In which there is a Brooklyn roof.
All my friends were afraid of my father because he was a big guy, and my friends never heard him say a word unless he was yelling at me. I was fourteen or fifteen and my Babe Ruth team was up to the plate. I was sitting on the bench, and because there was no dugout, you could see the stands, houses, and parking lot. My father was standing leaning up against the bleachers when a teammate hit a high foul ball. The crowd on the bleachers scurried away and my father just stood there. The ball hit the top of his head: It sounded like a sledgehammer striking a concrete basement floor. The ball bounced off his head, went almost as high as it was hit, and landed in the parking lot. My father did not turn red, cry out, or rub his head. My junior year I was a catcher for my high school and broke my left finger in practice. I played the rest of the year with a painful broken finger because I wanted to be tough like my father. Dad later admitted it hurt like hell.
— PAUL SAVARD Jr., Waterford, Vermont
2009. I AM SITTING ON THE ROOF OF MY APARTMENT IN BROOKLYN, high enough that I can overlook downtown Manhattan, the Statue of Liberty, the Verrazano Bridge, and the Brooklyn Bridge, drinking a beer with my father. It’s the summer of 2009, nine months after the game at Wrigley. The Cardinals lost at Citi Field to a dreadful Mets team earlier that night, and my mother and my girlfriend are asleep downstairs. It’s past midnight. I have to go to work the next day. But we’re up there, drinking. It’s one of those perfect summer nights that feel like fall, a slight breeze coming from the East River, and airplanes, thanks to a recent change in the LaGuardia Airport flight routes, are floating to their landing just about a thousand feet over our heads. We can watch their entire process, no longer scary, not eight years later, as they come in from the south, over Staten Island and Bay Ridge and on to Queens. I find myself staring at one plane in particular, flashing a red light on one wing and, oddly, a blue one on the other, as it glides in, seemingly motionless, until it’s right on top of me. I’m lying on the ledge of our Cobble Hill apartment building, a wide enough ledge that I’m not worried about falling off, smoking a cigarette, and staring upward. Dad’s sitting on the ledge next to me. Dad doesn’t like that I smoke—no father would, or should—but he recognizes, as a former addict himself, that lecturing me about it isn’t going to stop me from doing it. (My mother does not recognize this.) Plus, I suspect he secretly likes it. He always lets me know it’s OK to smoke around him, in a way that makes me think he misses the smell, that former smokers never really overcome the desire to be at least around cigarettes. When my father talks about how poor he and my mother were during the early years of their marriage, he tells the story of digging through old ashtrays looking for cigarette butts that might have just a smidgen of tobacco left in them. “You could usually find one,” he’ll say. “Enough to get you through the next hour, anyway.”
I’ve been living with my girlfriend for about three months, and we’ve been dating for about two years. I’m thirty-three years old. There aren’t that many shopping days till Christmas. I’ve been engaged twice in my life, but never married. (One was my decision, one wasn’t.) My father knows this. Which is why I’m telling him I’m going to ask my girlfriend to marry me before I’m telling anyone else. Because he won’t make a big deal about it. Because it’ll be the middle part of a conversation about how frustrating it was to watch Kyle Lohse pitch today, about how awful Rick Ankiel’s strike zone discipline is, about how we desperately need some lineup protection for Albert Pujols, about how lucky we are the Cubs haven’t gotten their act together this season, not yet.
That I’m telling him this while staring up into the sky watching planes pass over, drinking a Budweiser Select, and smoking a Marlboro Light, rather than, you know, sitting and looking him in the eye, is of course the point. Plus, it’s late.
“Well, she’s a great girl,” he says, and she is, and he knows that, and I know that, which is why he says it. It’s easy and simple and will segue into the next topic. “Congratulations.” He clinks my Budweiser Select with his. I don’t really like Budweiser Select. The whole thing feels like a marketing gimmick. What does “Select” mean, anyway?
I’m about to ask Dad who’s pitching tomorrow—I know who it is, I always do, but it gets us talking—when he pipes up.
“You know, the thing with your generation is,” he says, “you guys are a helluva lot better at marriage than you are at kids.”
I perk up and lose the flight path of the blue- and red-lighted plane. I pull myself up and let my legs dangle over the ledge, facing away from the street, toward my dad. “How do you mean?” I ask, a little taken aback. This isn’t about tomorrow’s starting pitcher at all.
