Michael Czyzniejewski
King Kong Plays Ping Pong with His Ding Dong
Stripeys
My son has taken an unnatural liking to coconut candies, those Neapolitan cubes of strawberry, vanilla, and chocolate. He’s become so addicted, I’ve made them my currency, what I give him when he’s good, what I deprive him of if he’s bad. At first, I thought it’d be a phase, something he’d get over after one weekend, two at the most. It’s been over a year. He eats, on average, seven stripeys a day, once going as high as twenty-nine, the day he got all As on his report card and went four-for-four in his Little League game. Since we can’t buy them at just any candy store—we have to go to the far mall or drive two highway exits up to that giant rest stop— the candy remains sufficiently exotic that I can say things like, “Help me clean the bathroom and we’ll drive to get some stripeys.” Stripeys have become as dictating a presence in our lives as Andy having to go to school and me having to go to work, as my custody arrangement with Laura. Our entire lives function on the basis of Neapolitan coconut stripeys.
Strawberry
Our coconut stripey dilemma can be traced back to Andy’s legendary rhyming phase. That started right after Andy learned to speak, little two-word phrases like “Hi, guy!” and “Glad, dad!” and “Food, dude!” sounds spewing from a toddler’s mouth, his ears and lips playing games. Soon, it stopped making sense: “Babies Habies!”; “Pizza rizza dizza!”; “Poopy doopy cloopy!” This went on for six months, nothing spoken aloud that didn’t rhyme, all of it gibberish.
One afternoon, us driving to his mother’s, Andy had an epiphany, an actual sentence: “Laura is more horror than scorer,” only horror and scorer didn’t have the R sounds at the end, making it a truer rhyme, “Laura is more horra than scora,” which made him laugh, leading to another sentence: “Rhyme time is prime time!” I acknowledged that it was indeed prime time. Energized, the trip across town was all “Laura is more horra than scora!” “Laura is more horra than scora!” Once: “I adora Laura the horra and the scora!”
It was easy to see why Laura wasn’t a big fan. Andy’s rhyme was annoying as all get-go, but my ex was more bothered by the message, believing that when Andy was saying “horror,” he was actually saying “whore.” I didn’t hear it, and I got backup: Laura’s new husband, Meyers, thought Andy was saying, “horror,” too, which earned Meyers Laura’s glance of death. By the time I pulled away, I agreed to agree that “horror” wasn’t a major upgrade from “whore,” if we were quantifying, and we’d both work to break Andy of his rhyming.
When I picked Andy up again that Friday, I was surprised (but not shocked) to hear him still reciting, “Laura is more horra than scora!” Laura looking like she hadn’t slept in four days.
“Tell Daddy the rhyme we learned about him,” Laura said, nodding to Andy in the driveway.
Nothing. No matter how many times we asked—I wanted to hear it—Andy wouldn’t say it, deferring to “Laura is more horra than scora!” as we drove off. I never did find out the rhyme Laura taught Andy about me, but it was probably best I didn’t know.
Vanilla
It took Andy that entire summer to stop rhyming, though it wasn’t because of anything we did. We ignored him, tried incentives, punished him, even took him to counseling. In the end, Andy simply quit. What came next was arguably worse: Andy repeating everything we said. “Andy, come down for breakfast,” followed by “Andy, come down for breakfast.” “Andy, pack your bag for Mom’s,” leading to “Andy, pack your bags for Mom’s.” It never paid to acknowledge him either, because as soon as we countered with something like “Cut it out. I mean it, mister,” we’d just get it back: “Cut it out. I mean it, mister,” in a nasally sneer.
This lasted all spring when Andy was four, Andy only quitting when Laura took his model trains—this really expensive collection Meyers had been buying him—and threw them in the trash. Meyers told me Andy persisted right until the end.
“I swear, I will drop these in this trash and they will be gone forever!”— “I swear, I will drop these in this trash and they will be gone forever!”
Even when Laura held true, dropping the engine, all the cars, tracks, little buildings and trees and people into the giant plastic container, it was “See, mister? I’m serious” times two. Andy only relented when the truck pulled up and its robot arm reached out to grab and dump the can, Andy yelling, “No! I’m sorry!” much too late. Meyers described running outside and trying to stop the truck, but once that can got flipped, there was nothing anyone could do. Andy watched from the window as the train pieces tumbled through the air, landing in the heap with the unmistakable sound of cracking plastic. The truck drove on to the next house and the trains were gone forever, along with Andy repeating everything we said.
Chocolate
Between the repetition and the stripeys, Andy started to wet himself. That was tough for everybody, but way worse for me because my apartment didn’t have a washer and dryer. Andy’s disgusting pants and underwear piled up in the corner of the bathroom until he ran out, until we had to either spend a few hours at the laundromat or buy more clothes. I hated the laundromat, and before we knew it, Andy had something like fifty pairs of underwear and twenty-seven pairs of pants.
