UNITED STATES—The new school year was scarcely five days old, and there had already begun a punishing ritual, the round of birthday parties among my daughter’s eighth grade schoolmate. One party after another spread across the calendar—it must be mostly a girl thing. Never does the concept of entitlement become so excruciatingly clear as when my daughter pronounces, “I have to buy a gift.” What she really means is, you, Dad, YOU have to buy a gift.
And my fury slowly begins to build—she must get a gift for $15. If it’s not $15 dollars, it isn’t a gift. But $10 is my limit. This elicits, “Da-ad, you’re so cheap.”
Also, instead of giving cash, she must buy a gift card (the most moronic thing ever invented), so this entails leaving my Hollywood haunts, buying a stinking gift card and driving her over to Beverly Hills for the party.
Well, I dropped my princess off at the rec center in Roxbury Park, where the party was being held. The agreement was to come back and pick her up at six o’clock. For me this meant cooling my heels in the Beverly Hills Public Library for the duration—no way I was going to drive to Hollywood and back to be at my house for 15 minutes before being called, “Come and get me.”
Despite the best planning, though, I still ended up driving to Hollywood and back. You see, by the time I got back to Roxbury Park, the birthday princess and her ladies in waiting were plotting under the toy palm trees, near the playground dinosaurs.
“We’ve decided to go to Octavia’s house,” said my daughter. “I’ll call you when I get back.”
“It’ll be two hours,” one of the girls assured me, in response to my troubled face.
I could already sense my parental authority had been trampled on and feel the sickly caving in to peer pressure, as the other princesses in party dresses traipsed toward a car, one of the mom’s has already started. Keep the peace, I thought. Yet surely another explosive grain had been added to my slowly building powder keg. I was already primed by the gift card, the hours in the library (not unpleasant ones, mind you), and now the dreaded trip to Hollywoodand back.
Eight o’clock rolled around and I was en route cross town again to 316 Roxbury, the address I’d been given. She called again, my bundle of joy. “We’d like to have a sleepover,” she said. “Please go over to Mommy’s house, since it’s on the way, and pick up my pajamas… and, oh, there’s a bottle of perfume in the far-left drawer in the bathroom.”
It all took a moment to settle in—this was not what we’d agreed to. This was unacceptable: trying to un-nail what had been previously nailed down. I called her back and the appropriate words tumbled out of my mouth, “When I come by, prepare to get your butt to the car.”
Twenty minutes later I arrived at a floodlit hacienda on S. Roxbury that would definitely qualify as a mansion. Party music thumped up through the trees in the back. I pressed the buzzer and nobody answered. I waited and waited. No parent or child appeared. The wooden gates for cars and another gate for people were sealed tight. Now quite beside myself, I called the cell number my daughter had been calling from and got the most insouciant recorded message, a sort of Valley Girl semi-rapped, “I’m too busy to play phone tag; I’m gonna blow you off. Say something after the beep, see if I care.” I now considered leaping over the barriers of the walled compound—this was too much, theseBeverly Hills kids’ rude messages and thinking they can call the shots. I’d had it.
Then my cell phone rang: it was my daughter. She was waiting for me onRexford Drive, not Roxbury. I was saved from breaking and entering the wrong house. When I pulled up to the front of the right house, an apartment complex on Rexford, denoted by a cluster of moms and girls standing on the curb out front, my daughter obediently emerged.
The sleepover had magically fizzled, no doubt nixed by other parents who kept their boundaries firm. All was well as we headed home for Hollywood.
Humorist Grady Miller is the author of the humor collection “Late Bloomer,” available on Amazon. He can be reached at grady.miller@canyon-news.com.
