20th Century Ghosts (17 page)

Also nobody likes that I take apart my food to inspect the components. I mostly do this with hamburgers. I was deeply affected by a special I saw on television once about what can happen if you get a bad hamburger. They had E.Coli on; they had mad cow; they even showed a mad cow, wrenching its head to one side and staggering around a pen bawling. When we get hamburgers from Wendy's, I have my dad unwrap it from the foil for me, and then I lay all the parts out and discard any vegetables that look suspect, and give the patty a good long sniff to make sure it isn't spoiled. Not once but twice I've actually discovered a spoiled one and refused to eat. On both occasions my refusal precipitated a royal screaming match between my mother and me over whether it was really spoiled or not, and of course such meetings of the minds inevitably can end in only one way, with me doing the kicking thing I sometimes do, where I lay on the floor and scream and kick at anyone who tries to touch me, which is one of what Dr. Faber calls my hysterical compulsions. Mostly what I do now is get rid of the hamburger in the trash without discussing it and just eat the roll. It isn't any pleasure, I can tell you, to have my dietary problems. I hate the taste of fish. I won't eat pork because pork has little white worms in it that boil out of the raw meat when you pour alcohol on it. What I really like is breakfast cereal. I'd have Kix three times a day if it was up to me. Cans of fruit salad also go over well with me. When I'm at the park I enjoy a bag of peanuts, although I wouldn't eat a hot dog for all the tea in China (which I wouldn't want anyway since for me caffeine triggers shrill, hyper behavior and impromptu nosebleeds).

Dr. Faber's a good guy. We sit on the floor of his office and play Candy Land and hash it out.

"I've heard crazy before, but that's just nuts," my psychiatrist says. "You think McDonald's would serve spoiled hamburger? They'd lose their shirts! You'd sue their ass!" He pauses to move a piece, then looks up, and says, "You and me, we got to start talking about these miserable feelings that come over you whenever you stick lunch in your mouth. I think you're blowing things out of proportion. Letting your imagination freak you out. I'll tell you something else. Let's say you did get some goofy food, which I claim is very unlikely, because the McDonald's chain has a vested interest in not getting their asses sued,
even if
—people do manage to eat some pretty foul stuff without, you know,
death
."

"Todd Dickey, who plays third base for us? He ate a squirrel once," I say. "For a thousand dollars. It was back when he was in the minors. The team bus crunched it backing up and he ate it. He says people where he's from just eat them."

Dr. Faber stares at me dumbly, his round, pleasant face struck blank with disgust. "Where's he from?"

"Minnesota. Pretty much everyone there lives on squirrel. That's what Todd says. That way they have more money for the important things at the supermarket—like beer and lottery tickets."

"He ate it—raw?"

"Oh no. He fried it. With canned chili. He said it was the easiest money he ever made. The thousand dollars. That's a lot of money in the minors. Ten different guys had to pony up a hundred dollars apiece. He said it was like getting paid a grand to eat a Whopper."

"Right," he says. "That brings us back to the McDonald's issue. If Todd Dickey can eat a squirrel he scraped up out of the parking lot—a menu I can't, as your doctor, recommend—and suffer no ill effects, then you can handle a Big Mac."

"Uh-huh."

And I see his point. I really do. He's saying Todd Dickey is a strapping young professional athlete, and here he eats all this awful stuff like squirrel chili and Big Macs that squirt grease when you bite into them and
he
doesn't die of mad cow disease. I'm just not going to argue after a certain point. But I know Todd Dickey, and that's not a guy who is all right. Deep down something's wrong with him.

When Todd gets into a game and he's out on third he does this thing where he's always pressing his mouth into his glove and it seems like he's whispering into the palm of it. Ramon Diego, our shortstop and one of my best friends, says that he
is
whispering. He's looking at the batter coming to the plate and he's whispering:
"Beat 'em or burn 'em. They go up pretty quick. Beat 'em or burn 'em. Or
fuck
'em. Either way. Either way beat 'em burn 'em or fuck 'em, fuck 'em, fuck this guy fucking
fuck
this guy!" Ramon says Todd gets spit all over his glove.

