Pops: Fatherhood in Pieces, Page 4

  So now, along with everything else—the rules of consent, the imperatives of sexual reciprocity, the fundamental principle of equality—I had to teach him not to be a dick to girls.

  Right off, I could see a few potential obstacles to this task. First of all, in order to do the job properly, it might help if I were myself not a dick. And I would like to believe that when it comes to the primary women in my life—wife, daughters, mother—most of the time, and usually but not always for the right reasons, I am a pretty nice guy. Considerate, helpful, willing to show affection, responsive, attentive, loyal, polite, et cetera. But to the extent that this is the case, no credit at all is due to me; it’s purely a matter of long years of training, conditioning, and unstinting effort by women—my mother, my first wife, and my current wife of twenty-five years.

  I spent the most intensely watchful and empirical years of my life—eleven to seventeen—observing as my mother, a steady and unflappable hand, attempted to steer a sometimes veering course through the treacherous archipelago of men. I can actually remember her telling me with a throb in her voice, three days into a weeklong period of silence and unreturned phone calls that followed some date she thought had gone unusually well, “Promise me that you will never do this to a girlfriend, when you have a girlfriend. If you say that you are going to call her, you have to call her.”

  I know this made an impression on me—I still remember the conversation forty years later—but I don’t think any of my first few serious girlfriends got much benefit from my mother’s injunction. Alone, in private, I knew how to treat them with kindness, tenderness, generosity of feeling and expression, but whenever we were in public, in particular among my male friends—and when you are a young man, you are always in public, always watching yourself, listening to yourself, audience and judge, checking your behavior against that of the mental list of exemplary men that you have been busy compiling—I was kind of a dick, never serious, never forgiving, never willing to commit to anything that might entangle me in seriousness or the need to forgive. I saw an early episode of M*A*S*H recently and was surprised to discover that the character of Hawkeye Pierce—one of my first exemplary men, after my father and Groucho Marx, with both of whom he shared one of the central dickish traits of making a joke out of everything—was not just a total dick but a creep whose primary pastime, apart from alcohol, was unremitting sexual harassment of his female coworkers—or as it was known at the time, rather chillingly, “being a ladies’ man.” My mother had her share of heartache at the hands of ladies’ men.

  She set a standard for me, though—keep your promises, be nice, remember the little things, call when you say you will call—and I grew up and got married to a woman who was older than I was and had certain expectations of how she ought and ought not to be treated. It was not just a matter of calling, keeping promises, maintaining the proper form. Even being nice, whatever that means, was insufficient. What loving a grown-up woman required, it turned out, was a kind of fundamental metaphysical shift akin to the move from Jewish to Christian law, from outward obedience and conformity with the commandments, as it were, to the cultivation and maintenance of a righteous soul. I was expected to reach outside myself, beyond the dome and eyeholes of my own skull, imagine the life that was going on inside the head of another human—her fears, wishes, needs, likes and dislikes, longings—and then take these into consideration before I acted. In order to be a man—a real man, by her lights—I must try to imagine what it was like to be a woman. I did my best. We got divorced, and then I got married again, and my daughters were born. And it is in this ongoing business of fathering girls that my root-level dickishness has faced its greatest challenge. With my wife, the process has been a continuing-education course, with those initial adventures in imagining the life inside that other head going far and deep, deeper and farther than with anyone else I’ve ever known, but somehow my failures with her—the inadvertent public putdowns, the lingering sexist assumptions, the small but crucial promises broken—have never borne the same constant freight of potential disaster as similar lapses with my girls.

  Now, I know that when men are called upon to denounce sexual harassment and rape culture they will often preface or bracket their denunciation with phrases like, “As the father of a daughter . . .” or “Because I care about my daughters . . .” The implication seems to be that unless and until a man has a daughter, he remains incapable of mustering the empathy required to grant women full status as human beings whose rights and integrity must be respected. That’s not what I’m saying; in fact, I am saying something almost the opposite: I have been working most of my life, intermittently at first but pretty much constantly since I was twenty-four years old, to imagine myself into the minds and circumstances of the women in my life. But it was not until I had daughters that I fully became aware of—and duly horrified by—the damage that I myself, in my latent dickitude, was capable of inflicting. I remember once taking my older daughter to the hair salon, and when she rose from the chair with a new cut, an asymmetrical bob, going out on a limb a little bit for a fourteen-year-old in her set, saying, “Daddy?,” seeking my reaction, wanting to know if I thought she looked pretty, I— Well, I don’t know what happened. I had been reading a magazine, there was some random thought in my head, I looked up, my face must have looked blank, seeing nothing new, nothing remarkable, my mind miles away from where it needed to be right then. You needed something? And for a moment her eyes went wide with fear and doubt.

  What a dick!

  “Beautiful,” I told her, but I knew it was too late: she had a crack in her now, fine as a hair but like all cracks irreversible. I was shocked by my own thoughtlessness, and ashamed of it, but the thing I felt most of all was horror. Horror is the only fit response when you are confronted by the full extent of your power to break another human being.

