El, by now, has mastered the art of pulling over and whipping N’s dipe off, scooping poop out, Bapy Wiping her ass and slapping a new diaper on faster than a crew pit at Nascar. Or is it the Indy 500? I was trying to snag a whole new demo with that metaphor, but in reality one of the two race-car drivers I could name is Dale Earnhardt Junior, and even that’s just because of the band Dale Earnhardt Junior Junior. (You have to wonder, were their lawsuits involved? Did the original Junior Dale demand the royalties from “Simple Girl?”) AJ Foyt never had that problem, though he had a cooler name.

The car thing is brutal because there is—literally—nowhere to go. The noise just bounces around in those four little windowed walls. It’s like being trapped in a portable season of American Horror: Asylum, all 13 episodes, compressed into one rolling hell-yowl, without Jessica Lange deranging from seat to seat. Lately El’s taken to riding in back of the Caddy, sitting beside little N, in hopes her proximity will dim the impulse to blow out the windshield with a single piercing my-parents-are-monsters note. One parent/neighbor with five month old twins actually suggested an adult car seat. Before the conversation, I didn’t know they had those. I’m still not sure the poor woman, clearly outgunned by a pair of chew-crazy under-oners, is telling the truth, or if she’s delusional. It happens. I haven’t taken the time to Google Adult Carseats (who has the energy?) but if they actually do have them, and they’d help put a damper on our daughter’s ear-bleeding screams we’d both hop in and buckle our crotch buckles. (Future headache for child: Dad’s got a Prius and a ten year old Cadillac, which makes him automotively revolting at both the Elvis and the Ed Begley Jr.  poles of existence.)

All of the above, by the way, was written with a yowling child—my yowling child—in her crib five feet away. She’s not just screaming, she’s eyeballing me, giving me the pre-crawler Mad Dog treatment as she blasts bloody nodes off her factory-fresh voicebox. Has anyone done studies on the effect of non-stop eye-contact infant screeching? Are there PhDs on the subject? Did doctoral candidates with young children perhaps decide to focus on their own spawn and end up standing in front of the mirror playing with their own hair for hours on end and muttering Mommy sad instead?

Of course, implicit—unspoken?—in this OGD’s reaction to baby screaming is the simple fact that baby gets to scream, while Daddy doesn’t. Babies can scream whenever they want. They can also unburden their bowels and touch themselves in public with impunity. I’m not claiming these questionable privileges inspire jealousy—I mean, either one of those would be creepy for a man over fifty, right? I am simply saying, forget the random crapping and crotchy touches, I would fucking love to wail at the top of my lungs when life didn’t go my way. Who wouldn’t? I don’t even need a reason. Just once, I would like to curl up on the floor of a supermarket, perhaps in the housewares aisle, and unleash my inexplicable, keening grief, just howl like an endangered timber wolf with his paw caught in an trap somewhere outside Nome. (Or is it Gnome? I give up.)

Babies are like the sidewalk screamers who used to rule New York when I lived there in the 70s. Back then babbling and screaming out loud on the street still got you looks. (This was before cell phones.)  Now, what makes life even more worth living is walking into a store or restaurant with a high-decibel wriggler in your arms. It’s not just the accusatory head-turning—I get that anyway, from just being a dick my age with a cool young girlfriend and a tot in tow – it’s the impossible-to-avoid thought-balloons above each head, the ones that say, “What have you done to that poor child?”  “What kind of twist-case are  you?” or “Wait until I call Social Services!” 

What unifies them all is a level of self-righteous, hateful and bilious viciousness which—until I lately fathered a Diaper Diva—I saw only once before, in the face of a grandmother in a black-and-white photo spitting on the corpse of Mussolini, hanging upside down in a Milan Esso Station. I think the term I’m looking for is war criminal. Or the parental equivalent thereof. The implication being that if a creature is wailing so loudly, so relentlessly, with such absolute, soul-searing, desperate ferocity, then there has to be a reason. Though, as anyone who’s been around one can tell you, babies don’t have to have reasons. In that respect, they’re a lot like us. The difference being that it’s appropriate for babies to behave like babies. We don’t get to scream. Except on the inside. Like I’m doing right now. Like, I cringe to admit, I probably do for about a quarter of any given day. (Am I being wildly optimistic?) Until young N, who has just learned to wave—a dainty palm-and-finger waggle accompanied by a coy smile into her own shoulder—decides to cease roiling and wave at me. And then, of course, it’s like the screaming never happened. Like my heart and ear-drums aren’t shattered in fifteen different places. And all is well in the world.

I’ve died and been cuted back to life.

I mean, how can you not love the little fuckers?

***

Rumpus original art by Jason Novak. 

Related Posts:

• OG DAD #18: When Good Babies Go Bad
• OG DAD #16: ZERO DARK DIRTY DIAPER
• OG DAD #15: TOT BITES DOG
• OG DAD #14: BACKOPALYPSE NOW
• OG DAD #13: My Baby Does The Hanky-Panky

That was eight weeks ago. By now she’s climbing. And singing—or maybe, more accurately, scatting, since she doesn’t actually know any words yet besides Dada, Ha-Mmm, and something that sounds suspiciously like ‘dork,’ which she only busts out when she’s staring at me and pointing. (How could she know?) What she doesn’t do is crawl. At least, not forward. Mysteriously, she can—when flat on her back, and possessed of the urge—do a kind of dry-land backstroke, kicking her little sausage-rockets and launching herself in the opposite direction of where she actually wants to go. It shows on her face—the alternate consternation at going the wrong the way, and the sheer delight of going anywhere.

But still—baby’s first bill! Today you are an American! I tell her. You owe money. If you don’t pay it, they’ll send more bills. If you don’t pay it for long enough, they’ll actually come after you. And, I admit, I was looking forward to the moment when we get a call, pick it up and it’s the collection agency demanding to know if Nico can come to the phone. Maybe they’ll send somebody around to repo her Jumperoo.

It’s all got me stirred up. Sleepless. Which works out well, since tonight my child is sleepless, I actually have an excuse for sitting in the dark and staring at the TV at three-forty-blow-my-brains-out in the morning. And—I can’t lie—I’m back to binging on Healthy Time Vanilla Teething biscuits. And again, I feel sort of Sylvia Plathy, without the whole head-in-the-oven thing. I mean, I’m not really depressed, I’m just Daddy-zombied. And Daddy doesn’t have it half as bad as Mommy, who, lately, must endure hours with a baby lodged on chest, jaw locked on her nipple like a bear trap with butt-dimples. Now that our tiny clamper has sprouted teeth, the situation has moved from mild discomfort to flat-out flesh pain. I sometimes wake in the night to see El starting straight ahead in the dark—the whites of her eyes slightly harrowing—Nico snoring and sleep-chomping atop her.

When Sweet Pea does cease nip-nibbling, it’s generally to revolve on her axis, so she can kick one of us in the face. It’s Nature Channely, the means by which our twenty-pounder finds the exact position for maximal Mom and Dad face-kicking. (Shout out to Claude Bessy, AKA Kickboy Face, late founder of Slash Magazine and Catholic Discipline.) Was this repetitive foot-in-teeth maneuver, like the stock video of Mama and Baby cheetah tussling on all the Big Cat shows, preparation  for real-life survival face-kicking down the road? Or is it simply that our offspring hates the fact that we have all our teeth, and she doesn’t, so she’d really like to heel-smack some of ours out?

Now it’s nearly four, and we’re watching a Sesame Street rerun, so the poignancy of the moment is charged by retro-knowledge of Elmo’s dismissal due to underage sex charges. Too bad he didn’t work for the Pope, or he could have kept his job and just been transferred to another kid’s show.

