by Craig Carton
I will never forget what happened five minutes before I was called up to receive an award. My great-aunt Diana was sitting next to me chitchatting. I wasn’t close with her, but my great-uncle was a cool dude who used to sell video games to big-box department stores, and he used to bring me along and pay me to demonstrate the games inside the store. It was a great job. For two hours I would sit in a reclining chair and play video games so other kids could see them and then ask their parents to buy them. It was brilliant marketing, and I would make twenty dollars each time I did it. He and I didn’t have much in common, but I will never forget that he was cool enough to pay me to play video games.
So I was sitting at the table half-listening to my aunt Diana, and I went to take a sip of soda from the glass I was holding. I slowly brought the glass up to my face, my nose entered the inside of the glass, and I began to sip the drink. My aunt said, “Wow, you have a big nose. I’m surprised you could even take a sip out of that cup.” I spit-gagged the soda, dumbfounded that she had said that—not to mention said it loud enough for everyone around us to hear.
My mother asked her to repeat what she had just said. Again without hesitation, Aunt Diana proclaimed, “Wow, he really has a big nose, and a funny mark on it, too.”
My brother and sister thought this was hysterical, and then each person at the table started looking at me to judge for himself if I had a big nose, and what the mark on it was.
Then I heard “. . . and the award goes to Craig Carton!”
I walked up to the stage to accept the award. When I turned around to face the crowd, all I could think was that they all were staring at the big-nosed kid. I was right about one table for sure. Another great moment ruined, and the night hadn’t even reached its peak of depressing.
When I was seven years old, my brother and I were horsing around with some toys, and we started to fight over who got to play with which one. My brother grabbed a toy truck that I wanted, and when I wouldn’t relent trying to get it, he slammed it into my face—my nose, to be exact—and said “Here, take the truck!”
The truck slammed across the bridge of my nose and cut me, leaving a small discoloration from the scar. My parents took me to the doctor. I had a hairline fracture, but not to worry: the scar would go away over time, and the nose would repair itself as well. At the time I knew we should have had it checked out more thoroughly. They argued back and forth about what to do.
I had not given it another thought from that day on, and I had never once been told I had a big nose. My parents thought differently, though. The entire car ride home from the banquet had nothing to do with my award or getting my varsity letter; it had everything to do with my appearance. My mother was so distracted by my nose that to this day, she still has never sewed the letter on the jacket.
When we got home, I heard them contemplating what to do. They made calls to relatives to ask what they thought about the Nose and then decided what had to be done. I needed to have my nose fixed to accommodate for the fracture. It had not healed properly, they believed.
At no point did they ask me what I wanted to do. Later that night my mother came in to say good night to me and added, “We’re going to see a doctor first thing tomorrow morning.” I asked why, and she said, “To examine your nose.” I told her that there was nothing wrong with it. It didn’t hurt or bother me, and I was fine with it. “Good night,” she said, and walked out of the room.
The next morning, to my dismay, my mother woke me up and told me to get in her car. We were off to New York City to see a nose specialist. He examined every angle of my schnoz and said I had some scar tissue from the original injury. If I wanted, he could fix it. I would even breathe better, he promised. My mother jumped on this one. This woman had forced me to get my tonsils out after two sore throats in first grade.
The doctor sensed that I wasn’t into it, as I didn’t say a single word during the entire exam. He asked if I was excited about what he was going to do. I said no. That brought on a whole new conversation between him and my mother about why this procedure was being done, but as a minor I had no say in the decision, and the doctor wasn’t going to fight it. He was going to get paid, after all.
Forty-eight hours later, I was in an operating room about to have scar tissue removed from inside my nose, and the rest of my nose “fixed.” I said nothing. I had learned to deal with everything on the inside, and that’s what I did yet again. I let my parents dictate major aspects of my life without saying a word. I was counting down the days until I was eighteen and on my own.
When I entered the operating room, I wasn’t nervous. I didn’t say anything until right before they knocked me out. I remembered that before the doctors operated on President Reagan when he was shot by John Hinckley, he commented, “I hope you are all Republicans.” I had no idea what a Republican was, but that story stuck with me. The guy could have died, but at least he had the presence of mind to be funny. I figured I’d try the same thing. Right before they put the gas mask on my face, I said, “I hope you are all Mets fans.” Not a sound—nothing. Damn!
When I woke up, my nose was bandaged. The future looked bleak. The only thing that would have cheered me up was if I could have foreseen two weeks into the future, and known that soon I’d get to spend two hours dry-humping a curvaceous lifeguard.
Speaking of humping, let’s be straight with one another: one of the perks of being a professional athlete is the opportunity to meet and sleep with tons of women. Hot chicks, ugly ones, skinny, fat—you name it. There is a sorority of women who will always be more than happy to oblige a famous athlete in the bedroom. What’s amazing, though, is how many athletes are more than willing to oblige these gals in their pursuit of alimony, child support, and living the good life, years and years after what may have been a one-night romp.
