FROM DAD

TO WORSE

 

 

Our adventurer spends the

weekend with an infant simulator

 

 

 

BY COREY LEVITAN

PHOTOS BY BRANIMIR KVARTUC/DAILY BREEZE

 

      I've always had this image of my future self as a John Lennon kind of househusband, doting over the baby as I type away in my home office.

      I can't exactly say why I've never squared this fantasy with the reality that I don't like babies. I find them loud, obstinate and smellier than cat boxes. Most significantly, I'm still a baby myself, and I don't need another one horning in on my attention.

      But I guess I believe, as I've often been told, that once you have one of your own, somehow, "it's different."

      A few weeks ago, I got one of my own -- thankfully not due to any recent vacation oversights, but because I asked the Orange County Child Abuse Prevention Center (OCCAPC) to spend the weekend with one of its fake babies.

      You can get a fake baby one of two ways -- by procreating with someone in the movie or music industries, or by borrowing the Baby Think It Over doll from a social-service agency. The modern-day equivalent of a sack of sugar, this $250 infant simulator is normally loaned to teen-age girls in conjunction with school programs.

      "Young girls tend to be very idealistic about what it's like to have a child," said Kathy McCarrell, OCCAPC executive director. "This gives them a realistic picture of what it entails and what needs that children aren't equipped to provide for their own children." 

      The OCCAPC program began in 1996 and has graduated 600 girls, about 95 percent of whom have a change of attitude about parenting, at least according to the agency's literature.

      Invented by a former NASA engineer, the Baby Think It Over doll looks and feels like an eight-month-old baby, and boy, does it cry like one. We're talking major bellows every two to four hours. Not only do you have to feed it around the clock to shut it up, it also cries when you fail to support its heavy head properly, shake it or hurl it off the balcony of your apartment in sleep-deprived frustration over what a fool you were to volunteer to write an article about it.

      Just kidding. But all that breast-feeding really did hurt.  

      My fake baby was named James. OCCAPC tries to match the race of its babies to the parents, but James was the last of 20 dolls it had on hand and appeared to be half Asian and half African-American.

      A microprocessor locked inside James behaved just like my mother. It recorded only the things I did wrong, and in minute detail. All would be reported back to OCCAPC when I brought James back on Monday morning. He could not be shut off or paused.

      "Waaaa! Waaaa!" 

      James was in the car seat, screaming for the second feeding of our first day together. Of course, the feedings weren't literal. A plastic key went into a slot on the doll's vinyl back.

      But I had to keep it turned fully to the right for 20 minutes, to simulate the inconvenience of a real feeding, otherwise the digital sound storm stirred anew.

      The problem was that I was in a bad neighborhood, on the way up to a date in Los Feliz. Stopping would have put James in more danger than letting him go hungry for a few more minutes. 

      Hey, I tried dropping James off with a friend beforehand.

      "I want to practice, too," said Tamara. "I'm curious." In a way, Tamara conceived James along with me, since the idea for this adventure came after she saw a Baby Think It Over on some daytime talk show.

      Only a few hours before my date, however, Tamara phoned to say "something came up" and she couldn't baby-sit.

      "I hate to leave you in the lurch, daddy," she said on my voicemail. "But welcome to reality. This is your first real-life crisis as a father."

      "I ain't no babysitter!" whined another helpful friend, Heather. And on it went. (Another important lesson: Take note of the friends who refuse to watch a doll for you. They probably shouldn't be counted on when a real baby needs looking after.)

      The date was with a girl I met at a wedding the night before. I called to ask Lisa whether her apartment was clean, because we were probably going to have to order in. 

      "I have to take my baby with us," I said. Silence consumed the other end of the phone.

      "I've dated men with children before," Lisa responded cautiously.

      I wish I had the nerve to milk this for more than a couple of seconds, but women who actually agree to date me are too rare in this life.

      I told Lisa the truth, after which she absolutely insisted that we take James out. 

      "This will be so fun!" she said.

      The other people waiting 30 minutes for a table at the Electric Lotus Indian restaurant seemed amused. They coddled our bundle of joy and talked the kind of gibberish popular with babies who aren't made out of vinyl with keyholes in their back.

      "He looks just like you," an Asian man said to me, joking, I could only assume. Another inquired whether a court had ordered our arrangement. 

      We propped James's bassinet up on a seat between us, and Lisa laughed.