“Well, if we’re gonna get into this, I’m gonna need another beer,” he says. “Actually, you got any whiskey?” It’s past midnight.
AFTER THAT LAST 1–2–3 inning, with the Cardinals’ best three hitters awkwardly flipping their bats at the weird ninety-five-mile-per-hour Wiffle balls Carlos Marmol was whizzing in their direction, the grandstands at Wrigley Field are starting to wave in undeniable anticipation. They know this is happening. You can tell. They haven’t exactly been as devoted to the action on the field as one might expect of a team trying to clinch its division—and now they’ve taken it to the next level. They’re singing.
It is to their credit that they’re not attempting to sing the tuneless Eddie Vedder ditty, though I suppose if they just started warbling and oohing inane non-syllables, it would sound somewhat similar. No, they’ve got an easy song to croon. They’re singing “Go Cubs Go.”
It is the sound of glaciers shifting, the sound of death rap-rap-rapping at your door. It is unquestionably catchy: It stores itself in the part of your brain that won’t let you forget the first time a girl told you she didn’t love you anymore, the time you took the live drive to the groin, the time your beloved family dog passed away. It is evil, this song: It is fucking evil.
“Jesus, what the hell is this?” Dad says.
“It’s ‘Go Cubs Go,’ ” Mike says, a smile taking over his face, his skull, his entire upper torso. “Catchy, isn’t it?”
Here is “Go Cubs Go.”
Baseball season’s under way
Well you better get ready for a brand-new day
Hey, Chicago, what do you say
The Cubs are gonna win today.
They’re singing . . .
Go, Cubs, go
Go, Cubs, go
Hey, Chicago, what do you say
The Cubs are gonna win today
Go, Cubs, go
Go, Cubs, go
Hey, Chicago, what do you say
The Cubs are gonna win today.
You know the song “City of New Orleans”? You like that song, right? I like that song. Arlo Guthrie made it famous, but it was written by a man named Steve Goodman. (He also wrote the mock country song “You Never Even Call Me By My Name.”) He was a bit of an underground folk hero and, as luck would have it, a die-hard Cubs fan. Goodman, who also wrote a song called “My Old Man” about his father, was born in 1948, three years after the Cubs’ last World Series appearance. He died of leukemia at the age of thirty-six, in 1984, four days before the Cubs clinched the National League East to secure their first postseason appearance since that World Series. Four years later his ashes were spread at Wrigley Field. In 2007, last season, the Cubs started playing “Go Cubs Go” after every win. Steve Goodman wrote that song.
He would enjoy that. He would enjoy knowing that his fun little song, with an advertising shout-out to WGN-TV, was screamed by forty thousand people on the day they clinched the National League Central Division. Before they clinched it, actually. That would tickle him pink, I’m sure.
Of course, he’s dead. So he never got to hear any of that, or know what he inspired. Poor guy. He should have seen it coming, though. He was a Cubs fan, after all.
The song really is catchy. It’s impossible not to hum along with it. Dad appears to have the same problem. I hear him humming it next to me, and I know, because I’m in tune with him. And there’s still three outs left to go. The erratic Kerry Wood is coming in. There’s still a chance. But I still can’t stop humming. Hey, Chicago, whaddya say?
I snap to when Derrek Lee hits a line drive right over our head halfway down the first-base line. We look up to see if anyone was killed.
“That get anybody?” Dad asks.
“Nope,” Mike replies. “Just missed that kid in the Soriano jersey.”
“Dammit.”
IN 1998, I lived in Los Angeles but flew into St. Louis to do an interview for the Sporting News. It was the weekend that Mike Piazza had been traded to the Florida Marlins from the Dodgers, and the Cardinals were to play the Marlins that night. Dad picked me up from the airport, where he gawked at a confused-looking Mr. Piazza himself (“I play for the Marlins?”) and headed to the ballpark, for beers and batting practice. It was the first time I’d actually seen Mark McGwire in a Cardinals jersey. I’d never seen anyone hit a baseball like that before, just moon shots, blasting into and through the ether. We drank and marveled. They used to run McGwire’s batting practice live on local cable newscasts. 1998 was a crazy time.
