Update on the Happy Meal, the post and the thing itself. The toy that came with it has been getting some action sitting on the counter. The basketball is hard plastic and bounces surprisingly well off the counter and floor. The plastic has a small seam in it that when it hits every so often sends the bounce crazy to the side. The action makes the shot on the Elmer Fudd hoop difficult to make at any distance beyond point blank. I’ve got a little scoring system for Elmer Fudd hoops:
If you make the shot and his hat flies off, that’s three points. If you make the shot and his hat doesn’t fly off or not all the way off, that’s two. If his hat flies off but the shot doesn’t go in, that’s one point. Bonus scoring play, if you make the shot, his hat flies off and the hat goes through the hoop, all the way through, that’s four point. First one to ten, but not sudden death, the other player still gets a chance to tie or win.
The movie looks terrible by the way. LeBron has been entertaining as hell to watch play basketball over his career. His awkward, sometimes disastrous media interactions (taking my talents to South Beach!) have also been entertaining, but not for reasons that translate well to the big screen. The dude is just sort of wooden and laconic (shout out to clone nation). Not at all like Jordan, who was good looking and super smooth. The outtakes from the Space Jam pickup games that were in the Jordan doc are great. The movie itself is okay. It starts with Jordan playing baseball, and that was real!
I don’t want to see the new one, but with the kids it could prove tricky to avoid. I will try! But I cannot say for sure that Space Jam: A New Legacy will not be the topic of a future XulaDad.
Somehow the boy got it into his head that road trips meant he got to stop at McDonald’s and get a Happy Meal, which had a toy in it. The toy was all he cared about, but to underestimate the degree of that care was a mistake. He was persuasive in a petulant and unacceptable way, throwing a fit, crying, then refusing any request I made, like for him to eat. He may have been buckled into a kids’ car seat, with limited ability to cause trouble, but the trip had been smooth, with him and his brother absorbing content through their screens and headphones in bliss, and me with my podcasts and recent albums by aging rock stars from my youth, with names like Gibbons and Nielsen. I was about the eldest’s age when I would pass time on road trips with hits recorded by those same names playing through the earphones of a Walkman. I hadn’t had a screen, just music and printed materials.
I didn’t mind the content on their screens, even if I knew the consecutive hours they spent on it on road trips scrambled their brains somewhat. I could tell it did when they didn’t notice we’d arrived somewhere, even home. That never happened with books and Walkmans. But the shows themselves that they watched were pretty good, scripted TV serials mostly. The plots may have been ridiculous and the dialogue corny, but at least the shows had plots and dialogue. The damage was limited compared to the content available with WIFI. Without streaming, social media, or YouTube, the worst they could do was to OD on bad scripted animation. These were my considerations. They were happy with the options they had. Watching those shows was what they’d have chosen to do at home anyway; this was just much more of it. I’d limited their access to social media, Youtube, and video games, and so far it had worked. They didn’t clamor for any of it, and that thrilled me, and surprised me. Even I’d been enthralled by video games at their age, growing up in the Atari and arcade era. Knowing how far games had developed since then, especially portable versions which would’ve been Mattel electronic football for me, and how immersive and addictive they were, I admired my kids for avoiding that road, not knowing how long it would last. It was the eldest. He was the one captured by narrative — stories, books, worlds, characters, mythologies, legends. Games had some of those elements, but he got it from books, and his brother followed his lead, mimicking his older brother’s reading skills as he developed them for himself. The eldest wasn’t into video games, so the younger wasn’t either, and that worked well for the moment.
The trip was going smoothly, so while I could’ve played the tough hand and made the younger suck it up and have whatever lunch we could find, I wanted to get him McDonald’s. I wanted to reward him for handling the long drive well. I wanted to make him happy because seeing him happy brought me joy. I spoiled him when I could. I still vaguely recalled the feeling of having my imagination completely captured by a toy, of having an idea in my head of what it might be like, if I could have it, hold it, play with it, of holding that idea up to the reality of it, should I ever get the chance. Even cheap plastic toys in bright colors and poly bags. Sometimes especially those. Maybe they seemed more within one’s grasp, more tangible somehow, more powerful. If I could recall even a small bit of that feeling in my heart, then how could I deny the boy, knowing how soon all that would go away?
Happy Meals themselves and their unknown joys within, I could recall quite well, having been around the younger’s age upon their introduction. I had wanted the cardboard box with the little handles and the mazes and word games on the sides, and to find out whatever the prize was, the toy, suspecting it to be worthless, even then, even as the boy might have himself. Still, the desire of it, the want for it to reveal itself to me. Who could control that as a child? Who would want to?
Save for the Happy Meal, though, it made little difference to me which fast food restaurant we stopped at. Stopping at one was one of the excitements of the trip. I wasn’t going to pack along some healthy alternatives. I had already accepted that we’d stop at one, and that we’d all eat some corporate meat product that I knew to be harming our bodies, our communities, our land, water, air. Our economy, our basic social fabric, were being eroded by the relentless greed and lack of ethics, perhaps an inability by definition to even possess ethics, of huge corporations, fast food just one among them. McDonald’s, one of the crown jewel models of American capitalism, had made themselves into an inescapable presence in our lives by appealing to our own evolutionary cravings of fat, salt, and sugar, then turning them against us through ruthless business practices, mind-warping ads and, all generous farm subsidies and trade policies. Citizens paid into and supported this model voluntarily, championing it in some cases, showering it with additional riches and cultural significance, all for the ability, the right, to purchase cheap, empty calories and to consume them in large quantities, anywhere across the land. Did knowing or believing all that to be true make me hate McDonald’s? No, not really. I still enjoyed their food. I ate it infrequently, but I couldn’t claim to dislike it. I hadn’t packed any nut sandwiches for myself either, after all? Did knowing it make me hate America? A voice on the radio had just been saying that radical leftists wanted to teach children to hate America by focusing on the horrible truths of its history. I wasn’t going to try to tell my kids the truth about McDonald’s. I did tell them that we couldn’t eat it too often because it wasn’t the healthiest food. That was how we’d arrived at the situation we were in — the road trip was the sometimes for it. I hadn’t counted on the stop necessarily having to be a McDonald’s, but that was where we were, as I scanned the blue signs near highway exit ramps for gold arches on a red background.
