Internet morons to the rescue!

Like everyone who’s not a complete sociopath (you know who you are) I sometimes get down on myself over past mistakes. I’ve made my share of them, that’s for sure.

The first I can remember was the time I left my chocolate-filled Easter basket on the dash of my folks’ shiny new ’60 Chevy while we attended mass. A hot, sunny day. By the time the priest finally meandered around to my favorite part of the service (dismissal), my chocolate delicacies had melted into an unremarkable brown puddle, most of which had soaked through the basket and into the radio speaker.

I was unhappy. My old man even more so. The radio never sounded the same. On the bright side, the car smelled delicious for months.

That was a relatively minor mistake, though, notable only because it was my first. Since then, my mistakes have grown in both size and significance.

You’d think my most memorable errors would involve ex-wives, of which I have several. But I don’t consider any of them mistakes, per se. They were all nice women, really. I wouldn’t have married them otherwise. Things just didn’t work out. Sometimes due to my mistakes, sometimes theirs. More often, both.

But the marriages themselves were not mistakes. Or so I believe. Some of my exes might say otherwise.

Then there were the kids. I was more or less a single parent during most of their upbringing, at least with the first two. Anyone who’s ever been a parent knows the odds of screwing up parenthood are about one in one.

It will happen. It did. My kids, long since grown, say I was a good parent, but Lord knows I could have been better. Were I younger, I might give it another go just to prove it.

Despite my laissez-faire parenting style, my kids turned out great for the most part. Not a serial killer among them. Now they’re adults and making their own mistakes, mistakes they will one day regret and thus the cycle continues.

When I’m getting especially down on myself, I sometimes resort to the “misery loves company” treatment; for that, the internet provides ample fodder.

I’m thinking now of the guys from Arkansas who were recently charged with aggravated assault after cops caught them taking turns shooting each other. They were testing out a bulletproof vest.

Why? Well, drinking was involved (surprise! surprise!). And in all fairness to the marksmen, it was only a .22-caliber rifle, though one of the participants did report getting miffed when the bullet left a red mark on his chest.

I read something like that and all of a sudden, the time I tried to install my own toilet doesn’t seem like such a gut-wrenching comedy of errors.

Then there’s the guy who tried to dry a wet baseball infield by dumping gasoline on it and setting it afire. Twenty-five gallons of gas! That’s enough to blast a Yugo into orbit!

Oh, bless you, you moron with a gas can! And the 75 spectators who watched it happen while filming the incident on their cell phones. I no longer feel bad about walking off a pier into Lake Michigan during a yacht club party and being forced to swim (fully clothed, in a black suit and cowboy boots) a quarter-mile from the marina to the nearest occupied boat. That seemed really dumb to me at the time, but compared to the guy torching the ball field? Not so much.

My favorite, though, at least this week, is the guy in Fresno who shoplifted a chainsaw by sticking it down the front of his pants. I swear I’m not making this up.

The store video shows it wasn’t a small chainsaw, either, but a nice-sized, gas-powered job, suitable for large tree removal.

I feel about this the same way I do about cop shows where the hard-boiled detective stuffs his revolver into the front of his pants before jumping into a convertible and tearing after the perp. It’s almost impossible for me to not anticipate the “bang” that will signal the end of the detective’s parental options.

The chainsaw guy? Well, he’s one misstep away from being eligible for a 19^th Century boys’ choir. Waaaay dumber than anything I’ve ever done.

So thanks again, internet nitwits. Without you, I’d probably still feel embarrassed about the time I figured the ice on the lake would be more than thick enough to support the weight my girlfriend’s dad’s new Mustang.

When you’re raised by Stooges

If either of my brothers had died violently back when we were kids, it would have been the fault of television.

It’s true that in those dark ages there were only three channels (two of which you could watch without developing a squiggly line exposure headache). We weren’t inundated with a thousand channels, YouTube videos, and whatever other new media monstrosity is developed between the time I write this and the moment it appears in print.

But at the same time, we were considerably less world-wise than the youth of today. We were gullible, innocent (mostly), susceptible to suggestion. And I, at least, was the poster boy for the “Monkey See, Monkey Do” movement.

Which begs the question: why did my parents let me watch “The Three Stooges?”

Every Saturday, there I was, my skinny, blank face mere inches from our 16-inch, black-and-white Philco, the sound cranked up, a bowl of Cheerios growing soggy in my lap. My mother’s warnings that I would go blind from sitting so close fell on deaf ears, as did her concerns that I was exposing myself to all sorts of unknown TV radiation.

Radiation, according to my mother in 1964, leaked from most appliances like whiskey from a termite-infested aging keg. I wasn’t worried. At nine, I thought it would be cool to either glow in the dark or be transformed into one of those flesh-dripping aliens like I’d seen on “The Outer Limits.”

Or better yet, the radiation exposure might impart to me my fondest wish: X-ray vision. I had questions regarding Patty Tineman, who lived next door, questions that could not be answered through the course of normal, fourth-grade conversation.

But I digress.

My point is (I’m sure there was one here somewhere) Larry, Moe and Curly were instrumental in helping me develop relationships with my younger siblings. These guys, after all, were hilarious!

Maybe they weren’t so great at plumbing, or conducting orchestras, or fighting bulls or flying into outer space, or … well, a lot of things. But they provided a template for my familial affiliations.

