My middle son Roscoe called me this morning, or at least he tried to call me. As I am sure most of you experience the same sort of collect calls from a state run prison as I do. I get these every morning from my son Roscoe, every morning I tell you, 10 AM, like clock work. Sometimes I take them, most times I pretend I don’t speak English.
“Hero?” I say in my fake Asian accent.
“Yes, this here the phone company, we gots a collect call from Roscow, you cept?”
“Hero?” I say again.
“Yeah, you speak English?”
“Shitty chicken? You want Shitty Chicken?”
“Yeah, she ain’t speak English man.”
I do that because I know Roscoe can hear me and I am sending a message. You know what the message is? Hey Roscoe, you send someone to stick a shiv in my stomach, you better send a real man, got it?
I guess you could say me and Roscoe are having a disagreement.
Here’s how it went down. Couple of weeks ago I get a call, I accept the charges, it’s Roscue, he is all hyped up on prison speed, which I have been told can be pretty fine, and he says the 49ers are gonna kick the Saints ass. I spit coffee I was laughing so hard. I bet him a pack of cigarettes and some porn. First, the best part of me not being in prison is that when I bet some inmate, I am betting the equivalent of something like 10 dollars of money, but to someone in lock up, that’s a shit load of value right there.
Anyway, he bites, he is so confident he is going to take his old man for some smokes and cheap porn that he wants to share a valuable tip with me, I can “get a 60 inch plasma, for real paps, for 300 bucks, for real.”
This is the way he talks, being locked up on a petty drug charge for 18 months now and he has this persona of a real tough guy, but he knows and I know, if it came down to it, I could lay him out with one punch, and if he suckers me into one more shitty deal, I will too. In December he turned me on to a shipment of 17 Antonio Banderas inflatable love dolls, said I could pick them up for 10 bucks a piece and sell them in the city for a hundred each, just stand around, inflate one and people will line up and pay 100 dollars cash for each one.
Now, in retrospect, if you think about it, a grown man, standing in New York City, in the middle of December, with a crate of uninflated Antonio Banderas love dolls of unknown quality, but one inflated and showing a fairly substantial package if you know what I mean, it sounds damn close to absurd and quite possibly obscene. That is, of course, in retrospect. When he first told me about it I was immediately sold on the idea, throw 170 bucks right into the plan and every day for 3 weeks I was standing on a variety of different street corners in New York City, sometimes for 10 or more hours, holding a totally inflated Antonio Banderas Love Doll and a box of 16 more, trying desperately to sell them. Three weeks. I sold 4, and not one for more than five bucks.
If Roscoe was not locked up behind bars, I’d of killed him.
So when he came to me with this great bet, he so sure the ultra gay San Francisco 49ers would kick the collective asses of one of the greatest teams playing the game right now, I jumped in with everything I had. When the 49ers proceeded to wipe the field with the dead carcass of the once proud Saints, I was sobbing into my beer, crying so loudly that my pet monkey Rufus T. Maplethorpe began throwing feces at me because he thought I might be dying and when a monkey senses its owner is in peril, it reacts in the most primitive way imaginable.
The phone rang again a few days ago.
“Marta de car es een zee garage.” I said.
“Yeah, I got a collect call from Roscoe, will you accept the charges?”
“Marta de car es een zee garage.”
“Yeah, he ain’t answering.” The operator hung up.
A couple hours later there was a man on the porch, I figured the mail man was delivering, so I gave him a minute to drop the mail and leave, I don’t really feel comfortable interacting with the mail man ever since I started ordering clown makeup and explosives via mail order from Argentina. The less eye contact, the better is how I have been playing it. I opened the door and checked the box and there was nothing there, which was strange since I had presumed the mail man to have just delivered, and right then a slick little black figure darted toward me from my left. I turned quickly, it was Rocky, this skinny dumb kid who used to live a couple of blocks over. I kicked him in the knee, and as he slid forward, I brought my elbow up and hit him in the jaw. His head shot directly back and my shoe caught the shiv and kicked it out into the snow.
