Paedogenesis
No, it’s not some weird disorder that you have to register with the local police department for. Paedogenesis is basically, the young giving rise to the young. It happens in some insects, when a larva reaches sexual maturity before it reaches physical maturity. The larva will give birth to other larva at which point it will either die of exhaustion or be devoured by its own offspring. In turn those little bastards get to grow up and live full happy lives. At least I think they do, not really sure how long and happy an insect’s life could be. But anyway, it tends to skip a generation. The parent’s die so the offspring can live on to give rise to other offspring who will then, likely die shortly after giving rise to other offspring. I think that’s a good metaphor for people, ya know. The first generation must struggle so the next doesn’t have to. The second generation grows up, ignorant of all the little hardships that past generations had to endure. In their ignorance, they allow the bullshit which created the hardships for their parents to take hold for their children. And then the third generation is back where the first one started all because they have a bunch of selfish assholes for parents. I think I’m the larva in this scenario, the larva which doesn’t get to grow up, or at least it doesn’t get to enjoy the fruits of its own labor.
When I was a kid, I would often times come home to a living room scattered with empty beer bottles. You could always tell when the Air Force sent Dad his monthly stipend because you would see empty bottles of Budweiser instead of cans of that Keystone shit. I would go into the kitchen and see a couple of crumpled up ten dollar bills underneath the ashtray which hasn’t been emptied in about a year or two, and next to it a note with the word “groceries” scribbled across it. Yeah, Thanks Dad. Some weeks the old man would forget to leave the ten-spots and my little brother would start crying his eyes out because he had to go to bed with no food in his belly. All I could do was say, “Don’t worry, kid. We’ll get us something to eat tomorrow,” knowing full well that the fridge was pretty much empty except for a few sticks of butter a carton of sour milk, a box of baking soda and a half empty can of baby clams. Don’t ask me what the hell we used those baby clams for, I sure as hell don’t know.
I hated lying to Josh. For me, it was like punching Jesus in the face or something, it really screwed with my head. And every time I lied to my little bro, I would secretly promise myself that I would do a better job if I ever had kids of my own. They wouldn’t have to worry about losing their free lunch ticket when they went to school. They’d never go an entire week without seeing my face. They’d never have to spend the night in some goddam group home getting groped by a bunch of teenage meth-heads all because I got into a fight with an off duty police officer. And most of all, they’d never go to bed hungry, I swore they wouldn’t.
To be honest, I never really wanted to have any kids, always sort of thought by the time I was old enough to have them, I’d be too crazy to do a good job raising them. When my son was born I realized that I’d been acting as somebody’s parent pretty much my whole damn life. Sometimes I wonder if acting is all I’ll ever be doing. My son is four years old and my wife’s pregnant with our second child. Alicia’s mom is convinced that this one’s gonna be a girl because of some crazy superstition of hers, something to do with her belly being shaped like a watermelon. The whole thing’s pretty dumb but who knows, she might be right.
Anyway, my son’s name is Jonah and he’s “the cutest little boy you’ve ever seen!” At least that’s what people say when we go out. I hate it. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I want my kid to have high self esteem and all that, but the way these White people talk about him he probably thinks he’s God’s gift to mankind. Which is all well and good, except for the fact that it’s pretty much impossible to raise a kid who thinks he’s hot shit. It’s all Alicia’s fault, well it’s mostly her fault. You see I wanted Jonah to have just a regular Caesar or a tapered fade or something. But Alicia, for reasons I’ll never understand, insisted that we have his hair braided into one of those ugly rattail things on the back of his head. Now I don’t really care all that much about hairstyle to be honest, but letting your kid walk around with a goddam rattail on the back of his head’s gotta be some kind of child abuse.
So we compromised and decided that he should have dreadlocks, hurray. Jonah’s dreads reach his shoulders now and all of these little housewives around here just love little kids with dreadlocks. I don’t get it, when I was growing up all the guys I knew who had dreads were pretty grimy, and not just in appearance either. Their whole persona made you wanna take a shower if you spent five minutes around them. Most of them, not all of them. I don’t wanna be responsible for instigating some kind of dreadlocks discrimination thing. I’m just saying, it’s a lot of grimy ass dudes with dreadlocks out there. But anyway, here in the suburbs dreads are considered cute apparently. Not sure, but I think the Disney Corporation’s got something to do with it, but I’m not gonna get into that.
