It was the quintessential weekend of a single, single dad. Ava left Thursday night for a sleepover all weekend long. Chet and I miss her so badly. He asked and I let him sleep in my bed that first night. When I got into my king-sized bed at midnight he looked so adorable on his side my heart broke a little. Then rom around two to six in the morning I regretted my decision. It is very hard to sleep with a six-year-old boy’s feet in your face. I would move his feet away, he would grumble, and move, and yet moments later his feet would return to my nose. Then, just as I finally gave in to sleep I was reawaked by the fast slurping sound of Chet sucking his thumb. We’ve been working on it for years now and he sleeps with a sock on his hand, usually, but this night I forgot. I try so very hard to stay positive with him, as all the books say, but he is so magnificent I just can’t understand why he can’t quit. I get scared for him in the future. My grandfather, whom Chet so resembles, was an alcoholic, (and later diagnosed by his psychiatrist son, my dad as manic-depressive). I know it’s neurotic of me but between my grandfather and my ex-wife (not to mention my own rather eccentric brain) I worry that he and his sister are carrying a hefty amount of crazy genes inside of them.
Then Friday night my friends from LA came into town and wanted to go out. I called the sitter for ten at night, a time, usually, when I’m winding down (or blogging) to be in bed around midnight. Instead I was cabbing downtown to pick them up and then further downtown to pick up their friend Sharon and from there all the way down to the Lower East Side to drink at Schillers and then on to SoHo and La Esquina.
From the outside it looks like a normal taqueria but a guy manning a door inside let’s you inside and down to a basement where you walk through the kitchen and finally find yourself in a very cool club. We had more drinks there. Intermittent pain was radioing from my big toe. My gout, brought on by the cyclosporine I take to keep my kidneys chugging along, forbids a lot of drinking so I sipped a lot but never finished a drink. That’s a probem. Being the only sober person in a club is not very fun. I’m already a snot and the loud drunken braying was none too inviting. Still, a half-dozen Swedish girls picked me to ask for advice on where to go out that night and instead of saying, “Sisters, you’re asking the wrong professor-blogger-novelist-screenwriter,” I faked being a hipster for a good fifteen minutes.
The place was packed when we first arrived (around 1) but twenty minutes later everyone had cleared out. We left with a friend of a friend who works there who marched us across town to their sister joint, The Box. It’s supposed to be the coolest place in town but I found it overpacked and the music very top 40. I left before the burlesque started. I’m told that the night before it was a naked male dwarf.
By three-fifteen I was home. Chet was in his own bed so I got some sleep.
The next day I was wrecked and groggy till two. Then my friend Steve called and said Chet and I could hitch a ride with them apple picking two hours north of the city. It sounded a little late in the day for such a trip but like most New Yorkers without a car, we never pass up a chance to ride in an automobile without a running meter.
I got Chet in a cab down to Riverside Drive and 96th, the mouth of a West Side Highway exit and soon thereafter Steve and his family pulled up in their Volvo SUV. I was in the back with Chet and Mason, their 9 year old. In the way back was Bennie, their five year old math genius and their six-month old black lab, Thor. Thor began just sporadically licking my ear but soon the seventy-pound puppy scuttled over the seat and settled in my lap. I don’t think I ever was a dog person until the hour I spent cradling this very happy, big baby. Traffic was bad and though it was beautiful out of the city, turkey buzzards lazed overhead and the trees were finally starting to change up here, there was absolutely no way that we’d make it to pick apples before the place closed at five. Dominique, Steve’s wife, who was driving, was riding him, justifiably but mercilessly and I loved watching the marital sparks. She had suggested that we all spend the night in a motel but I broke it to her that I had made plans to see my LA friends again that night.
It reminded me of what I used to have. It was clear to me that for the rest of their marriage she would have, “That time you took us apple picking,” ready to pull out any time he acted up.
So there we were racing the setting sun only to arrive at the Weeds Orchard somewhere in Orange County, New York, at 5:15. The parking lot was still full however. Steve and I rushed out with the kids while she parked. I was ready to make up some sort of excuse, have the boys talk funny and tell the farmers that they were slow so have mercy on them.
So as I was trying to slip past the farmers before they stopped us the friendliest guy you ever saw sliced a freakishly large apple for us and offered us slices. Wow. He told us they were Jonagold apples and that they’d be open for another hour for picking. Steve ran back to tell Dom and save his marriage.
I grabbed some sacks and a wagon and raced the kids around the back of the barn but there were a lot of people still he didn’t want to leave the perfect looking farm and the pond and the reddening leaves on a day hot as July in October. The boys raced from tree to tree picking dozens of apples regardless of their state. Dom and Steve and Thor joined us and I bought a jug of cider, the very best cider I have ever tasted and having grown up in Michigan, the land of Autumn, I consider myself an apple cider sommelier. Steve bought huge pumpkins as well as a zucchini as large as a smallish torpedo.
We drove back home and had dinner at a sprawling Greek diner. I was near comatose with happy exhaustion in the car, wondering how I could excuse myself of going out again tonight. That’s when talk of a sleepover erupted. It seemed that Mason and Bennie were spending the night at my house. We’d get in around nine, I’d hurry them to bed and then the sitter comes at ten again.
I was happy for them all and it really was no trouble. Steve and Dom have been so wonderful to my little family that the least I could do was let them get their freak on for a night. Besides, I was curious to see how a roomful of boys differed from the roomful of girls I’ve had when Ava’s had a sleepover.
As soon as we entered the house I ordered the kids out of their clothes and into bed. They were all filthy but it was nine-thirty and bathing them all was beyond my strength.
I went to my office to see about the sale of my car when I heard what sounded like pots clanging or in general a small battle. I tried to ignore them and concentrate. It seemed that the car title that I FedExed to the guy helping me sell my car had disappeared in the bowels of FedEx and my internet, internet phone and cable TV (all connected) were all kaput. When the noises sounded more life threatening I ran to investigate, holding my thumb over my cellphone’s mouthpiece so the FedEx guy would’t hear me screaming.
Chet had light sable, Mason a plastic cutlass and Bennie a Samurai sword and they were all doing their best to draw blood. I hollered but they were so overtired and so amped up that words seemed to have no effect whatsoever. I could sense that they saw that since I was also on the phone, how serious could it be.
I hung up on FedEx and laid down the law. Then the whining and howling and negotiating from everyone erupted. “I’m hungry,” “I’m thirsty,” “I can’t sleep.” I just said no to everything and started to dress for the night and kept saying no after I’d turned off the lights and they took turns coming in to my room with yet another lament. The sitter came at ten and I left at ten-thirty and they were down.
And now the nighttime portion of our show was just beginning. Somehow I got a second wind in the $20 cab downtown. Oh, the cab. It should have cost almost thirty but the cabbie was out of paper so the ride would be off the books. I loved it. Those damn meters stress me out. They remind me of the hourglass the wicked witch of the north uses to see how much time Dorothy has left to live.
Back to La Esquina again and then to yet another of their sister bars, 205, which I loved. Great music as we entered. The night was full of possibilities.
