Tom, A Dad's Story -- Part 2

[smokesmoke]

The next day, when I got home and found out that TJ had gone shopping with his girl buddy and her mom, I decided it was time to take some action.

At dinner he giggled about what a good time he’d had at the mall, at Target, at JC Penney, at some kitchen store even, where he’d looked at fancy knives. His sisters chattered right along with him and everyone except me was all thrilled about some sandals the women had bought.

“I tried them on too,” he tittered, “when no one was looking except Melanie.”

Jesus, I could hardly contain myself. Trying on women’s shoes? What next? I lit up a cigarette to calm me down as soon as I stepped away from the table. I went outside, stood on the concrete patio and smoked hard. And you know, I felt better after three reds, and a good idea came to head.

“What do you say we go down to the rec center this weekend,” I said to TJ when I went back into the house. “We’ll sign you up for a swimming class.”

“Okay,” he said skeptically. “You think maybe I could take a friend along?”

“Who’d you have in mind?” I asked, delaying a real answer. If that was that Zack kid, how the hell would I say “no fucking way.” Another red, maybe that would help. I lit up.

“I was thinking maybe Melanie,” he said. “We saw some real cool bathing suits at Dillard’s.”

I held in my smoke, let it out slowly after a long pause and a good soaking of my lungs. “Well,” I said, “I think maybe this would be something better without Melanie. I was thinking we’d sign up for a boys beginners class.”

TJ’s face fell. “Oh,” he said, taking this in. “Well, okay I guess.”

“Good,” I said. “And I’m going to check out the hours at the pool, see when maybe I can go down and bone up a little on my stroke.”

“Cool,” said TJ. “Can I watch my show now?”

Jennifer came in, sat down beside TJ, sensing that he wasn’t happy. She lit up one of her long white cigarettes. “You tired, honey?” she asked, putting her arm around the boy’s shoulders.

“Yeah mom, I’m fine,” he said. He watched her, smiled when she blew out a puff of smoke.

“Melanie’s mom smokes Virginia Slims, too,” he said. “But not the menthols like yours.”

Funny, he never had commented on either of us smoking before or our cigarettes. For a minute I wondered. Was he interested in smoking? I grinned to myself, but then reality hit me. Last thing in the world I wanted was my son to be puffing away on a cigarette with some girl. All wrong.

I watched a lot of TV that night, sitting there while the girls came and went, pulling Jennifer away for some girl talk in the kitchen while she cleaned up. TJ sat with me for a while, nipping off any conversation I tried to make with simple “no’s” and “ok’s.” I got more frustrated, saw the gap between me and my mid turning into a Grand Canyon. I smoked like a stove, one smoke after another, trying to stay cool, trying to say something that would interest him. No way, nowhere.

“Telephone TJ,” his sister Annie called out. He popped up like he was released from jail, skipped off, yes he actually skipped, all excited to have one of his girlfriends to talk to.

I turned up the TV so I wouldn’t have to hear any of the drivel between Jennifer and Annie, jealous as hell that the mother daughter relationships in our house were just fine. As the ten o’clock news came on, I watched the headlines, then decided it was time to hit the hay.

As I walked down the hall to the big bedroom Jennifer and I share, I passed TJ’s open door. “Yeah,” he was saying, “it’s dumb as a donkey, but he’s going to make me do it. Like I want to swim or something.”

So that was how he felt about the swimming class, and deeper but not too much, what he thought of me. An old crank pushing him to do stuff he hated. I stripped for bed, looking as I always do in the mirror. Not bad, that’s what I always said to myself, and I knew Jennifer thought so too. Thinking about her brought me to a better space, it always does, except when we’ve had a fight of course. But I was thinking about TJ, too, how I wished he had a brother. What a shame Jennifer had been fixed. We might have tried again and gotten another boy. Maybe a little brother would snap TJ into manhood, and if it didn’t, hell at least I’d have one real son.

Of course thinking about this got me going and Jennifer and I had a good roll between the sheets, even though it was a weeknight. Fast, yeah, but passionate and intense and like always, sex brings us close together in thought. Intimacy, that’s the word.

I leaned back and lit a Marlboro, held my lighter over for Jennifer’s long cigarette.
“I’ve been thinking,” I said.

“And?”

“I dunno,” I said. “I’m hoping this swimming stuff might help TJ out.”

“Help him out? Tom, he’s fine. He’s happy.”

“I know,” I went on. “But Jen, he’s almost twelve years old. He’s going to be in middle school, going to be around a lot of older kids. He needs to start, I don’t know how to say it, needs to start being a guy.”

