Nicaragua

(This was originally posted on Reddit) 

My dad is special.

If you peruse my post history you'll notice that he and I don't see eye to eye anymore and that he maybe probably most definitely has narcissistic personality disorder and was/is rather hard to live with. At times he is a nuclear level asshole. But my dad is also my hero because I love him and always will. His life history seems to have fallen out 50-50, good and bad. He's done some mean, moronic, bone stupid and awful stuff in his life, but when he did good, he did really good.

My dad is a Vietnam vet. Like most vets he came home and was promptly treated like the maggot-ridden mouse the cat dragged in. The concept of veteran support was slightly better in the 70s than, say, the 1940s, but only slightly. Plus there was some stuff the Air Force decided didn't happen, so Dad couldn't talk about that at all. Dad basically drowned PTSD and memories of Danang under approximately all the alcohol. This tanked his first marriage and left him in the position of having to either dry out and face his ghosts or die.

Eventually, he dried out, and like most recovering addicts he became an evangelist for sobriety. Dad made his living as a salesman, and felt better selling sobriety to drunks than he did selling diamonds or eye glasses or paper. And he was good at it. Which is how he landed in a group home for teenage boys in the French Quarter of New Orleans back in the 80s.

Again, my dad has issues. At times he can be a selfish bastard and at his absolute best, he's doing things for his own benefit first. But I am not exaggerating when I say that he saved the lives of a lot of these kids. These were kids who came home from school and discovered that their whole family had moved away without him. These were kids who thought the other kids were lying when they said Milk comes from cows, because they had seen with their own eyes that milk comes from the store. My dad's job was to keep them from killing each other, keep them sober, and try to teach them some kind of life skill because as soon as they turned 18, they got a bus ticket to the city of their choice and couldn't contact anyone from their group home for several years. The kid who told me this story was one of several who hunted my dad down as soon as it was legal to let the only father figure they'd ever had know that they were okay. When Dad had a stroke out of state, about four of his former foster kids sat with him because he is, and always will be, their dad. He fucked up by the numbers, alright, but he also did good by a lot of these kids.

But it wasn't easy. Sometimes the kids needed a lesson and consequences. And there's a whole list of things you can't do to kids in foster care, especially a highly supervised setting like a group home. You can't spank or restrict food. Confinement is out. Chores are reasonable but only up to a point. And you've got this whole behavioral pattern called "negative attention seeking" that basically meant most of the kids wanted to be yelled at and punished, because being yelled at and punished was the only kind of attention they ever got. It was familiar and safe, to these kids, to be beaten, sent to bed without supper, and be yelled at in the morning for good measure. These kids couldn't understand why the house parents didn't do that. They kept trying to force somebody, anybody, in authority to do the kind of violent bullshit they expected from parents. So whatever consequences you used couldn't feed into that cycle. It made working with these kids a challenge.

One area that nobody could seem to fix was Family Night. Every Wednesday the group home was supposed to take their battered collection of kiddos out to do something fun and normal. Bond with them. Give them a chance to see that normal and safe is kind of the opposite of having an abusive parent, and that love means something other than getting hit. It's a great theory. But putting it into practice meant getting ten plus teenagers to all agree on the same thing: "Where do you want to go tonight?"

And the battle would start. The movies. The arcade. The mall. The roller-rink. No, I want the movies. I want the mall. We did the mall last week. On and on, moving into fist fight territory. And nothing gets on Dad's nerves like stupid, pointless, ballsy, immature bickering. He wanted to teach these kids a lesson and get them to knock that shit off. But he couldn't. Most of the parental go-to tools just...don't work on these kids.

Which meant it was time for Dad to get creative.

Now, my dad tried most of my life to get a hobby. He tried dozens but none of them stuck. My mother thinks it's because he tried too many at once. I think it's because his real hobby is fucking with people. My dad is never as happy as he is when somebody gives him an opening to con them. He once took my brother for twenty bucks on a trick pool shot, and he won by walking the cue ball around the obstacles. He once spent two hours feeding the pair of us utter bullshit and only broke character when he told us he had made it all up. When you become the beneficiary of his hobby, he will try to be benevolent and bring you in on the joke so you have some fun too. He's not a sadist. But his goal is still fucking with you.

