Eileen Gunn: Questionable Practices

“I think I better take you to the sheriff’s office. They’ll know what to do. Where you been, anyway?”

“Ripvanwinkleville,” said Christy.

Great. The sheriff’s office. I hope Christy’s not packing out any of that homegrown.

Christy

When we got back, I figured I had to do something fast to support me and Andrea and the baby. I mean, Andrea wasn’t going to be able to bring in much from waitressing after a few months.

I figured there should be a book in there somewhere, if I could just find somebody to write it. Any real writer would jump at the chance. So I got hold of this guy I knew at The Stranger . We’d talked about doing this Hunter Thompson thing once, over a pitcher or two of margaritas, but nothing ever came of it. He wasn’t against the idea, but he said it would be easier to sell the book if it was a news story first. He said if the story had legs, it would walk, and then he’d write the book. First he had to finish a book on hiking in Peru, anyway. But he thought his friend Darla could help with the news story.

Darla was kind of a mistake — all she knew was the confession market. So the story broke in News of the World , and everybody thought it was a big joke. I guess I can’t blame them. That headline wouldn’t have been my first choice: “He fathered a bigfoot baby… and became a deadbeat dad.”

I got phone calls and email from all my old buddies, who basically figured I’d pulled off a scam of some kind. I mean, it’s nice to be congratulated, but if it’s your life and not a scam, it’s a little embarrassing.

It wasn’t my idea to contact Maury. That was Darla, came up with that. I had had my sights on Oprah, actually. A lovely woman, a bit matronly, but clearly someone who could converse on a higher plane, who would not judge me because I had left my little one behind with a loving parent. I could hear her: she would extend her generous hand to me, and she would say, “You sharing your story here with us today has brought us all a bit closer to an understanding of our relationship to the wilderness.” That’s how I wanted to tell my story.

But Darla couldn’t get the Oprah people to even return her calls, so she went on this website and sent my story to the Maury show. So we don’t hear from them, and we don’t hear from them, and we don’t hear from them. They are really into deadbeat dads there, which isn’t my story, in my opinion. But like Darla said, we didn’t have time to wait for them to do a show on bigfoot babies. I had to fit into the story they were doing.

So, anyway, I went to the show, and they had a woman up there and three deadbeat dads. Maury talked for a while, and the woman cried, and then the deadbeat dads talked. And then I interrupted, and I took the dads to task for not taking better care of their kids. I really pitched into them. I was like, I’d give anything to get back to my kid and take care of him or her. And this was true, or it seems true when I think about it. Anyway, I did my stuff, and pretty soon I was sitting up there with the deadbeat dads, and we were all crying and Maury was comforting us.

The part I didn’t understand was that not only did Mickey not want to spend any time with me, but neither did Andrea. She was into the whole idea of having a baby, but not into the idea of me any more.

So then, Maury kind of jumped all over me, y’know? He asked how come if I was such a good dad I wasn’t supporting my kid either?

Even the deadbeat dads joined in. I think this is the result of all those therapy programs at prisons. We’ve raised a whole generation of ex-cons who are in touch with their sensitive sides.

It was rough — Oprah, like I said, would have been a much better choice — but I stood up for myself, and Maury even said I was making a good case for parental responsibility in the abstract, if not in actuality. Eventually, we all hugged, and I got out of there alive.

The Maury people liked how I handled it, and they did a follow-up show a few weeks later, where they had me working with this psychic who said she could lead me to the cave again, but she couldn’t. We got a couple of TV shows out of it, including one where people who’ve been cheated by psychics confront the cheats. And then I met this guy that wanted to do a film script. When he finished it, he said, he was hoping they could get Ben Stiller or Luke Wilson to play me. I always liked Owen Wilson better than Luke, but apparently he wasn’t available or something.

Andrea

Well, it’s like I thought. Christy always lands on his feet.

We had a hard time getting along after we got back to Seattle. Before, we had mostly the same opinions about things, but now, it seemed like whatever he wanted to do was totally screwed. I don’t know why, but I just didn’t want to go along with his schemes. Me being pregnant made a difference, for sure. Christy was completely sure it’s his baby, but how could he be so sure of that? I didn’t rub his nose in it, but I think he knew there was something going on between me and Mickey. He would believe what he wanted to believe, just like he would tell the stories that get him the biggest reaction from other people, when you got right down to it, whether he believed them or not.

He wasn’t a bad dad, though. He’s very into the baby, and he doesn’t seem to care whose it is. When I was pregnant, he was always bugging me to eat right, and exercise, and all this stuff. And once little Baker arrived, Christy was all over me with baby-care advice from the shopping channel.

But, give me a break, I knew how to take care of a baby. I used to be a babysitter. It’s no big deal. Just keep them breathing and don’t drop them.

And of course my mother was delighted. She certainly didn’t think it was Christy’s baby. When Baker was born, she took one look at him, and she said, “We’ve got to talk.” And of course, when we sat down to talk, which was, with one thing and another, a month later, she wormed the whole story out of me, just as you have.

“I knew it,” she said. “I knew it. I had a dream.”

The thing that I wondered about was the story that Christy told — about him and the bigfoot baby. I mean, I’m the one that should have been on Oprah or something, technically. Mickey threw us out of the cave, after all — so didn’t that make him the deadbeat dad? I mean, really, if Mickey is Baker’s dad?

It’s kind of soon to tell, but there’s something about Baker that is so not like Christy.

So I watched the Maury show. It’s not something I’d ordinarily do, but I had to watch it, when he said he’d be on it.

It was a show on deadbeat dads, and while “deadbeat” probably does describe Christy pretty well, I didn’t figure that he was completely aware of that. So I thought there would be some acknowledgment by Christy of just where he went wrong, you know?

So I tuned in, and it wasn’t like Christy was actually on the show: Christy was in the audience. Why did I believe him, I thought. Had again.

And then, when he spoke up from the audience, and accused those young guest guys, I thought, what?! He wasn’t telling this straight. What was going on? And then I realized that he was talking about Mickey.

He even mentioned his name: he even called him Mickey. But he was talking about him like he was a girl. This I didn’t understand. Christy embroiders, you know, but he doesn’t usually tell bald-faced lies. It’s too easy to get caught, for one thing, telling bald-faced lies. Christy is smarter than that.

And he was crying like she broke his heart and stole his baby. Mickey? Hey! It’s my heart that was broken. I’m the one who got seduced and abandoned. Mickey’s the deadbeat dad, not you, I thought. And I’ve got the baby.