Jennifer squeezed my cock. “One guy in the house is really good for me,” she grinned.

“Yeah,” I couldn’t resist giving her a little feel. What a great woman. “But he is a boy, after all, and it’s time he started acting like one.”

“Well,” she said. “I think you’re way off, I don’t mind telling you so. But it isn’t a bad idea for him to learn to swim, and I do think you need to be a little more part of his life, closer to him you know. Because he is going to grow up and he is going to have questions and things that you can help him with better than me. But a boy needs his mom, you know that too.”

Too many words. I was wiped out, stubbed out my cigarette and that was the night.

Thursday stank on ice. One of the apprentices at work gave me lip, I had to get him in his place and he still argued with me. Fucking kids today. And when I came home, ready for an easy evening, maybe a cold beer, a few cigarettes, I was kind of relieved that TJ wasn’t around. I figured I probably wouldn’t like what he was up to, shuddered when I thought of him over at Melanie’s or one of the other girls, and of course that is exactly where he was. Polly or Patty or someone was having a little party, a tea party, Jennifer said as if it were the cutest thing in the world. “And then her dad’s doing barbecue,” she said.

Shit, maybe I should be that kind of dad. Maybe after we’d signed up for the swimming classes I’d head to Lowe’s and buy one of them big fancy gas grilles and I could do the cooking thing on summer Saturday nights.

“TJ would love it,” Jennifer said. “he’s really getting into cooking.”

Men do cook, and I’d do it I said to myself, to rove to him that it can be a guy thing but it is not the way women cook and it is not a tea party. An eleven year old boy at a fucking tea party. I lit a Marlboro, stretched out on the couch. Frankly, life was not getting any better, not with a budding sissy boy son. Yeah, I had to admit it and it sent me to the fridge for another beer, a fresh pack of reds from my room.

But it was Thursday, I couldn’t afford to get wasted, there was still Friday to get through. I drank two beers, smoked half a pack of cigarettes, watched some mind numbing sitcoms and crawled into bed after Jennifer was asleep.

I tell you, I was almost afraid to come home Friday night. What the hell would I find? Let’s see, my kid had been wearing an apron and cooking, doing laundry, shopping with a girl, watching girl TV shows with a wimpy puss of a friend, and going to a fucking tea party. And sure enough, when I got home, who should be there but little Miss Zack. I noticed how long his blond hair was, how he almost sashayed when he walked. No question, this boy was going to be a big fag. Not that I’m prejudiced, I even know a couple of gay guys that I work with, and of course there are a few women plumbers who aren’t quite women, if you know what I mean. But my boy was not going to be a fag, not if I had anything to do with it and yeah, I know they say it’s genes and all that, but when I looked at Zack I thought I gotta get my kid away from this sissy.

It was fucking movie night, we always do this on Fridays. New DVD from Netflix. All three of the girls had gone out, birthday parties and movie dates and the oldest, Tara had a real date with a real boy. I should have been worried about that, but Jennifer took care of the girls and I knew she’d had the talk with her and so everything was safe. So it was me and Jen, TJ and Zack. And damned if Jen didn’t get a call from her sister, a loudmouth lush who could carry on all night.

The three of us guys sat on the couch watching some stupid ass comedy. The boys giggled, which really irritated me. I drank two beers right away and I was cracking open my second pack of smokes within half an hour. I don’t usually smoke that much, by the way. I smoke maybe a pack a day, can’t smoke too much at work you know, except at breaks, and most of my pleasure cigarettes were in the evening. But when I’m having a really good time, a few drinks maybe, the cigarettes keep lighting themselves it seems.

Same thing when I’m blue, when I’m down. I’d been smoking heavier than usual this week. Had to stop and buy a carton at Xtra Mart on the way home, which I usually don’t do til Sunday afternoon when I fill up the gas tank on my red F-250 for the week.

The movie was dumb as shit, but the kids liked it and I was getting a few laughs, too, once I relaxed. Maybe life wasn‘t so bad, maybe I‘d just had a long week, and it wasn’t pay day either. The 52” Sony shot a good picture, the Yamaha surround sound blasted some good tunes. There was food in my stomach, a beer in one hand and a cigarette in the other, my daughters were out having fun and my son, well he wasn’t such a bad kid. And his little friend, maybe I was being too harsh. He seemed polite enough, said thank you and helped clean up after dinner. Yeah, life was good.

