A Portrait of My Progeny as a Young Man

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A Portrait of My Progeny as a Young Man

“I don't care if you've robbed a bank, I don't care if you murdered somebody in Mexico because you were trying to make good with the cartel, I don't care if you were doing lines of cocaine with Tom Hanks in Dolly Parton's Tennessee casita—we are the ones you tell.”

There are so many things you never think you're going to have to say to your kid. Parenting is hard, but I constantly have to remind myself that growing up is harder. It's hard to figure out who you are. It's hard to figure out where the boundaries are. It's hard to figure out what's too far and what's not far enough. I also have to remind myself that it's his job, his calling, his destiny to push back, to explore the borders, to embody the spirits of punk rock and gangster rap, to become the man and shed the little boy.

Say what you will about social media, but the memories that pop up again and again are so wonderfully nostalgic. I looked up the word nostalgia after I watched a scene in Mad Men where Don Draper used nostalgia to pitch the Kodak carousel. Nostalgia comes from the Greek. It's “the suffering evoked by the desire to return to one's place of origin.” When these memories pop up or my wife and I scroll through the camera roll, the nostalgia runneth over. Lately, the nostalgia has mostly been around our son, Sam (we call him Sammers), who is in the throes of puberty, and he is, and has always been, an old soul—charming, spirited, and a little too witty for his own good.

When he was a toddler, I used to threaten to “thump” him when he was whining or generally being a turd, just a playful threat in good fun. Funny enough, when I was grumpy or in a bad mood, he would mimic my threat and tell me he was going to “thump me in the face.” 

Adorable. 

Except that his "th" is more lip than tongue and sounds like “f,” and his “mp” is more tongue than lip and sounds like “ck,” which made for a pretty R-rated Quentin Tarantino meets Judd Apatow translation. Several parents at the local park looked at me with abject terror. 

Before puberty, when he was a baby and until just recently, his hair was practically white. The sun would hit it, and he would glow. When we would take him to Disneyland, where there were a lot of international tourists, we were regularly stopped by Japanese families who wanted to take a picture with him, ostensibly because of his Goldilocks halo. 

He played one year of soccer, and our league brought in some coaches from the UK—some kind of foreign exchange coach program. One of the coaches, an endearing twenty-something young woman, had this exchange with Sammers:

Coach: Hello, handsome.

Sam: Do you know me?

Coach: Yes. 

Sam: How do you know me? 

Coach: I recognize you from practice. 

Sam: How do you recognize me? 

Coach: How do you think? 

Sam: Um… (and then, as he brushed a white-hot glowing golden lock out of his face) …it must be my bright blue eyes.

Oh, to be wildly confident and wildly naive.

We named him Samuel Cash after my favorite storytellers—Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain) and Johnny Cash. One day, just for fun, we dipped into the Halloween bin and dressed him up like one half of his namesake. I followed the Mark Twain House on Facebook. I thought they might get a kick out of our photo session, so I sent it in, and they posted it. It got its fair share of attention. Yes, because he looks a little like a cartoon version of Mark Twain, but also because I believe you can sense that he has that Mark Twain spirit—a gift of gab and wit, of humor and timing.

One day we were driving, and I was playing Jeff Buckley's cover of Hallelujah. Charlee, my daughter, was impressed by Jeff Buckley and asked, “Wow, how does he hold that note for so long?”

“Breath control,” I responded.

Immediately, Sam chimed in, “Didn't he drown?” 

It wasn't just his timing that was impressive—it was the fact that he was familiar with Jeff Buckley's bio at 8-years-old and used it to question my commentary on the man’s iconic vocal performance. A third-grade iconoclast. 

For all of his charm, he was not without his struggles. He could recite the NBA statistics of Jerry West and Wilt Chamberlain, speak at length about the lyrics of the Stones and the Beatles, and explain the family tree of all the Greek and Roman gods in detail, but it took him quite a long time to master not wetting the bed. During his struggle to attain bladder mastery, he made it six days in a row with a dry pull-up. On the seventh day, he woke us up and said, "Mom, Dad, my pull-up's not dry this morning." We smiled, hugged him, and told him it was no big deal. He replied, "Well, guys, I guess this is just the way I’m gonna have to live my life." You gotta respect a man who knows his limitations.