We spent the evening drinking, drinking, drinking, downing $5 beers, one after another. I was twenty-two. This was exciting; I hadn’t seen my father since Christmas. The conversation veered in odd directions. We talked about women he’d dated before Mom, about how weird one of my uncles was, about how Dad always thought that one girl, what was her name, the older one I dated, was pretty damned attractive, why didn’t I stay with her? I never knew Dad had noticed anyone I dated.
McGwire stepped to the plate. He was facing Livan Hernandez, one of the lone survivors of the Marlins’ binge-and-purge of their World Series champions from the season before. I think Dad and I were talking about how you have to double down when you’ve got eleven and the dealer’s showing sixteen, when McGwire hit a fly ball to center field.
We leapt up to see if the ball could sneak over the center-field fence. Dad started yelling, “Get! Get! Get!”—he stole that line from Cardinals broadcaster Mike Shannon, who drunkenly wails that every pop-up, when a ball looks like it might make it over the fence but he isn’t sure. The ball landed in the grass area just beyond the wall, and we cheered. “Whew, that one just barely made it!” I exclaimed. “Yeah, that was close,” Dad replied.
We had just ordered another beer when a graphic flashed on the JumboTron. “MARK MCGWIRE’S HOME RUN WAS MEASURED AT 545 FEET, THE LONGEST OF HIS CAREER.” It was true. The ball hadn’t just slipped over the wall; it had bashed against the St. Louis Post-Dispatch sign that hung under the upper deck, then fallen into the grass below. You might have heard of this home run; the Cardinals immortalized it by placing an enormous Band-Aid over the sign to make it clear just how far the ball had traveled. McGwire later said, “I don’t think I can hit one any better than that.”
My father and I had seen one of the longest home runs in the history of baseball; we were just too drunk to notice. It happens.
I COME BACK up to the roof with two Captain Morgan and Diet Cokes, one for each of us. Rum mixed with a carbonated beverage seems like the right call here, rather than whiskey. Anything that hard will knock us both off the roof, and, frankly, we could use the caffeine.
“Sorry, I don’t have any limes,” I say as I hand Dad the drink. “So . . . what were you saying?”
Dad takes a big swig. He only started drinking hard alcohol in the last few years, probably because my mother, after her cancer went into remission, caught a health kick and is now in better shape than any other member of the family has ever been in their entire lives. Mom has taken to showing off her six-pack abs. This is disturbing to me, and I can’t imagine that Dad, with his hard-earned, rock-solid beer gut, is enraptured by it either. Sometimes you just hit the point where you say, “You know, fuck it, I’m getting fat, I have the right.” Mom has deprived him of this right. Hard alcohol keeps the gut in check and allows you to go to bed earlier. Theoretically, anyway. It’s approaching 1 A.M., and Dad’s belly button is still arriving to appointments twenty minutes before he does.
“You know, your mom only agreed to marry me because I had a nice bike and looked nice in my uniform.”
One bitter cold February 1970 evening in Mattoon, Illinois, young Sally Dooley, eighteen, was beckoned from her quiet room by Kathy, her roommate and best friend. “That asshole Bryan isn’t here yet. He’s an hour late. I’m sick of waiting on him. He’s probably drunk again.”
Sally, a somewhat sheepish yet wild-if-provoked bookworm, rarely went out on dates. She’d met a few guys in Moweaqua, her hometown, a village of two thousand just outside Decatur and about an hour from Mattoon, but they were pretty much going nowhere, happy just to cruise around, drink beer, and try to get in girls’ pants, and all three recklessly. It was a time of displacement for Sally; living with her brother Ron and Kathy, geographically too far removed from hippie rebellion, she simply wanted to go to college, studying whatever—today’s choice was physical education—and find some sense of order in everything. As for guys, well, all she really knew was that she wanted to date a guy with a nice bike. That was key. But she was in no hurry.
Kathy was still screaming in her ear. “Goddamn him, Sally! He thinks he’s so tough, with his motorcycle, but I’m sick of it. To hell with this. I’m going out. If he ends up showing up, tell him to buzz off and not to come by anymore. I don’t like riding on that bike anyway. It just messes up my hair.”
And so Kathy bolted, and Bryan showed up about a half hour later, can of Busch at his side, stoic atop his Triumph cycle, and Sally was waiting there, steeling herself to deliver the bad news. And thus was love born.