I didn’t need to look for long, as soon we were soon slowing down somewhere between Atlanta and Montgomery. The restaurant was in view and the turn in was smooth, but the parking lot revealed a large crowd. Every spot was taken, and a line of cars waited just to get through. Were they trying to get In or out? I couldn’t tell. People filed in and out of the doors. They couldn’t get through either. Who were they? They couldn’t have all been interstate travelers, although the road, and gas stops, had been filled with vacationers, beach or mountain bound, noted by their vehicles, gear, and group sizes. But the scene at the restaurant didn’t look like that. Their vehicles, gear, and group sizes seemed to indicate that they just lived there, within a short drive of that McDonald’s. It was noontime and they were just getting lunch. They weren’t on a road trip with a kid who only had a Happy Meal toy on his mind, and two other people who just needed something to eat, one of whom was a vegetarian.
“We can’t,” I said plainly, already turning hard to the right to avoid entering the parking lot. “I’m sorry. It’s too crowded.”
“We can’t go to McDonald’s???” the younger exclaimed. “Aww, no!!!” I could see the flailing and head drooping from the rear-view mirror.
We had passed a Burger King just before that had a big, yellow and red playground in front. I knew it was a longshot but I threw it out anyway: “What about Burger King? It’s right here, not crowded, and has a big playground!”
“Aww, no!!!” the younger exclaimed again with more flailing.
Now his brother chimed in: “He only cares about the toy!!!” he yelled. “Burger King doesn’t have toys!”
“They might,” I said. Didn’t they used to?
“Burger King doesn’t have toys!!!” the eldest yelled again. “Everybody knows that!!!”
This was the vegetarian, who would only eat french fries from wherever we stopped, now yelling at me in support of his brother, whose request he knew to be unreasonable, but which he accepted as his brother’s way. It frustrated him at times, but he defended his younger brother’s right to his own autonomy. It was a dynamic they shared as brothers that was separate from their relationship with me. The yelling, I had tried hard as I could to model against, but it was undeniable that in some sense they were the people I had raised them to be, I and their mother, separately.
“Alright,” I said. “We’ll keep going until the next McDonald’s.”
“That won’t be hard, dad,” the eldest said, voicing my exact thought. “Almost every sign has McDonald’s on it.”
He could read the blue interstate signs and probably had been doing so for years. He knew just about as much as I did, that on certain stretches of interstate in the south, McDonald’s was often the only “Food” on those blue signs. What he likely didn’t know was that on some in particular, the other was Blimpie.
There was a McDonald’s at the next exit, and the parking lot was less crowded. We parked near the door and went in. The boys wore masks, but no one else did, except for some of the staff. One woman was ahead of us in line, two men in neon yellow t-shirts waited to the side, holding drinks. Three more neon-clad men came in behind us. The woman ahead moved aside and we stepped forward.
“Take you order?”
The young clerk made brief eye-contact before shifting his glance to the side, then to the other side. I told him the order, which he punched in and which appeared on a screen visible to me as he did so.
“Does that complete your order? Does it look right on the screen?”
The total was under twelve dollars. He tore the receipt and passed it to me with two fingers through a gap in clear plexiglass, along with three cups, without ever looking at me again. His was a job that was automated in many restaurants around the world.
The boys couldn’t agree on a table. I needed to use the restroom and didn’t want to bring them in. I thought that having them seated at one table together would be safer while I left them unattended, but when they started yelling about why they didn’t want to sit at the other’s chosen table, I abandoned my efforts, set the cups on a third table, and went to the restroom. When I came out, they had settled on the third table. None of the people who’d been waiting had gotten food, even after I’d filled drinks and returned them to the table with their snapped lids and wide, durable plastic straws of yellow pinstripe. I didn’t begrudge the wait or the workers preparing the food. The work was hard, pay low, hours long. The public contained significant percentages of a-holes and idiots, a smaller but still significant number who were both. It was unfortunate that the lack of general affability created an atmosphere that felt more tense than it need be, for a restaurant or any place of business. The customers, even with the percentages, could still have been pleasant, more patient, kinder, with just a basic greeting and acknowledgement of humanity. But the job didn’t include smiles, as much as corporate powers may have tried to instill it. The work, the hours, the insecurity, the harsh reality of the life that the meager pay afforded all worked against basic humanity, one’s own and others’. This dynamic was coupled with racism, blatant and subtle, but real, and a heightened racial dynamic stoked, amplified, argued about in media. The workers were of varied ethnicities, as were the customers, but the general sense of agitation that permeated the interactions could not be teased apart from the racial reality that we all lived in.
