Pops: Fatherhood in Pieces Read online

  The truth was that I had been suffering for a number of years from a deepening case of baseball depression. This is an ailment little talked about but which I believe must be fairly widespread among lovers of the game. So much of what we call baseball is really our attachment to the past, to our own histories and baseball’s—as if there were any difference between the two. One of the seminal baseball books is an oral history of early professional ball called The Glory of Their Times, and that title pretty much summarizes the retrospective bent of fandom. An educated baseball fan over a certain age fights a lifelong battle against the dangerous tendency to lapse into gloom about the present state of the game, of its players, and of the world they seem, on bad days, to represent. And that has been true for at least the past fifty years.

  Watching my boy live his life between the lines, comparing his constricted field of play to the relatively unbounded one that I remembered, I felt myself giving in to this same style of thinking. I was tired of the steroid scandals, of the ballparks that changed their names with every corporate collapse or merger, of salary arbitration, of trying to keep track of the insane permutations of team rosters from season to season, of losing my favorites to free agency every year, of cupidity and stupidity among the owners and players, of rock and hip-hop songs being blasted at the park, of five-man rotations and setup men and pitchers who couldn’t lay down a bunt. I missed the old dominance of the great African-American ballplayers I grew up with: the flash and speed and power. I missed the dynastic infields, the double-play combinations that endured for years. I missed the musical reign of the organ and the moments of strange silence that used to settle over a ballpark between innings or batters, even when the stands were packed.

  I revile all codgers, coots, and alter kockers with their retrograde agendas, and it pained me to find myself among them. I tried to remind myself of the ugly system that preceded free agency, of the statistically provable superiority of modern play to that of the glory times, of the undisputed beauty that has resulted, thanks to the demands of expansion, from the increasing presence of international players in the game. But sometimes it seemed like it might be better simply to stop thinking about baseball entirely.

  Then one day a few weeks after the Little League season ended, I was watching San Francisco play Anaheim on television. My wife was out of town, and I had put the kids to bed, and Matt Cain, then a young pitcher for the Giants, was taking a no-hitter into the sixth. Right as I was wishing there were somebody to enjoy the kid’s performance with me, my elder daughter came in, having finished the novel she was reading (Watership Down, for those who are keeping score). She curled up on the couch with me and got totally sucked into the game. She asked a lot of questions: What is a no-hitter? A shutout? A perfect game? Why is the runner standing so far from the bag at first? What is the catcher saying to the pitcher when he trudges out to the mound for a visit?

  It wasn’t the first time my daughter had watched a game with me; far from it. But it was the first time she seemed to understand enough of baseball to know that she didn’t understand; and that, of course, is the beginning of wisdom, and of fandom, too.

  I wondered, sitting with my eleven-year-old daughter smushed companionably against me, employing me as furniture in a way that I never would have dreamed of attempting with my father, if I had somehow spoiled baseball for my son and me by laying too much emphasis on it as something for fathers and sons to share, if my daughter had been just waiting all these years for me to admit her onto the playing field, or if maybe I was mistaken in my memories. Maybe I hadn’t really come to love baseball, to fully understand it, until I was nearly twelve, like her.

  I did my best to answer, and I think I answered well. It was an exciting game, one that introduced her not only to the key concepts of the no-hitter and the young phenom but also to that of the pesky little spark plug, in the person of Anaheim’s Chone Figgins, who broke up the no-hitter in the top of the eighth with a line-drive hit to center, and scored the Angels’ only run against Matt Cain with some aggressive base-running. She was moved by the ovation Cain received on leaving the game. She cringed and gasped and cheered her way through Armando Benítez’s successful effort to save the game for Cain in the bottom of the ninth.

  “That was fun,” she said when it was over and the Giants had won.

  “It was,” I said. “A lot of fun.”

  “I want to watch another one. Is there a game tomorrow night?”

  I said there was. There would be a whole summer’s worth of games, every summer, for the rest of our lives.

