Doing Crimes w my dad
a throwback for dad day (originally published in May 2023)
Doing crimes w my dad
Last month I flew to Rhode Island with Lauren and baby Wilder for for lil dude’s first visit to stay with my parents / his grandparents. As we eat my mom’s world famous omelet (top secret recipe: eggs + water + bragg’s liquid aminos), my dad asks if I can help him get rid of an an old TV.
He’s got a bad back and can’t lift the TV himself, making this a rare opportunity for the adult father and adult son bonding that's becoming more elusive as the years, in predictable fashion, keep on keepin’ on.
“Move it where?” I ask.
“To a dumpster nearby. Two minutes away,” he says in English with a Russian accent because Lauren is around.
“Okay cool, let’s go now?” I respond, in English with no accent because we moved here when I was seven and my vocal cords hadn’t yet hardened.
"Ehhhh...let's wait. For night time." he says back, in Russian, quietly.
Aha. So it’s a crime.
We’re doing a crime. Got it.
One Last Job
For dinner, my mom serves baked cod with sweet potatoes and buckwheat. The buckwheat comes special from a Russian store in Boston which, my mom reminds me, isn't easy to come by right now given everything going on with the war.
I explain that I can’t eat buckwheat because it makes me fart but everyone says that makes no sense so I eat the buckwheat anyways.
As the sun sets, we head down the stairs to the basement aka my parent's Costco Away From Costco. There, among the olive oil, toilet paper, and canned garbanzo beans, is the TV.
Its old, probably from the mid 2000s? And not huge either, but THICK. Like 30 inches diagonally but also 30 inches deep. A hoss. Since they did not have the ability to take photographs back then, here’s an artist’s rendition of said TV:
I lift the TV - it’s heavy but doable. My dad tries to help but I say I got it and we argue about whose gonna carry it. After much hemming and believe it or not even some hawing, he lets me carry it on my own.
In hindsight I should have probably just carried it with him, but some part of me - the 12yr old boy halfway through puberty, wisps of mustache hair that will ONLY grow on the sides of the upper lip and under NO CIRCUMSTANCE on top of the lip - still needs to prove to my dad that I could do it by myself. That I was a man.
nightfall
I say goodbye to Lauren and Wilder knowing I may never see them again. I grab Wilder’s face close and say “If I don’t come back, tell your mother I love her,” which of course his mother hears because she’s holding him. No one laughs even though this is a funny joke.
Cruising at 5mph in my dad’s Prius Prime, silent as the buckwheat farts I’ve been producing for the last couple hours, I scan the sidewalks. Empty. Phew.
Not even a full two minutes later and we arrive, pulling up slow toward the dumpsters. We move in stealth like the k in knife, a word my dad loves to cite as one of the many things wrong with the English language.
I grab the TV and my dad says "Let me help you" in Russian because its just us and I say "no I got it!" in English. This is how we talk when there are no Americans around - him and my mom in Russian, me in English, a cold war of words, thankfully with no end in sight.
I put the TV it down next to the dumpster as directed by my dad. "Place it upright," my dad says, "maybe someone will want it."
I look back at him. Yes, maybe someone will walk by it and say "hey, that 2004 TV reminds me of the salad days when I watched Jerry Springer and Judge Judy at the same time with picture-in-picture technology - I was happy!"
We drive home in silence like the k in knife and walk back through the door, much to my mom and Lauren's elation. We are safe. We are sound. There will be no more crime. We all drink vodka until the morning.
Actually, we scroll through photos of Wilder for like ten minutes until we all get too tired and agree its time for bed.
Cozy under the covers, Lauren and I fantasize about all the things we can do now that I'm done doing all that crime. Let's travel, let's fix up an old farmhouse, let's start a podcast. By which I mean we scroll through photos of Wilder for 10 minutes when I hear a mechanical vrrrr coming from downstairs. Is that?
It is. The garage.
"Is he going back for the TV?" I ask Lauren. And she says no, probably not, why would he do that?
"Why else would he open the garage" I ask.
I pop out of bed and call him.
"Hi" he says, all casual and shit.
"Are you going back for the TV?" I ask.
"Yea" he says.
"Ok well wait, I'm coming with you.”
"Okay".
We Have To Go Back
"I Googled it," my dad says in Russian as I get into the car, "and if we leave the TV, there could be some 'nepriatnasti'" which roughly translates to "issues" or "some feathers could be ruffled.”
