The Suburban You Read online

  After this fun-filled activity, you lag behind with your coach friends and rank each of the kids and assemble your strategy for the draft. The other managers and coaches do the same.

  On Tuesday evening, you and the other ninety-six managers and coaches show up at a recreation-center meeting room to select your teams. This is the draft. You have your preranked list and so have they. The manager for each team then selects a number out of a hat, to determine their order in the draft.

  The draft commences and each team selects one player per turn, moving down their list of ranked players. The players are identified only by the numbers that were pinned to their backs during the “evaluation.” When a player is selected, you and all the other managers cross the player off your lists. Throughout this process, you are surprised by the consistency with which the players have been ranked by all the managers and coaches.

  This process is moving along with a high degree of predictability, with one exception. You notice your friend Stephen, a manager for a competing team, is making draft selections that are entirely inconsistent with the way in which you and every other manager and coach in the room has ranked the players. For instance, for his first pick he selects the player that you ranked number 94 on your list. His next selection was some kid who was number 114 on your list, and his third draft pick was number 67 on your list. Each and every one of his subsequent selections seems equally illogical. Each time Stephen makes a selection, the other managers and coaches in the room laugh. You do not, because you know three things about Stephen:

  1. He has older sons and has been through this before.

  2. He is funny.

  3. He is smart.

  The draft concludes and you have assembled a respectable team. You do not get a chance to talk with Stephen before he leaves to see what he was doing. However, you get a much better idea of Stephen's draft strategy when you arrive for your first game against his team. On his sidelines spectating the game are fourteen of the most attractive moms, excluding your kids' mom, who reside in your suburb. Many you have seen before with glowing hair at the black-light bowling alley. Stephen, having been a coach for one of his older sons a few years ago, knows that with three practices and two games a week the fans are an important part of assembling a team. You win the game 14–1. Stephen's team becomes each manager's and player's favorite opposing team.

  Listen to a Guy Tell You How Great His Kids Are

  You live in a suburb where all of the kids are active and involved in many activities from a very young age. They all play many sports, they all have academic interests, they all can navigate a computer more capably than most of the adults that live in your suburb, and they are all exposed to movies and a wide range of cultural events.

  Because of the broad exposure that all of these fortunate kids experience, parents have generally learned not to be obnoxious in talking with their friends about how wonderful their kids are or how many character-building activities their kids are involved in. They have learned this because they realize that everyone's kids are in overdrive with these activities and that almost nothing is unique and that people just don't want to hear about it.

  It is nine o'clock on a Saturday morning and you are at your daughter's preschool's open house. You enter the school and the first thing that you do is sit down at a preschool-size round table in a chair whose seat is as high as the midpoint between your ankle and your knee. You sit down there with your daughter at this small table in the hallway, outside of her classroom. You are eating this wonderful coffee cake that your daughter has been telling you that she and her classmates made yesterday; it is coffee cake without coffee, she has told you three times that morning, and you are raving about it to her. You tell her that it is the best coffee cake that you have ever eaten, and you are probably fairly accurate, because coffee cake has never been high on your list of favorite foods.

  You are enjoying your coffee cake with your daughter while seated in the world's smallest chair at the world's lowest table. In the middle of her wonderfully expressive coffee-cake story, another dad, whom you have never met, joins you with his daughter, a girl that your daughter does not know. As he sits down, and before he says hello to you or your daughter, he says, while interrupting your daughter's coffee-cake story, that, while it is only 9:15 A.M. on this Saturday, he has already been to a basketball game for one of his sons and a swim meet for his daughter. Here is your interpretation of what was really said and the conversation that his comment prompted.

  What he said: “I can't believe that it is 9:15 A.M. on Saturday and I have already been to my son's basketball game and my daughter's swim meet.”

  What you think he meant: I am Super Dad, probably better than you, waking up so early on a Saturday morning to see my kids play sports, and I am grooming my kids to be great athletes. I bet you did not take any of your kids to any sporting activities this morning, like I did. My kids are better than yours, they are more active than yours, and I am an amazing dad who has an amazing wife for scheduling my kids into such wholesome activities. In fact, I am probably a better athlete than you.

  What you think about what he said: You are an asshole. Didn't you read the memo, the one that says that you should not brag about your kids and never interrupt a kid when she is excitedly expressing a constructive thought?

  How you would respond if you were like him: So, big deal, I am not impressed. My daughter swims at 10 A.M., then goes to climbing class at 11. My son has a basketball game at 11, right after his swim lesson with Annika; a pinewood-derby race at 2 and tennis at 4 P.M. I coach my kid's football and baseball teams and am my son's Cub Scout den leader. I spend more time with my kids and do more stuff with them than you probably ever will. And, besides, I am in my athletic prime. You are nothing special. I just know better than to brag about all this, because every kid who lives in this suburb is involved in so many things that none of it is impressive to anyone. No one really cares.

  What you actually say in response: “Come on, honey, show me your classroom now. That was the best coffee cake I have ever had.”