  Be Cool or Be Cast Out

  One Saturday when I was twelve or thirteen, I went to the T-shirt counter at McCrory’s dime store, in the Columbia mall, and had them print me up a custom one, using heat-transfer letters and a steam press. I chose a light blue cotton-poly blend; the letters were dark blue, almost purple, made from some fuzzy iron-on stuff, in a functional sans-serif typeface like you might employ to put your last name on the back of your baseball jersey, which was probably the use for which the letters had been intended. I think I may have been inspired to communicate with the world in this way by the example of a then-well-known photograph of the comedian Chevy Chase, in which he was shown wearing a T-shirt that said YES IT’S MY REAL NAME. I went in kind of a different direction, though. My shirt said LIBERTINE.

  I find this memory somewhat surprising. It is a clear memory: I remember the adhesive-tape smell of the letters, the slick clingy feel of the shirt, my reflection in the bathroom mirror, the word reversed, my bespectacled face grinning from ear to ear. I remember enduring all kinds of puzzled looks, mispronunciations (people liked to rhyme it with “valentine”) and questions, chief among which, of course, was “What the hell is a libertine?”

  I was only too happy to provide a definition. “It means a freethinker,” I would say, giving what I knew to be the word’s decidedly secondary sense. I don’t remember if I ever offered the primary meaning, which is, according to the New Oxford American Dictionary on my Macintosh, “a person, esp. a man, who behaves without moral principles or a sense of responsibility, esp. in sexual matters.” But I was fully aware of this lurid aspect of the word. I had encountered “libertine” in some work of musty pornography, one of a number of self-important, intellectual-looking Grove Press Black Cat paperbacks—Marquis de Sade, John Cleland, Pierre Louÿs, the ever popular Anonymous—that my parents half-heartedly concealed in the bookcase headboard of their bed. I knew all of its interesting synonyms: “roué,” “rake,” “lothario,” “satyr.” But I never would have gone to McCrory’s and asked the lady to print one of those words on a shirt (“rake” in particular). Something about “libertine,” that Latinate dactyl chiming at its finish like a bell, stirred me, caught my fancy, and persuaded me to adopt it as a proper or at least a hopeful label for myself.

  Looking back, as I say, I’m surprised by this choice, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that I’m surprised by the memory of the person who made it. First of all, I was not, in fact, a libertine. When it came to sex, all I had ever done was masturbate, with the ready assistance of that semi-concealed library, an activity that raised no questions in my mind of moral principle or responsibility. Furthermore, my sense of principle was strong, in the usual way of young teenagers. The world was all justice and injustice, fairness and unfairness, offense and outrage and hypocrisies to be scorned. I might not have been the most responsible kid in the world, but I cooked dinner and walked the dog, did my homework without being told, visited my grandparents. As for being a freethinker—this was, like, 1976. Punk rock was experiencing its birth pangs. My parents smoked pot. Five Easy Pieces was a big-studio Hollywood movie. Freethinking was orthodoxy. A true libertine of the time would have been obliged to repudiate stale convention by submitting to some rigid doctrine, say, or by only listening to the kind of Dixieland jazz they played on Main Street, U.S.A., at Disney World.

  The thing that surprises me the most, however, is that
in retrospect I appear to have felt confident or comfortable enough, in the eyes of the world, to wear that shirt—many times—in the halls of Ellicott City Middle School. When I consider the boy I was in seventh grade, which, frankly, I try to do as seldom as possible, I tend to see a shy, persecuted, Space: 1999–watching, bespectacled über-nerd slinking as unobtrusively through the hallways as possible, living in constant fear of having his glasses broken or his books dumped. Pity for oneself as a child feels more pardonable than pity for the current model and is almost as satisfying. And narratives of one’s former loserhood are always, to a degree, a form of self-flattery, since, like the origin tales of costumed heroes, they proceed by drawing a contrast between Before and After, and take for granted the presence, in the unformed embryonic superbeing, of seeds of greatness.