And dad figured out real quick that he didn't have to punish these kids, he just had to make their lives miserable. Do what Dad wants, have a good time. Don't do what he wants, twist in the wind. He just had to do it in a way that didn't violate the program's framework.

So one day he's checking the movie times while the kids are fighting over where they're gonna go, and he sees it: The answer to the problem. The most beautiful solution his devious, brilliant, self absorbed mind could conceive of. So he tells the kids he will put up with the battle tonight, but they needed to pick their weekly activity out before next Wednesday, or he was gonna do it.

Picture a dozen-plus juvenile boys, most of whom have very poor respect for authority, looking back at a kind of scraggly quasi-hippy who is overly fond of ponchos. This is the guy who planted a container garden to show them that eggplants don't produce eggs, who spends a lot of time talking about twelve steps and Jesus. He's got socks on with sandals. The Big Lebowski hadn't come out yet, but when it did these kids immediately tried to figure out which rug was tying the whole room together, man. Picture them looking at him like what's the worst you can do, old man?

Dad folded up the newspaper and let them fight. The lesson would go best if they didn't take him seriously.

Wednesday comes around, and they haven't picked an activity. This is now, after all, an authoritative battleground. This is a supervised group home. Dad can't make them go shovel shit, if he tells them to sit and do homework they can just say they won't. Being put on restriction, they've done that before. There is no way my Dad could make these kids decide on a fun group activity a week in advance. They now had a place to fly their defiance flag high and prove they were bigger and harder and badder than my dad. And they could do it by not agreeing to have fun. No sir. We will not agree. No fun will be had. Fuck the man.

The kid who told me this story was in his late twenties, early thirties. He had just gotten out of the navy and there were at least fifteen years between him and that home in New Orleans. And I could still hear the horror and awe in his voice when he told me what my father did next.

He folded the newspaper and said, "Alright. My pick."

And then this die hard pro-capitalism Republican veteran took a dozen teenage boys to the local communist club's student documentary on the starving children of Nicaragua.

The kid who told me this story said that he finally broke when an old Korean war vet stood up, shook his fist at the screen and shouted "God Bless Ronald Regan," halfway through the film.

When it was done, Dad took them home because that was the group activity, as promised, and they didn't get another one until next week.

Next Wednesday, Dad asked, "So what are we doing tonight?"

Oddly enough, they already had a movie picked out.

The Pool and the Game

(Note: This story was originally told on Reddit)

 I once worked front desk at a public pool.

 It was horrible, but one interaction stands out, both for how malicious my compliance was and for the fallout. Our swim team had just launched and parents came to sign their kids up for every single thing they could because it meant after school activities and freedom! Yay!

 My responsibility was The Form. First, I had to help design The Form, because the design the city gave us (made by a woman who was making more than minimum wage as a pool desk caddy) was not enough for my boss and my dumb ass let her know I could make MS Word sit up and do tricks for e-cookies. Once The Form was approved (and by then I was taking proofs home to burn as catharsis) my job was to make sure that every single parent had signed The Form and paid their fee.

Enter Daddy T. His daughter was on swim team, and he had this charismatic grin and confident way of speaking that immediately put my alarm bells into “Danger, Will Robinson". He was a little…too smiley. A little too happy. And vaguely familiar. There was something kind of off about him. I wasn't sure what it was, but it made me want to be as far under his radar as possible.

Unfortunately, while his kid was signed up for swim team, he still needed to sign The Form and pay for her entry. Which meant I needed to interact with him.

Most females, and not too few males, know that gazelle-on-the-veldt feeling. Something is off. Something had the hair on the back of your neck standing on end. You don't know what it is, and the rules of social interaction demand you keep your mouth shut and play nice.