The night was interesting before this. We took Nico on a baby date. Tots love other tots. And the tot Nico loves right now is a year-and-changer with a biblical name and Evil Kneivel tendencies. Cool kid. I’m crazy about the little guy. And when, in the middle of the meal, I watched him crawl randomly across the floor of a Mexican restaurant, with the fearlessness of a blind man on PCP, I thought I saw my daughter’s eyes widen, unbridled fascination spread her lips in a vivid smile. I think the technical term is smitten. “That’s how it is,” El says, stabbing a ball of guacamole with a corn chip, then crunching it, “little girls like bad little boys.”

I’d never seen a grown stunt-man take as many face-plants as Nico’s baby boyfriend. It was impressive. Despite my trepidation that she’d follow in his—well, not footsteps, since neither of them walk; belly-grime, maybe—I had to admit, it was impressive. And I was wondering at what point my little girl would take an itch to make her bones by bellying her way across a four-lane freeway at rush hour.

Perv jacket or not, I found it soothing to just listen to Elmo—in character—and not worry about the future, the big dangerous world and the smooth-tongued one-year-olds out to lure my pride and joy into potentially fatal restaurant floor-crawls.

It will happen, soon enough. For now, give me Sesame Street and teething biscuits. Wild times. We’ll pay the bills later.

When good babies go bad.

It happens to all of us. Eventually.

Related Posts:

• OG DAD #19: The Scream
• OG DAD #16: ZERO DARK DIRTY DIAPER
• OG DAD #15: TOT BITES DOG
• OG DAD #14: BACKOPALYPSE NOW
• OG DAD #13: My Baby Does The Hanky-Panky

The snippet above was recorded verbatim, from a man I’ll call “Kenny” at a New Dad Support Group I attended. It is, of course, wrong on too many levels to contemplate. But what truly disturbs, as much as the mechanics of the incident itself—up and including use of the term “underscrote,” which I’ve never heard before and, truth be told, could live without hearing again—was the grotesque reference to his child’s fontanel.

Another fellow, whose name I knew only as Ted from Alta-Dena, seemed to share my revulsion. “Whoa, Dude, slow down! That’s not technically a teabag. There was no intent. But still, man… I mean, you really did kind of Tetleyed your son’s soft spot?” We were in a back booth at Denny’s. Five New Dads, of every socio-economic stripe. Ted looks at me, conspiratorial, and shrugs “You ask me,” he whimpers, wiping his palms on his pant-legs, as if to smear off the psychic quease, “the whole thing feels like some kind of gypsy curse… ”

Even now, transcribing the chunk of New Dad convo from my notebook to my computer, I feel like drilling a hole in my skull and pumping Purell inside. I guess the moral is—it’s not easy being a New Dad. (That, or stuff cotton in your ears before you attend a support group for Nervous Pops. I don’t know what I expected – maybe tips on getting your baby to drool somewhere besides your chest when you carry them. (The white stains, inevitably in nip-range, make it look like I’m the one who’s lactating.) Or ways to keep from scooping your eyes out with a serrated grapefruit spoon and sinking them in mulch after watching your 18th consecutive pre-dawn rerun of The Chica Show. On the Sprout Network—which is where we get Sesame Street in my neck of the Direct TV parental woods. (I’m not, by the way, one of those people who think TV is bad for children and you should never let a youngster near one. I mean, I was, once upon a time, but then I actually had a kid and had to deal with the yawning hours of non-sleep screaming and crying and couldn’t bear to read another Golden book, play another five minutes with the talking doggy. It knows my child’s name, and keeps asking her if she’s happy, and since I don’t know to turn it off I finally had to dismember it.)

Anyway, how I ended up at the New Dad meeting was, I met a guy at a zoo party. You do things like this, go to zoo parties, when you have a baby. The zoo party was a birthday event a musician friend of mine was having for his three year old. Which is how I came to hear the spectacularly unsavory, if wholly believable, paternal creep-fest shared by this poor shlub cited above.

“Boundary issues,” was Ted from Alta Dena’s ultimate explanation for the lamentable soft spot incident.  Strange territory, fatherhood. Occasionally deeply creepy. I didn’t go back to the New Dad confabs. Mostly because I didn’t need to hear anybody else’s parental agita. (Least of all involving involuntary bathtub twin tea-baggage.)

Meanwhile, my own child has been whinging non stop for days, coughing like a sixty year old with a quart of Four Roses and three pack a day Chesterfield habit. Worse, I know where she got sick. In fact, I can precisely identify the time and place. Three Saturdays ago, at 6:15 PM, in the ER of the Hollywood Presbyterian Hospital. Waiting room. We’d gone there, by way or adventure, when El stuck her finger in a portable blender. Long story. Short version, we earned ourselves a four hour slot in the pain lottery, with all the other walk-in fevers, bleeding eyeballs, stricken grandparents, tweaky hipsters and chattering, scab-faced schizophrenics likely to slog in out of the dark on any Hollywood Saturday night for a little ER Time.

What made it worse—beyond my girlfriend’s anguish at seeing her left forefinger newly morphed into tomato paste—was that we had, by necessity, to bring our eight month old into this inferno. Even that would not have been so bad, had not a curious cultural phenomenon kicked in within five minutes of our arrival. Namely, the propensity for old Russian ladies to squeeze her cheeks, grab her feet and generally manhandle our child. Every time one of these Gromyko-faced babushkas paddled by I’d find myself testy as Mister Whipple screaming “Don’t Squeeze the Charmin” at grabby customers. If I fend one off on the left, another bubkas up behind me and rubs noses. Mostly a stoic decorum reigns among the ER denizens. But our blue-eyed baby exerts some kind of  pull on these  aggressively grandmotherly émigrés. Before I could intervene, one lady, with a face remarkably like Christopher Lee in the 1966 Hammer Films classic, Rasputin the Mad Monk (if Christopher Lee had put on about 89 pounds, all in the face) was literally coughing into a sopping hanky with one hand and pinching Bink’s cheeks with the other. No sooner had I shooed her away than a second, more Khrushchev-esque intruder sidled up. There seemed no way to stop the former Soviet bloc putsch. “Is Russian baby!” each babushka announced. Before proceeding to douse her with Borscht-resistant cold germs that had her coughing up hamhock-sized Cracker Jack prizes for the next month.

Of course, there is the theory that the more germs the baby’s exposed to—the greater resistance your baby will have. Dousing her in the detritus of a Saturday nigh Hollywood ER, our child may well have an Armor-All Immunity for the foreseeable future. That or she’ll come down with Moscow Fever and we’ll have to nurse her back to life with blini. At which point she will also emerge stronger and better equipped for a tough, toxic tomorrow. As a viral astronaut for the former Soviet Union.

Still, all I can think about is the accidental family tea-bagger. “Hey,” was the last thing Kenny the Bathtub miscreant pleaded, “accidents happen.”

Sad but true. I’m accidentally never going back to my New Dad Support Group. But not because of the disturbo and disgraced priestly over-share. (I’ve heard stranger—there was another fellow who could not bring himself to hug his one year old because she had eyes just like his mother, who used to make him do the Mashed Potatoes in monkey pajamas for her lady’s bridge group, which he claims is the source of his lifelong performance anxiety with women.)

Sometimes I think they should require psychological profiles, or at least learner’s permits, for parenthood. But then, how many of us would be here if they did?

***

Rumpus original art by Jason Novak.

Related Posts:

• OG DAD #16: ZERO DARK DIRTY DIAPER
• OG DAD #10: Milkaholic
• OG DAD #3: Insane in the Membrane
• OG DAD #2: The Texas Jew Panel
• OG DAD #1: The Hum

I read in The New York Times about feces transplants—quite possibly the future of post-antibiotic intestinal medicine—and the future of my entire family suddenly seemed rosy. With the amount of shit my daughter generates in one day, she could put herself through college, or maybe buy a college. The article did not specify how much a pound of healthy tot feces goes for on the black market, but if it’s anything like kidneys and livers, I’m sniffing a Bentley in the garage by Christmas. Picture Chiwetel Ejiofor from Dirty Pretty Things, only instead of uncovering a hotel organ removal racket, he stumbles on a hospital nursery running an industrial baby crap factory.

