Manhood for Amateurs

by Michael Chabon

  And then, inexorably, you turn the card over. Because the great secret theme of baseball is Loss (with its teammate, Failure), reading the backs of baseball cards is always an exercise in pity, and this is particularly true of the reverse of an older card like a 1952 Bowman, where the details of a ballplayer’s career are usually given not in the clean, bloodless statistical charts of today but in terse prose paragraphs, where they take on some of the mighty sadness of narrative, and each card can become the tiniest of novels whose plot is the familiar tale of futility and squandered promise and a ballclub’s giving up. Howie Pollet “began the 1951 season with the Cards. In 6 games for them, with no wins and 3 losses. With the Pirates Howie took the mound 21 times, with 6 wins and 10 losses. Season’s record: 6 and 13. Led League in 1946 with 21 wins. Had 20 wins in 1949. Broke into majors with Cardinals.” At the bottom of every card is the send-away offer of a baseball cap of your favorite major league team (“a $1.00 value”) for five waxed wrappers and fifty cents.

  The thing was, I didn’t really collect baseball cards, and I thought my father knew that. During the winter of the Lockout of 1990, just before my first marriage ended, in the miserable grip of a Seattle January that consisted, without exaggeration, of thirty full days of rain, I had dabbled in the hobby out of a kind of desperate yearning for a season that, it then appeared, might not have its Opening Day. But I’ve never had the collecting temperament—not the way my father has it—and when the package arrived, over a year had passed since I had bought my last card. But that wasn’t important. I owned a little-used copy of Dr. Beckett’s Price Guide, in which I could look up the values of the seven cards and see that my father’s gift was a generous one, but that wasn’t important, either. That was what I was thinking, at any rate, as I took down the copy of Macmillan’s Baseball Encyclopedia that had been my father’s birthday gift to me in 1970, and I discovered that Billy Goodman was actually a pretty good ballplayer who in 1950 led the American League in hitting with a .354 average, and that Vern Bickford, in the same year, pitched the season’s only no-hitter. It wasn’t important that I didn’t collect 1952 Bowmans nor care what they were worth (not really), or that when I was finished turning each card over and over and wondering at that lost expression in Howie Pollet’s eyes, I would put them all away in my sock drawer and “lose” them for many years (they recently turned up again, ageless in their Mylar jackets). The important thing was the nature of the gift, was my father’s saying to me after twenty-eight years during which we had lost Roberto Clemente and our beloved Washington Senators and my father’s mother and father, and had split two divorces between us, and had known all the usual guilt and bitterness and recrimination, and had moved, in modern and terrible fashion, to opposite ends of the continent, “Here, son, have seven baseball cards.” What’s important was that baseball, after all these years of artificial turf and expansion and the designated hitter and drugs and free agency and thousand-dollar bubblegum cards, is still a gift given by fathers to sons.

  [ V ]

  At one time there was a pair of hooks on the back of the bathroom door from which one could hang a couple of towels, but people used the towels as vines, webbing, and rope for games of Tarzan, Spider-Man, and Look! I’m a Dead Guy That Hung Themself, and now, to serve four children, there remained one wall-mounted towel rack with only two bars. This situation encouraged the general tendency among the children to leave their soggy bath towels in Noguchi-like arrangements on the floor. The parents allocated resources for a pilot program of nag-based maintenance, targeted yelling, and regular exercises in stumbling over damp bath towels in dark bedrooms, but when emotional funding at last ran out, it became apparent that someone would have to put up a second towel rack. Responsibility for this task logically fell to the person who knew, kind of, how to use an electric drill.

  You should have seen me. I had my cordless Makita in its blue high-impact plastic case. I had a ratcheting screwdriver, a nice Sears Craftsman hammer, a mechanical pencil with a good eraser, and (that most beautifully named of all tools) a spirit level. I sat down on the tile floor of the bathroom with the new chrome towel rack from Restoration Hardware and its gnomic instruction sheet, and I ran the fingers of one hand across the designated stretch of beadboard while sagely stroking my whiskers with the fingers of the other. I strongly suspect that I may well have looked as if I knew what I was doing.