I’d just finished my third beer, picked up a fresh one from the kitchen, and walked back to the couch with a bag of chips and two ice cold cokes for the guys. My hands were full, the soda bottles were wet, and when I went to pick up my cigarette, something slipped, I don’t know what, and the next thing the butt was on the floor. On the brand new carpet, ready to burn a fucking hole.

Before I could get my hands free, before I could bend over and pick that up, TJ was right on it. He picked up the cigarette before there was hardly more than a few gray spots on that beige carpet. “Here you go dad,” he said, holding the half smoked Marlboro out to me.

Relief, yeah something swelled over me and I was so damned proud of my boy. He’d saved the carpet, and my ass, and maybe prevented a fire. He’d acted fast. And he looked like a little man, all of a sudden, sitting on the edge of the green sofa with a burning butt in his hand.

I was so impressed that I almost lost it. I was just about to say “hey, why don’t you take a drag” when a squeal pierced the dream.

“Eeew! That’s so gross!” The snarky little bastard on the couch next to my son sneered as if my son were holding a dog turd.

“Thanks TJ,” I said, ignoring the little prick. “That was a great save.”

“Sure dad,” TJ said. “Here, take your cigarette.”

Zack sniffed, I swear, and I took the red from my son’s hand, carefully so neither of us got burned. I took a drag, and another one, calmed down and leaned back. This is the funny thing about cigarettes, here I almost burned down the house because of one, and then that very same object was giving me pleasure and relaxation.

The movie wrapped up in a few minutes. Zack was hinting about watching some TV, and it was clear that he was dogging for an overnight invitation. Once upon a time I would have been fine with my son having a stay over, but tonight, no way. At least not with this kid. I was honestly worried, if you want to know the truth. Who knows what might be happening with him and TJ in the same room?
You know what else, it wasn’t just the queer stuff that gave my stomach the whirlies. That whole business with the dropped cigarette was eating at me. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not like I want my kids to smoke. I think Tara has tried it a few times, and I’ve caught Annie once taking a puff from one of Jen’s Virginia Slims. She wasn’t good at it, she coughed which is why I caught her. But that reaction, that girly “eeew,” that bothered me. This is almost a teenage boy and hell, everyone wants to try smoking at least once, don’t they? It must come up even in this day and age.

You know, what I wanted was a tough little pal for TJ, someone bigger and stronger, someone who might tempt him to do something bad. Not real bad, not drugs and not that homo stuff that I was worried about with Zack. But you know, letting off a stink bomb in a crowded store, dare you stuff, and hell yeah, sneaking a cigarette.

I offered to drive Zack home, felt I could do that much. TJ was mad, I could see, but he grudgingly agreed to come along. I was dog tired, and not all that sober although I’d only had three beers. Hey, I’m Irish, remember. I lit up a smoke the minute we climbed into Jen’s Accord and almost instantly little Zack had his finger on the window button. He didn’t quite dare say anything, though, and it was a damned good thing. I might have smacked him.

We dropped him at his house, about half a mile away, there were some quiet good-nights from two unhappy boys and I felt a little bit mean. “Come on TJ,” I said, “you hop in front with me.” He did, showing a sulkiness which I actually admired. At least it was some spirit, if not out and out rebellion. But he didn’t say a word as I drove along, firing up another Marlboro.

“So,” I said, trying to break the ice barrier, “what time you think we need to go down to the swimming pool tomorrow?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “It’s your big idea.”

“Whoa,” I said. “Don’t give me a lot of attitude. I thought you wanted to do this, too.”

“Well I don’t,” he said and I thought he would stomp his foot, he sounded so much like one of his sisters.

“Look TJ,” I reasoned. “You got to learn to swim. Everyone has to, and it’s fun.”

“I don’t care.”

“You got to have something to do in the summer,” I said. “And you’ll meet some neat kids, I’m sure.” Sure hoping, that was.

“I have plenty to do,” he said.

I inhaled deep, thinking what I could say. “Well, let’s just give it a try. We’ll go down tomorrow, check it out, and you know, there’s lots of times I’ve had to do stuff I thought I’d hate but it turned out fun. And we can do something afterwards, too, you know. Maybe go look at cams at Best Buy, grab a burger.”

I don’t know if it was the shopping bug that bit him or if he was just such a naturally good kid that he began to soften. “Okay dad,” he said. “I’ll try it.”

We were in our own driveway now. Neither of us had anything to say. I stopped the car. TJ hopped out before I had the key out of the ignition. “You coming?” he asked me, heading to the door to the house.

