Dad and I were always close, and he had a big impact on the way I think today. For example, Dad instilled a strong respect for truth in me at an early age — because honesty didn’t come naturally to me at first.
When I was little, my philosophy was “Let someone else break it.” It worked like this: If I was tossing a ball around in the house and broke a lamp, I would painstakingly reassemble the pieces and then tiptoe out of the room. The next time somebody walked through the house, the lamp would rattle apart, right before their eyes. Son of a gun. And I was nowhere in sight.
But then one day I broke Dad’s hammer and I couldn’t think of any way to make it look like somebody else did it.
See, I used to watch a lot of cowboy and Indian movies, and I loved it when the Indians threw their tomahawks with such deadly accuracy. I went out to see if Dad had a tomahawk on his workbench in the garage.
He didn’t, but he had a hammer about the same size and shape, so I took it outside, took aim at a tree trunk, and let it fly.
The hammer-hawk flew beautifully, flipping end-over-end, but it missed the tree and hit a rock. One of the claws snapped off and flew into the bushes, where I couldn’t even find it to piece gingerly together.
I was in trouble, because Dad loved his tools. With that claw missing, how could I trick him into thinking the hammer just fell apart the next time he picked it up?
So I invented a strange new philosophy to explain things that break in my presence. It’s called “The Truth,” or at least a version of it.
When Dad got home, I told him: “The hammer got broken.” Not “I broke the hammer,” but “it got broken.” I was new to this whole “Truth” thing, still operating on my learner’s permit.
“How did it get broken?” Dad asked. Tough question.
I said, “Well, somehow it got itself thrown at a tree, and the hammer missed the tree, and it hit a rock, and the rock broke it.”
I mean, sure, you could say I was there when it happened. The hammer flew out of my hand, but we could argue all day about whose fault it was — mine or the hammer’s. And then what was that rock doing there, anyway? And I’m not so sure the tree was entirely innocent. So, I figured, the honest thing to do when you’re completely responsible for breaking something is to take some small part of the blame.
But then, for good measure, one more Truth on top of it all: “You know, whoever taught me how to throw didn’t do a very good job of it.” Just to remind him not to blame the real victim here.
Dad just nodded. “Get in the car,” he said. “We’re going for a ride.”
Well, this was it. I was finished. I had seen enough gangster films to know what it meant when an angry man clutching a jagged hammer said he was taking you for a ride.
“Can I say goodbye to Mom?” I asked, hoping she might intervene. I went inside and gave her a hug, telling her that Dad’s hammer got itself broken with me nearby and he was taking me for a ride.
“Oh, I’m glad,” she said, which seemed pretty cold-hearted to me, under the circumstances.
I wondered where he would do it. Probably the river, I thought, but we crossed the bridge and kept going. Well, then, he would tie me up and leave me on the railroad tracks. But no, we crossed the tracks, too.
We got to the south side of Elmwood Park — an Italian neighborhood — and I thought: “Of course, I’ve seen those films, too. You could plug a guy and dump him out of a speeding car in an Italian neighborhood and nobody would even look up from raking the lawn.” The movies never lied, right?
But Dad pulled into the Sears parking lot on the corner of North and Harlem. “Let’s go,” he said as he got out.
I was confused. I had never seen a film where anybody got snuffed in a Sears store, but then I was still young and had an early bedtime.
So which department would it be? Sports? Plenty of guns there. Or Kitchenware, with those Ginsu knives? But no, he walked into the Hardware department. Of course — a chainsaw, I thought.
Dad pulled a new hammer off the rack. He handed the broken hammer to the man at the cash register and said, “This old Craftsman hammer broke.”
“Huh,” the guy said. “How’d that happen?”
“The boy threw it at a tree,” Dad said.
Well, you’re not gonna get anywhere with that version of the truth, I thought. To help his case along, I said, “The hammer missed the tree. A rock broke it.”
“Yeah, that’ll happen,” the guy said. “Hammers aren’t accurate, like tomahawks.” I was starting to like this guy.
He dropped the broken hammer into a trash can and handed the new hammer to Dad. “Have a good day,” he said, and we left without paying.
“See,” Dad said as we drove home, “the Sears Craftsman company says if any of their tools break, for any reason, they’ll replace it for free. And I believe them, because…” and here he looked deep into my eyes, “…they always… tell… the… truth.”
Needless to say, I learned a valuable lesson that day.
I learned that with the right tool, you could play cowboy and Indian all day long.
TR Kerth is the author of the book “Revenge of the Sardines” Contact him at trkerth@yahoo.com.
