Ham (6 page)

Coach Flynn felt that the tradition of tryouts and winning a position on the team was important for morale, so every afternoon that week, all of us pitched and caught and batted and grounded and fielded. I hadn't much experience at this kind of thing but was a fast runner—if not a great pitcher, catcher, batter, grounder, or fielder. Still, I gave it my all.

At the end of the week, we gathered in the dugout as Coach Flynn called out our names one by one.

“Morgan!”

Russell Morgan threw his cap in the air and ran to the field, overjoyed. “Patterson! Cook! Moss!”

They tossed their caps and joined Russell to play catch with boyish elation at being chosen.
Chosen?
We were eight years old, who wouldn't be chosen? It was the ritual, the accomplishment, the deserving of the title. Finally all the names had been called. Except mine. With the cheering boys in view, playing in the background, Coach Flynn swaggered up to me and bent down, placed his palms on his grass-stained knee breeches, and, in a broad and tanned and manly whisper, said, “You can be water boy if you want . . .”

My father was parked fifty feet away in our imitation-wood-paneled Ford station wagon. I glanced over in time to see him absorb what had happened and then drop his hands and head onto the steering wheel in disgrace or submission or something in between. He didn't get out and question the coach. He didn't put his arm around me and offer me a Life Saver. He didn't even look at me. I picked up my mitt and walked to the car, and we drove home silently, staring straight ahead, never speaking of it again.

I didn't care if I ever played baseball, but I think it killed my father that day. While he had never been the kind of dad who tossed a ball or practiced batting with me, this moment was not about athletic preparedness. It signified that he wasn't the only one who knew I was different. Odd. Not like the others. The secret was out. I don't think he ever blamed me. He was just sad and disappointed, afraid that if I wasn't like him, my life would be hard and lonely. He saw how the misfits were treated and he didn't want that for his son.

Suck it up, Dad, I'm in show business.

A few days after the Little League tryouts, my father called out my name, hoisted himself forward from his La-Z-Boy, turned down the TV, and put on a record of classical music. He asked me to close my eyes.

“What do you see?” he said.

I listened and concentrated and let the music create a picture in my mind. “There is a graveyard. And it's cold and windy . . . and foggy. And there are old headstones.”

The music changed. “What else?” he asked.

“Now there are skeletons dancing around the cemetery. They're celebrating a new dead person. They're flying around. The dead person is alive again with them.”

Rather than attaching a story to the music, it was as if I was making the music happen! By the time the symphony ended, I was enthralled. I understood that music came from intention and not the other way around. I could escape to anywhere I dreamed. I could create my own world. With underscoring.

I was the muddled concoction of my father's contradictions. The same man who warned me that “life is a bowl-a shit” was the channel to my bliss. The infection and the cure. He was, at once, the drought that left me parched and gasping, and the rain that nurtured the single blade of grass, pushing itself up from between the jagged cracks in the sidewalk, and into the sun.

My four-year-old son, Cooper, and I have little in common.

When he was born, I was the primary caretaker. It was a natural role for me, and Cooper and I had an immediate, primordial bond. I was scheduler and night feeder, burper, soother, then organic baby food maker, onesie stocker, BPA-PVC-phthalate-free checker, lead tester, baby proofer. Toppling stacks of baby books, each over a foot high, were piled on and around my nightstand and, though previously a voracious reader of fiction and biographies, I did not open a single nonbaby book—all highlighted, underlined, and dog-eared—for nearly two years.

Danny was head-over-heels in love and couldn't get enough of our son, but as he bounced the lumpy lox of a do-nothing infant who just ate and pooped and gurgled and spit, I could tell he was eager to get past this stage so they could climb trees and play catch and destroy things. When Cooper took his first wobbly steps, Danny immediately wanted to take him Rollerblading. I kept saying, “Don't worry, there will come a day before we know it where it's all about you guys.”

