Sleepwalk With Me_ And Other Painfully True Stories - Mike Birbiglia [19]
We didn’t get involved with that punch-slap minefield. We were safely on Eric’s front steps. That was our property, kind of. I cautiously said to Eric, “Do you think we should do anything?” And Eric, holding back tears, said, “That’s just what Alex’s dad does. I don’t want to talk about it.” Understandable.
My dad never said a lot when I was a kid. And when he did, I’d get worried, because it probably meant he was mad about something. It’s hard for people who have jobs where they are in charge to come home to anarchy and chaos and a family where no one listens to you. At work, he could say things like “Scalpel,” and someone would hand him a scalpel. At home, he’d say, “Someone find me a rake,” and I’d shout, “I’m not finding a rake. I’m watching the Celtics!” That wouldn’t go over so well. In instances like these, my dad would shout so loud it was like a rock concert. It was like a Dad-tallica concert. It shook you to your core. Even if the rock-and-roll shouting hadn’t made a sound, the sheer magnitude of the vibration would get you up to get that rake. “WHEN I SAY GET A RAKE, YOU GET ME A GODDAMN RAKE! THESE GODDAMN KIDS NEED SOME REALITY TESTING!”
My dad has always been obsessed with “reality testing.” I didn’t know what the hell he was talking about, but apparently we needed it. I guess it meant we were living in some kind of fantasy world. It didn’t seem like I was in a fantasy world. At school Matt Backman would call me a faggot six times a day and regularly throw me down a cement hill. What the hell kind of fantasy was that? If my life was a fantasy, it would have things like girls liking me back and a dad who didn’t shout so loud it made me wince.
Once, we were preparing for a Christmas ski vacation to Vermont. And my dad never bothered to make sure the rusty old ski rack fit our newer car. So when that freezing morning came, he realized that we needed a new rack and it would cost three hundred dollars or more. “We’re not going, goddammit!” He was literally canceling Christmas. I was petrified. Now we’d have all that excess pent-up anger in our own house for all of Christmas instead of letting it run wild in the mountains.
But my brother Joe, always resourceful, realized he could strap the skis to the roof of the station wagon with bungee cords, just like in the olden days, and the vacation was back on.
Joe wasn’t as intimidated by our dad. Somehow he was oblivious to it all. I think because he thought of Dad as another guy, not this larger-than-life stoic whose every word was chock full of meaning. Joe’s casual attitude toward our parents grew as he did. During his first visit home from college, he started addressing my parents by their first names: MJ and Vince. It was as though he had taken some course about the oppression of names, and he decided to take charge, to throw off the shackles of “Mom” and “Dad,” like these titles represented some form of indentured servitude or something. Or maybe he just did it because he thought it was funny. It was a little bumpy at first. MJ, whose full name is Mary Jean, was fine with it. I believe her response was “That’s my name!” Vince was not so keen on being addressed like he was some sort of golfing buddy.
I couldn’t believe what Joe was doing. I was fifteen years old and I asked Joe, “You can just call them MJ and Vince?”
And Joe said, “I can do anything I want.” He was right.
Every time Joe would say, “Hey Vince!” my dad would frown at him, give him a long judgmental stare, and then, if Joe hadn’t yet backed down in this staring contest, Vince would throw in the word “Enough.”
That worked