I agree, I guess, though I think he's being paranoid, a trait I have zero experience in myself. We pull back into the scene of the crime - I see the dumpsters in the distance and, yep, the TV is still there. “No one took it,” he says, joking.
I laugh. "What if a bunch of SWAT team guys pop out from the bushes right now and scream 'we've got your surrounded.’" I say.
And he laughs. Like really laughs. In a way I haven't heard him do on this trip, and maybe for a whole lot longer. It's music, that laughter. The best kind too, the kind I grew up on, his laughter and my mom's too, a song beyond and before language that says sure, we left everything we knew moving here and yes, we have no idea what we’re doing but, hey — that shit is funny.
"We're going to get arrested now for taking the TV too," my dad says.
I laugh again because its funny, and all of a sudden, there in the Prius Prime we are riffing like two best friends turning the stupid into the profound, the bit into bond.
"It was a crime to illegally dump the TV, yes," I say, pretending to be the apartment management.
"-but once you did dump it,” my dad says, completing my thought in Russian, “it became our property. And now you are stealing our property."
"That's two crimes, so double the trouble," I finish.
I laugh and he laughs some more, like two leafblowers that keep pulling each other’s jump cords or whatever those things are called you get what I’m saying we’re revving each other up!
My dad says this whole thing feels like a Seinfeld episode.
"Wasn't there an episode with a TV?," I ask.
"Yea the parking garage one, Kramer has the TV," he responds.
That's when it clicks - my dad always laughs this much when he watches Seinfeld. And Office Space. And his favorite movie of all time: My Cousin Vinny.
We take turns pretending to be apartment complex management.
"Yes it WAS your TV. But once you left it on our property it became our TV, which you stole."
"You shouldn't have put it there but once you did, you definitely shouldn't have taken it."
"Someone could have used that TV. Someone who deserves it, not you two schmuks."
We used to do stuff like this, my dad and I. Not the crimes so much but the goofing. When I was 12 and we were driving to Costco, I would be a greeting card salesman and he'd play an old lady who didn't want to buy any cards. Or maybe it was the other way around. Either way, A+ for specificity in what was most definitely the first improv scene of my life.
But now, twenty years later, in this low emissions vehicle full of enough buckwheat fart to wreck the planet twice over — we sit. Just two adult men, one TV, and silence, so all one can hear is the laughter.
We bring the TV back and I prop it up on a box of 1 gallon Poland Spring jugs in the garage (my parents have Poland spring accessible at various points throughout the house, just in case). I take a photo of the TV cuz at this point I know I’m gonna write about this:
Walking up those few steps back into the house, I’m overwhelmed with the love I feel for my dad. I want to hug him and tell him how much I love him, how glad I am to be having this moment. But I don’t. He pats my back a few times, an 1/8th of a hug each, and I imagine myself thirty years from now, recalling this memory, one of my favorites of the two of us together.
Back in bed I feel giddy, the bit the joke the moment from ten minutes ago lingering, still swirling around in my mind. So I do what I always do when I want to keep the bit alive: I send him a text. "I can see the headline now Two Unarmed Ukrainian Men Dump And Then Steal 20 Year Old TV on Private Property."
He responds right away "Search warrant is being issued by subdivision board of trusties”
And I respond "hahaha".
Afterward:
A couple months later, back in in the LA, my dad texts me this image with the caption “the drum bit of illegal dumping is getting louder.”
There are enough signs and hidden meanings in that text message to solve cancer.
First - instead of beat, he wrote bit. BIT! But even more important: where the TV was there is now a drum.
This is no coincidence — the drum is not a random object. Drumming is my dad’s thing. Growing up he wanted to be a drummer. And here was a drum. I don’t believe in God, but this? This is divine magic. I call him and ask if he took the drum home. He and my mom - both there on speakerphone, they always both talk to me on speakerphone, respond at the same time:
“I’m not allowed to,” he says.
“It’s dirty” my mom says.
We laugh. The bit continues, and once more all I hear is the drumbeat of their laughter, both his and hers, a duet that, on its best days, sounds a whole lot like family.
C’mon, let’s Comment
Have you done crimes? With or without your parents?
Do you and your family have really stupid but hilarious running jokes?
What’s your fav heist movie?
Who do you think you’d be on the heist team - what would your special skill be.
Have you been seeing how I leave a couple of numbers blank as a really funny and advanced bit?
Perhaps my favorite BAT essay ever???
I think it’s awesome that you have that kind of relationship with your father🙌🎉