You don’t consider, going into child-rearing, the amount of fecal-centric activity you’re going to be enjoying with your child. In my own case, the grumpy business is amplified by the fact that I also walk two dogs in the morning. And, as is custom in my neck of the planet, I stuff a batch of plastic shitbags in my pocket before I leave the house, and pause to gather up dog-bombs as they drop and sneak them into the nearest garbage cans. (In Nick Tosches’s wrongly overlooked masterpiece The Hand Of Dante, the author devotes some serious ink to the grisly phenom of humans picking up canine waste, and is suitably repulsed. For this giant of American of literature, the practice embodies, more or less, the Decline of Western Civilization. It’s a powerful notion. And I’m with him—though, in all honesty, my concerns, at the moment, are more mercenary. The potential for bootleg feces, it suddenly hits me, could be huge. With enough dogs in his posse, a guy could make serious money. I could be the Henry Ford of Fido-bagging.)

 ***

Hours later, at the 10:30 AM baby-friendly matinee at our local multiplex—this week, Zero Dark Thirty—I find myself watching a man strapped to a wall with his pants at his ankles while my eight-month-old lolls on a blanket on the theater floor, footloose and diaper free. The whole thing feels very Mapplethorpe/Nan Goldin-ish, had Garlic Nan or Mapplethorpe been inclined to feature naked-from-the-waste town toddler-voyeurs in their shots. Either way, of course, the torture isn’t real—it’s just, you know, entertainment. But still… The images are big, blaring and onscreen, and I can’t help but ponder the savage wonders no doubt churning, that very moment, in my offspring’s’ nascent psyche. (See Melanie Klein, below.)

Truth be told, I missed the peanut butter on genitalia action—you can only half focus during your Mommy and Me, what with the actual “Me” in question needing semi-constant tending. Still the juxtaposition of screamy detainee and screamy babies is a not undisturbing one, especially when the screaming is accompanied by manic under-one year old giggle-howls. The random babies in these M&Ms have a way of communicating, below (or beyond) language, and it is hard not to read meaning into their collective Wahs and Dah-Dahs during the “enhanced interrogation” scenes. Hard not to picture pink-cheeked Dick Cheney, on his back and waggling his fat white legs, chittering happily and tugging his turgid pee-pee as the onscreen pain-fest surges on.

With assorted parents and spawn arrayed on seats and carpet for public diapering, the entire theatre morphs into a kind of poopatorium. But, in truth, our girl didn’t just stay naked for her dipe change, she stayed that way for half the movie, cooing delightedly at the breeze in her pudenda, while Jessica Chastain moved relentlessly toward that Patriots-Will-Cream-In-Their-Popcorn boffo ending, locating and smoking the villainous bad actor-with-a-beard. (The actor in question being Ricky Sekhon, a Brit whose role involved playing dead in a bodybag. With a beard. Step aside, Ian McKellen!)

The Mommy and Me torture-fest left Nico happy as a clamcake, even as it left her parents seriously creeped out. (Yay! We’re America, and we’ll make you wear panties, show your junk to white women and stuff you in a box for 24 hours to get you to tell us what we want!) What little girl doesn’t dream of growing up and hanging with the boys hanging putative terrorists from meathooks in the ceiling? Will Nico now eschew My Little Pony for Tiny Taliban, anatomically correct Al Qaeda to suspend from hooks in baby’s first black site fun kit? For that matter, will little kids still play army—or will they now play drone, and simply launch firecracker-rigged hot dogs at each other? Too soon to tell. Though – as far as Baby Nico goes – her fave pre-lingual toy of the moment is a scruffy tractor, missing a wheel, and painted the color of farm mud. (The great thing about flea market toys, for you parents on a budget, is that they come pre-broken, so you don’t have to worry about shelling big bucks only to find pieces of whatever the hell you just bought lodged under the couch with the molting Christmas Huggie and the missing pink bunny hat.)

Driving home, post ZDT, when the little bugger looks up with those blue eyes and goes ga-ga just like a movie baby, I wonder if the movie was such a good move. Why not just head to Texas, strap her in her stroller and roll her to an execution?

I have, as it happens, just been reading Melanie Klein, Godmother of Child Therapists, and her theories of the ultra-aggressive fantasies brewing in the dark hearts of children everywhere. Could taking my gurgly daughter to a Kathleen Bigelow torture porn trigger the inner torments already roiling under her fontanel? (And, by the way, can we talk about the whole notion of this wafer-thin throbbing soft spot above my baby’s brain-pudding, vulnerable to a world of flying pencils, ice picks and poorly child-proofed table edges? No wonder Klein thought children were borderline mini-psychotics. They basically have a tiny, trauma-susceptible scrotum slice wedged on top of their heads. Who wouldn’t be annoyed?)

It’s no picnic, being a pre-lingual ankle-biter. But thanks to a medical breakthrough, and my baby’s bounteous output, her future may be paved with diapers of gold.

NEXT TIME: The Tooth of Crime… Learning To Crawl… The Twelve Steps Of Milk-anon…

***

Rumpus original art by Jason Novak.

Related Posts:

• OG DAD #10: Milkaholic
• OG DAD #3: Insane in the Membrane
• OG DAD #2: The Texas Jew Panel
• OG DAD #1: The Hum
• OG DAD #19: The Scream

(Are the voices in our heads congenital? And why does mine sound like Eartha Kitt? So many questions!)

Do you ever just open the refrigerator door and stare? Does that count as meditation?

***

If I were to keep a fatherhood journal (which I don’t, I’m less organized than amoebae), I’d title it Close Calls. I mean, for fuck’s sake, when it’s actually in your arms, how can you forget you have a child? (Full disclosure: when I originally wrote this, I typed, how can you forget you are a child. Jesus. In Typo Veritas.)

Anyway, two nights ago, my girlfriend E and I are sitting there like normal Americans, watching some riveting swill on TV, our newly-tankish little post-half year old propped on the couch between us. And yea, thanks for asking, we were watching “I’d Kill For A Baby” on Discovery Health. (Why an hour of insane ladies stalking and slashing late-term mothers-to-be or snatching newborns out of Walmart Parking lots qualifies as “Health” is a question I’ll leave for the Discovery Execs. They’re the professionals. It’s like a diet network that shows people killing deli workers, binging on pastrami and dying. But what do I know?) After pretending to be pregnant to family and co-workers, we’re told, and after making home videos of themselves unwrapping baby shower presents, these desperate wanna-Moms will stop at nothing to lose the pillows strapped to their guts and get their bloody mitts on an actual infant. Which was not what got me so het up I scared my own child into primal, wailing panic when I banged a fist off the coffee table and nearly doused her with tomato soup. (Miraculously – and happily – it splashed on either side of her, creating the jarring spectacle of a tiny child sitting on a throne of blood, like a Kurosawa warlord.)

No, what made me lose my shit was that AT&T commercial, maybe you’ve seen it, where some smarmy douche asks a bunch of children whether “bigger is better.” A cute little girl spouts some blather that concludes with her saying how she wouldn’t want to have a small tree house, and the smarmy guy turns to the little sweetheart and says, “that’s a pain in the buns.”

“Bigger is better?” “Pain in the buns?” In a conversation with schoolchildren? Is it me?

