Starf*cker: a Meme-oir (8 page)

More ominously, one of the guys wound up with a girl in his room, which led to all the other players chanting outside his door and attempting to beat it down. I looked down the hall in time to see a girl with really high hair dashing out of the room and out of the building in just a towel.

But the incident that put the kibosh on football camp was toward the end, as students began to return for the upcoming semester, when my dad’s team spotted a parade outside the dorm. It was headed up by the school’s marching band, many of them females (and probably quite a few honorary females like me), so—still keyed up from their talent show performances—my dad’s players dropped their pants and shook anything that moved through the window at them.

The bandleader complained bitterly to my father because many of the virginal girls—did I forget to mention it was a Nazarene college?—had seen penises for the very first time thanks to my dad’s rowdy, inner-city squad. The poor, fragile dears…losing their eyeball virginities to black guys. Needless to say, my dad’s team was invited to not return. But also needless to say, I had been given a cherished peek into the world of the heterosexual male teenager, a creature I hoped I might become in a few years. It was like I’d spent time in an integrated version of the movie
Zapped!
Moon-and-starstruck, I actually had the guys autograph the construction-paper footballs with their names on them that had been stuck on their doors…and I still own them.

It had been unprecedented access for me, and I owed it to my dad, to whom I felt like such a disappointment since I hated anything to do with balls that were not attached to a penis.

Not long after my dad had set up that sweet locker-room visit, probably within the same year even, he and I were in the car after a McDonald’s run—he could always reach me through carbs—listening to the radio when it was announced that Angels player Lyman Bostock had just been shot to death in the back seat of a car somewhere. My dad reacted with his usual animation over death announcements on the radio. When Natalie Wood died, I thought the world was ending by the level of interest he showed, and of course it kind of was…but my dad was more upset than Robert Wagner.

“You
met
him,” he insisted as the news report continued. “Remember?” I did. And I have.

I think the important thing I was supposed to remember is that my dad had used his pull to get me something not many other kids were given that day: an unearned early trip into the vault of manhood. He was trying to mold me into a man through sports, and while it wasn’t working, it was. It wasn’t his fault that I didn’t care about baseball, or that I would wind up recalling that locker visit not fondly but
fondle
-y. I did and do remember his good intentions in arranging it, in taking me to see the Tigers irregularly, in forcing me into tee-ball and Little League baseball year after year, in inviting me to football camp. (Fuck, if only rugby had existed in Flint, Michigan, back then.) He was just trying to help.

Even though my dad wanting me to play and/or appreciate sports was eat-a-box-of-donuts vexing at the time, I haven’t held a grudge. I think my experience in that locker room and at that football camp—so
different from the experiences he presumed I was having—showed me that there is
no way
for parents to have any clue whether the child they think they’re rearing is the same child they actually are rearing. Parents
have to
assume a
lot
just to proceed, and there’s a very good chance one or more of the bedrock assumptions will not be accurate.

But in parenting as in baseball, it’s not how many you win or lose, it’s how you play the game.

Missouri is where part of my mom’s dad’s family settled. When I was about eleven, I for some reason asked to go with my grandparents on one of their annual car trips there and somehow was allowed. Yes, I was the kind of boy who thought hanging with my grandparents was cool. I think I was curious to see another part of my family since genealogy was such a big part of my R.E.A.C.H. program, and I still have the “Amateur Genealogist” certificate to prove it. I think I was also curious to see just how broad that word “family” could be.

My mom’s parents were both born in the South, and had gone from picking cotton alongside black people who had former slaves in their immediate families to being business owners. Once I knew this, I always felt their sometimes-racist attitudes seemed to be a knee-jerk response to this, to a desire to be above the level of their fellow cotton-pickers. It’s not an excuse, but I know that when they made disparaging remarks about black people (from which Eye-talians were about one step up), it was more about class than about deeply feeling that a person with brown skin was inferior. My sister as a child begged for a Michael Jackson doll for Christmas one year, but my grandmother refused to buy her a black doll. “Who knows where that will lead?” she said. But without any fanfare, her need to give her granddaughter the most-cherished gift superseded her deep-seated racial misgivings. And she was right, by the way, because my sister grew up and married a black guy. But she was wrong, too, because she loves her biracial great-granddaughter, something that would have been improbable had she been a biracial granddaughter. People change their minds.

My grandfather had fought in WWII in a tank, suffered a breakdown and was reassigned as a cook. He became renowned for his down-home eats, especially his fried chicken and meringue pies. After the war, he owned a series of highly regarded restaurants bearing variations on his name, places so popular for his perfect pies that he was forced to include the recipe in the purchase price when they later cashed out and retired. They did it too early and he wound up bored stiff, so would help his son-in-law sell hot dogs at his deli and poured himself into maintaining a pristinely landscaped yard, complete with babied apple trees that yielded the goods for some pies that you simply can not imagine, so I won’t even try to conjure them up. Just know that whenever you bit into a slice of Owen and Mary’s pie, you were grateful to be unable to fit into even your fat pants later on.

My grandparents were proud of and never took for granted any of the creature comforts they’d earned in life. They were not overly ostentatious nor were they spendthrifts, but my memory is that they always had a new Cadillac and took care to dress smartly, my grandmother with artfully teased and sprayed hair and in church-lady pastel suits under beaver and fox jackets and my grandfather always in sporty shirts and slacks, sporting a rakish fedora with a colorful feather at the side. My grandmother had some beautiful jewelry and a small collection of fine furs—when you’re raised on a farm where chickens’ heads were twisted off in advance of dinner, I think the concept of “animal rights” is an even greater luxury than a sable coat, so that never bothered me, even later on when I was sympathetic toward the people who sprayed ladies’ minks with red paint.

