In which your narrator tries
not to slap a three-year-old.
“UNCLE WILL! UNCLE WILL! WAKE UP!”
I’m in a guest room. It’s one of those guest rooms that young couples who are expecting large families, but haven’t gotten there yet, have for their old friends visiting from out of town who are too cheap to spring for a hotel. Someday there will be a child here. Right now, there’s a thirty-two-year-old nursing a hangover. There’s a dresser, a mattress, a clock, and some piece of Ikea art on the wall. No one cares much about this room. It’s a room to be named later.
I arrived at Mike’s early the evening before. He wasn’t home from the newspaper yet, so it was me, his wife Joan, the other leg of our college triumvirate, and their son, Jack. Jack is three years old, which means he’s just starting to develop a personality that doesn’t make his parents want to put him through a wall half the time. The suburban parents don’t quite know what to do with their single friend from halfway across the country, so Joan asked if I wanted to accompany her and Jack for a walk.
They live in the Chicago suburb of Lisle, in a clean, safe, empty neighborhood with a collection of early thirtysomethings raising small children, finally taking life seriously, following in the footsteps of their parents, hesitantly. In A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, Dave Eggers writes about how graduates of the University of Illinois, like Mike and Joan, inevitably end up living in Chicago proper before upgrading to the suburbs when grown-up life beckons. “So few make it out of the state,” Eggers wrote. “To most, Chicago was Oz, anything beyond it was China, the moon.” The University of Illinois has sort of a thirty-year round-trip shuttle bus. You grow up in the Chicago suburbs, you head downstate for four years of college, you come back up to Chicago to live in the city until you become the oldest guy at the bar and/or start having baby fever, and then you move to the suburbs and put your children through the exact same thing. In a weird way, it’s kind of a well-rounded life; you’ve pretty much covered all your bases. This is what Mike and Joan have done. They seem happy with it. I suspect they’re right. They sure as hell pay less for their home than I do for my apartment in New York, and they can move around in there without knocking over a shelf too.
Joan pulled Jack behind her in a wagon while I resisted the temptation to light a cigarette. The family park was just a couple of blocks away, as much as this twisting cul-de-sac land had “blocks,” and a few children ran screaming past us while their parents watched, more bored than nervous. I noticed that the playground joys of my youth are a lot safer than they once were. The teeter-totter, which was mostly used for sadistic Jump Off So You Can Free Fall The Child On The Other End To The Ground games when I was young, has been kid-proofed. You sit on one end, and your opposite sits diagonal to you. Neither one of you even approaches the ground. The merry-go-round, the contraption responsible for 35 percent of my bodily scars, has a governor to make sure it doesn’t go too fast. Joan, humoring my line of inquiry, pointed out that a kid last week still found a way to break his leg on the slide, which might as well have been made of foam. Do what you want, but kids will always find a way to hurt themselves.
On the way back, Jack asked me, whom he’d taken to calling “Uncle Will,” to pull him on the wagon. I eyed Joan for approval, and she nodded, glad to have a few minutes off. I pulled him faster than I probably should have, and he screamed in joy. So did I. Back at the house, sweating, I asked Joan if I went too fast. “You can’t go fast enough for him,” she said. “I wish I had the energy of either one of you.”
Jack is a fun kid. Before he went to bed last night, I showed him my iPhone, and an application called “Koi Pond,” which provides a serene fake-fish-tank environment where you can touch the screen and splash the fish around. It’s meant to be soothing. He enjoyed this for about fifteen seconds before asking “what else?” Like all boys, he preferred the game where you get to shoot zombies.
“What’s a zombie?” he asked.
“Well, they’re the walking undead,” I cheerily replied.
“The walking undead!” He liked the sound of that. So do I. Joan sighed with condescension and then put Jack to bed. Then I stayed up late with Mike and got drunk and remembered a long-past miserable time fondly because what else can you do really?
And now Jack is screaming. “Uncle Will! Uncle Will! Wake up! Can I play with the zombies? Wake up!” The room is hazy, but I’m not ready to wake up yet. Come on, kid: I didn’t start shaking you at 4 A.M. and demanding we get out the wagon again. My eyes start to come into focus, and I see Jack a few feet away from me, jumping on the bed, yelling “Zombie! Zombie! Uncle Will!”
Then I see what he is wearing. It is a Chicago Cubs T-shirt jersey. It is the jersey of Jim Edmonds. Jim Edmonds had specifically signed with the Cubs that season, for the sole purpose of sticking it in the face of his former team, who had traded him because he’d grown too old. The Cubs had embraced their former rival, and now he had helped lead the team to within one win of the National League Central Division title. That one win could come today. It could come against that former team. The St. Louis Cardinals. My St. Louis Cardinals. At Wrigley Field. Today. For the division title. This is why I was in town, after all.
