My Dad isn’t your cookie-cutter All-American father. He doesn’t ride a lawnmower or wax the car in the driveway. When it comes to tools, his handiwork is relegated to using a butter knife to screw in the batteries for the remote control. He doesn’t even have an alcohol problem; one Pinot Greeg and done. Half of you are thinking, “Okay, so your Dad is a faggot”, the other half is thinking, “ Okay, so your Dad is a Jew”. The former is debatable, but the latter is dead on. His Semitic qualities are only compounded by the fact that he looks exactly like Larry David. Not only is he a dead ringer for LD, but his life is also quite Curb-esque.
It was Christmas break and I was twelve years old. Like most Jewy New Yorkers, my family would flock down to Boca Raton to escape the cold and free ourselves from the oppressive stranglehold of Jesus Christ. In particular, Boca’s Mizner Park shopping center becomes the hot spot for Jews to congregate and discuss whose frequent flyer program saved them the most money on the flight down to Florida. In Mizner there is a popular ice cream parlor called Sloan’s. Sloan’s is rife with kitschy bullshit; 5 lb gummy bears, model trains that deliver your order, and a bathroom with a see-through glass door.
The last thing is actually pretty cool. You open the glass bathroom door, go inside and press a button. When you press the button, the glass fogs up, giving you the necessary privacy. One might view the see-through fog door as unnecessary. But Sloan’s knows that the Jews will go back to New York and brag to their other Jew friends about the “crazy fog door in Boca, ya hafta checkitout!”
I didn’t even wait to head north. I tried it, and rushed over to Dad. He and his large prostate were intrigued, so I took his place in line as he went to test it out. Before
I could order my cup of Dulce de leche, I was distracted by giggling and whispers. Being a self-conscious pre-teen, I was immediately concerned that I sprouted a random boner or something of the like.
“What’s wrong?” I asked the cashier.
“Look over there, that guy didn’t press the button”
There was my Dad, pants around his ankles, squeezing out a shit in all his hairy-legged splendor. He grunted and twisted his body like someone dropping a deuce in a cheesy comedy. The performance seemed to last for hours.
He was so enamored with the gadget that he didn’t notice an ice cream store full of Jews laughing at his foible. It wasn’t even the fact that my dad was grunting and churning out feces in public, it was that the fact that he was doing so in that public. My entire hometown was there!
My heart sank as I saw my middle-school crush, Jenna Richman, walk out of Sloan’s with her parents. “What a douchebag” her father quipped.
Bar-Mitzvah king Brian Kronengold wasn’t nearly as kind.” If I was that guy’s family, I’d kill myself”.
I did the next best thing,I switched my Puma visor from upside-down backwards to right-side forwards and stormed out. My mom was waiting outside. I tried to tell her what happened but she already overhead a couple leaving the store and guessed Dad was the offender. This wasn’t her first rodeo with David Krumholz. In fact, people were leaving like they just saw a movie, going over the details of the defecation. To an insecure sixth-grader, this was my personal Holocaust. Out strolled my father, blissfully ignorant.
“That bathroom thing is pretty cool, huh?”
I didn’t speak to him for three days, and haven’t been back to Boca since.
Now that I’m older, I appreciate my Dad’s foibles. It was funny as shit (pun very much intended) and hell, he paid for this laptop, who am I to judge? So let this be a reminder to you younger bros- Dad may have his shortcomings, but it’s those quirks that will make you smile in the future. Unless he touched you.
Got any good Dad stories? Think mine sucked? Think I made it up? Call Sloan’s and revel in my misery. Leave it all in the Comments section!!!
Krum is an NYC based comedian. Follow him on Twitter @KrumLifeDotCom
[Father and son image via ShutterStock]
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