She was the tough one of the couple. He did a lot of the cooking, but she had been a waitress long enough to be a stern taskmistress when it came to serving a family dinner to her three children and their offspring. She wasn’t happy-go-lucky; she could cut you to the bone with a few choice words, and sometimes did, though treated her grandchildren like gold, saving one from choking by turning her upside down and shaking her until she cut it out and letting me camp out with them when I was recovering from chicken pox. Cookies apparently help chicken pox—who knew? There was also always a thick sense that she knew stuff that if she told you, you’d understand why she could be aloof. She did not enjoy whatever those secrets were, but I think over time she grew to enjoy being able to keep them. A few years ago, I visited with her and looked through her photos, asking her family-history questions. Out of nowhere, she laughed, “I have lots of secrets,” but her eyes weren’t laughing. It was like she was daring me to ask. So I did. “You want to have bad dreams?” she replied. As of this writing, she is no closer to revealing any of them.

Grandpa was a quiet guy, but liked to tease the series of small dogs they owned, each of whom subsisted on chicken fat and bacon and were lucky to live half as long as their littermates. He could be very funny in a rascally way; salty, too, but rarely crass. He was a classy guy who valued being classy. He never, ever talked about the war.

When it was time to head to Missouri with them, I rode in the back of their Caddy, writing stories and postcards; I was already very much in love with words and my agility with them. Wordplay was my foreplay. Other than getting away from my routine, and my little sister Melissa who I now think is amazing but who I then thought was a waste of space and whom I intentionally infected with chicken pox by stealing a kiss when nobody was looking, I was most excited
about all the fireworks stands that began appearing just off the highway because the tough stuff was illegal in Michigan and I knew if I could return with some tanks or other exotic explosive devices, I would be golden with Cousin Wally. With the help of fireworks, I could be a real boy—me and Pinocchio.

But I didn’t have enough money and my grandparents weren’t as excited about the prospect of putting explosives into my hands, so instead we stopped at every one of a family-style restaurant chain’s locations along the way. My grandparents, being food-biz vets, were hilariously judgmental sticklers about food. It didn’t matter if the food in question was just a burger or if it was some exotic cuisine that no one else in Flushing, certainly no one originally from the South, would be adventurous enough to try; it had to be good, it had to be priced fairly, and it had to be served properly.

Once, over dinner at Bill Knapp’s, an upscale chain in our hometown, my grandmother mortified me by sending back her steak for being improperly cooked. She didn’t mince words over things like this, and I was at the stage where I was embarrassed when any adult said anything ever. She stared down the kitchen and when the steak was returned, she told them, “I sat and watched that steak and this one isn’t mine; you switched it with someone else’s.” She of course did not pay, but she would never try to get out of paying just to save money—it was the principle. If she could serve food properly for 40 years, everybody else better get it right, too.

On the Missouri trip, they loved the chain we stopped at so often because it had a family atmosphere, was dirt cheap, and had an expansive buffet of heart-stopping foods. Their blood type was gravy, and yet my grandfather (after surviving serious heart attacks) lived to his mid-80s and my grandmother is still alive and coasting toward 100. She still eats whatever she wants, including donuts, bacon, Red Lobster, fried anything, and whatever else you’ve got, though all in moderation.

When we got to where we were going, we stayed with my great-grandmother (another argument against the presumed evils of cholesterol). Belle—she had one of those oddly pretty names that no one really named their children anymore, though it’s since made a comeback—was elderly and frail, but she was able to recite poetry that she’d learned as a ten-year-old girl for a countywide contest that she’d won against adults. This appealed to the spelling bee champ in me.

“I’m telling you, he was a grown man and he was in tears by the time I finished my poem,” she giggled.
Poym
.

I also hung out with a colorful great-aunt and great-uncle and learned “shnuff?” was code for “sure enough?” which meant “really?” and that it was traditional to use it at the end of every sentence. I swear I had a twang by the time we left, and I kept accidentally calling pop “soda.”

It wasn’t a thrill, that trip—one of my letters home stated, “There’s nothing to do so we just keep eating.”—but I’ve never forgotten it because it was such a deviation from my day-to-day camp-out in my room (“Leave me alone!”) and because I witnessed my grandparents looking after and fretting over his mom in the same way I hope I can be counted on to look after and fret over my own parents.

Who will look after and fret over the single gay guy?

That is some deep-fried food for thought. Family-style.

Journeys were part of my family’s routine, usually consisting of camping up North in RV parks in cities like Petoskey, where almost every other stone you’d fish from the water had a unique, spider-web-like fossil from pre-Biblical times. They’re exquisite and they come from Michigan, like Taylor Lautner.

More luxuriously, we at least a couple of times went camping in Leelanau at a resort called Timber Shores. I remember it as the French Riviera, except with geese. It had a gorgeous white-sand beach, dunes, idyllic weather, an indoor/outdoor pool combo, and a concession stand that had every kind of candy bar, including the newly introduced Whatchamacallit and the rare Reggie! Bar. It even had a steam room, which didn’t allow kids. In my head, I imagined it was a place where parents (Not mine! Never mine!) would swap spouses as their kids floated in water wings outside. In reality, it was a place where parents took turns being alone without the shrieks of the creatures they’d created whenever the rhythm method failed.