by Craig Carton
I told her to keep it fair and gave her a wink. She didn’t react. I guess I should have put a couple of singles in her G-string. As the game continued, a terrible rainstorm overtook us and we played in a torrential downpour. Scoreless at halftime with thirty minutes to go . . . We were playing in mud up to our ankles, and the prospects of scoring grew smaller as the afternoon grew older. No way would they cancel the game and require parents to give up another Sunday to watch their spoiled kids run around on a field—not when it cut into “parental alone time,” as my folks called it. (I think we call it “fucking” now, but I’m not sure. My wife and I call it “Mommy and Daddy conversation time,” but we haven’t said a word to each other privately without fucking in years.)
Regulation came and went, and still scoreless. To overtime we went.
Five minutes one way, and still tied.
Five minutes the other way, and still tied.
Sudden death it would be.
Five more minutes one way, and still tied.
Five more sudden-death minutes the other way; still tied.
The parents convened and decided they would pull the goalies and play more sudden death.
Five minutes more, and we were still tied.
Five more scoreless minutes, and unbelievably, we were still tied.
They put the goalies back in, but took a position player off the field so there would be more room to run and make a play.
Five minutes like that, and still tied.
An epic game for the ages.
As the clock ticked down in the umpteenth overtime session, I moved the ball from my right foot to my left and got by a defender on the left wing. I came back to the right foot about thirty yards away from the goal and, rain pounding my body, I stepped into the mud, four seconds remaining. I came down hard and made contact with the ball at three seconds left. The ball headed toward the goal—two seconds—the goalie dove, but the ball was out of his reach. One second. The ball sailed into the net’s upper right-hand corner; it’s a game-winning goal, smack-dab at zero seconds—game over, we won! My father ran onto the field and knocked me to the ground, then picked me up and put me on his shoulders. His son had just scored the greatest goal in the history of youth soccer. We were going to celebrate, goddamn it.
Parents from the other team stormed the field and made a beeline for the referee. They surrounded him, yelling and pushing, demanding to know if the clock ran out before or after the ball went into the net. They all turned as one and looked at my mother, who had the timer in her hands. It was up to the former summer stock dancer to decide our fate. She alone would choose whether or not I would have the greatest memory any kid could ever have and go on to play in the state tournament, or take the victory away from me. Knowing that the other parents had cheated the clock many times, she drew herself up, conscious of everyone awaiting her verdict, and pronounced: “The clock hit zero before it went into the net”—stabbing her own son in the back.
Tie game, pandemonium, too much mayhem to restore order. As a result, we had to replay the whole thing the following week. Score: 3–1, their favor.
How could she do that to me? How about one for the home team, Mom? As the crowd of parents grew more aggressive, I heard shouts aimed at my mother, from “Don’t be a cheater!” to “We know where you live!” to “Do the right thing!” Parents of my teammates thought for sure the goal was scored before the clock ran out, and parents of our opponents thought time must have expired. Whichever way she went, she would be accused of having fixed the score—scandal either way, for sure. Maybe she saw it as a way of gaining importance in the eyes of the other parents—as opposed to being seen as just a broad with a big chest. The game was talked about for years to come, and came to redefine who kept the clock and how it was kept. You’d think it was a World Cup game that had been decided by a referees’ call, like the famous or infamous Maradona “Hand of God” goal that propelled Argentina to the 1986 World Cup title.
The soccer game of 1977 defined my relationship with my mother, and still does. It may not have been influenced by the hand of God, but it sure as hell had something to do with the Boobs of Bobbe.
Tim Tebow is the backup quarterback for my beloved New York Jets. Why? I have no idea.
Most people have fallen in love with Tim and the religion that he is so passionate about. I have come to believe that Tebow is sincere, that his whole persona is not an act, and that he believes it to his core. But there is one aspect of the Tebowmania that I refuse to buy. What kind of guy could possibly live the life he proclaims to live when he is surrounded by constant temptation?
First off, having met Tim and had him on my radio show, I can attest that he might be the single most handsome dude I have ever seen up close. I love Mark Sanchez and Alex Rodriguez, and they would win most beauty contests, but this Tebow is on another planet. He’s a great athlete—arguably the best college QB ever—and he just so happened to go to the University of Florida, which has more hot girls on campus per square inch than just about any other school in the country. Yet he professed to be a virgin through his graduation.
Bullshit!
He was drafted by the Denver Broncos and guaranteed millions of dollars.
Still a virgin.
Bullshit!
He leads the Broncos to a whole bunch of last-second wins, and even helps them win a playoff game for the first time in almost a decade.
Still a virgin.
Bullshit!
During that magical run with the Broncos, he has a cold sore on his lip for a month.
Still a virgin.
Bullshit!
In Tebow’s first month with the Jets, his buddy and fellow QB Mark Sanchez is linked to a minimum of three celebrity women, each one hotter than the next. Tebow describes his only meaningful relationship as the one he has with a church advisor who keeps him on the straight and narrow.
Still a virgin.
Okay . . . maybe.
