No way would I ever be the parent of a teenage child if I weren’t one already.
My son turned 15 this month has used the occasion as an excuse to intensify the sullen obtuseness that has characterized his behaviour since he turned 13.
He has almost pared down his vocabulary to one vowel: uh! Though occasionally if feeling impassioned will expand to a testy OK!
‘How are you today, Jamie?’ I might ask him.
‘Uh,’ he will reply.
‘How was school?’
‘Uh.’
‘Have you done your homework?’
‘Uh.’ His school doesn’t ever assign him homework on some fantastic belief that its pupils will go home and review and preview by themselves without being explicitly told what to do. I assume that the headmaster once ate the wrong kind of wild mushrooms on a field trip. I therefore have less idea what ‘uh’ means in this context than I usually do.
‘Would you like tea or milk with your dinner?’
‘Uh.’
‘Would you like me to fill your underpants with itching powder and stuff jelly beans up your nose?’
‘Uh.’
Yesterday, Jamie came home from school and stomped around the house and beat walls and furniture in rhythm to baseball songs (which sound alarmingly like the tunes broadcast by the right wing sound trucks that patrol Osaka). I was upstairs working, trying to write a review of Philip Roth’s Everyman in just 250 words, a task that doesn’t go well with thuds, crashes and demands to show North Korea who’s boss. I went downstairs and told him I was working and got the customary single syllable, which I inferred on this occasion meant he was just playing with the cat.
Shortly after I came down again to recharge my bucket of tea and found him playing PlayStation baseball. Jamie wants to be a professional baseball player but is unfortunately utterly crap at the game. I think there are small green frogs getting ready to spawn in the neighbourhood paddies that stand a better chance of playing baseball professionally than Jamie. I therefore asked him whether lounging on the sofa at 3:30 on a Friday afternoon playing TV games was good preparation for a career in top-level competitive sports, especially when he had practice and team selection the following day and has in three years failed to make the team once.
‘Uh,’ he told me.
I told him then in no uncertain terms that the next morning his mother would be getting up at 3:30, yes, 3:30, to make bento and prepare his stuff, yes, his stuff, ready for baseball, which began at 5:30 some god-awful back end of nowhere, that she did everything for him while he made no effort at all and that his mother was working harder at baseball, his chosen career, than he was. I then suggested going out running, or doing some weight training or practicing swinging or work on stretching muscles with the rubber tube things.
To which I received the testy ‘OK!’ Point made, discussion won, I went back to work.
Thereafter whenever I took my half-hourly trip to the kitchen to attend to my tea addiction there Jamie was, lounging on the sofa still playing PS baseball. Incidentally, he fixes the game preferences so that he can’t lose and wins every game 15-0 while retaining a glowingly obvious sense of achievement on each occasion.
Eventually I had to remind him of our earlier conversation (or my earlier monologue). To my astonishment I actually got a sentence out of him: ‘Yeah, I’m going to.’ No sense, however, of 90 minutes lost workout time that had passed since I first raised the subject of not lounging on the sofa wasting time.
That was about 5pm. At 5:45 he left the house to practice pitch and catch with his brother and go to the batting centre to whack a few balls. 6:45 he was back on the sofa watching kids cartoons on the telly.
3:30 this morning his mother was in the kitchen cooking. 4:15 Jamie got out of bed, turned on the hall light and went down. 4:20, I irritably got up and turned off the hall light because it was shining directly on my face. I have to leave the bedroom door wedged open or the cat digs holes in it during the night. 4:30 Jamie came back upstairs and turned the hall light back on. Then he went downstairs again singing baseball songs and thudding his bag on the wall to provide the bass line. 4:40 I got up again to turn the fucking hall light off.
Of course, the true obtuseness of the teen only comes to the fore when challenged about their mobile phone bill. Jamie is regularly the biggest spender of the three of us in the family that have phones. Three months ago Jamie’s bill peaked at 8,000 yen. My bill for that month was 4,500 yen, and I use my phone for work. Two months later he has heroically struggled to get his bill down to a shade under 7,000yen.
Looking aghast him over this latest billing atrocity I told him, ‘Don’t keep using the phone!’
He looked very aggrieved, pained even. Traduced. ‘I don’t!’ he exclaimed.
‘So why is the bill nearly 7,000yen?’
‘I don’t know!’ he insisted. Perhaps some evil telephone demon had slipped in his window during the night and phoned all its friends in Evil Telephone Demon Land.
‘You’re downloading lots of rubbish,’ I suggested.
‘No, I’m not. My friends keep sending me email.’ At which point my will to continue collapsed. My wife is face down on the kitchen table in exhausted semi-consciousness, too dazed to join in the fight, the telly is blaring crap, my son is the victim of mysterious forces that run up huge phone bills and I am obviously just getting in the way.
‘Uh,’ I told everyone and disappeared into my room with a bottle.