Home Run

by Paul Kropp

  ALSO BY PAUL KROPP

  For Parents

  I’ll Be the Parent, You Be the Kid

  How to Make Your Child a Reader for Life

  The Reading Solution

  For Teens

  Running the Bases

  The Countess and Me

  Moodkid and Prometheus

  Moodkid and Liberty

  Ellen, Eléna, Luna

  For Younger Readers

  Against All Odds

  Avalanche

  Hitting the Road

  My Broken Family

  Street Scene

  What a Story!

  COPYRIGHT © 2006 PAUL KROPP

  All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication, reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system without the prior written consent of the publisher—or, in the case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a license from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency—is an infringement of the copyright law.

  Doubleday Canada and colophon are trademarks.

  LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION

  Kropp, Paul, 1948–

  Home run / Paul Kropp.

  eISBN: 978-0-385-67285-6

  I. Title

  PS8571.R772H64 2006 jC813′.54 C2006-903185-1

  Published in Canada by

  Doubleday Canada, a division of

  Random House of Canada Limited

  Visit Random House of Canada Limited’s website: www.​randomhouse.​ca

  v4.1

  a

  Contents

  Cover

  Also by Paul Kropp

  Title Page

  Copyright

  1 A Father-Son Moment

  2 Pledges

  3 The Pyjama Party

  4 Butter

  5 Sweet Words and Sour

  6 Prayers

  7 The Grind

  8 Gloriana

  9 Trick and Treat

  10 Counting to Three

  11 Dysfunctional Thoughts

  12 Nobody Messes With Pug

  13 One Problem Resolved

  14 The Most Frustrating Christmas Pageant Ever

  15 True Love Doesn’t Always Wait

  16 Happy Holidays

  17 The Great Unfolding of the World

  18 Two Blasts of Heat

  19 A Brief Cultural Excursion

  20 So Much for Culture

  21 Lineup

  22 New Vows

  23 The Muses

  24 Farewell and Welcome

  25 Slammed

  26 At Last

  27 Poet Laureate

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  1

  A Father-Son Moment

  WITH ANY REASONABLE LUCK, I might have begun my university years by flying out west, unpacking a suitcase of clothes, setting up my computer, and waiting patiently while Greyhound shipped a few boxes of essential gear. But no. Somewhere in the how-to-be-a-parent guidebook it says that parents must drive their children to the school, transport the offspring and his/her goods to the dorm room, and then engage in tearful farewells and worthy admonitions.

  Admonitions! Pretty good word, isn’t it? See what being in first year has already done for me?

  The trip out west took two days, and involved four stops for gas, five bathroom breaks, three fast-food meals, and one overnight stay in a sleazy motel. I was okay with the four stops, five breaks, and three quick meals. It was the overnight that was gruelling.

  During the days, I was able to cocoon myself in the back seat of our old Ford, listening to various MP3s through my headphones. It was actually a fairly pleasant zone to be in, watching the landscape roll by, listening to Yellowcard and U2 and my new favourite group, the Thinkertoys.

  I was interrupted only occasionally by my parents. My mom would turn back, shake my knee to get my attention, and then wait until I took off my headphones. “This is the Continental Divide,” she would say.

  I would respond “Oh,” and put my headphones back on.

  My mother and my father would return to their CDs of 1970s favourites and I would go back to the Thinkertoys. Cross-country trips do not make for parent-child bonding any more.

  But our one overnight was difficult, at least for me. We had reached somewhere in Alberta—not Calgary, since that would have been too interesting—but some place where the only scenery was oil derricks. To save money, my father had booked a motel that looked like something out of Psycho. An Anthony Perkins look-alike was at the front desk, smiling politely. He gave my dad a key to our collective room: two queen beds, two bathroom towels, and plastic glasses wrapped in crinkly plastic wrappers. The only word to describe this level of elegance would be…sanitary. Even the toilet was covered with a piece of paper “for your protection,” making you wonder what the toilet might do if it were not sealed up.

  We had supper at the motel “restaurant.” The quotation marks reflect the neon sign and the quality of food and service. It was the kind of place that made Harvey’s seem like a big step up. The “restaurant” had hamburgers the consistency of leather anointed with ketchup that had a vague petroleum taste, as if it were diluted with something from the oil derricks in the distance. Still, the portions were big and the lemon-cream pie almost good, especially in comparison to everything else.

  When we got back to the room, my parents put on the TV for Law and Order and I put on my headphones. I had brought a book for the trip, The Iliad, which I was trying to read in preparation for my Humanities class. I was not doing well with The Iliad, though my eyes kept going over the words. Maybe it’s a book that you have to read without listening to the Thinkertoys at the same time.

  Eventually I gave up and fell into a comatose state on the bed. There’s another good word—deriving from coma (to which I was headed) and maybe toes (which were glad to be out of my shoes). I fell back on my bed and began thinking about sex.

  I apologize for this. I realize that an eighteen-year-old guy about to enter university should be thinking about his studies, his future, his course reading lists, if not the deep meaning of The Iliad—whose surface meaning still escaped me. But I was not thinking about these things. I was thinking about Maggie, this red-headed girl I’d gone out with for the past year. I was thinking about her hair and her eyes, and the funny little laugh she has. Then I began thinking about how she always pushed my hands away when she decided that our making out had gone far enough.

