Warning: Grandma Will Get You What You Ask For

When we were young, my brother Eric was our family's Eeyore -- pessimistic, rather gloomy.  Experience taught him early on that if something bad was going to happen, it was going to happen to him.  Most of the time it wasn't even his fault, he just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, fall victim to a misunderstanding, or suffer some other stroke of random misfortune like putting his arm through a window or sliding down a wooden bench and getting a foot long splinter embedded in his thigh. 

One Saturday afternoon when I was thirteen and Eric was nine, our dad came home with two bikes that were given to him by a friend whose kids had outgrown them.  One was a sleek metallic blue five-speed with a banana seat and hand brakes, the other was a small turtle-shit green K-mart model with coaster brakes and a basket on the handlebars.  In retrospect, Dad should've decided beforehand which of us was going to get which bike.  Maybe he was hoping it would work out naturally, but whatever the case, Dad committed one of the Cardinal Sins of Fatherhood -- he asked both of us which bike we wanted.  The result was not a surprise.

"I want the blue one," I said.

"No, I want the blue one," said Eric.

After several minutes of arguing back and forth, firing phrases like "I'm older, I should get it," and "No fair, you always get your way," at each other, Dad decided to flip a coin.

"Chris, you call it," he said.

"Why doe HE get to call it?" asked Eric.

"Fine, you call it then," I said.

"Heads," said Eric.

Dad tossed the coin, caught it, and flipped it over on the back of his hand.

"It's tails.  Chris, you get to pick your bike."

I'd like to say that I took this golden opportunity to be the bigger person, to set aside my own selfish desires and accept the turtle-shit green K-Mart clunker so my little brother could have the bike of his dreams, to be a thoughtful and caring big brother who Eric would look up to for the rest of his life.

But I think we all know what really happened.

"I'll take the blue one."

Eric, predictably, pitched a hissy fit and ran upstairs to our bedroom.  I felt guilty for about eight seconds, then I hopped on my bike and rode to my friend Paul's house, shifting gears the whole way.

A similar incident had occurred a few years prior only instead of bicycles, the subject was Halloween costumes.  Most years, our Aunt Patti took me, Eric, and our youngest brother Bobby to FAO Schwarz in New York to pick out really cool outfits to wear for Trick or Treat.  One year I was an astronaut, another time Eric was a snazzy-looking Canadian Mountie, and Bobby spent Halloween 1975 gathering Tootsie Pops and Milky Ways decked out as a four-foot tall Spiderman.

One year, though, all we had to choose from was the family's Costumes of Halloweens Past, those that were recycled year to year and passed along as hand-me-downs.  Bobby was a tiger, I was Batman, and Eric was a clown.

Eric, however, had absolutely no interest in being a clown.  He griped, he grumbled, he pouted.  To this day, no one is sure why he was so against the idea, but it may have had something to do with the time we were all kidnapped by Giggles McYukyuk at one of our mom's Cub Scout leaders' meetings.

It gets worse.

Not only did Eric have to don the clown suit, Mom insisted on stuffing the front of the costume with balloons so he resembled one of those inflatable punching bags.  As a result, Eric is the only child in Halloween history to sulk his way through Trick or Treating.

It also led to the most hilarious picture in our family's scrapbook:

So yeah, Eric always seemed to be the one getting the bum deal, which makes what happened on Christmas 1979 all the more pitiful.

Every Christmas, we'd wake up at the crack of dawn, roust our parents out of bed and storm downstairs to unwrap our presents.  Once the gifts were opened, Mom would whip up a batch of Pillsbury orange danish and we'd spend the rest of the morning playing with our new toys.  In the early afternoon, we'd drive across town to our grandmother's house for round two.

Traditionally, Grandma would give us each a stocking full of candy and small toys, a couple mid-level gifts (clothes were the most common in this category), and finally, our one "big" present.  Grandma had a fairly close relationship with Santa Claus, so we always knew that the main gift was going to be something really cool.  One year I got a complete set of barbells, another time it was a guitar, and when I got a bit older, I received a top-of-the-line Texas Instruments digital watch.

