“Can I draw stuff?” I asked.
“What does that mean? What would you draw? I don’t want one of these guys walking up to you and you’re drawing two dogs fucking or something. I gotta be professional here.”
“I don’t know how to draw that. I just draw airplanes,” I said.
He opened up his black leather briefcase, grabbed a piece of lined notepad paper and a multicolored pen, and handed them to me. We got out of the car, and I followed him through the glass doors of a big university building and through the lobby to a lecture hall that was filled with doctors, all of whom seemed to know my dad. He introduced me to a few people and then took me over to the back row of chairs that stood about a hundred feet from the stage and podium at the front of the room.
“Okay, here’s your seat. Here’s a king-size Snickers. If you start to get sleepy, eat it,” he said, giving me a candy bar the size of my forearm. “All right. I gotta go do my shit.”
The doctors filed into the rows, took their seats, and the conference started. My dad sat up onstage while some other guy with a giant forehead starting talking. About two minutes in, I had already devoured the entire Snickers bar and was beginning to feel the effects of the thirty-five grams of sugar that were making their way into my bloodstream. Every minute of the lecture felt like an hour. I couldn’t sit still and decided I needed to get on the ground so I could blow off some steam where nobody could see me. I crawled down onto the floor right as I heard the man speaking introduce my dad. I popped my head up, and as I did, I saw him, a hundred feet away, staring at me intensely, as if he had been tracking me the entire time. I quickly ducked back down behind the chairs in front of me.
As I crouched on the ground, I realized that I could fit in between the legs of the chairs, and that each row contained a few chairs that were empty. I thought it would be a really fun game—and no bother to anyone—if I crawled on my hands and knees, from my row in the back, to the front row, using the empty chairs to advance forward. I carefully began my journey, crawling laterally, underneath the unsuspecting rears of oncologist after oncologist, until I reached an open chair in the row in front, and then I’d move forward a row. It was like a real-life game of Frogger. And I was doing pretty well until I’d advanced seven rows forward and realized there were no more open chairs in front of me. But when I turned around to go back, I saw that someone had filled in the one empty chair in the row behind me. I was stuck.
The sound of my dad’s voice over the speaker system sounded like the voice of God, if God were talking about molecular biology. I decided my only shot at getting back to my seat was to crawl over the feet of the fifteen or so doctors who sat between me and the aisle, where I figured I could get really low to the ground and slither back to my chair without my dad spotting me. Unfortunately the doctors didn’t share my determination to hide my antics and did not play along as if nothing was happening. Instead, they stood up one by one as I tried to crawl past, whispering expressions of irritation to one another. And although I was on the ground and couldn’t see anything, I heard my dad abruptly stop speaking. He knew something was up. I froze. When he started speaking again, I thought I was in the clear and forged ahead—until I accidentally smashed my knee into the loafer of a bearded guy sitting two seats from the aisle.
“Ah—God—this is ridiculous!” he huffed through his whiskers.
My dad stopped speaking again. I slowly crawled out past the last chair, then turned my head toward the stage, where he was staring right at me, along with everyone else.
The lecture hall was completely silent as I stood up, pretending nothing at all had happened, and walked back to my seat, averting my eyes from the room full of disbelieving gazes. I sat back down in my chair. After a couple moments, my dad began speaking again. His face was bright red and looked like a dodgeball with a furious frown and angry eyebrows. Suddenly his lecture on thyroid cancer had the same inflection as a coach tearing his football team a new one at halftime.
My dad ended his talk quickly and rushed through answering a couple of questions. As the audience applauded, he hopped down off the stage, choosing not to use the stairs. He made a beeline toward me, ignoring all the doctors who stood up to chat or compliment his lecture. He picked me up by my belt from the back of my pants like he was holding a six-pack of beer, pushed through the doors to the lobby, and then outside into the light. He carried me like that all the way to the car, opened the door, and tossed me in the front seat. He got in the driver’s seat, where he took a few deep breaths, the veins in his neck bulging with anger. Then he turned to me and through clenched teeth yelled, “Fucking hell! All I asked, goddamn it, was that you sit still for a couple hours while I lectured on thyroid cancer!” He peeled out of the parking lot and drove us home in complete silence.
