in the history of our charity sports league to be given a technical foul while on the bench.

  My closest friends are all people who have learned to laugh at me during these types of situations. Otherwise, it would probably be impossible for them to tolerate my semi-frequent outbursts of completely uncalled-for emotion. They’ve figured out how to roll with these particular punches but have often wondered aloud where my anger comes from, and are generally shocked at my answer. Especially if they’ve met my parents.

  For her part, my mother actually has no need to express outward anger, because she is very smart and skillfully passive-aggressive. My mother is Catholic, and that means she is a legitimate master of guilt inducement. I don’t remember her ever yelling at me when I was growing up, but I do recall being on the business end of the following choice statements quite often:

  “I thought I raised you better than that.”

  “I didn’t realize that I was so terrible.”

  And worst of all: “I just didn’t know you were that kind of person.”

  Usually, a heartbreaker of a line like that would be more than enough to put me in my place when I was acting out as a kid. But even when it didn’t, she never resorted to screaming or yelling.

  She’d simply say, “Okay . . . I’ll just tell your father about this when he gets home.”

  Most people who meet my dad immediately like him. “He just seems like a nice guy,” they’ll say. “A nice guy with a moustache.”

  In addition to the moustache, his defining characteristics are that he’s big (six foot two), slightly out of his element in social situations (but in an endearing way that’s accompanied by a goofy grin), and a national expert on water treatment. When we go on vacation, his first order of business is to taste the tap water.

  “Man, the pH is all off,” he’ll say, shaking his head. “I should go talk to these guys.” You can’t not love a guy who makes it his personal crusade to travel around America giving the locals slightly better drinking water.

  My father’s other interests include gardening, baking, and my mom. He’s like the big quiet friend everyone wants in life. I don’t feel cheesy saying I’m lucky he’s my dad.

  But like a suburban town that’s home to a serial killer, or a likable athlete who runs a dog-fighting ring, my father has a dark side.

  “Not your dad!” people say when I tell them my anger is inherited from him.

  Then I recount a tale that has been passed down through my family for thirty years—a tale of a wronged man out for justice. A tale of vengeance. A tale of my father.

  In August of 1980, I was three months old. My older brother was the tender age of two, and he was a bad sleeper. For my mom, this meant long sleepless nights that really took a toll on her. My father has always been incredibly protective of my mother, and seeing her exhausted and at the end of her rope made him even more so than usual.

  My parents had recently moved into the first home they owned, on Franklin Avenue in West Orange, New Jersey. It was nothing fancy. There was no front lawn, so the modest house sat right up against the road. The cracked driveway led to a cramped backyard. The interior was the same: small and cozy, an admitted fixer-upper.

  Both of my parents had grown up in the neighborhood and knew it well. The section of town it was located in was generally a good one, but had always had a rough element. Up the street was Colgate Park. For generations it had been a meeting ground for teenage kids—specifically, the type who liked to cause trouble—and around this time there was a notorious crew of burnouts who called the park their home base.

  My father became obsessed with launching into home improvement projects. This is how he’s been with every home he’s owned since. It pains him to hire anyone to do something he can do with his own hands. I think this gives him the sense that these houses aren’t just random buildings anymore—they’re really his.

  That’s probably why the door was such a big deal.

  The first alteration he made to the house on Franklin Avenue was to install a shiny, white aluminum door. After all, this was the brand-new entrance to his brand-new home. It was the literal gateway that would welcome visitors into the biggest and most important purchase he had ever made.

  Perhaps that helps explain the vigilante death spree my father embarked upon.

  A few nights after the door was proudly hung on its hinges, my parents were awakened at two in the morning by a terrifying crash. My brother woke from a rare night of sound sleep and screamed. I was up and crying as well. My father ran downstairs to discover that someone had kicked in his brand-new door. The first personal touch he put on his house had been destroyed.

  The next morning he got up and removed the battered door from its hinges. He took a hammer and went through the arduous process of flattening it into as much of its original shape as possible, and rehung it. But it was no longer pristine. It was no longer new. His home—his home—already had its first blemish.

  That night, the door was kicked in again. The results were the same: his months-old newborn screaming in fear. The baby’s two-year-old brother crying in confusion. The babies’ frazzled mother awake all night. And in the midst of all this frenzy my beleaguered father, who had to get up for work at the crack of dawn so he could feed the family that he felt he was currently failing to protect. Not to mention he was going to have to hammer out and rehang the goddamn aluminum door that some neighborhood kids found so hilariously kick-in-able.

  This happened every night for the next four nights.

  Maybe you can push a man only so far before he pushes back. Maybe something changes in his disposition once he has kids, something that makes him more prone to commit protective aggression and violence. Or maybe it’s that my father was only twenty-one when the Charles Bronson movie Death Wish came out and put into his head the idea that vigilante violence is a valid answer to life’s problems. I’m not sure. What I am sure of is that my father snapped.