When my number was finally called, the woman handed it to me with no additional words, and no eye contact. I brought it to the table only to discover no ketchup in the bag. I walked back to the counter and drink area, and scanned for some. The pandemic had ended the pumps that had long dispensed the stuff via paper pill cups, and self-serve packets had vanished long before then. One had to speak with a clerk. The counter was clear as people who’d ordered stood back awaiting their numbers to be called. But the woman was very busy, and she apparently avoided all eye contact with people standing at the counter as practice. She must have been used to voice interjections, probably not polite ones, to get her attention, but I thought it might improve her day ever so slightly to have her attention gained by eyesight ahead of a verbal request for ketchup, despite my irritation at the extra steps needed to obtain ketchup for fries that came by the bag-load in every order. She must have known that easier public access to ketchup would have improved her shift, but she was likely prevented from acting on this knowledge by corporate policy. The reduced interactions may have even allowed her to put a little more of herself, such as with eye contact, into each of them. But as it was she wasn’t budging. I was about to raise a hand a speak, but I’d been standing there long enough for another worker, wearing a different uniform, maybe a manager, filling iced tea canisters, to step in and answer my sauce-based request, smiling as he did so.
Now contented, the younger sat with his legs crossed, eating his McNuggets in small bites. He would wait for the car to open the toy, a tie-in to the new Space Jam, which he hadn’t seen. His plan, unspoken beyond flails and cries, yet fully realized in his mind, had come to pass. I was happy to see him like that. It reminded me of how I used to feel when I finally got a hold of one of those chunky plastic Happy Meal toys, savoring it, stretching it out, knowing its thrill was limited. The pickles and onions of the cheeseburger I chewed as I watched him reminded me of being a kid, too.
That man on the radio had it all wrong. I wanted my kids to enjoy McDonald’s the way I had. I didn’t hate the country that brought us that. But those workers didn’t need to be in such sorry states, nor did the customers whose own lives were harried, short on lunch breaks and cash. That McDonald’s at the previous stop didn’t need to be the only affordable option serving lunch in that area. McDonald’s may have been smarter by making the Happy Meal and its toy a known quantity. I’ve read that it accounts for around 10% of their sales. But do we all need to be in the business of keeping them cheap? Keeping the beef, potatoes, oil, Chinese plastic cheap and profitable? Especially when those who reap the profits are poor stewards of communities and their environments, across all stops of the chain, from production, to point of sale, to clean-up and beyond. Who who had money and power was helping improve the lives of the people in those restaurants? Who among us was helping society? Who was hurting it? The man on the radio said that it was me, that I was the danger, the threat to American society. But I was just a customer. Knowing the truth wasn’t going to change that. I didn’t want it to. I only wanted the truth itself to change.
Sated with salt and sugar, we slurped our drinks to the bottom and stuffed the cups in overflowing bins on our way to the car. A bit weary but with many miles to go, we fired our engine and merged into the whoosh of cars and trucks carrying people and products to a thousand different destinations ahead, one of which was our home.
Back in the days before I was Xuladad, when I was just Xuladude, I once went on a date with a woman from China, a couple of dates actually. The first was a tennis date. Her communist upbringing had instilled in her strong tennis fundamentals. She hit topspin off both wings, and had a good kick serve that would’ve made her an excellent mixed doubles partner. On the second date we sat down for an afternoon coffee, and it was then that I learned that she’d never heard of the Beatles. Her communist upbringing had failed her!
For a minute I entertained the thought. Could be fun in a way, a complete pop culture tabula rasa. We could go through it all together, she experiencing the wonder and amazement of the first time, and I excitedly reliving it all vicariously. But then I thought better of it. That might not have been the best ever reason not to date someone, but it surely wasn’t the worst. I was looking for something new, but not that new. You need to be able to start somewhere with someone, and topspin wasn’t going to do it. Besides, in the back of my mind I knew that turning someone on to the Beatles from scratch wasn’t what having a girlfriend was for. It was what having kids was for.
Even if we don’t actively try to turn our kids on to the Beatles, (and really who doesn’t?) it just seeps in. When it comes on in the car, we turn it up. They notice how we know all the words. And so much of the lyrics, particularly later-era, are so whimsical and child-like that the songs must seem to kids like they’re explicitly for kids. What kid isn’t going to naturally tune in to “Octopus’s Garden” or “Bungalow Bill” or “Here Comes the Sun”? Kids discover the Beatles organically, whether or not an adult tries.
Sometimes parents do it accidentally. My father is, along with Deke Dickerson, one person I know for sure who could not give a “rat’s ass” about the Beatles (Deke’s words, not dad’s). But I know damn well that Deke knows way more of the lyrics than he wishes he did, and even dad would likely surprise himself on identifying Beatles songs and lyrics. So it was probably in this spirit of knowing there must be something there, even if he didn’t get it, that he took me as a kid of around seven years old to see a screening of A Hard Day’s Night, I believe at the Tulane student center. He may have figured that if the whole thing was basically for screaming teenage girls, then it must’ve been juvenile enough for a curious, pre-adolescent boy to get something out of.
Whatever the thinking, it worked. The movie is so damn good, and the music so amazing, that it kickstarted a lifelong love right then and there. And as many of you know, when you start young with the Beatles, their growth and evolution is there waiting for you as you grow and get older, so that each time you go back over the years, it keeps giving in new ways. I remember not being able to tell them apart, then not being able to tell the voices apart, then at some point by the time I was grown being able to instantly identify the voices. (The same thing happened to me with the Beach Boys, which I really never thought would happen, but now when I hear Carl, it’s Carl.)
When the time came to try my boys on one of the movies, I should’ve gone straight to Hard Day’s but instead I tried Yellow Submarine, thinking since it was a cartoon and all. Well, that didn’t work for shit. For one, my kids weren’t on acid. But the whole thing is just too strange and dated, and when the Blue Meanies start turning people into stone with their arrows, my boys had seen enough.