Okay I’ve kind of got a bias against Disney, if you must know, because my son simply must watch every goddam Disney movie in existence at least eighty-seven times apiece before he’s five. I mean he’ll sit there and watch The Incredibles from start to finish and then he’ll start it over and watch it again. And The Incredibles isn’t a bad movie, it’s really not. But I pretty much hate that movie now because I’ve gotta watch the shit twelve times a day. That and Spiderman, Jonah just loves Spiderman. Whenever I take him to the store with me, I’ve gotta be on the lookout for anything that even resembles Spiderman so I can steer clear of it. If not, I’m gonna have to endure about a million, “Daddy, can I have it? Pleeeease!” until I have a goddam aneurism. It wouldn’t be so bad if he were into better superheroes. I mean Spiderman is okay and all, but let’s be honest Peter Parker is soft. And I don’t want my kid to end up being some sensitive little sissy boy who gets his ass beat during recess. If only I could get him into Thor. I could put up with buying Jonah about a million pairs of Thor pajamas. He was my favorite hero growing up because unlike Spiderman, Thor was the fucking boss. If somebody killed Thor’s uncle, I guarantee you he wouldn’t embark on some “emotional journey of self-discovery.” Hell no, he’d find the son of a bitch and smash his skull with that hammer of his. But unfortunately there aren’t any good Thor movies out right now, none that I know of at least. I tried to get Jonah to watch Ironman with me because at least Tony Stark is a successful role model, but he wouldn’t have it. It’s all about Spiderman with my boy. It kills me, it really does.
Which brings us to this afternoon, I got off work early so I picked up Jonah from the daycare and took him to the mall just like I promised him I would for picking up all his toys out of the play room. We went to the mall, walked around for a little bit, I let him ride on that crazy indoor merry-go-round by the food court. Then we went to the toy store, just like we do every single time we got to that mall, and I bought him a Spiderman Halloween costume even though Halloween is like five months away. He already had the regular Spiderman costume but he just has to have the black one to go with it. God I hate that movie.
So we’re getting ready to leave the mall and much to my dismay, Jonah spots the Dippin’ Dots stand in the middle of the walkway, you know those little flash frozen sugar balls those assholes peddle to little kids at malls and theme parks and whatnot. So he sees the goddam icecream stand and he looks up at me with those big old puppy dog eyes of his and goes, “Daddy, can I have some dippin dots?”
He knows the brand name of every sugar product out there, I swear to god he does.
I say, “Naw, kid. Maybe later.”
Then Jonah goes, “pleeeease?!!!??!” God I hate that.
And I try to sound as nice as I can when I go, “No, kid. You’re gonna spoil your appetite,” which isn’t at all the reason I don’t want him to have it.
You may think I’m just being mean but the fact is that Jonah’s already a pretty active kid without a mountain of sugar coursing through his developing bloodstream. If I bought him that damn ice cream he would’ve been bouncing off the walls for the rest of the afternoon. And then sure as you’re born, he’d have an energy crash before dinnertime and I’d have to let him take a nap. And if he takes a nap before dinnertime, it’s pretty much a given that he’s not gonna go to sleep until its well past two in the morning. And Alicia’s seven months heavy and needs her sleep, so I already know I’d be the one that’s got to deal with Jonah’s craziness until the wee hours of the morning and I’m just not in the mood for all of that shit right now, not when I gotta do all of the goddam yard work tomorrow.
So I deny the kid his ice cream and as always he does his usual routine. Clenched fists, stomping his feet and he put’s this pouty look on his face that says I’m the most evil son of a bitch since Josef Mengele, because I wouldn’t buy him his peanut butter fudge or whatever the hell it was he wanted. When he puts on that face I feel like jumping off the third floor terrace of that mall because I know it’s gonna be next to impossible to get him to listen to me for the rest of the day.
