Out of the frying pan into the fire, as the saying goes.
Jeff sussed out a new league, where, as fate would have it, Ezra was placed on the one team in this league headed by a coach who didn’t believe in keeping score in games with young children. Each week Jeff was increasingly agitated by this coach, who, by a coincidence, was an old friend of mine.
I wasn’t present when “the incident” occurred, but as I later heard from numerous sources, Jeff got into a screaming match with my friend in full view of the seven-year-old players. The fallout
from this incident became extremely uncomfortable for me as word spread through the community. I’d find myself at my friend’s house agreeing that my husband had been over the top, but it felt icky, as if I were betraying him. Something had to give. Is there nothing more painful than watching women like Hillary Clinton, Silda Spitzer, or Elizabeth Edwards publicly stand by their men? I’ve always thought I’d never do that. Certainly, Jeff’s behavior wasn’t reaching a level of public humiliation—it was more on the scale of neighborhood disaffection—but a choice had to be made. I stood by him … in public. I cut back my time with my friend, but that didn’t stop me from reading him the riot act in the privacy of our home and everywhere we went together for the next month: “Did you go off of your medication? You are fucking out of control, and you have got to get hold of yourself!!”
From the fire into the flames? There’s just no idiom that truly conveys going from bad to worse. The next league Jeff shuffled Ezra to practiced in a local park named for the Elysian Fields, the area of the Greek underworld that was the final resting place of the souls of the heroic and the virtuous. But in modern-day Los Angeles, the Elysian Fields is the home of a cliquey group of coaches and families, who, as it turned out, didn’t much like our kid’s emotionally expressive artistic temperament. I thought it might be a good life lesson for our child to experience this kind of thing—after all, not everyone is going to appreciate your uniqueness—but Jeff insisted on making it known that he wasn’t happy and things were spiraling down again as Coach K started to make regular appearances at Elysian Fields. During the time our issue played on that team, a day didn’t go by that Jeff and I didn’t argue about how hard he was riding our child on the field and how much he was rushing him through his homework so he could not only arrive at practice early but also attend supplementary practices for practice!
Coach K became fixated on the idea that our son should be working toward winning a college baseball scholarship,* even though his entire body could fit inside the pant leg of any one of his teammates. The tension escalated to the point where our son turned around on the plate one day and, seething, said, “Shut up, Dad!” The next week Ezra insisted that Coach K cease all talking during games and he was eventually exiled to the outfield, where the team could see him yelling from a distance but, fortunately, couldn’t hear his admonishments.
It was only a short time later that Coach K announced that he’d found the über league of all Little Leagues that was definitely going to be the launching pad for Ezra Kahn’s career. This new league is widely known as a competitive hotbed of Little League intrigue brimming with power struggles between dads vying for status and position for their progeny.
Jeff loves it! More important, Ezra really enjoys playing in this league; he’s made good friends and seems eager to put in the time, even though joining up means he has to play on two teams at once in order to keep a position on the travel team. Honestly, I don’t see how these kids can be expected to keep it all straight. In the last league, you could steal but you couldn’t lead off the base, but in the new one, you can take a lead, but if it’s a close play at home, you have to slide or you’re out. I have no idea what this means and if I saw it in the field, I’d be just as confused as I am writing about it. I can only hope that this kind of thing will serve as some kind of sequential-thinking exercise so our kid will do better in math than either of us.
Maybe it’s a form of Stockholm syndrome, but I get it. I have no idea whether Ezra will stick with the sport, and the health of his kidney may well dictate his career trajectory. But with all of the reconstructive surgeries he’s weathered, it’s amazing that he’s so athletic.* It has also been a real opportunity for me to work on that Zen acceptance of life that Jeff says he’s adopted in relation to Ezra’s health. For instance, we were on a tour of a school recently and were trying to make a good impression with the admissions director when a child stood up, pointed at Jeff, and announced to the classroom, “That’s the dad that yells in the stands!” Oh, that was so funny.
