I can definitely remember a period of time when the gas crisis, the Carter administration, and"Alan Alda's bleeding-heart liberal propaganda" were starting to wear on Don Fey's day-to-day dignity.
One Saturday my dad got it in his head that he was going to rent a rug shampooer at Pathmark and shampoo our carpets. He expressed this desire to my mother, who said nonchalantly, "Ugh, those things never work." We still had a half-empty bottle of rug shampoo from the one other time he'd tried it. But Don Fey could not be deterred, and I, his faithful servant, went with him. We rented the shampooer, bought a new full bottle of soap, and loaded them into the back of the Catalina.
When we got home I was sent to play outside so my dad could shampoo the whole first floor. I barely had my Star Wars figures lined up in the patch of dirt by the basement steps also known as Tatooine when I heard a commotion inside. My dad was cursing. Objects were being rumbled around. I got an instant bellyache.
The screen door flew open. The two bottles of rug shampoo were slammed onto the back porch.The rug shampooer came tumbling out the back door in a tangled mess.
"Your mother... is a witch!" my dad blurted as he came outside. He meant it literally. "She cursed me!" It would seem that the rented rug shampooer did not work. "The goddamn thing is defective."
"Defective" was a big word in our house. Many things were labeled "defective" only to miraculously turn functional once the directions had been read more thoroughly. If I had to name the two words I most associate with my dad between 1970 and 1990, they would be "defective" and"inexcusable." Leaving your baseball glove in a neighbor's car? Inexcusable. Not knowing that "a lot"was two words? Inexcusable. The seltzer machine that we were going to use to make homemade soda?Defective. The misspelled sign at the Beach Boys Fourth of July concert that read "From Sea to Shinning Sea"? Inexcusable. Richie Ashburn not being in the baseball hall of fame yet? Bullshit. (Don Fey had a large rubber stamp that said "bullshit," which was and is awesome.) Was it too much to expect the rest of the world to care about grammar or pay attention to details? Shouldn't someone at the Pathmark have to make sure that the goddamn rug shampooers are in working order?
He carried the defective shampooer down the back steps, the hose flopping around on purpose just to annoy him. There was sudsy water inside it, sloshing around, mocking his dream of an orderly house. "Son of a bitch!" As he backed our giant car up the fifty-degree incline of our driveway, scraping the bumper, he barked, "Get the bottle of soap. Come on." I was going along for the ride back to Pathmark? Great. I looked at the two identical bottles of rug detergent on the back porch. One was new and returnable. One was six months old and half empty. But which was which? I couldn't tell! They were opaque. I knew that word because I was in the Gifted Program, but it didn't help me in that split second.Why didn't I pick them both up to see which one was heavier? Why didn't I just bring both of them? I would never be placed in the Common Sense Program. My dad honked the horn for me to hurry up. I grabbed a bottle and dashed for the car.
We rode in tense silence to the Pathmark. And, by the way, I get it now. I'm a working parent and I understand that sometimes you want to have a very productive Saturday to feel that you are in control of your life, which of course you are not. Children and Jimmy Carter ruin all your best-laid plans.And then your wife casts some sort of evil spell?! Inexcusable.
I followed my dad as he stormed into the Pathmark to explain to them what kind of a country America was supposed to be. He took the bottle from me to put it on the customer service counter, and his face went red at the weight of it. I had grabbed the half-empty one.
And here was the indignity of the 1979 economy-we couldn't afford to waste the three dollars.Sure, once the Internet boom came in the nineties we'd all be throwing out half-full mouthwash because we wanted to try the new cinnamint flavor. We'd buy chamomile tea at Starbucks and not finish it. But not Don Fey. Not in 1979. He was going to have to drive home again and get that other bottle to return it. "Wait here," he said in a strangled voice.
He left me at the end of the No Frills aisle. I stood there, fighting back tears, pretty sure that it was illegal to leave your nine year old at Pathmark. Unfortunately, I was wearing a red polo shirt and shorts. With my short haircut and doughy frame, no fewer than three old ladies mistook me for a stock boy. "Young man, where are the plums?"
I only hope that one day I can frighten my daughter this much. Right now, she's not scared of my husband or me at all. I think it's a problem. I was a freshman home from college the first time my dad said, "You're going out at ten P.M.? I don't think so," and I just laughed and said, "It's fine." I feel like my daughter will be doing that to me by age six.
How can I give her what Don Fey gave me? The gift of anxiety. The fear of getting in trouble. The knowledge that while you are loved, you are not above the law. The Worldwide Parental Anxiety System is failing if this many of us have made sex tapes.
