“Did Darryl tell you that? That he wants to be a ballplayer?”
“Not in so many words. But all you gotta do is see him out there. He loves it.”
“I loved playing baseball at his age, too. And I also loved playing nurse. And reading books.”
“With all due respect, Miriam—”
She holds up her hand. “Keep your respect. The point is, it’s up to Darryl what he wants to be, and I think you’re trying to make that decision for him. So. Here’s the deal. You let him play Martin Luther King. Give Jackie Robinson to James.”
I shake my head, no.
I’m not sure why I’m being so stubborn. I guess I don’t trust Darryl to decide on his own to be a ballplayer. He needs guidance. And anyway I don’t like Miriam telling me what to do with him. He’s my project.
“Sorry,” I tell her.
“I see,” she says. “Well. In that case, I’m afraid you can no longer work here.”
“You’re kidding.”
“I assure you, I’m not.”
“You’re firing me?”
“That’s correct.”
“I’m a volunteer”
“No longer.”
“Fine. I was quitting anyway. Did you know that?”
“No, I didn’t.”
“I might be willing to stay, under one condition: Darryl plays Jackie Robinson.”
“Sorry.”
“Then I’m afraid I can no longer work here.”
“Your resignation is accepted.”
On my way to the Greyhound Bus depot, I go up an extra block to Lambert Road so I can walk with my two suitcases and sad face past the school playground. The day is turning cool, the sun going in and out. A little drizzle, of course, would be perfect.
As usual the place is crawling with kids. I don’t look for him. I just walk by very slowly, head lowered, suitcases almost skimming the sidewalk.
Sure enough, before I reach the end of the block I hear behind me, “Mister Butthead!”
I slowly set down my suitcases and slowly turn around.
“Where you going?” he says, standing there about ten yards aways, arms at his sides.
“I’m going home, Darryl. To Chicago. Where I’m from. Goodbye.”
I want to break his little heart.
“Whaddaya got in there?” he says, pointing at the suitcases, sounding not at all heartbroken.
“Clothes,” I tell him. “And my baseball glove,” I add.
“You were gonna get me one.”
“I know I was. But I can’t now.”
“Why not?”
“Because Miriam said I have to leave.” I hold back from adding Thanks to you, and pick up my suitcases and walk slowly away.
“Hey!”
I keep walking.
“Mister Butthead!”
I suddenly realize I’ll never see Darryl again.
I turn around and tell him to come here.
He walks up, a little cautiously, and stands before me. I get down and put my hands on his shoulders: “Darryl, listen to me, okay?”
He nods.
But I’m not sure what I want to tell him, what I want him to know. I ask him to give me a hug and he puts his strong little arms around my neck. “I’m gonna miss you,” I tell him. Thafs what I want him to know.
“Will you pitch to me?”
“I wish I could, Darryl.”
“Please?”
“I can’t. I’m sorry. I really am.”
“Please, Mister Butthead?”
“Darryl …”
“Pleeease?”
“Darryl, you’re choking me.”
As I sit there staring out the window on the bus trip home, it occurs to me that I’m turning out to be kind of a failure. Kind of a butthead, in fact.
Instructor, Composition Skills
CENTRAL Y COMMUNITY COLLEGE CHICAGO 1976
So I go back to grad school and finish my degree and land a job at a two-year college down on Wacker and LaSalle, find a studio apartment, open a savings account, buy all new underwear, and get a girlfriend.
Her name is Patty Anderson. She’s the secretary-receptionist in the English office. She seems extremely well-organized and efficient, a person who leaves nothing to chance. I like that. To hell with chance.
And she almost looks a little bit like Mary Tyler Moore, from a certain angle.
We eat lunch together in the school cafeteria. She tells me about her day so far and I tell her about mine. After we’re finished eating she often tells me a joke, like dessert. It’s never very funny but the food here isn’t very good, so it seems right. And I always manage to laugh.
“That’s very funny,” I tell her. “I’ll have to remember that one.”
“Laughter is good for the digestion,” she points out.
“Yes, I’ve read that somewhere.”
“Would you like to hear another one?”
“We should probably be going.”
At the door of her apartment building following our fifth date, she says, “We can start sleeping together now, if you’d like.”
I tell her I would, very much.
In bed she informs me that she enjoys being kissed on the neck, especially just below the jaw line, and that she has very sensitive breasts. She says if I wish to excite her, those would be good areas to work on.
I go to work on those areas.
“I’m ready now,” she says.
My students seem extremely lazy, sloppy and scatterbrained. I start requiring them to include a formal outline with their final draft. I declare war on digression. And I ask Lorenzo Ruiz to remove his hat. He looks at me like I’m crazy, but removes it.