A Hard Day’s Night (1964) is of course a completely different bag, with the silly, farcical elements baked right in from the start, and nothing remotely like the Blue Meanies. From about the scene when the Fab Four are seated in a train car one minute, then running alongside the train outside the window the next, the boys were mostly in. Not quite in like with openings of modern Disney movies, like Moana, where the backstory is laid out in tight, animated narrative. But that’s formula, and Disney has an army of evil product-testing suit-bots to make sure their movies work from frame one. The Beatles had Richard Lester, who was just a director, albeit one with excellent comedic pacing and shot-framing instincts, but one who definitely didn’t specialize in kids’ fare, and one who despite farcical instincts, such as displayed in his The Three Musketeers (1973), could be said to have been most comfortable with adult and bawdy themes, such as in that same film.
If one had to guess which individual Beatle most resonated with the kids, then I imagine it wouldn’t take any Beatles fan long to figure out that it had to be John. John was truly the child heart of the group, the overgrown kid whose instincts for pranks and whimsical foolishness really drove much of the band ethos, especially early on, but even later, although with darker overtones. And sure enough, John’s bathtub scene elicited the most open laughter from my kids. The scene begins as the group is preparing to leave the hotel for the night’s meet-and-greets. George gets a bit of a laugh by lathering up the mirror in the shape of a beard, then shaving the mirror instead of his face. But John is in the tub, filled with bubbles, playing an imagination game of HMS Royal Navy with some toy boats. He does voices, sound effects, explosions, and sinkings, just like a kid, all while wearing his trademark fisherman hat. My boys cracked up. As their manager comes in to hurry him along, John goes under, and the manager watches the bubble bath drain until empty, with no John inside. John then comes in wearing a robe and tells the manager to quit fooling around and come on.
It’s a wonderful scene, but as the film goes on such scenes become less frequent, as the focus shifts to the music, and also to the insane dynamic between the group and the fans. Beatlemania, as it was known, makes perfect sense to us, even if we didn’t live through it, but not so much to a kid, and playing off it in the film didn’t have quite the same effect for them as the more straight comedic elements. As for the music, every single note of it is absolutely great, and there’s nothing not to love about scenes of them dancing to their own tunes, or the self-contained sequence in the field for “Can’t Buy Me Love”, or the “rehearsal” take of “And I Love Her.” But the whole thing is leading up to a “live” performance as a climax, where some of the tunes are repeated. If you love the tunes, you don’t mind one bit. But my boys aren’t quite there yet with the music. Their playlist is more in the Imagine Dragons, Michael Jackson, “Ghostbusters” realm for the moment, and although it probably won’t stay there, that’s a perfectly fine place for it to be.
They liked the movie well enough, but after all, it’s hard to argue with what Archie told me afterwards: “We don’t live in the past, dad.”
What makes 1938’s The Adventures of Robin Hood such a great movie? It’s surely something to do with the action: sword fights, swinging from vines and ropes, leaps from trees, the archery contest, all set in gorgeous color, the bright yellows and reds of the Norman costumes, and the greens and browns of the Sherwood gang, against bright blue skies and rolling hills of Chico, California, where much of it was shot. Then there’s the character of Robin himself, bold and daring, like when he barges in on Prince John’s feast and deposits the carcass of his illegally poached spoil on the table as a gift. Or righteous and kind, like when he gives Maid Marian a tour of his camp and explains how his unjustly fallen stature has led to his loyalty to his men. But there’s also no denying another key aspect of the enduring appeal of this film: the dazzling good looks of Errol Flynn.
I knew Flynn being good looking would be a tough sell to a seven and a five-year-old, but I thought I had a chance with the other aspects. We’d been rotating picks on Friday night movie nights, and I’d been doing what a lot of parents do, taking my picks as opportunities to show them movies that I loved as a kid, in this case a movie that was shown to me as a kid. I had no idea then that the film came out years before my father was born, just as my kids have no sense of the relative age of things. All I knew, all they know, is that it’s an old movie.
“We can tell it’s old because the credits are in the beginning,” the older boy once told me. True enough, but the credits are also in the beginning of Back to the Future and Grease, and although those movies would get their own day in our house, and maybe their own blog post, I wanted to go all the way back, the Golden Era, technicolor and sound, the height of the studio system, to try to build their knowledge from the ground up, I suppose the way I felt mine had been built. I wanted them to be like me, seven-year-olds walking around knowing who Basil Rathbone and Claude Raines were, because not only was that totally not weird, it was cool!
“Okay, dad, but just remember, we don’t live in the past. We live in the present,” the older one said, speaking as usual, for the both of them.
“Yeah, yeah,” I said. “Okay, just give it a try, and if you don’t like it we’ll switch and watch something else.”
But when the older one balked at the hunting scene near the beginning of the movie, I didn’t stop it. “It’s just one scene,” I said. “It gets better.” But for him, it didn’t, and when the sheriff’s men give chase to Robin’s poachers, he went into the next room and remained there sulking for the rest of the movie. Why didn’t I turn it off? What kind of sadistic monster was I being? The answer was in the bug-eyed expression of pure wonder on the face of the younger boy. He was so enthralled by the early scenes of the film that he didn’t even notice that his brother had left the room. I weighed the cost, knowing full well that the older would never forget, and never let either of us forget, how we wouldn’t stop Robin Hood even though he hated it and it scared him. But the younger was loving it so much, and I was loving it so much, now on multiple levels, and their aunt who was with us was also loving it, that I let it roll. That and the fact that the movie is simply, objectively great.
