Boy Wonders

by Cathal Kelly

  “Please,” she’d say, and all the men would hang their heads in shame. The women would run to her. That was it—“Please.” She’d circle the group, touching each one on the shoulder and gently moving him or her away from the incipient fray.

  A new fight would break out about who was most at fault for upsetting Mammy, but it was half-hearted. Then we’d all go home. Weeks or months later, they’d all pretend they hadn’t done this before, and do it again.

  The reunion was held at my aunt Deidre’s house in North Bay. She was the one who’d remained there and married a French Canadian named Armand. They’d done well for themselves. They were the only ones with a spread suitable to host a hundred people.

  I’d driven up alone with my father that weekend. Deidre and Armand’s house filled quickly. The party started on a Thursday and didn’t flag. By Saturday night, it had morphed into a pagan ritual—bonfires in the backyard; hooting in the moonlight. They’d begun building a beer-can pyramid that reached ten feet off the ground. I didn’t know half these people.

  My father was engaged in one of his occasional attempts at sobriety. His mood suffered for it. He planted himself on a lawn chair and felt sorry for himself while everyone else staggered around. It was at this point that, from out of the darkness, a half-eaten chicken leg came cartwheeling at him and hit him in the face. My father popped out of the chair.

  “Who threw that?” he screamed. “Who fucking threw that?”

  Everyone got very quiet. There were a lot of men you didn’t want to cross in that backyard, and none you wanted to cross less than my father.

  Deidre lurched into view.

  “I threw it,” she said.

  “Why?”

  “I was trying to hit Armand. I wanted him to know it was good.”

  Imagine it being like that all the time. Because it sort of was.

  As the festivities dragged on, I was getting sick. My chest was tightening. It felt as if I were breathing through a straw. The worst part about asthma is the sense of panic, the feeling that a minute or ten minutes from now you won’t be able to breathe at all. Once the panic gets hold of you, you’re in real trouble.

  Normally, I’d have told my mother and we’d have gone to an emergency room. I told my father. He was not impressed. He wanted to know how bad it was.

  “Well, bad.”

  “But how bad?”

  “Just bad.”

  “Let’s see how it is tomorrow.” And he went back to the party.

  By the next morning, it was very bad. My father was still doubtful. It’s hard to argue with asthma—you can hear the wheezing and see the fevered pallor—but my father wanted to argue. How was it compared to other times? Did it ever just go away? Maybe if I sat out in the fresh air for a while. So I put on a coat and sat out on the back porch for an hour by myself. It didn’t help.

  I need to go to the hospital, I told him. Mom would’ve taken me to the hospital by now.

  That annoyed him. He said we’d wait and see.

  I did not want to cause a fuss, but finally I went to Deidre. She took hold of my shoulders, looked at me for a few seconds and threw a fit. She went to my father and yelled at him in front of everyone. What was he doing? Your son is sick. Go to the hospital.

  So, peevishly, he took me to the hospital. We didn’t talk on the way over. Once he’d checked me in and got me seated in a waiting room, he left. He told me to call once I was done. He didn’t leave a phone number.

  At this point, I was woozy from oxygen deprivation. The next few hours were a blur. When I snapped back to, I was in a hospital bed, hooked up to IVs. That had never happened before.

  It was never made clear to me what my father had said when he’d left to take a kid to the hospital, then returned an hour later without the kid. But it was the habit of his family not to get too involved in other people’s business.

  No one at the hospital seemed to wonder where my parents were, and I couldn’t tell them. I was in a semi-conscious state, largely because when the admitting nurse asked my father if I had any allergies, my father said, “No,” having no idea if that was true or not. I did have allergies, a bunch of them. They pumped me full of a medicine I was particularly allergic to. That made me exponentially more ill.

  I suppose they must have figured that out (I would only be told about it much later). The worst of it passed. I was still profoundly unwell, as sick as I’d ever been. I was still hooked up to drips and monitors. But I was alone and it was quiet. That was a nice change.

