Blank Confession by Pete Hautman

same as
being
brilliant?”
    â€œNo. What you’re
doing
is
saying.
”
    â€œYeah, well I say you’re a crunk monkey.”
    Dad had clamped his jaw shut and was looking off into the distance. I wondered what would have come out of his mouth if he hadn’t been working so hard to keep it in.
    Shayne must have noticed it too. He said, “Mr. Martin, how does it feel to live in a house filled with philosophers?”
    â€œPhilosophers?” He gave Shayne an uncomprehending look.
    Shayne said, “Yeah, like the nature of reality: If you say something, does that make it real? Like when Mikey says, ‘crunk monkey,’ does that mean crunk monkeys actually exist?”
    Dad looked at Shayne with an odd, brow-crinkling expression—maybe trying to figure out if he was being teased.
    Shayne said, “It’s exactly like philosophy, only without all the—you know—logic and stuff. And with crunk monkeys.”
    Dad said, “What
is
a ‘crunk monkey?’”
    â€œApparently,
I
am a crunk monkey,” said Marie, giving me her squinchy face.
    Dad laughed; it was like a balloon popping. All the tension went out of the room, tension I hadn’t even known was there.
    Dad loosened up and asked Shayne who he favored in the next presidential election.
    â€œDad, he doesn’t care about politics,” I said. “He can’t even vote!”
    â€œJust because you’re too young to vote doesn’t mean you shouldn’t know who you would vote for if you could vote,” Dad said. Like crunk monkey logic, that made sense only if you didn’t think about it too hard.
    Shayne said, “Who will
you
be voting for, sir?”
    Dad told him, then spent an eternity explaining why. Shayne listened attentively, nodding in all the right places. By the time he finished, Dad had convinced himself that everyone at the table agreed with everything he had said. Of course, nobody disagreed because nobody wanted to keep talking about it.
    I don’t want to give the impression that my dad is as boring as a crunk monkey. But he can be tedious when it comes to certain subjects. Politics, for example. Or submersible pumps. Do
not
get him started on submersible pumps. He engineers pumps for his job, and engineers are the most boring people on the planet when they talk about their work. He can go on about pumps for hours.
    Once we were done discussing politics, Marie tried to move the conversation on to recent movies. Bad idea. Thelast movie my parents went to was
Schindler’s List
, before I was born. But that didn’t stop Dad from talking about it all the way through dessert. Shayne’s attentive nodding became robotic, and Marie was rolling her eyes so hard I could almost hear them squeak. Finally, I interrupted him and said Shayne and I were hoping to shoot some baskets before it got dark.
    Once Shayne and I got outside I said, “Sorry about my dad.”
    â€œWhy?” Shayne asked.
    â€œHe can go on a bit.”
    â€œI like your dad,” he said. “He’s intense.”
    â€œI like him too, but he’s my
dad.
” I grabbed the basketball and made a jump shot from the side. Swish.
    â€œHORSE,” I said, and passed the ball to Shayne.
    My dad, who is six feet two inches tall, put up the basketball net when I was in kindergarten. It took me until the second grade to make my first basket. From that moment on, I dreamed of becoming the next Shaquille O’Neal. I got pretty good for a guy my size—but I’m still waiting for that growth spurt.
    Shayne duplicated my shot. I dribbled the ball halfway down the driveway and sank an underhanded lob.
    â€œYou’re lucky,” Shayne said.
    â€œPure skill,” I said.
    â€œI mean, you’re lucky to have such a great dad.”
    â€œOh.” I didn’t know what to say to that. Shayne’s dad was in Afghanistan or wherever, and here I was complaining