It’s all a bit much for 7 A.M. I extend my arm out, grip Jack’s head, and lightly toss him off the bed. He lands with a weak thud. Confused, he pulls himself back up, looks at me, and starts laughing. “Uncle Will! Zombies! Uncle Will!”
I pull the covers back over my head and wait for him to go away.
MIKE IS A MANAGING EDITOR of a suburban Chicago newspaper, which, these days, pretty much means he’s in charge of the Web site. We met in college. We were both social introverts studying journalism, obsessed with grunge rock, unattainable women, and baseball. On baseball and grunge, the years have clearly proven me the winner. My Cardinals have won a World Series while his Cubs have floundered and broken hearts; I doubt even Eddie Vedder would claim that Mike’s Pearl Jam was ever a better band than my Nirvana. As for women, he married Joan, whom I had halfheartedly dated before he swooped in and saved both their lives. He had a son, lives near his parents, and covers city politics and crime. I moved a thousand miles away and started a sports blog that made fun of professional athletes for having their pictures taken while drinking with college students. He’s a month older than me, but lives in a universe decades older, where he wipes up spittle, worries about his 401(k), and takes his child to playgrounds that have met city safety specifications.
He’s pouring coffee and trying to feed Jack, who’s still babbling about zombies. The kitchen is in a quiet suburban enclave but is louder than the most chaotic New York City block. Electronics whirring, kid screaming, the television blaring—everything seems teetering on the precipice of combustion. His face, slack, betrays none of this. He pours the coffee with one hand and spoons some orange gloop into his son’s mouth. Neither endeavor is proving particularly successful, but he doesn’t seem to notice.
A friend of mine in Brooklyn, Jason, is older than me, with an eight-year-old son. Jason loves the Mets and is desperate for his son to share his obsession. His son has learned this, and discovered that if there’s a product with the Mets logo on it, his father will buy it for him. Jack might not understand this key parental manipulation tactic, but he will soon: His room is covered with Cubs memorabilia, from Cubs bibs to Cubs onesies to Cubs teddy bears to Cubs sippy cups. I have tried to explain to Mike that he is poisoning his son’s mind, that he is subscribing him to a life of misery, but Mike never listens. On his own bedroom wall, he has a picture of Vedder (a Cubs fan) playing catch with former Cubs first baseman Mark Grace. I’m always surprised Joan lets that stay up there.
“Who’s pitching today again?” Mike says. I am surprised by the question. The Cubs have had one of the most dominant seasons in their history. It is the one hundredth anniversary of the Cubs’ last World Series title, and the whole season, pretty much from Opening Day on, has felt like a coronation. There was never any doubt that the Cubs were the best team in the National League. The fuzzy Cubbies, the lovable losers—this year, they were dominant. Every day was a celebration for the Cubs in 2008. Guys like Mike had been waiting for a season like this since they were babies. It was perfect. One hundred years. World Championship. 2008. Billy Goat. Bartman. All that nonsense, gone, with one season. That’s the plan. This is the year. I imagined Mike was spending every waking moment immersed in all Cubs minutiae. After all, I was doing the same thing for the Cardinals, and we weren’t even contenders anymore, not after a dreadful stretch in late August and early September. That hadn’t slowed me down. Watching and thinking about the Cardinals was better than watching and thinking about life. I assumed Mike was the same way. And he didn’t know who was starting?
“Ted Lilly,” I say, masking annoyance. “Cardinals can’t hit left-handers. So you should be good.”
Jack is finally working on the orange gloop, and Mike’s sipping his coffee and flipping aimlessly through the paper. He turns to Jack. “The Cubbies are going to win their division today,” he says. “Do you know what that means?”
“Zombies!” Jack says.
Mike smiles. “It means we’re going to beat Uncle Will’s Cardinals. Daddy’s going to the game with Uncle Will. We don’t like the Cardinals, do we?” Jack giggles while the goop drips onto the table, and Mike dabs it up without missing a beat. I look down and stare at the koi pond fish on my phone. They really are quite soothing.
My phone rings. A picture pops up on my phone, the same one that pops up every time the 217 area code number dials in. It’s of a middle-aged man, wearing Oakley sunglasses, drinking a Natural Light, sporting a dirty gray tanktop. He’s sitting behind the wheel of a truck. The picture makes him look like he’s driving down a private road that only he’s allowed to be on. It’s iconic. It should be in the Smithsonian.