To his credit, Jonah didn’t make that big of a scene when we were still inside the mall. He wasn’t that bad at all until we got to the parking lot. I get to the sedan and try to put him in his little car seat and he does that limp-limbs trick that all little kids do. You know the one; he puts his arms straight up in the air so when I try to pick him up he ends up slipping out of my hands and falling butt first into the asphalt. God I hate that. I swear there must be some kind of code written into the DNA of every four year old that tells them how to punish disobedient parents. Everywhere I go I see some poor guy wrestling with his own toddler who’s doing that limp-limbs trick and I think to myself, “poor bastard,” as I shake my head.
Whenever Jonah acts like that, I find myself wondering just why it is that he’s here. I mean, Alicia will never admit it, but she and I both know that Jonah wasn’t planned. It was just the two of us for a little more than a year, then all of a sudden she’s missing her goddam period and I’m moving all of my weights from the room upstairs and putting them in the goddam basement. I hate working out in the fucking basement. It’s cold as shit down there and there’s no way I’m doing my sets when I’m busy freezing my ass off. And now all of a sudden Alicia’s pregnant, again. Why? To prove to us both that Jonah wasn’t a mistake? My wife, I love her more than any other person, but she can really piss me off sometimes, she really can.
So through all the drama, I managed to get Jonah into his car seat and we drove off. Jonah was done throwing his little tantrum by the time we got to the highway and he moved into phase 2 of my punishment, “the silent treatment.” He sits there in his little car seat with his arms crossed in a way that is all too grown up and he stares holes in the back of my headrest. I adjusted the mirror so I could get a look at him and boy was he pissed. I tried to get him to lighten up.
I said, “Hey, kid. How’s about a movie before bedtime?”
No answer, of course. I returned my attention to the road just as this bitch in a yellow Mustang cut in front of me. I guess ten miles over the speed limit just aint fast enough for some people, some assholes I mean. You know it gets to me sometimes, when my son’s doing that silent treatment shit. Sometimes I think it’s worse than his tantrums. I mean, the tantrums I was used to from having to deal with my little brother when we were kids, trying to get him to take a bath or go to bed on time or eat his goddam vegetables or something. But Josh never did that silent treatment shit like Jonah does. I hate it; I swear I can see my Dad’s face in my son’s whenever he stares at me like that. I see my old man’s face and it scares the hell outta me. I remember the first time Jonah looked at me like that; all of a sudden I was that same little kid, staring at the floor in front of my dad’s feet while he’s got that goddam belt in his hand, god I hated that fucking belt. He asks me why the hell I didn’t buy the goddam groceries like I was supposed to, and I couldn’t say anything because my eyes would always start tearing up and then I feel like a damn fool because I’m crying in front of my dad for no reason at all, and then my voice doesn’t work and I can’t say a thing in my defense. And then, just like always my right hand would start twitching. I don’t know why my hand always twitched like that. It still twitches every once and a while but I could never figure out how to stop it.
Anyway, I finally had enough of that silent treatment shit. If Jonah wants to sit back there and not say anything then let him, but there’s no reason I have to sit there with the sound of his silence driving me fucking insane, is there? I turn on the radio and put in my Illadelph Halflife CD. I love that album, but Alicia hates it when I listen to it in the car. She hates all my music. This one Easter when Jonah was about six months old, we were all driving to my mother-in-law’s for Sunday dinner after we went to church. It kills me every time we go to church with Alicia’s parents. Neither one of us believes in any of that God stuff, but Alicia goes to mass on Christmas and Easter to appease her parents. Her dad’s pretty cool but her mom absolutely hates me because I won’t even pretend that I’m praying before we eat. I mean don’t get me wrong, I like Jesus and all, he’s a pretty cool dude, but none of that “New Testament” stuff was in the scriptures, I mean the old old scriptures, the ones the Jews wrote down back before Alexander the Great and all that. You know the ancient Jews didn’t even believe in an afterlife. Don’t believe me, go read the book of Ecclesiastes and tell me I’m lying. That’s about the only book in the Bible I like to read, depressing as hell, but still a great read. I could sympathize with poor old Ecclesiastes, I really could.
I’m going off on a tangent. Where was I? Oh yeah, so Jonah’s six months old and all three of us are on our way to Alicia’s parents and I’m listening to one of my CDs and all of a sudden one of the guys on there says the word “shit” and all hell breaks loose.
