Kick Me Page 5

  “There really is a Santa Claus, isn’t there?” I asked her point-blank.

  She was silent for several moments, and then she deflated. Looking almost as if she was going to cry, she simply averted her eyes, shook her head, and uttered an embarrassed “no.” It was the answer I’d been expecting, having recently deduced the impossibility of the physics of Santa’s single night of worldwide gift distribution after watching a movie about clocks and time in my second-grade class. But still, I made a grand show of my mortification, dropping my jaw and making the standard “I can’t believe you would do this to me” face that kids become so adept at pulling out in any circumstance in which they are denied some impulsive whim. I even forced myself to start crying, asking tearfully, “Then who eats the cookies and milk I put out on Christmas Eve?” My mother confirmed what I had always suspected and yet didn’t want to believe—it was my father. In a colossal act of grief management, I decided to seek revenge. I ended up mixing a devil’s brew of spices, cooking oils, vinegars, and spit in order to teach my lie-mongering father a lesson about deceiving his only son. However, as I mixed the vile-smelling cocktail in the kitchen sink while my mother watched, amused and somehow relishing my plan, as if she had wanted to get back at my father for all the years of lying he had forced her into, something happened. I was suddenly overcome with a strange mixture of disgust, grief, nostalgia, and love for my father. The image of my dad bringing out presents that he and my mother had taken the time to research, buy, and wrap was too much for me to take. He was only trying to be a good dad, I thought. I just couldn’t reward his earnestness with a poisoned glass of swill. And so I ended up dumping the nauseating liquid down the drain, pouring my father a fresh glass of milk and putting it out next to a plate of just opened store-bought cookies. And when I unwrapped my presents the next morning, I pretended to be excited that Santa had arrived during the night, even though my mother threw looks at my father that showed they both knew I no longer believed but was somehow trying to squeeze one more year out of the Santa lie.

  But I couldn’t. Santa was dead. Rest in peace, you goddamn, fat-assed liar.

  After that, whenever my parents would leave me alone in the house in the month of December, I would turn into a junior McCloud and scour my parents’ bedroom for the gifts that I knew I was going to get anyway, albeit sometime in the not-near-enough future. One year, when I found a particularly good batch of toys my parents had successfully figured out I wanted, I spent the next several weeks pulling out the not-yet-wrapped presents from the back of my mother’s closet whenever she left the house. I would carefully extract the toys from their packages and then play with them nervously, one ear focused on the door in our family room, listening for my parents’ return. It wasn’t particularly fun playing with these illegal toys but the thrill of doing something I wasn’t supposed to be doing made it feel dirty and exciting.

  However, my skulduggery skills proved to be far superior to my judgment skills. On Christmas Eve, when my father asked me what presents I thought I was going to get that year, I put on a big act of divining and ended up naming every single present in my mother’s closet in excruciating detail, including an exact description of an obscure knock-off version of a G.I. Joe scuba outfit made for a low-rent action figure transparently named “Army Jack.” My mother and father exchanged disappointed looks with each other as I made matters worse by pretending to have no idea what they were upset about.

  “What? What’s the matter? Why are you guys looking at each other like that?” I said, performing one of the most unconvincing portrayals of an innocent person ever perpetrated on stage or screen. My guilt was complete when, the next morning, I got up only to find my presents lying under the Christmas tree unwrapped, and my mother sitting on the couch drinking a cup of tea, saying disappointedly, “What’s the point of wrapping them? You already know what they are anyway.”