In what pedophilic funhouse was this splash of corporate splooge squeezed out? Absolutely fucking disgusting, on nine different levels. I imagine some wax-lipped descendent of an actual Mad Man snirkling to himself as he sneaks this one past the client. Until it occurs to me, maybe it wasn’t the client. Maybe it was AT&T, itself, who asked for the Short Eyes slant. No doubt to appeal to all the crusty old sex tourists who spend big money on Cambodian child rape vacations. I saw in another doc, on NGC, that Phnom Penh was a prime chickenhawk destination. (And hasn’t it been great to see National Geographic abandon its musty, pith helmet legacy for the tabloidy heights of Taboo – this week, Prison Love!  – Doomsday Preppers, Family Guns, and late night infomercials for Mohatma Gandhi Leg-waxers? He was a man of peace – and his calves were smooth!) What a swell market for a fine corporation like AT&T to cash in on. Every time Grandpa Kiddie-Diddler calls home to let the folks back in Beaver Falls know how much he’s enjoying his golden years, it’s a nice ka-ching for shareholders. Jean Genet must be beating off in his grave.)

Over-reacting to this perv-fest, I bang my hand on the table, and the aforementioned non-hot low sodium Earth Garden organic boxed tomato splashes around – but not, as mentioned – actually on our innocent child. A close call (see first paragraph), but what can I say? Being strung out on heroin is donuts with the pope compared to being strung on baby. They’re both 24-7, alternately euphoric and terrifying commitments. Though late-life Dadhood, I would argue (if anybody wanted to argue) takes significantly more balls. (Or idiocy, depending on how you look at it.)

Admittedly, Junkie versus Dad (as opposed to Junkie Dad, which is a whole other story, but I already wrote that one) presents a less-than-PTA-esque apposition. But fuck the PTA. If I’d made my bones as a devil-may-care female impersonator in Taliban-held Marja, I’d zone back to those halcyon days performing my Afghani Liza – have you ever heard New York, New York in Pashto? – and dodging homophobic knife-in-the-teeth zealots. But smackheadism is what I know. Besides which, who needs to compare or contrast?

Now that Tiny N has reached the put-everything-in-her-mouth stage, life’s become even more of a non-stop potential Poison Control party. At some point you just give up worrying about that green plastic hippo she picked off the bus seat and jammed in her piehole while you were fishing in a diaper bag for a teething biscuit. (A sentence, I’m not going to lie, I could not have conceived of writing five years ago.) It’s not like I can yank the biscuit from her toothless maw and spray Bactine on her gums. To her eternal credit, the difficult-to-ruffle E routinely talks me back from foaming, germaphobic paranoia to something like a reasonably cautionary posture. Meaning, essentially, that instead of freaking out when our Pompadoured 18 pounder puts the dog’s paw in her mouth, I simply remove it. And try not to obsess on what fecal smorgasbord the adorable, poop-sniffing Basenji has pranced through.

To paraphrase that old hippie chestnut, sometimes the bear eats you, sometimes your baby tries to eat the bear.

In truth, now that my fear-free little girl greets the world with mouth open, ready to lick, gum or swallow anything in sight, I have this recurring image: legions of yawping, grasping infants, tummying their way from shore to shore, shoving everything – rocks, bum-shoes, Audis, Jehovah’s Witnesses and possibly their own parents into their mouths, in some Lilliputian takeover of the world of us shady adults. And, for reasons I myself can’t fathom, I find the notion vaguely reassuring.

Of course, I’m writing this at hell-fifteen in the morning, scribbling in the dark after Nico has yowled herself awake. I watch my blue-eyed wailer alternately shlucking her mother’s ravaged nipple and raising her still-soft head to peer my way and smile. Making sure, no doubt, to let me know whose fucking world it really is.

NEXT TIME: Adventures in Public Screaming… Happiness is a Warm Diaper… Creepy Parents

***

Rumpus original art by Jason Novak.

Related Posts:

• OG DAD #19: The Scream
• OG DAD #18: When Good Babies Go Bad
• OG DAD #16: ZERO DARK DIRTY DIAPER
• OG DAD #14: BACKOPALYPSE NOW
• OG DAD #13: My Baby Does The Hanky-Panky

Anyway, due to safety concerns—not, as I first assumed, over a few savvy tots learning to unlatch their cages, bounce onto the linoleum and make a crawl for it, but 150 tragic deaths by suffocation or strangulation—the CPRC (Consumer Products Safety Commission) 86ed side-cribs and opted for top loaders. After which as, my Bentley-driving Beverly Hills sciatica pro informed me, business got very very good for spine surgeons.

 ***

Trust me, nothing makes you feel like a real man like having to ask your 110 pound girlfriend to pick up your toddler for you. But fuck that. A detail like the one above—150 dead babies, due to industry idiocy—rightly drowns out whatever little nugget of kvetchy skaghound bemusement I was going to bang out. Kicks it into grisly foreshadowing of the fact that, in these vicious times, it’s what seems safest in life—cribs! schools!—that most often morphs into murderous and unspeakable tragedy. America has its own weird progress: we’ve expanded our child-killers from factory-made to flesh-and-blood. (In industrial terms the faulty product in question, most recently, being a twenty year old still-at-homer who didn’t want his picture in the yearbook.)

The grim irony that a prepper Mom was preppered for everything but her own son is hard to ignore. In a dark moment, after a day of cable news re-caps, I found myself wondering what thought went through the gun-loving Mom’s head when, woken from sleep,  she saw the last thing she would ever see:  her own boy—another gun-lover!—pointing a Bushmaster at her. Surprise? Terror? Pride? To quote Alexander Pope, in Moral Essays (sometimes a guy just has to read a little Pope ): “Just as the twig is bent the tree’s inclined.” But let us pause, for a moment, to make a note of the name of the product in question. The Bushmaster. Would not, in the deeper recesses of his unconscious, a man with inadequacy issues feel a little buoyed by the notion of mastering bush? I’m not going to elaborate.

Okay, okay. If I’m scattered forgive me. Mass child-homicide will do that. Did I already mention that, after my backbone exam at Cedars Sinai, we had our first appointment with a new pediatrician on the other side of town? The Waiting room was divided into a SICK side and a WELL side. (The signs in black crayon, taped up and sagging.) Immediately—and wrongly—assuming the signs were referring to parents’ psycho-emotional health, I made for the unwell wing before E grabbed my arm and steered me in the right direction. WELL, happily, was crowded. Kids and mothers, kids and aunts, kids and grandmothers. Only one male beside me. A scowling Asian fellow in an elevator repairman jumpsuit mutters in the corner, tapping a Bic pen on the clipboard as he wrestles with the New Patient Form. “What am I —  trying to get a mortgage here?”

Two seconds after we meet our new doctor—think smirky Elizabeth Warren, with chunky white orthopedic shoes and forbidding cankles—she launches into a list of 7 month milestones, none of which our child has reached. Is she crawling? Does she climb the bars of her crib? How much Tummy Time does she do each do? By the time the pediatrician finishes her spiel—smirking, it feels to me, sadistically, I feel like I may be raising a tree stump, and wonder if I have to go all Great Santini on Bink’s under-one-year-old ass. “No need for concern,”  the pediatrician adds, after I think she’s done, “she should advance eventually.” It’s the eventually that makes me cringe. For a second, after the doctor’s damned us with our daughter’s lack of critical motor skills, I suddenly flash on Andrew Wyeth’s trademark painting Christina’s World, picturing Baby N, at twenty, dragging her dead legs behind her through the swaying grass, towards the family house on a hill.

Interrupting my brain dive, E snaps back at Dr. Dryenitchy, “She’s fine, okay? Every baby grows at their own pace.” Which merits a smug little lip curl as the critical MD reaches over the now screaming Baby N (who’s just had a flu shot, don’t get me started) and hands over a chart listing dates and “Developmental Event Markers. ” That’s when I realize why I instantly hated the woman. She reminds me of Miss Keebler,  the school librarian whose massive calves I had to massage in kindergarten after I accidently bonked them with a stack of Wonder Books I knocked off her desk. The second Cinderella smacked her shinbone she grabbed my face and told me to get down on my knees and rub her legs. Even then it seemed a little S&M’y. I can still remember how hot her stockings felt, under her rolled-up donuts, like I was handling two huge, musty Bratwursts. Fortunately the incident had no effect, and I grew up perfectly normal, with no kinks whatsoever.