  But this matter of the LIBERTINE T-shirt would seem to cast doubt on that old origin tale. Because whatever my intentions might have been in choosing that particular text, the real message of my T-shirt, as poorly encrypted as my parents’ library of Enlightenment and Victorian pornography, was “Ask me about my T-shirt!” I was exposing myself, willingly, to the attention of others, and furthermore to the possibility, admittedly slight among that particular body of students, that somebody might know what “libertine” actually meant, and would spread the word that I enjoyed, say, sodomizing chambermaids and valets while wearing a leather mask. By testing the limits of my classmates’ and teachers’ knowledge and intelligence, daring them to be as smart, or at least as well read in fancy smut as I was, I was flirting with disaster, publicly. And that makes me appear to have been not only confident as a twelve-year-old but even cocky. Or maybe, as my wife suggests, I just couldn’t help myself; I was not in control of my signification. In wearing that crazy T-shirt, I was fulfilling not my hidden destiny as a freethinker but simply collaborating with my oppressors in singling me out for abuse, evolving the coloration appropriate to my ecological niche. I was not Napoleon; I was Napoleon Dynamite.

  I first found myself recalling this business of the LIBERTINE T-shirt as I watched my older son struggling, in so many ways, against the crushing orthodoxy of middle school (so aptly named!), against the opinions and strictures of his classmates (nice kids, taken individually). I had forgotten how socially repressive twelve-year-olds really are, how closed-minded, as anti-libertine as the Calvinism to which we owe our present notion of the word. In seventh grade, at Hanukkah, my son asked for, and received, a peacoat. It was a classic number, navy blue, double-breasted wool, great big plastic buttons stamped—oh, the coolness!—with little anchors. We got it from an online army-navy store. It had a quilted lining, and when he wore it on a gray East Bay afternoon, with an extra-long scarf striped in muted colors wrapped around his neck, and his hair cut in a late-’65, early-’66 Small Faces shag, he looked terrific. Stylish and lanky and handsome; and warm. Over Christmas break he wore it constantly, and to everything he said and did, with that scarf blowing out behind him, there was a whiff of oracular Blonde on Blonde cool. He did not so much walk around in it as lope.

  Then one chilly January morning when the school carpool arrived, he ran out the door wearing only his old zippered Volcom hoodie. “I left it at school,” he explained when I asked him where the peacoat was. He was forgetful, and I am forgetful, and there followed a week or two of cold weather, and every day he braved it in his hoodie. And then one day I happened to notice the peacoat hanging in the hall closet. For another week thereafter I reminded him to wear it—the weather had turned even colder—and he always said the same thing: “It doesn’t look good with these jeans.” This statement seemed not to depend on the cut or color of the jeans he was wearing. Finally, I got the point: He wasn’t going to be wearing his peacoat to school anymore. I asked him why, and even before the flicker of pain came and went across his features, I knew—I remembered—the answer.

  “Did somebody make fun of you in your coat?”

  “I look like a mushroom.”

  “You do not.”

  “I look all emo.”

  “Oh, come on. You look so cool in that coat.”

  But then I dropped it, for I knew that there are few sentences more utterly devoid of meaning than than those in which your parents assert your coolness. I remember only too well how it felt, when I was his age, to find myself caught up in the mystifying tangle of secret legislation that determined which clothes and styles were cool and which were hopeless. One Monday you would show up for school in your Levi’s, or (in my case, alas) your stiff reinforced-knee Sears Toughskins, and discover that over the weekend everyone but you appeared to have received a memorandum informing them that Britannia was the sole acceptable brand of blue jeans. Or you would be informed by a panel of experts (whose accreditation appeared to derive from the same mysterious authority that had sent out the Britannia memo) that your new pair of sneakers, with their bright red plimsoll lines, in which you had passed an entire Sunday afternoon at the basketball hoop over the garage hopefully noting improvements in your vertical leap, your turnaround jump shot, and your overall élan, belonged irrevocably to that dreaded class of footwear known, in the Baltimore area at that time, as “fish heads.” At my son’s age, kids seem to be wired with an unerring instinct, even a yearning, for that perfection of conformity, as inexplicable and wondrous in its way as the ability of a thousand birds all to make the same abrupt turn to the left at the same instant, known by its celebrants and detractors alike as “fashion,” a word whose literal, original meaning is “a behavior engaged in by a group.”

