My son Marty was always different. I was in the delivery room when he entered this world. He was a month late and his head tore Judy up a bit as she had him fast, with no time for numbing drugs, enemas, or episiotomies. The sight of shit, blood, and a screaming infant with a misshapen head will always haunt me. And just when I have buried that horror in some dark recess of what is left of my mind, some new father tells me of the joy and happiness of his birthing experience and asks me to view the video. I quietly leave the room and puke. Thank God he and Judy survived, and he turned out sort of normal.
At four he taught himself to read, at five to write, and he was always pushing my buttons and everyone else’s in the family. While still in diapers he took a glass of water and poured it out the second-floor window on his brother’s head, then turned the glass back upright and dropped it on him, then giggled. He once crayoned a mural on the laundry room wall, then thinking he would probably get in trouble signed it with “Wes”, who is his older brother. He might have gotten away with that one, but the “e” was backwards. In public he was often an embarrassment as he would say the first thing that popped into his head. Just because it was the truth did not make it better. For example, when a 400-pound, filthy gas station attendant walked up to our car Marty yelled out the window, “Hey mister, how come you’re so fat and dirty?”
But the worst is when Judy’s brother married his second wife in San Diego. John’s wife was a doll, but her family was “new rich” and liked to flaunt it. I am sure that they were rubbing it in at the rehearsal dinner to John’s poor but honest family and Navy buddies with the two kinds of wine, fillet mignon, and a candlelight dinner by the pool. We were being snubbed and my fascination with their bug zapper probably did not help.
Right after dinner during their pretentious toasting’s, Marty, who as a child had a bladder the size of a thimble, started yelling at the top of his voice from inside the house, “Cockroach! There’s a cockroach in the bathroom!”
It took me only a few seconds to make it from the pool-side table and into the bathroom, but he wouldn’t shut up and everyone on the patio was listening in dead silence. When I pointed out that it was only a cricket Marty still in near hysterics, and full voiced replied,
“Dad, I know a cockroach when I see one and that’s a cockroach!”
Putting my hand over his mouth only made it worse. Later when one of John’s Navy buddies slipped me a ten to buy something for the kid, I realized that his bathroom discovery had been a catharsis. A five-year-old had put those prigs in their rightful place in the universe, for no matter how much money they had, their bathroom hygiene had been found out and aired in a most embarrassing and public manner. Sometimes God does work in mysterious and wonderful ways.
I had hoped that as Marty grew older, he would mellow a bit. No such luck. Our house was always in chaos and he was the center of almost all of it. As he grew, he went through a stage where he was awkward and clumsy. He couldn’t care less if his shoes were tied and was constantly tripping as a result. When the tennis shoes with the Velcro ties came out Judy thought she had that problem solved, but he lost one of his shoes the first time he wore them to school. He knocked a small hair bush into the toilet which required an hour to retrieve after we took the toilet out. Later he knocked one of Judy’s perfume bottles into the same toilet. Knowing the trouble, he got into with the brush he was resolved to fix it himself. He solved that problem by shooting and breaking it with Wes’s air rifle. Lucky for us the 22 was locked in a closet.
Marty, like most boys, had a thing for fireworks. In Oregon, the good ones that fly and really go boom are banned. To get the good stuff you need to buy them from an Indian reservation where they are exempt from state laws. It is still illegal to possess them and use them in the state of Oregon, but the cops usually turn a blind eye on the 4th of July as they would have to arrest half the population of the state.
One year I neglected to buy the needed contraband, so Marty set out to get it for us. He called the local Siletz reservation but found out that they did not sell any which prompted him to say.
“You’re not real Indians are you”.
Next, he tried to make his own. He found that if you put dry ice into a plastic two-liter Pepsi bottle with a little water, shook it up and tossed it, it made a nice retort. Judy of course forbids him from doing this, but he was Marty. So, one day while she was distracted, i.e. reading a book, he was once again experimenting with these devices in the front yard while I was under the house working on the plumbing and wondering whose car was back firing in the neighborhood. Marty soon switched to the one-liter sized bottle reasoning quite correctly that the smaller diameter of the bottle made for a stronger casing which meant that more pressure should build up inside before it ruptured and burst. It was either that or he ran out of the two-liter variety. Regardless of the reason, what he hadn’t figured on is that the ass end of the one-liter bottle was particularly sturdy and shaped very much like a Nazi WWII anti-tank projectile. He prepped it the same way he had with the two-liter bottles and tossed it a few yards away. After a minute or two this new and improved version had still not exploded. Marty carefully slipped the yard rake under the device to move it. Why he felt it needed to be moved I have no clue nor could he give me a valid explanation later. As soon as he picked it up it went off. The bottom of the bottle separated from the rest and hit him on the inner thigh just missing making him a soprano for life. For a brief instant millions of skin cells cried out in terror and then were silent. Marty didn’t cry but began yelling at the top of his lungs.
