Watching Scarface With My Son

by Rebecca Schoenkopf

I am not the sheltering type. My son does not have virgin ears. I believe sheltered children grow up to be priggish adults, and I’d rather my son be the kid in trouble for cussing than the kid who tattles because someone cussed. Before eighth grade started, I even gave him a few lessons in creative linguistics. He’s little, like Tanner in The Bad News Bears; at least he can have a mouth on him. (Minus the nasty racist talk.)

Even so, I wouldn’t let him watch Scarface or Reservoir Dogs, I said, until he was 14. I’d let him watch all kinds of inappropriate flicks. Following a particularly nasty breakup with an ex who said my son would knock girls up and do drugs because I cuss around him, and whose own kids, who were like 11, weren’t allowed to watch PG movies, we celebrated by watching Jay & Silent Bob Strike Back, which, frankly, is fucking filthy. I think he was nine. He liked it a lot. But damn! Scarface!

Then Christmas came around, and I was cheap this year—along with everyone else in this gleaming city on a hill. There was no satisfying big-ticket item for my son, no air hockey table (which he doesn’t play) or punching bag and gloves (which he doesn’t use) or anything else. I couldn’t think of a damn thing to get him. I barely got him clothes—underwear, socks, a sweater, but not pants. What could I get my son that would make him think this Christmas was special despite all the evidence not piling up around him?

I decided to lower our personal NC-14 to NC-13-and-a-half. That way, at least a couple of his gifts would have the thrill of the illicit.

And so we watched Scarface last night. I explained about refugee camps in Miami. I simplified the intricacies of the gang wars. I translated into 2008 dollars what Pacino had just spent on his car, or how much he’d just handed to Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio. My son didn’t care. “Is there going to be action?” he asked not long after Angel got dismembered with the chain saw in the shower. I guess Saw and Hostel have really upped the ante.

There were more questions, all of them about Tony Montana’s relative net worth. “Is he rich now?” my son asked when Pacino showed up in some fresh disco duds. “Not yet,” I answered. “But he’s getting there. Wait’ll you see the house he gets.”

“Will I like it?” he asked.

“You’ll love it.”

My son has always had an appreciation for the gold-plated and the McMansion. It is not an appreciation I understand, but I try not to make too much fun of it. I try to let him have his own tastes, maybe tweaked just a bit with my gentle guidance pointing out the individual, the unique, the charactered. I can always tell which tacky pile of shit will get his heart racing, and he can always tell which shabby old house will catch mine. “You only like crappy small houses,” he tells me with a frown. Not true. I like fancy, ’spensive Modernist spaces as much as anyone else does, but barring the money fairy popping out of my pocket with an extra $6 mill, I’ll rent a dilapidated house from the ’20s with moldings and built-ins, or even a nice ’60s rancher, provided they’ve knocked out all the interior walls.

What I don’t go for is travertine, and granite countertops leave me icy. I much prefer those pretty old tiles, so my bacteria friends can picnic on the coffee spills in the filthy grout. Nor do I go for faux-Mediterranean, or multimillion-dollar estates on postage-stamp lots.

“Faux” and “postage-stamp” don’t bother my son at all, so long as there are Doric columns and porticoes.

And so there is Al Pacino in a thousand-square-foot bathroom, watching his gold-plated television (with two additional inset pictures) from his sunken Roman bath that’s easily ten feet in diameter. The Scotch is nearby in the wet bar, which I’m pretty sure is gold-plated too. An open bottle of Champagne chills at Pacino’s elbow, in case he’d like to switch libations. The suds in the tub look like an I Love Lucy disaster, and zing go the strings of my son’s heart.

My mom and I laugh at him—gently—a lot. We can pick out the most graceless, nouveau riche boxes and know that he will love them, as long as the square footage is properly grand. And a portico—always a portico. With columns.

But despite my vaunted and truly elegant tastes, I remember very well honing one particular daydream over many walks home from school. And that was this: that Mick Jagger, in his limousine, would be lost in the wilds of Thousand Oaks, and I would direct him (and sing for him “Mother’s Little Helper,” in a proper Cockney accent), and he would repay me with many things fashioned from gold. I practiced the song every day, along with the Archies’ “Sugar Sugar,” and the Zombies’ “She’s Not There.” So maybe I don’t have room to talk. I mean about all the stuff that is gold.

I will give my son this—though a lot of it may be that all his school friends are Latino and black, and he says all they talk about is whether a particular girl’s ass is big enough for their discriminating eighth grade tastes: “Michelle Pfeiffer’s ugly,” he exclaimed last night. “Well, not ugly. But why is she so skinny?”

Good boy, honey. We’ll work—gently—on the rest of it.

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