This is the picture:
“I’m in Rantoul.” My father has a gruff, abrupt, you’re-lucky-I’m-talking-this-much voice. He talks like he’s under a court order; he’ll talk, sure, but he doesn’t have to like it.
“I’ll be at Union Station in an hour-and-a-half,” I tell him. “I’ll be the guy wearing a Cardinals jersey who kind of looks like you.” He hangs up before I hear his response.
Mike turns to Jack. “That was Will’s dad on the phone,” he says. “He’s going to the game today. He likes the Cardinals too. So Will’s dad is very sad.”
I interrupt. “My dad is a zombie, Jack. A Cardinals zombie.”
Jack screams again, spewing gloop everywhere. This tickles him, and he keeps spitting it in all directions. Mike lets him know this is unacceptable and wipes it up.
“You know how to get to the train station?” he asks. I nod. “You know,” he says, “I wouldn’t wear that jersey. You’re in Chicago.” I am wearing a Rick Ankiel 66 jersey. It is my most prized possession.
“I have GPS,” I tell him. “And I think the jersey will be just fine. Won’t it, Jack?”
“Zombies!” The walking undead.
WEARING A CARDINALS JERSEY does not get me accosted by Cubs fans. It gets me accosted by panhandlers. I have to admire the strategy of the Chicago Union Station panhandlers. The best of them is pulling a suitcase behind him, talking into a cellphone, saying things like “This’ll never work, man. I’m stuck here. Why would some stranger help me out? I wouldn’t help me out. Shit!” before telling whoever’s next to him, “Man, I lost my wallet, and I just need twelve bucks to get home.” The suitcase and cellphone seem to be working for him. He spotted my Ankiel jersey and tried it with me, and I probably would have fallen for it had I not seen him run the con on half the station.
The robot lady voice informs me that Train 58, the City of New Orleans, has arrived. I didn’t need the help. I could have heard my dad from the parking garage.
He is surrounded by four people, a family, it seems, carting an unnatural amount of luggage. Each of them is dragging two suitcases behind them, and Dad’s carrying three bags; I have no idea how they would have handled everything had they not run into him. But of course they did. Dad talks to everybody. I can’t tell what he’s talking about, but the family is laughing so hard the mother drops one of the suitcases. He’s wearing a white Cardinals jersey that has maybe one button attached; maybe they’re talking about his navel, since they can see it. Amazingly, he is also swigging what I am sure is a stiff Bloody Mary from a plastic thermos. I had no idea my father had so many hands. It is a cluster of activity—warm, chaotic, random. It is pure Bryan Leitch.
“Yo!” he says when he sees me. He is wearing sunglasses. “Go Birds!” He gives me a high five.
Mike has taken the Metra to the station. He’s just around the corner. We’re in parking garage five. Dad’s Bloody Mary is eating through the plastic. Dad says good-bye to his friends. I bet they tell everyone they meet in Chicago about the very nice man they met on the train. The big city’s a crazy place.
MY FATHER TURNS SIXTY years old this year, and save for trips to visit his children on opposite coasts and his time in the military, he has rarely left his home state of Illinois, or his hometown of Mattoon. He is not a simple man, but he is a basic one: He cares about his family, his job, his dogs, and his St. Louis Cardinals, not necessarily in that order. And despite living just two hundred miles south on Highway 57, he has never visited Wrigley Field. His answer has a fierce ideological purity: “That place is crawling with Cubs fans. Why would I want to go there?”
I am the one who talked him into this. “Come on, Dad, it’ll be fun,” I said. “Cardinals-Cubs! Wrigley Field! I’ll even buy the tickets.” How was I supposed to know this would be the game where the Cubs might clinch the division? That he’d be arriving at Wrigley Field just in time for a party to celebrate the destruction of all he believes in, all he values, all that matters? Am I overstating this? I fear that I am not.
He looks nervous. Dad doesn’t like traffic. I look nervous too. I don’t like my dad in traffic. Not Mike, though. He’s not a surburban dad anymore. He’s three years old. He’s looking out the window, a goofy kid eager to go outside and roll around in the grass.
We pull into the parking garage. Thirty goddamned dollars. Freaking Wrigley. We are here.
“So, who needs a beer?” my dad says. Me. Me. I need one.
KNOWLEDGE YOU NOW HAVE
- Back in 2008, there was something called an “iPhone,” and it was considered the height of modern technology. Unlike what’s wrapped around your wrist right now, it was unable to beam you to China when you typed in a personalized PIN code.
- A Bloody Mary will remain cold in a thermos throughout a four-hour train ride.
- The reason your father is so much older than your friends’ parents is that he found himself much more interesting in his early thirties than he really was.