Also when the guys get talking about all the ball-club groupies they've made (I'm not supposed to hear this kind of talk but just try being around professional athletes and not catching some of it), Todd, who is one of these big ballplayers for Holy Everlasting Jesus!, listens with a face that seems swollen, and a weird intense look in his eyes, and sometimes without warning the muscles in the left side of his face all at once will start jumping and rippling unnaturally, and
he doesn't even know his face is doing what it's doing when it's doing it.

Ramon Diego thinks he's weird and so do I. No parking-lot squirrel for me. There's a difference between being a stone-cold Colt .45-drinking hayseed redneck and being some kind of whispering psycho killer with a degenerative nerve condition in your face.
 

My dad deals really well with all my issues, like the time he took me road-tripping with him and we stayed at the Four Seasons in Chicago for a three-spot with the White Sox.

We settle into a suite with a big living room, and at one end is a door into his bedroom, and at the other is a door into mine. We stay up until midnight watching a movie on hotel cable. For dinner we order Froot Loops from room service (his idea—I didn't even ask). He sits slumped low in his chair, naked except for his jockey shorts, and the fingers of his right hand stuck in under the elastic waistband as they always are except in my mother's presence, watching the television in a drowsy, absent-minded sort of way. I don't remember falling asleep with the movie on. What I remember is that I wake up when he lifts me out of the cool leather couch to haul me into my bedroom, and my face is turned into his chest, and I'm breathing in the good smell of him. I can't tell you what that smell is, except that it has grass and clean earth in it, and sweat and locker rooms, and also the inherent sweetness of aged, lived-in skin. I bet farmers smell good just the same way.

After he's gone I'm laying alone in the dark, as comfortable as can be in my icy nestle of sheets, when for the first time I notice a thin, shrill whine, bad like when someone is rewinding a tape in the VCR. Almost the instant I'm aware of it I receive the first sick pulse in my back teeth. I'm not sleepy anymore—being carried has jostled me partly awake, and the cold sheets have shocked me the rest of the way—so I sit up and listen to the light-starved world around me. The traffic in the street whooshes along and horns bleat from a long distance off. I hold the clock-radio to my ear, but that isn't what's doing it. I hoist myself out of bed. On with the light. It has to be the air conditioner. In most hotels the air conditioner is usually a steel cabinet against the wall beneath the window, but not the Four Seasons, which is too good for that. The only air conditioning component I can track down is a slotted gray vent in the ceiling, and standing beneath it I can hear that this is the culprit. The whine is more than I can stand. My eardrums hurt. I snatch a hardcover I've been reading out of my tote and stand beneath the vent throwing the book up at it.

"Be quiet! Shut up! Stop it! No
more
!" I hit the vent a couple good shots with the book, too—clang! whang! A screw pops out of one corner and the whole vent falls loose at one side, but no luck—not only does it still whine but now it is also sometimes producing a delicate buzz, as if a piece of metal somewhere inside has been knocked loose and is shuddering a little. A cool wetness trickles at the edge of my mouth. I suck spit and give one last helpless look at the busted vent, and then I go into the living room with my fingers jamming my ears to get away from it, but the whine is whining even worse in there. There is no place to go and the fingers in my ears are no help.

The sound drives me into my father's bedroom.

"Dad," I say and wipe my chin on my shoulder—my jaw is slathered in spit—and go on, "Dad, can I sleep with you?"

"Huh? Okay. I got the farts, though. Watch out."

I scramble into his bed and pull the sheets over me. In his room too there is of course the thin piercing whine.

"Are you all right?" he asks.

"The air conditioner. The air conditioner has a noise. It's hurting my teeth. I couldn't find how to turn it off."

"Switch is in the living room. Right by the front door."

"I'll go get it," I say and I skitter to the edge of the bed.

"Hey," he says and clasps my upper arm. "You better not. This is Chicago in June. It was a hundred and three today. It'll get too stuffy. I mean it, we'll die in here."

"But I can't listen to it. Do you hear it? Do you hear the way it's making that noise? It hurts my teeth. It's as bad as when people crunch tinfoil, Dad, it's as bad as that."

