Alternadad

by Neal Pollack Narrated by Neal Pollack

Overview

In Alternadad, Neal Pollack offers a wonderfully candid account of his and his wife's attempt to bring up their son while still having fun and preserving their attachment to youth culture. For Pollack, this means bringing the boy to music festivals and teaching him about the history of rock and roll, and nothing brings joy to his heart like hearing his son say he wants to listen to the Ramones. It means having posters of Johnny Cash and not of Wilco, or learning that Baby Bear is a terrible show while Sesame Street rocks. It means teaching your son to be irreverent without being a bad kid. In the end, Alternadad is about learning to be a responsible parent who can also teach his son how to mosh. It also just might become the parenting bible for a new generation of parents trying to raise their kids in an increasingly homogenized and uptight culture.

Editorial Reviews

Neal Pollack doesn't need to convince us that he lives or wants to live on the fringe. His eccentricities are well documented in Never Mind the Pollacks and The Neal Pollack Anthology of America. But what happens when a wannabe rock star becomes a papa? Alternadad records Pollack's uneven progress toward the responsibilities of parenthood in a hilarious, often moving way. A baby manual for the truly unconventional.

Elissa Schappell

Childless readers who fear the un-cooling effects of parenthood will be relieved to learn kids, born slam dancers, really dig the Ramones, and will be heartened to see that Pollack, despite drinking chai with soymilk and listening to NPR, hasn’t become Mr. Rogers in a Black Sabbath T-shirt. Some readers with children will chuckle empathetically at the couple’s travails. Yep, our kid stuck rocks up his nose too!
— The New York Times

Publishers Weekly

His novel Never Mind the Pollacks, a hilarious treat, used a fictional "Neal Pollack" to parody the excesses and idiocy of current pop culture. But his self-awareness becomes more self-indulgent (though still witty) in this straightforward memoir of life with his artist wife, the couple's decision a few years ago to have a baby and the attendant strains that his son, Elijah, wreaks on their hipster lifestyle. Pollack details the kind of problems that can be found in almost every memoir on child-rearing, from how to clean up baby poop to figuring out how best to be a "Dad" while being a friend. But he never really defines what it is that makes his parenting so alternative other than that he wants to be a parent and still get high and stay out late. Nevertheless, Pollack hasn't lost his flair for tongue-in-cheek commentary ("I'd begun exerting cultural control over my son; I was going to shape his mind until he was exactly like me"). (Jan.) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

A rock-'n'-roll writer becomes a father and finds it wonderful. Pollack (Never Mind the Pollacks, 2003, etc.) was a hip single guy working the rock scene. Then he found fetching, quirky Regina from Nashville. She was the woman he was looking for, "a smart, confident, talented, patient, bossy, good-looking Southern nerd." So he married her. Soon, with the combined application of scientific method and the tried-and-true old-fashioned way, they made a baby. The proud daddy describes, perhaps in more detail than necessary, the birth of Elijah (9 lb, 10 oz), the best child ever. We learn of doulas and birthing techniques, obstetricians, grandparents, baby showers and, of course, the yeas and nays of circumcision ("Peeniegate"). There are narratives about schooling choices, butt rashes, applesauce, Elijah's attempts at walking and talking and his penchant for blood-drawing biting. The little nuclear family moves from Chicago to Philly to Austin (where there are neighborhood problems) and, as of last report, to L.A. Pollack's journal includes an excursus now and again regarding such matters as road trips with a band, his wife's anatomy and the salubrious effects of getting stoned on good grass. Elijah is now four, Dad is 36 and they are both growing up nicely. God job, Neal! Someday, Elijah will especially enjoy this history, and meanwhile, we can look forward to his Bar Mitzvah. Foolproof material, illustrated with snapshots proving Elijah's cuteness. Agent: Daniel Greenberg/Levine Greenberg Literary Agency

From the Publisher

Very funny. . .an honest and true story, just beyond the ordinary, of two people with a child trying to make their way in the world.”–Poets & Writers

“Hilarious. . .Bracingly honest, and so full of love it could just as easily go in the Parenting section, next to Anne Lamont's classic, Operating Instructions. . .Alternadad gives comfort, with a bonus of lots of laughs, to every parent who is just doing the best he can.”–The Plain Dealer

“Hilarious and emotional. . .an amusingly cranky memoir.”–The New York Times Book Review

“Pollack's candid account of his escapades is a refreshing antidote to the ultrasensitive, get-it-all-right mommy struggles that can make every parent feel even more overwhelmed and inadequate.”–The New York Post

“Pollack treats the subject of fatherhood with humor and honesty...Never resorting to Bill Cosby-Fatherhood-type wit and witticisms, he succeeds in writing about parenting and reveals himself as an ever-evolving writer who's not afraid to call life as he sees it.”–Playboy

