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A Father's Duty
by
David A. Gillaspie
The parent still holds primary responsible for socializing their offspring; of
fitting them into a cultural framework. In the end, if they stay out of jail,
the whole village celebrates their success. But, if they crack the top ten call
list with the local police, there’s only one person to blame, to shun: The
father. Everytime. But it’s even worse for the father of a son in trouble. He
alone is the most liable of all parents.
It’s the father who equips his children with every survival skill needed for
success in life, even if he has none himself. The father who pushes the extra
mile. Why? If his kids fail, he is the reason. If his sons fail, he is faulty.
If they succeed, he is the main hindrance.
This is the man who introduces the process of boyhood to manhood. This is about
gender focus, boy to man, a complex series of experiments taken one unscientific
step at a time. These are events, when occuring at the right time, that shape a
man’s life.
The strains of manliness comes in many varieties, but a clean strain needs the
right test tube to incubate. That’s what football is all about. After you go
through a few years of that you learn how to get along with people.
Once you figure out what to do on a football field, you have to figure out when
to do it and when not to do it. It’s a pretty limited set of skills that can get
you in trouble if you use them in the wrong place.
The fathering guide steps in for the job of showing the right place and the
right time for football. The father instructs his sons that football behavior is
reserved for playing football games.
For added contrast in wrong place, wrong time, the considerate father chooses a
set of Industrial Metal concerts as observation laboratories for social
research.
The first experiment, an arena show in full scream, was Korn in their thin days.
Disturbed opened. Between acts a man below us, a tanned longhair in a beater,
fell into a frenzy. His date, or his sister, rubbed his shoulder to calm him
down, but he roared like Raider fan on a goal line stand. Security stepped in
and removed him.
The lesson? Behave yourself long enough to see the headliner; that’s what you
paid for.
Two women in seats beside the stage bared their breasts, caught a spotlight, got
invited up on stage. They stayed there all night and left with the band. There’s
a lesson with the girls, but once the spotlight hit them it all blurred into
rock mythology.
The next targeted experiment was an all age concert in a smaller setting. It had
a tight stage, a small dance floor, and a second floor balcony with a bar. More
controlled. Shorter sight lines.
I took four mid-teen boys to the infamous club, telling them ahead of time about
the blues murder in the basement. Nothing sets the table for the night like a
Rock Club murder. None of the boys said, “Cool.” We agreed that murder is a
wrong thing to be a part of, let alone commit, even a blues murder over a John
Lee Hooker show.
During the first of four acts I told the boys to find a Rock Queen, the one girl
in the place with Rock and Roll in her soul, who makes you feel it. There’s
always at least one. Turned out to be quite a few after a closer inspection.
I spotted the first queen in the balcony, looking like a second grade teacher,
but shaking the horns with both hands. Responsible and wild. She leads the
normal life, but she gets the boogie-woogie flu. No pill gonna cure her ill.
From the back of the room you could see where tattooed men with shaved heads and
no shirts slammed into each other below the stage. The pecking order was
established when one after another they skulked into the crowd, leaving one man
standing his ground, dancing his dance.
The lesson: Learn to express your aggression in a positive manner when you get
out of prison. Main lesson? Behave well enough to stay out of prison.
We were all there for the same reason: The legendary guitar player. No one goes
to a stinking din with unshowered people lathered up in a mosh pit for anything
else.
You’re not there for the lyrics. You have to read them ahead of time to
understand the words because the painful vocal style of the genre is a guttural
growl like someone vomiting. Is there a better way to say ‘I love you'.
The boys made it clear from the start that I stay at least fifteen feet away at
all times. I respected their request. Either they were frightened of the
survival mode of the mosh pit and wanted me near, or they were cruising for Rock
chicks and wanted me out of sight.
The best place to keep an eye on them was the crows nest view from the balcony.
I made it past the bar and found a place on the wall to lean back.
The story I had planned on telling the kid’s parents, and my wife, had me as the
responsible chaperone for coming of age boys.
The story gets a little confusing when the Rock Queen schoolteacher starts
squeezing past me face to face in an uncrowded catwalk every five minutes. Back
and forth, rubbing tighter each time. I kept my eye on the boys down on the
floor. They were watching me. I could have moved, but I wasn’t in the way of
anyone else. Rock Queen couldn’t keep from pressing closer and closer. What was
I supposed to do? I was the same place, I had an estab! lished position, not one
flinch. She was the encroacher. My take was from the NBA, no blood, no foul.
The moment the headliner took the stage, the guys in the mosh pit forgot the
asskicking they received earlier and started jamming on each other again. The
principal dancer renewed his effort to smash them off the floor.
The lead singer in the band, looking like my version of a Turkish holyman with
his hair straight up and his beard straight down, jumped up on a platform and
began growling. I heard an echo behind me. Amazing acoustics, I thought.
Instead, I turned around and found a guy singing the songs note for note, growl
for growl. He knew the words. I was amazed. It was a first. I praised his
singing. He introduced me to his big blonde girlfriend. Fair exchange.
We watched the crowd surfing below. A pretty woman in a tube top cruised hand to
hand and got down in front wearing her tube like a belt. The topless woman
wasn’t happy, you could see that, but she didn’t do anything except pull up her
top and move to the back where she had been.
This is where the life lessons shifted from the teenagers. My singing friend’s
girl said she’d surf the crowd, too. She had on a tube top, too. She kept her
clothes on but came back with the first tube top girl. Before long I was in a
crowd of young women in tube tops or less.
The singer in the balcony was a minor rock star in the area and all the girls
knew him. Groupies? No, just friends from his girlfriend’s work. She was a
stripper.
The boys on the floor looked up at the cluster of women surrounding me. I looked
at the cluster of women surrounding me. I’d never been in such a cluster. They
were shoulder to shoulder.
Okay, they weren’t there just to surround me, but they surrounded me just the
same. I was in the vicinity. I was Hugh Hefner for a moment. Too short a moment,
but I got the idea of what it felt like. It felt nice. Not just sexy, hot, nice.
Just nice in a safe sort of way. Real nice.
I waved from the center of this gathering, bobbing my head and swaying like I
was grooving on the industrial metal music. The girls descended in pairs, surfed
the crowd, then returned.
My boys drifted closer and closer to the balcony, getting a better look at the
women gyrating around me. They watched them from the foot of the stairs to the
balcony; watched them come down; watched them surf the crowd; watched them come
back; watched them cruise by me with their faces turned up.
I danced. I smiled. It was great.
After the first encore, a few of the girls gave me business cards for a strip
bar, and invited me to come and see their work. I looked at them and saw their
pictures under the letters VIP. A VIP pass at a strip bar? What a great
souvenir?
The crushing industrial music finally stopped. I took the plugs out of my ears.
Very uncool to miss one note of music, so I took them out on the sneak. I went
downstairs and collected the boys.
We made a vow. They could ask questions, but I did not have to answer.
My kid asked first.
“What were you doing up there?”
“Listening to the music. What did it look like?”
My question would throw him off. It didn’t.
“You don’t even like the music. You didn’t even want to come.”
It was true.
“But I like it now. When’s the next show. I have some new friends.”
“What were those people doing?”
I handed them my new VIP cards.
The lesson? Sometimes the best lessons show up without any planning. Or inspite
of it.
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