Free Someone Could Get Hurt: A Memoir of Twenty-First-Century Parenthood by Drew Magary Page A

civilized lady.
    “That was excellent,” I told her. “I’ve never had so much fun, and thank you for taking your bath without a fuss.”
    “Do one more!” she said.
    So I found one more thing to stick up your butt and she slipped into her jammies without a fight.
    “Let’s go tell Mom!”
    “No, no, no,” I said. “She wouldn’t get any of these jokes. Far too sophisticated for her. Let’s just keep this between us for now. No butt talk outside the tub, all right?”
    “All right.”
    And for the next six weeks, bathtime was the greatest time ever. I had found the key to bonding with my child in the tub, and all it required was me reciting a laundry list of terrifying rectal fillings: ham sandwiches, rice pudding, an eyeball coated in diarrhea, rabbit feet soaked in pee-pee, and such and such. Oh, we had a ball. I felt like I was holding court at the Comedy Cellar every night, bringing the house down with every set. It was magic.
    Until . . .
    “I overheard you in the bath,” my wife said. “Why are you guys talking about putting stuff up butts?”
    “It’s just our special time.”
    “Drew.”
    “I didn’t teach her any swearwords. Except for ‘butt,’ I guess. Does that count?”
    “‘Put some barf salad up your butt’?”
    “It’s completely innocent.”
    “No more.”
    “I’ll never have an audience like this again! Free speech, woman!”
    “No more.”
    I relented. I knew I’d get caught eventually and I knew it was a cheap way of gaining my daughter’s affections. I began to wonder how much damage all those butt jokes had done to her psyche. Now she was gonna head off to school and tell her teacher to stick a doodie fish pie up her butt and it would be all my fault. There was no going back now. The floodgates had been opened.
    I brought her upstairs the next night and she jumped in the tub excitedly.
    “Put some snowmen up your butt!”
    “Right. About that . . . ,” I began. “Listen, we can’t make poopy jokes anymore.”
    “Why not?”
    “Because it’s just not right. I can’t have you talking poopy talk once you get to school and all that. I’m sorry, girl. We can still tell jokes, but they gotta be clean.”
    “Hairy eyeballs?”
    “I think that’s allowable.”
    “Hairy cow eyeballs.”
    “Fish gut sandwich.”
    “Bucket filled with cow poop!”
    “Let’s make it cow tongues,” I said. “No poop. We need to expand the repertoire.”
    “Oh, okay.”
    “Can I wash your hair?”
    “Sure, Daddy.”
    “Thank you.”
    “And thank
you
, dead monkey ice cream sundae with monkey eyeballs on top.”

FLATHEAD
    D r. Ferris was unavailable for my son’s six month appointment, which was too bad because Dr. Ferris was a master of his craft. He would walk into the office and it was like being greeted by a rock star.
He’s here! At long last! Those two nurses who opened for him were okay, but now we’ve got the headliner!
The boy would stop crying and Dr. Ferris would grab his feet and play with him and call him all kinds of crazy nicknames and, in three seconds, develop a bond with him far stronger than the bond I had with the child. If I grabbed the boy’s feet, he’d try to kick me in the nose. But when Dr. Ferris did it? MAGIC. Then he’d grab the shiny light thing doctors use and flash it in my son’s ear and ask, “Is there a little birdie in this ear? I think there is! Chirp chirp!” and the boy would whoop and wail and the scene in the room would look like the cover of an AstraZeneca quarterly prospectus. Secretly, I was kind of jealous of Dr. Ferris. I didn’t think I’d ever learn to be that good with children, not even my own. He also had fabulous hair. Dr. Ferris was good. Too good.
    He was so good that his practice grew by the month, and getting appointments with him instead of one of his perfectly capable subordinates became more difficult. No one wants the B-lister at the doctor’s office. They want the star attraction. They want to be