 ***

As we’re leaving—finally—the superior pediatrician barks that we need to put Bink on her stomach and make her stay there, even if she cries, for ten minutes at a time, with five minute breaks. We try this, when we get home. After ten seconds the baby’s whimpering. Around twenty she’s cranking the volume. Before a minute passes she is wailing as if, to my parentally warped ears, impaled on some laughing Nazi’s bayonet at Auschwitz.

Say what? For some reason, kinder-killing Nazis have been on my mind since word of the Newtown slaughter. We hear about it as we’re pulling out of the Despero Medical parking lot, across from a bar called Oinkies and a Winnebago outlet. An SS trademark was roaring into some little village, separating parents and kids, then famously tossing babies in the air and catching them on their bayonets before dispatching the victims’ older brothers and sisters in front of their horrified (there is no adjective that does the reality justice) parents. A million and a half children were murdered by the Germans. It was national policy. In the same way, as many pointed out after Connecticut, that it’s policy to create more dead children via drones in Pakistan, or rockets in Gaza, or to ignore dead children in Chicago. (Media prefer to focus, as Cornel West likes to say, on the “vanilla” victims.) And let’s not even get into industries that pour money into Congress to keep regulations lax on childhood-cancer-causing chemicals in food, or GMOS, or air ruining pollution, or, waiting in the wings, fracking, which pretty much seeds the American earth with human-destroying compounds. (Slower than a bullet but just as effective, killing-wise.)

But hey, enough happy talk. It’s Christmas. Or, by the time you’re reading this, post-Christmas, and that means time to think about the Son of God. Of course God, Himself, is the original OG Dad. If you believe the Bible, when He had Jesus, the Old Man was already older than time, having (allegedly) invented it. If He exists, I’m guessing that his back is killing Him. And that, if there’s CNN on high, He drinks Himself to sleep.

***

Rumpus original art by Jason Novak.

Related Posts:

• OG DAD #19: The Scream
• OG DAD #18: When Good Babies Go Bad
• OG DAD #16: ZERO DARK DIRTY DIAPER
• OG DAD #15: TOT BITES DOG
• OG DAD #13: My Baby Does The Hanky-Panky

And just to further twist the whole experience, as Baby N hit the five months mark, she discovered her vagina. Picture if you will, a half year old Donald aiming her preternatural smirk your way while gurgling and thrumming her genitalia. Masturbating babies may be the best-kept secret in parenthood. As if, in some unspoken pact of delicacy, moms and dads have decided to keep this quirk of tot-dom to themselves, sensing – quite rightly – that, for those who have never actually witnessed the festive diddling of fresh-out-of-the-oven pleasure seekers it may be just be TOO MUCH. Conceptually.

I once heard Progressive talk show giant, (giantess?) Randi Rhodes remark that on every birthday her mother reminds her how she was born masturbating. I also just saw Louie CK do a whole riff on the subject of his little girl’s labial antics on his HBO special. The whole deal’s not unique at all – until you throw in the Donald face.

Naturally, I did what any parent would do when they find their five month old cavorting in what Pat Robertson would doubtless refer to as a, “highly secular and unholy fashion”. I hit the internet. And there it was, in black and white, on Baby Center.com. “Toddlers masturbate for the same reason that older children do. It feels good.” This mind you, is not idle patter. It’s been verified by the BABY CENTER MEDICAL ADVISORY BOARD! The article (entitled, catchily enough “MASBURBATION”) continues, quoting nurse practitioner Meg Zweiback – and no, I didn’t make it up, perhaps she works at a hospital with Nurse Tollhouse and Dr. Nutter Butter. Anyway, to quote Nurse Zweiback, “A toddler may masturbate herself to orgasm complete with panting, red face, and a big sigh at the end. But it’s absolutely not something to be worried about.”

Really? Did baby Jesus do this? I mean, I’m no prude, I don’t begrudge a recent newborn a little finger-fun. (Though I’ll admit, I could have gone the rest of my life without having to process the concept of “tot-gasm.”) It’s not like a kid that age has much else do besides suck Mommy’s nipple, crap herself, and stare out the window at trees. Poor thing can’t even crawl, so she can’t sneak off for a quickie where no one can see her.

As nature would have it, Baby N’s sudden interest in self-stimulation coincides with her discovery of her own voice. She now yammers all day long, raising her eyes to Mom and Dad like we’re a couple of feebs for not being able to understand her inchoate gurps and blurbles. But that’s the thing: maybe it’s not gurpling. Watching her work her nether cleft and babbling loudly at the ceiling, how do I know that she’s not actually saying something? That – just thinking this makes me wants to slap oven cleaner on a Q tip and jam it into my brain – that she’s NOT actually fantasizing about Justin Bieber and yelping, in some pre-lingual as yet undeciphered Crib-speak: “Oh yeah, Justin, yeah! You’re such a dirty little poopy-pants!”). THE HORROR!

Seriously, I don’t know whether to run out the door or text Sally Mann. The whole phenom makes me feel like my head’s going to shoot flames. Why don’t they tell you this in the hospital before they send you home? Not that it’s bad or somehow immoral. (Victorian nannies who believed that masturbation was Satan’s work would tie helpless infant’s hands to the bars of their crib, like they were wretches in debtor’s prison.) At first, I’m not going to lie the performance was a little… shocking. Doubly so because not two weeks ago, E and I read in the Times about the pedophilic New York cop who got caught sending emails full of fantasies about sex with infants, along with Top Chef ruminations on the joys of dappling their plump little thighs with butter and roasting them. I couldn’t help but imagine that somewhere in a world with enough child-centric perversion to keep Law and Order: SVU on the air for fourteen years, some sicko was getting off watching a roomful of Rumanian newborns on secret ‘toddler cams’.

“Privacy,” Nurse Zweiback goes on to explain, “means nothing to an ‘under 3. It’s not a meaningful concept.” Fair enough. As long as she’s not still doing it on subways at thirty, no harm/no foul. But what really is a progressive-minded product of a creepily dysfunctional (don’t ask) family to do? Well, thanks again to the No Nonsense Crew at Babycenter.com, my go-to guide for all things parenty and problematic, I know the answer: “Distract her. Even knowing it’s normal, even knowing lots of children do it, you’ll probably be embarrassed if your toddler starts masturbating in front of company. If you can’t ignore it or laugh it off, distraction is your best bet. Masturbation is a lot like nose-picking — children do it because it’s there, because they’re bored, and because their hands are free. If your toddler’s hands stray toward her crotch at inopportune moments (in front of your in-laws, for example), keep a squeaky toy or other substitute handy…  anything that keeps her hands out of her pants.”

Wow! She had me right to squeaky toy. I’m no Sigmund Freud but isn’t it at least even odds that if I squeak her bunny every time my little sensualist rides the climax train, she might grow up suffering relationship-killing fantasies about rabbits every time she and her love-partner try to have ‘normal’ sex. (The actual syndrome’s name is Leporinia, an obsession, generally sexual with actual artistically rendered, or toy bunnies.) Every Easter will be a living hell until they find a cure. I can only pray that she doesn’t grow up and develop a Crush Fetish – trying to block her Peter Rabbit scenarios by snuffing out a store-bought bunny with a pair of six-inch heels. (In Berlin, there are special clubs. Café Der Hase Töten.)

But why worry about an uncertain future? Lately Baby N just puts the plushy long-ears in her mouth while slapping her diaper. At six months, she has not yet figured out how to slide her hand into her Huggie and merely smacks it, looking confused that somebody pulled down the garage door.

In other words, she’s perfectly normal. Dad’s the one who’s feeling a little weird.

***

Rumpus original art by Jason Novak.

Related Posts:

• OG DAD #19: The Scream
• OG DAD #18: When Good Babies Go Bad
• OG DAD #16: ZERO DARK DIRTY DIAPER
• OG DAD #15: TOT BITES DOG
• OG DAD #14: BACKOPALYPSE NOW

Or something.