The 70's were a much simpler time.

So anyway, on the Christmas That Will Live in Infamy, we'd plowed through the preliminary presents and were ready for the main event.  Family policy required us to open our presents one at a time, so we all got to see what the others had received.  Also, it made the process last longer than twelve seconds.

"Okay, who wants to open their big gift first?" asked Dad, clearly forgetting about the bicycle incident of a year earlier.

"I do!" said Bobby.

"Me!" I shouted.

"Here we go again," muttered Eric.

Since there were three of us involved in this decision coin-flipping wasn't an option, so Dad wrote down the numbers 1, 2, and 3 on slips of paper and put them into a bowl.  Eric drew first and pulled out the number 3.

"What a surprise, I'm last," he said.

Bobby had drawn the number 1, so he retrieved his gift from under the tree and ripped off the red and gold wrapping paper.

"Cool!  A Johnny Lightning racing set!  Thanks, Grandma!"  He reluctantly set the box aside so he could watch me unwrap my present.

Mine was wrapped in green paper with snowmen all over it.  I tore it open, to reveal the gift I'd been asking for since August.

"An Atari video game set with five game cartridges!" I said.  "Pacman, Adventure, Kaboom, bowling, and Tank Battle!  This is great, thanks, Grandma!"

By this point, Eric was practically bursting with anticipation.  Seeing Bobby and I hit the jackpot with Johnny Lightning and Atari, he just knew his present was going to be something spectacular.  Taking his time, he removed the silver paper from the box, revealing his special gift.  It was exactly what he'd asked for . . .

A few months earlier, Eric and Mom were watching television when a commercial came on advertising an innovative new product.  It was an item that Eric did indeed have a particular need for, even if it wasn't something most ten year olds would have any interest in.  As kind of a joke, he said to Mom, "Hey, look at that, maybe Santa can bring me one of those for Christmas."  Mom, however, didn't realize he was kidding, so she passed this information along to Grandma who went out and bought Eric the gift he was now looking at with a puzzled and somewhat somber expression on his face.

The Foot Fixer, by Clairol.

Think about this for a minute.  Here's a ten-year-old kid who's just seen his brothers open a brand-new video game system and a racing set where you can actually juice up the cars and they rip around the track on their own.  It's Christmas, the highlight of every kid's year, and what does he have to show for it?

A flippin' Foot Fixer.

All things considered, the kid handled it pretty damn well.  He didn't burst into tears, he didn't throw the thing across the living room, he didn't look at Grandma and ask, "What the hell is THIS?"  He just let out a pathetic sigh and said, "A Foot Fixer.  Thanks, Grandma."

He wanted to cry, though, you could tell.

Here's the rest of the story.

Eric had flat feet.  He was always quick to point this out, and he often used it as an excuse to get out of doing household chores, kind of like a ten-year-old on disability.

"Eric, it's your turn to bring in the trash cans."

"I can't, my feet hurt.  I have flat feet, you know."

"Eric, it's time to set the dinner table."

"My feet hurt, I'll do it later.  I have flat feet, you know."

Truthfully, he did suffer through bouts with foot pain from time to time, especially at night while trying to get to sleep.  So when he and Mom saw the Foot Fixer commercial on TV, he thought it might be something that would help.

But not as his Christmas present.

The real victim here, though, is our grandmother.  She genuinely believed that Eric wanted The Foot Fixer, and once she realized how disappointed the poor kid was, that it was all a big mistake, she felt terrible.  I don't recall what happened in the aftermath, but I'm sure it involved taking Eric to Toys R Us and letting him pick out whatever he wanted.

But to be honest about it, The Foot Fixer wasn't a total loss.  If you filled it up with water and plugged it in, the resulting vibrations caused a tsunami that was great for capsizing our toy battleships.


Note: In no way is Grandma at fault for this.  She was absolutely the kindest, most thoughtful, and most wonderful human being to ever grace the planet.  Her role in the Foot Fixer Incident of 1979 was simply to provide her grandsons with whatever they asked for.  The misunderstanding was absolutely not on her.  No, the blame lies somewhere else entirely.

