"To DUMP!"

Why I thought my father a fool for too long

Mar 01, 2026

Did Gen-X start the whole thing of parents deliberately embarrassing their kids as a fun prank? It certainly couldn’t have been the Boomers, who have still never let go of their notion that they are forever cool, mainly because they were the first generation of teenagers with disposable income to be actively targeted by advertising.

My father’s notion of being cool was a little different. He tuned in to the whole folk revival, and while he was never into hardcore outdoor camping like a real backpacker, the notion of a cabin without full modern conveniences seemed to appeal. (We used to get crickets coming up through the kitchen sink all the time, because “Nobody’s putting chemicals down the sink in my house!”)

He also maintained the sense of humor shorthand he’d developed with his college friends, during the one period in life he cut loose and got drunk constantly. And that stuck, but it combined with a kind of hippie exhibitionism that we’ll get to.

Anyway, this story is about a time we were in England, circa probably 1986. The house we were staying at had what an appraiser might call functional obsolescence – one of the guest bedrooms required walking through a bathroom. Said bedroom being where I was staying.

So I’m hanging out with one of the kids there, and my dad comes back from wherever he’s been – every time he got home anywhere, he would always immediately search out where I was. I forget the details of where he had been, but after briefly telling us, he added, “I gotta go poop, but I better not do it in here, or I’ll STANK UP LUKE’S BEDROOM.” I don’t think we reacted to that the way he had hoped, finding it gross rather than funny. But the conversation was wrapping up, and as he turned to leave, he ended it on. “I need to poop.”

Then he took a beat..

“TO DUMP!”

Now, understand, this was way before Beavis and Butt-head, and this was phraseology I’d never heard before. I suspect he had heard it only recently, and was kind of trying it out on the tongue. Irish and English kids didn’t even say “poop,” so I was treated like a fool as a kid for doing so, and stopped.

But understand – this fell into a certain expectation about my dad that I found quite uncomfortable. He was, again, something of an exhibitionist, borne not just of the hippie era but also coming up as a kid with PTSD-alcoholic parents who’d walk around the house at night naked, slamming doors. As an adult, my father ignored the whole concept of a bathroom door, and he was the type to swim naked in my uncle’s pool, even if kids were around. It didn’t occur to him that that was inappropriate, because he thought nudity was natural and society was just inhibited. (I should also add into his psychological mix the love of art history, including lots of Renaissance-era paintings and sculptures that were nudes.) He did read Playboys, though, so he understood that at least when it came to women, there was an erotic aspect to nudity.

He really wanted to normalize bathroom stuff as being in the open, though. At fancy dinner parties in Ireland, he thought it appropriate to talk about my mother’s bowel movements. He’d try to get me to use the commode while he still wasn’t finished brushing his teeth. He insisted there be no lock on the bathroom door, because again “No internal locks in my house.” He’d talk about the cat’s bodily functions. At times it seemed he’d take any excuse to insert “poop” into the conversation. He’d announce his own every time.

So that one quote stuck, and every time he’d do something annoying, or whine at me (he did not yell, but rather whined, in a high-pitched strain, “oooooohhhh, son, don’t do thaaaaat!”) I’d mentally think, “This is the guy who says ‘Ah need tuh POOP! TUH DUMP! HUH HUH HUH’” He did not actually laugh like that, but in my head caricature he did. And the number of times he’d walk naked around the house, drinking orange juice directly out of the carton, only contributed to this caricature.

My father was quite the scholar. But that was the side he showed at work, not home.

I would suggest to parents that if you prank your kid by being deliberately embarrassing, you apologize afterward. Make clear you were fucking around. Because that quote has lived rent-free in my head for decades now as a defining thing my dad said. If you don’t want your dumbest thing to define you, clarify that it was meant to be dumb.

I don’t really want it there. I’m putting this story down on pixels to get it out of my head. Because there was so much more to him than that. It’s to my shame that I never really respected his level of knowledge and fandom of paintings that mostly bored me; I have, in my own life, made a point of trying to meet people where they are in terms of film appreciation, because he was unable to do that for me with art. Again, I should have tried to meet him on his turf a bit more. But that’s another topic.

Today he would have turned 79. I wish he were here.