Long John Silver’s

Unknown Parts of West Virginia

Want to break a man? Send him on a three-hour drive with his family. There is something about the male psyche where it can handle illness and war and poverty, but it will absolutely snap when one makes bad time on a road trip. It does not matter how laid back your dad normally is; when you have reached hour two of a supposedly four-hour journey only just having passed the county-line—in other words, not even close to the halfway point—your dad will lose his mind. He will lose it like a dictator that was just told none of his armies showed up for battle.

And, like all collapsing dictatorships, he will reach the paranoiac’s conclusion that it was his inner circle—his own kids—that orchestrated it. He will convince himself that those nearest and dearest to him had met privately and conspired to divide their bathroom breaks into the most inconvenient exit points. There once was a (now debunked) theory called “The McClintock Effect,” that stated that when women live together their menstruation cycles become aligned. That has always sounded dubious to me, but I am somewhat willing to allow the possibility that it exists because I can tell you for a fact, that the exact opposite effect occurs on road trips involving children. Once the car hits the asphalt, your kids will immediately dis-align their bathroom cycles; they will make you stop at every exit along the highway. You will make worse time than a public bus.

My family lives in a bungalow with two bathrooms and there is always a line for one of them; my kids seem to consistently use them at the same time at home and will scream endlessly at each other about the delays. But, on a road trip, the converse is true. It’s as though the excretory system of a child has evolved less for the purpose of removing waste and more so that the timing of everything annoys as many family members as possible.
 

One of the peculiarities of regular, repeat road trips with the full family—a sort of mundane déjà vu—is that you end up stopping at the same places for bathroom breaks. Due to how often we drive back to Ohio, I have visited the same Indy 500-themed McDonald’s in rural Indiana more often than I have gone to my local post office. And we enter the same way each time, too: I hold open the door as one kids bursts through, grasping their crotch and hysterically scanning for the bathroom, then a second kid enters a bit more casually, looks around, and screams: “WE HAVE BEEN HERE BEFORE!” If the staff didn’t have such a high turnover, they would surely recognize us; it’s also possible the latter has something to do with the former.

One of my kids has a kind of photographic memory for these places, which is not an advantage. Once, when driving through West Virginia (we travel to North Carolina every few years to see the ocean and visit my father-in-law’s grave) we stopped at a Long John Silver’s. My wife sat with our youngest at a table while me and the two boys waited for the food at the counter. We got the food and one of my sons dropped his fork on the floor and yelled, “DAMNIT!”

The south is very weird about swearing. I have been in bars where men punched each other in disputes, loudly threatened each other—or entire creeds of people—and the staff mostly ignored them or politely asked them to settle down. But use the word “fuck” at anything above a whisper and they are impossibly offended: “Hey, hey, fellas, if you can’t clean up the language, you’re going to have to leave. It’s not that kind of place.”

With this in mind I was quick to chide my son for his outburst before the staff could object. “Hey! We don’t swear in this family,” I admonished.

“Actually, mom swears all the time,” my eldest chimed in from afar.

“OK, well, mom is an adult and sometimes she uses adult words, but look at me; I never swear.”

There’s some truth to this: I almost never swear at home if the kids are around. Swearing for me is a conscious act. I select the word with deliberation, and although I swear when performing stand-up or with friends or coworkers or my wife at a bar, I don’t even accidentally swear in front of the kids; a hammer could fall upon my toe, and I would not cuss if the kids are present. So I was, at this time, entirely convinced that none of my kids had ever heard a swear word from me.

My eldest—the one with the steel-trap memory— disagreed:

“That’s not true, Dad.”

“What’s not true?”

“That you don’t swear. You’ve sworn once, Dad. And…it was at this Long John Silver’s.”

Internally, I began to feel terror: my eldest is never wrong when it comes to memories. Plus, as I glanced, some of the fixtures of the place began to look familiar: the aquarium containing unhealthily large fish, for one.

“It was three years ago, Dad.”

He was talking in the kid “Fact Voice,” the voice they use to tell you stuff like: “TECHNICALLY, IN ORDER TO BE A DINOSAUR, YOU CANNOT FLY.” The voice where they scream, as if they have acquired data and knowledge that will rewrite history. Everyone in the pirate-themed seafood restaurant could hear him. The staff started to congregate around the register, smiling, fascinated with my son’s oral history of the restaurant.

“The staff screwed up our order four times,” my son recounted loudly, “and, when we got back to the table, you told mom, ‘West Virginia makes shitheads like Ohio makes mosquitoes.’”

The staff erupted in laughter. First of all, probably none of them worked there three years prior. And as such took no slight from the criticism, but more importantly, these employees—who regularly had to tolerate customers attempting to embarrass and belittle them—finally got to see a customer get wholly embarrassed by his own kid.

I started laughing. “Well, Ohio doesn’t have quite as many mosquitoes as you’d think,” I equivocated, and waved to the cashiers abashedly.

We walked back to our table with the food. My wife noticed me smiling and the employees laughing.

“What’s going on?” she asked.

“We’ve been to this Long John Silver’s before,” I answered.

“Yeah! And dad swears!” my youngest added.
 