  Total a Car

  A bigger shot than you moves from the city into a house around the corner. At least, you think that he is a bigger shot than you, because he has a bright-red Ferrari. You heard that this car costs $250,000. It could be that he is not such a big deal, because instead of investing in real estate with a dad whom he met on the sidelines of his kid's soccer game, who, like you, has a vowel on the end of his last name, he bought a bright-red, $250,000 Ferrari, which you guess has been fed nothing but premium gasoline. That is what you tell yourself, anyway.

  The curious thing is that the seven-figure house that this Italian sports-car aficionado has purchased has no garage. So the Ferrari gets parked on the street, which is irritating to some. It is an odd contrast to the brick street upon which it is parked and the old homes that look out over it. If it were parked on your street, your son would feel an immediate urge to play baseball with a brand-new hardball on the front lawn.

  Four years before Ferrari guy moved into your neighborhood, your village redid the entire sewer system to rectify a problem. The problem then was that when it rained hard the rainwater would quickly drain into the sewer pipes that ran underneath the nice brick streets. The sewer pipes would get overfilled and the rainwater that was in the sewer pipe, which would get mixed in with toilet water, had nowhere to go except to back up into the pipes that connected the homes in your suburb to the sewer system. The overflowing water would then end up in everyone's basement. Stinky and no fun at all.

  One year, the village decided to tap into some of its $60-million-a-year tax revenues and put restrictor valves on the sewer drains. Restrictor valves are like big funnels that regulate the rate at which rainwater flows into the sewer system, basically slowing it. As a result, the water no longer backs up into anyone's basement. However, the by-product of this sewer upgrade is that water stays in the streets longer. In fact, when it rains hard, as it does a few tim
es a year, water rises to one, two, or even three feet in the low spots along your suburban streets. It may take four or five hours for the water to drain through the restrictor valves and into the sewer system to a point where the streets are puddle-free.

  One evening, exactly four days after moving into his new overpriced home without a garage, your new neighbor, the trader, parked his low-slung, bright-red, $250,000, premium-gasoline-filled Ferrari in the lowest spot along the brick street in front of his charming old house. The spot that he chose is in a little valley with a slight rise in front of and to the rear of the Ferrari. To your new neighbor, it appears to be the perfect spot, as the driver's door of the car is directly adjacent to the walkway of his new home's front door. There is no better and more convenient place to park, or so he thought that evening.

  That night, it rains like a mother. You wake up the next morning and are out of your house at 4:45 A.M. to take a limo to pick up your friend-boss and then head to the airport. You put on a pair of boots and walk to the limo, which is parked in front of your house, which is sitting in a foot of water. You can see that the restrictor valves have done their job that night, just as they were designed to do. There is plenty of water in the street, and none in anyone's basements.

  You direct the limo driver to carefully stay on flat streets that will be less flooded than the streets with bumps. You avoid any streets where there are low spots. When making a left-hand turn onto Orchard Street, you pass by Ginkgo Street and notice the red roof of what looks like your new neighbor's red Ferrari. It is. You cannot see any other part of the car, because, except for about five inches of its roof, the entire car is underwater.

  That is the last time you ever see the red Ferrari. A month later, a black one shows up and it is parked on the rise in the street.

  Bring the Kids to the Auto-Recycling Facility

  with Their Friends

  You are at the school benefit for your daughter's preschool, which your wife has organized. You “win” a few things at this auction. You hear people use this term “win” at this auction, but what you are really winning is the right to pay more than anyone else would possibly think of paying for an item you do not need. You call that losing, not winning.

  One thing that you have “won” at this auction is a “tour of an auto-recycling facility” for five kids and their parents. You have won the right to pay $250 for this because absolutely nobody bid against you. You are drawn to this item because you imagine it to be a huge facility that melts down metal or whatever it is that is done to recycle autos. You have been on factory tours before; you have been to Ben & Jerry's to see how ice cream is made, to the Coors Brewery to see how beer is made, and to Ethan Allen, where you watched furniture makers turn canopy-bed posts. You expect the tour of the auto-recycling facility to be very similar to the other tours you have been on. They are well organized and professionally run, with fun take-homes for the kids when you leave. A lot of these tours are sanitized, insulating you from what really goes on, but despite that it should still be a fun outing.

  At this auction, like many of the neighborhood-oriented auctions you attend, you will experience, as you have come to expect, seeing some of your neighbors involved in brutal bidding wars. They will compete with one another to “win,” and when they “win” they will have won the right to pay $6,000 for their kid and three of her friends to have a sleepover at the school with her teacher. Some overachieving bidder will “win” the privilege of paying $7,500 to play a round of golf in North Carolina (transportation not included), and another neighbor will “win” the $10,000 guitar that Bruce Springsteen supposedly played once in New Jersey. The “winners” are competing with their kids' schoolmates' parents (their neighbors) to see who can wake up tomorrow morning and feel like the biggest loser.

