Galen’s first homework assignment for first grade was to learn his home address and phone number, the full names of everyone in his immediate family, and his parents’ occupations. His teacher sent home a note encouraging families to work on the assignment together and to supplement the school-provided worksheet with “expressions of our child’s individual creativity.” Examples included but were not limited to: a three-dimensional representation of the family made from salt dough or papier-mâché, a food dish from our cultural tradition (enough to share, no nuts please), or a performance with a musical instrument. The school’s principal was a trained cellist and played with the local symphony.
“I swear,” Katherine said, “the school gives out these assignments to mess with us.”
We opted to let Galen express his individual creativity by way of a poster board collage of family photographs. He was permitted to use, under strict supervision and far from his brother’s skin, the good kitchen scissors in order to cut the pictures into different shapes and to paste them to the board in a manner reflective of his truest, most creative self. In most of the pictures, our bodies were cut in half or decapitated, our heads floating along the top of the poster board like stars in a really trippy sky while our legs and feet lay heaped in a pile on the dining room table. To my surprise, Galen had a solid grasp of the basic family demographics. He knew our address cold and could even tell us how to get from our house to the school and back again. When asked about our jobs, he confidently proclaimed that Mom was a social worker and Dad was a professor.
“What does that mean?” Katherine asked. “What does a social worker do?”
Galen stopped cutting and looked up, the scissors paused guillotine-like over the glossy image of his brother’s neck. “Mom takes care of sick babies and sick mamas.”
Hayden’s head tumbled into a pile of de-limbed torsos.
As a hospital social worker, Katherine covered pediatrics, maternity, and the neonatal intensive care, where she spent the bulk of her time. Neither a doctor nor a nurse, she wasn’t involved in the medical care of the patients; rather, it was her job to ensure the babies who came through the hospital—some born so early it was a miracle they survived—had safe homes to go to once they were discharged. Moms were screened for postpartum depression and substance addiction and signs of domestic abuse. From her night shifts in the ER back in Utah, she’d developed a keen eye for spotting problems often missed in the doctors’ offices, and thanks to her interventions numerous women had carried their bundles of joy into residential treatment programs and women’s shelters and the homes of relatives rather than back to the husbands and boyfriends who’d sent them to the hospital with black eyes and cracked ribs. It was important, if underpaid, work, and I was proud to be connected to it.
“What about Dad?” Katherine asked. “What does a professor do?”
Galen looked at me, his face utterly blank. To protect my books from unsanctioned cutting, gluing, or Magic Markering, I kept everything work related at my office on campus. Unlike Katherine, I didn’t carry a pager clipped to my belt, and rare was the day when I was called away from the dinner table to attend to an emergency. “Hmm,” Galen said. “You read your computer and eat your lunch.”
Katherine laughed. “You are usually eating when we come visit.”
“I stop working when I know you’re coming,” I said, more defensive than I ought to have been. “I work until I hear you coming down the hall.”
Her face said, Right. She turned to Galen. “Dad’s a teacher and a writer. He writes books.”
“You do?” Galen said. Despite the dearth of adult books around the house, our shelves were nonetheless full of things to read. We had, to name only a few, the complete works of Mo Willems, Russell and Lillian Hoban’s Frances series, Ian Falconer’s Olivia, numerous Frog and Toads, and so many Dr. Seuss books that, laid flat, they could tile the floor of Galen’s bedroom. Hayden also kept on his shelf a galley of my first book, a collection of stories published when he was one. He liked to tote it around under his arm. I’d be lying if I said that seeing him do that didn’t thrill me. Eager to join the discussion, Hayden leapt from the floor and ran to his room to fetch the book. He handed it to Galen.
“Oh, that thing,” Galen said. “I forgot about it.”
I turned to the acknowledgments page and pointed to his name. “You’re in it. Sort of.”
He tossed it to the rug. “I like my books better.”