Alicia starts chewing me out with all of her, “I can’t believe you’d let our son listen to that. I don’t want him to grow up talking like that, it’s so unsophisticated…”
Boy was she pissed, but it probably didn’t help the situation when I started laughing my ass off. The kid wasn’t even talking at that point so it’s a pretty fair assumption that he had no idea what the hell those guys were talking about. I mean, god forbid I should really screw up and let him listen to 75 Bars or something. The poor boy’ll be traumatized. Maybe he’ll even grow up to be a sociopath like his old man.
We passed under the highway sign that says my exit’s about a mile away and I remembered that Jonah’s favorite park is nearby. The one with this playground made out of recycled wood or something. It’s built to look like a castle or a fortress with about a million towers and turrets and whatnot.
I turn down the volume and ask him, “Hey kid, you wanna stop at the park for a little while.”
No answer, but he looks slightly less pissed off than he was a minute ago. I took that as a yes and exitted the highway. We roll down that narrow road past the tall church on the corner with the really big steeple and all of those crazy bells up there. It kills me sometimes. I don’t believe in god, but I love those old churches. When I was a little kid I used to want to live in this old church down the street from my house. I’d go there whenever I could with this friend of mine who was Catholic. I didn’t really like our own church very much, the choir was pretty much the best you’d ever heard but it didn’t have those cool stained glass windows or the bell towers like my friend’s did. I mean if you’re gonna be a Christian you might as well go to whatever church you want, right?
We roll past the old church and down the little road that’s covered by about a million sycamore trees so it looks like you’re driving through a green tunnel or something. We pass by the gap in the trees that lets you see the lake at the North side of the park, the one with the paved running path around it where all of those goddam joggers spend all of their free time. Do those people even have jobs? I swear you could go out there at four in the fucking morning and see at least ten of them running around there in their neon bright spandex. You can tell they’re not poor because they’ve all got those crazy Ipods hanging out of their ears. It’s probably those same asshole college kids who hang out at the Starbucks all day. When I was in college I didn’t have time to spend all day at the goddam coffee shop talking about poetry and politics or whatever, because I had three separate jobs to do. Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays I’d get up at three in the goddam morning and load packages onto trucks at this shipping company. Tuesday and Thursday nights I’d wait tables at the diner across the street from my apartment. And weekends I’d spend about six hours a day up in this crazy tower at the oil refinery “looking for fires.” I swear that’s all I did there was look for fires and if I ever saw one, which I never did, I’d call whoever was in the security booth on my little radio and they’d send somebody over to spray it with some kind of weird gas that sucks all of the oxygen out of the air. I practically prayed for there to be a fire just so I could see them use that shit.
The funny thing is that I got my degree in physics but I work at a commodities broker. What the hell does particle physics have to do with buying and selling pork bellies? Not a goddam thing, that’s what. What gets me is that I would have been just as qualified for this job if all I had was my GED. I mean I can do basic math just as good now as I could in the twelfth grade and I’ve yet to use anything I learned in college at my current job. Some poor bastard with an associate’s in management probably got snubbed for a job because I went to a prestigious sounding school and can hold a conversation in Spanish better than your average White person, big deal. If only I knew how to play golf, those jerks would probably promote me to CFO. I wish I would’ve just stuck with physics and got my PhD. My dream is to run CERN tests at the Hadron Collider. I’d still have to deal with a bunch of assholes probably, but at least I’d get to show some subatomic particles who’s boss. I’m Tony Danza to these bitchmade hadrons. Ha-ha, lame eighties sitcom joke. I got a million of them.
So we get to the park and of course Jonah’s still mad as hell because I didn’t buy him his Dippin’ Dots. He didn’t say a word when we got there. I took the little backpack out of the trunk, the one that’s got all of his kid stuff in it; band-aids, little apple-juice packets and about a dozen or so plastic bags full of Cheerios. I get Jonah out of the car but he refuses to hold my hand as we walk. And to make matters worse, an ice cream truck of all things pulls up into the goddam parking lot. It’s playing that crazy music and about a hundred or so little kids run up there all happy and shit. Jonah looks at the truck and back at me and his face just contorts into this “God, I’m so fucking pissed off right now,” look and he marches alongside me toward the entrance to the playground. He acts way too grown up sometimes, I swear he does.
