There was a trick displayed on a recent episode of Boardwalk Empire where a prohibition gangster whanged a sharp knife on to a table between his outstretched fingers at extremely high speed.
This trick is called Five Finger Fillet.
My father used to do this in front of bewildered visitors and us when he was cooking a steak.
When he was drunk, which is when he always wanted steak.
Occasionally, drunker still, he would change hands.
We never remember him cutting himself once.
I sometimes wondered if perhaps my father was unusual.
Then I started thinking about all my school friends' fathers.
What an utterly dissimilar lot they were.
My father was really just another example of random chance.
He did have one more spectacular trick where he would place his forefinger on the edge of a table and slam a full can of beans or soup down on the finger.
Logically he would snap the finger in two, but so long as he kept clear of the join, the can would instead fold into the letter V.
Impressive.
The father of the boy who was later best man at my wedding only grunted at his son.
They didn't seem remotely related, possibly because they had different-sized brains.
The extended family treated the intellectual freak son in similar fashion, an uncle offering him a considerable sum of money if he failed school certificate.
Which, of course, would bring him down to their level and restore their sense of fair play.
One of my best friends at primary school was an extraordinarily skilled shoplifter.
He taught me everything he knew and soon I wasn't bad either.
Then we were caught.
I was summoned by the father for a private meeting in the basement of his house where I presumed I would be given a damn good slapping.
Even though I was the corruptee.
But no, he merely extracted a promise from me that I would not associate with his son for six months.
The father, a local detective, had every jacket pocket in his wardrobe packed with cash, which my friend plundered willy-nilly.
There was a degree of hypocrisy afoot here.
But hypocrisy was not a concept I understood at that age, so my friendship took a six-month sabbatical.
Another close friend from high school, one I walked home with every lunch-time, had a father who treasured impeccable appearance, propriety and cleanliness, as indeed did his son.
One New Year's Eve, three of us roared up my friend's drive in an ageing Morgan sports car.
As it was New Year's Eve, we had begun celebrating some hours before.
The needlessly excessive tooting brought the father out on to the porch with his eternal wry smile.
"We want to take Neil out to Brighton beach for the New Year's Eve fireworks!" we shouted as one.
"In THAT?" asked the father.
"Absolutely," we replied.
"Our driver is impeccable."
"It's on fire," said the father.
And indeed it was.
Flames were lapping the doors of the Morgan's unique wooden substructure, and in a matter of minutes, the fireworks could be us.
The father helped put out the fire, we parked the Morgan, and walked down to Rattray St, where we saw in the new year in a legendary Chinese restaurant drinking Chinese whisky, the strongest liquor I have ever encountered, with the owner's son, Hong.
"This belongs to my father," slurred Hong.
"I will be in trouble later on."
One father ran the observatory, scanning the galaxy nightly imagining thrilling possibilities we would never dream of, another spoke only ridiculous war comic German when we went to his son's house, and one always made me breathless at his achievements, including swimming for Holland at the Olympics, all of which later turned out to be lies.
All of these different fathers must surely have finished up in the same school function room at some point.
I wondered what on earth they talked about.
• Roy Colbert is a Dunedin writer.
