He Smiles
I get off work at six. I get home at six forty-five. I eat dinner with Alyna and the kids at seven. Alyna gives the kids their baths at seven-thirty. So the thirty minutes from seven-thirty to 8 P.M. on every weeknight are mine. I can usually get in at least two games of Modern Warfare, sometimes three. I’m in the middle of my second game of Team Deathmatch on the Paris map and somebody on the opposite team just got Juggernaut when my son, Andy, comes out of the bathroom naked. I just catch him out of my peripheral vision, trying not to turn my full attention away from the game, when he says, “Look, Daddy, he smiles.” He’s four. He says fucked-up things that make no sense all the time. I stopped trying to figure out most of the shit he says a long time ago, but the phrase “Look, Daddy, he smiles” implies that my son wants me to look at something, and I’m curious who this “he” is. So I look away from the game and see my son standing by the hallway that leads back to the bathroom. He’s completely naked, hair still wet from his bath, and he’s holding his cock, looking down at it and laughing. But he’s not just holding his cock. He has the head kind of turned sideways so the hole in his dick is horizontal instead of vertical, and he’s pinching the head with the index finger and thumb on each of his hands, stretching the hole and twisting it up on the ends so it does, in fact, look like a tiny smile. I look away from his cock and back to my game as quickly as I can, wondering if I did shit like that when I was his age. Probably.
He says it again: “Look, Daddy, he smiles.”
I say, “Yeah, I saw it.”
He says, “No! Look longer.”
I don’t know what the fuck I’m supposed to do. I’m sure there is some way to respond to him, some proper, child-psychologist-approved manner in which I am supposed to interact with him at this point in his psychological development that won’t leave any lasting negative effect, but all I can imagine is me saying the wrong thing and Andy ending up with a limp dick for the rest of his life or feeling like a woman trapped in a man’s body or becoming a pedophile. I try to ignore him and hope he’ll wander back into the bathroom, where I assume Alyna will know how to handle it. But he says it again, this time with more urgency: “Daddy, look! He smiles!” He really wants me to look at the little show he’s putting on with his fucking cock, really give it the attention he feels it deserves. So I do it.
I look away from my game of Modern Warfare and stare right at my four-year-old son’s dick as he twists it up as far as the skin will stretch. He starts bouncing up and down, doing a little dance, happy that I’m paying attention.
He says, “Can yours smile, daddy?”
Again, I have no idea what to say. I reason that I probably shouldn’t make him feel isolated or strange or different from his dad in any way. So I say, “Yeah, mine can smile.”
He says, “Make him smile. I want to see.”
I imagine myself comparing smiling dicks with my son for a few seconds before Alyna comes out, sees him mangling his cock, and says, “Andy, you were supposed to put on your PJs.”
He says, “Look, Mommy, he smiles.”
Before I can even take note of how Alyna reacts, she says, “Yes, he does. But once it’s nighttime he needs to sleep.”
Andy says, “Okay, Mommy,” drops his dick, and lets my wife hustle him off to bed. Even though she barely fucks me anymore, she’s a good mom. That’s the last thought I give the situation before getting in one more game of Free-for-All, in which I get demolished by a player I assume is a guy based on the gamertag 420BONERKING who goes 30-4. Then Alyna comes out of the kids’ bedroom, turns off the Xbox, and says, “They’re asleep. Game over. American Idol. Then bed. I’m exhausted.”
This is the exact announcement Alyna makes every night, with only minor variation where the name of the reality-TV show is concerned. After she watches American Idol, she says, “I’m going to bed. You coming?”
I say, “Yeah, just need to check some work e-mails real quick,” then I wait for her to go into the bedroom and I go to the office, where I turn the sound on the computer down as low as possible without turning it completely off, jerk off to some pregnant porn, blow my load in my hand, go to the guest bathroom, wash my hand, then go into the bedroom to find Alyna already asleep and snoring.
The last thought that crosses my mind before I enter dreamless sleep is a memory of fucking Casey, the girlfriend I had before Alyna, in a tiny hotel room with the window open on a trip we took to Catalina Island when we were young.