His shoe was untied so we stopped and I knelt down in front of him to tie it for him. I finish tying those crazy Spiderman sneakers of his and I go, “There ya go, kiddo,” and I look into his face and now he’s got this look on him, not his usual pissed off look, but it’s more like he’s saying, “You should just give up.” The way he looks at me all cold and unemotional, it’s like looking into my Dad’s eyes again and it makes me feel dead inside.
So I gave up on trying to coax a response out of him and we started walking again. Jonah picks up the pace the closer we get to the big wooden archway that forms the playground entrance until he’s practically sprinting to get inside there. Leaving me alone to walk over to the little built-in wooden bleachers on the south side of the playground where all of the other poor bastards are watching their kids run around on the equipment. They’re all playing the same game I am, bringing their kids to the park so they’ll wear themselves out and be easier to manage when they get home. It’s not a bad tactic, hell maybe I can even get Jonah to sleep in his own room and Alicia and I can have the bed to ourselves tonight, not that we’d get to mess around or anything. The doctor says it’s safe for Alicia and me to have sex, but she’s been getting her “morning” sickness at nighttime for some odd reason. If there really is a god, he hates me, I swear he does. No we probably won’t get to mess around; but for once it’d be nice to wake up in the morning without Jonah’s foot in my face.
So I’m sitting there, all depressed and shit, until I decide that now’s as good a time as any to go over those boring ass reports Mr. Gein sent me. Mr. Gein’s my boss in case you were wondering, well one of my bosses. He’s a real jerk too just like the rest of them. I mean, okay he’s a nice enough guy and all. He’s always inviting me and Alicia to these parties and complementing me on my pictures of Jonah and all, but something about him just rubs me the wrong way. I don’t know, maybe I’m being paranoid but he just strikes me as the kind of guy that likes to kidnap people and lock them in his basement. I wouldn’t leave him alone with my kids, is all I’m saying.
But anyway I pull out my little netbook thing to check my emails. I hate those netbooks, they’re pretty much useless when you already got a laptop and a smart-phone, and I feel like such a bitch typing on those tiny ass keyboards. But I use it anyway because Alicia bought it for our anniversary and I’d be the worst husband in the world if I didn’t use my wife’s crazy gifts. She’s a doll though, she really is. So I’m checking my emails, scrolling through all of those boring claims reports and whatnot, until I see that my little bro sent me an email titled, “Advertising Win”. So I open it up and it’s this picture of one of those goddam “pro-life” billboards with a picture of this baby all smiling and happy on the front of it. Right above the baby’s head it said, “Embryos are Babies!” But right underneath was another billboard, this one was an ad for McDonald’s and it had a picture of an egg with a comic-book thought-bubble coming out of it, inside the bubble was a picture of an Egg McMuffin, and right underneath it said, “Every egg’s dream.” It kills me. That’s typical of the stuff my little brother sends me, the clever bastard. You’d never guess it if you met him, with how positive and upbeat he is all the time, but my little bro’s got a real dark sense of humor, not unlike myself to be honest.
So anyway, I’m trying not to laugh my ass off at that crazy email Josh sent me, when I see Jonah in the corner of my eye, climbing up the ladder of this little six foot tall tower. His hand must’ve slipped or something because he fell off the ladder, and I guess he must’ve scraped his knee on the way down because next thing I know he’s sitting in the wood shavings staring at his knee with his eyes all tearing up.
As I’m sitting there watching my son preparing to burst into tears I find myself thinking about how fragile he is, throwing tantrums and ready to break down and cry at a moment’s notice. I find myself wondering if I was ever that weak and vulnerable. There was this short gray haired lady sitting next to me, watching my son about to explode in an all out bawling session. She looked at Jonah then at me with this crazy look and then back at Jonah. She never said anything but I imagined her slapping me in the face and going, “The hell’s the matter with you?! Your son’s hurt and you’re sitting here judging him? Get off yer sorry ass and help him!”
