THE DADS AND wives bought houses. The wives taught grade school and brought home children's drawings that they pinned to their fridges with magnetic fruit. The wives looked at the drawings and said, "Aw," in a pointed way. The dads were stuck in middle management; they built workshops in their garages. "That's my workshop in there," they told the wives. "That's my space." We went out into the garages and panned over the workshops, over the workbenches in the workshops, and the tools that would rarely get used. "This is golden stuff," we said to one another. We were making a film about dads.
THERE WERE MOMENTS we didn't get. The dads told us about nights of laughter with their wives; they told us about moments of tenderness, shared joy, or sorrow, a walk in the park and ducks. But the cinematographers' union allowed us a cameraman only for a certain number of hours. We would show up in the morning and the dads would say, "You should have seen us last night," but we could only shrug and say, "Sorry."
THEN THE WIVES got pregnant. The dads inseminated the wives with their sperm, which shot out of a dad's penis and into the corresponding wife's vagina, etc., and nine months later a baby plopped out like a prize. We had to find some stock footage for the delivery, because the doctors wouldn't let the crew into the delivery room. The result was a beautiful montage with flowers blooming and shots of the universe and the emergence into the world of living things, hippos and such, all set to a specially commissioned soundtrack of synthesized brass and drum machine. At the hospital, the dads stood in the hallway with unlit cigars wagging from their mouths, talking to anyone who would listen. "My wife is having a baby!" they hollered, thrusting a cigar in whoever's direction. The person, usually no one the dads knew, would decline the cigar and back away nervously, as if from a bear.
WHEN THE DADS saw the babies, shrivelled and purple in their wives' arms, they declared, "That's the most beautiful thing I've ever seen in my life," and then cupped the babies' skulls in their hands as though they were testing fruit. The babies cooed and gurgled and so did the dads; it was unclear who was imitating whom.
TWO YEARS LATER there was a plan for another baby, and the process repeated itself: the sperm, the vagina, the cigars, the unintelligible exchange of sounds. We used different stock footage this time, crosscut with scenes of the first child, confused and alone in a field of lavender (this we staged using a blue screen).
NOW, WITH Two kids, the dads were really cooking. Along with the children, they had gas barbecues, station wagons, digital cable. They were no longer stuck in middle management; they were somewhere better. The kids got older, and the dads coached their soccer teams. The dads drank beer on Sunday afternoons and watched football. But the dads might add something incongruous. "I also have season's tickets to the opera," they might say. Or: "It's fine if one of the kids turns out gay." These things, we decided, would best be snipped right out of the film.
WHEN IT WAS time for the children to move away from home, the dads were strong. The wives wept in the driveways as the children pulled away in cars with couches strapped to the roofs, and the dads held the wives and stroked their hair. It would later be easy for us to erase the tears that ran down the dads' faces. We have computer programs for that sort of business.
THEN THE DADS became granddads. Their sons were now dads. In minivans the sons brought grandchildren, and the dads crouched in front of the babies among them and produced noises as they had at babies they themselves had once sired. For older grandchildren small change was produced from unlikely places, behind the grandchildren's ears or the couch, and then displayed magically. "Grandpa!" the grandchildren said. When it was time to go, the dads hugged their sons and their grandchildren and marvelled in the driveway that the boys among them, although they had their shoes on the wrong feet, would one day also, somehow, be dads.
AFTER SOME TIME, it became difficult for the dads to sit down, nearly impossible to urinate. The dads' pee came in a dribble. There was some putting off and some more putting off, but at the wives' insistence a medical examination confirmed it: the dads had very advanced-stage cancer of the prostate. There was no hope, the cancer was everywhere, they would be dead in six months, said the doctors, with their hands on the dads' shoulders and a look of caring in their eyes. We scored this segment of the film with a single cello sawing away, sad and lonely. Back at home, we took long, long takes of the dads standing at the window, watching cars pass by on the street. The wives hovered nearby and drank sherry.
WHEN THE DADS DIED, no one knew quite what to say. At the funerals, former co-workers made speeches about dedication that left everyone feeling empty. This we recognized would be impossible to convey in our film, unless we resorted to voiceover. But we shot what we could: the mourners and flowers and the open coffins with the dads lying inside, silent and still. People walked by, peering in, some of them sniffling back tears. "It was time," declared the wives, sensibly. They left and went back home to stand in the parlours of their houses, where they nibbled triangular sandwiches and accepted the condolences of family and strangers with polite nods, whispering, "Thank you, thank you. Thank you, everyone."
WHEN IT WAS ALL over, when the wives were left alone in their houses, when even their children had driven away in minivans, we rushed back to the studio to put together a rough cut of our film about dads. We had spent years making a film about dads, and now the dads were gone, and our financial backers had expectations. Our crew had been there for all the critical moments: we had captured everything in the dads' lives, from the formative years to the golden, deformative years. Now it was time to make some art. And there were reels and reels of film piled around us in the studio, but we just sat there, looking around — at the computers, at the rushes, at one another — not quite knowing where to begin.
PUSHING OCEANS IN AND PULLING OCEANS OUT
IT'S APRIL AND the world is opening up like a hand with something secret in it. The world is all, Hey I've got something to show you, so you lean in and go, What? You go, Show me! And you look and the fingers peel back and then whammo there it is, green and muddy and fresh and dripping wet with rain.
The world is melting but it's almost all water anyway. The world is like 75 percent water. It's a ball made of water and some mountains and other stuff, some trees and hills and deserts. Buildings and roads. People walk around on it and we're like 75 percent water too. My dad Greg is 236 pounds, which makes him 177 pounds of water, like a hundred thousand glasses of water, maybe more. He's a bathtub full of water — bigger than a bathtub, a kiddie pool. Anyway, my dad Greg is a whole lot of water. And Mom is the moon.
You learn all this water stuff in grade five science. The units are called The Earth and The Human Body. And in The Human Body we learned about vaginas and wangs. Big whoop though, right? Vaginas and wangs, big whoop.
It's springtime and you've got to make sure that Brian wears his rubber boots because of all the mud. Like Granny says, Brian's slow and only seven, and my dad Greg'11 forget if I don't do it. But my dad Greg calls me Big Gal or BG for short because I'm responsible and mature for my age (nine).
Brian crapped his pants four times in class already this year so one of his teachers called home to see if maybe he needs diapers and my dad Greg said no so they said well okay make sure he wears pants with elastics around the ankles. Get it?
But one time he came home with a diaper on anyway and my dad lost it. He called them up at Brian's school and said fuck and everything, I heard him. He said, Are you telling me how to raise my fucking kid? And then after, he went and sat on his bike in the garage for like thirty hours or something.