  After that, I vowed never to seek out my Christmas presents again. However, within weeks, the lure of the backs of my parents’ closets proved too strong to resist and I returned to my prying ways, justifying my snooping by reassuring myself that I wasn’t looking for presents—I was just being nosy. I couldn’t help it. It was just too tempting. Our house always seemed to offer up a never-ending wealth of poorly hidden treasures. My mother was a bit of a pack rat, a trait that I have inherited from her in spades. I am loath to throw out even the most disposable of items, for fear that some day in the near future, I will (a) find myself in need of an old Time magazine even though its contents are much more conveniently archived on the Internet, (b) figure out a way to refill and repair that old disposable “Makin’ Bacon” lighter I found several years ago, or (c) mourn the nostalgic boost I’d miss if I threw away that stack of completely out-of-focus photos of my backyard taken for insurance purposes. No, mother and son Feig would save everything, and I was always stumbling upon bizarre items from my past in our closets.

  My mom had saved the first book I ever wrote, an obtuse little tome titled “BananaLand” that I penned in the first grade and then tried to bind into a book using construction paper and a stapler. Unfortunately, I laid it out completely backward, so that it had to be read from back to front like the Torah. I found my old handprint plaques from preschool, uncomfortable little craft items made out of plaster and spray-painted gold. I found my mother’s old mortarboard from her high school graduation, and, when no one was home, I would parade around the house wearing it and carrying a rolled-up comic book that served as my diploma from the College for Gifted Goofballs. It always made me happy that my mom saved everything I ever did, because there’s nothing more terrifying to me than people throwing out your past while you’re still alive. After you’re dead, I guess they can just toss everything on the scrap heap, but I know I don’t want to be an old man who sits around saying, “You should have seen me when I was a kid. Man, was I good-lookin’.” With photographic evidence available, I could quickly be brought back to my senses despite the onslaught of my aged delusion.

  Even though my dad was the “if you don’t use it for twentyfour hours it goes in the trash” sort of guy, it was actually his few saved items that offered the greatest treasure-hunting finds. When I was seven, I would frequently sneak nervously into his den, a room that sounds much more ostentatious than it actually was. It was the smallest room in our already small house, a place where he could balance his store’s accounting books in peace. He had a tiny desk in there, a small countertop, and shelves along one wall that Mr. Lufthauser from down the street had built for him. Into the middle of it all my dad had crammed in a large reclining chair, where he’d spend his days off trying to catch up on politics and end up open-mouthed and drooling after falling asleep two minutes into an attempted reading of the Sunday Detroit News. But it was the closet next to his chair that was the gateway to adventure every time I was brave enough to venture inside it. It had sliding aluminum doors that had been painted orange to match the rest of the burnt umber and dark-paneled room. I always remember the forbidden thrill of putting my hands on that cold door and slowly sliding it to the side as it rumbled with a metallic shudder. Even though I knew nobody was home, I’d get completely paranoid and have to run out into the living room several times to convince myself that the rumbling door noise hadn’t masked the sound of my dad’s station wagon pulling into our driveway. Then, on hands and knees, I’d slowly work my way into the piles of old brown paper grocery bags in which my dad had stored all the selected items from his past.

  On most occasions I’d only get far enough in to find old homemovie equipment and bags of forgotten sweaters and shoes. Once I came across an old tool kit sitting under some of the bags. The beat-up metal case contained ancient power and hand tools that even Ethan Allen would have rejected as being too clunky and antiquated. I took out an old drill and something that looked like a pointy egg beater and started to pretend they were deadly weapons that only I had the power to control. After a few minutes, I became convinced that my d
ad had memorized the exact way the tools had been laid into the box and spent the next half hour in a panic, trying to rearrange them back inside the case so that their disruption could pass the scrutiny of my father’s probing eyes. Looking back, I’m sure my father hadn’t thought about those tools in years and wouldn’t have known I had disturbed them if I had put a note inside the box that read “I swear I didn’t touch your tools.” But, like any good intrigue worth its salt, paranoia was an essential part of espionage.

  And, unfortunately, the one time I erased paranoia from the equation was the time I almost got my family into big trouble.