  I managed to sustain the appearance of competence over nearly the entire course of the next three hours, except for the painful minute that followed my dropping one of the metal towel bars onto my right thumb, behind whose nail, like a ghost on an old television screen, a grayish-blue blotch immediately made manifest. But from the moment I began to trace with my pencil the prospective outline of one of the faceplates against the beadboard until the moment when, holding my breath, I insinuated two ominously heavy towels into the works of the now-mounted towel rack, I was expecting, at every instant, disaster: molly bolts sliding with a creak of splintering wood from their holes, nickel-plated towel bars clanging against the floor.

  I knew how to use my tools, more or less. I understood the rudimentary physics of tension and load that were supposed to hold the rack together and keep it fixed to the wall. And yet on both the deepest and the most practical levels, I had no reason to believe, no evidence from prior experience of myself, physics, or life itself, that I knew how or would be able to pull off the job. In fact, I had encountered a certain amount of tragedy in my dealings with molly bolts over the years.

  “You’re going to put that up?” my wife had asked me when I brought the rack home from the store. She didn’t sound dubious so much as surprised, as if I were also proposing to weave a new set of bath towels from cotton I had grown and harvested myself.

  “Duh,” I said coolly. “No biggie.”

  This is an essential element of the business of being a man: to flood everyone around you in a great radiant arc of bullshit, one whose source and object of greatest intensity is yourself. To behave as if you have everything firmly under control even when you have just sailed your boat over the falls. “To keep your head,” wrote Rudyard Kipling in his classic poem “If,” which articulated the code of high-Victorian masculinity in whose fragmentary shadow American men still come of age, “when all about you are losing theirs”; but in reality, the trick of being a man is to give the appearance of keeping your head when, deep inside, the truest part of you is crying out, Oh, shit!

  Perhaps in the end there is little difference between keeping one’s head and appearing to do so; perhaps the effort required to feign unconcern and control over a situation itself imparts a measure of control. If so, then the essence of traditional male virtue lies in imposture, in an ongoing act of dissimulation—fronting—which hardly conforms to the classic Kipling model of square-dealing candor.

  I have no doubt that the male impulse to downplay his own lack of fitness for a job, to refuse to acknowledge his inadequacy, insufficiency, or lack of preparation, has been and continues to be responsible for a large share of the world’s woes, in the form of the accidents, errors, and calamities that result from specific or overarching acts of faking it, a grim encyclopedia of which the G. W. Bush administration readily affords. There is also the more subtle damage that is done repeatedly to boys who grow up learning from their fathers and the men around them the tragic lesson that failure is not a human constant but a kind of aberration of gender, a flaw in a man, to be concealed.

  Men’s refusal to stop and ask for directions, a foundational cliché of women’s criticism, analysis, and stand-up mockery of male behavior, is a perfect example of this tendency to put up a front, in that it views as aberrant a condition—being lost—that is ineluctable, a given of human existence. We are born lost and spend vast stretches of our lives on wrong turns and backtracking. In this respect, male fronting resembles a number of other behaviors typically ascribed to men and masculinity, in that it proceeds by denying essential human conditions or responses—say
public displays of mutual affection, grief, or triumph—marking them as feminine, infantile, socially unacceptable.

  I learned to pretend that I know what I am doing from my own father, an extremely intelligent and well-informed man whose intermittent bouts with mistakenness and inaccuracy visibly cost him bitter pain and embarrassment, and shocked the hell out of me when I was a child. By fiat and consensus, fathers are always right, so that when facts or events inevitably conspire to prove them wrong, they and their sons alike totter on the brink of an abyss. I have never forgotten the day—I can’t have been older than five—when I watched in silent horror as my father, imperturbable and confident and disdaining the instruction sheet, assembled an entire barbecue grill with its key pieces upside down and backward. I remember my mounting anxiety about whether I should point out his mistake to him, and most clearly of all I remember the sharp and mocking look my mother gave him when at last I betrayed him.

