God, if You're Not Up There . . . (4 page)

Before I was old enough for school, each morning my mother and I drove to pick up Myrtise. We had to cross a bridge to get there, and every time we did, my mother would swerve as though she were going to drive the car right off. I was never convinced that she wouldn’t do it some day.

On Sundays throughout my childhood, I went to church with my mother, but when I was little I asked questions that got me in trouble. If it was seven days to make the world, how long was a day? Was a day an hour? Was there a sun yet? If there wasn’t a sun, how long was a day? One time I made the mistake of referring to the “ghost of Jesus,” which was blasphemy. “He’s a
spirit
, not a ghost,” somebody said angrily to me. What’s the difference, they’re both gaseous? At four or five years old, what the hell did I know about the Holy Trinity?

M
y father didn’t go to church much; his religion was the United States of America. Tall and blond, he had a Cary Grant–esque dimple in his chin and shoulders broad enough to fill a doorway. He’d gone to military prep school just as the United States was joining the Allied effort in World War II. Under his junior year photo in his yearbook, Max Hammond had written that it was his dream to go to Duke, play baseball, then go on to law school. This was in the days when baseball was king; aside from boxing, there wasn’t much else in professional sports—no football, no basketball, no hockey—so every kid played baseball. My father’s high school team was top-notch; one of his teammates was Al “Flip” Rosen, who would become a four-time All-Star for the Cleveland Indians in the 1940s and ’50s.

But by the time my father was a senior, the caption under his yearbook photo said his dream was “To serve my country the best way I can.” He was sent to Germany an eighteen-year-old second lieutenant, the youngest commissioned officer in the history of the U.S. military at the time, or so he was told. I never learned all the details of his service, but he came home with a lot of medals and a tortured soul. Armed conflict ruined him.

My father used to tell me about one battle when almost everyone in his company had been killed, and the Germans were looking to shoot survivors. There was a guy lying next to him, the top of his skull blown off. My father reached over and scooped out a handful of brains and smeared it over his own face, and lay there pretending to be dead so the Germans would pass him by.

“You do what you have to do to survive,” he’d say.

Once in a while, my father would sit at the dining room table, getting drunk on gin. Staring off into space, he would sometimes begin speaking to his men as if they were going into battle:

Some of you won’t be coming home tonight. I might not be coming home tonight. You have to remember that you’re part of something that’s bigger than you. This is about fighting evil, not someone who’s angry or going through a phase or disgruntled, but someone who’s crossed the line between sick and bad. They want to stop the country we live in, to stop us from being able to choose the color of the paint on the wall or a career or what clothes you wear. You can be sure that God will be coming into battle with us. God has an interest in what happens here today, and some of us may go with Him. But when these cocksuckers are fucking with us, they’re fucking with God.

Over the years, I heard that a lot. He still harbored plans to play professional baseball and go to law school after the war, but then he and my mother got married in Sylvester, Georgia, in 1947, so he had to work to support his wife. Three years later, he was called back for duty in Korea. A week after he shipped out, he was in another war zone, this time in the Far East.

How do you go back to civilian life after that? One minute he was a trained killer, and, as his medals reflect, a damn good one. The next he was supposed to be a hardworking family man, then they sent him back to kill again. He’d lived in a world with bombs and guns and shattered corpses everywhere, and then next thing he knows he’s sitting in a lawn chair drinking a martini with our Siberian husky at his side. Sometimes when he sat at the table with that glass of gin in front of him, he would cry, muttering that after what he’d done, he couldn’t be loved.

Perhaps that was why whenever I caught his eye, he always looked away quickly.

I
don’t know if it was his military experience or simply how he was raised back in Georgia, but my dad took shit from no one, and he wasn’t shy about telling people what he thought of them.

One day a Jehovah’s Witness came to our door. Unfortunately for the poor bastard, my father was the one who answered it. When the guy was done with his glory-of-God spiel, my father looked at him for a long minute before he said, “You’re not worth shit, are you, son?” And he slammed the door in the man’s face.

On a sun-drenched Saturday afternoon, my father was in the yard when a car came speeding down the road. He stepped out to the curb and waved it down. “You’re driving too fast, son. Do it again, I’m gonna bounce ya, and I’m gonna bounce ya good.”

More than once I saw him walk up to boys he didn’t know and say, “Cut your hair, son.” And to one kid who had a ring through his lip, he said, “You didn’t turn out too good, did you, boy?”

One night during dinner, my sister told us the veterinarian was threatening to put down her dog because of an unpaid bill. My father got up and went straight to the phone to call him.

“My daughter said you’re talking about destroying her dog.”

I could hear “blah blah blah” on the other end of phone.

“Well, if you touch the dog, you’re gonna get killed, son. Do you understand me?”

More “blah blah blah.”

“No, no, this is not about what’s right or wrong, what the police will do, or what they can do, or what God would want. This is about what’s gonna happen. And what’s gonna happen is you’re gonna get killed, son.”

He scared the fuck outta the guy, and then we ate.

S
ometimes he turned his rage on us. We’d be at the dinner table, and my sister or I would inadvertently say something that upset him.

“What in the goddamn hell!” he’d say, then he would get up and walk over to either my bedroom door or my sister’s bedroom door and kick in a hole, then walk back to the table and sit down. We lived for years with those holes in our doors. My father bought crude squares of aluminum that he pasted over some of them.

I’d be in my bedroom and hear this crash at the door and my father yelling, “I’m going to bash you halfway through that wall.” I believed him.

My father kicked or punched my bedroom door so often, it eventually gave way.

He once said to either my mom or my sister, “Why don’t you just kill me? Why don’t you just get yourself a gun, put it right up here, temporal lobe, squeeze the trigger, blow my brains out, end my life, get me off of this earth? Because that’s where we’re going.”

