Better Parenting thru Child Abuse

Inspired by my life-long friend Mark Caddell, when my son Alec turned 13, I took him aside and had one of those father-son quality moments where we bonded. I told him about a very special movie that I wanted him to watch.

"What is it," he asked? He looked up at me expectantly, listening to my every word with great reverence.

"It’s a movie that changed my life. It made me a better man. It’s the story of a poor black sharecropper and his rise from poverty to become a millionaire with his own disco and his own disco friends."

"What is it," he asked again?

"It’s a movie called The Jerk starring Steve Martin."

He never forgave me. I warped his fragile little mind. But that’s what dads do. Hopefully, someday, he’ll take his son aside and tell him of the magical movie that changed his life when it was released in 1980. Maybe he’ll tell him the story of how a down-and-out ex-navy pilot, who was shot down during the war, saved an airliner full of passengers when the Captain and co-pilots were incapacitated. He’ll tell his son how the movie Airplane touched him deeply and taught him how to love again.

And the circle of violence continues.

Back then his taste in music was sickening.

My boy was about as sharp as a pound of wet leather. I tried to give him lessons from a music master. "The thing about music," I pronounced loudly and with an overly Texas drawl, "I say, I say, the thing about music is, you can tell a lot from a person by his choice in music. So, this is important.

For instance, the first time I heard a mariachi band I thought, what the fuck happened to Mexicans that would make them do this?" Then I told him how my aunt, who lived in San Miguel for a few years, had a mariachi band play outside her window at daybreak until she paid them $5 a month. I had always suspected those bands were an extortion plot.

Indian (the quick-e-mart kind, not the casino kind) music is like their food post vomit. Then I told him not to do drugs; implying that everyone from India had to be on drugs when they wrote that crap. "You know, the Beatles were fine young boys before the Maharishi filled them full of LSD in the 60's."

"Dad, does America have Indian music?"

"It’s called free-form jazz. Don’t let shithead listen to it. It’s causes seizures in dogs." I told him polka was the oversized retarded German love child of music and if it had an inbred American cousin, that would be Dixieland.

"What’s Dixieland?"

"Okay. I’ll only explain this once. Dixieland is forcing happiness and sunshine up your ass with jackhammer made out of butterfly wishes and Ethel Merman’s early career as a scream singer. And if I ever catch you listening to that crap, you are grounded for life! No driving privileges, no cell phone; you’ll sit in your room alone and stare out the window for months if I catch you with that devil music! Mark my words. I’ll hire a de-programming if that’s what it takes."

"What’s bluegrass?"

"Bluegrass?!? What do you know about bluegrass?"

"Nothing. Honest. I heard a few kids talking about it in school."

"Well, you stay away from it, you hear me boy?!? Bluegrass is how white trash mountain folk serenade their livestock before they fuck ‘em. It’s mostly about sheep and what pretty eyes they have."

My job here is done.