  His first step toward retaliation was to build what can only be described as a lair. Good old “wouldn’t hurt a fly” Dad took a bunch of couch cushions and blankets and arranged them in a heap on our front porch. From the outside, it looked like a pile of garbage that was set on the porch to eventually be thrown out. Dad had decided to sit up all night, covered in these cushions and blankets, camouflaging himself, waiting for the teenage hooligans who had been causing him so much trouble. After five terrorized nights there was no reason to think they weren’t coming back. They didn’t realize that they had gone from predator to prey.

  Of course, that night they no-showed. My father’s hours of vigilance resulted merely in additional sleep deprivation.

  “This is making things worse,” my mother gently told him. “You can’t fly off the handle like this.”

  The next night, he slept in his bed, embarrassed about his extreme behavior.

  Needless to say, that night the teenage punks returned and kicked in the door.

  My dad now felt like a fool, convinced that the teenagers were purposely toying with him. His anger returned and intensified. Insane or not, he told my mother he would be spending that night back in his rage nest, waiting for his chance to exact swift vengeance on his family’s tormentors.

  At about 2:30 A.M., my dad was woken from a light sleep by the laughter of the approaching youths. Slowly, quietly, he got up on his
knees, making sure not to move so much that the kids would see him through the screens of the porch.

  He heard one of them walking up the steps. One step, two steps, three steps.

  Then, a crash.

  Before the kid could rear back his foot to kick the door again, my father erupted from his pile of bedding bellowing a primal, rage-filled, Braveheart-battle scream. Immediately, the kids all screamed back in shock and terror.

  In many ways, my father is not unlike a panda bear. First impressions of a panda are that it’s nice, quiet, and adorable. My dad is the same way. But an angry panda bear is still a bear. It will fuck you up. No man emerges unscathed from a battle with a fucking panda. Cute or not, it will tear you apart instantly. As mentioned, my dad’s six foot two and weighs in around 220 pounds. When in a good mood, he seems like a lovable goofball. A nice guy, as my friends have described him. When angry, he’s something else entirely—he’s an angry panda bear.

  The kids, about four or five of them, spun around and took off. But instead of simply being content with his terrifying ambush, my father flew out the front door, landed on the sidewalk, screamed again, and took off after them. The kids left him in the dust—initially. But what they couldn’t have known was that in high school my dad had played football. And his nickname was “the Dump Truck.”

  If a dump truck was sitting still, and someone asked you to outrun it once it started up, you could probably do so for the first hundred yards or so. It’s big and clunky and takes a while to get going. But give it just a minute to gather some steam, and then see what happens.

  These kids were being chased by a human, momentum-gathering Dump Truck. And that Dump Truck was being driven by the Angry Panda Bear.

  The kids made a left and cut through the gravel parking lot of Colgate Park, but to their surprise and terror the Dump Truck was right on their asses. They sprinted toward the outfield of the park’s baseball field in full panic. My father could see them, out in the open; they were like helpless gazelle loose on the plains. Sensing their fear, he sped up.

  But the kids had an advantage. They had spent a lot more time in the park at night than my dad had. What they knew, and he didn’t, was that each night the park’s caretakers strung a chain across the end of the parking lot so that cars couldn’t enter the park.

  In the dark the knee-high chain was basically invisible, and my father ran straight into it. Serving the same function as a tripwire set up in the jungle by malicious Vietcong or surprisingly inventive Ewoks, it sent the big man sprawling into the field face-first.

  It had recently rained, so when my father hit the ground he slid, face- and chest-down, ten feet out into the grass. There was a lot of mud on the field that night, and when he stood back up, he was covered head to toe in thick brown sludge. The kids, who must have been sure their freedom was at hand, could only stare dumbfounded as my father rose without missing a stride—his eyes and teeth now the only parts of him visible beneath the mud—and continued his pursuit.

  Colgate Park’s outfield goes uphill and is bordered by a large concrete wall. My father realized that in their panic, the kids were boxing themselves in against the wall. One by one they hit it, turned around, and saw he was still coming. When he got to them, they huddled next to each other, backs pinned against the concrete. They were terrified, and had every right to be. My father, covered in mud, was grinning like a lunatic and laughing with glee. His terrifying words didn’t match this joyous mood.

  He wheezed from the run while making eye contact with each of the kids.

  “I’M GONNA COME BACK HERE TOMORROW NIGHT,” he finally bellowed, “AND START CAVING IN SKULLS WITH A PIPE.”

  He then howled with laughter. He repeated the same sentence for three straight minutes, his hysterical laughter interrupted only by his rants and ravings about killing teenagers with a pipe.

  When the cops arrived my father was initially pleased to see them, until they drew their guns on him. It didn’t dawn on him that they might not be as concerned with disciplining scared teenagers as they were with securing the mud-covered madman joyously shouting about committing murder with a pipe.

  My old man quickly realized the severity of the situation and wisely cooled down. He explained to the cops what had been happening—the property damage, his two young sons and recovering wife, the multiple incidents of nighttime vandalism.

