Up On The Roof

I hate heights. I think I have mentioned this particular phobia before. It’s the reason we have trees that have never been trimmed, lights in the ceiling that will never be replaced, and Christmas lights on our eaves that went up the first year we moved in and are never coming back down.

I don’t like climbing ladders if they have more than four of five steps. By the time you get to step six, anything in your immediate vicinity was completely over your head while you were on the ground. If you don’t look up, why worry about whatever is there?

My dad didn’t like heights much, either. While I have no idea if phobias have a genetic component to them, if they do, I definitely inherited the trait from him. He was, however, a much braver person than I will ever be. Despite the fact he detested climbing up on ladders, it was his job to climb up onto the roof whenever one of us kids threw something up there.

There was always something on our roof when I was growing up. It was like a magnet that attracted toys. On any given day, you could find a frisbee, a football, tennis ball, tennis racket, somebody’s sandwich, and a pair of shoes on our roof. Whenever something previously landbound found its way up there, my dad was the one expected to drag the ladder out of the garage, climb onto the cracked wooden shingles covering our house, and throw down the detritus.

When I was about nine, I remember my dad finally got completely fed up retrieving our stuff from the top of the house. He warned me and my brothers that the next item we lost something on the roof, we would have to go up and get it ourselves. I suggested simply leaving the stuff up there whenever we lost an item, but my dad said something about the eventual weight breaking through and leaving a hole in our ceiling. I don’t think he was exaggerating, either.

The first item I had to retrieve myself was a baseball. I tossed it up on the roof and was practicing catching it when it rolled off the edge. On one particular throw, the ball got stuck in the rain gutter. I went to get my dad. He pulled the ladder out of the garage, balanced it against the roof, pointed upward and said, “Go, get it.”

I hated climbing up the shaky, wooden, deathtrap. 1970’s ladders were designed for one thing and one thing only: to murder children.

After that adventure, I tried really hard not to lose anything on the roof ever again. One time, my dad found me sitting on the front lawn, just staring at the street. He asked me, “Where’s your football.”

I just shrugged and muttered something like, “I put it away.”

“Where did you put it?”

I shrugged again.

My dad looked up on the roof and immediately spotted my football stuck up against the brick chimney. He pointed at the garage and told me to get the ladder. My life had become absolute hell.

It was one of my brothers that eventually saved me from my frequent rooftop adventures. He gave me an empty whiskey bottle, then told me to stick it in the rain gutter and leave it there until the next time dad made me climb up on the roof.

In those days, my dad was still drinking pretty heavily. Some weekends, he would drink so much he forgot where he was or what he was doing while he was there. Now, we call that being blackout drunk. Back then, my brothers and I referred to it as “dad’s Friday night.”

A few days after I planted the whiskey bottle, I threw something else up onto the roof. I don’t remember exactly what it was. It could have been a frisbee, or maybe the neighbor’s dog. I forget.

My dad dragged out the ladder and told me to climb. This time, as soon as I got high enough to see into the rain gutter, I pulled out the bottle and held it out so my dad could see it.

“How did this get here?” I asked, pretending I had never seen it before.

My dad looked startled, confused, and guilty all at the same time.

“Do you think I should tell mom that somebody threw a bottle on top of our house?”

“No. There’s no need for that,” he said.

“Do you think I ever need to climb up on this ladder again?” I asked.

This was the first time that my dad realized that I was a little asshole and that I wasn’t above blackmail to get what I wanted.

To make a long story short, the bottle ended up in the trash and I never climbed on the roof again. My dad never learned the truth about how the bottle actually got there, and he quit drinking completely a couple years later. I consider that a win-win.

Today, there is nobody to force me to climb ladders or go on the roof. I don’t make EM1 or EM2 do it either. I don’t think either one of them is afraid of heights, but just in case, I don’t really want to find out what kind of dirt those kids have on me. Blackmail might be genetic, too.

So, we’ll all just stay safely on the ground.

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