A Father's Prayer

Mid-April. Driving from Green Bay home to Minneapolis. My flight had been canceled due to weather. I thought the weather they were referring to was a mildly thick fog that had settled over Green Bay but, according to weather reports, lifted about ten miles west of town. I was wrong. The weather they were referring to was snow in Minneapolis. In the middle of April. Gross.

Driving, though, turned out to be a great idea. Beat the hell out of spending another night in Green Bay. Or so I thought until I was 70 miles away from Minneapolis and drove into a blizzard. That last 70 miles took nearly 3 hours. Then, it seemed, driving was a lousy idea. Until the next morning when I went out to NWA’s website and discovered that the snow storm I drove through hit Green Bay about the time a morning flight would have taken off and due to some weirdness with the lake the front sat down over Green Bay for the day meaning had I not driven I’d have been stuck there for two day. So…you know… I guess driving wasn’t such a horrible choice.

On the drive home, well before I hit the blizzard, or even knew there was one waiting for me up yonder, I stopped in some non-descript small town for a bite to eat. It wasn’t a destination but as I was approaching the exit for the town I saw a big neon sign along the top edge of a low slung building “Bowling  Pizza  Burgers  Beer”.

That’s my kinda sign. No “branding”. No slightly vague names like “Family Fun Center” which, for those of you not hip to such things, is what most big bowling alley chains now call themselves. I hate that shit. I don’t know what Family Fun Center means. I don’t know what is contained therein. “Bowling  Pizza  Burgers  Beer”. Got it. I understand my options. I’m on it.

It was a rundown place but run down in that way that a bowling alley should be.  So many people using the lanes and the arcade and the restaurant and the snack shop and the bar (and my, oh my, how they used the bar) that the place simply couldn’t keep everything looking shiny and new and sleek. Not that they tried to upgrade the décor. Looked right out of the 70’s. But it wasn’t dirty. Rundown but clean, you know? Smelled like bowling alley wax and stale cigarettes and beer. Lotsa kids hootin’ and hollerin’ and kickin’ up a ruckus. Yes, I know we are to recoil in horror at the thought of taking children somewhere with cigarettes and alcohol and surely they are all going to die from terrible environmental diseases before they reach the age of 12. Apparently the good people of this small Wisconsin burgh hadn’t gotten the memo. Me…I like the smell. Reminds me of being a kid. And I’m not dead yet. Even though I do everything wrong. And even though I hung out in bowling alleys. And didn’t wear a helmet. Or carry anti-bacterial wipes that I’d use before and after using the publicly shared bowling balls. Or a fuckin’ gas mask. Or, whatever.

At the restaurant I got to talking to Randy. He’s mid-forties. He’s fucked up a lot of things in his life. Mostly because he’s always pissed off. He’s one of those guys always on the lookout for someone trying to screw him. My experience is when you look for that you will find it. Whether or not it exists.

He’s an angry guy, always on the edge of issuing a challenge but you can see him trying like hell to sublimate that part of him. You can see the tension of this internal conflict ripple across his broad shoulders when he turns that quick killer glare at you ‘cause maybe, just maybe that innocuous phrase you just uttered was really a thinly veiled dissing.

He introduces me to his son, Will. Not Willie. You get the glare from Randy if you screw that one up. Will was celebrating his 16^th birthday at Bowling  Pizza  Burgers  Beer. He had gathered up a passel of his friends and they were alternating between bowling and video games and lots and lots of pizza. Randy, for whatever else may be going on with him, has that proud father glow. He and Will’s mom have been divorced for ten years but Randy lives two blocks away. It was not a friendly divorce. I suspect there aren’t many disagreements in Randy’s life that ever stay in the civil category. The only thing, according to Randy, that they did right in the divorce… “We didn’t fuck with the kids. We didn’t turn ‘em into weapons against each other. She hates my ass, man. Hates it. But she doesn’t talk shit about me to the kids no matter how pissed she is at me. I don’t talk shit about her in front of ‘em.” She’s got the official custody but the kids (Will has a sister two years younger) move back and forth between their parents houses as they see fit. After the first year she didn’t bother enforcing the two weekends a month thing. The kids chose…and I guess that’s the way it should be. Will is, from what I can tell, a really together kid. Quietly confident, polite, smart.

 After Will goes back to join his friends Randy does a 20 minute soliloquy on him being a straight – A student and all of his other accomplishments. Then he gets pensive.

“I hope I don’t fuck him up. He’s changed everything. I’m forty-two. I work whatever shit jobs I can find. I bitch about that but it’s my own fault. I didn’t want to study or work for anything. Too good to start at the bottom of the ladder and work my way up. Didn’t want some guy telling me what to do. All that shit. All I wanted was a few bucks in my pocket and where’s the next party. Now I got this 16 year-old kid who’s turned everything upside down. I’m trying to figure out how I get my shit together. Get a job that pays…a career. This kid…I don’t want him going to some shitty local college or junior college or whatever ‘cause his old man was too fuckin’ stupid to figure out how to scrape up the money for him to go to a good school. ‘Cause he can get into just about anywhere he wants. He’s smart as they get, man. My ex and I we try to figure out where that came from. Hell, we’re both dumbasses.”

We ramble on while I eat my BBQ chicken sandwich (nope…it didn’t make the sign out front but I was betting they had something along those lines) and he watches Will and his friends bowl. At one point Will comes over, clearly pissed off. Kinda scary quiet seething gonna kill that motherfucker pissed off. He thinks one of his friends was cheating while keeping score. Randy gives him some good fatherly advice, running through the gamut of “you don’t really know he was”, “how important is that really”, “is this something that’s so big of a deal you should be this mad about it.” Mostly, he just keeps talking low and calm until Will decides to let it go.

I commented to Randy that I thought he handled that just fine and I thought he was being too hard on himself in terms of fuckin’ his kid up. “That’s the only thing, really, that worries me about Will. Good kid. Smart kid. He’s got my temper. I mean…if he decided to followup on that…call his friend out…he wouldn’t just try to pick a fight with him…he’d try to destroy him. That’s the me in him. I don’t want him to be like that. It’s the only thing I pray for. Haven’t been in a church in 14 years, man. But that’s the thing I hit my knees to pray for every night.”

“What,” I asked.

“Dear Lord. Don’t let my boy be like me.”

Comments

[Amsra]

Wow....just wow.

[Taoist Biker]

I think most fathers think that at one time or another. I know that on the day my son was born, when I went home from the hospital, I poured a shot of the bourbon that I'd been saving for four years and toasted: "To my son. May he be a better man than his forefathers."

Glad to hear from you again, bruddah!

[James Ray]

And just in time for Father's Day...

Rik, you have a gift for taking ordinary experiences and finding extraordinary lessons in this life.

Rock on!

[Travis]

I am so happy to find another entry on your blog, and another of your wonderful stories. I've been wondering if you had fallen off the planet. Good to know that you haven't, and that you're just in Wisconsin.

Great story, by the way. I have to admire the bravery of people who have children and have enough self-knowledge and awareness to want to their children to NOT turn out like them. It speaks of love on a soul level.

Travis

[Eric]

Haven't visited your site in awhile. Great story. The great thing about kids is that they somwhow seem to be smart enough to take the good things us parents have to offer and forgive us our faults. No perfect parenting exists. Just love em every day and do your best!

[Phirwertipt]

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