  The cops didn’t need to hear much. They were familiar with the park and the kids who loitered there. They told my dad to head home and turned their attention to the troublemakers.

  The next morning there was a knock on our door. It was one of the punks from the night before. His father was with him, and the kid was holding a brand-new door. He apologized profusely, unable to mask the unadulterated fear that my father, even when not covered in mud, now produced deep within his soul.

  The kid and his dad took down our severely beaten-up front door and installed the new one. The kid apologized again, and his dad assured my father there would be no further trouble. And for the five years we stayed in that house, there was none.

  I’ve never personally seen my father as mad as that story recounts. But I’ve often felt that mad myself. I suppose you could say that it’s the part of his legacy that lives on in me. I’m not physically intimidating like my dad. Sadly, I inherited the tiny, malnutritioned-looking Irish stature of my mom’s side of the family. I didn’t stand a chance of playing high school football. I don’t share my dad’s interest in tap water, either, and since I have a woeful inability to grow facial hair, his moustache shall unfortunately die with him as well. But his anger—his mud-on-the-face, murder-in-the-eyes anger—is something that will live on in our bloodline forever.

  My desire to tell embarrassing stories about our loved ones, meanwhile, is something I inherited from my mom. She’s also the one who taught me that in some cases these stories can continue to grow well after the events that inspired them. Especially since it’s best to leave out certain sensitive details until enough time has safely passed and everyone can look back and laugh about them.

  For this story, that length of time was twenty-nine years.

  It wasn’t until Christmas Eve of 2009 when, during a special holiday retelling of the story by my mother, she added a line none of us had ever heard before.

  “I was scared he was going to get arrested,” she said, “and that’s why I called the cops on him.”

  My father froze, a decades-old anger roaring back to life in his eyes.

  “You did what?” he asked. “You’re the one who called the cops on me?”

  “I thought you were gonna murder somebody,” she calmly said. “And I’m sorry, but I didn’t feel like raising two kids on my own.”

  Then we opened presents, like I imagine normal families do.

  Pa

  When I first started having panic attacks, or more accurately, when I finally started seeking treatment for them, my shrink told me I needed to find out if my family had a history of mental illness. That meant asking my mother to fill me in on any information she might have.

  “Well . . . ,” my mother said, shifting uncomfortably at our kitchen table.

  “Ma, it’s me, I don’t care,” I told her. “They just need to know.”

  “Let’s see . . . on my side of the family, a bunch of people are on antidepressants,” she said. “My dad never got treatment, but probably should have. And—”

  “And what?” I said. She was clearly trying to find a way out of the conversation.

  “Well, Pa was once in a mental hospital,” she told me, her shoulders slumping.

  It explained so much.

  We moved to Alan Street when I was in kindergarten. Even though the new neighborhood was just a few short miles from our old house, the differences were like night and day. We were in a better school district. The area was cleaner and safer.

  An added benefit—or, some would say, a severe drawback—was that the new neighborhood was full of members of my extended fami
ly.

  My maternal grandparents lived three blocks away. Two blocks in the opposite direction were my mom’s sister and her husband. Around the corner from us on Valley Way were my father’s amazingly talkative sister Joan and three of my cousins. And just around the corner were my paternal grandparents, Grammy and Pa.

  Living a stone’s throw from our grandparents was magical for my brother and me. Suddenly we could say and do no wrong. Instead, these wonderful old people actually applauded our misbehavior. They thought it was cute and convinced our parents over and over again that we shouldn’t be punished. My grandmother’s contributions to my diet consisted primarily of butterscotch and ice cream sodas. Her definition of candy was pretty liberal, too.

  “Grandma, can I have some candy?”

  “Of course, Chris. Here’s a spoon. There’s sugar in that bowl.”

  And so the good times rolled, until my grandmother died of a stroke in 1987 and Pa responded by what can only be described as “freaking the fuck out.”

  As an adult, I would learn that Pa and Grammy’s relationship was far more complex than it had seemed to me when I was a kid. According to my parents, Pa had been pretty dependent on Grammy for most of his adult life. During his middle-age years, anxiety about his work at Westinghouse led to a severe set of breakdowns, and that’s what landed him in the Overbrook Mental Facility in Verona, New Jersey. He bounced back, but a few years later he underwent a botched operation, and afterward became even more nervous and fearful. This time, instead of entering a hospital, he clung to my grandma. Even to my young eyes, it was clear that he was scared to leave her side. He depended on her for almost everything. And she stood by him faithfully. With her help, he was able to live a pretty normal life. Of course, as a seven-year-old, I wasn’t aware of any of this. I just knew that after my grandma died, Pa turned scary.

  The transformation was quick and pronounced. Pa showed up at our front door every day, looking helpless. Once inside, after grunting hello, he’d sit on the couch in our basement watching sports. He remained silent for hours at a time. Gregg or I would bring him his dinner every night, and he’d mumble a few words of thanks and send us on our way. Each night when I’d head to bed, the sounds of the TV reaching my bedroom reminded me that he was still there. Each morning, he’d be gone.