  One day when I was eight, while scavenging in my father’s closet, I made a strange and exciting discovery after making it all the way to the very back and bottom bag. I had dreamed of going in this far for a year now but had never had the nerve. However, having earlier that day won the first and only game of tetherball I would ever win in my life (because I had challenged a right-handed kid whose right arm was in a cast—a kid I still almost ended up losing to), I found the courage to boldly go where I hadn’t gone before. What I ended up finding as I dug into the decaying bag was my father’s stash of memorabilia he had collected during his time as a GI in Europe during World War II. My dad would occasionally tell me stories about how his division had landed at Normandy, albeit on the day after D Day, but I found this to be quite impressive and always told my friends that my father was a war hero. And now I found myself quite excited that I was finally getting some tangible proof. I opened the musty-smelling grocery bag and looked inside. On top were some old army clothes, including a shirt that had my dad’s name written over the breast pocket. Sticking up along the side of the bag was a green handle. I pulled it out carefully and found that it was a folding army shovel. I was impressed that these were things that actually belonged to my father during World War II. But since he sold both old army clothes and folding shovels in his store, I realized that I’d have to dig deeper in the bag if I wanted to find something really good. I pulled out an old boot and another pair of green army pants. And then I uncovered two items that blew my eight-year-old mind.

  I reached in and pulled out a long, sleek-looking dagger in a sheath. I stared at the knife in disbelief. It didn’t look like something an American soldier would carry. Knowing nothing about military history, I deduced from the old war movies I had seen my dad watching on TV that this was a knife that had belonged to somebody important and scary in the war. I slid the dagger out of its sheath. The blade was about a foot long and thin and looked practically new. I lightly touched the edge and realized it was sharp enough to cut me if I so much as put my fingers on it with any sort of additional pressure. The handle was covered with a thin layer of leather and between the blade and the handle was a medallion with a strange-looking eagle on it. I was immediately in awe and terrified of the dagger. I slowly swung it around, trying to act in a way that I thought someone with a knife like this might act during a war. But I was soon struck with an image of me accidentally dropping the knife and cutting my leg off. And so I quickly put the knife back in its sheath, carefully set it aside, and looked back into the bag.

  I saw something brightly colored and pulled it out. It looked like a red bedsheet that had been folded up. Confused, I started to unfold it slowly, remembering exactly how I was doing it so that when I refolded it, it would tell no tales. After a few unfolds, I saw a large patch of white sewn onto it. Another unfold revealed part of a black symbol stitched onto the white area. One more unfold and I realized that it was a flag. What I didn’t know at the time was that it was a Nazi flag. Another unfold revealed a large black swastika in the center of the white circle. My eight-year-old brain was enthralled. I remembered seeing flags just like this in those war movies my dad had watched, the movies that I didn’t pay much attention to except when bombs were exploding and guys were flying through the air. All I could think was, Wow, this is something my dad brought back from World War II. Beyond that, I had no idea what the flag or the strange symbol that looked like four sevens in a circle stood for. The only thing I knew for sure was that, compared with the old shoes and Christmas presents I was used to finding in our closets, I had just found something very, very cool.

  I took the flag and unfolded it completely. It was big, about six feet by four feet. I carried it around the house for a while, pretending to be a general leading my army into battle. The flag was so crisp and new-looking that I was completely enamored with it. I remember thinking that my dad was so cool because he had saved this flag that was part of history and that if everyone else knew my dad had done this, they would think he was cool, too. Maybe they’d even say he was a war hero and he’d get to be in the paper. Our local paper was always running pictures of wrinkled old veterans in their McDonald’s trainee–like army caps every Memorial Day and Veterans Day, and each year I thought that my dad should have his picture in the paper, too, since he probably did more than any of those old grandpa-looking guys ever did. I mean, my dad had landed at Normandy. One day after D Day, for cryin’ out loud.

  Overcome with love for and pride in my father, I figured that I should let the whole neighborhood know just how great a guy my dad really was and decided right then and there to hang the Nazi flag in our front window.