When I was a kid there was a TV interstitial during Saturday morning cartoons with a song that went like this: "The most important person in the whole wide world is you, and you hardly even know you. / You're the most important person!" Is this not the absolute worst thing you could instill in a child?They're the most important person? In the world? That's what they already think. You need to teach them the opposite. They need to be a little afraid of what will happen if they lose the top of their Grizzly Adams thermos.
Don Fey is from the Silent Generation. They are different from their children. They cannot be"marketed to." They don't feel "loyalty" to Barnes and Noble over Borders. If you told Don Fey that you never go to Burger King, only McDonald's, because you "grew up with the Hamburglar," he would look at you like you were a moron.
When my face was slashed, my dad held me on his lap in the car to the hospital, applying direct pressure with the swift calm of a veteran and an ex-fireman. I looked up and asked him, "Am I going to die?" "Don't speak," he said. So, yeah, he's not the kind of guy who wants to watch people eat bugs on Survivor. It's so clear to me how those two things are related.
My dad has visited me at work over the years, and I've noticed that powerful men react to him in a weird way. They "stand down." The first time Lorne Michaels met my dad, he said afterward, "Your father is... impressive." They meet Don Fey and it rearranges something in their brain about me. Alec Baldwin took a long look at him and gave him a firm handshake. "This is your dad, huh?" What are they realizing? I wonder. That they'd better never mess with me, or Don Fey will yell at them? That I have high expectations for the men in my life because I have a strong father figure?
Only Colin Quinn was direct about it. "Your father doesn't fucking play games. You would never come home with a shamrock tattoo in that house."
That's Don Fey.
Climbing Old Rag Mountain
Let me start off by saying that at the University of Virginia in 1990, I was Mexican. I looked Mexican, that is, next to my fifteen thousand blond and blue-eyed classmates, most of whom owned horses, or at least resembled them.
I had grown up as the "whitest" girl in a very Greek neighborhood, but in the eyes of my new classmates, I was Frida Kahlo in leggings.
For many people, college is a time of sexual experimentation and discovery, and I am no exception. After a series of failed experiments with Caucasian men, I discovered that what I am really into is Caucasian men.
And I mean Caucasian. Maybe it's my way of rejecting my Hellenic upbringing, but I like 'em fair-skinned with old-timey manners and some knowledge of fishing. If I'm honest with myself, I can admit that I've known this ever since I saw Larry Wilcox ride a motorcycle-on the back of a flatbed camera truck-down the Pacific Coast Highway. I like white boys.
This worked out perfectly for me in college, because what nineteen-year-old Virginia boy doesn't want a wide-hipped, sarcastic Greek girl with short hair that's permed on top? What's that you say? None of them want that? You are correct. So I spent four years attempting to charm the uninterested. (It was probably good practice for my future career on a low-rated TV show.) I couldn't figure out how to play it. I couldn't compete with the sorority girls with their long blond ponytails and hoop earrings. I tried to find the white-boy-looking-to-rebel, but I wasn't ethnic enough to be an exciting departure. I wasn't Korean or African American or actually Mexican. I was just not all-the-way-white.
I realized my predicament early in my First Year. We don't say "freshman" or "senior," etc., at UVA because Mr. Jefferson felt that education is a lifelong process. Thomas Jefferson-another gorgeous white boy who would not have been interested in me. This was my problem in a nutshell. To get some play in Charlottesville, you had to be either a Martha Jefferson or a Sally Hemings.
During my First Year, I had a crush on a brainy, raven-haired boy from my dorm. This played out like the typical sexy coed letter to Penthouse. He would ask me at least once a day if I had ever seen the movie Full Metal Jacket. I would remind him that I had not. He would then describe parts of it to me.After several weeks of mistaking this for flirtation, I tried to kiss him one night by the Monroe Hill dorms and he literally ran away. Not figuratively. Literally.
I did go to one fraternity formal with a devastatingly handsome guy named Awbrey Madison Cartwright III from Georgia. I mean, this guy looked like Clark Kent, no joke. He held my chair for me and opened doors. He was genteel and attentive. There was only one problem. Here's how our exchange went when he invited me to the formal:
Tina sits on the steps in front of the theater building, chatting with friends from acting class.Awbrey Cartwright approaches.
TINA: Hey, Awbrey, you're gay, right?
AWBREY: (thrown) What? No. I was coming over here to ask if you want to go to my formal with me.
TINA: Oh. Sure.
I was right, by the way. He was for dudes.
So you can see why, when I occasionally had a little success with a heterosexual white male, I dug in and hung on for dear life. And this is why I climbed Old Rag Mountain at night.