“Fuck me, it’s my fault, it’s my fault, fuck me!”
This brought Judy out of her reading trance as nothing is more annoying to her than foul language spoken by someone other than herself. By the time I had crawled from under the house she was already treating the wound which appeared as two concentric circles of oozing blood which exactly matched the bottom of the plastic bottle. Judy was particularly calm about all this; he was too old to spank at this point and yelling at him had been tried many times and failed. But she did feel the need to subtly remind him that she had warned him about this:
“So, did you learn your lesson?
To which he replied, “Yes mom.”
“And what is that lesson”, she asked expecting to hear “I should have listened to you”.
Instead, what she heard was “Next time I will use the longer rake and hold it out to the side”.
This episode did not end my son’s experimentation with firecracker substitutes. He eventually found that if you took three or four of those magnesium coated wire sparkers which were legal in Oregon and wrapped them tightly with electrician’s tape that it would make a respectable bang. Only trouble with that one is it had no easy ignition method, so you had to build a small fire under it first. I think the word of his discovery soon spread as within a few years that type of sparkler was no longer available in the state probably due to the number of reported injuries; or the damn Chinese driving yet another all- American company out of business with their cheap products produced by slave labor.
Please don’t get the impression that we as parents did not try to control our son. We did tried, but nothing worked. For example, every light switch in the house had a smear on the wall above and below it from his turning them on and off by swiping his hand on the wall then over the switch. I figured that this might be a place to start to teach my son some very rudimentary etiquette. After cleaning all the switches and repainting the offending smears, I took him aside and carefully instructed him on how to turn on and off light switches by using only his fingers on the switch itself. I then made him practice the lesson on every light switch that I had just cleaned and repainted. A day later I found a peanut butter and jelly smear starting a foot below and ending a foot above the bathroom switch. He had made himself a PB&J with about an inch of each and had turned on the light in his tried-and-true manner on his way to washing his hands after consuming this gustatory delight. I was a failure as a father. Nothing I could do was going to change him. I was struck by the brilliance of a statement I believe was made by Mark Twain about how to raise a teenage boy:
“When they turn 14, put them in a barrel and feed them though the bung hole. When they turn 16 plug the hole.”
Sometime when Marty was about 16 things began to get better. Maybe he was maturing, maybe it was me giving up trying to mold him, but I think it was sports. In most high schools in the country a brainy, awkward kid would have been relegated to the geeks and nerd’s clique. But Waldport being a small town had trouble getting enough kids to come out for sports; as a result, Marty was on the varsity football team as a freshman. Okay, so they only had a varsity team so what, he was on it. And what Marty lacked in physical ability he made up for in drive. By the time he was a sophomore he had earned a position as a starter and he did seem to hold his own.
What he really excelled at was wrestling which was surprising as Waldport in those years had a really good HS wrestling team. His freshman year I don’t think he won a single match, but by mid-season he had learned something about himself. If he really applied his will, he could not be pinned. We watched in awe as HS seniors who were district champs tried to pin him. By the end of the match, they were really getting pissed. Marty might have been easy to take down and to get on his back but then they could only get one shoulder down at a time, the other popping off the mat like he was made of rubber. His coach soon named him Gumby. The next year he did better and by the time he was senior he was district champ, a feat his jock brother never came close to accomplishing.
In his senior year he signed up for the Navy. He had decided to go into the Navy, not because of our family’s Naval tradition, nor because he thought of himself as gung-ho. He went in because he did not want to have us pay for his college education, having watched us struggle with helping Wes. Judy and I tried to talk him out of it. How could such a free spirit handle military discipline? But he was adamant and shortly after his 18th birthday he was in basic training in San Diego. Much to my surprise he excelled. Twenty-nine years later he is still in, having worked himself up the ranks, serving two tours of duty in the Middle East as a linguist, becoming a chief and being accepted to Officer Candidate School the same month. He then spent the next three years in New York becoming an officer, a nurse, then a nurse anesthetist, and is currently working on a Ph.D. What is even more astonishing is that military did not change him. He is just as crazy as he was when he was a kid.