I’ll never forget the moment last year on Hard Knocks when New York Jets cornerback Antonio Cromartie struggled to name all of his kids. At the time, he only had ten children with eight different women. Then came the news this past spring that Antonio’s on-again wife was pregnant again, this time with twins. Antonio now has twelve kids: four with his current wife, and eight others with seven different women.
Unprotected sex feels better—no argument from me—but giving some random woman a couple of hundred grand a year for eighteen years because she saw herself as a celebrity semen collector makes rubbers sound hot. We should update Fifty Shades of Grey and put some condoms in the room. (Totally turned on now.) Antonio signed a four-year, $32 million contract with the Jets, so you would think that he could make the ridiculous monthly payments he is obligated to make. But more than that, unless his goal is to field an entire team made up of his DNA, he should either pull out or use condoms.
Cromartie ain’t the only knucklehead handing out DNA lottery tickets. Charles Rogers, former number-two overall pick of the NFL draft in 2003 (and amazingly, out of the league two years later), received a total of $14 million in guaranteed bonuses. Figuring he would never run out of cash, he fathered five kids with four different women. I can only imagine how great that one gal who had two of his kids felt when all the moms got together. Sadly, though, Rogers was busted for hitting the weed pipe. Since that was a violation of his NFL contract, a judge ordered him to repay more than $6 million. Oops!
The all-time leader in this category is former Houston Rocket Calvin Murphy. He sired fourteen kids with nine different women. Murphy played professional ball in the 1970s, the era of the huge Afro and even huger pubic hair Afros, and was a onetime all-star. He was such a loving parent that as many as five of his daughters accused him in a court of law of abusing them. He was acquitted of those charges, but I suspect he doesn’t receive any Father’s Day gifts.
I heard of an Eagles player who came home after a strenuous workout without showering at the team facility. He was soaking wet and smelled like the garbage you’d find in the Hudson River. As he pulled into his townhouse parking lot, there was an attractive woman whom he had slep
t with several times before. She was waiting for him to come home so they could have sex. He gave her a quick hug and kiss and walked her into his home. She immediately went after him. He told her that he just came from working out and would gladly shower first, but she replied that she liked it dirty. He grabbed a condom and they had sex. Afterward he got up to discard the now-filled condom.
The groupie protested. “No reason to throw that out. That’s for me for later,” she said. God only knows what she had in mind. As nasty as it is, I hope she was going to drink it—although I wonder if she was going to inject it inside herself to try to get pregnant. You see, even when these guys try to do the responsible thing, sometimes it just doesn’t matter.
Picture this: A lanky teenage boy is standing just past the forty-yard line on a field that doubles for both football and soccer. He is sweating, having been in the summer sun for well over an hour. No more than twenty-five yards away, his high school varsity soccer team is playing on the same field. They are working on dribbling drills and corner kick plays. He knows every kid on the team. They are not only his best friends since first grade. Until a few weeks ago, they were his teammates.
The lanky kid figured he would be practicing alongside those kids. He was wrong, and now he’s having his nose rubbed in it. An errant corner kick flies in his direction and stops maybe five feet away. His instinct is to kick it, but as the goalie runs toward the ball to retrieve it, the kid can only look away. Unsure if the goalie has figured out who he is or what he is doing, he keeps his head down and kicks the ball hard and straight thirty yards away and into the goal. Now the goalie knows, and now he understands. “Hey, Craig, sorry man. Good luck.”
“Carton!” screams the band leader. “We can’t play ‘I Feel Good’ without you hitting the bass drum! Let’s start again.”
Why me?
By the time I got to ninth grade, which in our school system was still junior high, I had established myself as one of the premier soccer players not just in New Rochelle, but statewide as well. I was invited to join highly competitive travel teams. I was first or second in goals and in assists. As I entered tenth grade, I was psyched about playing varsity soccer alongside the kids I had been playing with since I was seven years old. I scored the winning goal in that famous multi-overtime game that was disallowed, and here we were about to enter high school and be varsity athletes. I knew we’d have a shot at advancing to the state championship every year we were there.
What I didn’t know then was that I would never play a single game for New Rochelle High School, nor would I be a part of the senior team that did go on to win the state championship.
I graduated junior high with a B+ average, and took two Advanced Placement exams and got high 80s on both. Yet when the report card came home before the summer started, my parents reprimanded me for not taking school seriously. They warned me that there would be some changes when I got to high school.
As Labor Day neared, I got the phone call from the coach that late summer practice would be starting in advance of the school year. I told my parents, who replied that not only would I not go to the practices, but I wouldn’t play soccer that year. It was time to “buckle down” and concentrate on my studies.
I was never anything less than a B+ student. While my parents were right that I didn’t take school seriously, how many kids did? Unfortunately, my older brother did. He was a straight-A student class president and soon on his way to Dartmouth College. He is a great guy, and as well-rounded as a kid could have been: disgustingly strong academically, a solid athlete, and he never got into any trouble, unfortunately. That might explain why I once held a Swiss army knife to his throat when he wouldn’t let me play ball with him and his friends, or why he never told my parents I did that.