WHAT THE HELL AM I READING HERE?

Hi. My name is Sean Bair-Flannery. I live in Oak Park, Illinois, with my wife Jessica and our three kids. I perform standup comedy at night and during the day I fix computers.

 

This is chapter from my book, “Places I Can’t Return To”.

 

Each week, I release a new chapter (the current one completes below). If you enjoy the stories, you can buy the full book below or, next week, you can come back and read the subsequent chapter.

 

Purchase Full Book:

    Digital                                 $4.99

    Paperback                   $14.99

    Audio                                     $19.99

 

This book is true stories, but it is not a memoir. It is a more an illustration — maybe a warning — of what your life will look like if you decide to live everyday like it’s your last. I actually followed that advice. I followed it for a good fifteen years.

 

I can’t re-enter most the places I visited in that time.

—S. B-F

Bathroom breaks are what finally caused my dad to snap. My dad was a social worker; he worked with the homeless, the addicted, the infirm, the victimized. Either despite or because of the fact he had that job on top of being father to half a dozen kids, he never lost his cool.

Until, that is, we left for a vacation on an island in Lake Erie. It was a ninety-minute drive but on this occasion, we were two hours into the drive, and yet not halfway there. The delay was due entirely to bathroom breaks, and my dad, who had arranged to get the keys to the cottage from the owner at a prearranged time, was freaking out about the tardiness. Dads reach a certain age—or rather, they reach a certain number of kids (usually three or more)—where they start to believe that the most disrespectful thing you can do to another man is make him wait. Sleeping with his wife would be less of an insult.

Also, this was back before the widespread availability of cellphones, so he couldn’t notify the guy that we were running late. Back then if someone was waiting for you, they would just have to stand at the rendezvous point, like a statue being slowly chiseled into an expression of increasing anger.

Whenever we were the late party, my dad would scream, “A man is waiting on us!” in an attempt to motivate us kids into the car faster. He’d scream it like we were smuggling a spy across an enemy border and the sentries were closing in. As opposed to the real mission, which was usually something like dropping off a wet/dry vac. My dad was even more melodramatic when the positions were reversed, and we were the ones waiting for the other party to show.

“Honey, maybe we should leave,” my mom would suggest after a thirty-minute wait.

“No, he might arrive any second,” Dad would counter. “What if we left, then he arrived ten seconds later?”

“I think at this point he couldn’t expect to still get the dresser.”

“Oh, I don’t care about the dresser,” Dad would snap. “You can burn the dresser for all I care. No, I want to be here when he gets here, because I want him to see my face when he arrives so I can tell him exactly how late he is. How he ruined our afternoon!”

“So,” my mom would summarize, “it’s more important for you to shame this guy about being late, than to head home and enjoy as much of your remaining afternoon as possible?”

“Exactly.”

My dad would do this often, after my mom had sarcastically distilled how ludicrous his plans were. Instead of recognizing that she was making fun of him, he would take it at face value, as if someone finally understood what he was getting at. “Yes! We are going to ruin more of the day, so I can potentially have two seconds of vengeance. I’m glad someone gets it.”

Back to the trip: Due to the persistent bathroom breaks, we were running late, and my dad was getting increasingly concerned about a “man waiting on us.” So he did something that was uncharacteristic for both him and our vehicle (a 1979 Ford Econoline Van loaded with eight people, four coolers, and an inflatable raft ): he started speeding. After about thirty minutes of cornfields blazing past our windows in a verdant blur, we were pulled over by a state trooper. The trooper came up and my dad exited the car, pointed to the trooper’s vehicle, and suggested, “Shall we chat?”

Several minutes later my dad re-entered the car with a long yellow ticket, and told us they got him for speeding “up there.” He went on to explain that the giant white rectangles painted along the shoulder of the road were actually markers for planes operated above by the Ohio State Highway Patrol, and that from these airplanes they would time you to the next marker to see if you were speeding. If so, they would radio for a patrolman to ticket you.

My dad had just received a speeding ticket he could not afford and I was at that annoying age—old enough to have adult thoughts, but not old enough to correctly read the room—so as he began merging back on to the highway and the state trooper passed us, waving, I asked:

“Dad, would you admit this ticket shows we live in a police state?”

“Sean, it’s just a speeding ticket.”

“Yes, but it was assigned BY A PLANE!”

“Well, I should not have been speeding. And, it’s good to have people slowing down. We need to be safe.”

“I get that Dad,” I continued, undeterred, “but that would be achieved by the cop just sitting in the middle of the road doing radar. In fact, that would slow more people down, because they would see the cop and drive safely. But, Dad, instead… they put a PLANE in the air! They don’t want you to actually slow down! They want the tickets! They want you to drive as fast as possible while a cop in the sky fines you! We live in a police state!” My dad started shaking his head back and forth, then noticed my littlest sister sleeping. He handed me a diaper.

“Put that on your sister. I don’t want to do another stop because she peed on her car seat.”

“But, Dad, you admit we live in a police state!” At this point my mom got involved, suddenly screaming back at me, “Sean! We don’t admit anything! We will never admit anything! Because we are more concerned about your sister peeing on the bucket seats!”