The younger brought back the wonder of some of the scenes for me, as I watched him watching it, and as we would discuss the scenes in the coming days: the ambush from the treetops, when Robin’s men fall on the Sheriff’s gang and knock them off their horses; the escape from the castle after the gift at John’s feast, which features a wonderful gate-closing stunt where Robin flies up the wall on the gate rope; the duel over the water with Little John, terrific staff-fighting action, famously mimicked by Daffy Duck. (Looney Tunes and The Adventures of Robin Hood are both productions of Warner Brothers.)
But the scene that seemed to stand out the most was the archery contest. The appeal of this scene seems to lie not only in the closely contested sharpshooting contest, which is exciting in itself, but in the fact that Robin is in disguise, his identity known to the viewer, but not to Prince John or Maid Marian. There’s something magical in this for a kid, and I think it has something to do with being granted an entryway into what is normally a difficult and unappealing aspect of old films: the way all of the characters look alike, and talk alike, and the way it’s so hard for a kid to identify and differentiate characters in old films. This difficulty is often compounded by the plots, the way characters discuss events and other characters who aren’t on screen, and by the language itself, which is old, and hard to follow.
But when Robin removes his hat at the beginning of the sequence, and seems to almost give a knowing wink to the viewer, to follow his character through the sequence, and it’s Errol Flynn’s mischievous grin, we, the viewers, young and old, are invited in, to participate and revel in the magic of storytelling. That was the moment for the younger, Robin in disguise. Interestingly this conceit, Robin in disguise, although not for an archery contest, is present in the earliest Robin Hood ballads, first written in English in the 1400s, although clearly dating from poems and myths from the century following the Norman Conquest of 1066. The treetop ambush is also present in early versions, as are his key costume elements including his brown buckskin shoes and quiver of arrows.
But the Robin of the middle-English poems was no fallen noble, nor was he necessarily altruistic. They robbed from the rich, or anyone else wandering the woods, and didn’t necessarily give to the poor. Murder was also not a big hang up for the early version of the Merry Men. These are facts that I imagine the older boy learning at some point and throwing in my face as further evidence of the wrong I did him by showing him the film. He’ll also probably find out one day that Errol Flynn wasn’t such a terrific guy either, being tried and acquitted for statutory rape in 1943, despite openly admitting his fondness for teenage girls, along with being an severely depressed alcoholic and heroin addict, who died of a heart attack at age 50.
Yes, the older will be throwing all of that in my face someday, and I look forward to those discussions. Just as I look forward to the younger and I talking about Robin swinging from the trees and winning the archery contest, in disguise, by splitting his opponent’s arrow, in the old movie that his brother wouldn’t watch.
June 25, 2017 was the last Xuladad post. Wow, that’s been a minute! Well, much has changed in the life of Xuladad since then, but those are tales for another day (maybe for the follow up to Stereo Killer, my 2019 debut novel, available in ebook, paperback, and audiobook on Amazon!). But I still teach at Xavier, and I’m still a dad. Thus, the two essential qualities of the Xuladad origin story remain in place. If this is your first Xuladad read, I highly recommend you start from the beginning, as all of the tales are hilarious, and the writing is top notch.
With this post the blog takes a narrative turn, and this post serves as an introduction to that. The new direction centers on old movies, because if there’s one thing everyone definitely needs right at this historical moment, it’s another random white dude film critic wannabe’s blog about old Hollywood. I heard the clarion call and valiantly stepped forward to fill the need. It’s the least I can do during this time of tremendous heroic sacrifice.
My kids will still feature in it, and in a sense it’s still about parenting, only through this lens of old movies. I mean, we all do it, right?, aged-out hipster parents trying to hip their progeny to movies that shaped them growing up, trying to repeat the magic, wondering if those old flicks are still any good, trying and failing often, as for numerous reasons the films don’t click with the youngsters at all. But sometimes they click, and an old flick will resonate with the kids, the gags hold up, the dialogue isn’t too racist and misogynist, and we enjoy the films again as well, only in a different way now. It’s a great feeling, really, as it enriches your appreciation of the films.
I don’t plan to stay right there with the kids angle. I’ve been watching a ton of old Hollywood movies, and reading and listening to podcasts, so much so that if I don’t try to pull something productive from it at this point, it will amount to a unholy dereliction of basic principles of productive time use. But who knows, maybe the kid thing will be enough to write on, as these things tend to go in unexpected directions. At any rate, my first movie was a mixed bag. One kid loved it and I suspect it might stick with him, but the other kid didn’t like it at all, and spent much of it in the next room not watching. I know he’ll remember that, in part because it’s the only time on record that I didn’t turn a movie off on his request. He’s the oldest, and if he doesn’t like it for whatever reason, that’s usually it. But in this case I kept going, and I’m not sure why. The younger was enjoying it so much, as was I, and the older’s objections seemed centered on one particular scene, a hunting scene, which upset his seven-year-old vegetarian spirit. Once that past, he didn’t have any other reason for not liking it, and admitted as much when he said he just didn’t want to watch, but that we should. So we did. Maybe he just wanted something to hold over me, which he does at key moments, reviews of Xuladad’s track record in selections, as fodder for arguments for his own preferences. Quite wily, that one, a future litigator or politician perhaps.
Anyway, I’ll get into the film on the next post: The Adventures of Robin Hood, the 1938 romantic adventure staring Errol Flynn.
Tropical Storm Cindy is heading for the city, but in the morning the sun is shining so I decide we should leave home quickly to get some outside time at the playground. Augie and Archie are sitting on Archie’s bed playing one of their favorite games: all this shit is mine and you can’t touch any of my shit.
Archie is five now and Augie is almost three. The key item at the moment is a book. It’s books a lot, but it could be absolutely anything: Legos, light sabers, sticks, rusted tin cans, rotten figs, busted printer parts, other shit they bring in from outside. Augie’s got the book, a Rainforest book featuring the Cat in the Hat, and Archie wanted it, which was super fun. But only for a minute, then Archie didn’t want it anymore, so Augie’s going, “Act like you want it again,” sitting there smiling, acting like he’s reading it.