  So I got his old serviceable ski jacket out of the closet—it was only a little short at the wrists—and wished that we could just take him out of school entirely for the next few years, travel the world, read good books, learn how to program our computers. Just pole-vault him clear over the whole middling middle school experience, so that he would alight, more competent, more well-rounded, and surer of who he was, on the doorstep of high school, having been given the opportunity to try on and discard as many coats and identities as he cared to try, without fear of ridicule or shame. But I guess we are too conformist for that.

  And then one week toward the end of eighth grade, when I picked him up from school (I had missed seeing him in the morning), he came out to the car wearing the burgundy velour blazer and the blue-and-white-plaid ultra-bell-bottom slacks that had constituted his Halloween costume a couple of years earlier—he’d gone as Austin Powers—over a black Rush T-shirt, to whose collar he had clipped a green tartan bow tie. He looked preposterous. He looked splendid.

  “Wow,” I said. “Where’s your shirt?” There had been a vintage seventies tuxedo shirt to complete the Austin Powers effect, I remembered, lemon yellow, foaming at the bodice with black-edged ruffles.

  “Couldn’t find it.”

  He got in the car, and we drove for a little while, and then I said, “So what did the kids have to say about your look?”

  He shrugged. “Nothing. I don’t know. Whatever.”

  Oh, well, I thought. So much for that. Tomorrow it would be back to the brand-name skatewear that was the only acceptable fashion for the boys of his set. At least he kept trying to express himself, his real self, as motley and inchoate for now as the outfit he was wearing. And maybe that was part of the purpose of middle school: to give you something to work against, to press upon, as you attempted to fashion a self from the lump of contradictory impulses and emotions and paradigms that your mind and your culture presented.

  I put my hand on his shoulder. “You look great,” I told him.

  The next morning when he came down to breakfast, he was wearing the fabulous yellow shirt and a face that said, “Nothing, I don’t know. Whatever.”

  The peacoat, I thought, had a little room in the shoulders. It might still fit him next winter, if he felt like putting it on.

  Pops

  You want to be a doctor, too?” the patient asks me, pushing up his left shirtsleeve the way my father has instructed him to d
o. He is an older man with jowls and a silvery crew cut, wearing a short-sleeved shirt and a necktie and pinned to a kitchen chair by the boulder of his abdomen. The tap drips water into a cup in the kitchen sink. The smell of the patient’s dinner lingers, raw meat and fat against cast iron.

  When I don’t immediately reply to his question, the patient looks up at my father, who has come to the patient’s home this evening to conduct an insurance physical. My father reaches into his black bag for his sphygmomanometer, unrolls the cuff, and uncoils the rubber tubing. Like many young doctors not long out of medical school, he supplements his income doing these in-home exams. After putting in a full day as a pediatrician at the Phoenix Indian Hospital, where he has been posted by the U.S. Public Health Service, he comes home just long enough to shower and shave for the second time that day, change his shirt and tie, grab a quick bite. Then he heads back out to perform one or more exams for one of the big insurance companies, often taking me with him. Sometimes, as has happened earlier tonight, we forgo dinner at home and stop at a favorite restaurant, a Mexican place called Ricardo’s.

  “Cute little guy,” the patient says to my father in a confidential tone, then calls to me, parked in a corner on another kitchen chair, “You want to be a doctor, eh? Just like your daddy?” Trying again, maybe I didn’t hear him the first time.

  I take my sphygmomanometer out of my black bag. Unlike my father’s, with its rubberized canvas cuff, sturdy squeeze bulb, and steel-and-glass gauge, mine is made entirely of brightly colored thin plastic, like my Taylor hammer, my otoscope, my syringe, and the stethoscope that I wear dangling like a pendant necklace, the way my father does, with the earpieces pincering my neck. My black bag is plastic, too, a flimsy, lightweight affair with none of the pachyderm heft and dignity of my father’s. The mouth of my father’s bag opens and closes smoothly on the hinges of a secret armature, clasped by a heavy brass tongue that slides home with a satisfying click. Mine pops open when you flip a plastic tab that has begun to shear loose and will soon snap off. A vial of candy “pills” was the sole advantage my black bag possessed over my father’s, but I have long since prescribed and administered them to myself. The empty vial rolls around at the bottom of the bag.