As the oldest brother, I naturally assumed the role of Moe. My middle brother, William, took on the Larry part. Bobby, the youngest, seemed born to walk in Curly’s shoes.

In our family, eye pokes, noogies, hair pulling and n’yuk-n’yuk-accompanied face slaps were so common my mother finally gave up and stopped yelling about it. It wasn’t until the day I applied a hot iron to William’s backside (resulting in a scar I believe he carries to this day) that the parental contingent banned the Stooges from our suburban home.

I got to spend a week alone in my bedroom with no TV, comic books or fun of any kind. This was to help me “think about what I had done.” Instead, I used the time to plan the calamities I would visit upon my tattle-faced brother upon the moment of my release.

It was probably a year or more before the Stooges were again allowed on the Taylor Family television. Meanwhile, there were other shows that provided almost as much inspiration for destruction as did Larry, Moe and Curly.

Ed Sullivan, for instance. Yup, good old family-friendly Ed, with Señor Wences, watered-down rock acts and the guy who spun plates on the ends of poles; even Ed could provide a wealth of terrible ideas for our fertile yet un-discerning minds.

The spinning plate thing, for instance. Turns out that’s a lot harder than it looks. William and I made this discovery one summer’s afternoon, using a mop handle and my mother’s best china. We figured if we swept up the shards, she’d never notice a few missing plates. We were wrong.

At least that time I had William to keep me company in lockup. We spent the week’s incarceration building pillow “forts” and then throwing toys across the room at each other, pretending they were hand grenades, like we’d seen on “Combat!” As our battles progressed, the toys became increasingly heavy, metallic and pointy.

Our brotherly wars might have been imaginary, but the after-battle medical triage was all too real. I don’t recall anyone ever needing stitches, but that doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.

Yet somehow, we all lived to adulthood. I became a writer, William a nurse. And Bobby? Well, he’s still Curly and I still give him noogies at every available opportunity. N’yuk n’yuck.

A son with a pickup is handy when you need to move a body

When someone asks you to help dispose of a body, you’re supposed to ask questions.

This is why I’m a little worried about my son, James.

As a kid, he hung on me like a barnacle. If I was doing yard work, he was doing yard work. If I had a quarrel with his mother and went down to the pub for a burger and beer to cool off, James would meet me there on his bike.

We fished, we rode bikes, we nearly lost our hearing at monster truck rallies. We watched old episodes of “Dukes of Hazzard” and “Walker, Texas Ranger.” (When you name a kid Jim Bob, he’s gonna grow up liking that sort of thing.)

Until he was 13, he was my shadow and I missed him when he reached that age (as most boys do), where I was no longer cool enough to hang with. I knew the honeymoon was over the day I overheard him refer to me to a friend as “The Dark One.”

James was my third ride on the parental merry-go-round, though, so I knew enough to not be offended. Like my older son, Jordan, before him, Jim-Bob eventually grew out of that phase and we were friends again.

These days we get together once a week for Bad Movie Night. We still go fishing, bike riding, all that stuff. My point is, after 30 years, we know each other well. Or I thought we did.

Maybe that’s why James had no questions when I told him I needed help disposing of a body.

The texted conversation went like this.

ME: Hey kiddo! Whazzup? You free tomorrow afternoon?

JAMES: Yup. Gotta work until 5, but free after that.

ME: Can you help me get rid of a dead body?

Now see, this is the point at which a normal person might say, “What the hell? A what!?” But not James.

He texted back: “I’ll bring a Sawzall with a good metal blade. Should be alright for body dismemberment.”

ME: I don’t think we’ll need that. But you will want some heavy gloves, a small tarp and maybe some rope.

JAMES: OK, no problem. I’m down.

This response worries me. Despite the fact I used to live in Detroit, I’m not mobbed up; I’m not a “made man.” When I “hit” someone, it’s usually a slap on the back to help dislodge a piece of partially-chewed steak. The only “capo” I understand is the kind that attaches to the neck of a guitar to raise the pitch. I’ve never even seen all the “Godfather” movies, so not only am I not a hit man, I’m barely a man at all.

So why was James all “no problem” about taking on a job that’s generally considered a major felony? I mean, he’s my son and I love him, but it’s not like he owes me a 20-to-life stretch in Shawshank. Why was he so willing to become an accessory after the fact? (I’ve never seen “The Godfather” but I’ve seen every “Law & Order” ever made; can you tell?)

I wondered, has he done this sort of thing before? Does he think I have? And if I had, hasn’t he ever wondered why I never did it to him, back when he was 14 and going through those difficult teen years? If ever I was going to kill someone, it would have been James at 14.

I ended our text with, “OK, then, I’ll see you tomorrow after work. Don’t forget to bring gloves; maybe even one of those face mask things. The smell’s pretty strong.”

And now, I thought, the questions will come: Who did you kill? Were there witnesses? It wasn’t Mom, was it?

But nope. Not one question.

Now, I knew “the body” in question belonged to a deer that had died next to the house sometime this past winter. James did not. So how could there be no questions?

He showed up the next evening with his big pickup truck and a pair of heavy gloves. When I showed him the carcass he said, “Oh, it’s a deer.”

He sounded neither disappointed nor relieved

And I’m supposed to be The Dark One?