I subconsciously mumbled, “Alright, keep yer shirt on ya crazy bitch,” as I closed up my netbook and set it down on the bleachers. I pick up the backpack and carry it over to the scene of the disaster. I’ve gotta give Jonah some credit because he wasn’t crying just yet when I got there. He just had this really sad teary-eyed look on his face. I knelt down in the dirty wood shavings next to him to get a look at his knee, to hell with the fact that those khakis were brand new. He had a little cut on his knee but it wasn’t too bad, we wouldn’t have to amputate it or anything. I made that lame amputation joke with Jonah this one time at the supermarket after he bumped his arm on the cart; it didn’t go over so well.
So I say to the kid, “Hey kid, guess you had a bit of a tumble.”
He nods his head, all slow and sad like. It kills me, it really does.
I go, “Aw, it’s not that bad. We’ll fix it up better than it was before.”
I reach into my little backpack and pull out the pack of sanitary wipes and clean up the little bit of blood that’s on there. All the while I’m thinking, “He doesn’t want a damn thing to do with me, unless I’m fixing his wounds or buying him his ice cream.” And then I dig around for that Neosporin stuff and I put a dab of that on there. Then I grab the box of Band-Aids, the one’s with those Spongebob characters on them, and I peel one of those off and stick it on there. Patrick and Sandy were both laughing at me from those bandages, I swear they were. By then I was starting to wonder if I ever really cared about this kid at all, if I wasn’t just pretending because I wanna prove that I’m a better father than my own old man.
After I put the bandage on, I say to Jonah, “All better?”
Jonah doesn’t say anything, but he holds up his right elbow at me and he’s still got that sad look on his face. He wants me to kiss his elbow; it’s this silly thing that all Moms make up at some point, a placebo kiss that magically heals all wounds. It’s pretty much the same as coddling your kids, but what the hell, I’m already dirtying up my good pants and typing on a little bitchmade netbook thing. Might as well top it off with a fake ass kiss.
So I kiss his scrawny elbow, all the while thinking that I should at least pretend I love him. I owe him that much at least. If nothing else, so he won’t grow up to be a basket case like me. Then he does something I never would’ve expected. He hugs me, and not just your run of the mill, “have a nice day at daycare, I’ll pick you up at three,” kinda hug either. No, you could tell the kid really meant it, the way he hugged me. I almost got choked up because he’s never done anything like that before, especially not after I refused to buy him his goddam dippin’ dots. He’s got his little arms around my neck and his head’s on my shoulder and I can feel his tears soaking through my dry-clean-only dress shirt, but I don’t give a damn. I liked it, I really did.
I hugged him back, patting him on the shoulder as I said, “It’s alright, kid. Everything’s gonna be alright.”
Then out of nowhere Jonah goes, “I love you, Daddy,” sounding all sad and apologetic when he says it.
Now that one really caught me off guard, because when he said it I pictured my Dad the way he was before my Mom died. I pictured my pops picking me up and giving me a hug and going, “I love you, Son,” and everything was all smiles and sunshine and what have you.
So I said to Jonah, “I love you too, kid,” and we just sat there like that for a minute.
Then I guess we both figured it was kinda weird, the two of us just sitting there hugging each other in the middle of the playground with everybody watching, all emotional and shit. So I let him go and next thing I know he’s off climbing up that crazy ladder like nothing had happened.
I’m walking back to the bleachers when I hear Jonah going, “Daddy! Daddy! Look at me!” so I turn around and I see him up there on this little wooden bridge. He’s too short to see over the guardrail so he has to keep jumping up and down for me to see him, those crazy dreadlocks of his bouncing all over the place like an 80s rock star or something. I wave at him to let him know I see him and he smiles and runs off. So I make my way back to my spot on the wooden bleachers but when I look around I get so mad I’m about ready to go Waco on all those assholes sitting there. That short gray haired lady was gone and so was my goddam netbook.
This was really good. At first I thought this would be some sort of science fiction thing but after reading a bit more I found out, wow this is really great! I think grammar needs a bit help but that just might be his accent and the way your MC talks. I guessing this is the entire story so haha I wonder how Alicia's gonna take it when he tells her the Netbook is gone 
Some of your paragraphs are a little bit long. They are intimidating. Let's shorten 'em up a bit, or break 'em up.