Speaking of limitations, he’s had his share of run-ins and dust-ups with bullies—and not the innocent coming-of-age schoolyard bullies, either. He’s dealt with some real shitheads. One kid blindsided him and broke his arm during a game of hide-and-seek. Another, three years older—bigger, taller, and stronger—yanked him out of a tree and then kicked him when he was on the ground. Being precocious and sweet can make you an easy target.

It reminds me of a Calvin and Hobbes comic strip when Calvin has to deal with the bully Moe. Moe approaches, ready to knock the crap out of Calvin, and Calvin asks him, "Are your maladjusted antisocial tendencies the product of your berserk pituitary gland?" I can see Sam saying something like this. In fact, when I got tired of him being bullied, I gave him the green light to tee off on any bully who so much as looked at him in a way that made him uncomfortable. Of course, it did come to blows, and Sam fought back—popped a bully right in the mush before it got broken up by a parent volunteer. Afterward, Sam approached the bully and said, "I want to explain to you why I punched you in the nose..." and then proceeded to articulate his philosophical approach to physical conflict resolution. My boy.

Now, as puberty is coming down hard, the little boy is slipping away to make way for the man. For all his precociousness, it took him a long time to understand “That’s what she said” jokes (my wife is a big fan of The Office). We might say something like, “I gotta drive Charlee to volleyball practice,” and he would say, “That’s what she said!” Then he’d look to us for approval, as if to say, “Right, Dad? That’s what she said, right?” Which was its own kind of hilarity. Well, now he understands them, and it’s a little depressing every time he tees up a good one.

The other day, he was talking to my wife about some girl he has his eye on and casually mentioned that the girl had a “gyatt,” which, if you don’t know, is new slang for a nice butt.

“Oh, are you a butt man?” my wife asked.

“A what?” he replied.

“You know, some men prefer butts, others prefer boobs.”

“Mom, I’m a total package kinda man.” He’s his father’s son.

For all the struggles he had through grade school and junior high, he’s loving his freshman year of high school. His sister is a junior and has laid out the red carpet for him. He’s got friends that are sophomores, juniors, and seniors, and most of the teachers already know him by way of his sister’s good reputation. He’s interpreted this as a license to lean back a little and take things easy, which has made things hard.

He’s always done well in school and he’s still doing well, but a few weeks ago, we checked his grades, and he had an F in Spanish. He’s never had lower than a B on a report card, but he was no longer headed in that direction. We asked him about it, and he immediately blamed the subject matter: "Spanish is stupid. Why do I have to learn it? It doesn’t make any sense. I’m never going to need it.” Never mind that Spanish is a beautiful language, his claims were especially annoying since he knows that his mother and I literally used Spanish to save a man’s life not too long ago.

Of course, his complaints were just a smokescreen for the fact that he’d been screwing around in class. A few times, his teacher printed out homework handouts, but she came up short. Since he sits in the back of the class, he assumed he just didn’t have to do the homework. The teacher told him that the homework was available online, he just needed to print it out and complete it, but he struggled with our printer—never mind that he has designed literal worlds in Minecraft and regularly plays online video games with kids from all over the globe. Evidently, our Samsung printer was where his vast technological skills reached their breaking point.

We told him he had to go talk to his teacher, apologize for his laziness, follow that up with a thank-you card for her service, and then come up with a plan to get his grade back on track. And he is doing so in a spirit of atonement and repentance. Again, the journey from boyhood to manhood is a constant tension: expansion toward manhood, contraction back to boyhood—succeed and fail, advance and retreat.

The most recent puberty-driven demonstration of this delicate dance occurred at their high school football game. My wife and I stayed home, and our daughter drove our son to the game. Afterwards, she was supposed to drive him back before going out with some of her friends. She dropped him off, and when he walked in, he was acting a little funny. My wife asked if he had been drinking or if he had taken something, and he just shook it off and said, “Nope, I’m going to take a shower.” Odd behavior, even for a boy suffering beneath the devastating weight of puberty.