All I know is that last week, for one day, L’il N refused to smile. Period. She wasn’t having it. I’d been away for a couple of weeks, and upon my return, expecting the usual cooey, life-affirming, pre-lingual love-fest – I mean, why else have a baby? – I got instead the steady, appraising gaze of a bank manager poised to reject my loan application. “And you, sir, you expect me to trust you? Pray tell why?”  Chilling.

E, of course, being a smart (which is to say not-as-brain-dented-as-me) mother, was more sanguine about our toddler’s Sudden Onset Gravitas. “Maybe she doesn’t feel like smiling. Do you feel like smiling all the time? You think she’s, like, a little ‘Make Life Fun For Daddy’ machine? Is that the deal?”

Tou-fucking-ché! Defending a child from genetic paranoia can make any parent testy.

I am mortified. Now that my own behavior is reflected back at me – the true joy of coupledom – I am forced to look at it. Jesus! How could anyone be so solipsistic? So selfish? Somehow, I have managed to let niggling insecurity morph in to unregenerate out-of-control douche-nozzledom.

“You’re right,” I say,  “you’re absolutely right!”

And then, three seconds after that, “So, seriously, you think she doesn’t like me or what?”

Had E picked up a fire extinguisher and given me a bagel head – hot new trend from Japan! – I would not have blamed her.

The rest of the evening, our child rocked, rode in her jungle-sounds electric swing, rolled in her stroller, woke up from mega-naps and glared at me during wet diaper changes sans mirth, delight, giggles or joy. It was like putting a Huggy on Alfred Hitchcock. Minus the theme music.

Another half day of non-smiling offspring later and I’m crouched by the pack’n’play, wondering if I have, you know, said something, maybe accidentally insulted young Binkelstein. Babies, any parent will tell you, hate it when you laugh around them. It makes them cry. Especially – and yes, I admit to having done it – if you’re laughing at them. They just know. Like say, when there’s a loud noise and my tiny daughter twitches and her eyes go wide as a silent movie actor. And I say, “Can you believe how much she looks like Fatty Arbuckle!” And she gets really, righteously indignant.

Forget that four months-out-of-the-womb humans do not generally understand English. (Plus which, unlike everyone else in America, they don’t yet have weight issues. Assuming her first words aren’t Does my ass look fat in this diaper?) Tiny N has a cloud in her eyes that seems to bespeak inner torment, perhaps even existential angst. To the extent that pre-crawlers are, you know, existential. Her lower lip’s outthrust, her chin crunched in; tears are welling up. If she knew how, she’d probably be stomping her foot. (Happily, I know from experience, the foot-stomping doesn’t start till three.)

And then, suddenly, at the height of my baby’s agita, comes an effect straight from vintage Robert Crumb. Rank onomatopoeia. A seat-fluttering BLAP! A fart so loud the bassinet shakes. Books rattle off the shelves and our basenji, Alvin, exchanges a nervous glance with our goldfish, Marv, who flaps his one fin frantically around his bowl. After which, even louder, from south of her diaper-top, comes BLAPPEDDA-BLAP, GURGLE-GURGLE, BLAP-BLAP-FERBLE-GOOOOSH-SH-SH!

My 13 pound squiggler breaks wind worthy of a 300 pound, borscht-fed Ukrainian steamfitter. I know this because my Great Uncle Boiny actually was a 300 pound Ukrainian steam-fitter. His mother – with whom Uncle Boin-Boin lived until he keeled over from a coronary at 56 – never met a meal that couldn’t be made better with boiled cabbage. Including breakfast. The result was a digestive tract, in Boiny’s case, that can only be described as NASCAR-esque.

Apparently, high-decibel flatulence, like left-handedness and Brillo hair, can skip a few generations. But when it returns, it returns big.

Cue “Here Comes The Sun.”

After her baritone sax solo, my little honker smiles with such giggly delight I can’t help but pick her up and do a few Hopak dance steps. (When he got drunk, Uncle Boiny swore he was a Cossack, and the Hopak is the dance Cossacks do when they dance. That thing where guys squat with their arms crossed and kick their legs in and out. Google Yul Brenner. He also liked to climb to the top of his apartment building and get more drunk, guzzling vodka one-handed while swaying on the lip of the roof, reciting verses by Osip Mandelstam. “I am wearied to death with life/There’s nothing it has that I want…”)

O Osip! I can still hear him!

Mine are a moody, despairing people, pain-stamped by Stalin and Hitler. And most of my female relatives have Moe Howard’s nose. My girlfriend’s tribe hails from Finnish iron miners. (Though oddly, even the men are pretty.) I imagine them all, at a wedding party, facing the wall and weeping.

But never mind.

Right now I’m leaning down close to my little girl, on her third-of-a-year birthday, trying to kiss her on her gravity-defying, Wendy O. Williams mohawk, and I’m happy to say she’s laughing in my face.

***

NEXT: Does visible earwax in a pediatrician imply anything about his pediatric skills?… Hello solid food!… Extreme post-natal sex tapes!

***
Rumpus original art by Jason Novak.

Related Posts:

• OG DAD #19: The Scream
• OG DAD #18: When Good Babies Go Bad
• OG DAD #16: ZERO DARK DIRTY DIAPER
• OG DAD #15: TOT BITES DOG
• OG DAD #14: BACKOPALYPSE NOW

(My own breast milk experience, thus far in Old Guy Dadhood, does not involve ingesting. Though I did, one groggy night in July, nearly lose an eye when E had a pap mishap and shot a 1963 Alabama National Guard firehose-level blast of Mother’s milk directly into my unibrow. Three centimeters left or right and I’d be sporting a patch and turning in my driver’s license. Instead I just wiped and went back to diapering. Which may be just as well.) [1]

Then there’s Rush Limbaugh, AKA America’s Keith Richard.

I have no idea if Rush is a fan of Mom-Dairy. From the look of those womanly hips – no disrespect, Big Fella! – more likely Mom-butterfat. But, thanks to a well-publicized, huge-enough-to-destroy-his-hearing Oxycontin habit, Rush has become, front and center, the pasty face of contemporary drug addiction, here in the USA. Right up there with contempo narco-poster children like Whitney and Kurt. What’s not to be proud of? [2]

Had Limbaugh been top dog Dope Icon when I started shooting, I would have steered clear of the stuff and stuck to boilermakers. Dope was much cooler when spokes-junkies like Keith and Jimi, not to mention Lenny, Billie, Miles and bouncing Bill Burroughs were the ones in the phone book when you looked up addict. But Rush? Give me a double Methadone, three bear claws, and a Narcan back. I’ve said it before, but Drug Czar Gil Kerlikowske should give the man a medal for making painkillers repulsive. (Imagine how Jesus would feel if He had to listen to Christian rock!) Again – Repetition of Theme-alert! – ideas aren’t responsible for the people who lame-ify them. (Other case in point: Walmart, who happens to the biggest corporate user of Solar Power, and is, even as we shriek, the subject of a strike by warehouse workers in Riverside, California, who, for $8  an hour, work in buildings as hot as 110 degrees inside, with either no water or water provided by bosses and described by workers as “foul and full of debris.” Braving 95 degree heat – outside – workers opted to make a fifty mile march to Los Angeles to call attention to their plight, which has been largely ignored in the media obsession with the bold and world-changing 2012 elections. And yes, Michelle Obama has decided to partner with Walmart, whose board have actively supported her anti-obesity campaign. Presumably, establishing oven-like Middle Passage warehouse conditions, Walmart will help employees shed unwanted pounds.)