He Says
Annabelle is not the first person to assume that I’m not into sports (because of my smallish stature) at first meeting me, but I assure you that sports and being a really good athlete were the most crucial and important aspects of my life right up until the second a girl touched my penis.
OK, perhaps if you grow up a member of the Taliban, it’s how fast you can saw off an infidel’s head that ingratiates you to your fellow men, but in most places in the world it’s sports. Over the years sports have given me many advantages. It’s like having an invisible passport that can get you past all the boundaries of men regardless of geography, politics, and racial, religious, or socioeconomic backgrounds. It’s our one common male language, and I feel that it is my paternal duty to pass on the love of sports to my own son, who, I might add, is not unlike his father in the lack of largeness department and could really benefit from the world of sports.
Annabelle would like everyone to believe that I hatched some sinister, predestined Rosemary’s Baby conspiracy to embroil our little Ezra into the dark world of athletic competition, but that’s not what happened at all. Here’s the real story about Ezra and our family’s journey into the world of kid sports:
At around the age of two and a half, Ezra was watching Tiger Woods on TV when he suddenly, as if hypnotized, walked out of the house into the backyard and began hitting plastic golf balls with his plastic clubs. That little boy could swing. The golf club became a baseball bat and a year and a half later Ez was playing on his first Little League team, the tiny T-Ball Giants. At his very first game, the gung-ho coach took notice and soon Ezra was his star rookie, playing at the pitcher position and smacking homers off the T-stand.
Ezra didn’t just like baseball, he loved it. My heart fluttered and danced. My son loves baseball! He couldn’t get enough of it. We played after school every day. He wanted me to continue to play even after the team practices ended. Every night, in our backyard, he had me throw him pop-ups until the sun set and my arm turned to Silly Putty. And it still wasn’t enough for him. “One more pop-up, Dad. Just one.” One more really meant a hundred more, in the dark, with Annabelle yelling at us to come in for dinner, until my arm and shoulder finally gave out. Every night I slathered my achy limbs with Tiger Balm. All my T-shirts smelled as if they’d been washed in menthol. For my little future Hall of Famer, it was nothing but baseball twenty-four hours a day. That’s why I simply suggested to Annabelle that if Ezra wanted to play professional baseball, she wasn’t going to stop him.
For Ezra’s second season of T-ball, I volunteered to coach his team. I became “Coach Kahn” only because I was trying to be a good, involved parent and not some kind of sports Svengali, as Annabelle would have you believe. There is also a long and storied history of fathers and sons in sports: Tiger Woods and his dad, Earl; Michael Jordan and father, James; Archie Manning and his sons Peyton and Eli. Maybe if Hitler’s daddy had played some sports with him, things would have turned out a lot better. Admittedly, my coaching style could be polarizing. Some parents adored me and loved my zeal, while others gawked at me with bewildered irritation as if I just cut them off on the freeway and then shot their tires out. After hearing some of the disgruntled parents gripe about me, Annabelle appointed herself our family’s official anti–baseball commissioner, whose first order of business was to conclude that playing baseball would interfere with the rigorous academic
expectations of first grade. And so Anti-Commish Gurwitch and Coach Kahn would go at each other over our son’s baseball passion as if it were the Little League version of the Scopes trial.
Ezra’s skills were improving so rapidly that it was only logical for him to graduate from hitting the ball off a tee and move to a league where the coaches pitched to the players to hit. For the new coach-pitch league, I hooked up to manage the team with another neighborhood sports dad, Tom. I thought we’d make a good team because where I have a hyper, nearly hysterical sideline demeanor, Tom’s coaching is elegantly understated. As luck would have it, the new league had no umpires to officiate, leaving it up to the coaches to determine who was out or safe. So it should come as no surprise how quickly things deteriorated when a couple of opposing coaches bitterly questioned one of Tom’s on-field calls. There were angry accusations, name-calling escalations, and then the macho challenge of “Okay, let’s go, you and me, right here, right now” was brazenly hurled at Tom by an undersized yet rabid opposing coach who was clearly in dire need of a Xanax. Soon parents from both sides started weighing in and kids began to cry and wander off the field looking for someone to hug. A coach on-field rumble was just the kind of damning evidence anti-Commissioner Gurwitch was looking for to slow down Ezra’s baseball career as well as the perfect thing she could demonstrate to all our friends, family, neighbors, and even strangers on the street as proof that she was right about my being way too intense. (Being right is Annabelle’s national pastime.) Fortunately, cooler heads prevailed, but I decided to switch leagues after the season. The anti-commish declared I was dragging Ezra from league to league as if we were some kind of roving panhandling baseball gypsies, but there was rhyme to my reason. If one league didn’t have umps, shouldn’t I find one that did?