When we arrived at our house, he opened the front door. I was standing next to him on the doormat when he turned to me and calmly said, “Listen, that was not a place where a kid should have been. I get that. But I’m going to go inside this house, and you are not. You are going to play outside of this house, because right now, my fucking head is going to explode.” Then he closed the door, and I stood outside, not sure what to do. From inside the house, I heard an echoing scream, “FUUUUUUUUUUCCCCCCCCCCCCCK!!!!!”
About an hour and a half later, he poked his head out the back door. I was sitting in the grass in our backyard.
“You can come on in if you want,” he said. “Also, wash your hands before you touch stuff. That conference hall floor smelled like dog shit and you were crawling around like a little monkey on it.”
On Finding Out I Didn’t Make the Little League All-Star Team
“This is bullshit. All the coaches just put their kids on the team. That shit bag’s son isn’t worthy of carrying your jock strap…. You don’t wear a jock strap? What the hell is wrong with you, son?”
On Dropping Me Off at School
“Your friends’ parents drive like assholes. Tell them it’s an elementary school parking lot, not downtown fucking Manhattan.”
On Getting a Dog
“Who’s going to take care of it? You?…Son, you came in the house yesterday with shit on your hands. Human shit. I don’t know how that happened, but if someone has shit on their hands, it’s an indicator that maybe the whole responsibility thing isn’t for them.”
On Showering with Regularity
“You’re ten years old now, you have to take a shower every day…. I don’t give a shit if you hate it. People hate smelly fuckers. I will not have a smelly fucker for a son.”
On LEGOs
“Listen, I don’t want to stifle your creativity, but that thing you built there, it looks like a pile of shit.”
On Bring-Your-Dad-to-School Day
“Who are all these fucking parents who can take a day off? If I’m taking a day off, I ain’t gonna spend it sitting at some tiny desk with a bunch of eleven-year-olds.”
On My Sixth-Grade Parent-Teacher Conference
“I don’t think that teacher likes you, so I don’t like her. You ding off more shit than a pinball, but goddamn it, you’re a good kid. She can go fuck herself.”
On My First School Dance
“Are you wearing perfume?…Son, there ain’t any cologne in this house, only your mother’s perfume. I know that scent, and let me tell you, it’s disturbing to smell your wife on your thirteen-year-old son.”
On Being Afraid to Use the Elementary School Bathrooms to Defecate
“Son, you’re complaining to the wrong man. I can shit anywhere, at any time. It’s one of my finer qualities. Some might say my finest.”
On My Last-Place Finish in the 50-Yard Dash During Little League Tryouts
“It kinda looked like you were being attacked by a bunch of bees or something. Then when I saw the fat kid with the watch who was timing you start laughing…. Well, I’ll just say it’s never a good sign when a fat kid laughs at you.”
“You have shamed the entire scientific community. Fucking Einstein, everybody.”
I’ve never been very good at math or science. I enjoyed the stories embedded in history and literature but lost interest when it came to periodic functions and the table of elements. So in sixth grade, when each member of my class was responsible for creating an experiment to show at the school’s science fair in late April, I felt about as excited as I’d feel today if I were told I had to attend a live reenactment of the entire first season of
Grey’s Anatomy
. My dad, on the other hand, was thrilled. He had spent the past twenty-five years performing medical and scientific research.
“Now you can get a glimpse into what my life is like every goddamned day,” he told me the night I received my assignment. “I’m going to be on your ass every step of the way. You will have the greatest science experiment that school has ever seen, or you will fucking die trying.”
“Will you do it with me?” I pleaded.
“What? No, I already do it all the goddamned day on my own. That’s what I just told you.”
He took a seat on our living room couch and motioned for me to take a seat next to him.
“Now, experiments start with a question. What do you want to know?”
I thought about it for a few seconds.