Moments later, my wife got a phone call from one of Sam’s friends who does a pretty solid unintentional Eddie Haskell impersonation. “Where was Sam when he lost his phone?” the kid asked.

“What?!” my wife said. “Sam lost his phone?!”

So, he wasn’t under the influence of alcohol or drugs—he was under the influence of dishonesty. There’s a time and a place for lying. I like fun lies, like casually mentioning at a party that one of the loveliest and most delightful people at said party did prison time for loan sharking—ya know, playful, benevolent lies. But lying to cover up shortcomings and mistakes or misdeeds and manipulations? No good. When you lie, you put a knot in a rope, and the more you hold on to that lie, the tighter that knot gets until it’s impossible to untangle.

Sam had carelessly lost his phone in the parking lot across from the high school. When his sister picked him up, he realized as much and enlisted her to search for his phone after she dropped him off.

We called his sister, and she had already mobilized all of Sam’s friends—about a dozen kids, all of them as sweet as they are obnoxious. She had also roped in about a dozen of her own friends, and they were coming up with nothing.

A few minutes later, it’s 11:00 on a Friday night, and my wife and I are driving to search for our son’s phone in an empty parking lot. We get to the frozen yogurt place where he thinks he dropped it, but it’s closed. No phone anywhere. My wife searches one side of the parking lot, I search the other. We both have apps that track our kids' phones, and the apps show us where his phone last pinged, but we find nothing. We search for about half an hour, calling each other, both of us annoyed and frustrated, and we start arguing. Meanwhile, my daughter and her gaggle of a search party make their way across the street, all of them rowdy and trying to find Sam's phone. I’m about as mad as I’ve been in a good long while. My wife gives hugs to all of my daughter’s friends, and I walk right past them, rage coursing through my veins—they probably feel the temperature rise about 5 degrees as I stomp toward our car.

When I get to the car, there’s a sandwich shop right next to the frozen yogurt place, and a tiny Mexican woman, about as big as a garden gnome, is locking up. In a Hail Mary, I ask her if anyone turned in a phone.

“No, we close. Open tomorrow morning,” she says in broken English.

And because I took four years of high school Spanish, two years of college Spanish, and because I worked in my fair share of Southern California’s restaurants and bars through high school and college, I am able to say, "Mi hijo perdió su celular rojo. ¿Has visto un celular rojo?"

Translation: “My son lost his red cell phone. Have you seen a red cell phone?”

Her eyes light up, “Ah, sí, ​​lo tenemos.” Ah, yes, we have it.

She reopens the shop and takes us to the kitchen where my son’s phone rests on the counter. My wife and I shower her with hugs and give her all the cash from our pockets, even though she protests. We exit the sandwich shop, phone in hand, and scream to our daughter and her friends that we have the phone, and for a brief moment, we all know what it feels like to win the Super Bowl in the final seconds of the fourth quarter. 

We get in the car and talk about how quickly we went from blind rage and disappointment to unbridled glee and gratitude. If you can think of a better way to describe what it’s like to go through puberty, you’re a better writer than I am. 

We get home, and that’s when I drop the monologue on Sam about honesty, about how he has to come to us when he’s in trouble, especially when he’s in trouble, even when he gets into trouble with Tom Hanks and Dolly Parton. We also assure him that he will make more mistakes, that the mistakes come with growth, and it’s okay as long as he’s honest. As I continue to wax poetic on the truth, I’m just about to tell him about MacBeth (which he won’t get until his junior year) and recite “Oh what a tangled web we weave when first we practice to deceive our loving, devoted, put-upon parents…” when I catch him staring off, pensive and wistful. For a moment, I think he might be ignoring me, and just to make sure, I do the dad thing and say, “You understand what I’m saying, Sammers?” 

He looks directly at me with all the confidence of a young man who pays attention during Spanish class and says, “Sí, yo comprendo.” 

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