My Dad’s Bachelor Pad
Part of the appeal of going to dad’s house was that you could do pretty much whatever you wanted. There were some rules, some order, but for the most part it came in the category of “WAY too little, WAY too late.”
To make it fun, let’s create a list of activities. See if you can guess which ones happened at mom’s house and which ones happened at dad’s:
-Staying up until 2 AM in internet chat rooms, berating adults until our address was completely blocked.
-Brushing teeth nightly.
-Discovering that you, as a child, do not have a toothbrush in the house(!) and being given the alternative to use a finger as a brush.
-Watching no more than one hour of TV during the entire school week.
-Waking up to the sounds of Nintendo and only going to bed once you cannot keep your eyes open long enough to get Donkey Kong through one more inch of his godforsaken country, leaving the TV only long enough to sprint to the bathroom and pee, having waited so long you nearly piss yourself.
-No sugary cereal.
-Drinking the leftover beer from cans strewn about the house, forgotten in a haze.
-No wrestling in the house.
-Roughhousing to the extent that you knocked your brother into a folding chair, saw your older brother nearly pull another kid’s earring out, cowered in fear in a room as your sister beat on the door with a baseball bat, and countless other horrible fights that could have been sold to any nature channel if someone had just had the foresight to dress us in baboon suits. (the author would like to take this opportunity to apologize to his family for the violence. And just to apologize in general.)
-Activities to fill the day such as planting things in a flower pot, painting, and building with Legos.
-Activities to fill the day such as holding a barbell plate, spinning, and letting go at a very bad time so that it flew and punched a hole in the wall.
You can use your imagination from there.
Now these apply to a home, a place where my dad was married to his second wife and we all lived together, well, at least on Wednesdays and every other weekend.
My dad got his second divorce, and he got himself a sweet bachelor pad.
Okay, sometimes it’s a little more complicated than that. For example, sometimes you have these four kids who all visit you at once, so that might reduce the sweetness of the bachelor pad.
At least, it might if you were not my dad.
The apartment he moved into was not a lot bigger than the place I have now. To be fair, it did have some amenities that my place lacks. Washer and dryer, for example. Or bench press setup right in the middle of the goddamn living room.
The place was assembled in a way that was confusing even to a kid. Why was my dad, the guy who slept here all the time, setting up his bed in the living room? Was it because he wanted to remind us all damn day not to eat on his bed while we were watching TV? And why the bench press bench in the middle of the goddamn living room? He would be doing something, typing or watching TV, then he would get up, push out a couple reps, let the bar clatter back into place, and then go back to doing whatever like nothing happened.
As far as I knew, this was the entirety of his new workout regimen.
The only decoration in the entire place was a poster of the comic book anti-hero Lobo standing on top of a pile of skulls and firing twin machine guns, a purchase he made on my suggestion. Not to talk bad about myself here, but when you’re taking home decorating advice straight from the mind of a fourteen year-old boy, you are either ME or you are making bad decisions. And you’re waving in a new era of lawlessness.
It sounds sitcommy, but it’s all true. We ate cake for breakfast. Way more than once. When cake was not available, my favorite source of calories was chocolate milk topped with whipped cream. As a meal. I’m probably supposed to be about 6’5″.
We could count on a good meal every day, either a pizza from the nearby take-n-bake, or spaghetti.
If cooking is an art, then my dad was the Jackson Pollock of spaghetti sauce. Meat, onions, tomatoes, of course. Clams? Why the hell not? Smoked cocktail wieners? The best way to know if something would potentially end up in the sauce was to ask the question, “Is it in the kitchen and can it be opened by a man?”
The weirdest part is that it ended up alright sometimes. The cocktail wieners were a bust, and I can’t endorse that. But the clams were actually pretty good.
We spent the days playing Nintendo and shooters in the two linked computers he had set up. And we spent the nights that way.
When you look back, a bachelor pad and the ideal house for a young teenage boy are pretty close to the same thing. Everything you care about is there for you: gaming, garbage food, and sleeping in sleeping bags in the living room. All that’s missing are the niceties of a house. Such as air conditioning.
Sometimes the apartment was so damn hot that there wasn’t a thing you could do about it besides laying on the floor and thinking about ice the way gulag prisoners think about not having their fingernails pulled out. It got so hot that the prime real estate, the most valuable square footage in the entire place, was the spot right in front of the fan.
There was an afternoon when my dad, so overheated and generally disgusted with sitting on the floor with the rest of us, scooted a little closer to the fan we’d set in front of the window. Then a little closer. Then, just when his eyes were closing and he was feeling the benefit of cold air, he leaned too hard against the fan and it burst through the window screen, falling to the concrete path below and nearly sending my dad falling after it.
The plug held and the fan was still dangling by its cord a few feet from the ground, still churning the air by the time I ran down the stairs to get it.
After a month or so, it was time to pull up stakes. There was no need to wrap the stakes because we weren’t moving too far, just from the third floor of one building to the third floor of another in the same complex.
As kids, we did our best to help, carrying the couple boxes he packed and then the rest of the loose shit, looking like we were moving a college dorm more than a grown man’s home. The worst thing was the bed. It was big and heavy, the mattress a saggy mess that we wrestled and fought up the stairs. Every inch was a victory earned with sweat and grunting.
The sad parts of that apartment were pretty sad. To go from a custom home where you were going to live with your family to a tiny apartment where one night a gun was fired and it took two apartments’ worth of walls to stop it had to be a tough transition. To go through a second divorce probably wasn’t fun either. But looking back on it, moving apartments with only your own kids to help you, mostly too young to be really effective…that must have been pretty goddamn lonely.
Fortunately, he managed to find a third wife in the next door apartment.
My dad’s third marriage was made official the day his second divorce was finalized.
Call it a wedding present.