  To be a feminist, as a man, it’s not enough to acknowledge the violence behind the power that you inherited at birth, along with all the entrenched structures, from language to custom to religion, that have been put into place in order to help you maintain it. To be a feminist—defined most simply, so that even an eleven-year-old boy can understand it, as the radical assertion that women are human beings—you must repudiate the legacy of violence, and resist those implacable structures of power. But even that’s not enough. Even after all the hard work of repudiation and resistance, your privilege will still be there, assigning higher value to your labor, giving your words more time and attention, and basically letting you be as big a dick as you want, whenever and however you please. Against that the only hope is empathy, and for empathy you need to call upon the greatest of all your human inheritances, stronger than violence, able to leap the most entrenched hierarchies in a single bound. To feel the proper horror of the power you have to break someone, you need to use your imagination.

  “How come you always blow her off that way?” I said to my son, the next time I saw the little SMS ritual enacted.

  I could see the question caught him off guard. He didn’t know how to answer it; he probably didn’t even know if the question had an answer.

  “It probably hurts her feelings,” I suggested. “If you think about it.”

  My son had the sullen grace to acknowledge that this was a possibility.

  “I know you don’t want to do that,” I said. “You’re friends. She’s a sweet girl.”

  “She’s whatever,” my son said.

  Not long after that, I suppose, the girl got the message. They never hung out, and she stopped texting him, and I don’t remember hearing too much about her at all until my son was about to graduate from high school, and one day her name came up in conversation. My son said that the two of them had lost touch completely, years before, but he had heard through the Berkeley-Oakland high school grapevine that she had pretty much gone off the rails: alcohol, drugs, wild behavior. My son shook his head, looking vaguely pitying, but I didn’t hear what I considered to be sufficient sympathy, let alone
empathy, in his tone.

  “It’s probably because you never texted her back,” I said, with a straight face, laying on a tone of serious reproach. It was a classic dick move.

  I could see him doing the emotional math, charting the butterfly effect of his callousness toward her, all those years ago. His face got very grave, and his eyes widened. For a moment he looked adequately horrified.

  “Maybe it is,” he said, and I could see that I had put a fine crack in him, too. But that was okay. Sometimes a crack is just what is needed, to let in a little shaft of light.

  The Old Ball Game

  I didn’t want my son to play baseball that spring. I tried to talk him out of it—twice. The first time was in the car, over my shoulder, in an exploratory way, half-joking, with weeks to go until the sign-up deadline for NOLL/SOLL, our local Little League. The second time, just before the fee was due, I actually sat him down. I assumed a grave manner and dwelled on all the reasons I thought he should reconsider. I described the appalling tedium of standing in the outfield, three thousand miles from home plate, cognizant in a vague way that somewhere on the far horizon another nine-year-old was busy striking out swinging, or striking out looking, or walking on three gopher balls and two wild pitches (the league rule being five balls to a walk), or taking his base after getting drilled on the leg or plunked on the helmet.

  Batter after batter, inning after inning, week after week, all spring long. I pointed out to him that at the level he would be playing, the games endured six full innings—or three hours, whichever came first. I reminded him that baseball was a hard game to play, a game rooted in failure, glorying in failure (who could forget Merkle’s Boner? Not, God knows, me), a game in which you try to hit a hard little ball with a very thin stick. Finally, I broke the news to him—in so many words—that fatherhood is a favorite sideline of assholes, a truth more frequently proved on the baseball diamond than anywhere else. But my son was having none of it. He saw himself out there in the sun, slouched and ready in those white, white pants, with a snappy script name appliquéd to his jersey and a pair of redoubtable cleats. His mother sent in his forms, and we equipped him with a new mitt, and I found myself compelled to expound the gruesome reality of the protective cup.

  I suppose I could have simply forbidden him. That’s how my own father handled the situation when I was eight or nine and eager to play. My father is a fan—the original fan, in my world—but that seemed to have no bearing on his feelings about my joining Little League. “You aren’t particularly athletic,” he informed me. “And the other fathers will disparage you, because they become crazy.” I was kind of upset, in fact, as I sat my son down, because I was behaving in a manner that so starkly echoed my father’s with me, and I had always resented his having prohibited me from playing Little League.

  Like my father, I love baseball, and when I say “love,” I’m really talking about a state of being—fandom—with no ready verb of its own. I study baseball like a scholar and a scientist; I dissolve myself in it like a mystic in mystery. In my mind, my history and American history are pegged like currencies to the index of baseball. From the time I was my son’s age, I have gone in and out of periods, some lasting years, during which my interest in the game has taken on some of the qualities of obsessive-compulsive disorder, with one in every three thoughts centering on some aspect, large or tiny, of the game and its players. I’m not sure I would go so far as to say that I believe, like Bull Durham’s Annie Savoy, in the Church of Baseball, but I live in its House; I shelter in its Friendly Confines. It has always seemed regrettable, therefore, that I never got to play the game at the organized level. Pickup games, schoolyard and backyard and street ball, yes. But I have never worn a real baseball uniform. I have no illusions, I hasten to add, that I would have done honor to said uniform, or even managed not to embarrass myself, but at times I have regretted that lost opportunity—and blamed my father for that regret.

