Fathers & Sons & Sports (15 page)

But Steven was wrong. We weren’t connected. And we certainly didn’t look like we were. My mother was taken for an elementary-school teacher. Old Jewish women would say to her on Friday afternoon, “Shabbat shalom.” People mistook my father for my grandfather. He looked as conformist as they come, bifo-caled, in conservative matte blazers, no jewelry, a balding head, hair mostly gray. And he was terribly hard of hearing—except when the phone rang. Sometimes he’d run to the receiver, pick it up and discover nothing but a dial tone. Often the phone hadn’t even been ringing.

My father had a full-time job—quotidian bureaucratic work for the city’s Department of Welfare. He hated it, for thirty-five years. It was there, at his day job, that he struck up friendships with the playwright Loften Mitchell and with the artist Romare Bearden, who was a caseworker. Getting to know these men was a bright spot, one of the few, in my father’s workday.

That was in the late ′50s, early ′60s, when our country was less educated but smarter somehow, more engaged. My father and Bearden would talk about Coleman Hawkins and Johnny Hodges, Vermeer and Giotto, the Rock and Clay. One day the humble Bearden said, “Hey, come to my studio; I make these collages.” He offered to make one for my father. Not wanting to seem presumptuous
(scustumad
, in the Neapolitan dialect of my father’s birthplace, East Harlem), my father said, “No, no, really, I couldn’t.”

“What that would be worth today,” my mother would say for years afterward. Then my father would say it again: “What that would be worth today.” When I was much older, I went to the Harlem home of author Albert Murray. There, in the bathroom, was a very small work of Bearden’s. It was exquisite, teeming with humanity and language, so much happening in so small a space. It was the kind of collage I now imagine Bearden would have given my father. As I stood in Murray’s bathroom, I thought, Why couldn’t we have one of those, something of rare beauty and value?

Of course, my father might have sold our Bearden in a fit of financial desperation. Then again, I have to remind myself that art was sacred to him, that Bearden was much closer to Albert Murray than he was to my father. Murray had fourteen original Beardens, large and small, around his apartment. Still, there is a photograph that exists somewhere of my father and Bearden taken after my father was one of a handful of people who spoke at a farewell party for Bearden when Bearden left the department to devote himself to his art, and I can’t help but think that one day, a special day or a sad day, that photograph and a transcendent little Bearden collage will be brought to me. I know in reality this will never happen. My father’s story is true: He didn’t want to be presumptuous. His collage exists only in Albert Murray’s bathroom or in a gallery on 57th Street between Madison and Park.

Unlike Bearden, my father stuck it out at the Department of Welfare. He had no viable alternative—it was the best he could
do with a high school education. Stuyvesant High School, but still high school. After the service, after the war, Colgate University was an option, but he didn’t go that way. Joining the Genovese crime family was another option. Frank Costello was the man in charge in East Harlem, and he was looking to recruit bright kids from the neighborhood. My father had a willing and able sponsor, but he didn’t go that way, either.

My father had a talent for something; for what, I’ve never been sure. It was something intangible, something suited to his strengths; the inherent disposition of a gambler, mettle, nerve, out-and-out gall. I wish I had some of these things, more guts, more guile, a romantic sense of risk, equanimity, smarts. Instead I have the college degree he never got.

When the two of us ended up alone, at a ball game or walking around the city (never camping, never golfing), he would talk to me—his nine-year-old—man to man. He didn’t want to put me on the spot, but he couldn’t help himself. By rationalizing to his son, he rationalized to himself: “Your mother doesn’t understand” … “My job can barely put food on the table”… “It’s a business; please understand,” I would nod plaintively, by now the ballgame or whatever outing we had planned was ruined.

He had to do whatever he did. For whatever reasons, however opaque, he didn’t go to college. Instead, he split his time between the Garden and the Met, read books, gambled, did some bookmaking. He also did tax returns, first for a professional outfit, then mainly for friends and their friends. He
worked cheap; word got around. He just hinted at a figure—something below reasonable—and often got in return only a bottle of hard liquor, which he never drank.

He wasn’t alone in his odd, elliptical sort of defiance, his hostility. A lot of the East Harlem recalcitrants he grew up with tried to tweak the system and give scapegoat society a collective fuck you, from Pleasant Avenue to the world. Some played it safe, bought two-family houses in the Bronx or Queens, but others grew bitter, self-destructed or vanished off the face of the earth. We heard stories, the same ones again and again, from my father, of Bense. I don’t even know his real name. He was an East Harlem boy, my father’s best friend, and all I remember from those stories is how he choked a dog to death because it barked at him the wrong way. Bense was one of those who fell off the earth, but I can’t recall how. My father said he was a great friend; fiercely loyal, free with a buck, would challenge guys twice his size to protect his friends. My mother just talked about his disconcerting gaze. She did everything she could to keep us away from the Benses of the world.

My father couldn’t work for anyone; that was another of his defining traits. He was a Manhattanite, but he was never invited to its upper precincts. He’d see art (Mantegna, Velazquez and Rubens were his Ruth, Gehrig and DiMaggio), see the latest Kurosawa or Fellini, read the Greek tragedies or Seneca the Stoic, or venture up to the decaying Polo Grounds to “lay a few dollars” on Warren Spahn when the Milwaukee Braves played
the Giants. Spahn was his boy. Later Ron Guidry, good Cajun, was his talisman. Nolan Ryan, as my mother never let us forget, brought nothing but dread.