The new league I found for Ezra’s fourth season had not only volunteer umpires, but also this really cool eighteen-year-old high school senior who was the coach of Ezra’s team. I was ecstatic to learn from Coach Teenager that he intended to lead the team to victory right up to the championship game at the end of the season. He seemed so perfect I barely gave it a second thought that he had a co-coach. She was a team mom who was usually very, very busy with work, but would be there in case he couldn’t make it, which would “hardly ever” happen.
Before the first game, Coach Teenager’s assistant coach strutted onto the field wearing a Ramones T-shirt and a bat slung over her shoulder like an Israeli soldier’s Uzi and brazenly announced with a George W. first-term swagger that she did not believe in competitive sports for kids, that winning and losing were irrelevant to her and completely contrary to the way she ran “my team.” Although Coach Teenager had said he was in charge, it was clear she was the boss. It wasn’t long before he alleged that he had become unexpectedly busy preparing for college and faded away, paving the way for Cruella De Coach to assume full control. The tension between Coach Snow Queen of Narnia and me escalated to an nearly Shia versus Sunni level as she proudly came unprepared to the games without such trivial details as batting orders and which positions the kids were to play. Still, I had no idea what kind of car bomb was waiting for me until one sunny Saturday before our weekly game when Coach Nurse Ratched caught sight of me setting up the kids for warm-ups. It must have been the last straw for her and the moment she had been waiting for to let me have it. She lambasted me loudly in front of all the kids, parents, and my own son. She rhetorically barked, “Are you the coach?” This was followed by “You don’t touch my players.” (I later learned that one of the team’s overtly PC moms was incensed that while coaching first base I had adjusted a player’s feet to help him learn the correct way to stand on a base.) The tirade continued with “If you want to coach your own team, go get fingerprinted!” (As in most leagues, coaches must be fingerprinted to prove that they aren’t sex offenders.) She kept howling “Go get fingerprinted,” as if instead of being at a Little League game, I was now the object of scorn at a NAMBLA protest rally. I could only presume that in Coach Lady Macbeth’s eyes, moving a kid’s feet was tantamount to reaching into his little pants and adjusting his tiny baseballs.
To make matters even worse, the Lizzie Borden of Little League, was an old friend of Annabelle’s as well as a member in good standing of Hollywood’s powerful lesbian elite. Besides the loss of friendship, Annabelle feared that she and I would find ourselves pariahs in the gay showbiz community on the order of the Reverend James Dobson and the post-Ellen Anne Heche. This made my situation at home particularly precarious. Although Annabelle professes to have sided with me, it came at a cost. Let’s just say that it’s hard to take your wife seriously when she’s telling you that you need anger management while she’s screaming her lungs out at you.
And so we switched leagues again. This one had well-kept fields, a great snack bar, genuine uniforms and caps, an electronic scoreboard, and the players, not the coaches, pitched to the batters, but three practices a week had the anti-commissioner and me at each other’s throats about Ezra’s eroding homework time. I was trapped. If Ezra didn’t show up for practice, he would never have a chance to prove his worth to his new coaches. So I overrode Annabelle and made sure Ezra attended each and every practice. We were rewarded for all our time and effort with a pathetically coached team that lost most games, sometimes by twenty-five runs or more, and with Ezra spending half the time on the bench. I don’t want to say that his coaches were lazy, narrow-minded, biased, and had no clue how to coach baseball—OK, yes, I do want to say it. Providentially, around the end of the horrific season Tom called to tell me he was very happy with a new league he’d found and suggested we try it.