"Yeah," he replies. He falls quiet and for a long moment seems to be listening to it himself. Then he says, "You're right. The air conditioner in this place sucks. It's a necessary evil, though. We'll suffocate in here like bugs screwed into a jar if we don't have air conditioning."

It has a steadying effect on me, the sound of his talk. Also, although when I climbed into the bed, the sheets had that crisp hotel room cold to them, by now I have warmed back up, and I'm not shivering so badly anymore. I feel better, although there are still the steady shoots of pain going through my jaw and up into my eardrums and then into my head. He has the farts, too, just as he warned me, but somehow even the reeky yellow smell of them, even that seems vaguely reassuring.

"All right," he decides. "Here's what we'll do. Come on."

He slips out of bed. I follow him through the dark to the bathroom. He clicks on the light. The bathroom is a vast expanse of beige-colored marble, and the sink has golden faucets, and in the corner is a shower with a door of rippled glass. It is pretty much the hotel bathroom of your dreams. By the sink is a collection of little bottles of shampoo and conditioner and skin lotion and boxes of soaps, a plastic jar of Q-tips, another of cotton balls. My father pops open the jar of cotton balls and crams one into each ear. I giggle at the sight of him—the sight of him standing there with a loose fluff of cotton hanging out of his big sunburned ears.

"Here," he said. "Put some of this in."

I force a few cotton balls deep into my ears. With the cotton in place, the world fills with a deep, hollow rushing roar.
My
roar, a steady flow of my own personal sound, a sound I find exceedingly pleasant.

I look at my father. He says, "Homkhmy chmn yhmu sthmll hhmhrmr thrm hrrr chmndhuthmmnhar?"

"What?" I yell happily.

He nods and makes an O with his thumb and index finger and we both go back to bed, which is what I mean about how my father deals really well with my issues. We both have a great night of sleep and the next morning my dad makes room service bring us cans of fruit salad and a can opener for breakfast.
 

Not everyone out there deals so well with my problems, case in point my aunt Mandy.

Aunt Mandy has tried her hand at a lot of things, but none of it has gone anywhere. Mom and Dad helped to pay for her to go to art school because she thought she was going to be a photographer for a while. After she gave that up, they also helped her start an art gallery in Cape Cod, but like Aunt Mandy says, it never
gelled
, it didn't come together, the click never clicked. She went to film school in L.A., and had a cup of coffee as a screenwriter—no dice. She married a man she thought was going to be a novelist, but he turned out to just be an English teacher, and furthermore not a very happy one, and Aunt Mandy had to pay
him
alimony for a little while, so even being a married person didn't come together so well.

What Aunt Mandy would say about it is that she's still trying to figure out what it is she's supposed to be. What my father would say is Mandy is wrong if she thinks the question hasn't been answered yet—she already is the person she was always sure to become. It's like Brad McGuane, who was the right-fielder when my father took over managing the Team, who is a lifetime .292 batter but who only hits about .200 with men in scoring position and has never had a postseason hit, in spite of about twenty-five at-bats the last time he got to the playoffs. He's a meltdown case—that's what my father calls him. McGuane has drifted from team to team to team and people keep hiring him because of his good numbers in general and because they think someone with such a good bat is bound to
develop
, but what they don't see is that he
did
develop, and this is what he developed into. His click already clicked and it sure seems that there are not many fresh clicks out there for those sweet young men who find themselves in the game of baseball, or for middle-aged women either who marry the wrong people and who are never happy doing what they're doing but can only think of what else the world has to offer that might be better, or for any of us really, which I suppose is what I'm afraid of in my own case, since I think it's pretty clear despite what Dr. Faber says about it that I'm not really a lot better but actually about the same as I've ever been which we all can safely say is not the ideal.

Needless to say, as you would guess based on their differences of philosophy and world view, et al., Aunt Mandy and my father don't really like each other, although they pretend otherwise for my mother's sake.

Mandy and I went up to North Altamont just the two of us on a Sunday, because Mom thought I had spent too much of the summer at the park. What really bothered her was that The Team had been pounded five straight and Mom was worried I was getting all wound up about it. She was right as far as that goes. The losing streak was really getting to me. The leak had never leaked so much as during the last homestand.