On one of his tours, he was assigned as a translator to the New Zealand Navy. I think they have two ships both made of wood. He was stationed in Bahrain and was to report to the ship when it docked in Kuwait. Only trouble was the US Navy was not supplying him with a passport to cross the border. Marty figured that someone did not like the idea of loaning a valuable asset to the Kiwi’s as his language skills were needed right where he was. As luck would have it George Herbert Walker Bush, a.k.a. George the wiser, had just deployed a lot of US troops to Kuwait in response to a perceived provocation by Saddam Hussein. The only problem was that George had neglected to clear it with the Kuwaitis. Marty had valid orders, just no passport. He just showed up at the Kuwait border and played dumb. After about an hour of the Kuwaitis telling him he could not cross without a passport and Marty acting like he had the IQ of a dim light bulb, they finally, in frustration, let him cross. He must have had a lot of fun on the Kiwi ship as he awoke one morning on a beach somewhere in the middle east, naked, using his shoes for a pillow.
I think he was a pretty good linguist. It is one thing to understand a foreign language, quite another to speak it like a native. This latter ability could have gotten him in trouble were it not for his quick wits. He was in a bazaar in one of those little sheikdoms that not even the French could locate on a map, negotiating the price on a polo shirt when the salesman turned to the owner of the shop and said in Farsi that he was going to get full price for the shirt from this stupid American. To which Marty without thinking replied in perfect Farsi that he was not stupid and was not going to pay full price. Letting a local know that you spoke their language when you are an American and obviously a member of the military was not a good idea even in the days before the second Iraq war. When the shocked salesman asked the inevitable question about how he knew their language, Marty brilliantly answered that he was from California. The salesman simply nodded, for no matter where you are in the world, be it Ireland or in one of the unpronounceable” stans” that split off from the Soviet Union, everyone knows that Californians are weird and that anything said about them no matter how incredible has the ring of truth.
It was during that deployment that he met Nikki. She was halfway across the world in Long Island going to college to become a geologist. Her cousin, Jeremy, just happened to be a naval cryptographer whose duty station was sitting right next to Marty. Somewhere in the depths of the ship, after hours of listening and encoding, Jeremy decided that Nikki was the girl for Marty. Why he thought this is a complete mystery. If ever there were complete opposites, it is Nikki and Marty. Nikki is neat; Marty used to sleep on a bare mattress wearing his clothes and shoes. Nikki is graceful; Marty is a puppy who never grew into his feet. Nikki is careful; Marty likes to play toss the baby with his brother. Nikki is a near vegetarian; Marty once swallowed a live fingerling salmon on a field trip to a fish hatchery. Nikki makes plans; Marty just does. Yet somehow, they fell in love as pen pals. Maybe if they had met first it would not have worked out, but somehow it did. Judy once asked Nikki’s father what she saw in him. He must have thought about this a lot because the answer came back in a flash, “Marty is her adventure”. To which Judy responded that “she is his anchor”. While he still does crazy things, a touch of her hand will still his twitching knee, a soft word and the voice becomes quieter. They now have three kids and Marty is a wonderful dad. All three kids happen to be girls. He has accused me on several occasions of not teaching his sperm to swim straight. Personally, I think it has something to do with an exploding panzerfaust Pepsi bottle.
He still goes off on wild tangents. Nikki and he went shopping for a sun dress for his oldest daughter Maddie and did not like what they found, so Marty decided to make her one, even though he had never done anything like that before. He bought the pattern and fabric, then called Judy from New York on our cell phone at 6AM as we were driving back from visiting Judy’s family, “Mom, what’s a seam allowance?” This was followed by a series of cell phone calls in which he asked advice on how to clip seams, what a dart was, and about a 15-minute conversation about what a facing and a selvage are. Not that I knew what any of this shit was either, but Judy seemed to know and took great delight in telling him. Somehow, he managed to preshrink the fabric, cut it, and put together a little girl’s sun dress for a 3 PM picnic that day. Judy saw it later and said it looked pretty good.
I once got a call about auto mechanics. Marty had shown no interest in working on cars when he lived with us. Even when he bought his own car as a HS senior, he refused to do any work on it or even look under the hood. “Dad, that’s what PROFESSIONAL mechanics are for”.