My profession carried about as much weight with the boys as it did with my neighbors, most of whom assumed I wiled away the day by smoking a pipe in a tweed jacket with my ankles crossed on my desk. In the boys’ minds, being a professor wasn’t much different than being a mailman. I went off each day with a large bag of papers slung over my shoulder. But a father’s work is often veiled, either by intention or accident. Masculinity and work have long been conjoined, and there’s a belief among a certain subset of men, including those from whom I’m descended, that the power of a job is inversely related to the amount of knowledge others have of it. To reveal or even talk too much about work is to risk exposing weakness. Only the vainglorious or deluded see themselves as unequaled in their careers, yet boys often idolize men who stand apart from the competition—the LeBron Jameses and Michael Phelpses and Tom Bradys of the world. If we can’t actually be the LeBrons of our industries, we can at least promote the illusion among our kids, take refuge in their adoration. It might be said that growing up is the prolonged process of making peace with the lies we were told as kids, both by and especially about our parents. And once our own kids get wise to the con, we can only hope they’ll love us anyway.
Compared with the prolific output of the writers who filled the boys’ shelves, I must have looked like a minor leaguer at best. Yet after the school assignment was handed in, a curious thing began to happen. The boys wanted me, and only me, to read to them at bedtime, even though Mom was better at doing the voices of the characters. I was the book authority; ergo, the job of nightly reader could be filled by no one else. Instead of two books each before bed, the standard for the last two years, they now demanded three or four. At first I was pleased that they saw their old man as connected to their books, but it soon became evident that the whole thing was a scam. Hayden argued that he should get at least one more book than Galen, since he wasn’t yet in school, and that took us up to nine books in total before I could be relieved of duty. I couldn’t tell whether their contest was for my attention or a coordinated effort to rope-a-dope me into breaking down and letting them stay up to watch TV.
I set a limit of three books each. They responded by choosing the longest books on the shelves. Instead of Don’t Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus! or Barnyard Dance!, they went right for the Dr. Seuss. Dr. Seuss books look slim from far away, but they often contain upwards of fifty or sixty pages each and can take a solid hour to read. Any attempt to skip pages was grounds for protest. Climbing the stairs at night, knowing that Hop on Pop or Fox in Socks or Mr. Brown Can Moo! Can You? waited for me at the top filled me with an existential dread only Samuel Beckett could imagine.
At a certain point, I started vetoing all Dr. Seuss books. Then I vetoed any book not by Mo Willems. I could burn through an Elephant and Piggie in under a minute if I really got after it. I read like an auctioneer trying to offload a bum steer, slamming shut the cover and exclaiming, “There, that’s three books. Now go to sleep.”
“But, Dad,” Galen said, “that didn’t take very long.”
“A deal’s a deal,” I said, pulling shut the door.
Katherine met me in the hallway. Her smirk was half amused and half horrified. “I think you might need a change of pace,” she said.
The next night, as we headed up the stairs for another round of ritualized torture, Katherine herded the boys and me into Hayden’s bedroom. It was by the far the smallest room in the house, but it was the only room with carpet on the floor. From her pocket she produced a deck of Uno cards. She slid the cards from the box, divided the crisp and squarely stacked pile into roughly equal halves, and proceeded to shuffle the deck with the flourish of a casino dealer. The cards flowed from her thumbs to the carpet and then abruptly changed direction and traveled upward, defying gravity, back into her hands. For a long moment the colored squares appeared suspended in midair, a blurry smear in the fabric of space and time. “How do you know how to do that?” Galen asked.
“Practice.” She dealt the cards around the circle our bodies formed on the carpet. It was November, below freezing at night, the tiny window at the back of the room fogged from the condensation of our body heat.
We’d played Uno a few times before, on car trips and in airports. Galen liked it because the rules were self-explanatory and he could win if he paid attention. Hayden liked it, too, because he knew his colors and numbers and even the Reverses and Skips had symbols he had little trouble matching. His problem was that he couldn’t hold the cards the way Mom and Dad held them, fanned out in one hand like a peacock’s tail. Instead he played standing up beside his bed, his cards laid out on his comforter, his back to us and his diapered butt an inch from my cheek.
“Let’s try a practice round,” Katherine said, turning over a card from the draw pile.
Within minutes, practice gave over to full-tilt competition. The four of us, but especially the boys and I, disappeared into the game with a ferocious intensity. I couldn’t really explain it other than my need to get back at them for all the Dr. Seuss. I think the boys saw the game as one more opportunity to stick it to me. Unlike books, which only had endings, each game of Uno added winners and losers to the mix. Katherine’s efforts to diffuse the tension generated by story time had unleashed an even darker force. It was too late to go back to our old tricks. We were hooked. We’d end up playing three games of Uno every night for more than a year.
