Alaska Confidential: Parental Meltdowns

You may find yourself living in a shotgun shack, and you may find yourself...

Everyone I know can relate to this childhood story, everyone from Alaska anyway, otherwise not as commonly: As a teenager they came home from an evening hang with friends and their father, who was pretty buttoned down and dismissive of the current pop culture trends, not in an animated way but more of a tongue-in-cheek grumpy dad sort of way, was sitting on the couch thoroughly enjoying something uncharacteristically lowbrow on TV.

For me, my dad, who would make sneering comments about basically anything me and my friends thought was funny or cool — “Who’s that, Jim Carrey, oh, the master thespian!” — was enjoying an episode of Darkwing Duck, the cartoon starring a noir mallard gumshoe.

A couple weeks later me and my best friend walked into his house to find his father, a bookish, consummately reserved neurologist, captivated and cackling deliriously at the film Freddy Got Fingered.

Then it happened at Juan’s house, his pops, a fairly intimidating and standoffish former cholo gangbanger, was engrossed in an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

We paused, then he paused, and he just yelled, “WHAT!?!”

Each time my friends and I would exchange a glance, as if to say, do we need to call 911, and the dad, as if we didn’t get the show that we’d already watched a hundred hours of and had outgrown, would now crib the stance reserved for us, the teenagers, like we didn’t get it, “This is funny! It’s really funny! This is great stuff, have you guys seen this? Look at this, he’s a duck, and a detective. His name is Drake Mallard? Get it? This is brilliant!”

We’d then slowly back away and tiptoe into another room, and there may be a comment such as, “What the hell was that about?” but usually not, because as far as I know every teenager is constantly asking, what the hell was that about, our parents are people?

I don’t even know, looking back, if we were being trolled or these guys were drunk.

For example, my friend had a basement to himself and we all used to hang out there and watch movies and music videos. From the ground level windows we could see when his dad, who was strangely enough a six-five three-hundred-pound kindergarten teacher, would arrive home from the bar every night, by the bottom half of his tires.

I had been to this dude’s house roughly seventy times, and give or take so had the other five guys in the basement that early evening, and I had never once talked to his dad, I didn’t know his dad’s name, and my friend had never once spoken a word, good or bad, about his dad, and nobody else had met him either.

There was an entryway the size of a shipping pallet where you’d take off your snowy or muddy shoes, and a set of stairs going up, and one going down. We never encountered his dad in the entryway, as we always went right down, and he always went right up.

I did find it odd that my friend was able to keep hosting get togethers at his place while getting straight Ds, and that he seemed very unconcerned about getting caught smoking pot in his basement, whereas most guys I knew would be shitting bricks if they were smoking a bowl and a parent arrived home and start coming up with remedies to make them look more guilty.

I don’t want to give the impression that his dad was creepy or foreboding in any way because he wasn’t, he just was completely indifferent to us and likewise, which in retrospect makes me certain that he was pretty normal because who wants to talk to a group of teenaged boys.

That was until this particular evening, when everything changed.

We were in the basement watching a Jennifer Lopez music video, and just when my friend had paused it on a shot of her cleavage, his dad walked down the stairs.

My friend barely made an effort to hide the pipe sitting on his TV tray, which was causing my heart to race, was he too stoned to see it, or did he not give a shit?

So, this mountain of a man ducked his head through the doorway and was now faced with a group of stoned teenagers he’d never met before, I didn’t know if we were busted or what.

He didn’t introduce himself, he just said, “Hey guys!” like we all knew each other, maybe he thought we were other people of a similar age he’d met before, he may have just seen us as generic, replaceable cogs, or maybe he was making an effort to get to know his son and his friends, maybe he had autism from all the coal in town, I do not know.

We looked at him blankly. It was his house, so we were inclined to respect him, we just didn’t know what he wanted.

Then he said, “Have you guys seen my frog puppet?”

Indeed, in the haze of the weed smoke that we had been blowing through a toilet paper roll stuffed with laundry softening sheets, a hack which amplified the smell of the smoke, and the dim lightbulb hanging by a string from the ceiling, I, for one, had neglected to notice that he was carrying an artisan string puppet of an oversized frog, in retrospect possibly a two-hundred-dollar item.

“Check this out,” the anonymous father said, “you know those commercials? Bud-Weis-Er? Haha. Check this out!”

At the time Budweiser had a culturally ubiquitous ad campaign that was just three frogs croaking the three syllables of Budweiser one at a time. It wasn’t clever but was compelling for some reason.

Everyone stared straight ahead as his dad did a surprisingly decent job of manipulating the strings on the puppet so as to animate the frog, was this a lifelong passion, or perhaps an intrinsic talent?

“Hey, what’s your name,” he said, looking in my direction, “I’m Mister Frog,” he said, or, I guess the frog said, then when nobody answered he went into more of an improvisational vein, singing in the cadence of the 70s disco song which happens to be called Lady Marmalade, by Patti Labelle, but almost nobody would understand either reference, you probably know it as, “Gitchy gitchy aya da da, gitghy gitchy ay ya ya.”

“Froggy froggy frog ass frog frog, froggy froggy frog frog frog,” his dad said.

He was starting to win over the room, as this was way more entertaining than J-Lo, but then he just said, “Okay, I’m hungry,” and walked back upstairs.

This was THE ONLY interaction I ever had with this man, and I continued hanging out at his house for another two years.

If you didn’t know, Native Alaskan boomers and also all other generations of them love Credence. Classic rock in general, but especially Credence. Music is weird that way. Shaggy, the pop-reggae dude who apparently sings into a pillow and has one annoying song to his name, is a major star in Ireland. Why, nobody knows, certainly AI will never get it.