  I got some string and tape from the kitchen drawer and rigged up the top corners of the flag so that I could tie them to the curtain rod over our living room window. Once it was secure, I let the flag hang down and adjusted it so that it was centered. Satisfied that I had presented it in the most aesthetically pleasing manner, I went outside to take a look. From our driveway, the Nazi flag looked quite handsome. It filled the entire front window of our house. I walked all the way out to the street and checked it out from there. Yep, it was fully visible to any passing car. I felt good. I felt proud. People were going to love my dad when they saw that flag hanging in the front window of our house, right in their very own neighborhood.

  As I stood there admiring my handiwork, my mother drove around the corner and onto our street unexpectedly. At first I was nervous, scared I’d get in trouble for going through my father’s closet. But the more I thought about it, I was sure my mother would be quite pleased that I was performing such a selfless act to show the neighborhood what a cool guy my dad was.

  I waved at my mom as her car approached. She waved back with a smile. She turned into our driveway and suddenly her car screeched to a stop. Wow, I thought, she must be really surprised. I bet she’s going to be so proud of me she’ll take me to Dairy Queen. As I stood there debating whether I would order a Mr. Misty Float or a Dilly Bar, my mother immediately jumped out of the car, wild-eyed.

  “Where did that come from?!” she sputtered.

  “It’s Dad’s. I found it in his closet,” I said proudly. “I thought I’d hang it up for everybody to—”

  “Oh, my God,” said my mother. And with that, she sprinted away from her still-idling car and ran into the house. I’d never seen my mother run before, especially in a pair of low-heeled pumps. And the next thing I knew she ripped the flag down from the window and closed the curtains.

  I didn’t get to go to Dairy Queen.

  That night, my father gave me a lecture on the horrors of the Nazis and told me that he had saved the flag and the dagger because most of the guys in his division had done the same thing, wanting to keep a few souvenirs of the enemy from their time in the war. Apparently he had picked up the flag and the dagger after his battalion had gone through France when the Germans had been defeated. He told me about friends of his who were killed during the war, and a wave of embarrassment at what I had done overtook me as I tried not to cry. Seeing this, my dad gave me a pat on the shoulder and said, “Hey, it’s okay. At least now you know.”

  Since he knew I’d thought I was doing something nice for him by showing off his flag, he thanked me for trying to make him a war hero and told me that he was going to donate the flag and the dagger to a war history museum where they could be prop
erly displayed in the right context. And then he grilled me over and over again to make sure that no one in the neighborhood had driven by and seen the flag in the window.

  Fortunately for all of us, nobody had.

  Well, that would have been one way to get my dad’s face in the paper.

  MY FIRST AND BESTEST

  GIRLFRIEND

  I met my first real and true girlfriend when I was in the second grade. It turned out to be the beginning of a very long and faithful relationship.

  We met in gym class. It was about a month into the new school year when our teacher, Mrs. Handler, informed us that we were going to learn how to climb ropes. We looked over and saw a two-inch-thick cotton cord hanging down from the very high ceiling. I had seen those ropes stored up in the rafters before but always assumed they were there to keep the roof from blowing away if a tornado tore it off. Beneath the rope was an extra-thick mat, signaling to us all that severe injury was possible. Mrs. Handler, making it sound simple, informed us that we were to grab the rope and use our hands to propel ourselves upward. She said that as we climbed we should use our thighs to pinch the cord and hold ourselves in place to prevent us from sliding back down and negating whatever progress we might be making before we reached the top. I was immediately terrified because it looked to me like the ceiling was about one mile up, and if I were to get up there and then lose my grip and fall, the mat would only prevent my body from breaking apart upon impact as I was killed. But like all things in any gym class, we had no say in the matter, and so we lined up to wait for our turns. I watched as each of my friends, both boys and girls, scurried up the rope as if it were the easiest thing in the world. Maybe this wouldn’t be so bad, I thought. It sure didn’t look like anyone else was having any problems. However, nobody else in the class cried when they got a mosquito bite, either. So I had no idea what to expect.