The entire extended family went to therapy: me, Andy, Meyers, Laura, and their new twin baby girls, Breanna and Ambrosia. The therapist was this super-tall guy—six-ten in bare feet—who specialized in bed wetting, boasting a “100 percent victory record,” a phrase emblazoned under the list of degrees on his business card. When I pointed out that Andy had never actually wet the bed, that this was something he did while he was awake, the enormous doctor regressed, saying his perfect record referred to bed wetters, not pants wetters.
“But I’ll see what I can do.”
Therapy invoked bad memories of me and Laura trying to save our marriage, sitting on exercise balls while Laura’s yoga instructor, Flower, burned incense and asked us to envision the best road to rekindled happiness. I envisioned romantic getaways; Laura envisioned a remodeled kitchen. I envisioned Laura and I making love; Laura envisioned me shaving my back. I envisioned Laura not correcting me in front of people; Laura envisioned a morning where she didn’t find the computer’s Internet history wiped from the night before. The back-and-forth persisted. Two sessions in, Flower suggested we divorce.
After two months of weekly meetings with Dr. Giganto, Andy still peed his pants. This included during all eight therapy sessions, as the doctor looked on, nodding, taking notes. Honestly, when that guy came out of his office to greet us, reaching out his enormous hand to shake, I wanted to piss myself, too.
The hitch was, my insurance only covered eight sessions, and if we wanted more, we’d either have to pay out of pocket or switch Andy over to Meyers’ insurance. I was not having that. Luckily, Laura and I agreed the visits to the colossal doctor weren’t helping Andy—though the twins, oddly, were waking with dry diapers— and that we should try something else. At the end of that eighth session, when the therapist said he’d see us next time, Laura and I both blurted out, “No thanks!” The therapist appeared stunned, claiming Andy was making real progress, ignoring the fact our son was standing in front of him with saturated trousers, stinking of urine.
On our way out, Laura and I bickering, Meyers wrestling the twins into the twin carrier, Andy asked the the therapist if he could have a piece of candy, pointing to the jar on his deck.
The giant glanced at the jar. He said, “That candy is for patients.” Meyers, who is a pretty big guy himself (though not bed-wetting- therapist big), put his girls down on the floor and approached the desk. “What’d you say, pal?” and the doctor stood up, too; it looked like my replacement and our worthless shrink were going to throw down.
I stuck my fingers in the jar, pulled out a piece of candy, handed it to Andy, and said, “Here you go, buddy.” Both men ceased all aggressions. Laura picked up the twins and we all followed her out. I told the therapist his business cards were a lie.
Andy, in the elevator, asked me, “What’s this, Dad?” “It’s coconut, sport. It’s yummy.”
The Cellophane Wrapper
Laura is super-allergic to coconut, so much so, we’ve designed a routine so we don’t kill her. First off, Andy can’t eat any stripeys the last six hours he’s at my apartment, nothing after the after-breakfast piece he gets if he cleans his plate. Second, Andy cannot kiss his mother the first twelve hours he’s back with her, unless he brushes his teeth, rinses with mouth wash, takes a shower, then brushes and rinses again. Lastly, and most important of all, Andy can never ever take a coconut stripey to Laura and Meyers’ or consume one within a one-mile radius of Laura. My ex has petitioned me, begged me, threatened me with more therapy to break Andy of this most recent obsession. Like with all his bad habits, I’ve explained to her it will pass. Sooner or later, Andy will get tired of these candies and he’ll move on to the next thing. Laura counterpointed out that none of Andy’s previous annoyances were life-threatening, and I conceded that point. While the stench from his pissy-pants pile was overwhelming, we could just keep the bathroom door shut.
On Fourth of July weekend—I have Andy for four days—he and I drive down to New Orleans. We settle in a hotel in the Quarter and Andy unwinds on the bed with a bag of stripeys and some cable cartoons. I devour a shrimp po boy and crave a Hurricane.
We walk Bourbon Street. Andy pops stripeys, sucking on them as we take it all in. In the center of a busy intersection, Andy points to a topless woman taking a picture with an older couple. The topless woman can’t be more than nineteen. A yellow and brown acrylic daisy stretches over each of her nipples. I move to cover Andy’s eyes, but he pushes my hand away, once, twice, and then I relent, let him stare. When the woman is done taking photos, she pulls a cardboard sign out from between her legs that says “Photos—Five Bucks!” and begins striding up Bourbon, brandishing the sign for potential customers. I begin thinking it might be time for the talk, that our fourteen-hour drive back home is going to be awkward.
Andy is suddenly fifty feet ahead of me. He is trailing the topless woman, hovering in her four o’clock, trying to peer around her without getting caught. When she stops to take photos with a squad of frat boys, Andy stops, too. The boys want lots of photos, and before long Andy has positioned himself below the selfie stick in the topless woman’s extended arm. I run to catch up to him but kick something along the way: a coconut stripey. A half dozen more litter the street, discarded in Andy’s wake. I bend to pick them up for later, but then I don’t. I watch Andy’s hand rise, shaking, then steadying, reaching forward, reaching up.