All right then. It was a long way around, but there’s a point in sight. I have come to discover that Shaw’s Theory applies to fatherhood. Deep as I am in Show Business Denial, there’s still no way to hide from the fact that every other movie and TV show dropping wet and slick from the curdled loins of Hollywood involves a human being with male genitals and his relationship to his recent newborn. One stellar recent example being ABC Family Channel’s “Baby Daddy”. Whose promo describes it thusly: Ben becomes a surprise dad to a baby girl when she’s left on his doorstep by an ex-girlfriend. Ben decides to raise the baby with the help of his mother, his brother Danny, his friend Tucker and Riley the girl who is harboring a secret crush on him. Talk about TiVo heaven!

Right now I’m watching another network Daddy show. Guy’s With Kids. One guy’s newly divorced. One guy’s the happily married hipster father. And, hot off Law and Order, Anthony Anderson crushes it as the stay at home Dad. He’s so tired, he says he gets up in the morning and tries to put his legs in his shirtsleeves.

Comedy gold! Sort of. I mean, I’m not saying it’s Louie. (CK doesn’t use a laugh track.) But what the hell? Just because your idea of fun is doing the Sunday NY Times crossword in magic marker, drunk on gin and lighter fluid, doesn’t mean you can’t enjoy a good Word Find.

No, my problem with the spate of TV pop-coms is not with the jokes and tone. (What do I know, anyway? I’m twice the age of the demographic.)

I can relate to the nonstop fatigue and sleep-deprived dementia. And my baby does cute shit, just like the babies with agents. What fucks with me is what’s not in the TV version of newborn daddy-hood.

Unlike network wack-a-daddies, I know there’s a fucking world outside the one I inhabit with my adorably adorable spawn. I am not, for you cynics, talking about the Big Issues. Like the fact that by the time Baby N is 20 all natural aquifers on the planet will have been bought up by Monsanto, Nestle or the Bush family, who may well decide to sell fresh water only to those who can afford them. Making non-fecally challenged bacterial water the H20 equivalent of Cristal for future generations. Or that, thanks to he greenhouse effect increasing mean temperatures by a degree a year, an anomaly like the Hantavirus (let’s all visit Yosemite!) will become the norm, and those whom the sun has not yet baked into melanomic stress monsters will be huddled in air conditioned hovels, assuming they have power. (Or, for that matter, hovels.)

But hey! Time out from the Eternal Bleak! I have to get up and take a pee. And, I’m not going to lie, whenever I carry my four-month-old little sweetheart into what my mother used to call “the john,” I feel like I may be committing some kind of crime against propriety. Standing there, baby in one hand, johnson in the other, relieving myself, I wonder if suddenly copters will begin whirling overhead, klieg lights suddenly light up my house, and some branch of Law and Order SVU come sweeping in, so my heinous neighbors will see me led off in infamy by Ice T. That said, what’s a cashew-bladdered Dad supposed to do – leave his little munchkin lying on the carpet to be eaten by the family dog? Happily, I’ve talked to other Dads, and to a man, they all say the same thing: it’s not something you’d do with your four, fourteen, or twenty-four year old, but hey, a baby’s a baby. And yet – this is the fun part – to the man, as well, all dads make sure their baby’s head is facing the other direction. I mean, what are we, priests? How insane is that?

But back to serious issues. Am I being Don Depresso here? I don’t want to come off like some kind of whinging eco-global panic freak. Thank gosh, there’s plenty of local splendor to get worked up over, too. I’ll never forget that heady thrill, the first time my first daughter and I stepped over a homeless sidewalk sleeper on Silverlake and Sunset. She was maybe one-and-a-half, and I could think of absolutely nothing appropriate to say. Instead I blurted, “Hey, somebody else has poopy pants!” At her age, I wasn’t sure she could grok the implications of global outsourcing and then president Bush’s special brand of economics. Her only experience with ‘trickle-down’ was a leaky Huggie. (Cue laugh track.) Instead I gave the guy a dollar and headed on into Tropical Bakery for our traditional Sunday morning Guava pie. (Full disclosure, I also didn’t mention that I’d shot dope with the sidewalk recliner a year or so earlier. Our children have a lifetime to be disillusioned about their parents, why rush?)

Anyway, fuck me. It’s been a while I’ve written a column. For weeks I have wanted to write about the giddy weirdness of hanging with the tiny faux-hawked newcomer gurgling up at me this very minute, combined with the mind-numbing rage incurred when trying to assemble a pack’n’play, a singing electric baby swing, and a Joovy 3-wheeled ‘jogging stroller.’ (Not that I jog, but I might take it up.)

We’re talking real sitcom fodder. But every time I try to bang out some wacky, device-assembly gag, the gelid, rictus grin of Mitt Romney curdles my psyche, dominating my brain like the giant poster of Orson Welles’ jowls in Citizen Kane. Heinous trumps Lovable, every time. It hits me, inextricably, that Romney, the best friend Monsanto ever had, will use my child’s world with all the love and temperance of a rich teenager jerking off in a sock.

But enough about me. Ultimately, too many obscenities abide to became insanely neurotic about any one of them. Maybe the soul crushing secret of 21^st Century post-environmentally inhabitable Planet America is to just… find a way not to think about it. For brief periods of time. To not let the specter of a grotesque future steal the sleepless wonder of whatever babified present you happen to inhabit.

For the past week – by way of explanation – I’ve been reading the Chris Hedges, Joe Sacco masterpiece, Days of Revolt, Days of Rage, which focuses on what Hedges calls Sacrifice Zones. (The sacrifice, in these cases, going to the Moloch of Capitalism.) The authors take us to Pine Ridge Reservation in Nebraska, where the average life expectancy is 48, one out of every five girls attempts suicide before the end of high school, and the locals spend their days sprawled on the ground guzzling malt liquor, when they can scrounge enough change to buy some. Hedges also writes about Camden, New Jersey, a high crime inner city inferno, whose government can no longer afford a police department. And Welch, West Virginia, where coal companies have blasted off mountain tops, turning the once-lush landscape into a pitted, oozing boil of carcinogenic runoff and poisoned dirt. We’re talking about entire towns where residents have lost their gall bladders, along with their loved ones, to the unregulated, unrepentant greed of mine-owners.

Hedges’ point is that these pockets of unimaginable despair are not grim exceptions. They represent the template for the future of America, in the same way that what was done to Native Americans was the template for what was done to people in the Philippines, Cuba, Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan. Now, as Hedges and Sacco illustrate, “it is finally being done to us.”

But forget all that. How cute is my little munchkin when she makes her Liberace face and craps pumpkin pudding? Cuter than George Bernard Shaw with a human milk moustache.

NEXT:  A man wonders if my baby is wearing a toupee… Why does Paul Ryan have Eddie Munster’s hairline?  Did Andrea Mitchell ask her plastic surgeon for Cameron Diaz’s face – and how does that affect my child’s future?

Related Posts:

• OG DAD #19: The Scream
• OG DAD #18: When Good Babies Go Bad
• OG DAD #16: ZERO DARK DIRTY DIAPER
• OG DAD #15: TOT BITES DOG
• OG DAD #14: BACKOPALYPSE NOW

I had wondered why there were uniformed policemen posted everywhere. Was all the security necessary? At that age – and by age I mean, like, nine minutes old – babies can’t even crawl. So what were they going to do? Poop their way to freedom? Why the tiny fascist hardware? The cops sat outside the same rooms every night and every day, for the three days I was in there. Mind you, I’m not even talking about the undercovers tricked out, no doubt, as pregnant women and, for all I know, babies – tiny mewling UCs, keeping an eye on the surroundings to make sure no one escaped. I figured the authorities allowed some convict to visit his newborn, and his handlers waited outside to make sure they didn’t make a run for it. That, or some America’s Most Wanted-type with a vagina had given birth, and they wanted to keep her on lockdown. Before deciding whether to give the baby to Social Services, Grandma, or Angelina Jolie.