Call me clairvoyant. As Cooper has grown into a full-on little boy, I may remain the go-to guy for meals, boo-boos, permission, daily organization, midnight fevers, developmental research, hard-ass rules, and “feelings,” but now, well, Danny trumps all. His time has come. He is the fun one. He is goofy and crazy and Cooper laughs a particular sound of pure joy that is exclusive to Papa, which is what he calls Danny. I'm Daddy. Daddy is fun, but not that kind of fun.

I go with Cooper's lead and we have a great time, but I have found myself searching for activities that interest us both. It's hard. Very hard. I get bored. Very bored. Not with him, but with what captivates him. We sip from different sippy cups of tea.

Cooper loves cars, jets, monster trucks, and motorcycles. All the time. I hate cars, jets, monster trucks, and motorcycles. All the time. Or rather, I have no real interest unless I build a mini-racetrack out of empty Amazon.com boxes complete with a service garage painted in watercolors, where lunch is served at a juice box picnic table with an affixed cocktail umbrella. But I am not remotely drawn to the actual races or endless crashes—and least of all to the cars themselves.

In real life, when asked what kind of car I drive, I say “a Lexus Nebula” because that is the given name of the color. Nebula actually means “an interstellar cloud of dust” but it rings like the name of an Egyptian prince. I do not know the model of my car and I often get SUV mixed up with SVU. I did not test-drive the vehicle before I bought it. It was a Lexus and it was pretty. Nebula.

There are many more differences.

I hear about kids who painstakingly choose their clothing. Cooper has favorite colors and superhero shirts, sure, but comfort is his criteria and he doesn't give a crap about coordinating. It is my duty to let him express himself
his
way, so I gulp a little as he romps out of the house in plaids mixed with checks and stripes and Spider-Man socks and Velcroed sneakers on the wrong feet because “I like them that way.”

Danny and I have always put looks before comfort. Danny is a button-down, dress-shoes man and has never left the house without checking his hair at least three times; then he continues to monitor it in any and every reflection or slightest facsimile thereof: a storefront window, a hubcap, a puddle. I swear I once saw him spit in his hand and gaze into it, tilting his head for adjustments. I admit that if I have no plans to leave the house, I don't care what I look like and have gone for days without seeing my face. However, I weigh myself at least twice a day, no matter what, and even when alone, I wear heavy luggish boots because they add two inches to my height and allow me to buy jeans longer than my legs, which gives me a better line. I feel happier when I feel thinner and I am much more pleasant to be around.

When I was doing
Grease
on Broadway, I wore a cinch corset under my skintight, black-and-white, horizontally striped Lycra shirt to smooth the slightest side bulge that might've pooched over my high-waisted jeans. It didn't matter that I couldn't breathe. It mattered that I was V-shaped.

I considered having ribs removed.

I like clean lines and clean rooms and clean drawers. Cooper makes enormous messes, emptying bins of die-cast cars, action figures, minuscule pieces of Legos, and collected rocks, acorns, and dead leaves.

When I was his age, my toys were categorized and color coded.

Cooper loves firemen, policemen, football players, paramedics, and wrestlers—any man in a uniform.

So do I, but for different reasons.

He talks of blood and bones and guts and boogers. His figurines engage in battle, and the fatality list is long. Detailed explanations of appendages severed with knives and saws and lasers and axes abound. We don't watch violent TV shows nor do we have any remotely weaponlike objects, except for a water gun, which we renamed a “water-blaster.”

I brought up my concerns at a preschool parent coffee. The girls' parents were clueless, as their little princesses were already painting in oils, publishing short stories, and crafting. They
did
have guns—hot glue guns. The boys' parents, however, nodded in exhausted agreement. With seemingly no influence whatsoever, the boys' expertise in savagery is something they just . . . know. No one knows how they know, but they know—as if they receive secret messages from an alien informant through a frequency that only four-year-old males can hear. Like those dog whistles, inaudible to humans, but containing pertinent, violent information. We agreed it's part of their Neanderthalic DNA . . . unless they like to play a lot of dress-up and their favorite song is “Defying Gravity,” in which case it's another kind of DNA. Cooper is among the rescuers, soldiers, explorers, hunters, gatherers—with just a smidge of potential serial killer.

“I'm gonna cut off his head and the blood is gonna spill out everywhere all over everything!”