M
y mother was at once more subtle and more sinister. I remember my hand being slammed in car doors and thinking it was my fault. But she wasn’t trying to break my fingers; she was saying, “See what I can do? See what I think of you?”

She used to recount cheerfully the time she beat me with her high heel and I began to bleed in front of everyone in the park in Jacksonville.

“I beat you bloody!” she’d say, her hand on her stomach to contain her chuckles.

I used to wake up in the morning wanting a mom. Not
my
mom, but
a
mom. I wanted mothering, the magic I noticed in the hands and the voices of other mothers. Instead, my mother told me that if I ever saw anyone in my room at night, it was ghosts, and I’m not talking about the friendly Casper variety. She was more interested in her church and her friends and playing piano. Her favorite piece of music was Tchaikovsky’s Sixth Symphony, which I picked up by watching her and imitating the movement of her fingers.

When I was about seven years old, I finally discovered a way to connect with my mother. I noticed that if I could get her talking about certain people in the neighborhood, she would become enraptured doing impressions of them. She would tell stories and do the voices of Coach Davis, Betsy Whatshername, Maggie Turnbull, and she did them all expertly. Doing my best to copy what she did, I learned to do voices too. If for nothing else, she seemed to love me for that.

We had a recording of Dickens’s
Christmas Carol
read by the British actors Ralph Richardson and Paul Scofield, and my mother and I learned all the parts. If I wanted to get her attention, I would say, “Let’s do Merry Christmas, Uncle!” We were especially fond of the conversation at the beginning of the story between pre–ghost visitations Ebenezer Scrooge and his rosy-cheeked nephew, which we acted out without the descriptive bits that Dickens had written into the original:

“A merry Christmas, uncle! God save you!”

“Bah! Humbug!”

“Christmas a humbug, uncle! You don’t mean that, I am sure?”

“I do. Merry Christmas! What right have you to be merry? What reason have you to be merry? You’re poor enough.”

“Come, then. What right have you to be dismal? What reason have you to be morose? You’re rich enough.”

“Bah! Humbug!”

“Don’t be cross, uncle.”

“What else can I be, when I live in such a world of fools as this? Merry Christmas! Out upon merry Christmas. What’s Christmas time to you but a time for paying bills without money; a time for finding yourself a year older, but not an hour richer; a time for balancing your books and having every item in them through a round dozen of months presented dead against you? If I could work my will, every idiot who goes about with ‘Merry Christmas’ on his lips, should be boiled with his own pudding, and buried with a stake of holly through his heart!”

We used to say that last line all the time, even when we weren’t doing the whole scene, just because it was so fun to say. For my money, if you’re going to tell someone off, do it in a posh British accent. It’s way more effective. I always wanted to use the words “vomitorious” and “oblivion” in the same sentence.

As I got a bit older, I decided to take the entertainment power of impressions farther afield. I started doing Porky Pig saying his trademark line, “That’s all, folks!” and Popeye doing his chuckle, which made me an instant star among my friends at school. A pattern for learning new voices quickly emerged: When I listened to a voice I wanted to imitate, for instance a recording of Popeye scat singing, the voice came to me as a color first. In Popeye’s case: blue. Then I saw all the letters in my head—
skee da bee dat doh skidibit day id ibit duh bug da yee da doh
. In the same vein, Porky Pig was yellow. Voices still come to me as colors first.

Despite what you’re thinking right now—which I’m guessing is something along the lines of, Aha!
That’s
where he got it!—I wasn’t destined for, or even interested in, a life doing impressions.

What I was really supposed to do was play baseball.

I
think all human beings on this earth deserve three golden years like the ones I had beginning at age twelve when I started playing Little League. For me, a tsunami of joy was unleashed with every stroke of the bat. The thrill of hitting a ball well was mind-bending, watching it rise up, the sun glinting off the horsehide, outfielders running back toward the fence. It made the constant sense of foreboding at home fade into the background.

Even the smell of the cigar smoke coming from the wizened old men from the neighborhood who’d come to watch was delicious. They didn’t know anybody or have any kids in the league, but it was a baseball game, and, for that night at least, we were all playing for keeps.

And the sound track to the late 1960s was glorious—Motown at its best. People brought their transistor radios to the games. Someone put a turntable in the announcer’s booth at Wells Park, and some guy would go up there and call the game. There was a guy named Damon Johnson who brought Motown songs. While we were getting ready for the game, he’d play the Four Tops, the Supremes, Marvin Gaye’s “Too Busy Thinking About My Baby,” the Zombies’ “Time of the Season,” the Jackson Five’s “Stop! The Love You Save,” the Foundations’ “Build Me Up Buttercup,” “Love Grows (Where My Rosemary Goes),” the one-hit wonder by Edison Lighthouse.

We didn’t know that we weren’t supposed to love black music any more than we weren’t supposed to love Hank Aaron. Some of us white boys used to imitate Hank Aaron’s stance batting. To us, he was just a hero baseball player who went to the All-Star game year after year. So was Roberto Clemente of the Pittsburgh Pirates. Whenever I was in a slump, I used to imitate Clemente’s teammate Willie Stargell, who hit two of the only four home runs ever to soar out of the confines of Dodger Stadium. It got me charged up so I could hit again.

But above and beyond, New York Yankee Mickey Mantle, one of the greatest players the game has ever seen, was my dude. First Bruce Bochy, then all my friends, called me Mick, because I always wore number 7 in his honor. (Who knew that thirty years later, the Mick would hold a press conference after receiving a liver transplant to replace the one he’d destroyed with booze in which he said, “Don’t be like me”?)