I was flabbergasted by how well Commissioner Gurwitch took the news. “You’ve gotta be kidding me! God, Jeff, when will it end? Did you ever think the coaches, umpires, and parents might not be problem, but you are?” I made my case for relocating: Ezra loved baseball and deserved to be at a place that appreciated his talent, hard work, and dedication. Finding the right Little League was like dating: you had to go through a few losers before you married the right one. “Like I did with you, right, honey?” Annabelle rolled her eyes, let out a sarcastic chortle and said, “We’ll see how long this one lasts.”
At the new league, Ezra’s ability and work ethic were immediately recognized during the league tryouts, and many of the coaches wanted him on their teams. These coaches were all dads of players and they also reminded me a lot of, well, me: basically nice guys, slightly neurotic, good senses of humor, sometimes temperamental and irrational, but loving fathers and intense advocates of their sons, such as the ex-army helicopter pilot named Buzz—that’s right, Buzz, a pitch-perfect name—who actually shouted this during his son’s at bat: “C’mon, Seth! Placate my adult insecurities and faded dreams!” Yes, I have finally found my people. Even Anti-Commissioner Gurwitch agrees that it’s a good fit. So you see I’m not this crazy, out-of-control Coach Kahn caricature that Annabelle cooked up. I’m just a sane, loving activist of my son’s baseball talents. Right? Sure, along the way there have been coaches, parents, players, lesbians, umpires, little siblings of players, the people who ran the concession stand, the ice-cream-truck driver who played that insidious repeating ice-cream-truck music, and even strangers walking their dogs who utterly detested me. Sure, it almost destroyed my relationship with my son and my marriage to Annabelle, but it’s all been worth it because after the long and precarious journey, we’ve finally made it to the right Little League.
OK, I admit the new league’s not perfect. It has its share of politics, rumors, gossipmongering, social cliques, and a player caste system as rigid as anything you can find in India. And it’s also true that if I put as much time and energy into my writing career as I continue to put into Ezra’s baseball, by this point I could have written at least three War and Peace–sized novels, a dozen screenplays, a half dozen plays, two books of short stories, and a collection of poetry, not to mention having a regular magazine column, my own comedy show on the Web, and s
till have time left over to resculpt my body at a gym and invent my own language. But it’s been totally worth it because nothing is better than seeing your son smash a hit into the outfield, round third, and score or make a great catch. And last year, after he made the last out and his travel team won a big tournament, he leaped into my arms like Yogi Berra did to Don Larsen after he pitched a perfect game in the 1956 World Series. I know, no matter what happens after Ezra’s travel team, the Titans, goes to play in Cooperstown in 2010 for the Field of Dreams Tournament, he’ll always remember that day he jumped in my arms to celebrate the victory. And if he does ever forget, I’ll be sure to remind him.
what’s love got to do with it?
Researchers from Australian National University tracking 2,500 couples, married or living together, from 2001 to 2007, have identified what it takes to keep a couple together: Couples in which one partner and not the other smokes are more likely to have a relationship that ends in failure. A husband who is nine or more years older than his wife is twice as likely to get divorced as are husbands who get married before they turn twenty-five. Sixteen percent of men and women whose parents ever separated or divorced experienced marital separation themselves compared with ten percent for those whose parents did not separate.
varieties of marriage
Polygamy: The Practice or condition of having more than one spouse at one time. Bigamy: Marrying one person while still legally married to another. Polygyny: The condition or practice of having more than one wife at one time. Endogamy: Marriage within one’s own tribe. Monogamy: Marriage with only one person at a time. Arranged: The selection of a marriage partner may involve the couple going through a selection process of courtship, or the marriage may be arranged by the couple’s parents or an outside party, a matchmaker.
You Say Tomato, I Say Shut Up Page 16