“Let’s see,” Hayden said one night. We were on our second game. Hayden plucked a card from his bed and laid it on the discard pile. “Six.”
“That’s not a six, it’s a nine,” Galen said. I’d already won the first, and had taken three in a row the night before. Galen was desperate for a win.
“It looks like a six to me,” Hayden said.
“It’s not!”
“Do you have a nine?” Katherine asked Hayden. “How about a red card?”
“No,” Hayden said. “I have a six.”
“Okay, go ahead and play it,” Katherine said. Hayden stood with his arm around his mom’s shoulder in his footed fleece pajamas. He looked innocent, but Galen and I both knew better. His social game was a thinly disguised ploy to sneak a glance at his mom’s hand.
“It’s not fair!” Galen cried. He threw his cards on the floor and crossed his arms. The cards landed faceup and spread across the carpet. I couldn’t help sneaking a look.
“We can go to bed,” Katherine said, “if you can’t play nicely.”
Galen picked up his cards and spent a long minute arranging them. He worked like a florist adding the last stems to an already overstuffed bouquet. I dropped a red six on Hayden’s blue to restore order, and the game resumed.
Now that I’d seen Galen’s cards, I had him in my sights. I dropped a green seven on him, which I knew he couldn’t play, and chased it with a Skip and a Draw Two. The more cards he was forced to draw the more sullen he became. “This isn’t fair,” he protested. “I have too many cards.”
“It’s how the game is played,” I said. “Uno is often rags to riches. And vice versa.”
“What’s that mean?”
“It means the other way around. You could go from last to first. Or from first to last.”
Galen pursed his lips. “Uno stinks,” he said. “Who even invented this stupid game?”
My parents were fans of Uno. They regularly gathered at friends’ houses to play on Saturday nights while I lolled about on the carpet with the other kids. This was in the late 1970s, before Devin was born. Like all games, Uno seemed at once arbitrary and universal. I never thought to question its origins. Nor did I understand until many years later that my parents, in 1979, were participants in a national, soon-to-be-global phenomenon deeply rooted in a rivalry (more than one, in fact) between fathers and sons.
In 1970, Merle Robbins, a barber in a small town outside of Cincinnati, got into an argument with his son, Ray, over the rules of Crazy Eights. Similar to the game it inspired, Crazy Eights involves offloading cards according to number and suit, but uses the aces for Skips, queens for Reverses, jacks for Draw Twos. Eights are wild and are sometimes used as Draws. Some people use kings for Reverses. The rules change depending on where you are and with whom you’re playing. Canada and the Netherlands have their own versions, with rules that make even less sense. Merle tried to settle the argument by writing the commands on the back of each card in Magic Marker. Not long after, he bought a deck with blank backing, making the handwritten commands easier to read. In 1971, Merle and his wife, Marie, sold their house and moved into a trailer so they could put up $8,000 of the $10,000 they needed to produce five thousand decks of the game they called “Uno.” They liked the name because it sounded like Bingo, sonorous and exuberant when called out. Ray and his wife, Kathy, contributed the remaining $2,000 needed. The first decks were khaki green and looked like something the army might issue to soldiers to pass the time. For a while they were sold exclusively at Merle’s Barbershop in Arlington Heights, Ohio. Men played in the shop and next door in Lichty’s Tavern while they waited for a chair to open.
Within a year the game had found its way into retail shops across Cincinnati and into Kiwanis Clubs scattered as far away as Florida and Missouri. Then a man named Robert Tezak, a twenty-three-year-old part-time florist, funeral director, and aspiring politician from Joliet, Illinois, got hold of the game. He flew to Ohio to meet the Robbins and offered to buy Uno for $50,000 plus a ten-cent royalty on each deck sold. Bob Tezak took the remaining inventory back to Joliet and founded International Games, Inc., a two-man start-up consisting of Tezak and his brother-in-law Ed Akeman, who ran the business out of the back of the family flower shop. Whenever someone called IGI’s phone, Akeman put the caller on hold, pretended to transfer the call to a different department, and disguised his voice. He wanted the company to appear big, an international player, though it took until Sam Walton, founder and CEO of Wal-Mart, personally placed an order for his stores that sales began to take off. By 1980, Uno sold eleven million decks a year. Cards were being printed, and the game was being played, around the clock. In 1984, the year Merle Robbins died, two college students played a game that lasted 132 hours.