In my parents’ old scrapbook, full of wedding photos and random candid shots from their courtship, there is a clipping from the Mattoon Journal-Gazette. It’s in the Notices section, presumably copied down straight from the police report.
ARRESTED
Sylvia K. Dooley, 19, Mattoon, illegal transportation of alcohol, underage consumption. William B. Leitch, 21, Mattoon, illegal transportation of alcohol.
Bryan and Sally hit it off splendidly, drinking together and finding that their backgrounds were more similar than they had anticipated. Bryan was the roughneck, the guy always with his head stuck under the hood of a ’57 Chevy, sneaking smokes and skipping out on every class except shop. Sally had been the smart one, enjoying only the occasional flirtation with The Other Half. But both had come from large families and both wanted to have fun while they could, before adulthood reared its nasty head.
The main difference: Bryan was going to escape Mattoon soon. With a few of his buddies from shop, he had enlisted in the air force. He was facing boot camp in about three months. This was during the Vietnam War, of course, and even though the big cities had been suffering through those dreadful protestors for a couple of years now, Mattoon had the same mind-set it had through all the other wars. You signed up and served your country, the way that you were supposed to, the way your father and his father and his father had. In the Leitch family household, the first thing Bryan saw when he woke up in the morning was the picture of his father in uniform, strong, firm, proud. For a guy with no designs on college and no real problems with the war, nothing he could tell so far anyway, waiting around for your draft card was not even a possibility. You enlisted, because that was what you did.
Boot camp approached. It had only been three months; was that enough time? To figure out if this was your life mate? Sure, they had fun together, and she sure was funny after a few cans of Pabst, but who knew what would happen in the service? What if he ended up going to Vietnam? Could he handle having her back in Mattoon, studying at Lake Land College, while he looked real life right in the face? She had come along at the wrong time. Maybe he would not have enlisted—his draft card number had indeed been low—had he known she would show up. But she had. So three months into their budding relationship, a week before he headed to Lackland Air Force Base in Texas, before life started getting weird, Bryan broke up with Sally. She handled the news well enough; it would be easier anyway, with him halfway across the country, perhaps someday halfway across the world. As nice a guy as he seemed to be, as sharp as he looked in his uniform, as bitchin’ a motorcycle as he might have, he was hardly the safest horse to bet on. So they parted ways.
Sally received the first letter about two weeks after he was gone. As always, Bryan was reserved in his words. The letter was bland in form, mainly just a here’s-what’s-going-on, my-hair’s-a-lot-shorter, have-an-asshole-drill-sergeant type of thing. It was the end of the letter that caught Sally’s attention. In Bryan’s scrawled, broken English was the sentence Sally, when I get back, I think we should talk.
For whatever reason—perhaps the close quarters with a bunch of men—Bryan couldn’t get Sally off his mind. The letters started coming weekly after that, through the six weeks of boot camp and the sixteen weeks following in Wichita Falls, Texas, for basic training. By way of his expertise in mechanics, Bryan was dispatched to flight maintenance and would not be going to Vietnam. He was needed here, working on planes, an under-the-hood troubleshooter. During the sixteen weeks in Wichita Falls—when I asked him about the training, my father instinctively recited, “43151C, Flight Maintenance,” like he had done so many times before, though likely not for about thirty years—the letters became more and more frequent. By now, Bryan and Sally were talking on the phone whenever they had the opportunity.
After maintenance training, he was to be stationed in Hampton, Virginia, at an air force base there, and the idea hit Bryan in a flash. As luck would have it, a fellow private at Hampton lived in Effingham, a city about twenty miles from Illinois. In March 1971, about three months after he’d arrived there, he propositioned the pal. “Hey, whaddya doing this weekend? Wanna go home for a few hours?” The drive was about fourteen hours. They would have a total of about ten hours in Mattoon, not alloting for sleep. He surprised Sally, waking her, and handed her an engagement ring. It was the same ring his mother had received from his father. Sally said yes. I do not want to know what they did with the other eight hours. They planned a wedding date in June, a mere two months after the engagement and after spending a total of two weeks together since they had broken up a year earlier. Bryan siphoned off a couple weeks of leave from the base, and they came back to Mattoon and were married. For their honeymoon, they headed to Effingham and spent a night at the Best Western Inn. Then it was off to Virginia. Mom was twenty years old. Dad was twenty-two.