  I began to think about the Blue Jays. The American League Championship series had been going on through all of this and, since my father’s family had no interest in baseball, I hadn’t seen any of it. There were no newspapers about. I had no idea how they were doing.

  I asked a nurse about the playoffs. A few minutes later, she returned to say Toronto was winning. That evening, another nurse rolled a television into my room—one of those grade-school A/V set-ups, perched on a cart. If I was very quiet, I’d be allowed to watch the game. A great deal was made of the fact that no one else was getting this privilege. It occurred to me that I had become an object of pity. I didn’t like that feeling, but if it got me a TV I was happy to play along. I tried to look especially miserable.

  I don’t know if I’d watched a complete Jays’ game that whole season. I knew everything that had gone on, but through box scores. Now, lying in that hospital bed, plucked out of the world, not sure if anyone knew where I was or cared, the Jays suddenly seemed of desperate importance. In a way that is hard for me to understand now and harder still to explain, the baseball team’s fortunes became intertwined with my own. If they were okay, I would be okay.

  It was looking good. The Jays were up 2—1 in a best-of-seven series.

  I groggily watched Game 4 in that bed. The Jays won. Al Oliver had the big hit in the ninth.

  Oliver was a thirty-eight-year-old journeyman at the end of his professional road. When he’d been traded to the Jays earlier in the season, I’d checked the numbers—shabby. But he was a monster in that playoff series.

  I hadn’t cared that much about Oliver before, but he now became my personal avatar. Al Oliver was doing this for me. I daydreamed that in a Diff’rent Strokes-ian twist, he was my father. I pretended that I’d been the one who’d believed in him all along. Al and me—the redoubtables. Once we got this baseball thing done and dusted, we’d head off together and have adventures. I was taking a lot of medication.

  Game 5 was played on Sunday. The Jays lost. I took that with equanimity.

  I’d now been in the hospital for several days. I wasn’t keeping good track. No one had come to visit me. None of the nurses or doctors had bothered to tell me what was going on, probably because I didn’t ask and they all assumed someone else had done it. I was okay with that.

  This was my home now. I’d stay here and watch baseball until someone threw me out.

  The Jays lost Game 6, and I did as well. There was a lot of yelling.

  The nurses were starting to worry. They’d given me this electronic soother and couldn’t really take it back now, but I was not playing nice.

  First, they shut the door. Then they asked me to be quiet. Then they told me to be quiet. Then I told them to be quiet. That was the end of our warm relationship, but they let me keep the TV.

  Before Game 7, I prayed.

  Until this point, I had prayed the way I assume most people pray—a lot of filler up front about peace on earth and ending global hunger, with the real point of the prayer tucked in at the end: “Please give me X” or “If you have a spare moment, please kill Y in some horrible way.”

  I didn’t expect any of my prayers to come true, but it was important to get this stuff on the record. For later.

  “Yes, it’s true that I’ve been less than perfect, but let’s refer back to my long series of assassination requests in fifth grade. There’s plenty of blame to go around here.”

  That day, I straight up begged. Let the J
ays win. Let the goddamned Kansas City Royals lose. Because I hate them. Let a line drive hit George Brett in the face and permanently disfigure him. Let Al Oliver have five home runs, and then let him drive up here to whatever this hospital is called and spend the night telling me about it. Wherever You are, this will be proof that You care.

  Of course, the Jays lost miserably. I wept with inconsolable anger. A nurse came in and tried to calm me down. It didn’t take. Eventually, she got into the bed with me so that I would stop slamming my fists against the railings. That is the purest sports emotion I have ever felt.

  My mother came to get me the following weekend. My father had returned home and hadn’t bothered to call her. She’d had to phone my aunt before anyone told her where I was. Then she had to wait for her brother’s day off so that someone could take her five hours north, since she couldn’t drive.

