“No more.”
“I’ll never have an audience like this again! Free speech, woman!”
“No more.”
I relented. I knew I’d get caught eventually and I knew it was a cheap way of gaining my daughter’s affections. I began to wonder how much damage all those butt jokes had done to her psyche. Now she was gonna head off to school and tell her teacher to stick a doodie fish pie up her butt and it would be all my fault. There was no going back now. The floodgates had been opened.
I brought her upstairs the next night and she jumped in the tub excitedly.
“Put some snowmen up your butt!”
“Right. About that . . . ,” I began. “Listen, we can’t make poopy jokes anymore.”
“Why not?”
“Because it’s just not right. I can’t have you talking poopy talk once you get to school and all that. I’m sorry, girl. We can still tell jokes, but they gotta be clean.”
“Hairy eyeballs?”
“I think that’s allowable.”
“Hairy cow eyeballs.”
“Fish gut sandwich.”
“Bucket filled with cow poop!”
“Let’s make it cow tongues,” I said. “No poop. We need to expand the repertoire.”
“Oh, okay.”
“Can I wash your hair?”
“Sure, Daddy.”
“Thank you.”
“And thank you, dead monkey ice cream sundae with monkey eyeballs on top.”
FLATHEAD
Dr. Ferris was unavailable for my son’s six month appointment, which was too bad because Dr. Ferris was a master of his craft. He would walk into the office and it was like being greeted by a rock star. He’s here! At long last! Those two nurses who opened for him were okay, but now we’ve got the headliner! The boy would stop crying and Dr. Ferris would grab his feet and play with him and call him all kinds of crazy nicknames and, in three seconds, develop a bond with him far stronger than the bond I had with the child. If I grabbed the boy’s feet, he’d try to kick me in the nose. But when Dr. Ferris did it? MAGIC. Then he’d grab the shiny light thing doctors use and flash it in my son’s ear and ask, “Is there a little birdie in this ear? I think there is! Chirp chirp!” and the boy would whoop and wail and the scene in the room would look like the cover of an AstraZeneca quarterly prospectus. Secretly, I was kind of jealous of Dr. Ferris. I didn’t think I’d ever learn to be that good with children, not even my own. He also had fabulous hair. Dr. Ferris was good. Too good.
He was so good that his practice grew by the month, and getting appointments with him instead of one of his perfectly capable subordinates became more difficult. No one wants the B-lister at the doctor’s office. They want the star attraction. They want to be special enough to have Dr. Ferris be the one checking on little Sally’s vaginitis. But the man was unavailable one week when the boy needed a checkup, and so we had to settle for Dr. Dergan instead.
Dr. Dergan examined our son from head to toe, and we asked her all the usual questions. Do you have some kind of magic way we can get him to sleep better? His shit looks like it has pearls in it. Is that okay? Where does he rank on the height and weight chart? Is he taller and heavier and therefore better than all the other kids? Dr. Dergan answered our questions dutifully and then examined the boy’s head.
“Hmm. Looks a little flat in the back.”
“Excuse me?” I asked.
“Nothing alarming,” she said. Doctors will never tell you any symptom is alarming unless there’s an arrow sticking out of your chest. “Just a little bit flat. You might consider sending him to a specialist at Children’s just to make sure.”
She left, and my wife and I grabbed the boy’s head, scrutinizing it obsessively.
“I guess it’s kinda flat,” I said. I took my hand and slid it up from the back of his neck to the top of his cranium. “See how it doesn’t stick out after the neck? Maybe that’s what she’s talking about.”
“I don’t know. He looks fine to me,” my wife said.
“Yeah. I mean, he has HAIR. The hair sticks out the back. You wouldn’t even notice the back of his head.”
“You don’t think he has flat head syndrome, do you?”