Father Knows Pests

My parents routinely confused me with neighborhood children. I missed a month of school in the fourth grade, and the teacher never knew it. I had brown hair, brown eyes, was average in height and weight, and became invisible in a crowd, a veritable chameleon on a leaf. I blended in with such consummate skill that I could have robbed a bank each day, left behind my picture, and still evaded capture.

The dash of red in my otherwise beige life was my father’s vocation. He was a seller of bug spray, one of three in Indiana employed by Johnson Wax of Racine, Wisconsin. To say he was a seller of bug spray is to say Tiger Woods dabbles in golf. In two separate years, my father sold more bug spray than any other bug-spray salesman in these United States. My father was a bug-spray evangelist, plying his craft with a zeal ordinarily associated with revivalists.

Each year in school, on Career Day, we would give an account of our fathers’ occupations. It was my one day to shine. My peers were children of postmen, farmers, grocery clerks, and accountants. Joe Bryant’s father was a police officer, but in a town where nothing happened, which dimmed the glow. When it came my turn to report, I would stand near the chalkboard, clear my throat, and announce, “My father is a leader in the pesticide industry.” I stared off into the distance, appearing regretful. “The Black Plague caused 75 million deaths. Spread by fleas.” I drew a flea on the chalkboard, making it look especially villainous by adding fangs and a stinger. “If my father had been there, it wouldn’t have happened.”

I walked over to the globe, spun it around to the Middle East, and jabbed a finger in the vicinity of Palestine. “1915. Locust plague. Lasted eight months, from March to October. Stripped the whole country of vegetation. My father could have stopped it dead in its tracks.”

Randy Watson, whose father worked at the Coliseum and hobnobbed with Dick the Bruiser and the Indiana Pacers, hung his head. “I wish my dad was in the pesticide industry,” he muttered. It was all my peers could do not to hoist me on their shoulders and crown me king.

In addition to its prestige, my father’s job had other glories. Nearly every week my dad would bring home bug-spray promotional items for our enjoyment—bug telephones, bug T-shirts, bug coffee mugs, bug backpacks, bug coolers, bug umbrellas, and my personal favorite, a bug radio with bug antennae that could be extended to pull in WLW all the way from Cincinnati. On summer nights, we would carry the bug radio out to the porch, point the bug antennae to the southeast, dial in WLW, and listen to Marty Brennaman and Joe Nuxhall announce Reds games.

My father’s job involved a fair amount of travel. He would pack his bags and kiss us goodbye, telling us he was headed to Fort Wayne or Toledo. But I knew he was trying to spare us the worry, that he was actually headed off to some remote location to fight a bug infestation. At mealtime, I would stare at his vacant chair and try not to think of him in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula battling swarms of black flies, or at the Texas border beating back an invasion of killer bees. My sister would burst into tears, flee from the table, and run to the bathroom to compose herself. A week later, my father would return, his eyes haunted, his body swollen with bites. I would climb onto his lap and plead with him to talk about his experiences, but he never would.

Eventually, Dad transferred to his company’s furniture-polish division and began selling paste wax. Soon it was Career Day again. To Joe Bryant’s immense good fortune, his father had been shot in the foot. More precisely, in the little toe of his right foot. Not to put too fine a point on it, but he did it himself, while sitting in his patrol car cleaning his sidearm. But still, it was a police-action shooting, and Joe told his account well, skipping over the less-pertinent details to dwell on the more exhilarating parts.

By then, word of my father’s transfer to the wax department had made its way around town, and my standing had plummeted. When I rose and walked to the chalkboard, there were a few titters, and Rusty Fender hit me with a spitball and called me Waxboy.