I'm looking at YOU, Mom. 


d

When in Doubt, Lie

As parents, we've seen it all.  Crayon scribbles on the living room wall.  Muddy footprints on the deep pile carpet.  Chocolaty smudges on the furniture proving that, despite claims to the contrary, MnM's do indeed melt in your hand.  Finding the perpetrator of such kiddie-crimes is usually pretty easy, especially if you only have one kid.  But I've always been somewhat amazed that, even in the face of irrefutable evidence, 98.3% of all children between the ages of two and eighteen will always give the lie a chance.

It was a Saturday morning, my son Ryan was not quite three.  I heard him tooling around in the living room, so I stumbled out of bed to see what he was up to and maybe fix us both a healthy breakfast of Cap'n Crunch and brown sugar cinnamon Poptarts.  When I got to the living room, I found him sitting on the coffee table, magic markers strewn about the carpet, looking like he was auditioning for Tatted Toddlers, inked to the elbows.

Okay, I'll admit it, I had to chuckle.  But then, putting on the "stern dad" face, I asked, "Ryan, how did your arms get like that?"

He looked me straight in the eye and said, "I didn't do it."

I'll say it again, the boy was TWO YEARS OLD.  So I have to wonder, at what age do children first realize that lying is an option?  Is it a survival instinct that they're born with?  Fight, flight, or lie your ass off?  Certainly they don't learn it from their parents.  We'd never lie to our children about anything, right?

Of course we would.  And the exact degree of bullshit varies depending upon the age of the child.  For example, up until the age of five, we lie to them like this:

"I know he might look a little different, but trust me, that's the same goldfish."

Not too long after the magic marker incident, Ryan and I were at a Fall Carnival at his preschool.  They had all sorts of games and activities for the kids.  Ryan wanted to try the traditional "throw the ping-pong ball into the bowl and win the goldfish."  Sure enough, on about his fifth try, he succeeded, making us the proud owners of "Mr. Krinklebine," the slightly unhealthy-looking feeder fish.  We stopped by the pet store on the way home, and spent about thirty bucks on a bigger bowl, fish food, gravel, and the requisite ceramic scuba diver.  Two nights later, Mr. Krinklebine was floating.  Like any good parent, I went to the pet store and bought a new fish, flushed Mr. K., substituted the impostor, and all was well.  Over the next seven years, there were about twelve different Mr. Krinklebines.  Finally, when Ryan was about ten, he was the one to discover the body.  I explained the circle of life, and we gave him a dignified burial at sea.

There's a pretty funny footnote to this story.  Ryan never caught on.  Not too long ago, when he was about sixteen, he was reminiscing about the pets we've had.  "Hey, Dad, remember Mr. Krinklebine?  Man, that fish lived a long time, what, about eight years?"

I laughed my ass off.

"What's so funny?" he asked.

"Um, I hate to break this to you now, but there were about a dozen of him."

"What?  You lied to me about my goldfish?"

Absolutely.

As the kids get a bit older, we have to step up our game.  They're a little tougher to fool, but it can still be done.  Let's take a look at one of the classics: 

"Being a kid was a lot harder when I was your age."

Okay, sure, kids today have all sorts of conveniences that we never had.  Cell phones, the Internet, high-tech video games.  But let's be honest, it's not like our generation grew up in the 1850's, waking up at 4:30 in the morning to chop wood for the stove and slop the hogs.  We weren't shearing any sheep in 1977, that's for damn sure.  No, the fact is my childhood was pretty candyass.  I woke up at 7:30 in the morning, enjoyed a healthy breakfast of Lucky Charms and frosted strawberry Poptarts, and walked to school in seasonably-predictable weather wearing a sturdy pair of Keds.  If it was uphill at all, we didn't really notice.  On the rare occasions we were asked to do manual labor, like shoveling snow or raking leaves, we expected (and often received) a reasonable allowance.