  Maggie and I had never had sex. That was pretty frustrating at the time, but probably for the best. At least, Maggie said it was for the best, and Maggie was smarter than me and right about so many things. At some level, Maggie knew she was destined for prime time, starting with heading east to the prestigious Sarah Lawrence College in New York state, while I was destined for afternoon soaps, and was headed west to the undistinguished Burrard University in Vancouver.

  Prime-time people don’t have sex with soaps people, it’s as simple as that. Anyhow, I lay on the motel bed and began thinking how much I missed Maggie, even though we had never had sex. And soon I began thinking about why we never had sex, and then thinking about what sex would have been like if we had had it. The last thought was the most interesting, and I pursued that until I fell asleep.

  I woke up about midnight when I heard a sound. In a flash, I became convinced that the Anthony Perkins look-alike in the lobby was now lurking in the room, or in the shower, or just over my bed…with a knife. Then, of course, I really woke up. But there was nothing to see in the dark room, and nothing more to hear until my mother whispered something like, “Go to sleep, dear.”

  But then I was wide awake, thinking about Maggie again. I remembered watching Py
scho as part of Maggie’s Friday film society. I remembered how scared we got, and how much fun we used to have. Then I wondered how her frosh week would go at Sarah Lawrence. I wondered if she was happy, or if she missed me. Of course Maggie had moved on, and I was moving on, and then I felt sad about all that and fell back asleep.

  The next day, we arrived at my BU dorm about three in the afternoon. The place was a hive of parents and kids, minivans and suitcases, confused expressions and looks of stern determination. The lucky students, the ones with smiles on their faces, lived close by. Their parents had packed up their belongings, driven an hour or so, and then dropped off their son or daughter who had already arranged a dorm room with some high school friend. These kids were already paired up with one or two or a half-dozen people they knew.

  Then there were the rest of us. Confused, awed, scared—if not quite willing to admit it. I had spent some time hanging around the local college back at home, so it wasn’t so bad for me. But I could see other kids going around slack-jawed and stunned, overwhelmed by the size and anonymity of the place. It’s a long way from high school in Podunk, Manitoba to the dorms at BU, and I’m not just speaking physical distance.

  My dad helped me lug my belongings up to the dorm room. These were minimal: two suitcases of clothes, one computer and its assorted stuff, a box of my parents’ suggested goodies like an alarm clock, a desk light and an iron (!), a backpack of my essential goodies like my CDs, my iPod, and a ratty toy hamster I’d had since the age of two. There were also a few books: three fantasy novels, The Iliad and The Odyssey (both second-hand), a book by somebody named Borges that Maggie had given me, and a book of selected poems of Shelley and Keats. These would suggest my impressive literary background to any girl I might be lucky enough to have visit my dorm room, providing I hid the three copies of Maxim magazine that I had also brought with me.

  “Not bad,” my father said when we reached the room. It was up three flights of stairs, so we were all out of breath.

  “Not bad at all,” I echoed.

  That was a lie. My dorm room was only slightly larger than my bedroom at home, and it had to accommodate both me and some unknown roommate assigned by the university housing office. The room looked like it had been divided down the middle, with a single bed and a dresser-desk-closet combination on each side of the divide. At the end was a window, with a view of a parking lot. From the look of the left side of the dorm room, my roommate had already arrived. He had taken the sunnier side of the room, plopped down two suitcases and a couple boxes of books, and disappeared.

  So I began putting my earthly possessions on the left side of the room, wondering what kind of roommate would actually leave a Bible on his bed.

  “The room’s not very large,” my mother said. She’s a master of understatement.

  “It’s the best we could do,” my father grumbled. In truth, I was on a “Macklin family scholarship”—my parents were paying—so I ended up with the cheapest dorm room and the cheapest meal plan. I figured my roommate was in the same financial boat, floating just over the poverty waterline.

  “But it is clean,” my mother replied brightly. “So don’t go making a mess, Alan.” I think this comment was meant to be encouraging.

  One more trudge up and down the stairs and all my gear had made it to the bedroom. I was now officially installed as a student at Burrard University—probably the least famous school in Vancouver.

  “Now where would the bathroom be?” my mother asked.

  “Maybe down the hall,” I told her.

  “Then I’m going to freshen up,” she said.

  “They’re coed,” I called after her, but my words didn’t quite reach her in time.

  That left my father and me, alone together and feeling awkward, as we always did in such situations. I’m not sure if he’s more awkward with me than I am with him, but it doesn’t matter much since the general awkwardness ends up quite high regardless. After a moment of silence, my father cleared his throat and looked at me.

  “Well, Alan, I guess this is it,” he said. Since this remark had no meaning, I took it as a verbal throat-clearing.

  “Guess so,” I replied.

  “We won’t see you until Thanksgiving, or maybe Christmas,” he said.

  “Guess not.”

  He paused, looked out the window at my sort-of view, then turned back in my direction. “I suppose you know how, uh, important this is. I mean, you’re the first person in our family to actually attend university, and your mother and I are very proud, you know.”