Apparently that's all quite normal for his age. It was also normal for Jeffrey Dahmer.

Danny laughs. I pretend to.

Once, during a family trek up the trails of Griffith Park, recent rains had left the paths and porous bluffs in partial ruin. There were gullies and chasms and mounds of soft dirt lying at the foot of root-exposed summits. Danny and Cooper found long sticks and bludgeoned the vulnerable walls, watching them crumble onto the path like Zeus on a bender. “BAM!” “KAPOW!” “ZONK!”

I desperately tried to stifle my tongue, but after fifteen massacring minutes, I finally blurted out in a calm but pointed tone, “Cooper, do you know what
erosion
is? It's when weather breaks down the hill, gradually destroying it for us and everyone who wants to come here. Forever! You and Papa are not helping. You are doing more damage than a tsunami. Please stop tearing down the mountain.”

Danny and Cooper rolled their eyes in unison as if to say, “Daddy spoils everything.”

I tried to redirect his interest. “Cooper, come over here and look at this black beetle. Notice how, when I put a stick near him, he turns around and raises his bottom in defense. He is planning to either sting or spray his attacker. Isn't the insect world amazing?”

Cooper crouched down to get a closer look.

“Maybe he's just gonna fart.”

I try to encourage creativity over destruction. I once used his Magna-Tiles, Lincoln Logs, Legos, and blocks to build a four-bedroom, three-bath dream house with gardens, a spacious kitchen with an island, a media room, a pool, a four-car garage, and a gift wrapping room, stocked with tiny rolls of real paper and ribbon. Eight seconds later, Cooper bombed it with a “meteorite” pillow followed by the proclamation “Everyone is dead.”

This behavior is so far away from my boyhood that I cannot relate. However, if I make the stretch, in the same way that Cooper can fashion a gun out of anything—a stick, a piece of cardboard, an apple core, a used tissue, bent and formed with the epoxy of fresh snot—I can walk into any kitchen, be told there is nothing to eat, and find enough stuff to make a scrumptious four-course meal that could be photographed for
Food & Wine
magazine.

Cooper and I do share a love of fine cuisine and I would define him as a miniature foodie. He has never met a calorie he didn't like. He partakes in all cultures: French, Latin, Indian, Moroccan, Thai, Chinese, Italian (not spaghetti and meatballs—osso bucco with gremolata). He doesn't like indigenous British food, but then no one does, not even the British. He loves sushi. Steamed mussels. Burrata with heirloom tomatoes. Pomegranate sorbet. He has a rare passion for raw oysters with just a touch of lemon. He loves tapas and is particularly fond of manchego-stuffed dates wrapped in rasher bacon. He has been known to request balsamic vinegar and can tell the difference between Himalayan and Mediterranean salt. This is due, in some part, to the policy in our house since he graduated from pulverized carrots and gooey oatmeal to real food:
Eat what I make or starve.

Children's menus in all restaurants offer the same things: hot dogs, mac 'n' cheese, spaghetti, chicken nuggets, and grilled cheese. Kids seem conditioned and enabled to avoid real food. We don't order from children's menus and I have explained to him that chickens don't have nuggets. There is no part of a chicken that is considered a nugget. I tell him, “Don't ever order a meat that you can't trace to an original body part.”

But sometimes I think it's all for naught. Truthfully, Cooper could eat potato chips and waffles at every meal and be happy. His palate is not so sophisticated as it is driven by his endomorphic
need
for food. While I strive to cultivate his appreciation for varied cookery, which is artfully served on white mini-ceramic plates that match our larger versions (never plastic for dinner), there are personality issues that make me fear he will one day drink Coors from a can.

For instance, he is quite fond of the words “fart” and “penis” and is obsessed with asking us to smell his feet. He thinks belching is the highest form of comedy.

I make up songs with inner rhymes:

Cooper is a super trouper,

A loop-the-looper, a sometime blooper,

Hula-hooper, secret snooper,

And he makes me laugh!

“Now your turn—make up a verse!” I say. Cooper responds with:

Cooper is a pooper and he has a stinky butt.