Turns out I had it all wrong. They weren’t keeping the babies from escaping. They were keeping strangers from coming in and escaping with babies. Less than a month earlier, our nurse explained, a Texas woman tried to grab somebody else’s newborn and make it her own. Apparently her own had been lost in a miscarriage. A truly heartbreaking and made-for-Lifetime Network crime. Whose commission, apparently, resulted in Baby Ward vigilance. And in retrospect it’s good to know how vigilant. They’ve wiped out Planned Parenthood in Texas. So mothers don’t have to worry about wasting time with pre-natal care or abortions. They can just hunker down and wait till it’s time to enter whatever obstetric Fort Knox they find to snip their umbilical and send them on their way.

The post-natal lockdown was a bit of a jolt. But nothing compared to the of sight of my baby’s anatomy. Nobody told me, going in, that baby girls are born with genitals as pink and protruding as Nature Channel orangutan ass. I mean, they could have warned me first! For one bad minute, I thought my girlfriend may have been consorting with a hot primate.

These are the kind of happy memories that bounce around a guy’s brainpan after his six week old scoop of ice cream has been yowling non-stop for four or five hours. I’m spotting for E, who keeled over with a haunted look and plaintive plea to “please take over” what feels like a week ago.

Side note: when we left the hospital, 72 hours after the birth of Binkelstein, we were both kind of amused and creeped by the thick stack of papers the staff stuck in our hands on the way out the door – at least half of which dealt with the subjects of “depression and anger,” specifically the kind of anger that makes you want to ‘shake your baby.’ Included, along with the hotline numbers, are a variety of tips for dealing with this, apparently – and sadly – all too common urge. “Take a few deep breaths… Remember something that made you happy!” The ludicrousness of which, I have to say, you really can’t appreciate until you’ve been subjected to that ceaseless, brain-stabbing, accusatory squall yourself. Having been in Scream Therapy for a while now, I have to wonder why the ATF blasted non-stop Metallica down there in Waco, back when David Koresh was holed up with his Branch Davidian followers. If the Fibbies had just subjected them to a night or three of quadrophonic wailing infants, the whole sect would have run weeping out of the house, and the government could have avoided all the troublesome paperwork that comes with burning 71 men, women and children to death.

Tonight, our little Klaus Nomi started in around two, and Democracy Now – which comes on at six – is just about wrapping. Amy Goodman’s been interviewing Jeff Masters, director of meteorology at the Weather Underground website, discussing rampant fires, heat waves and water wars, guaranteed staples of the future Baby N will inhabit. The future I inflicted on her. The Weather Underground is a group of progressive meteorologists who want the weather media to start mentioning global climate change, instead of fluffing the public with record heat wave stats, like global warming is some kind of Olympic Event, and we’re all cheering for another broken record. “Why, folks, this is the hottest day in Washington since Dick Morris broke his tooth on a hooker’s toenail in 2007!” Meteorologists like Masters believe their fellow weathermen have a moral obligation to discuss, not just the effects, but the environmental causes of  the new Toast Age we seem to be entering.

Normally, these brutal previews of Life on Planet Hotplate depress the shit out of me. Well, in all honesty, they do now. Before my first daughter was born, I’m not proud to admit, I used to secretly savor details of the sizzling dystopia to come – the more grisly the better. By 2050, most human beings will forced to crawl on their hands and knees in the dark and snort guano! What the hell, I’ll be well out of it. Once I had some skin in the game – in the form of a child for whose well-being I would eat my own face – all bets were off.

This morning, however, not even news of Inferno America can penetrate the aural fortress of doom in which Baby N’s vocal reaming has locked my skull. Talk about your cri de coeur! After three minutes my eyes water, after three hours my ears are bleeding. If she’s this inconsolable at a month and a half, I can’t help but think, what’s the rest of her life going to be? (I almost said she makes Yoko Ono sound like Doris Day, but only old fucks – who aren’t necessarily Dads – know who Doris Day is. Though a certain kind of obsesso old fuck will know that her son, record producer Terry Melcher, was pals with Charlie Manson. Dennis Wilson, of Beach Boy fame, brought Charlie by Terry’s house at 10050 Cielo Drive to play some tunes, in hopes Doris’s pride and joy would want to produce a Manson album. Terry passed. But by the time Charlie sent his Family out to 10050 Cielo Drive to make Terry pay for his taste, Melcher’d moved out and Sharon Tate had moved in. The rest is history. Some say Hitler started the Holocaust cause nobody liked his watercolors. Roman Polanski might be an Old Grand-Dad today if Doris Day’s baby boy had only liked Charlie’s singing. Then again, maybe it’s just that Mama Manson never breast-fed her pre-Swastika’d toddler.)

Que Sera Sera.

Worse than our dumpling’s heart-searing vocals, however, is the little Pain Hula that goes with it. Bink’s arms kind of flare from her sides, straight for the ceiling. Then she uncurls her fists, bangs open the preternaturally long fingers she inherited from her mother as though throwing two-handed craps. (As opposed to taking them, Huggie-filling being part of the newborn’s job description; which is a whole other bag of diaper candy.) All accompanied with out-thrust indignant lower lip and tear-filled how-could-you-be-so-uncaring-and-horrible eyes. At that age, tears don’t actually roll down their cheeks, their eyes just fill up, which somehow is even more poignant. Her message is clear: “I am in deep and inexplicable pain here! Do something! What kind of incompetent, loser parents are you!” Is six weeks too young for existential angst? Was Camus a cry-baby?

If, like me, you came up in a screamy household, you may have a special vulnerability to the sound of another human being railing at you.  When the human being weighs less than a pair of Bundt cakes, and you love them enough to sacrifice your entire being – beginning with your sanity, peace of mind, sleep hygiene, and will to live, in no particular order– the effect is devastating. Until you learn some kind of detachment – and where do they teach that? – it’s like having your soul deep fried and your thoughts scrambled every night.

If, also like me, you’re genetically possessed of a strain of guilt immune to logic or Dr. Spock – the famed baby-shrink Nixonites blamed for Sixties Era “permissiveness” (i.e. hippies), not the Vulcan – you will likely feel responsible for the desperate yelps emanating from your child.

Happily, there is a solution. Milk. All babies are milk junkies. That first taste of Mommy juice kicks in a high that has my daughter nodding and drooly within a mili-second of her first hit. If you don’t believe me, stand there and watch a screaming toddler’s eyes roll back in its head while it goes limp in the grips of milk bliss. As an ex-heroin professional, I’d be lying if I did not admit I’m slightly (and semi-embarrassingly) jealous every time I witness my little girl satisfy her cravings. When my first daughter was doing the very same thing, I was actually still shooting dope. Even then it weirded me how all of us are basically born addicted. Living from tit-rush to tit-rush, with a lot of nodding off, puking and howling in between.

I’m not talking just about out-of-the womb junkies, or crack babies.  I’m talking about you, little newcomer.  Just the way He, She or It made way you.

And there it is.  I’m Baby N and I’m a milkaholic…. Or, as her mother likes to say, “I’m more than a Mom, I’m a mini-bar.”

Needless to say, I am hardly the first person in the world to notice that babies are hope-to-die milk drunks. My late friend Hubert Selby used to talk about the Sugar Tit. How addicts were toddlers who didn’t get the pleasure medicine they wanted, when they wanted it. Or maybe they were born so extra-sensitive they needed it more than regular babies – which kept them babies. The world is just too much, man! Either way, as adult lushes and druggies they could do what they couldn’t do as infants: control the flow. Because, to quote The Hokey Pokey, that’s what it’s all about. Control. Babies don’t have any. So they scream. Some of us still do; some – occasionally  – just want to. Selby used to describe himself as “a scream looking for a mouth.”

The amazing thing, to me, is that we ever stop.

NEXT TIME: Adventures in Diaper Rash…. A funeral in Pittsburgh… Memories of sleep…

***

Rumpus original art by Jason Novak.

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• OG DAD #3: Insane in the Membrane
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• OG DAD #19: The Scream