      "This is certainly the most memorable date I've ever had," she said. I took that in the positive way, although she didn't really specify. Regardless, some definitive positives were beginning to emerge from this fatherhood racket. 

      For instance, I used James as an excuse whenever I wanted to blow someone off on the phone.

      "I have to go take care of the baby, sorry," I said while hanging up on all the friends who refused to baby-sit but called to make sure I would still talk to them. 

      Buzzing around freeway traffic in the diamond lane for three whole days was also a gas. I actually wanted a cop to pull me over, so he or she could be part of this article. But James looked even more real speeding by at 75 mph than he did standing still.

      Most significantly, James was a bigger babe magnet than a toy poodle with bows. I brought him to my friend Marc's party in Hollywood on Saturday night.

      "Aw," said one pretty face after another. 

      But Baby Think It Over is primarily intended to inconvenience the user. And, I admit, it eventually did its job. As the party got progressively more jammed, reactions turned from aw to awful.

      "I want to hear it cry!" insisted my friend Ali. I suggested a therapist for her Munchhausen's Syndrome by Proxy.

      "Does he like it when you do this?" asked some Jack Black look-alike, as he yanked James's head all the way back and made Ali's wish come true.

      After James stopped bawling, I placed him gingerly down in a dark bedroom to go to sleep. There was a bathroom in that bedroom, however, and people spotted the bassinet when they came in to use it.

      When I returned to check on James, some leather-clad, 40ish stranger was violently shaking him with a scowl on her face. I grabbed James from her evil clutches as she laughed.

      "It's funny!" insisted the woman, who identified herself as Terry.

      "I just wanted to see what he'd do," she explained. "He's such a freaky-looking baby."

      Because the Baby Think It Over doll doesn't require real feeding or diapering, and because it doesn't vomit, you may not think the experience veers close enough to harsh reality to deter anyone. 

      But a fake baby comes with its own unique negatives, such as the difficulty of involving others in your pretense.

      Varied and unsettling reactions from people I worked with didn't exactly make me comfortable about running errands around town with a doll.

      So I lived on the dwindling groceries in my apartment. (I recommend Durkee Italian Seasoning soup for the discriminating shut-in.)

      There was no jogging, no gym. And James also negatively interfered with my career. I had to cancel a Sunday interview with child actor Frankie Muniz for his new movie, "Big Fat Liar," because it suddenly dawned on me how appropriate it would be if James burst out crying in the middle of a press junket.

      "Waaa! Waaa!"

      At 4 a.m. Monday morning, James screamed for his second feeding since our bedtime. By then I'd figured out a shortcut. If I jabbed him down really hard into my mattress, while the key in his back was fully turned, it stayed in place until 20 minutes later, when I had to take it out or hear James cry from being full. 

      But I didn't want to be awakened in another 20 minutes to take the key out, nor at 6 or 7 a.m. to repeat the whole process. Ruining weekend nights was OK, since I slept it off in the mornings. But I had to be up and thinking for

work in a few hours. I stuck James in my closet.

      There was no way I was going to pass this test anyway. My name was probably destined for a child-abuse CD-ROM.

      As I drifted off, a nightmare hit. It was me who was locked in the closet and my mom who was trying to get rid of me so she could sleep. Then James came into focus, his eyes glowing red and his head spinning.

      "Hi, I'm Chucky," he said. "Wanna play?"

      Only slightly less frightening were the faces of Valerie Chavez and Bridget Walin, OCCAPC program managers, as they downloaded the results from James's microprocessor.

      I had 10 neglected feeding sessions (out of 30), 31 head-support violations and one rough handling.

      This was not a good score at all. But the worst part was that James had spent 99 minutes crying while unattended (a good portion of which was probably closet time).

      "The minutes cried is really, really high," said Walin. "That's probably the highest we ever had."

      I was following a carefully constructed regimen of tough love, I tried explaining.

      "I don't think you're really ready to be a father yet," said Chavez. "If you were serious about taking care of a baby yourself, I'd probably send somebody out to your house. 

      "I'd consider you high risk."

      I then pointed out all the good things I did over the weekend that the readout didn't register, such as taking James to a McDonald's playground for some fun.

      "I'm sure you had a great time," Chavez responded. "But we're talking about James' ... health and well-being. He's a very delicate baby."

      So there it is, from the experts. 

      I am not qualified to become a single teen-age mother. 

      However, I still am not dissuaded from my notion of becoming a father one day... 

      ... as long as there's a mother around to take care of the baby.