There was a kid, older than me, an architecture student who did plays in the drama department on the side. I won't use his real name because I think he'd find out about it and it would give him too much satisfaction. I'll refer to him instead by how he looked at the time, which was like a handsome Robert Wuhl. Go spend an hour trying to picture exactly what that could be and pick up the book again when you've got it.
Welcome back.
Handsome Robert Wuhl and I were in a few plays and some acting classes together. He seemed to appreciate my sense of humor. Like all boys at that time, he tried to talk like David Letterman, which I appreciated. I don't remember how we first came to be making out in a car, but it was awesome so I kept doing it. Should it have been a "red flag" to me that these incidents would only take place under cover of night, in the back driveway behind my on-campus housing? Absolutely. Was it "not great" that there was never any actual "date" before these events and that it was a secret? Of course. But I finally had my hands on a thin-lipped white boy so everybody just shut up about it!
Secret make-out time went on for a while. Handsome Robert Wuhl claimed to have some ethical/religious reasons for not going all the way, which was fine by me, as I would have been terrified. I say "claimed" because I think it was closer to the truth that he was just a control freak who thought he should save himself for someone hot.
Sometimes there would be a big drama department event, like a party to celebrate the opening of The Robber Bridegroom or a wine and cheese reception to welcome guest artist Aaron Sorkin (totally true). Handsome Robert Wuhl would take a pretty date to the party while I attended with friends, and then he'd pick me up later for car sports. Sometimes we would just drive around. We hit a deer once.Why were we just driving around the Blue Ridge Mountains? To this day I do not understand what this boy was up to. Was it a control experiment to see how much boring nothingness I would put up with before we finally made out? Possibly.
We did eventually go on kind of a date. He took me to the mall to help him shop for a present for another girl, and he bought me a sandwich at Hickory Farms. "You can really eat a lot," he laughed when I finished it. I was certain that he would eventually be so impressed with my ability to eat like one of the guys that he would want me to be his girlfriend.
So when HRW asked me casually if I'd like to climb Old Rag Mountain with him, I said yes immediately, then raced home to tell my roommates. Clearly I was very special to him. Why else would he invite me to climb a nearby mountain? They were skeptical.
I met HRW the next evening at his off-campus apartment. Yes, the climb was going to be at night. I didn't question this because I didn't know anything about rock climbing and I assumed that we were in this for the romance. He introduced me to one of his roommates, Jess or Chris or something. He was a wiry little guy who would be joining us on the climb. This was news to both me and Jess-Chriss. To say he was unfriendly would be the biggest understatement since the captain of the Hindenberg said "I smell gas."* He alternated between ignoring me and shooting me disdainful looks that clearly said "Who is this ugly off-brand non-sorority girl ruining our homo-erotic bro-times?"
We drove out of town a little ways, listening to Peter Gabriel's "In Your Eyes." HRW played that song constantly. He was very deep. Did I mention yet that he always wore a small shell necklace and he told me that he was never going to take it off until Apartheid ended?
It was dusk when we got to the bottom of Old Rag, and when HRW and Jess-Chriss realized that neither of them had brought flashlights. After a quick debate about whose fault it was, they decided it didn't matter and we should just start climbing.
The first leg of our journey was the walk from the parking lot to the beginning of the actual trail.It was about a mile and a half. By the time we got to the foot of the mountain, I was already nauseous from overexertion and trying to hide it. I asked for some water.
"Aw, are you kidding me?" The two bros looked blankly at each other. They had also forgotten to bring any water.
The next, more difficult portion of the trail was the "rock scramble," a feat requiring serious concentration to find a foothold and safely navigate up, over, and in between slippery rocks. It was getting dark now, but there was bright moonlight. It was difficult, but I was actually enjoying the challenge. Jess-Chriss continued to wish I was dead and/or better looking. HRW climbed ahead of us both, showing off. I learned that night that there are markers on these kinds of trails, one color for the easy path, one color for the intermediate path. I also learned that sometimes, especially at night, these markers are hard to see.
Soon HRW told us he was "going off the trail" and he'd meet us after a while. Neither Jess-Chriss nor I was happy about this, but I guess HRW was just too good a climber to be held back. Jess-Chriss and I climbed along in silence for about twenty minutes. If Jess-Chriss had trouble finding the next marker he certainly didn't get any help from me, because I was a hiking novice. I was wearing wrestling shoes, for example. Jess-Chriss kept calling ahead to HRW to "stop showing off" and "stop being a dick." HRWwould call back through the dark that he just wanted to try something and he'd be back on the trail in a few minutes. And then we heard it. A grunt and the sound of little rocks rolling down bigger rocks and then a sound like a bag of laundry bouncing and scraping down your basement steps. That idiot had fallen off the mountain.