Right before the season begins, GQ publishes photos of Tebow with no shirt on, posing as Sexy Jesus. Local New York City television crews catch him running in the rain with his shirt off in front of female fans who are passing out from the sight of his pecs.
Still a virgin.
Bullshit!
Of all the things that my brain cannot process—such as how in the world we can push ten random numeric buttons on a small box and start talking with someone halfway around the world, let alone next door—what tops the list is that a good-looking, successful superstar who has women throwing themselves at him like women used to fling panties at Tom Jones has never, not even once, experienced the nectar of the forbidden fruit.
I can only imagine how his head is going to explode when he does it for the first time. Not only because of how great it is, but because he’ll realize how much he’s passed on, up until that point.
I hate him now.
Okay . . . bullshit.
CLOCKWORK ORANGE, FOR REAL (OR, HOW I CAME TO LOVE BASEBALL)
Imagine being locked in a room against your will.
Really locked, and not in a room that you could move around in. I mean locked in one position for four days.
You cannot move without your captors’ help, and even then it’s just to go to the bathroom or to eat. While you’re lying there, you can have the television on, but you can only pick one thing to watch. What would you choose to see?
But let me step back for a minute and set the scene. The year was 1976 and I was seven years old, a first-grade student in Roosevelt Elementary School on North Avenue in New Rochelle. An old three-story brick building, the school consisted of grades from kindergarten to sixth. I learned my first curse word there, played kickball for the first time, tackled and kissed a girl for the first time, and—maybe my finest memory—got to climb the rope in gym class and feel the sensation of friction against my junk for the first time. Climbing the rope became my single favorite activity in elementary school. I would climb high and slow, and enjoy every minute
of it.
Suffice it to say, at that point I was a normal kid, except for one thing. Earlier that year, I had developed a “problem,” as my folks put it. I would reach across the dinner table and knock the water pitcher over.
Apparently I did this a lot, and it pissed my parents off. We had a clam-shaped table in our kitchen, which we sat around for meals. My mother always put a big glass pitcher of water on the table for us to share. The pitcher was never near me, it seemed, and it was too big for my brother or sister to pick up. So whenever I wanted to refill my glass, I had to reach across the table to get it.
I frequently knocked it over—not because I meant to, but because it was big and heavy, and I couldn’t quite grasp it. You would think someone would fill my glass before dinner and eliminate the problem. But instead the pitcher stayed, I kept knocking it down, and my parents kept yelling at me. They also said I blinked excessively, especially after making a mess with the water.
After several months of wet tables and blinking, and no one thinking they ought to move the pitcher closer to me, my folks decided to send me to the neighborhood shrink. His office was inside his house, and I wondered if the guy was for real. If he was, why didn’t he have a real office?
He was a nice enough man, and he took me into his play area to chat while my folks had to wait outside. I liked that they were not allowed in the room with me, but I still didn’t know why I was there. Sure, I blinked and spilled the water. I also believed that inanimate objects had feelings—specifically this one large rock that was at the end of our driveway. The rock was huge, too big for three of us kids to budge an inch, and we tried damn near every day. I started to talk to the rock to encourage it to move. One day I painted the rock just to see if he—that’s right, the rock had a cock—would like being a different color. That rock never did move, of course, but I spoke to it every day until I was in high school, when I realized that talking to a rock might be considered weird. After that, I decided to communicate with it telepathically, and I did so until the day I went to college. But then again, who didn’t believe weird stuff at age seven?
The doctor played cards with me, and then we moved to a mean round of Othello. During the games, he asked me why I kept spilling the water. I told him that I didn’t do it on purpose, that it happened because I had to reach all the way across the table. Then he asked why I blinked. I told him I didn’t think I blinked more than the average kid. He asked me more questions for half an hour. I didn’t give him anything he could use against me, since I was already a seasoned mob witness in my own mind.
Earlier that year, I was coming back to school after lunch at the nearby strip mall with a friend of mine, Max. My friends and I did this every day, as back then the school allowed it. On this particular day, three teenagers approached me and Max in an alleyway, shoved us up against the wall, and demanded any money or jewelry we had. I pushed one of the kids and told Max to run with me. As I sprinted away, Max stayed put, frozen in fear. By the time I realized he wasn’t next to me, I was three blocks up the street. I couldn’t just leave him there, so I ran to the crossing guard and told her what had happened. When we got to the alley, the kids ran away, leaving Max crying. They stole his necklace and a few bucks. But more than that, they stole his confidence. He didn’t go out to lunch again for the rest of the year.
About a week later, on a Saturday morning, New Rochelle police officers came to my house. They had caught the kids who held up Max, and wanted me to testify in court. That was a nonstarter in my family. My father told them it wasn’t going to happen, and just like out of the movie A Bronx Tale, the officers bypassed my dad and said, “Son, could you identify the kids that stopped you in the alleyway?”
Of course I could, but now, with my father in front of me, I knew the right answer: “Sorry, officer, I don’t think I could.” The cop gave me his card so I could call him if I changed my mind; then he left.
Based on this experience, I knew how to avoid giving anything away to the shrink. When he allowed my folks back into the room with us, he told them that I was a normal kid. They disagreed. They wanted something to be wrong with me—not because they wanted their son to be broken, but so they could blame me for the behavior that bugged them.