“All I was was a crew cut and a uniform,” Dad says, finishing the rest of his Captain Morgan and Diet Coke. Time for another one. “I didn’t even have the bike anymore.”
IN MATTOON, there are six houses built by my grandfather and two built by my father. (There’s another one Dad and his brothers built in Moweaqua.) I remember being four years old, while Mom was pregnant with my sister, and sitting in a folding chair on the newly poured foundation, watching a tiny black-and-white television while my father hammered and sawed his way to the home where I’d spend the next fourteen years of my life. By 2000, when I’d moved to Los Angeles and my sister was heading off to college, Dad decided to build another one, this one just for him and Mom. It would have a massive kitchen, four bathrooms, two garages, and a basement with a huge television, a bar, a jukebox, a pinball machine, and endless Cardinals paraphernalia. It was Dad’s last major project. “I figure I’ll die in that house,” he said when he was building it, and four years later, his mother-in-law, my grandmother, did. Like the other houses, like the ones my grandfather built, like that house he built while I picked my nose and chased moths in my underwear (the house just two houses down from the second one he built), it’ll last forever. There’s a house there that didn’t exist until my dad built it. He drew up the plans, picked the materials, dug the foundation, poured the concrete, hammered the nails, laid the carpeting, installed the wiring, put in the plumbing, insulated the walls. There’s a house that stands because my dad constructed it for his family. In fact, there are two of them.
MIKE SPENDS MOST of Aramis Ramirez’s six-pitch at bat screaming into his phone.
“They’re WINNING! Yes, they’re AHEAD! The CUBS!” Everyone around him is hollering; the buzz isn’t just overpowering, it’s futzing with his phone. The bad connection and loco vibes are turning a simple phone call into something impossible. And that’s before Mike tries to talk to his three-year-old.
“The CUBBIES! Yes, Jackson, the CUBBIES! That’s right, the blue team. We’re winning. We’re gonna win the division. Daddy will be home a little later, because we’ll be celebrating. The blue team won. The CUBBIES, Jackson, the CUBBIES!” I finally tire of Mike’s impossible task and grab the phone from him.
“Hey, Jackson!” I yell. “The happy chickens are dancing! There’s a folder with a butterfly and thirty-six daffodils. My left patella has been eaten by a Turkish fifty-cent coin. CUBBIES!” I then hang up.
“Thanks,” Mike says. “I have no idea why Joan put me on the phone with him.”
I wonder, if the Cubs never do anything again, if this game, this National League Central Division Championship, turns out to be the lone highlight of young Jackson’s Cubs fandom, if he has a Steve Goodman life, the one season of mirth happening too young for him to understand, 2008 being the one year everyone hangs onto as they go through decades in the wilderness, the story Mike tells his son as the Cubs finish in last place every year, Honest, Jackson, one year they won the division by beating the Cardinals and I was there with Uncle Will and his dad, and little Jackson Cetera can’t believe it, because the Cubs are always so awful, Go Cubs Go, Go Cubs Go, hey, Chicago, whaddya say . . .
Aramis Ramirez strikes out, and Ryan Franklin has set down five in a row. This isn’t over yet. It isn’t. It isn’t.
ANOTHER DRINK. Nearly 2 A.M. Fewer planes now. Dad speaks.
You see, your mom didn’t know me at all. She was just lucky. I could have been a terrible person. I could have gone to Vietnam and come back all fucked up. I could have not given a shit about being a husband, or a father. I could have been molested as a kid. I could have been a secret serial killer. I could have been one of those guys who cheated on her forever. I could have not realized I was a fag. I could have been anything. She had no idea. She just liked the car and the uniform. She was twenty years old. She didn’t know me at all.
She was just lucky, you see. And so was I. We got married so young because that’s what you were supposed to do, that’s what my parents did, that’s what everyone else did. Sure, we loved each other, as much as we could possibly understand what that was. But we had no idea. We had no idea what thirty-five years of marriage would be like, what kind of parents we’d be, what the real world was like. I turned out to be a hardworking guy, the type of guy who worked his ass off no matter what, someone who didn’t have much more of a desire to do much other than raise a family and be a good husband. You wanted to write, you wanted to see the world, you wanted to go do whatever it is that you do, and that’s great, you had to go, you had to do that. I didn’t want to do that. I just wanted a house and some kids and a wife. But your mom didn’t know that. As far as she knew, I was gonna bail in five years the first time I saw some lady in a low-cut dress or a crotch-high skirt. Maybe I wanted to go find myself. Maybe I wanted to do something other than raise a family. I didn’t. That was enough for me. But when I was twenty-two, and your mom was twenty, she didn’t know any of that. And neither did I.
