HOME / dad again: Notes on fatherhood.

Eek, Mickey Mouse!A low-rent cartoon character drives six hours to scare the crap out of my daughter.

By Michael LewisUpdated Monday, July 29, 2002, at 5:38 PM ET

I once went to visit Roald Dahl at his home in the English countryside. The author of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, James and the Giant Peach, and other macabre tales for children had just publicly denounced The Satanic Verses as an irresponsible piece of self-promotion. He didn't exactly endorse the fatwa that had just been issued against Salman Rushdie, but he came close, and I used this as an excuse to go and talk to him. He wasn't well—he was more or less confined to an upholstered chair and wasn't long for this world—but he could not have been better company. I remember next to nothing of what he said about Rushdie. What I recall was lunch. Several Dahls gathered, and a plate of ham cold cuts arrived at the table. Dahl said something about how closely the cold cuts resembled human flesh, and how he once thought of writing a story about children who are served cold cuts from the corpse of a missing friend. I expected someone at the table to complain but instead his daughter giggled and told a story about how she had witnessed, first hand, a butcher slice off his palm while running a shank of ham over a meat slicer. She went on to describe, to the delight of the entire family, how the slice of butcher's flesh fit perfectly on top of the stack of ham. Exactly like the ham we were about to eat! Sixty seconds into the meal the Dahls were vying to out-gross each other with tales of severed limbs and pulsing pink flesh, while happily munching ham sandwiches. With the possible exception of Mrs. Dahl, the entire family had preserved into adulthood a childlike delight in the grotesque.

RSS

Once you have a small child you can see the full appeal of the Dahlian imagination. To a small child the adult world is grotesque. For a start, it's all ridiculously out of proportion: To a child every grown-up is a monster. Then there are all these events that occur in the grown-up world that a child, in trying to get her mind around them, distorts wildly. I went out of town on business last week. "Are you going on an airplane?" Tallulah asked, before I left. "Yes," I said. "Are you going to an airport?" she asked. "Yes," I said. "Are they going to put chickens on your luggage?" she asked. I had to think about that one. Then it struck me: check-in luggage/chickens on the luggage. How strange the adult world must seem when filtered through the child's vocabulary. Even those aspects of the adult world designed explicitly to give innocent pleasure to a child are often, to a child, either weird or downright horrifying. Which brings me to Mickey Mouse.

Tallulah as Mickey Mouse (on her way to a birthday party)I had taken Tallulah to a birthday party around the corner from our house in Berkeley. The highlight of the birthday party was to be the appearance of Mickey Mouse. Mickey was meant to be kept a secret. The children would gather and play for a bit and then Mickey Mouse would burst through the doors and surprise everyone. But it's hard to keep a secret, especially a good one, from Tallulah, as it is so tempting to use any prospective treat as a bribe. To coax her into her car seat I had told her that if she ceased to struggle she would get to meet Mickey Mouse. In the flesh. She seemed pleased by the idea.

We arrived at the birthday party. Tallulah overcame the shyness she always experiences when she enters a crowded room and was soon playing with the other children. But there is no such thing as equilibrium in a room full of toddlers; something bad is always about to happen; and what happened was that the father of the birthday girl came over to say there was a problem with Mickey. The company that farmed out Mickey to children's birthday parties had just phoned: Mickey was ill. The company had called around looking for a substitute. They had found one, but he lived six hours away. He was on his way, but he'd be late.

You had to admire the commitment. In six hours you can get from our house in Berkeley to Reno, Nev. Some poor guy who lived, in effect, in Reno had tossed his Mickey Mouse costume in the trunk of his car in the wee hours of that morning and was now hauling ass across the country to humor a room full of 3-year-olds. And he wasn't even the real Mickey Mouse. He was an understudy.

An hour or so later Tallulah was off on one side of a large deck playing with a doll house. The other kids and adults mingled on the other side. I was munching a raw carrot and glancing across the deck every four seconds to ensure Tallulah hadn't fallen off. Suddenly, onto the deck, between Tallulah and everyone else, burst Mickey Mouse. He wore all the official gear. But still there was something off about him. In the first place, he wasn't alone. Trailing him was a ghoulish assistant, clutching balloons and sweating so profusely that one of the children turned to his mother and said, "Mommy, the man went swimming!" Together the two of them looked as if they had jogged, not driven, from Reno.