A few weeks later, I developed a habit of moving my neck around when it was stiff, as if to crack it. One day while walking into the entrance of my school, I went to loosen my neck and I felt a ping. I was sent to the nurse’s office because it hurt, and she put a neck brace on me. My mother came to pick me up, and when I got home, I lay down on the couch to see if I’d feel any better.
A few hours later, my dad came home early, which put me on alert because he never left work before six. He was accompanied by a strange man who was carrying a weird contraption with metal bars. For about an hour they worked in my bedroom with the door shut, and then the guy left.
My parents summoned me to my room, where I was shocked to see this huge device with bars and a collar hanging over my bed. My parents told me that they were concerned about the repeated neck-loosening. They wanted to help me stop doing it. I was to lie in bed with my neck immobilized. This device would put an end to my twitching neck.
In other words, forced behavior therapy was about to take place, with me as the guinea pig. Think Clockwork Orange, but for real. I was in trouble, but what could I say or do about it? From the grim expressions on their faces, I realized I had no choice.
I put on my pajamas and climbed into bed. My parents fitted the metal collar around me and connected me to the machine. Held motionless, I couldn’t move my head, neck, or shoulders even an inch in any direction. They then wheeled in our only television, a nineteen-inch set that had the six channels all New Yorkers got back then, long before the days of ESPN. They even gave me a choice of what I wanted to watch. The remote control hadn’t been invented yet, so this would be my only channel for the duration of my lockdown. Fuck!!!
Thank God the day I was locked in that thing, the Major League Game of the Week was on. There was no kid programming back then, but there was baseball, and there was Joe Garagiola. I fell in love with him and baseball that day and have never stopped loving it. I can still close my eyes and hear Joe announce what the Oakland A’s were doing. I guess Joe could have been any announcer that day, but his ability just to talk and talk and talk about baseball with such love, admiration, and passion grabbed hold of me and allowed me to daydream away from being locked in traction, and into the ballpark. I just wish I could thank Joe for freeing me.
Since I have Tourette’s, the neck twitching and blinking were out of my control, no matter how much my parents thought I did it to annoy them. As for the water spilling, I guess I was just clumsy. I was too young to hate my parents, but I wasn’t too young to become fearful of them, which is what I did. Not being loved, or told I was loved, did two profound things to me. First, it created a disconnect between me and my parents, which led me to hide as many things as I could from them and not be open about anything with them—and ultimately with anyone else, either. I figured if I didn’t reveal what I was doing or thinking, there was no way they could put me in traction or punish me in other ways. I was already a quiet kid around adults, so this wasn’t hard to do. Sure, my parents thought they were helping me. They even invited my relatives to come see the freak boy in the traction machine. Baseball was my savior that week, and I will never forget it.
On the other hand, the Tourette’s wasn’t as easy to cope with. I didn’t know what it was called, but I knew I blinked and twitched. I started to figure out that I could control the tics for a certain length of time, only to have a major explosion later on. And that’s what I did. Whenever I was around my parents, I tried to suppress the urge to twitch. When I felt I couldn’t anymore, I would try to make sure I was alone in my room or outside where nobody would see. I pulled this off from first grade until I was thirty, and then I got busted.
When I was a kid, I looked forward to Sunday evenings, when we always went to a Chines
e restaurant. For one thing, I didn’t have to eat my mother’s cooking—not that she was a bad cook, but she made the same thing over and over again. How in the world can you fuck up meat loaf when you make it every single week for more than a decade? My mom would routinely go to the mason jar of oil and drop pieces of chicken into what looked like the Exxon Valdez spill, again and again and again. And we would eat it, again and again and again.
Sundays were a reprieve from that, although our custom was just as repetitive as with at-home meals. We went to the same restaurant, Szechuan Empire, at the same time, 6 p.m. We always sat at the same table, and had the same waiter named Henry. His real name couldn’t have been Henry, but the restaurant’s owner made the Chinese staff take American names that were more pronounceable. The place was full of Johns and Steves and Bobs, none of whom spoke English.
As a boy, my Chinese food regimen was simple: egg roll, spare ribs, dumplings, lo mein—the same shit every time. I would never eat seafood; I just didn’t care for it, and I wasn’t going to risk trying anything new after my recent fiasco with onion soup. My family had gone out to eat at a steak and chops place, and I saw someone at a nearby table order French onion soup that arrived bubbling over with cheese and a big piece of French bread. It looked so good—like garlic bread with melted mozzarella. I begged my folks to let me order it. After a few minutes of pleading, they relented, with the proviso that I had to finish it so they didn’t waste their money. God forbid I didn’t like it.
The soup came and looked wonderful. I jumped right into the ooey gooey cheese and bread. I loved it, but then I got to the onion broth underneath. It was disgusting, so I didn’t take a second spoonful. My parents yelled at me for wasting their money and told me I had to finish it or there would be no dinner. For a full hour they watched as I tried to sip the soup but never made a dent in it. They held to their word. I was not getting dinner. It was the first, but not the last, time I left a restaurant hungry.