“Surprisingly heartwarming, considerably jarring and funny as fuck.”–Philadelphia City Paper

“Very funny. . . Neal Pollack chronicles his version of rock ‘n roll fatherhood.”–Child

“Revelatory and funny . . . More traditional dads surely love their kids just as much, but rarely has the bond felt more moving than it does here.”–Los Angeles Times Book Review

“Both laugh-out-loud funny and cry-softly poignant. . . it just may be the most offbeat book about parenting ever written. . . makes the reader break out into smiles nearly constantly.”–Booklist

“Engaging...Pollack is...America's postmodern Erma Bombeck.”–Texas Monthly

“Witty...Pollack hasn't lost his flair for tongue-in-cheek commentary.”–Publisher's Weekly

“Hilarious. . . [his son] Elijah is. . . a precocious child with the face of a Botticelli and the temperament of Dennis the Menace.”–The Los Angeles Times

“Eminently readable...observant, witty, and smart.”–Library Journal

“With his new memoir, the recovered satirist follows in the grand tradition of books like Bill Cosby's Fatherhood. For Pollack, it's a drastic reversal...but we're lucky that he acquiesced.”–Details

"Alternadad is peppered with the scary-funny one-liners we’ve come to expect from the intriguing American crank Neal Pollack. But it's also a surprisingly romantic tale of love and hope and even civic-minded warmth, set amidst the dingier blocks of Chicago and Austin and the trash-can fires of Philadelphia."

—Sarah Vowell, author of Assassination Vacation

OCT/NOV 07 - AudioFile

A freelance writer and humorist, determined to protect his newborn son from today’s shallow culture, becomes a different type of father—“alternadad.” Pollack is extremely funny as he describes his bawdy and unconventional youth, and his reluctant path toward marriage and fatherhood. His stories, ranging from his own early years to his son’s preschool years, have an outrageous counterculture edge. They convey the good-hearted soul of this struggling artist, as well as his flaws and occasional stupidity. Pollack’s reading contributes to the enormous appeal of this audio. He sounds thoroughly spontaneous, boisterous in just the right amounts, and consistently hilarious. He’s a musician and pop music fanatic, so young fathers with these interests will feel even more connected with this hugely entertaining audio. T.W. © AudioFile 2007, Portland, Maine

Product Details

BN ID:	2940170560592
Publisher:	Recorded Books, LLC
Publication date:	06/06/2008
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

Alternadad

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By Neal Pollack

Pantheon

Copyright © 2007 Neal Pollack
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0375423621

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Chapter 1

Positively Chase Avenue

1993–1997



In the early 1990s, years before I became a father, I lived in a neighborhood called Rogers Park, on the far North Side of Chicago. The neighborhood held a dozen blocks north to south that were lined with wide, shady trees. Thick-grained Lake Michigan beaches made up its eastern border. But despite its natural advantages, Rogers Park wasn't one of the fancier parts of Chicago at the time. We didn't get the upscale retro diners, loft condos, or bars that catered to Indiana University graduates who seemed to spread throughout the city as if hatched from pods. Instead, the streets of Rogers Park dripped of mild neglect. This made them interesting but not particularly dangerous.

The apartment buildings in my neighborhood looked a little ragged, but you often heard guitars playing from inside them as you walked. No major trend had touched the neighborhood in decades; the people who lived there deliberately defied trendiness. The nightlife tried but failed. Hip-hop DJs, start-up rock bands, and small independent film societies ran up against the same frustrations. No one in the neighborhood could afford to go out, unless they could, and then they went out in other neighborhoods. My cohabitants were poets and drunks, low-end shop owners and itinerant musicians, union organizers and shifty-eyed permanent graduatestudents who slept on the floor. At the time, I described the people of Rogers Park as the sediment left over after you put the city of Chicago through a sifter. It was a neighborhood for people who didn't belong in any other neighborhood.

I lived on Chase Avenue, at the far northern end of the city, in a quasi-communal apartment with a female construction worker from rural North Carolina named Rachel. We shared the apartment with a thin- fingered graduate student who possessed a bad temper and a cat whose name, Trakl, will be obscure except to those familiar with Norwegian philosophy. I had the room off the living room, which was separated from the rest of the apartment by a plyboard wall painted with a mural depicting lush greenery that somehow also managed to be ugly. Previous residents of the apartment had constructed it during a drunken party, and it looked like something that amateurs slapped up during a weekend fund-raiser at an elementary school. They'd included one nice feature, a window from which I could peek out onto the rest of the apartment, like a guest star dropping in on Pee-wee's Playhouse. I got an actual window view as well, of a parking lot and beyond that a concrete pier and a gray swirl of Lake Michigan surf.

Rachel was a hippie, albeit one who spent her nights reading Russian novels. She hung out with a loose coalition of assorted weirdos. Some of her friends even had children, or were in the process of making children, which I couldn't believe.