And we sure as hell never had to worry about some cyber-bully taking a picture of us in the locker room and posting it on his Facebook page.  Our bullies were more traditional, goons like Danny Esposito who would wait for you after class just to give you a power wedgie that you were picking out of your butt crack all through fifth grade.  Not only that, the bastard would stalk you every day in the lunchroom, and swipe your Snack Pack chocolate pudding that your mom bought especially for you because she knew it was your favorite, but you never got to eat it, not once, because Esposito friggin' took it.  And then, in sixth grade, when you were giving your oral report on the Egyptian pyramids, he accidentally (but not really) dropped his social studies book on top of your Great Pyramid, the one that took you six hours and five hundred sugar cubes to make, and had to beg your mom to drive you to school that day so you didn't drop it while you walked.

That's all hypothetical, of course.

Once our kids hit the teenage years, successfully putting one over on them becomes darn near impossible.   Not only do our kids become insufferable lunatics, they also develop a healthy skepticism of our every word.  So their questions demand a much more sophisticated level of deception. 

"Of course not!  I never touched alcohol until I was 21."
"Of course not!  I never had sex with anyone until I was married to your mother/father."
"Of course not!  I have never tried any kind of drugs."

Answering our teenagers' questions about the things we did at their age always presents a dilemma.  On the one hand we want to be honest, in the hopes that they'll be honest in return, allowing us to have open dialogue about the dangers of alcohol, drug use, and sexual promiscuity.  But what if they use our history against us?  Maybe they'll think, "Well, my dad shot heroin, guzzled tequila and nailed an endless parade of disease-ridden hookers and he didn't turn out that screwed up," and see it as permission to experiment with those very things.  "You did those things, so why can't I?" they'll say, at least, that's what we're afraid of.

So we lie.  And try to fool our teenagers into thinking that we were tee-totaling virgins until the age of thirty.

Look, I'm not condoning dishonesty.  Sure, we have to take a few strategic liberties from time to time, but for the most part, as the cliche says, "honesty is the best policy."  We're better off teaching our kids to take responsibility for their actions and to be forthright when explaining their misbehavior.

I remember one time when I was about twelve, my brothers and I were goofing around in the backyard.  We set up a few tin cans on the porch, and tried to knock them over with rocks.  On my second or third shot, I winged one a bit too hard and shattered the kitchen window.  Naturally, I pointed the finger of guilt at my brother Eric, who adamantly declared his innocence.  In an effort to get to the truth, my dad put his hand on my shoulder, looked me in the eye and said, "If you just tell me the truth, you won't get in trouble."

Which was, of course, a lie.

s

The Art of Camping in the Rain

I was hanging out with my father not too long ago, reminiscing about some of the vacations we took when I was a kid, and I happened to mention a couple of our camping trips.  "You know, Dad," I said, "those trips to Bryce Canyon and Mesa Verde were great.  I remember them as being a lot of fun."

"What are you talking about?" he asked.  "You hated camping, always griping about the weather, the bugs, setting up the tent . . . "

I'm sure he's right, but now that I'm older, I've really come to appreciate the chilly nights in the wilderness, eating cold Dinty Moore beef stew, burning marshmallows on an open fire, and spraying each other with industrial-strength OFF! to keep the mosquitoes at bay.

Ah, memories.

We did a lot of camping at local state parks in Jersey, Voorhees and Hacklebarney in particular, but it was our two-week summer trips that provided the memories that have lasted a lifetime.  Here are a few of my favorites.

ZION NATIONAL PARK, UTAH
SUMMER 1976

As the sun broke through the clouds that fine Utah morning, my eight year-old brother Eric and I were sitting at the picnic table doing Mad Libs.

"Okay, I need an adjective," I said.

"Horse."

"That's a noun.  An adjective's a describing word, like 'big' or 'little'."

"Little."

"Well, that's just an example, you can pick a funnier one if you want."

"Disgusting."

"Okay, good."  I wrote it down in the Mad Libs book.  As I was writing, Eric reached into the Dunkin' Donuts box that had been left on the table overnight.  He grabbed a jelly-filled (his favorite), and took a bite.  As he chewed, I noticed a strange expression creep across his face, a combination of confusion and panic.  He looked at me, then down at the donut he was holding.