“I’m just going to finish this cigarette out here,” I said. “And look at the stars. You ever do that?”
“We learned some of the constellations in Earth Science,” he said. “That’s the big dipper and that’s Orion.” He pointed up.

“Damn, you’re good,” I said blowing my smoke into the night air. Trying to rebuild some rapport between us.

TJ looked at me with big question mark eyes. Like he wondered if I was really that bad after all.
“Your smoke looks cool when you do that,” he said.

He was right, the white of the smoke in the damp night air made an impressive cloud. What got me though was that he was obviously accepting my smoking, that he was letting me know that he wasn’t so hateful about smoke as his little friend Zack. If I’d had the balls, I might have offered him a drag, I thought about this later when I was in bed. But we weren’t that tight, sad to say for a dad and his only son.

TJ was on his best Saturday morning. He told Jen and me that he’d already cleaned his room, and yeah, I’d heard the darn vacuum cleaner whirring away up there. Good enough, I didn’t really object but it niggled me, watching him sit there sipping a big glass of orange juice. Why was my mid so damned obedient?

The answer, of course, was that he was hoping I’d forgotten or that he could worm his way out of the swimming classes. When I suggested it was time to think about getting down to the rec center, he made a little face, which at least was spirit but not the kind I wanted. Jennifer saw that I was about to slam the kid, to let him have a piece of my mind and she interrupted.

“yes,” she said. “It’s probably better to get there before it gets too crowded.”

TJ stared at her, disappointed that she was not coming to his rescue. He finished his juice, wiped his lips – can you believe it – and trudged upstairs to put on his shoes.

“He isn’t too thrilled, you know,” Jennifer said.

“Yeah I can see,” I said. “But it will be good for him, and he will end up liking it.”

We didn’t fight, though I sensed that my wife disagreed with my decision. “Look,” I said, “I’ll take him out to lunch, maybe stop at the mall or something.” It was a bad compromise, because the last thing I wanted to do was to hit the stores, that’s really women’s stuff. I needed to come up with some more guy type things, but hell I couldn’t pull out my rod and suggest an afternoon fishing trip up to the river. Too far away, and I knew that would really piss TJ off, too.

We had a long, quiet ride through the town in my big truck. I put out a few comments, pointing out a couple of cars I liked, asking him little questions about houses we passed and didn’t one of his friends live there. Of course his answers were short and it turned out I was wrong. “No, not there. Melanie lives across the street in the yellow house.” I kept lighting cigarettes, one after another, staying cool and calm.

The town rec center was a pretty good facility, and no wonder. Our taxes were sky high. I parked, TJ climbed down and I locked my truck. I had a red in my hand, of course, about half smoked, and as we got closer to the door, I could see one of those big red no smoking sings over a sand filled ashtray. That’s okay, I know in this day and age you can’t smoke hardly anywhere. I hauled deep, one, two three drags, not wanting to waste any of a cigarette. And wanting to store up the nicotine in me. I knew this was not going to be an easy expedition.

TJ’s face was not his usual little cheerful sunshine. “You can’t smoke here,” he said to me, almost a declaration of defiance.

“Yeah, of course not,” I said as I stubbed my butt in next to a couple of dozen filters sticking up from the sand.

A shapely blonde, nineteen or so and probably a college student, sat at the reception desk and offered to help us.

“We want to sign up, well my son does, not me,” I stumbled over my words as I took in her nicely tanned boobs pushing up from a very tight white top. “Sign up for swimming class. Beginners. Boys.”

“Oh,” she flashed a big smile, “You can do that right down the hall, second door to the right where it says ‘Pool’.”

The place was much quieter than I’d imagined it would be, not too many kids. I figured maybe Saturdays were not the busiest times, mostly kids would come here when their parents were at work during the week. The Pool office was a small room, one young guy sitting at a computer screen, stacks of towels on three shelves behind him.

I told him what we wanted, boys swimming classes.

“Have you swum before?” His deep blue eyes flashed kindly at TJ.

“Uh, no,” TJ said, hardly a whisper.

“Great,” the guy said. “We’ve still got a lot of openings.” He looked at a printed piece of paper, a schedule I guessed, on the desk.

“Um, let’s see,” he said. “We got a lot of choices. Well not that many. I got a beginners section at 10 o’clock, that’ Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, that’s boys and girls.”

Co-ed? Shit. No way.

TJ, though, brightened up. “That would be good,” he said.