All your friends, all those ones whose parents are divorced, like your girl’s, they were just like us. They didn’t know the other person for shit. That’s why that happened. They didn’t take the time to figure out what was gonna happen, with either one of them. They just got married because that’s what you were supposed to do. Which is fine: Ain’t nothing wrong with marriage. But people realized early on that, damn, this marriage shit is hard. You gotta be in the right mind-set for that. You gotta know what you’re doing. You gotta know that this is exactly what you want, that you’ve looked around and thought and experienced and bled and shit and fucked and everything else, and this is the place you were eventually going, this is what you want, this is what you were looking for all that time. You have to know that. Because marriage is the start of something, sure, but for a lot of people, they see it as the end. They don’t think they see it that way, but they do, they absolutely do, and sometimes that’s a good thing and sometimes it ain’t. If you’ve never done nothin’ with your life, and you go into a marriage thinking it’s the end of something, then you start thinking that you ended up doing nothing at all, that you’re trapped, that it’s all over, that you went and got yourself stuck in something before you realized what was going on. That’s what people did. That’s why they all got divorced. They got married before they knew anything about the other person, but most important, they got married before they knew anything about themselves. For God’s sake, I was an idiot at twenty-two. So were you. So’s everybody. What business do we have making decisions at twenty-two that affect the rest of our lives? We don’t. We don’t know a goddamned thing. So people like your friends’ parents, they hit the reset button, they started over, they quit. Maybe they ended up happy, and maybe they didn’t. But they tried to make a smarter decision, a more mature decision. They probably didn’t pull that off very often. But they tried. They thought they knew themselves better. They thought they could get it right this time.
Me and your mom, we were just so goddamned lucky. Sure, she wants to stab me in the eye half the time, and sometimes I want to wrap her head in duct tape just so she’ll shut up for a goddamned second. But we wanted the same things. We wanted to be good people with good kids, and we both valued work and family and didn’t think that we were some special snowflake. We thought if something hurt or sucked, you could rub some dirt on it, walk it off, move on with your life. Your mom and me, if we’d have known what each other would be like when we were fifty-five, back when we were twenty-two, we, man, we would have been scared shitless. We didn’t know anything back then. We would have been so wrong. We didn’t know what we wanted. We were just lucky.
But we had you guys, you and your sister. We didn’t always agree on the best way to raise you. You were easier, you were quieter, it wasn’t so hard to push you around and make you do what the hell we wanted you to; your sister’s more hardheaded, she’s louder, she’s a goddamned steamroller, ’swhat she is. We didn’t realize that for a while. But we figured it out. We did some stupid shit, we made some mistakes, but we loved you guys and understood that no matter what happened with us, no matter whether everything turned out the way we thought it was going to, we had you guys, we had these two amazing kids, these two other human beings, that we created, and you’re so different from us and so exactly the fucking same, and just being able to watch you grow up, being able to be there for it, to be able to sit up here and get shitfaced with you, it’s an honor, it’s a goddamned honor. You’ll remember this. You won’t remember that girl who screwed you over, you won’t remember that girl you screwed over, you won’t remember your first job or your first piece in a newspaper or the first time you got stoned. But you’ll remember this. This is what matters. We get to do this.
And see, Will, this is what you should be worried about. This is the downside to the way you, and the rest of your generation, does it. You took your time. You figured your shit out. You gave yourself time to fuck up, to let yourself struggle in your career, to be an asshole to women and let them be an asshole to you, to write for no money, to answer phones, to make minimum wage, to try shit out and devote yourself to what you do, to understand what kind of person you are, what you want, what you don’t want, what matters to you, what don’t mean shit. You took your time. That was smart. That woman down there, that woman you’re going to marry, you’d have never gotten her when you were twenty-two. You would have fumbled it, or she would, or both of you would have. Each of you now knows the other, and yourselves, well enough to understand what matters, what each of you wants, just how lucky you are to have found each other. You value it. I guarantee you there are going to be fewer divorces now because people are taking so much time. You’re doing it right. You did it right. You found the right girl, and she found the right guy.