Born of a father-son dispute, Uno likely caused thousands more as families sat down to play the game. But it’s likely that none were as dark as the clash between Bob Tezak and his son, Mark. With the millions he earned from the game, Bob Tezak acquired a fleet of cars, a riverside mansion in Joliet and another in Arizona, and a private plane. He used his money to get elected coroner of Will County, Illinois, and to fashion himself into a political kingmaker. He overspent on local and state elections, bought an AM radio station, invested in an Indy Car team that took the checkered flag at the Indianapolis 500. Since this was the 1980s, he also took an interest in cocaine, and less pertinent to the epoch, his teenage son’s teenage girlfriend. The affair continued even after Mark Tezak and the woman were married and ended only after Bob Tezak set fire to his own bowling alley to destroy records subpoenaed by the IRS. His daughter-in-law became a government witness and Bob tried to have her killed. In 1992, he was sentenced to twelve years in prison, and International Games, Inc. sold Uno to Mattel for forty million dollars. By the time Bob Tezak was released in 2003, his millions were gone, and Uno had grown into a megalithic brand encompassing a panoply of forms, ranging from decks festooned with movie and TV and sports logos; online, mobile, and video games; special versions featuring new cards with new commands, new rules, new gizmos for raining down a torrent of cards upon an unlucky opponent. It’s now estimated that more than a billion people have played the game in one form or another. It’s second only to Monopoly, which had a forty-year head start.
We only ever played Uno old school, with a single deck, 108 cards, our legs in a bow, sitting on the floor.
As I came down to my final two cards, I paused to consider my options. I was holding a Wild and a yellow four. If I played the yellow, I’d be invincible, my victory guaranteed. If I played the Wild, the color and number could change before my turn was up again and I’d be forced to draw.
Deliberating, I recalled a story Katherine had told at least a hundred times about the trip her family took to a remote cabin in the Colorado mountains, a place with a sublime view and no television or radio. The only entertainment was a shelf of musty paperbacks and a stack of board games. Katherine was twelve, her brothers ten and five. Instead of Monopoly or Risk, they chose Candy Land so that everyone in the family could play. My father-in-law attacked the board ruthlessly, disallowing backward moves, forcing his opponents to remain stuck in the Cherry Pitfalls until they drew the right card. He refused to fudge the rules or look the other way. He won every game until his children were crying and dispirited. It was at that point that Candy Land metamorphosed from a simplistic children’s game into a morality tale, the family struggle in miniature. My mother-in-law gave up playing in favor of one of the paperbacks. Katherine anted up and played to win, no matter how futile her chances; one brother set his gingerbread man on the first square and refused to move off it, regardless of the card he drew; the other took the unused game pieces into the corner and choreographed a puppet show in a language only he could understand. Twenty-five years later, Katherine had yet to back down from a fight. She was gentle with the boys, but Annie Duke when she squared off with me. If we got into a mano a mano while playing Uno, she turned into her old man. I loved this about her. She loved her dad, but when she introduced me to him, she warned me not to play games with him. I thought she meant in the figurative sense, to avoid excessive sarcasm and beating around the bush regarding my intentions with his daughter. But, no, she meant it literally: Whether the game was cards, billiards, trivia, or Candy Land, he was a killer and an awful loser. A loss in the wrong game, under the wrong conditions, could cost me his blessing. Katherine must have recognized that on some level I wasn’t so different.
There was a moment in every game of Uno when I faced the choice of whether or not to swoop in for the kill. My impulse, like my father-in-law, was to take what was mine. I justified destroying a six- and three-year-old at Uno as early lessons in the School of Hard Knocks. And playing Uno every night showed me a few things about the boys. Galen had, whether by instinct or institutionalizing, a watchmaker’s faith in fairness and the orderly harmony made possible by rules. The regs ought to apply absolutely and work in his favor. So long as the parameters of the game were properly observed, he saw no reason why he shouldn’t win. Again and again he protested his losses by claiming it was his turn to win.