“No, Augie, I don’t want it.”
“Yes you do want it.”
Augie repeats everything verbatim. With his bro he’ll just repeat and argue, but with me he’ll repeat and tag it with a question mark, and follow it with “why?” For example: “Whoa, Augie, you stunk up the room real bad.”
“I stunk up the room real bad?”
“Yes”
“Why?”
“Why’d you stink up the room real bad?”
“Why you stink up the room real bad?”
“No, you stunk up the room real bad.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. Because you’re still a baby, I guess.”
“I’m a baby, I guess?”
“Yes, you’re a baby.”
“Why?”
“That’s what I want to know! It’s been fucking forever with the diapers!”
When it’s time to get dressed, Augie wants to pick out his clothes. Archie used to want to do that, but now Archie’s requests have gotten more sensible, like he wants to wear his Superman t-shirt with a snap-button shirt over top so he can pull it open and reveal the S on his chest. Augie’s requests, though, make no sense. Pink button-downs to sleep in. T-shirts over button downs like he’s Andrew McCarthy in an eighties flick. Pajamas over shirts over jackets, with a cape. He dressed himself once and came out with five shirts on, just the neck-holes only, like a giant infinity scarf, covering half his face, like the mujahideen in the mountains of Tora Bora.
I wrestle Augie’s clothes on as he’s kicking me in the face. The kid can do a lot for a two-year old. He can name half the characters in Star Wars, including Darth Maul and Kylo Ren and a bunch of characters from those stupid movies I never even saw. He can sing the melody of “I Wanna Be Like You” from The Jungle Book. He can keep a little rhythm and hit the melodies of a few other Disney tunes. He can catch a ball and throw one, forward even (Archie still basically throws backwards.) Quite impressive for age two. Flip side, he still shits in a diaper and kicks me in the face when I get him dressed.
Once out the door, we play one of his other favorite games: keep away, as I try to get them in their car seats. He loves this game, running around one side of the car, then the other. It’s June in New Orleans and a tropical storm is coming, so it’s hot, and I’m breaking a sweat, sprinting awkwardly around the car, trying to grab him by the shirt or by the waist or anything, trying not to turn an ankle or knock him over or hit a tree branch or drive him into the street. He loves it, laughing and squealing in delight, as I snatch his ass up.
Archie, meanwhile, has secretly carried a forbidden item out of the house, an arrow with a suction tip that he’s been carrying around for days, like a stripper with a vape pen, even sleeping with it. As we’re pull out, he produces the object with a satisfied, “Ha ha!”
“Good one,” I say.
“Daddy, do you know how I did it?”
“Do tell.”
“I acted like I didn’t care. Then we were already outside, and I had it!”
The kid has learned the basics of how to get away with shoplifting.
“That’s right” I say, reinforcing the lesson (am I bad?). “If you’re thinking about it, it’ll show and you’ll look suspicious. But if you can somehow forget you’re even doing it, you’ll get away.”
I realize this bit is eerily similar to a bit in Black Mass when Whitey Bulger tells his kid that if no one sees it, it never happened. At this point I know for sure I’m doing something wrong. Later that night Erin shows him how to place a needle on a turntable, and I think, that’s a pretty big damn day in a life, learning how to steal, and how drop a needle on a record, on the same day.
There’s a few other kids and parents at the playground because they’ve canceled camps because of the storm. Believe me when I tell you that nothing, I mean nothing, spurs New Orleanians to conversations with strangers more than perceived over-reaction and overabundance of caution in the face of approaching storms. Even the random six-year old climbing the rope structure in a bike helmet is indignant:
“Why did they cancel my camp?”
He’s asking me.
“Beats me, kid.”
“It doesn’t make sense. It’s not even raining, and it’s sunny.”
“I know.” This kid is going to do great in the Rouses checkout line someday.
“What camp do you go to?” I ask, thinking stupidly there’d be some simple answer, like, art camp or zoo camp. But no.
“Saint What’s-his-stan of the Immaculate Archdiocese of the Orthodox Corinthian Missionary.”
“Sounds fun. Hey, boys, we’ve got to go.”
No, I’m not trying to get them away from the Christ-child. Some time elapsed, okay? We played for like forty-five minutes. But it’s a blog, not a documentary. I’m taking them to the movies as a surprise, and I can see the dark clouds moving in. I want to get them in the theater before it unleashes, which I do, sort of. It’s started to rain when we get there, but it’s tropical storm bands, not like a regular thunderstorm, more windy and sporadic. In the car I take off their shirts and stuff them in my pants to keep them dry, so the boys aren’t cold and miserable in the super AC theater. Then I grab them both, one in each arm, shirtless, and we make a mad dash from the car to the theater. This is by far the most exciting part of the day. Archie is squealing and Augie is laughing, and when I put them down under cover, they both want to do it again.
Inside we’re hella early (NoCal whassup!) so we kill time in the arcade. The theater is actually kind of full for an a.m. show, for the same reason the playground was. Kids are running around the arcade, pretending to play, climbing on the motorcycles, throwing the air hockey paddles. With little ones in an arcade you get as much fun with no tokens. Augie picks up this giant AK-47 from a zombie shooting game. The thing is as big as he is, and he can barely hold it up, but he looks awesome holding it! And he knows what to do, making his shooter noises. The kid loves shooters. Everything is a shooter, sticks, kitchen utensils, rolled up towels, Legos. Augie loves to make shooters out of Legos. Archie uses them to make cakes.