But I don’t know if you’re going to be able to do this. By the time you have a kid, you’re gonna be thirty-five, thirty-six, thirty-seven years old. When your son or daughter is the age you are now, thirty-three, you’re going to be nearly seventy years old. I can tell you this: There ain’t no goddamned way I’m gonna be up here drinking rum and Cokes with you til two in the morning when I’m seventy years old. I won’t even live that long. Getting married so young, even if I had no idea what I was doing, allowed this to happen. It gave me the opportunity to watch you and your sister not only grow up, but turn into actual adults. And to live with you the way that you live. I don’t understand New York, or what the hell she’s doing out in San Francisco, but I can get glimpses of it, I can see that it makes you happy, I can drink with you and go to ball games and stay up late and talk about all of it. We weren’t doing this fifteen years ago. We’re doing it now. We’re lucky. We’re fucking lucky. We’re all so fucking lucky.
But I don’t know if you can do this. I think this is your trade-off. This is what I’m saying. You guys are getting marriage right. But we got kids right. You guys are sticking test tubes in your ass and taking goat genes so you can have babies when you’re forty, and you end up with messed up Octomom shit. You made the right decisions for you. But there ain’t much time left. And someday you’re gonna be taking your walker across the street, or your motorized Segway or your rocket packs or whatever the hell you’ll have then, and you’ll look at your thirty-three-year-old kid and you’ll wish that you were able to do this. I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with it. There isn’t. Which is more important? Which matters more? I think you’re going to be a hell of a dad . . . but I have ten years on you, at least. That we get to do this while you’re an adult, that we can sit up here and drink and second-guess La Russa and watch planes, that’s a direct result of me and your mom being lucky idiots when we were twenty years old. You made your own luck. That’s great. But I fear you’ll pay for it down the line. Life’s just too short, that’s all it is. You only have so much time. You can’t fit it all in. You just have to be as lucky as me and your mom. I’m blessed to have you and your sister and your mom, and I can’t believe it, I musta been a goddamned nun in a former life or something. Every dad wants his kid to have a better life than he did. And I fear you won’t. I fear you won’t. And you deserve one. And so does your kid. If you ever have one.
And you better have one. Because I ain’t gonna be here forever. I’d like to meet him. Or her. Clock’s tickin’, bucko.
OK, it’s about bedtime for Bonzo. Big game tomorrow. Wainwright’s pitching.
I drain my glass. This is not exactly how the conversation went.
JIM EDMONDS grounds out to Felipe Lopez at second base, and hey, Ryan Franklin looked pretty solid out there today. Not that anyone cares right now. Three outs to go. Kerry Wood coming in. Troy Glaus, Adam Kennedy, and Skip Schumaker coming to the plate. The crowd is roaring. Mike is bobbing up and down again. Dad stands up and watches Albert Pujols jog into the dugout.
“You know, this really is a nice ballpark,” he says.
Three more outs. One last chance. One last chance to get this right.
THE NEXT MORNING, hungover and blurry, Dad and I walked to the hardware store just down the street in Brooklyn. I’d bought a new television, coinciding with my parents’ visit, so Dad could help me install it. And by that, I mean “Dad does the work and I hand him tools.” It’s always been like that. It doesn’t bother either of us, not anymore.
Dad needed a ratchet, or a socket, or something, I don’t know. As we walked into the Ace store, I saw a picture of a middle-aged Puerto Rican man wearing a Mets ball cap, sitting at a workbench, surprised by the person taking the photo, not smiling but not annoyed, just in the middle of something. Hi honey, you know I don’t like having my picture taken but OK, go ahead, how’s your mom, is dinner ready? Beneath the picture was a caption: “PAPA 1932–2001.”
Behind the desk was a man, maybe forty-five or something, who spoke no English and looked an awful lot like the Papa in the photo. Dad walked up to him and said, “Ratchet?” The guy nodded and walked to the back of the store, with Dad in tow. I didn’t follow. I just watched them back there, picking up tools, showing them to each other, nodding more, smiling, communicating in that Dad language that only those who have spent a lifetime doing manual labor, building things, fixing things, can understand. We paid the man and Dad shook his hand. “Gracias,” my dad said, and I damned near lost it right there.