The guy spends a few minutes of charismatic smiles (I had never seen teeth like that outside of channel ten news presenters) acting like he's having trouble reading The Form. I designed The Form over the course of multiple painful weeks and know you would have to be severely brain damaged to have issues understanding it. My boss had me dumb it down to the point that a kindergarten student could know where to scribble a name approximation. And this guy is well spoken and clean cut, and he's got the sharpest (and most familiar!) gaze I’ve ever seen. I cannot think of any reason for him to be this obtuse honestly. And I begin to suspect he is hitting on me. Which for multiple reasons has me creeped out by several orders of magnitude. I just want this guy to go away.

Finally, after agonizing minutes of him struggling with a form that a two year old could sign, he hands it back and says (still with that same confident, charismatic smile) “Read it to me.”

I was at a low point in my life. I hated every single thing about my life. I had untreated PTSD and the thought of anyone hitting on me made me want to go scrub a layer of skin off. The realization that this guy had me pinned to a desk I could not leave until he signed The Form made me want to punch him. But I needed this job, and my boss would grind me into flour and turn me into concession stand specials if I even pretended to stand up for myself. So instead, I complied. I shifted into Happy Customer Service Mode and I read him that goddamn Form. I summarized legalese. I dumbed things down from Kindergarten to PreSchool. I did it all with the sweetest smile I could muster and tried to be about as asexual as the desktop computer right next to the counter window. I made it a point to be The Most Cheerfully Helpful Person, and hoped that somehow this would translate to go the fuck away.

And it worked. He signed. He left. I breathed a sigh of relief.

Until next week, when The Form had to be supplemented by The Sign In Sheet and the whole fucking song and dance repeated itself. He asked me to read him the goddamn sign-in sheet. And I did. With a smile. That couldn’t have been more forced if he had a gun to my head. At this point I was heaping lit coals on his head and practicing my “obtuse as fuck" face. I might be a captive audience but I would be damned before I let him know he got to me. I maliciously treated him like any other customer. I hated to see him arrive, and when he left I cheered

And this went on for weeks, because every session the boss would need a new form signed, and every session that guy asked me to read it to him, and I managed it by channeling my inner robot. I even began highlighting his daughter's name—what kind of shit dad “forgets" his daughter's name—and our interactions became a game. Him trying to get to me. Me, refusing to be got. It almost felt like chess.

Then it came time to distribute the Swim Team Gear, and that brought a whole new set of forms. Which meant That Guy asked me to read him every single one of them.

And just when I’m contemplating leaping out the nearest window while doing s full body Silkwood decontam, he suddenly meets my eyes and this layer of pretense I hadn't ever noticed drops away. He has tears, literal tears, in his eyes. And he says “Thank you. Thank you. Thank you so much."

See, the entire time I had been maliciously complying with him, by being the best reader ever? I'd been struck by how familiar he looked. But I didn't ever really watch the news. I just sat and read books while my parents watched it instead. Which is why I didn't recognize our local weatherman when he began bringing his daughter to swim practice.

It's also why I didn't know why he had recently retired. He'd been diagnosed with a malignant brain tumor, you see. And they'd just finished a round of surgery and chemo to save his life that they weren't sure would actually work. His odds sucked. It really had been all over the news. They even gave him a really nice, heartbreaking sound off that I never watched because of my own depression and isolation. I found it on YouTube later. It's the kind of thing all of us would pray someone do in out memory.

He thanked me, because ever since his surgery, his ability to function had been compromised. He could mask most of the damage with his charisma and training, and usually could fake-it-till-you-make-it with the best of them, but he'd lost a lot of his capacity to read. It was a struggle he’d obviously never faced before and it frustrated him that after all his college education and decades being the face of the local weather, he suddenly couldn't even read a basic form for his daughter’s swim team. And he was so thankful (he was crying) that I was taking so much time out of my day to help him. And not just to help him, but to be so un-patronizing. I had treated him like he was normal. He said that I made him feel sort of…whole, again. He made every effort to make it clear: he was genuinely, sincerely grateful for how helpful I had been.

And I am suddenly reviewing every insult I thought about him. Every time I questioned his mental capacity or quality as a parent. He was so low that what I meant as a mockery and a punishment was, to him, a gift. I made him feel normal.

There aren't words for that kind of shame. I thought it was a game. I really did.

People still talk about how he touched lives. I know he touched mine.