Her best friend had a little daughter, about four or five. The girl seemed perfectly happy. She ran around barefoot and dressed like a princess, as a little girl must. But she also colored and read books in a dingy café while her mom smoked cigarettes and did her own homework. Sure, my mom had gone to graduate school when I was a kid, and sure, she'd smoked a lot of cigarettes back when that was socially acceptable in the suburbs, but hanging out in a café? That was crazy. My parents only took us to Chinese restaurants. The little girl's parents attributed her conception to a bottle of wine, a lack of birth control, and a Hawkwind album. They lived in an apartment and were marginally employed! How, I wondered, could people like this possibly have kids?

In Rogers Park, it seemed impossible to be any kind of parent other than an eccentric one. One couple I got to know, Brian and Sue Kozin, owned the No Exit Café, a place that had existed in several shades of brown since 1958 and practically screamed Leo Kottke Slept Here. They raised three kids in a world of folk music, bad poetry, and men with food in their beards who played backgammon and Go for money. I hung out with them from time to time because I liked them, but also because I had trouble believing they were real. I wanted to say, You're parents? But you make your own jewelry and attend Native American coming-of-age ceremonies in South Dakota! It's not possible. My father is president of the Phoenix Rotary Club and eats hot dogs at Costco. That's what dads are supposed to do.

I became friends with a guy named Lou, a Vietnam veteran and computer animation specialist in his early fifties who liked to drink, and had therefore met all the women in the neighborhood under thirty who went to bars. He threw Sunday potluck dinners at his condo, which he shared with a rotating roster of young roommates, a pit bull, and an utterly horrifying hairless twenty-one-year-old cat. The dinners were like a halfway house version of Brigadoon. Every poet, freeloader, harmonica player, and semi-insane drug fiend in the neighborhood showed up, sometimes as many as a hundred a week, only to disappear until the next dinner. This went on for years and eventually led to the cancellation of the dinners because Lou had a taste for the finer meats and couldn't afford the filchers anymore. I went nearly every week and filched as well, though I was one of the few people who at least brought a bottle of wine or a six-pack.

Lou had two children, late-teenage variety, that hung out at the potlucks. His daughter sang folk songs, played the guitar, and sometimes kissed girls. His son dropped in and out of college and seemed to like to hang around his dad all the time. Then there was another son, a little red-haired kid who was ten when I met him. Lou would drive to South Carolina every summer to fetch the kid from the kid's mother. He and the kid did a lot of normal things, like go to the beach and roller-skate and play basketball, but the kid also spent a lot of time at restaurants with bars, where Lou drank beer.

Lou didn't seem like a worse parent, or a better one, than any other I'd known. It had never occurred to me that kids would choose to hang out with their parents. I would no sooner go out drinking with my dad than I would go skydiving with him. And while my folks had always been very generous about throwing parties, I really couldn't imagine them, or want them to consider, smoking pot with my friends.

I grew up in high-upper-middle-class suburban Phoenix. When we moved there, in 1977, my father was a marketing executive for a large corporate hotel chain. His employment situation, and our material circumstances, went up and down throughout my childhood. But we were never forced to abandon our house, which had an unobstructed view of Camelback Mountain and its adjacent two acres of uncultivated desert brush. We had orange, lemon, grapefruit, and fig trees, a kidney- shaped swimming pool, and a cool, inviting back porch. I got my own shag-carpeted bedroom with built-in bookshelves, a desk, and corkboard; it was the size of an average Manhattan studio apartment, with a connecting bathroom that had a glass-stalled shower and Saltillo tile floors. My parents planted us in a pretty exclusive neighborhood. My first Arizona playmate, a neighbor from down the road, was the heir to the Campbell's Soup fortune.

This was a land where parents were named Diane and Ted. They coached baseball, ran bake sales to raise money for the eighth-grade cheerleading squad, and had closets bigger than most people's garages. Several friends of mine practiced on personal tennis courts. On the other hand, the father of the kid whom I'd carpooled with to Hebrew school went to jail for some naughty legal work he did for Charles Keating. The dad of one of my co-editors on the high school paper suffered a similar fate for running a corrupt S&L. Those kinds of things never happened to parents in Rogers Park.

I knew a young Rogers Park woman who'd worked in every café in the neighborhood. When I learned that she had a little daughter, it just seemed impossible.

"But she sleeps with guys!" I said to Rachel.

"So?" Rachel said.

"She has a kid!"

"And what's your point?"

I really was that naïve. But suddenly, parenthood no longer seemed like something exclusive to stable adults in boring suburbs. It seemed like everyone I knew suddenly had kids. Maybe, I thought, a guy like me could become a dad after all.