If only he could be like his brother, my parents must have thought. I applied myself enough to get B-plusses, and I was content with that. I wasn’t interested in studying, and I’m fortunate enough to have a limited photographic memory, so I just absorbed a lot of what I had to learn. If I’d buckled down, I could have been an A student, but why bother? My parents were the nothing-is-ever-good-enough types, particularly about grades, but I thought I didn’t deserve to be punished. What normal tenth grader is looking ahead to the SATs or college choices—or anything other than girls and sports?
My parents were so crazy about schooling that my mother held the office of PTA president longer than any other human being in our district back then. She even handpicked all of my teachers before I got to opening day of first grade.
So here I was, a week away from entering high school, and I was forbidden from playing on the soccer team. To make matters worse, my parents decided that I had to take up a different extracurricular activity, so they forced me to be in the school band. I had to suffer the indignity of not just being in the marching band and the symphony band; I also had to practice marching moves on the same field that the soccer team sometimes practiced on. There I stood with this huge fucking bass drum attached to my body, as my closest pals played soccer twenty yards away.
What did I do in a previous life to deserve this? Why was I the only kid I knew who’d come home after getting a 92 on a difficult biology exam, only to have my folks say to him, “What happened to the other eight points?” My brother paved the way academically, so my parents thought that I should follow in his footsteps. The difference was, I didn’t like raising my hand in class and didn’t pay much attention to the teacher. Most of my time in school was spent daydreaming about playing center field for the Mets or playing soccer with Pelé.
When I was in fourth grade, my laziness caught up with me. I had a pop quiz on material that I did not remember reading, probably because I didn’t. The teacher wanted to make sure that we were doing our assignments. I was as clueless as Snooki taking her SATs.
I did the best I could. The next day, when we got it back, I saw that I had got fourteen out of twenty questions right. I knew this wasn’t going to fly. We had to get the tests signed by our parents. I thought of everything I could to get around the beating I would take if I came home with this test. I came up with something that turned out even worse.
I took Wite-Out and covered over four of the x’s.
The marks were written in green, for some reason. I whited them out with the precision of Leonardo da Vinci. I inspected them for hours before handing them to my parents. They knew I’d taken the test because they knew about every exam I ever took. After looking it over several times, they quizzically asked why the teacher wrote 14/20 when it appeared to them that I only got two wrong.
I donned my acting cap and said, “You’re right! I got gypped.” My parents said they would be escorting me to school the next day to find out what the problem was. I told them I would handle it. After all, it was just a quiz that didn’t count against my overall grade. They were pissed, though, and wanted to know how this error could have happened.
I went to bed anxious, but resolute that I would walk in there with them in the morning anyhow and see what transpired. That would have been a terrible mistake, of course, but it never happened.
The next morning, as we were all eating breakfast, my father came down with a scowl on his face. He gripped the test so tightly that his fingers made dents in it. As I tried to gulp my orange juice, my father held the paper in the air and said, “I still can’t believe this.” As he did, the sunlight came through our kitchen window behind the paper. My mother said, “What is that?”
“What is what?” my father demanded. She said, “Look at the paper; it has something weird on it.” The jig was up. My father turned the paper over and saw the Wite-Out from the backside.
There was no place to hide. There was no quick-witted story I could concoct. My father furrowed his brow and gave me the look that meant I was going to get the belt. Then he said something that has stayed with me: he wasn’t as mad at me for what I had done with the Wite-Out as he was pissed that I was going to let them go to school and embarrass themsel
ves by questioning the teacher’s integrity.
“Why would you do that to me? What were you thinking?” The best I could offer was that I didn’t want to get punished for getting a bad grade on a meaningless pop quiz. The saddest part was that no one else’s parents even knew there was a quiz, but because my mom was czar of the PTA, she knew about each homework assignment and pop quiz. She knew when a teacher farted. I hated school because of it.
In sixth grade, it got even worse. My parents felt that I should follow in my brother’s academic footsteps and be in the Advanced Placement program. Sixth fucking grade—who cared about AP? I just wanted to play dodgeball. The teacher was a nice older woman named Mrs. Sciopelli, and she’d taught my brother. This was also a curse because not only did my parents expect me to live up to my brother’s performance; now the teacher figured I should do so, too.
The first test we took, I was sitting next to Josh Kurzban. I had already decided that I would just copy his paper, since I knew nothing about what the test was on. So committed was I that I wrote “Josh Kurzban” where it asked for my name. That was a little hard to explain to Mrs. S.
At the end of the semester, we had a huge project that required three things: a written report, a verbal presentation, and a physical structure. Throughout the semester we had to give updates on our research to show we were doing the work. This project was supposed to take three months to complete. I did nothing. My topic was the relationship between lords and serfs in medieval times. When we had to do our last update in class one-on-one with the teacher, I had nothing. She gave me an F.