  I don’t remember anything about her arriving. Not her coming through the door or the packing me up or the getting in a car (all things that must have happened). I don’t remember any sense of rescue or relief. It had only been a few days, but days of such unaccustomed isolation that I think I’d given up on ever leaving.

  I lasted a day at home before I needed to go to the hospital again. It was assumed that I’d be there for a while, so I was placed in a cystic fibrosis ward. Every day, a phalanx of attendants would come in, bend these painfully frail kids over the edge of their beds and beat the phlegm out of their lungs. Often more than once. Everyone in there spent most of their days hacking into buckets. It was medieval.

  My clearest memory of the teenager in the bed alongside mine was that he had a laptop computer. I’d never even heard of such a thing.

  If you want to put your troubles in perspective, spend one night with twenty kids who all know they’re going to die, and soon. Nobody left that room and nobody expected to.

  Every time I begin to feel sorry for myself, I think about that place. I memorized the small, brutal details for that very purpose. After North Bay, my mother went to court and my father had his visitation rights severed. He’d never paid child support and wasn’t about to start now, so he didn’t bother fighting and I didn’t miss him.

  Once I recovered, the Jays passed beyond an interest and into a fixation. From ’85 until they won the World Series in 1992, the Blue Jays were the perfect sports organization. They often disappointed, but what they offered is what fans want but have trouble articulating—a chance to tease.

  People learn to hate a team that is good, but not good enough. And they don’t want a team that comes out of nowhere to win everything either. Not really.

  What they want is a team that takes incremental steps over many years toward an inevitable goal, and then gets there. They want the slow, painful build and the cathartic pleasure of eventual release.

  Those Jays did that. They taunted you with potential. They blew it in ’87 and got hammered the next two times they made the playoffs in ’89 and ’91. In between, they opened the SkyDome and now you could see what was going on.

  I’d become so used to the experience of sitting in the outer rings that I couldn’t acclimate myself to the Dome’s closeness. A girlfriend gave me her father’s season tickets early in the ’92 season. First baseline, front row. I took my brother.

  We set to our usual routine of catcalling the visitors—in this case, the Detroit Tigers.

  The Tigers’ catcher at the time was Mickey Tettleton, a decent player who looked as if someone had stuck a bike pump in his armpit and inflated him for several hours.

  In the pre-game, Tettleton walked by us with a bat hanging off his shoulder, bored out of his mind, headed down the right-field line to the visitors’ bullpen.

  Very few people had taken their seats at this point. We were almost alone in the stands. As Tettleton passed, we began idiotically mocking him: “Miiii-keeeee, Miiii-keeeee.”

  It didn’t register with us that we were no longer in the nosebleeds. He could hear and see us. It was the equivalent of jeering the guy sitting across from you on the bus.

  “Miiiii-keeee, Miiiii-keeee.”

  Tettleton stopped and swivelled. He was maybe six feet away. Running was not an option unless we split up. One of us would survive.

  “What are you doing?” he said. He was more curious than angry.

  “Nothing.”

  “Well, stop it.”

  “Yes, sorry. Sorry, Mickey. Have a great game! Sorry again.”

  Then he walked away.

  It was a golden time to care about baseball in Toronto and it will never be repeated. By now, the Jays had found their great stars—Roberto Alomar, Joe Carter, Tony Fernández, Jesse Barfield, George Bell. A team that had had none was now bursting with them. No Toronto team in my lifetime has had more charisma.

  Years later, I was offered the chance to become the Blue Jays beat writer for the Toronto Star.

  “Tell me one thing,” the sports editor asked. “Do you follow baseball?”

  “Yes, of course. Absolutely,” I lied.

  At the time, I couldn’t name five players on the team. Back in the day, I could’ve told you the batting average of every man on the roster.

  In 1992, the Jays won the World Series. I didn’t live at home anymore, but I was there for the final game. It was the only time I remember my mother, brother and me watching an entire contest of any sort all together.