That's when it hit him.

Crawling out of the jelly hole came a swarm of tiny red fire ants.  In the meantime, their semi-chewed comrades scurried around inside my brother's mouth looking for an escape route, which Eric provided for them in the form of horrified gagging, spitting, and puking.

"Okay," I said, "Now I need a plural noun."

MESA VERDE NATIONAL PARK, COLORADO
SUMMER 1977

As you may remember from a story of mine involving the game Simon, my father is not a bluffer.  He did not make idle threats.  When he said, "If I have to come up there one more time, someone's not going to be sitting down for a week," we knew he meant business and we shut the hell up and went to sleep.  So anyway, one summer we were camping at Mesa Verde National Park, and Mom and Dad decided to take us across the campground to listen to an Indian guide tell stories by the fire.  Eric, however, wasn't all that excited about going so he basically whined the whole way.  Before long, Dad said, "Eric, if you don't quit complaining I'm going to pull the van over and you can walk back to the campsite."

Well, Eric didn't quit complaining.

As advertised, Dad pulled the van over to the side of the road and waited, presumably for Eric to say something like, "I'm sorry, dear father, I will never again express my reluctance to join the family for a fun-filled evening of Indian stories."

But that's not what happened.  What happened was, Eric decided to call Dad's bluff.  When the van came to a stop, Eric simply opened the sliding door, hopped out, and headed back to the campsite.  Actually, he was going the wrong way, but that became a moot point almost immediately.

I don't know how he did it, but in one fluid motion, Dad shut off the engine, climbed out of the driver's seat, circled the van, removed his belt, and served Eric a healthy portion of attitude adjustment.

We then proceeded to the campfire and listened to the Indians' fascinating legends.  Most of us sat on wooden benches, but Eric decided he'd rather stand.

BRYCE CANYON, UTAH
SUMMER 1974

This was the year my youngest brother Bobby had really long, curly blond hair.  My Dad got so tired of people saying, "What a cute little girl you have," that he actually spelled out the words I AM A BOY in black electrical tape on the back of Bobby's jacket.  A haircut might've been more practical, but I wasn't going to tell my Dad that.


HIGH POINT STATE PARK, NEW JERSEY
SUMMER, 1978

Our campsite that year was beautiful, lots of trees and it was set right on a lake.  We spent a lot of time fishing, mostly catching and releasing the same five sunfish.  One of those stupid bastards had about thirty-five holes in his upper lip.  But there was one fish, who we dubbed "Tuffy", that wouldn't go for the bait.  We tried everything; worms, bread, Kraft American Cheese.  Eventually, Eric was able to catch him by snagging the hook in his gills.

VARIOUS POINTS IN NEW ENGLAND AND EASTERN CANADA
SUMMER, 1975

The trip up to Nova Scotia was by far the most memorable of our family camping expeditions, and by "memorable" I of course mean "left deep scars that will probably never heal."  To begin with, it rained every day.  Now, most of the time when someone makes a statement like that, what they really mean is "it rained an awful lot."  It's an exaggeration, like when you say, "Diane is such a slut she nailed every guy in Kappa Gamma Phi," you just mean she's a whore who slept with a lot of guys, not literally everyone.  But rest assured, when I say "it rained every day," I mean that it rained every single fucking day.  For two weeks.

Rainy weather and camping don't really mix well.  You can't build a fire, and the muddy terrain leaves the tent stakes clinging desperately for some sort of stability.  It's too wet to do anything fun other than sit around in the tent playing checkers and doing more Mad Libs which gets really damn old after, oh, three hours.

There were other problems.  Somewhere in a town called (and I'm not making this up) Pugwash, we had car problems.  So Dad took me on a "side excursion" to the Pugwash Pep Boys  to pick up a couple air shocks.  We watched in amusement as Dad installed the new shocks in the pouring rain.  I think that was also the night my parents finally said "the hell with it" and booked us a room at a motel, which was really a series of cabins.  Here's some irony for you -- the cabins did not have running water.