I knew my friend’s mom, an Athabaskan woman from Kaltag, a village of a few hundred people a hundred miles down the river, was a big fan of Creedence, because she owned one CD, and it was Creedence Clearwater Revival’s Greatest Hits, and we all communally listened to it all the time.

I hadn’t ever seen this lady get mad at anything. She just laughed a lot. She’d have friends over and they’d tell stories and laugh, these Native ladies love to gossip, and me and my friends would hang out with them for a while and then leave and my friends would get out their hidden weed and these ladies would do the same.

Trolling wasn’t a thing at this point in time in the late 90s, people just thought I was a school shooter or something.

So, one day I was bored, and I had a new hairstyle which was longer than my normal haircut, and I was pretty proud of it, and I walked into my friend’s house without knocking and I found my friend’s mom in the Lay-Z-Boy listening to Creedence.

Up to this point most of my communication with this woman was in a group setting and it entailed my friends and I making dumb jokes and her giggling and saying, “You guys are so fucking stupid,” but really, she wanted us to keep going.

“Where’s Frank,” I asked.

“He’s in the shower.”

Proud Mary keep on boewnin’ How does this guy have a thick Cajun accent but he’s from the Bay Area, I now wonder.

“Did you see my new haircut?” I asked.

“Mm.”

“I asked the stylist to make me look exactly like John Fogerty (of Creedence),” I said.

“What?” she said, putting her nose in the air, and she lowered the volume of the Creedence with the stereo remote, which was a pretty impressive piece of technology at the time.

“Yeah, she said that I look exactly like John Fogerty now,” I said, beaming.

She muttered something underneath her breath. I’d hung out with this lady two hundred times and never seen a hint of darkness, but suddenly her eyes narrowed, and she looked me dead in the eye, like a nun would if you just said Jesus was a bum or a New Englander would if you said Tom Brady was overrated, and I sensed a burning sense of deep, deep resentment, and she said, deliberately, to make sure I understood, “You look NOTHING like John Fogerty!”

Frank popped out of the bathroom with a towel around his waist. I was a little shaken, I’d just meant to slightly irritate her, not piss her off.

“Meet me in the car,” I said, and got up to leave.

“Nothing! You look, NOTHING like John Fogerty, with that stupid haircut!” she reiterated, raising up out of the recliner to chase me out the door.

Apparently, when it comes to middle-aged or elderly Native ladies, you don’t talk lightly about John Fogerty.

Lesson learned.

One of my friend’s dads had a Harley, which he could only ride in the summer, obviously. He also had a shaved head, so I was afraid of him.

Based solely on his look I genuinely thought he might kick my ass.

It was after school, seventh grade, he was making quesadillas. His family, like most families, were not from Alaska. They were from Wisconsin. His fridge contained ten one-pound blocks of cheddar cheese.

Another friend’s family were from the Chicago area and of Polish descent and they always had a twelve-inch reserve kielbasa chilling in the back right corner of their fridge. My mom was from Oklahoma and we had a Folgers can of solidified bacon fat which lived in the center of the stove. My dad was from the Midwest and only ate beef. My other friend’s dad was from Washington DC and quoted Shakespeare. My other friend’s dad was a hippy from Oklahoma, perhaps the only one. This other guy was known for getting in bar fights. He was and is considered a great guy by the community, and by me to this day. My other friend’s mom was from the East Coast and pronounced donkey as dun-key.

“What the fuck is a dunkey? It’s donkey.”

“Dunkey.”

“You’re saying it wrong!”

“What, dunkey.”

“Donkey.”

“I’m saying it exactly like you guys. Dunkey!”

“Your mom is fucking nuts bro!”

We did have one friend who had normal parents, he’s in prison now.

I mean, my dad coached our basketball teams while dressed like Uncle Buck, but he wasn’t much of a wonk when it came to drawing up plays, he spent the entire time arguing with the refs, like really going ballistic, and then he shook their hand at the end of the game.

Anyway, he was making quesadillas, and his dad pulled up in his Harley. I had the impression that all bikers were murderers and possibly immortal incarnates. I think this was based on some B-movie I’d watched as a kid.

“I gotta go,” I said, when I heard the bike approaching.

“Why,” my friend asked.

“Oh, I, uh, I’m not sure your dad wants me to be here.”

“What are you talking about,” he said, taken aback.

“I’m just saying, he has a shaved head,” I said.

“He’s bald,” my friend said.

“Yeah, I know, that’s like, kind of the problem! A skinhead!” I said.

“No, I mean, he just doesn’t have any hair,” my friend said.

I now realize he simply shaved the one-inch strip of hair he had from his ears to the base of his skull. These forty-nine hairs, in my underdeveloped mind, separated a family man with a penchant for weekend cruises from a homicidal renegade, but you have to admit that it’s weird, a guy with a shaved head is tough looking, but a guy with a horseshoe just looks like a hobbyist who glues model airplanes together, I think this dad was just ahead of his time.

I realized my error at any rate.

The dad walked in and took off his helmet. He was no bigger than Pauly Shore, really.

“Hey bud, I’m Larry,” he said, “what’s for dinner, grilled cheese?” we had a nice meal.

I don’t really know what was going on with any of these adults, who were younger than I am now at the time of my telling of these pointless stories, I just know they didn’t give a fuck what anyone thought, and they were pretty cool, so much cooler than people who try, I’m looking at you Southern California, you’re pushing a stroller and the tattoos don’t matter, probably happens in small towns all over the country, though I’m not sure, these people were pretty weird.