Hayden, on the other hand, was a guerrilla card player, as he was elsewhere in life. After a barbecue the summer before, I stashed a leftover twelve-pack of Fresca in the basement, on a shelf in the laundry room. Hayden opened the cardboard sleeve from the bottom, so I wouldn’t see the tear, and squirreled out the cans one by one. It was advanced work for a kid who still wore diapers to bed. Weeks later, I still tracked crawling lines of ants toward half-drained sodas hidden behind the furnace and water heater, stashed between suitcases. When it came to Uno, he had no qualms about drawing extra cards if he felt he could use them or liked the colors, or appealing to his mother’s affections in order to play a nine when the game called for a six. Rules? Fuck the rules.
Seated on the floor between my sons, I felt I was the junction between two extremes. To my right sat the belief that success ought to come as a matter of course; to my left sat the idea that rules were meaningless concepts only others ought to obey. What neither of the boys were ready to accept was that losing often imparted the greater lesson. The stubbornness to take your licks and keep playing. To persist even when the outcome seemed certain and to abide by the rules given the chance to cheat. It was an important lesson for boys—and lest I forget, white boys, for whom life’s playing field has long tilted in favor—to internalize. I had plenty of misgivings about the word privilege (especially when used as a verb), but I had even less patience for white men who believed their race and gender were discriminated against. I wanted the boys to understand that rules, much like the truth, matter. Even when the conditions ought to work in your favor, sometimes life was just hard. You played and lost and no one else was to blame. No one, in any case, but yourself.
And yet these were my sons and I was their father. If the world was indeed hard, shouldn’t I have been a soft place within it? Where the rules might be bent or suspended so the boys might taste victory every now and then? After all, they were six and three. It felt like a simple question, but I honestly didn’t know how to answer.
I played the Wild. I told myself I was giving the kids a break when in reality I wanted to see how far I could press my luck and still come out on top. I called for green hoping to lure one of my opponents into playing a yellow. I held up the one card in my hand. “Uno!” I called.
“I’m getting tired of this game,” Galen said. “I always lose.”
“No, you don’t,” I said. “You’ve won plenty.”
“Dad hasn’t won yet,” Katherine said. “He’s still got one more card.”
I should have recognized the warning, but I didn’t. Once you’re holding Uno, you’re a marked man. The world has it in for you.
I escaped defeat twice as the game moved around. After I threw the Wild, Hayden played a red eight. By luck I drew a red seven from the deck and immediately cast it to the pile. I went up to two cards on the next pass, adding a blue five to my yellow four, and then like magic Hayden played a blue four. I could have gone either way, but the yellow four had carried me this far so I dropped the blue. “Uno!” I called.
The next time around Hayden out of nowhere threw a Reverse. Having him to my right for so long had been an ace in the hole. Katherine went big and laid down her Draw Four, which she’d been holding on to for God knows how long. We had Galen between us, but it turned out he was packing the same heat. He set his own Draw Four atop hers. I was almost certain the boys were in cahoots with their mom, but what could I do? I lowered my head and drew my eight cards from the pile.
“Boom!” Galen said.
“Boom chaka-laka!” Hayden said. He wiggled his butt in my face. I could smell the baby powder I’d sprinkled in his diaper when I got him ready for bed.
“You need an Advil, Professor?” Katherine asked me. “Because that one had to hurt.”
“I’m good,” I said. “The game’s not over yet.” But as I looked around the circle I saw Katherine and Galen were down to two cards each. I was holding nine rectangles of worthless junk. All the Wilds and Draw Twos and Skips lay in the discard pile. I was toast.
On the next pass, Galen called out Uno, and the pass after that he took the game. His turn after all. He sat back on his hands without saying a word, victoriously unburdened. See why my question wasn’t so easy to answer? Slaying Goliath was so much sweeter when Goliath actually showed up to the fight.
Hayden scooped the cards off his mattress and dropped them in the center pile. “Shuffle,” he said to his mom. While she cut the deck, Hayden came over to me. His pajamas smelled like Tide, his hair like baby shampoo. He put his arm around my shoulder, leaned close to my ear, and recited the very words I used after each game, as hollow and facetious in his voice as they surely were in mine. “You played a great game,” he said.