“What you doing Rocky, you gonna stick me?”
He rolled onto the porch, laid up on his back and stared at me. Defenseless. What a pathetic attempt. I looked at him and smiled. “Rocky, you’re a punk. You cold?” He shock his head and I put my hand down and helped him up. “Roscoe put you up to this?” He shook his head yes. “You want some coffee? The girls might have some hot chocolate, I could make you some?” He smiled and we went inside. Try to stick a shiv in me? What the hell, the kid must weight 100 pounds.
The phone rang the next morning. “Yes, yes I will accept the collect charges.”
“Hey dad.”
“Oh, hi Roscoe. How’s everything?”
“Well, could be better.”
“Yeah? Well, me too. You know, almost got spiked my some punk yesterday. Guess what? Apparently the going rate to have your own father stuck is now 50 cents. You hear me son? You were gonna pay that punk 50 cents to stab me in the stomach?”
“I was sending a message.” Roscoe said, seriously.
“Yeah, I got your message. You are one dumb mother fucker.”
“The fruit does not fall far from the tree.”
“What’s that supposed to mean? You calling me a homo?”
“Shoe fits.”
“What the hells that mean?”
“Thrice the boxing match.”
“No clue. Not any idea what the fuck you are talking right now. Are you letting the guards hit you in head with night sticks?”
“Yeah.”
I hung up the phone at that point. Not like it was free Verizon minutes, I was actually paying for that useless conversation.
Roscoe is my least favorite son, which is really saying something in my collection of children, because of the 8 or 9 sons, at least 4 of them are in prison, 3 in foreign prisons, and one of those is in Abu Garib, the famous Baghdad prison, and get this, at least once a week, the Baghdad guards email me some terrible picture of my son, naked, covered in peanut butter, or dancing with a scantily clad midget, just some sort of strange shit they make him do to humiliate him. I actually find it funny, but in their culture, it’s just terrible.
Still, Roscoe is the one who hired a kid for 50 cents to stab me, that may be an all time low. No, now that I think about it, there was the exploding six pack of imported French Canadian Queens Ale beer the kids gave me when I turned 28 last year. That was unpleasant as well.
I keep getting asked a lot lately, strangers, emailers, prison guards and republicans running for president, everyone is asking me for advice on parenting. Just because I have 17 children and I seem to have them all under control, or in state custody, other parents want to know how it is done. Newt Gingrich thinks I should write a book.
I was at a park in Cranston a couple of days ago, watching my youngest son throw dirt onto the faces of unsuspecting 4 year olds and this woman sat down next to me on a bench. She was watching her daughter playing in the field about 10 yards ahead of us. My lesbian dog was laying out in the sun and her daughter started to move towards her and she called out, “Millie, leave the doggy alone,” but I told her, not to worry, that dog loves children.
The little girl walked up and started to pet the dog, who glanced up and seemed to appreciate the gesture. Then the girl started to pull the fur, which the kinky side of my dog also seems to like. After a few minutes of that sort of rough stuff, my dog got up to walk away, but the little girl was having none of that, so jumped onto the dogs back as if she was going to ride her like a horse. The mother next to me was a bit alarmed, but I grabbed her arm and assured her that the dog was well trained. I assured that both the young girl and the elderly dog would learn their important lessons. Not 30 seconds later the dog was sprinting across the green grass, the girl screaming for everything she was worth, holding onto the dogs collar until she finally let lose and fell off to the side. My dog slowed, looked back at the crying child and walked a few steps, did that circle dog thing and laid back down.
The mother ran to her uninjured daughter, picked her up and carried her crying young girl back to the bench, scowling at me. “What were you thinking, your dog could have killed my daughter.”
“Your daughter could have killed my dog.”
“What?”
“I said your irresponsible and mean spirited daughter could have killed my dog. She is a dainty old dog.”
“You said she was good with children?”
“Yeah, well, she doesn’t much like it when kids try to ride her like a horse.”
“You are about the worst parent I have ever met.”
“Well, you should read my book.”
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