  For the tour of the auto-recycling plant that you have “won,” you call up five of your kids' friends' parents and you get five easy yeses. Nobody asks for details, and that is a good thing, because the yeses may not have come so easily had your kids' five friends' parents asked a basic question, like where the facility was located.

  The Friday before the Saturday you scheduled the tour, you get the address, which is on Ninety-fifth Street in the city, a neighborhood with which most of your kids' friends' parents are unfamiliar, because it is on the deep South Side of Chicago. It is a neighborhood that many people in your suburb have paid handsomely to move as far away from as possible. You call your kids' friends' parents with the address, an address that everyone recognizes as being on the South Side, but where few of them have ever been. At this point, those five quick yeses are all wishing they hadn't said yes so quickly. It is too late to back out now. Most of what everyone has heard about the South Side has to do with gangs, housing projects, drive-by shootings, crime, and poverty. It would be awkward to back out now, because everyone has already said yes.

  You tell them that it is OK, it will be safe. “It is Ninety-fifth Street,” you say. “Ninety-fifth Street is busy and there is nothing to worry about.” Not that you know any of this, but you think that this “auto-recycling facility” will be a memorable experience that they would never have had otherwise, plus you want some company for you and your kid. “We will all be better off having seen this auto-recycling plant,” you say. “It will be a great experience for the kids.” You have just barely convinced your kids' friends' parents, who you can tell have all become suspicious of your parental judgment during these phone conversations. You get the impression that they would much rather be embracing diversity in your suburb, where there is none, than on the South Side of Chicago.

  That Saturday morning, you load your kid into the car and start heading south. This will be a great family outing, you think. You have always wondered how cars are recycled. You arrive at Ninety-fifth Street and it narrows into a small street. On this street in this neighborhood, unlike yours, you will politely pull over to the side of the street when an opposing car is coming your way. You do not want to give anyone in this neighborhood any reason to get angry with you. It is quiet and desolate. You are expecting a big building with smokestacks and a large asphalt parking lot with a designated visitors' section. You are expecting that there will be men in white jumpsuits manipulating car-recycling controls. You expect that you will be directed to a viewing area behind some heavy-duty glass listening to a recorded tour or be escorted by an attractive, professional tour guide, like the woman who gave you and your family a tour of Ben & Jerry's in Vermont.

  As you pull up to this address, you are puzzled, because there is none of this. There is a beaten-up trailer sitting on wheels that are fully deflated. The rusted and dented trailer looks like someone may be living in it. There is a weathered wooden fence, which in some sections is still standing. There is no parking lot. There is no specially marked “Visitors Park Here” section. You park on the street near the trailer. You are the first to arrive and you hope that your premium-gasoline-fueled German luxury vehicle will not go through some recycling of its own in the time that it takes you to tour this “facility.” You hesitantly approach the trailer and the door opens before you arrive. “Hi, I'm Tonya,” a friendly voice yells out. “Welcome to our auto-recycling facility.”

  You introduce yourself and your family and let Tonya know that you are the first to arrive. Over the next fifteen minutes, your kids' friends and families gather, each one as curious as you about what condition their European cars will be in when they return from this “facility” tour, for which you are responsible. They, like you, are probably wondering where the “facility” is, because the only thing that looks at all like a facility is the beat-up trailer that Tonya walked out of fifteen minutes ago. No one is smiling and no one has thanked you for inviting them.

  Tonya assembles the group and tells everyone to follow her into the recycling facility, which to you looks like something that you would call a junkyard. The “recycling facility” is a lot the size of half a football field. Covering the ground are metal scra
ps, glass shards, car parts, doors, engines, engine parts, transmissions, lots of oil and grease, and some stripped-out car shells that are strewn about but that appear to be ready to be “recycled.” Tonya explains to all of the kids how they get the cars, strip off all the parts that can be resold, then crush what is left of the cars, to be hauled away and melted. She asks who would like to crush a car and five hands instantly shoot up.

  On her walkie-talkie, she calls the forklift operator, Jim. The arrangement is this, Tonya explains. Each kid will drive with Jim in the forklift. With Jim, each kid will select a car that they want to bring over to the hydraulic press. With Jim, they will insert the car into the press, sandwich it between two massive slabs of steel, get out of the forklift truck, and press the two buttons on the hydraulic press, which sets the top slab into an unstoppable downward motion, crushing the car shell.

  “Who would like to go first?” Tonya asks. Five hands shoot up, more quickly than before. Jim pulls around in the forklift and takes the first kid. They do just as Tonya described. Over the next hour and a half, five kids have crushed five car shells as flat as a pancake.

  You leave wondering what your car is looking like and you are relieved to know that it is just as you left it, as are your friends' cars. Your friends thank you profusely for inviting them on this outing, a facility tour that they will never, ever forget.

  You leave Tonya knowing that you will never “win” anything cooler at any school benefit in your life.

  Teach Your Son About Sex

  Your son is in second grade and you are in New York City on a business trip with your friend-boss and two other colleagues. You have left for New York on a Monday and are planning to return Tuesday evening.