“I think the dog is cool,” I said, motioning toward Brownie, our five-year-old chocolate Lab mix.
“What? What the hell does that mean? That’s not a fucking question.”
“What if I said: Do people think the dog is cool?”
“Jesus fucking Christ,” he said, rubbing his temples. “Think of a question like Do larger objects fall faster than smaller ones? Something like that.”
“Okay. Well, can the question be something about the dog?”
“It can be about whatever the fuck you want. Okay, you’re stuck on shit with the dog, so how about this: Can dogs recognize shapes? How does that sound?”
It sounded good. I loved Brownie, so I was glad he could be part of my experiment. My dad helped me outline exactly how the experiment would work. Basically, every day I would hold up in front of the dog three pieces of paper, each of which had a drawing of either a triangle, circle, or square. I would give him a treat every time I held up a circle, tell him to sit every time I held up a square, and do absolutely nothing every time I held up the triangle. After fifteen days of training, I’d perform two days of trials when I’d hold up the drawings of the shapes without giving any of the corresponding rewards. The goal was to see whether or not he’d respond to the shapes in anticipation of the actions that had followed during the lead-up to the trials. I was supposed to record my findings in a journal throughout the entire seventeen days.
When I did my “research” the first day, it was really boring. The dog didn’t understand what was going on; he just stared at me while I held up the pieces of paper, and occasionally licked himself. He mostly just wanted to play, so I started running around the backyard, having him chase me, until I got tired. My dad worked late every night, so he didn’t know I wasn’t following through with my experiment. He’d check in from time to time, and I’d tell him my research was going fine. I just assumed I had plenty of time. As long as I started seventeen days before we had to turn in our findings at school, I’d be fine. But then I forgot about the experiment altogether.
One afternoon, the teacher reminded us our experiments were due in three days, and my stomach dropped. My mom picked me up from school that day, and when we got home I ran into my bedroom and shut the door. I took out my journal and began making up fake results from my nonexistent tests, complete with fake corresponding dates. I figured that a sly way of hiding my laziness was to report that the dog had slowly started to recognize the shapes toward the end of the experiment. Then when I did the trials without the rewards, he’d reacted in such a way that I knew he recognized the shapes. I remembered hearing a story about Pavlov’s dogs. Pavlov sounded like a madcap scientist, and this experiment sounded like one he might even have performed himself. This was enough reasoning for me.
My dad happened to get home early that day, and I heard him barrel through the front door right as I finished writing up the last of my “findings.” I threw my pen across the room to get rid of any evidence of my fraud. Almost as if he knew what I was up to, my dad immediately came into my room.
“How goes the science life?” he asked on cue.
Before I could answer, he saw my journal and picked it up.
“All the data is in there, Dad.”
He was no longer paying attention to me, just perusing the data. After turning the pages and digesting my results for a minute, he set my journal down on my desk and looked at me.
“So the dog recognizes shapes, huh?”
“Yeah, it’s weird,” I said, trying to sound ambiguous.
“Yeah, that is weird,” he said. “You obviously don’t mind then if I run a little test on the dog, just so I can see for myself,” he added.
At that moment I went a bit numb. All I could think was that maybe somehow, some way, the dog would know the shapes and react how I had written down that he reacted. My dad grabbed the crumpled pictures of the shapes from the floor of my room and walked outside.
“Sometimes the dog doesn’t do it, though. It depends on how he’s feeling and stuff,” I said, trying to cover myself for any possible outcome.
My dad wasn’t listening. He called the dog’s name, and Brownie ran over toward us. My dad proceeded to hold the first shape, a triangle, in front of Brownie’s slobbering face. According to my “data,” Brownie was supposed to do nothing when he saw the triangle. Which he did. Unfortunately that was also his reaction to the circle and the square, which he was supposed to react to by sniffing my hand, in anticipation of a treat, and sitting down, respectively. Brownie ran off, and my dad turned to me. He looked me in the eye with an eerie sense of calm.
“I’m going to give you a chance right now to tell me anything you want to tell me,” he said.