We settle in with a couple big blue Icees, but we’re early, and it’s the pre-previews still. You know, obnoxious Mark Whalberg ads that somehow don’t become less obnoxious when you blow them up on a 30-foot screen and blast them in Dolby. Then the previews. Archie’s asking me when the real movie is going to start. I’m getting worried. Augie’s already climbing in and out of his seat. We’ll never make it.
But once the feature starts, Hollywood works its dark magic, and they make it through with only one little break in the middle. (They should bring back intermission for all kids movies.) The film is Captain Underpants: The First Epic Movie, and it’s actually quite clever and very well done. Of course it’s pitched square at Archie and he’s howling laughing as toilet paper rolls are flying. Plus it gives him an excuse to say “diarrhea” a lot, which continues for several weeks.
On the way out we pass one of those hurricane simulators where you put money in and get inside a plastic box and get blasted by wind. Augie wants to try it, but once again we don’t need any tokens for this one, as I glance out the door to see Cindy barreling thorough the parking lot. Ah, summertime in New Orleans.
I’m trying to get the boys out the door and into the car to get them to daycare on time so I can maximize my coffee-shop time, but Archie wants me to witness a fireworks experiment on the front porch.
Okay, I say, locking the front door and clicking the car unlocked. It’s a hundred and five degrees at nine in the morning.
“So these fireworks are special kinds, not the breakable kinds, but made with special paints, okay?”
He asks “okay?” after every statement to make sure you’re paying attention, and if you don’t answer he’ll start again at the beginning, so you’d better be paying attention if you want to avoid melting on the porch.
“So here goes the first experiment. It’s blue and pink fireworks and they shoot from a special cannon over the lake, okay?” He makes explosions with his hands and spins in circles and does sound effects.
Yeah, yeah, good, good. I’m trying to sneak Augie into the car and get back on the porch before Archie notices to keep things moving.
“Daddy, you’re not saying it in your happy voice.”
His imagination runs on and on. Stuffed bunnies take trips on invisible jets to South America and conduct experiments on frozen ponds where they celebrate Holi by parading through the streets and in the parades which are baby parades the parents can grab any baby they like and take him home to live with them in their house which is a spaceship orbiting Mars.
It’s all so incredibly cute and wonderful. I don’t want to stifle a single minute of it because if I’m not a hundred percent enthusiastic then I’m afraid he’ll start keeping it to himself and tell a psychiatrist years later that his father stifled his imagination by not paying attention and answering in a sad voice and always trying to shove him in the car to get him somewhere on time so his father could do what? Go to a coffee shop and write stupid blogs that people click through and read and don’t even press “like.”
But it’s a hundred and five, and five-until-nine, and now Augie is already strapped in the car, so I grab Archie off the porch and start to put him in while he’s still setting off fireworks and making sure I’m paying attention.
“So now this next experiment is to make a special kind of rainbow paint that’s used to color snowballs but these balls break pretty easily so you have to be careful with them, okay?”
Okay, sounds good.
I start the car. The damn Writer’s Almanac is already on. NOOOOOOOOOOO! Not because I don’t want to hear about how much Degas hated Jews and how none of his friends could stand to be around him and all gave up on him in the end. Not even because the sound of Garrison Keeler’s voice makes me want to jam a Bic pen into my temple. But because it’s almost nine. It’s practically nine. It’s nine! Nine already! Daycare is beginning, one of my precious coffee-shop mornings has begun and I’m nowhere near a coffee shop. I’m halfway across town still and there’s an experiment happening in the back seat that requires more of my attention than an actual splitting of the atom would.
“So the next paints are made of crystals and these crystals can’t break. They can only change from soft to hard and then they turn three colors and disappear behind a cloud, okay?”
I click the radio off and answer in an honest and true happy voice.
Archie discovered Wonder Woman in a little “I Can Read!” book and now nothing else matters.
“This book was stuck in my brain all night,” he says first thing in the morning.
“Yeah, I know the feeling.”
Of course my first thought is how to use this to get him to eat.
“Why don’t we look at it at breakfast?” I say buttering the half piece of toast that most likely has the bottom of the garbage can in its near future.
“How about this?” he counters, constant negotiation now firmly established as the key component of his discourse. “We look at a few pages now and then have breakfast.”
Buttered wheat toast with blueberry jam, the good bonne maman stuff, is no match for the allure of Wonder Woman and her “fancy underwear.” He’s too absorbed in the pages to take more than a tiny, hamster nibble. I notice his hand down the front of his jammy pants but this isn’t surprising as he spends a good amount of jammy time with his hand down there. I decide not to draw attention to it and instead try to sneak a bite into his mouth, which works for a second, until he snaps out of his trance and yells at me that he can feed himself, proving once again that autonomy is the strongest motivator, more than even a lasso of truth.
Okay, okay, I say, and he immediately forgets about the toast and starts explaining the characters and plot to me instead.
“These guys over here are the good guys, and these guys try to do bad things because they’re bad people. After breakfast we can read to find out what happens to them.”
Speaking of which, “Can I be all done?” He’s noticed little bro has been released from his food-torture seat after crushing a half piece of toast (no blueberry jam. I finally learned!) and a chunk of watermelon and is happily frolicking on the couch.
“Two more bites,” I say.
“I’m too cold to eat,” he says, one of his latest tactics.
“You want me to turn the fan off?”
“No that will make me more cold.”
His logic is mind-numbingly consistent even as it defies, well, logic. But if you say it enough times and keep saying it, then I you actually start to believe it. Turning the fan off will make me more cold. I’m hungry but I don’t want food. I’m not tired. Illegal immigrants are stealing our jobs.