Finally, around Day 12, the rain stopped for a couple hours and the sun peeked out from behind the clouds.  Naturally, my brothers and I begged our parents to let us go swimming in the lake.  My mom started to talk us out of it (the temperature was in the low 50's), but after we bitched and whined for fifteen minutes, my dad said something like, "ah, the hell with it, let 'em go in."

So we put on our swim trunks and waded in.  It was when I got in up to my knees that I realized that the water was about 33 degrees.  I immediately walked back to the gravelly beach, and it felt like my ankles were broken.  My brothers didn't last any longer.  My dad, however, was convinced that his sons were just a bunch of wimps, so he said something like, "you guys are just a bunch of wimps" and ran into the water.

Here's the beauty of the situation.  Since Dad had just called us wimps, he couldn't just dart back out of the water, although the look on his face indicated that he wanted to do just that.  He declared, "It's r-r-r-r-realy not s-s-s-s-so bad once y-y-you get used t-t-t-to it."

I've never seen my mom look so smug.

So Dad toughed it out for a couple minutes, and just before hypothermia set in he came ashore, having acquired a bright pink hue.  He quickly toweled off and wrapped himself in a warm blanket.

It immediately started raining again.


h

Brotherly Pranks, Part One: The Sandwich

It was a Saturday afternoon, the year was 1977.  My brother Eric and I were in the kitchen whipping up a couple of baloney and cheese sandwiches for our lunch.  Mom was at work, and Dad was in the cellar working on something.  Our youngest brother Bobby was lying on the couch, recovering from the common cold.

"Dad!  Can I have lunch?" Bobby yelled.  It was a small house.  Voices carried, even down to the cellar.

Dad called up, "Are you guys in the kitchen?"

"Yeah!" I hollered back.

"Make Bobby a sandwich, would ya?"

There's no way to sugar-coat this.  At the age of seven, our brother Bobby was a little shit.  Being the youngest, he took a lot of crap from me and Eric, but he dished it out pretty well too.  And now, with the support of our father, he had us doing his bidding.  He was more than eager to take advantage of the situation.

"You heard him,  slave boys.  Make my lunch."

Eric and I looked at each other.  "I'm not making it, not if he's gonna be a jerk," said Eric.

"Don't look at me, I'm not making that little twerp a sandwich."

"And hurry up about it!"  Bobby ordered.

Eric slammed his green army hat to the floor, and stomped over to the top of the cellar stairs.  "Dad, Bobby's being a jerk!  Do we really have to make his lunch?"

"Just do it, please!" Dad replied.

"Yeah, slave boys," said Bobby.  "Just DO it!"

Eric came back to the kitchen.  "This sucks."

By this point, though, a thought had occurred to me.  Dad didn't exactly say what KIND of sandwich to make for our smart-ass little brother.  "So, Eric," I said.  "Just what kind of sandwich do you think Bobby would like?"

"I don't care, baloney?"

"Okay, anything else you want to add?"

Eric's eyes narrowed, and a smirk crawled across his face.  "Uh, yeah, I think he might like some peanut butter on it, too."

I spread a thin layer of Skippy on the one slice of bread.  "What next?"

"Oh, I don't know," said Eric.  "Maybe some mustard?"

Out came the Heinz Spicy Brown.  We took a quick inventory of the refrigerator.  Catsup.  Horseradish.  American cheese.  Grape jelly.  Hey, with a name like Smucker's . . .

By the time we finished, Bobby's sandwich was loaded up pretty good.  We went extra heavy on the horseradish around the edges of the bread, so that first (and probably only) bite was going to be a doozy.  Then we used lettuce leaves and a couple extra slices of baloney to make the sandwich look "normal".  We put it on a paper plate, garnished it with some Lay's potato chips, and delivered it to our sickly brother.

"About time, slave boys.  Now get me a Dr. Pepper."

"Anything you say, your majesty," I answered, stifling a chuckle.

Eric and I went back into the kitchen and waited.

