No Sneaking Out Sideways
Big news before we get to this week’s story! I’ve just published a dark crime comedy novella called Dig, under the pen name Pastrami Crawford. I’ll be sharing more details below, but if you want to dig right in, I’m running a free promo on Kindle for the next three days.
Maybe I’ve made you smile or laugh when you’ve read some of my writing. Doing the above would indirectly allow me to see your smile or hear your laugh.
You’ll be among the first. Feels good to be first.
You like your laughs with a side of evil.
You enjoy watching people make one horrible decision after another.
You like dialogue that cracks like a whip.
You’re a fan of any of the following who influenced this novella: Alfred Hitchcock, Edgar Allan Poe, Raymond Chandler, the Coen Brothers, Elmore Leonard, Tom Waits, Aaron Sorkin, Flannery O’Connor, Martin McDonagh, Charles Portis, John Kennedy Toole, Joe Lansdale, and Quentin Tarantino.
More details after today’s story, but in case you missed the link, here it is: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CWS7HN7P
One second, maybe two seconds, before it happened, I heard my daughter, Charlee, say the words. In that second or two between what she said and what happened, time slowed in a way that defied physics. The following is a transcript of my interior monologue during that brief window of time:
Did Charlee really just say that? There’s no way. She’s been raised better. Why the hell did I show her all those Alfred Hitchcock movies? It’s like she’s willfully ignoring the collegiate-level moral and philosophical education I’ve spoon fed her since she was a baby. She looked fate right in the eye, and she fucking winked. No! Worse than that! She talked shit. She talked shit to fate. She was there, she bore witness to the one time I talked shit to fate and ended up with a broken bone, a concussion, and an afternoon of my wife dislodging pebbles from the side of my face (more on that another time). I have utterly failed her as a father. And it’s likely going to cost me more than it will cost her.
So what did she do?
We were out for a driving lesson. Charlee recently got her permit, and I’ve been trying to rack up hours for her behind the wheel. My wife happily surrendered this parenting albatross to me because she possesses “a strong sense of self awareness.” Translation? She can hardly stomach watching our son, Sam, play basketball. Every time Sam sets a pick or gets picked, my wife nearly has an anxiety attack. Sitting beside her first born daughter while she figures out how to control what is essentially a 2,000 pound killing machine was not my wife’s idea of time well spent.
I, on the other hand, was looking forward to this milestone. Having taught college for the better part of two decades, I prided myself as a patient, calm mentor, the kind of teacher who could usher his daughter into a lifetime practice of defensive yet confident motoring.
The plan was to let her drive to Starbucks to study with her girlfriends. We made a stop for gas. I made her pump it herself because this dad is raising an independent young woman. After that, it was just a football field’s drive into the Starbucks parking lot.
En route, I provided her with my usual co-pilot affirmations:
“We’re in a parking lot. Be alert! Sweep your eyes for kids, morons, senior citizens, teens, morons, runaway strollers with babies, runaway shopping carts, morons, canyon zombies, morons, Real Housewives of Orange County, morons… Even if you run over a moron, you’ll feel bad. You’ll definitely have nightmares about it… Okay, go ahead and pull slowly—ever so slowly—into one of those three parking spots.”
I started to gesture to the parking spots I had mentioned, and that’s when she said it.
“You’re about to see what a good parker I am.”
Are you fucking kidding me?!
Next, of course, I rambled through the aforementioned interior monologue during that pre-traumatic window of physics-defying seconds.
Shortly after that, my sweet, beautiful daughter—my intelligent little girl who is an exceptional athlete with top-tier coordination and agility, to say nothing of her GPA, which is north of 4.0—jerked the wheel and, for reasons that escape me, stomped on the gas.
As time returned to its normal flow, I took stock of what had just happened. Charlee missed her parking target by about three feet and smashed the front bumper of our SUV into the rear fender of a sedan whose passengers were busy—no shit—scratching lottery tickets.
Nobody was hurt. The passengers of the other car, a mother and her daughter, couldn’t have been kinder or more patient. Charlee was rattled. The daughter in the sedan said,”Don’t worry about it. I did the same thing. You’ll be fine.” She was very sweet. I wanted to hug her for the kind words. But I also wanted to slap the shit out of her.
Don’t worry about it?!
Do you know who says things like that? People who don’t pay for insurance.
But the girl was right. Worrying has never yielded much for me. And as much as I’ve spent time talking with my daughter about fate and how it shouldn’t be tempted—or shit-talked—some lessons have to be learned the demolition derby way.
Oddly, I’m grateful for this little accident. Driving is a milestone. It’s the next thing that means our little girl is on her way, that time is moving faster than I’d like. Not that I want it to slow down in ways that defy physics, but I do want more time with my little girl, and this fender-bending debacle has given her pause. Yes, I want her to be an independent woman who’s tough and resilient and knows when to take risks, but I also need her to be fully aware of the lessons of fate: Life can turn upside down quicker than a hiccup, and you can’t always sneak out sideways.
Related, when Charlee was a baby, we drove to the river in the middle of the night. Road trips are easier when babies sleep through them. On the way out, I stopped for gas in the middle of nowhere and took a side road to get back to the highway. Charlee woke up with a dirty diaper, and I pulled off the road to change her. That’s when we saw something weird.
In a field, about 50 yards away, three men stood in the headlights of an old car, it looked like Cadillac. One of the three men was half the size of the other two. They all had short-handled shovels, and they were digging a hole. It was just past 2am. One of them stopped digging and stared at me as I put Charlee back in her car seat and sped away.
This, I thought, is what it looks like to try to sneak out sideways after life has turned upside down. Two-and-a-half clowns digging a shallow grave with short-handled shovels. The image stayed with me for a long while until I decided to write a story about it. The aforementioned Dig. Here’s the brief pitch:
One body. Two brothers. A whole lotta gravedigging.
Most people need all ten fingers to play the piano. So when up-and-coming bluesman Griff Wiggins freakishly loses two of his fingers, it doesn’t take much effort for his two-bit older brother Ollie to talk him into a career change.
The career? Robbing the local kingpin.
But when the robbery goes sideways, they find themselves digging a shallow grave in a mountain pass. The dead body wasn’t part of the plan, but if they can just dig the grave and lay the body to rest, they’ll be on their way with the score of a lifetime. Seems easy enough, right?
Wrong. There’s Ollie’s girlfriend who’s playing her own angle. There’s car trouble. There’s a one-legged associate who can’t stop bringing up quasi-philosophical quandaries. But most importantly, there’s a river of bad blood flowing through a lifetime of broken brotherhood.
And Griff and Ollie will have to bury the hatchet if they hope to bury the body.
If you’re new here, consider perusing some previous All Kinds of Funny:
This will give you a good idea about the characters/family members who I frequently dish on, including the dog whose image inspired the All Kinds of Funny logo: Highs, Lows, and Mids
Another story about my daughter and a birds-and-the-bees fiasco: Are you there, Judy Blume? It's me, Norm.
Avocado of Doom: A story about another accident of sorts.
And one more about the resilience of our chickens, or at least one of our chickens: The Lifesaving Virtues of Super Glue
Yikes! The story of your daughter brings back memories of teaching my kids to drive....well, ah, I didn't, so I guess that's why I don't remember. I probably didn't have the courage. I was working as a single mom raising them then and I somehow got past that stage. One day, my son was driving and another, my daughter was....and I don't even remember how they got in the driver's seat. Pretty scary story, that, yeah?