Then after his first tour of duty in the Middle East he was stationed in Monterey, CA. He had bought an older Honda while overseas and had it shipped home. I don’t know why he decided that when it started to run rough that he could fix it with my help even though I was 700 miles away in Oregon. He buys a Wal-Mart tool kit and then gives me a call,
“Dad the Honda has something wrong with it, listen”, then points the phone at the car.
With the tuned ear of an expert mechanic, I soon diagnose the problem. “Marty, it’s not running right”.
“I know that dad, but what do you think is wrong?”
“Sounds to me that it is only running on three.
“Running on three what?”
“Three cylinders”
“What do I do?”
“Check for a lose spark plug wire.”
“Where are those?”
“They are attached to the spark plugs”
“Where are those?”
“Do you see a bunch of large black wires coming out of a round plastic thing?”
“Yeah!”
“That’s your distributor, follow one of the wires and tell me where it goes?”
“To this black cylinder-shaped thingy”
“Followed the wire in the middle of the distributor, didn’t you?”
“Yeah”
“Now follow one of the other wires that aren’t are coming out of the middle of the distributor that lead in the opposite direction.”
“How did you know that there would be four wires?
“Never mind that, just follow the damn wire.”
“Okay now I see a spark plug.”
Thank goodness that when he was a boy that I had often used old spark plugs for weights while jetty fishing or it might have taken a bit lot longer to get to this point.
“Marty, you need to check the wires on the spark plugs it see if they are on tight.”
“Okay Dad”
There is silence at the end of the line except for a badly knocking Honda in the background. It was only then that I realized my mistake: “Marty, turn off the car…turn off the car…TURN OFF THE CAR!!”, but I was too late.
“OH SHIT SHIT SHIT! That hurt like hell! Dad the car shocked me! Should I turn the car off?”
“Yes Marty, that would be a good idea.”
The distress motor noise abruptly stopped. A few seconds later the dialog continued.
“Dad, the wires are all tight, but I can wiggle one of the spark plugs”
“Pull off the wire and take the plug out and look at it.”
“Okay, SHIT! HOT HOT HOT!”
I had neglected to say let the engine cool first or use a spark plug wrench. After a bit of further over-the-phone profanity he finally gets back to me and we discuss the various parts of the automobile sparking plug and mutually decide that there is nothing wrong with the plug and that all he needs is to put it back in and reattach the wire. He does manage to get it into the now cooled hole without cross threading it but it still needs to be tightened.
“Marty, get out the spark plug socket from your tool kit and make sure it fits before tightening it, and then just snug it down, cause if you reef on it as it might break, then reattach the wire, and start the car.”
“Dad, What’s a spark plug socket?”
“Look in your tool kit at the sockets that came with it”
“Okay”
“Do you see any that are longer than the rest.”
“No, they are all the same length.”
“Marty, does your neighbor work on his cars.”
“I think so.”
“Do you get along with him?
“Yeah, he’s a hell of a nice guy.”
“Marty, take the spark plug back out and go over to your neighbors, hold up the spark plug and ask him if he has anything that will fit it.”
About a half hour later the phone rings. Marty now has the car running smoothly and is all excited about auto mechanics, asking me all kinds of questions visible to him but invisible to me about car parts. “Dad what does this do?” Either he just forgot that I was hundreds of miles away and on a phone without video as it had not been invented yet, or more likely he was just fucking with me.
So, it should come as no surprise to you that he called the other day and asked Judy, if she knew what to do with a deer after you shot it. He knew better than to ask me. In truth Judy had eaten a lot of game in her youth as her whole family were avid hunters. When she asked him if he had taken up hunting, he replied not yet, but that it was legal in Maryland to bag six deer as long as you didn’t go hunting on Sundays. Judy then pointed out to him that as Nikki didn’t like elk meat when she tried it, and that venison was a lot more gamey, what the hell was he going to do with six deer? He replied that he would eat some of it but have most made into sausage and pepperoni. Judy did tell him that it was best to take down the deer with the first shot as a running deer, especially a wounded one would have a stronger gamey taste. I don’t know why she knows this, or even if it’s true, but I know better to question her red neck upbringing. Marty said he would have no problem taking down the deer on the first shot cause he was going to use a muzzle loader. Like I said Marty is special. But then so are his wife and daughters. Although I have had a lot of fun poking fun at him in this article, I can’t imagine my world without him. He as enriched our lives as has his whole family.