  So I wasn’t going to tell my son he couldn’t play.

  Besides, I reasoned, he might like it. He might even love it. He might very well prove me wrong. I like it when my children prove me wrong; I enjoy the sensation, though not quite as much, perhaps, as I enjoy being right. I was going to be surprised if my son enjoyed cooling his cleats in the Kamchatka of center right, or if he managed to collect a few solid base hits, or if he passed an entire season without being exposed to any stark assholery from the fathers at the game. I guess you could say that when I gave in and said he could play this year, I was hoping to be surprised.

  No such luck: He hated every minute of it. By the second game of the season he was pleading to be allowed to miss practice, to skip games, to quit. Like the Milwaukee Braves on the days not assigned to Spahn or Sain, my son prayed for rain, and often enough, that rainy spring, his prayers were answered. When it didn’t rain, he and I would drive down to a grim diamond in West Oakland, scraped out of a chance gap between a decommissioned army base and a storage yard for ISO containers, and sometimes I would sit with the team in the chain-link dugout on the rickety two-by-six that served as a bench, keeping score.

  Keeping score is an emblematic pleasure of being a baseball fan. The craft of scorekeeping unites the taking of field notes, the inscribing of occult alphabets, the chronicling of history, and the repetition of an uncontrollable tic. It is also, like fandom itself, the gift of my father, an art he imparted in the stands at Memorial Stadium, during Game 1 of the 1971 American League playoffs between Baltimore and Oakland. There is no surer way for a spectator to keep his or her mind on a game than to track it with a pencil on a scorecard, and since I was going to be no help at all to my son’s team as a coach on the field, I was happy to have some way to contribute.

  But keeping score for yourself in the stands, with a Coke between your knees and all of baseball history spread out before you in the green splendor of the grounds, is one thing. No one depends on your accuracy, neatness, or skill. You might as well be counting the pigeons wheeling in the grandstand or ticking off the progress of the shadows as they grow long across the outfield. The scorecards that I filled out for my son’s team, on the other hand, were official documents to be registered and recorded with the league. The number of throws by each young pitcher, in particular, was to be monitored so that nobody’s arm got ruined. If I missed a sacrifice, or lost track of a run batted in, it was as if it never happened at all. That made it hard to relax and enjoy the game, though I noticed that when I was there in the dugout with the team, my son seemed to hate the game a little less. But he never stopped begging to be allowed to drop out.

  I wouldn’t let him quit. I forced him to attend Thursday practices and show up for the endless Saturday games. Even when he cried. Even though I found that I hated Little League, too, and for a reason I hadn’t considered in trying to warn him away, a reason I would not have the heart to try to explain.

  My prior exposure to “youth baseball” was on Vashon Island, Washington, during the spring of 1990, when, as a favor to a ten-year-old friend, I served as scorekeeper for his Mustang League team. It was a talented team that won a lot of games, and the experience of Little League struck me as positive on the whole, though every so often there was trouble with an asshole dad. But those Vashon boys were a little wild, in the way that I remembered myself having been wild as a kid. When they were not at school or Scouts or on the baseball field, they went out into the woods and the empty lots, and rode their bikes to the ends of the island. They got lost, and blew things up, and set things on fire, and fell into all kinds of mud. It made sense, it evened things out somehow, for them to submit themselves a few days a week to regulation play.

  My son didn’t have a sandlot to repair to on a Sunday afternoon. Nobody ever came by with a glove and a Wiffle ball to see if he wanted to hit some, at least not without complicated arrangements having been made beforehand by the parents. He had no idea that a baseball game was something that could just happen to a kid, spontaneous as a fever, that it could be disor
ganized, random, open-ended, played according to quirky and variant rules, with manhole covers and car fenders for bases and a mean old lady for a color commentator.

  What I came to dislike about Little League that spring was not the regulation per se, or the fathers—whose consciousness had generally been raised at least a little bit—or the tedium, or the low quality of play, or the pain of watching my son strike out a lot. It was the way I got reminded, every game, that this was the world my children lived in: the world in which the wild watershed of childhood had been brought fully under control of the adult Corps of Engineers. Looking at my son and the other boys on his team, I felt the way I do sometimes when I look at a poodle and think about wolves. I was never a wolf as a kid, but I used to chase cars, and dig escape tunnels under fences, and run around for days on end without a leash.

  It stopped raining and my son played out his games, and the season ended, and we were both relieved. I told him I was proud of him for finishing what he’d started, for fulfilling his commitment to his teammates and his coaches, for hanging in there at the plate, for getting his glove down once or twice to stop a grounder that seemed likely to get by him. But when I looked at baseball now, I sensed a gathering darkness in my view.