  I believe I was blushing. I believe my father was blushing. It wasn’t clear who was more embarrassed by this little speech.

  “Anyhow, I wish I had some great words of wisdom to encourage you as you start off, but I don’t.” He stopped, looked at the floor and then at my mattress. “We hope you do well and, uh, don’t make foolish mistakes.”

  “I won’t, Dad,” I said.

  “But just to be on the safe side,” he said, clearing his throat again, “I bought you these.”

  My father reached into his gym bag and brought out a box—a box of a dozen condoms.

  “Dad,” said, “I still haven’t used the first one you gave me.”

  My father shook his head. “You don’t have to lie to me, Alan. I know what I was like at your age and, well, I just want you to be a little more careful.” He handed me the box. “Now get these out of sight before your mother comes back. I don’t want her to think I’m encouraging you. And I am not encouraging you, understand?”

  “Got it,” I told him. “You just want me to be careful.”

  “As Yogi Berra once said, ‘Don’t screw up.’”

  “Did he really say that?”

  “Something like that,” my dad muttered, just as my mother came rushing back into the dorm room.

  “Did you know those bathrooms are coed?” my mother demanded, as if this were the strangest thing in the world. “A boy came in and sat down in the stall right beside me.”

  “That’s how a coed bathroom works, Mom,” I said.

  “Well, it was disgusting! Alan—whatever you do—respect other people’s privacy.”

  My second bit of advice for the afternoon. “I will, Mom.”

  She seemed relieved. My dad decided it was time for the two of them to make their exit.

  “Good luck, Alan,” my dad said. He reached out to shake my hand, which I took as a sign of my new maturity.

  “And you call every other night,” my mother said, a bit teary-eyed either from the situation here or the distress in the bathroom. “As soon as you get a phone, you call.”

  “Yes, Mom,” I said as she kissed both cheeks and my lips.

  “Be careful with your money, Al,” my father added. Now the advice was coming fast and loose. “The dime you save today is a dollar you can spend tomorrow.”

  “Don’t get in trouble,” my mother said as she went down the hall. And then the two of them disappeared down the stairs.

  I breathed a sigh of relief and went back into the dorm room. I pulled out the box of condoms my father had given me. They were genuine Trojans, but only average size. I didn’t know if I should feel insulted.

  I was holding the box of condoms in my hand when a face appeared at the doorway. It was quite a handsome face, really, with dark eyes, a straight nose with flared nostrils, and a chiselled jaw. The face reminded me of half a dozen Hollywood actors, from Hugh Grant to Brad Pitt, without specifically looking like any one of them.

  “Hi, there, I’m Kirk.” He put out his hand.

  I had to move the condom box from my right hand to my left to shake.

  “I’m Alan. Alan Macklin.”

  “We’re roommates,” he went on, as if this were especially good news. “I guess you just got in.”

  “Yeah,” I replied. “Just made it through all the worthy admonitions and the tearful farewells,” I said.

  “You must be an English major,” he said. “I’m in theology.”


  “You mean, like, God?”

  “I mean, like, religion.”

  This was something of a conversation stopper. Suddenly I was embarrassed about even holding the box of condoms. We both seemed to be staring at the box.

  “Well, uh, this was a kind of parting gift from my dad,” I explained. “Enough for the next four years at the rate I’m going. I mean, if you ever run short, just let me know.”

  He was still smiling like the televangelists you see on VisionTV. “I wouldn’t need one of those,” he said.

  I gave him a look. Since I barely knew him, this wasn’t the time to ask the obvious question. Nonetheless, he gave me an answer.

  “You see,” Kirk explained, “I’ve taken the pledge.”

  2

  Pledges

  AT THE END of that first day, I did what any self-respecting person does after a difficult time: I sat down at my computer and sent emails. In the old days, at home, I’d just IM people because our lives seemed like they were all connected. Now I was way out west, so we were down to email—in touch but more remote.

  The person I emailed first was Maggie, former girlfriend, former dating advisor, current subject of too many late-night dreams, and probably my best friend.

  From: amacklin@​BU.​edu

  To: maggiemac@​sl.​edu

  Moving in has been gruelling. My roommate is a born-again something, my mother thinks this place is disgusting, and my father thinks I’m a sex maniac. It’s enough to make me feel nostalgic for high school. Only bright spot on the horizon is that my parents are gone and have left me in peace. Please tell me not to jump off a bridge.

  From: maggiemac@​sl.​edu

  To: amacklin@​BU.​edu

  Don’t jump off a bridge by yourself. But if you find a good one let me know and I’ll join you. I feel like the proverbial fish out of water here: I don’t have the right clothes, the right attitudes, or the right pedigree. My roommate has such a dizzying social life that I’ve only seen her for twenty minutes since arrival, and that was twenty minutes with her looking down her nose at me. This borders on excruciating.

  I spent the rest of the evening emailing my other good friends—Scrooge and Jeremy—and then my second-string friends, all of them spread over the country at various colleges and universities, all of them feeling vaguely lost and confused judging from the emails I got back.