"AAAAGH!  What is this?!?  This is DISGUSTING!"  Ah, the joys of horseradish.  "DAAAAAAD!"

Our father thundered up the cellar steps.  "What's going on?" he asked.

"They made me a gross sandwich!"

We were still giggling when Dad confronted us in the kitchen.  "What did you guys put on his sandwich?"

"Actually, Dad," said Eric, "it would be easier to tell you what we DIDN'T put on his sandwich.  Milk."

We knew we were in the clear when Dad cracked a smile.  "Okay, okay, maybe he asked for it.  Can you guys make him a baloney-and-cheese-and-nothing-else sandwich now?"

"No bread?" I asked.

"Uh, yeah, bread too."

So we did.  You've never seen a kid eat a baloney and cheese sandwich more carefully.


o

Dad Never Bluffs

Dads don't bluff.

My brothers and I learned this valuable lesson as we were trekking down Interstate 95 on Christmas night, 1979.

Most Decembers of my childhood, we would visit my mom's parents in Orlando over Christmas vacation, leaving on the night of Christmas and returning after New Year's. In the winter of '79, we had been on the road for about five hours when the aforementioned lesson took place.

You see, that year my brothers and I received, courtesy of the "Make Parents Want to Stab Themselves With a Dull Pencil" division of the Milton Bradley Company, a game called "Simon". The object of "Simon" was to repeat, in exact sequence, the beeps, boops, and buzzes (accompanied by multicolored lights) emitted by the jelly donut-shaped game console. We'd been at it since about 5:30 that morning, and when my dad, in a move he would come to regret, said we could bring one toy with us on the trip to Florida, well, Simon was the obvious choice. In the back of the Chevy Nomad we sat, pressing buttons and racking up new high scores into the night.

We beeped our way down the Jersey Turnpike.

We booped through Delaware.

We buzzed past Baltimore.

We even blipped and bleeped across the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel.

In retrospect, and now being a father myself, I have to be honest and say my dad lasted a lot longer than I would have. But even so, somewhere in Virginia we hit DEFCON 1 on the Dad-o-Meter.

"If I hear one more (expletive) beep, I'm throwing that thing to the side of the highway!"

This would be as good a time as any to tell you a little bit about my youngest brother Bobby.

Bobby is five years younger than I am, which made him nine years old that particular Christmas. He is blessed with the gift of humor, the sincere desire to be all things to all people, and a good-natured personality that makes him almost impossible not to like and even harder to get angry at. At age nine he was not, unfortunately, endowed with much of an ability to think things through to their inevitable conclusion. So when Dad made the threat, let's just say that one of us was not on the same page.

"Come on, one more game, it's my turn anyway," Bobby whispered.

"You heard Dad, we have to stop," replied 11-year old Eric. He's the family equivalent of Switzerland.

"Just once. He won't really throw it away," Bobby insisted.

"He might not throw it away, but we'll get in trouble," I added. Keeping it real.

"I think he'll throw it away AND we'll get in trouble," said Eric, keeping it realer.

"Here, let me have it," Bobby said, and grabbed Simon from the van's table. Eric and I just looked at each other. Let the games begin.

BOOP.

Somewhere in Detroit, at Chevrolet's manufacturing plant, there is a man who was responsible for installing the braking system on the 1978 Chevy Nomad. Based on the immediacy with which my father was able to bring the vehicle to a screeching halt on the shoulder of I-95, I am certain that this gentleman at Chevy took his job very seriously, and undoubtedly earned Employee of the Year honors.

The sliding door opened. An outstretched arm and an open hand reached into the back of the van. Without a word, Bobby placed Simon in the hand. The arm withdrew. The door slammed shut.

When we next saw our father, he was standing in front of the van, illuminated only by the headlights. It was almost ethereal. Then, in one fluid, Jenner-esque motion, Dad wound up and discus-flung Simon into the night, abandoned, to beep its final boop in the woods outside Norfolk.

We drove the next 25 miles or so in dead silence, which was only to be broken by two words Eric muttered under his breath."Told ya."