Most Sunday afternoons in autumn and winter, some of the biggest gambling days of the year, my sister would lock herself in her room, listen to Blondie records, and immerse herself in homework, obsessed with good grades. I didn’t study as much, just enough to get by, and for the most part I didn’t mind my father’s second job. Only when we went to a game and he needed the other team to win would it dampen my mood. Imagine rooting for the Kansas City Kings against the Knicks, the San Diego Padres against the Mets, because you fear your father might get hurt if the visiting team doesn’t cover. When you’re a boy, your father is still more important to you than Louis Orr or Dave Kingman.

In later years, I resented him and admired him. I learned to see things. He taught me how to improvise. And we had Tommy Hearns. Sugar Ray Leonard versus Tommy Hearns, September 1981. We went to Madison Square Garden for the closed-circuit telecast. My father met me at 23rd and Broadway; there was a bus from the Bronx that let out there. We took a short walk to Paul & Jimmy’s on Irving Place for dinner. Then he took this little seventh grader, the envy of I.S. 181 that day, to the fight with a New York crowd, 20,000, no kids, all grown-ups, all men, some scary. In the thirteenth round, when a desperate, puffy-eyed Leonard, behind on points, threw a last-ditch roundhouse right and Hearns’s
spindly legs buckled, we yelled together, “Stay up, Tommy.” Tommy went down—three times—and one round later the ref stopped the fight. We rushed out onto Seventh Avenue, rancid and teeming.

My mother worried. She thought I would grow up to be a gambler, I would casually ask at the dinner table. “Daddy, what’s a parlay? What’s a two-team teaser? How much is a nickel? How much is a dime? What’s a wheel bet? What’s the line on the Vikings game this week? …
Three and a half
, that’s it?”

“See what you’re teaching him?” she’d say.

He would send me to the candy store to get
The New York Times
, the
Post
and a touting sheet called
The Sports Eye
before I could even reach the countertop. Some of the old men—two dollar bettors whom my father looked down on—thought it was cute. Who knows what else they thought?

We never owned a house, had virtually no savings, and barely owned a car—you couldn’t really count the used-up gray-and-black 1960-something Buick LeSabre that was stolen twice, both times when we were in New Orleans. But we saw places: Italy in ′73; Spain, Portugal and Morocco in ′76; England and Holland in ′79; Martinique in ′80; St Martin in ′81; the Dominican Republic in ′82; Mexico, Canada and Charleston. South Carolina, in ′83; Switzerland in ′85, Six times we went to Puerto Rico, where my father had two gambling friends, a Romanian and a half-Pole, half-Puerto Rican, who would pare down their debt by letting us stay in their Santurce apartments.

One night in the early spring of 1984, with those Super Bowl winnings still trickling in, my parents talked about the summer. The Bronx would be unforgiving in July, they reasoned; France would be nice. (At last they agreed on something.) Two months later, we were bound for Orly Airport. Off to Paris, Chartres, the Loire Valley, then Versailles for an afternoon, across to Strasbourg, down to Lyon, then to Nice, where the people looked like us, tiptoeing around dog shit in Aix-en-Provence, west into Languedoc, to Carcassonne in the foothills of the Pyrenees. “On a clear day” a man said to a child, “you can see Spain if you squint.” We went way up north, fourteen hours by overnight train, to Rouen, the bane of Joan of Arc, before returning to a Paris, bright and perfect.

It was a special trip. My sister and I were getting older; more and more of those tuition bills dotted the horizon. My father’s losses were mounting. Already, U.S. marshals had rung the bell to remind us we owed four months’ rent, handing my mother the eviction notice.

We managed Geneva the following year, unexpectedly, thanks maybe to Villanova. But in 1984, we figured France to be our last trip together, though none of us said so. We talked about staying in Paris, for a week, a month, forever. It was comforting. Eight francs to the dollar. We met only one haughty Frenchman the entire month. But we had to get back, back to reality, back to our waiting, anomalous Bronx. A new football season was about to start. Doors would open or close with each Monday-morning
line. On Sunday nights, I would peek into my father’s bedroom, sometimes pitch-black, after his screeching big-band tapes were through, Benny Goodman and Basie and Jimmy Lunceford, and see him staring straight ahead, sometimes muttering softly the line: Cincy minus seven, Denver plus two and a half, Texas Tech pick ’em. Now, when the sun is just right, at such an angle where you have to use your hand as a visor, and the air has the warmth of July in it, numbers like that can carry me back to southwestern France, standing on a dusty bluff in Carcassonne. If you squint hard enough, on the clearest of days, you can see Spain.

UGUSTA, Georgia—Most everything makes me think about my daddy, and this morning, of all the stupid reasons to fight back tears in public, it’s chipped beef on toast. I’m sitting at the corner table on the clubhouse veranda, waiting for Arnold Palmer to hit the ceremonial first shot of the Masters. Man, my father loved watching Arnie. To do it from the veranda with a plate of chipped beef? Hotty Toddy, brother. Only, the excitement of incredible moments like this is muted for
me now. I’ve learned in the past three years that I did many things solely to tell Daddy about them later.

The crowd stands on Washington Road, waiting for the gates to open. For a moment, the course is quiet. Birds chirp. Mowers drone. Soon, another lucky diner asks if he can join me. His food arrives first. As we talk a bit, bundled against the chill, he looks at the empty space in front of me.