Well what the hell could I say? One look at this lean young dude in a State t-shirt that fit like the paper on the wall, and I felt fat and old. Shit, the guy was probably boffing the receptionist at lunch or something. I didn’t want to argue, didn’t want to push my agenda of male bonding right there in front of him. I knew TJ would screw up his face and I’d look like a shit and he’d look like a sissy.

“Anything else?” I asked. “Maybe some time when I could come down and watch?” Yeah, that was a good cover.

“Oh sure,” the guy said. “We got 3:00, no wait, that’s girls. There’s 8:00, boys. That’s it.”
Eight o’clock in the morning wouldn’t work for me, and it would be a tough sell for TJ, especially since he’d hear that there was one at 10. But I didn’t give up. “What do you think?” I asked TJ. “Think you want to get it over with early in the day before it gets too hot?” An impossible, sell. Hell, the point of swimming is too cool off.

“No,” he said. “The later one would be good.”

I couldn’t argue. I couldn’t pull him aside and say look, I want you to hang around with guys, not more damn girls. Do the boys class or else. Anyhow, it wasn’t like the girls would be wading while the guys were doing cannonballs. Hell, swimming is an equal opportunity sport. And there was always the locker room.

“You want to sign up for a class?” the guys asked me as he handed TJ a form and a roller ball pen.

“Uh, no thanks,” I said. “I might come down for free swim, though. You got a schedule?”

“Families any time from 5 to 9,” he said. “And we got early bird at 6 a.m.”

“Good enough,” I said. “Yeah, I’d like to come down and get in shape.”

“You don’t look in bad shape,” the guy said, quite friendly I thought.

Before I could think of how to answer that without sounding weird, TJ took care of things. “He smokes,” my son piped up.

The guy laughed. “You ought to quit,” he said to me. But then he winked, while TJ was checking boxes and writing down our address, and tapped the right pocket of his cargo shorts. Must have been a pack in there, I’ll be damned.

I was aching for a smoke by the time we got through filling out the forms, waivers, and handing over my Visa. Neither of us was happy, TJ had really been hoping the classes would be full, I could tell. I wasn’t getting to the goal, not at all. Christ, he’d probably go home and call up Melanie and have her sign up for the same damn class. I wanted a smoke.

“Let me show you around,” the guy said.

Me, I was ready to leave, but I had to act interested and of course build it all up for TJ. He had warmed up a little, accepting that this was going to happen whether he liked it or not and maybe it wouldn’t be so horrible after all.

He led us behind the counter, through a door and out to the pool. Yeah, it was huge, a big square with more than a dozen lanes, bright blue and reeking a bucket of bleach.

“Nice,” I said, and it was. Maybe I would come down and swim some evening. Yeah, once TJ got the wing of things, we’d come down and take a dip. Good way to work on that bonding stuff.

TJ looked at the water apprehensively. “Nice,” he echoed me. I could see he was nervous and scared and I knew my decision was a good one. Time to grow up, to get over being afraid of the water at least.

The guy explained a few things to us about the filter system, about the depth of the pool, the rules, no running and no diving. “And you have to take a shower before you get in,” he said.

“Before?” TJ was stumped.

“To wash off any body dirt,” the guy explained. “And anything that might be stuck to your swim suit, I guess.”

TJ took this in and I guess it made sense to him. He nodded.

“And you take one afterwards, too,” the guy went on, “to wash off the chlorine. And rinse out your suit.”

We walked back inside, through a door marked “Men.” We passed a row of shower heads against a wall, three or four guys were just stepping under the water, their baggy board shorts still dry. And then we stepped through another opening. Lockers, sinks, three or four urinals and a couple of stalls. Showers, more showers, this must be where you washed off after the swim. I hadn’t been in a locker room in years, and a lot of stuff came back to me from high school. That kind of male pride, the cockiness of walking around naked or half naked.

I guess it was all new to TJ. He seemed kind of surprised a little nervous. And then we saw two guys, probably high school kids, standing there in their underwear in front of metal lockers. TJ looked at them, looked away, then looked back just as they simultaneously dropped their boxers. And he looked away really fast then. I saw him turn six shades of pink.

Yeah, this was going to be some growing up stuff for him.

“Well, that’s it,’ the guy said as we headed back to the office. “And I gotta take a break. Lunch.”
Probably a smoke break, I thought, but maybe that was because that was what was on my mind. This had been a long morning.

I fired up a red the second I hit the parking lot. “Well,” I said, trying to sound jovial and feeling a lot better when the smoke hit my lungs, “that turned out okay, didn’t it?"

“Yeah,” said TJ. “Yeah it looks good.”