The charade continues until one of us is worn down and too deflated to continue. It’s never him.
“One more bite,” one of us pleads.
“One more bite?
“One more bite.”
“ONE MORE BITE!”
Fortunately this discussion is interrupted by a knock at the door. It’s Billie, a woman who comes every other week to make our house smell good again and return some sense of order to the crumbling chaos that surrounds us. She’s tall and blonde and Archie drops his comic book at the door and follows her to the back, hand down his jammy pants.
I slice up their hot dogs, steaming from the boil water, and plastic-plate them with a squirt of ketchup, trying like hell to avoid as much as touching the juice, which I’m certain contains Zika. Just like grown-ups at a ball game or the county fair, my kids enjoy hot dogs most when their brains are completely shut off. And they don’t even know the horrible truth about hot dogs, you know, the Zika.
“Hey, daddy?”
“Yes?”
“I really like Curious George so I might read it again, alright?”
Archie chews his hot dog while he talks, head down, mumbling, mouth full, almost incomprehensible. He thinks he’s winning, setting me up so that he can keep reading his book while he eats, but he doesn’t know that I’ve already won because he’s eating a hot dog and doesn’t even know it.
In the thrill of my victory over Archie, I let my guard down and Augie Jedi-mind-tricks me into letting him out of his high chair after only a few bites. He goes in his room and comes out with three shirts around his neck, looking like a baby Necklush model (http://shop.necklush.com/ free shout-outs! message me). He “dresses” himself now.
“Hey, daddy.”
“Yes?”
“I think I getting a lil bit scay-ed because thinking about No-noggin so I think I need you to come keep an eye on me while I read this book in the bed, alright?”
“Alright”
But I’m reading about Muhammad Ali and not paying attention so he starts to get out of his chair before I see he still has a pile of cut-up hot dog pieces. I negotiate with him from my usual position of weakness (Trump will fix this for me) and get him to choke down one more piece before being all done. Then I take his pieces and Augie’s pieces and put them in a little baggie in the fridge. I’ll nuke and serve the same pieces later, but when they don’t eat them again, I’ll throw them away, which I hate doing, but how many lives does a piece of cut-up hot dog have?
What I won’t do ever is eat them, even though I kind of want to.
After days of boiling, slicing, serving, saving, nuking, and throwing away, I reach breaking point where I’m going to have to eat one. But not one of theirs, nasty Zika-filled things. I’m talking one off the grill. Fortunately it’s Memorial Day–a solemn day of remembrance when all factory-farming, Monsanto-spewing, waist-busting, artery-clogging, 35%-of-American-men-are-obese-ing bets are off. (Relax. I know my timeline is jacked with the Ali reference. This is all fiction.)
I fire one up until it starts to split, turning it carefully, lovingly, no black on the skin, just pure slightly crispy brown with juice bubbling off the seams. Burger King can’t touch this. I pull it off smoking hot and put a fork right to it. They don’t make buns good enough for this masterpiece. Hot juice shoots out five feet in the air.
“Yeeeeeaaaaaahhhhhh!!!!!”
I yell not because the scalding-hot juice hits my face, but rather from sheer joy.
“Everything okay out there? I think the kids are hungry.”
I know there is such a thing as a hunger strike, but the concept boggles the mind: an adult of otherwise sound mind deciding not to eat food in order to get what he or she wants? Things must be pretty freaking bad if not eating is the only way to make them better. Yet judging by my kids’ daily effort, I must be running a Siberian Gulag.
It starts with Archie, the Ghandi of Breakfast. He’s prepared for his difficult challenge by bringing along an illustrated Hansel and Gretel to distract his mind from food. I could not make this up; The book he has at the table to use as a wedge between his face and the food is a fairy tale about starving kids.
“Archie, that book is distracting you from eating. It’s got to go.”
“No, it’s not. I promise it’s not.”
“Take a bite.”
“I think I want to sit more next to you.”
“Here. Now take a bite.”
“Oh, look, daddy. Hansel is doing something we can’t do. He’s on the roof of his house!”
I don’t yet know what his demands are, probably to reconcile the warring factions of plush and hard-plastic animals that have staked claims on opposite ends of his bed.
Meanwhile Augie picks at the top of the toast to pull off the jelly and eat it. He’s fairly successful, getting the blueberry remnant bits off the surface and leaving only a thin, pale layer. He won’t eat the toast, though. Why? There’s still jelly on there. “Sticky” he says, and he’s got the jam in his hair, making a kind of Ed Grimley/Something About Mary spike. He tries to knock the food away when I try to feed him a bite. His cause in this hunger strike remains known only to him, or perhaps to other toddlers somewhere, his allies. I give up on Archie and go to the mat with Augie. It’s down to a standoff.
“Your want to get down? Eat one bite.” I give the signs for eat and down. He understands, I’m certain, event though he turns down his lip and holds that face. He’s stubborn. He cries. He grabs the bread and smashes it through his fingers.
Archie says, “I think Augie wants his toast to take a bite of him so his toast can get down.”
Archie and I try to break him, chanting “Augie eat, Augie eat!” pounding on the table. We’re like Cazale and Pacino in Dog Day Afternoon, chanting “Attica, Attica!” He stares, listens, wonders. Whole NPR segments of time go by. Finally as I go to type this line, he takes a small nibble. We cheer. Archie is ecstatic and considers for a moment breaking his own hunger strike. Augie finishes the whole piece in a minute, as I thought he would. I win, I win. The causes of social justice lose the day, as I comfort myself that I’ve preserved the status quo and have only two more meals to go until I can lock their cell door for the night.
XulaDad 