How to Get Suspended and Influence People

1 It's a good thing my father is an accountant, because he really sucks at being an inventor. It's not that he hasn't given 110 percent or any of that crap; it's just that he never quite got the fundamentals right. For one thing, inventions are supposed to work. Furthermore, they're supposed to be things that don't already exist. He really can't get his mind around that. "Do you know what the world needs?" he asked one night. "A machine that will automatically pour water into a cat's dish." I tried to explain that such a machine already existed, but he didn't listen. Even when I showed him the various models that were available at our local pet store, he said that to simply buy something you could invent yourself, using good old American ingenuity, is practically unpatriotic. I tried to explain that buying products is what capitalism is all about, and that it's therefore perfectly patriotic, which anyone who ever took a sixth-grade civics class should have known to begin with, but he didn't listen to that, either. Instead, he worked for three months, and flooded the basement twice, building a machine that I suppose might have worked but that might also have been a dud. There was no way to tell. The cat wouldn't go near the thing. Dad's inventions aren't the only dangerous things I have to put up with; the meals at my house are just as deadly, and often frankly embarrassing. It isn't that my mother's a bad cook or anything; hell, as far as I know, she could be the best cook in town. But she and my dad are what they call "food disaster hobbyists." It's like being the sort of person who watches bad movies on purpose just to make fun of them, only with food. My parents' idea of a good time is going down to the thrift store and buying old cookbooks from the fifties and sixties, ones with titles like The Wonders of Lard and You and Your Artichokes. I don't know if you've ever seen one of those, but some of the pictures and recipes in them look absolutely wretched. Every few weekends, my parents buy up a stack of them and spend hours laughing at some of the worst recipes, and then, for reasons I have never been able to fathom, once or twice a week they cook them and serve them for dinner. It's one of their many poor, misguided attempts at "quality family time." Dad's inventions can get a bit embarrassing or dangerous, but cooking terrible recipes on purpose and expecting your kid to eat them simply isn't very nice. Mom and Dad insist that the recipes aren't really bad, just different, and even point out that now and then one turns out to be pretty good, but the odds on that are really pretty dismal. Even orphans in the old days got to eat good old reliable gruel. Nobody tried to make the gruel into an even nastier casserole. On the night after my first day of eighth grade, I really didn't want to go through with the usual family dinner, since I knew that they'd just bought up another batch of cookbooks they probably couldn't wait to try. "So, Leon," said my father as we sat down, "how was the first day of school?" "Fine," I mumbled as my mother heaped a much larger pile of some mysterious form of casserole than I would have liked onto my plate. The casserole clashed badly with the dinnerware, which was from what I guess you'd call the 1950s Vomitesque school of household design, like the ugly, paste-colored trays with swirling designs that we used to have at the cafeteria in elementary school. Even the harvest gold and avocado green of the 1970s haven't been out of style long enough for my mother to get on the bandwagon. "That's it?" my father asked. "Just fine?" "He's not telling us something," said my mother, as if I wasn't present. "What aren't you telling us, Leon?" I shoveled a large spoonful of the casserole into my mouth and chewed it long andSelzer, Adam is the author of 'How to Get Suspended and Influence People', published 2007 under ISBN 9780385903844 and ISBN 0385903847.