  When I became a father, I made a promise to myself not to pretend to knowledge I did not possess, not to claim authority I plainly lacked, not to hide my doubts and uncertainties, my setbacks and regrets, from my children. And so I have tried to share them over the years as I have been fired from screenwriting jobs or proved wrong or led to look a fool. I have made a point (until the recent advent of GPS) to stop and ask for directions. But sometimes I waver in my resolve. My sense of myself as a father, my sense of fathers, is so deeply caught up with some kind of primal longing (which I think we all share) for inerrancy, for the word of God, for a rock and a redeemer, a mighty hand and an outstretched arm, for the needle that always always finds true north in a storm.

  And maybe that longing in one’s wife and children runs beyond the understanding of even the most painfully self-conscious of fathers. One recent winter my family and I found ourselves stuck in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, in the middle of a snowstorm. All flights out were canceled. There was a flight home from Idaho Falls, a drive of two hours through a high mountain pass, or three hours by an easier route that skirted the mountains. Either way, there would be snow, ice, unknown chances. If we wanted, we could wait for an airline-chartered bus that might eventually depart for Idaho Falls, getting us home to Oakland no one could say when. Or we could sit tight, wait it out, and hope to get home sometime tomorrow or the next day.

  I didn’t give it a moment’s thought. We had rented a big strong four-by-four. It had the tires and the muscle for the roads up there. I liked the way I felt behind its wheel, competent and unperturbed by weather. The fact that I had not driven in a blizzard in twenty years barely entered the conscious register of my thoughts.

  “Let’s drive,” I told my wife. “I’ll go the long way around.”

  She looked at me with a strange expression, then said okay; later, after we had made it safely and without incident up and down through ice and rain and snowfall that was at times blinding, my wife told me that she initially thought I was dangerously insane when I proposed driving to Idaho Falls through a blizzard. But then she had heard something in my voice that reassured her; she’d seen something in my eyes. I looked as if I knew what I was doing. And though I gripped the wheel with bloodless hands and prayed wildly to the gods of the interstate trucker whom I carefully tailed all the way to Idaho, in the backseat the kids calmly watched their iPod videos, and my wife studied the map and gossiped with me, and none of them knew or suspected for a moment—for I never betrayed, by word or deed, my secret—that I was in way over my head. I was the father and the husband; they were safe with me. We made it to the airport right on time to catch the next flight home.

  “I knew you could do it,” my wife said, and I thought about saying, “Well, that makes one of us.” But I held my tongue and nodded with a Kiplingesque modesty, because the truth was that in the absence of any evidence or experience or reason to think so, I had known that I could do it, too. I had no choice, do you see, but to know that.

  By the way, the towels are still hanging from the rack in the bathroom. And I fully expect, at any moment, in the dead of night, to hear a telltale clatter on the tiles.

  My life as a cook began on the back panel of a Bisquick box, with Velvet Crumb Cake. This was shortly before my tenth birthday. By that time I’d been helping my mother in the kitchen for several years, as she had helped her own mother, Nettie Cohen. Through helping her—and I know just how patience-taxing and supremely unhelpful a young sous chef can be—I had learned the basic techniques and tools to use: how to level a cup of flour, chop an onion, work the Mixmaster, separate an egg. But I don’t remember preparing any particular dish until I undertook the recipe on the back of that bright yellow box.

  Bisquick mix was an anonymous staple of my mother’s kitchen. Pancakes and biscuits were never made with anything else, and nothing else was ever made with it. I think that was the initial appeal of the idea of Velvet Crumb Cake. I was shocked to discover that Bisquick had other uses, other roles that it had been waiting to play, like a shy yet talented understudy. The realization was like finding out that I could make a working model of an X-15 rocket plane out of a rubber-band glider. The only Bisquick recipes I’d ever seen were the two printed on a floury and tattered square of cardboard that my mother had cut from the back of an old box years before and then abandoned to her special Bisquick canister—ordered by mail from Betty Crocker—to be buried and reburied in an endless drift of biscuit mix. For years I never saw a Bisquick box at all. The chance revelation of the possibility of Velvet Crumb Cake, with its extravagant name, seemed to hint at the existence of a world hidden within the world of our kitchen, and to hold out promise of a more fabulous one beyond.