Gene Simmons is Not a Satanist

"Paul Stanley is sick of KISS." - Paul Rudd, Role Models

I was in fifth grade when the the rock supergroup KISS exploded upon the American music scene in 1975, amid smashing guitars and blistering pyrotechnics. KISS actually formed in '73, but it wasn't until the release of the album Alive! that they became the pop culture/glam rock Gods that they remain to this very day.

Because of the timing, I went directly from being a fan of the Brady Bunch to a Love Gun-wielding soldier in the KISS Army. One would think that I could've transitioned through some sort of pop culture halfway house, say, the Partridge Family or the Bay City Rollers, but no. It was "Sunshine day, everybody's smilin'" one day, "It's cold gin time again" the next. It's probably a good thing the Bradys and KISS never overlapped in the public consciousness, because the Brady Bunch episode featuring Davy Jones would've had a whole different dynamic if the ex-Monkee had been replaced by circa 1975 Gene Simmons. I doubt Mrs. Brady would've been so enthusiastic about her daughter's "prom date".

After much begging and cajoling, my parents bought me the Alive! album for Christmas. I don't think my father had ever heard KISS's music at this point, he was more the Roger Miller "King of the Road" type, but KISS's Kabuki-makeup and blood-spitting, fire-breathing antics caused him to make some grossly unfair assumptions about the band's potential negative influence on his 10 year-old son. . .

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The first sign of trouble came when he walked into my room with "Nothin' to Lose" blaring through the speakers . . .

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Before I had a baby, didn't care anyway

Thought about the back door, didn't know what to say . . .

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He entered my room, hands covering his ears. "What's that crap you're listening to?"

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"Uh, the KISS album. Why?"

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"Thought about the back door?" he quoted. "What do you think that means?"

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"Um, he's trying to get her attention and she's not answering the front door?"

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Believe it or not, I was serious. I was a pretty naive kid, and it's not like I was analyzing the lyrical underpinnings of the Simmons-Stanley songbook anyway. That would come later, and boy, was I surprised when I found out what "Plaster Caster" was all about. But that one was still three albums away.

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"Yes, exactly right, he's ringing her front doorbell. Enjoy the music," Dad muttered as he walked out, shutting the door behind him.

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This was also about the time my dad heard the ridiculous rumor that the name KISS was actually an acronym for "Knights in Satan's Service", and that the band members were devil-worshipers. Come on, how could anyone believe such nonsense?

I patiently explained to Dad that, according to the February 1976 edition of the KISS Army Newsletter, Paul Stanley came up with the name "KISS" because it was a simple, one word moniker that everyone could identify with. Gene, Paul, Ace, and Peter were definitely not Satanists.

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But damn, Gene, you're really tough to defend sometimes.

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By the time Alive II came out three years later, I was a full-fledged KISSmaniac. I dressed as Peter Criss for Halloween, owned the entire KISS-cography, and faithfully scooped up any issue of Circus, Rolling Stone, or People (yep, People) magazine that the boys appeared in. I dreamed of the day that my Dad would let me attend my first KISS concert. It was a tough sell. Love Gun tour, 1978? Not a chance. Dynasty tour, 1980? No way.

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Eventually, however, I wore him down and he gave me the go-ahead.

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In 1996. The Reunion Tour. I was 31.

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By today's standards, KISS music is pretty tame. Double entendres abound, and no one's going to call Paul Stanley subtle ("You make me rock hard, baby all night. My love's a glove and you fit just right" is but one example), but compared to say, Eminem, even the most raunchy of KISS lyrics come off as fairly tepid.

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And I'm still a fan, the entire KISS catalogue downloaded on my iPod (even Music from the Elder, which sold about eight copies when it came out in '81). When my son was about ten, I recruited him into the KISS Army as well. Took him to a concert and everything.

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The boys are still touring, too. Sure, Peter and Ace have been given the boot (again), but Gene, Paul, and a couple other guys are still rockin' and rollin' all night and partyin' every day.

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Dad's still convinced they're the minions of Satan.