But the real problem was Mickey himself. He wasn't the cute little Mickey you think of when you think of Mickey Mouse. He was a large man, stuffed into a small costume that didn't quite fit. His giant mouse head tilted this way then that, as if partially severed. His white gloves failed to disguise the thick black hair on the backs of his hands. Even his black mouse slacks looked to be loaners; bending over hurriedly to greet the first child he saw, he flashed a rear vertical smile. The first child he saw was Tallulah.

I tried to imagine this scene from Tallulah's point of view. The fact is that while she had pretended to be delighted that she was going to meet Mickey Mouse, she had never actually heard of the creature. God knows what she thought she was getting into, but it wasn't a 6-foot rodent with a greaseball sidekick. Instantly—so quickly that Mickey didn't have a chance to lay his hairy mitts on her—her face dissolved in terror and she began to scream. Not a playful scream, a Janet Leigh in the shower in Psycho scream. I raced across the deck, clutched her in my arms, and spent the next five minutes consoling her. When she'd calmed down she squirmed away from me and ran into the house.

"Where are you going?" I hollered after her.

"To find Mickey Mouse!" she said.

For the next hour or so she enjoyed Mickey Mouse in a way that was new to me and I assume also to Mickey. Mickey Mouse, to Tallulah, was not an endearing character. He was a serial killer. This was Disney with a twist of lime. She'd sneak right up to him and then, when he noticed her, dash away screaming bloody murder. It was strange to see. Her mother and father can't bear scary movies, and I'll bet money that when she grows up she won't like them either. But in her current state of mind she likes nothing more than the toddler equivalent of a horror flick. If she weren't so much like every other small child, she'd be considered insane.

E-MAIL

RECOMMEND... Get Slate RSS Feeds

Michael Lewis' most recent book is The Blind Side.

Photographs by Tabitha Soren.

COMMENTS

Notes From The Fray Editor:

Happy families are all alike—Tolstoi. Toddler birthday parties are all alike—The Fray. While this installment of Dad Again provoked the by-now-usual tut-tutting over Lewis's parental style, pollymath's suspicious pity is so deflating even the Fray Editor almost believed it. But enough self-reflection, on to the ethnography. It seems that terror in the face of the Great Disney Logo is nigh on universal, and provides us a window onto the American search for familiness.

Remarks From The Fray:

Since this column is called "Dad Again," shouldn't there be a bit more about the second child? Or is Lewis implying that he wouldn't be doing these things with his older daughter if his wife weren't busy with young Lewis number 2?

I suspect that he writes about Tallulah more because he finds her more interesting. And she probably is more interesting since she can, among other accomplishments, talk. What disturbs me is that I get a vague feeling that he loves Tallulah more than Dixie. This probably harkens back to the column which talks about learning to love a child after doing things for her, like not pitching her off a balcony. I think he got it backwards. I think he loves his kids because of what they do for him - amuse him mostly - which is why Dixie seems to be almost absent from his life.

How sad.

-- pollymath

(To reply, click here.)

…I was a bit surprised by the fact that Michael was surprised by Tallulah's attraction to that 6-foot-tall Mickey monstrosity. Michael, have you never chased your kids while growling like a kid-eating dinosaur so realistically that they almost think they are in real danger? Kids love that sort of thing, and they scream like banshees while playing it. If you try it, Tallulah will beg you to do it again and again.

Why do kids love this so much? I don't know. I think evolution built in a love of this chase-me game so that youngsters would get some practice evading predators. Practicing evasive maneuvers while the cost of failure is low is a lot more adaptive than practicing for the first time when the cost of failure is being eaten alive by a sabre-tooth tiger!

-- John

(To reply, click here.)

Since the series Dad Again started, the comments on the Fray have been either that Lewis is a pathetic, self-absorbed jerk and should be fired or, Lewis is like all others fathers, so what's the point of the column --fire him.

I have a different opinion. I like him -- at least the version of himself that he represents on Slate. His attempts at fatherhood seem sincere, and his writing is interesting. The reason, however, that I think my opinion differs from the great majority is because I was raised in a series of foster homes. Some of my foster parents were cruel, but most did enough so that I could subsist and eventually leave the system.

One result of this experience is that I'm intensely interested in families. Like an ambitious ethnologist, I find myself studying families, seeing how they interact, unconsciously interested in almost all. In addition to my desire to have a family and be a good father, I also find myself incapable of criticizing most families. Like a good scientist, I seem only capable of observing.

Lewis, from my experience, is a damn good father. He's caring and he tries. This may seem limited and everyday to most, but for me it's what I want to strive to be.

-- Adam Morgan

(To reply, click here.)

(7/30)

What did you think of this article?

Join The Fray: Our Reader Discussion Forum

POST A MESSAGE | READ MESSAGES