About a year and two roommates after I moved in with Rachel, her friend Ned came to live with us. Ned had a lot of problems. He got really depressed. Sometimes he thought that vampires were hovering outside the apartment and that they wanted to eat his brain while he slept, neither of which he could objectively prove. He wasn't capable of working a normal job, or of waking up before noon, but he was quite sweet and funny, played bass reasonably well, and could draw brilliantly, though to no end other than filling sketchbook upon sketchbook.

Ned was kind, almost guileless. He was also a dad. Years before, he'd gotten his high school girlfriend pregnant. She'd kept the baby, and he'd left town. He knew his daughter, a little. Sometimes he'd visit his hometown for a week or two and come back with pictures of his smiling girl. He became the star exhibit in a Museum of Weird Parenthood that existed only in my mind. When my parents came to visit, I liked to show him off, as if to say, "See, not everyone lives in bourgeois comfort like you do." My mom, who'd spent much of her teenage life hanging out with actors in Greenwich Village, and my dad, who'd grown up in the Bronx with Jewish parents who'd left Germany, not by choice, in the mid-1930s, weren't impressed with the bohemian authenticity of my circumstances. I, on the other hand, looked at Ned as a piece of living, breathing outsider art, and couldn't believe that my life had moved in such a fascinating direction, or that it contained such original people.

Somewhere along this important voyage of personal discovery, I got my own place. Rachel moved back to North Carolina with a boyfriend. Ned became the senior resident of the apartment on Chase Avenue, which was by now so far removed from the original lessees that it had become a de facto squat. I started hearing stories. Hanging out at the No Exit Café, Ned met Jill, a sophomore journalism student from Northwestern, my alma mater. They drove around in her car all night, talking. For days they talked and talked and then they were in love. I went over to the apartment for dinner one night, and it was a lot cleaner than it'd been the last time. Jill had moved in.

They got a little careless with the birth control. Jill wasn't feeling so good one evening. The next day, she and Ned took a bus to the doctor on Western Avenue, who told them the news. They went to a diner and gazed at each other over their favorite sandwich, which they shared because they could only afford one. The next time I saw Ned, he said, "Jill and I are having a baby."

"Oh," I said. "That's great."

"I'm gonna get a job."

"Good for you."

"I want to be a real dad this time."

"I think you'll be a wonderful dad."

In reality, I had no idea, because I didn't know what it meant to be a wonderful dad, or any kind of dad at all. Here were a college student and an unemployed, mentally ill musician, and they were about to bring a child into the world. My head nearly exploded at the thought. I had to understand. One night, I went over to the apartment and sat them down.

"I want to do a story about you guys," I said.

Soon after moving to Rogers Park, I'd been hired as a reporter at a weekly "alternative" newspaper. It wasn't a typical job. I never had to go into the office unless I wanted to, and I usually didn't want to. My editors gave me few deadlines and even fewer assignments. I was completely free. On days when I didn't have anything else to do, which were frequent, I'd hop the El and ride it to a stop I'd never visited before. I covered whole wards with my notebook and tape recorder, hanging out in taverns and junkyards, on piss-stained Lake Michigan piers and in strangers' basements. Every experience seemed important and precious. I conducted four-hour interviews with coffeehouse owners and popcorn-stand proprietors and played beach volleyball with drag queens. Among my friends I counted a Colombian cab driver, a Korean liquor-store owner, a flamboyantly gay black barbecue entrepreneur, and an eighty-year-old former exotic dancer who illegally sold used furniture from her front yard in the shadow of Wrigley Field.

But I wanted to write a story that, to me, exemplified the neighborhood I called home. Ned and Jill were it. I approached my editor with the story idea.

"It's about hippies having kids," I said.

My editor wasn't impressed. She had two children herself.

"No, really," I said. "It's a good story. It's emblematic of the culture of the neighborhood."

Every editor has his or her weak spots, and writers who don't want to work very hard need to discover those weak spots if they want to survive. I'd hit on one of her tics. My paper, like many urban weeklies, specialized in amateur urban anthropology, and I was a leading practitioner.

"All right," she said. "But keep me updated."

That meant "call me in three months."

"No problem," I said.

I went to the doctor with Ned and Jill. We got a sonogram. Jill and I went shopping for vitamins. Once a week, I attended birthing classes, which were conducted on soft pillows in the den of a late-nineteenth- century house in Evanston owned by a young, good-looking couple to whom the Clinton years had obviously been kind. We sat for hours in Ned and Jill's apartment talking about their dreams and possible baby names. Jill would go to school part-time, and also work part-time. Ned would work part-time, too, and take care of the baby when Jill was busy. He really wanted to be a hands-on dad. Theirs, they thought, was the perfect setup. It was hard for me to keep a reportorial distance, so I got excited along with them. I felt a little bit like a member of the third gender in Stranger in a Strange Land, though I hate it when people use the verb "to grok."

Continues...

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Excerpted from Alternadad by Neal Pollack Copyright © 2007 by Neal Pollack. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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