  It was coffee cake; I hope that statement implies no sense of disappointment. Eaten warm from the oven, moist and crumbly, a nice coffee cake is pretty hard to fault. Coffee cake! I had made a coffee cake! Mysteriously, I thought, it contained no coffee. The velvet crumb business turned out to revolve around an impasto of butter, brown sugar, chopped nuts, flaked coconut, and a little milk that you spread over the cake after it came out of the oven. Then you stuck it back in the oven for a minute or two. Something wonderful happened to those five ingredients when you blended them and briefly subjected them to intense heat. The result was both smooth and grainy, crisp and chewy. Cooking, it turned out, was a magical act, a feat of transformation, a way of turning the homely and the familiar into something finer, like carving a pumpkin into a lantern.

  That year for my birthday my mother gave me a cookbook. It was called Betty Crocker’s New Boys and Girls Cook Book. Like the Bisquick box, its cover was bright yellow. It featured intensely colored photographs of the things you could make from it: huge, lustrous cakes, casseroles, and molds awesome as monuments in a depopulated landscape. The recipe for spaghetti called (in retrospect, somewhat nauseatingly) for you to boil the noodles in the tomato sauce. A lot of the other recipes given in Betty Crocker’s New Boys and Girls Cook Book, perhaps not surprisingly, suggested that they be prepared with Betty Crocker-brand ingredients, especially Bisquick. Many turned for their effects on bits of kitchen legerdemain, exploiting quirks of food chemistry. I was fascinated by and still recall affectionately a recipe for Fudge Upside-Down Cake (or something like that—my copy disappeared years ago) that went into the oven with the batter on the bottom of the cake pan, under a layer of boiling water, and emerged with a layer of cake on top, floating like the earth’s mantle on a glutinous brown magma.

  My mother was into cookbooks, and as soon as she saw my interest, she gave me the run of her library and let me try to make pretty much whatever sounded good. It was a solid and typical American-cookbook shelf of the day: keystones like the Better Homes and Gardens New Cook Book and Joy of Cooking; Julia Child and Craig Claiborne; an intimidating bunch of classical French compendia; and period novelties like 365 Ways to Cook Hamburger and a fondue cookbook. The Library of Babel that is ethnic cuisine was summarized in a footnote, Claiborne’s New York Times International Cookbook. My all-time favorite, from the mom
ent of its publication in 1972, was James Beard’s American Cookery. It had a recipe for nearly everything an American kid could ever imagine eating, including squirrel. Almost in passing—rather, in the style of my mother—it taught the fundamentals of the kitchen: how to boil shrimp, poach an egg, prepare an artichoke. (It also offered excellent recipes for pancakes and for biscuits, including those of Beard’s own mother.) And in retelling the history of the United States from Indian pudding to cheeseburgers, through the history of our great cookbooks and cooks (most of them women), it also turned out to be a kind of autobiography in the form of recipes, written in prose that was magisterial and laconic. I used to lie around reading it for hours.

  I had a lot of disasters in the kitchen, even during the long period when I was cooking under my mother’s supervision and with the benefit of her experience. I still fail all the time, in particular when I turn to baking. After hundreds of attempts, following dozens of different formulas, I don’t think I have ever made what I would consider to be a completely successful pie crust. Disaster is somehow part of the appeal of cooking for me. If that first Velvet Crumb Cake had turned out a flop, I don’t know if I would have pursued my interest in cooking. But cooking entails stubbornness and a tolerance—maybe even a taste—for last-minute collapse. You have to be able to enjoy the repeated and deliberate following of a more or less lengthy, more or less complicated series of steps whose product is very likely—after all that work, with no warning, right at the end—to curdle, sink, scorch, dry up, congeal, burn, or simply taste bad.