  When Atlanta tied the game in the ninth, I walked out of the house and began kicking a plastic garbage can down the street. One of our neighbours came rushing out in alarm and watched me brutalize the container for a while.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Nothing. Sorry. Nothing.”

  I picked up the can and went back to the house. I told my brother to tell me what happened. Then I stood on the porch for the two extra innings. After every batter, my brother came out to let me know what had happened.

  I believe strongly that you can curse a thing by depending on an outcome. So I cleared my mind of desire. Whatever would happen had, in a sense, already happened. Take yourself to that future place. This mantra has seen me through many a hard time.

  When it got to two outs in the bottom of the 11th with the Jays in the lead, I came back in. I was there for the end.

  We didn’t hug. We weren’t huggers. My mother said something about getting up early and went upstairs. My brother and I sat on the porch for a while and talked about nothing in particular. We could dimly hear people celebrating around us, the shouts coming from the main street down the block.

  I took the side streets to get back to my apartment. My girlfriend was asleep, so I sat up for a while by myself in the living room thinking about ’85 and how things connect.

  What if the Jays had won then? Would that have changed anything for me?

  No. Nothing at all. The circle was always going to close. It just took a while. In the meantime, it had given me something outside myself to focus on.

  I stopped watching baseball then. It had served its purpose.

  THE MICHAEL JACKSON JACKET

  A FEW YEARS AGO, a travelling exhibit of David Bowie’s collected paraphernalia came through town. When I was young, Bowie was just another pop star. I came to him too late—in his “Let’s Dance” phase—to be an acolyte. Everyone I went to school with liked him. No one loved him. He was no different than Thomas Dolby or Howard Jones or any other vaguely fashionable purveyor of smart (i.e., British) synth music.

  Now that I am old and he is dead, Bowie has graduated to cultural prophet, a sort of boomer Jesus. All the things people held against him at the time—the overweening artistry, the androgyny, the sly, distant persona, the refusal to settle on a style and churn out hits—have become, in retrospect, indications of his saintliness.

  It’s proof that you have to choose—be seen as right now, or be proven right later.

  Two things struck me at that show.

  First, David Bowie was small. Like, elfin. I couldn’t wear his pants as arm sleeves. This
is why I never dreamed of being a rock star—I had to accept that I was too fat to fit into the job. Also, I couldn’t sing or play an instrument or dance in any way that didn’t look like I was in the midst of a fit.

  I believe this is why hip hop has become the monolithic musical genre of the modern age—it can be performed by normal-looking people in jeans from the husky section, rather than by hipless, Mick Jagger—looking people in spandex.

  The second thing that hit me was the clothes. Bowie wasn’t there, of course. His clothes stood in for him, fitted onto mannequins.

  With several decades of his wardrobe on hand, you did not feel the absence of the man who’d owned it. As with everyone, his body had changed over the years. He’d caked on more or less make-up, had different hairstyles, had his tombstone teeth torn out and replaced with a Chiclet smile (a terrible decision).

  But if you had pinned up a series of Bowie’s portraits through the course of his career, it would not have told you as much about him as what he wore.

  For Bowie—and maybe for all of us—fashion is reality.

  Children in the twenty-first century are fashionable. I’ve noticed this. They look put together. Like they’ve stood on a stool in the bathroom with a couple of polos on hangers, flashing them in front of the mirror to see which one goes better with teal.

  This is one of the notable modern victories of the marketing-industrial complex—convincing six-year-olds that how they look matters.

  We did not care how we looked. We were not fashionable. Our mothers bought our clothes. Going back over the photo evidence, they bought them without an iota of thought put into how the clothes would look on us. Every grade-school class photo looks like it was taken at a down-at-heel jockey academy—a lot of tartan, checks and polka dots. Nothing fit right. The shirts were too big or far too small. Everyone got their pants at the Polyester Emporium.