I put a diaper on my sister—she continued to sleep through it—and, not ten seconds later, one of my brothers announced, “I need to pee.”

My dad looked at the ceiling of the car for about ten seconds—traveling at highway speed with eyes pointed away from the road—and muttered, “My God.”

Dad looked back into the van. “WHY DIDN’T YOU PEE WHEN WE LAST STOPPED?”

“Dad, when you last stopped I thought you were getting arrested, and I shouldn’t get out and pee,” he answered.

“A state trooper doesn’t care if a five-year-old pees!” Dad yelled back.

“They might be looking for it ‘up there,’” I chimed in, “given that this is a police state”.

Dad pulled over at the next exit. As a current parent, I now recognize that this is the hardest delay—the most difficult exit-pill to swallow—because it is a stop just after another stop while two of the kids are sleeping. As all parents know, a kid can sleep through the car running over a deer, a traffic stop by the police, a loud fight by siblings; but decelerate into a gas station and they will wake up with a collective “I want to buy something!”

My dad pulled into the station. All the kids were now awake. Dad walked across, forcefully slid the van door open and screamed:

“ERRRYEEE UNN! ODDA DA CAAR!”.

My dad would occasionally reach what I called his “anger accent state,” where he was so furious each word sounded like it came from Boston or Liverpool. We all obediently exited the car, even though only half of us needed to pee. My youngest brother, Brendan, piped up, “I can’t go.”

The other kids immediately shot him that older-sibling advice look, the one that says, “Are you sure you want to pick this moment to bring up that point?”

“Juuuussss gooowwww!” my dad yelled back, rage causing his vowels to once again drown in the mid-Atlantic.

“Dad,” Brendan responded calmly, “I can’t go. I’m trying to go right now. I’m seriously trying to pee my pants and it’s dry. I can’t go.”

We all went to the restroom, loaded back into the van, and got back on our way. My dad was hoping against hope the man is still waiting for us. He accelerated up the entrance ramp and, before we even merged with traffic, we heard Brendan say from the back, “You’re not gonna believe this.”

We all knew what was about to happen next.

“I have to go,” he repeated desperately, adding, “and it’s an emergency!”

Driving with your dad for more than three hours is a lot like being in a submarine with a captain that is slowly going insane from the depth.

Upon hearing about Brendan’s urgent bathroom situation, my dad stopped looking at how to merge on the highway, and instead started looking at the floor. For a good five seconds he had his head bowed, as he mumbled, “This trip, this trip, this trip.”

My mom tied to snap him out of it, yelling, “Honey, we are going to have to merge”.

I am convinced that, in that moment, my dad had a stroke from pure anger. If Apple watches had existed back then, the biometrics would have registered him as legally dead for at least a second. Fortunately his dad-brain kicked in, and reminded him that an accident might happen that could affect the resale value of the van. His mind re-booted just in time for him to merge onto the highway; even more impressively it did so as he simultaneously lost his shit, conceived of a plan, and began executing it:

“OK, Sean, pass him up!” Dad barked.

“What?” I asked.

“Pass him up! He has an emergency! Pass him to me!” then added, “Oh, and Sean? Close the windows back there!”

This was met with a Midwestern Greek chorus of “What?” None of us quite understood what was going on.

“I’m going to dangle his ass out the window,” my dad answered, “and he’s going to piss or shit into the highway.”

What’s weird about being Irish Catholic is that it’s such an ordinance-based religion that I remember thinking: “I can’t believe Dad said ‘ass’ and ‘’shit’” and not: “I can’t believe my dad wants to shove my brother’s bare rear end out of the window of a car that’s moving at speed down a major thoroughfare.”

“Brian!” yelled Mom. “You can’t do that!”

“Shelia, no, I got it,” he replied, “that’s why I’m having Sean close the windows.”

In other words, my dad thought Mom’s issue with having a three-year-old relieve himself from the window of a moving van was not that he could die or be traumatized, but that the shit could float back into the van. Which, in turn, would affect the resale value.
 

About forty-five minutes and two stops later, we reached the man my dad needed to meet for the keys. No one was dangled out of the window. The man was good-humored about the delay.

“I have four kids myself,” he commiserated while laughing, “I remember those road trips.” He then added, “A guy in my neighborhood drilled a hole in the bottom of his van for his kids to use on road trips. Bragged that he could make any state park in under two hours!

“I heard the same thing about a fella one town over from me!” my dad replied, excitedly

In the mid-1980s this seems to have been a suburban myth passed on from tardy dad to tardy dad; tales of a fabled, audacious man one town or one block over—no one had ever met him directly, they had only heard lore—who could caravan faster than so many geese because his kids would piss and shit through a hole in the car.

The tardy dads were never sure if they wanted to do it with their own kids—have them dangle their genitals or orifices six inches above pavement flying past at 70 miles an hour—and they were certain that their wives “probably wouldn’t allow that.” But still, damn, the time savings would be massive. You could make the trip times of a single man.

One could tell my dad was mulling the idea over as he walked back to the car.

My mom cut off his train of thought. “You don’t think a giant hole that’s been used as a toilet by six kids in the bottom of the van might affect the resale value?”