I tell Patty that night: “So I said to him, ‘Hey. Get rid … of the lid.’”
“And did he?”
“Oh yeah.”
“Good for you, honey.”
We call each other “honey.”
Patty and I decide we’re in love and that I should move into her apartment. And if that works out, we should get engaged in the spring and married in the summer. We set up a joint savings account. We buy a used car, a little blue and white Nash. And we have a child, sort of.
His name is Malcolm. He’s actually a teddy bear Patty’s had since she was little. She wants to have a real child exactly one year and nine months after we’re married. Until then, this is our practice child.
She shows me how to burp him. I lay the dish towel over my shoulder and pat him gently but firmly on the back. And I swear I hear him give a tiny belch near my ear.
I learn to change his diapers, holding my breath.
Lorenzo Ruiz returns, hat in hand, after having missed his fourth class already this semester. I’ve given them three as the limit, no excuses acceptable. So I have to inform him that he’s no longer in the class.
He says his father was shot. “Damn near killed him, man.”
I tell him I’m sorry to hear that.
“So I’m okay, right?”
I tell him I’m sorry.
“This is my father, man.”
I repeat that I’m very sorry.
If I make an exception for him, everyone’s father will be shot, and I can’t let that happen.
Lorenzo puts his face close to mine, says something in Spanish, and leaves the room.
Maybe he said, “Have a nice day.”
As a little girl Patty had asthma, so there’s a possibility our child will be asthmatic. So Malcolm has asthma. We make sure he sleeps on his back—in his open dresser drawer, under his little blue blanket—and now and then we have to hold him over a pot of boiling water, letting him breathe in the steam.
I haven’t said anything, but I’m getting a little tired of Malcolm. Just a little bit.
One evening in the living room while I’m working on a stack of essays and Patty’s reading Parents magazine and Malcolm’s playing around on the floor, she suddenly says, “Oh my God,” scoops him up and hands him to me. “He’s got a penny caught in his
throat!”
This is something that could happen to our Real Child, is the idea. But like I said, I’m getting tired of Malcolm. So I whack him a few times on the back and return him, telling her, “Honey, I’m sorry. I did all I could.”
“What are you saying?
I can’t go through with it. You should see her face. I tell her he’s fine. “He swallowed it,” I tell her.
She hugs him with huge relief. Then she looks at him and pokes his tummy: “You think you’re a little piggy bank? Is that what you think? Hmmm?”
Lorenzo Ruiz comes up to me one cold evening on the street as I’m walking to the bus stop after my last class.
“Teacher! Hey!” He looks happy to see me.
“Lorenzo. Hi. How are you?”
“I’m good, man. How you doing?”
“Fine. How’s your father?”
“My father?”
“The one that got shot.”
“Oh, yeah. He’s okay. The bullet, you know, it went right through.”
“Glad to hear it. Well…”
“Ask you a question?”
“All right.”
“You got something against Chicanos, man?”
“No, I don’t.”
“That’s good. I thought maybe you did, you know?”
“Lorenzo, look …”
“See you around, man, okay?”
Two in the morning Patty shakes me awake and says, “Will you get him, honey? I’m so tired.”
I don’t know what she’s talking about. Maybe she’s still asleep.
But she’s not. She wants me to get up and take Malcolm out of his bed—the open dresser drawer—and walk him around the apartment because he’s crying hysterically.
I tell her he’s probably hungry. Patty enjoys feeding him, with her sensitive breasts.
She says no, he isn’t hungry, he’s had a nightmare.
I’ve about had it with this bear.
I tell her, “Patty, listen to me. Malcolm doesn’t have nightmares. He doesn’t dream, you know?”
She says I’m wrong about that. “Babies begin dreaming early on.”
“Babies, yes. But not teddy bears. They can’t. They’re made out of stuffing.”
She gets angry. “I am well aware of the fact that Malcolm is a teddy bear, but I am also aware that we’ll be having a real child someday—and then what?”
“Then I promise I’ll get up when he’s crying and walk him around.”
She’s glad to hear it, but shouldn’t we begin getting used to the idea? “We can’t just pretend Malcolm’s our child when it’s convenient. If there’s one thing about a Real Child, it’s never very convenient.”
“Patty…”
“Never mind. Stay in bed. I’ll get him.”
“I got him, I got him, I got him,” I tell her and get up and grab him out of his drawer and go pacing up and down the living room, holding him by one leg, swinging him a little, letting his head bang against the coffee table.
“Oh … my … God,” she says from the bedroom doorway.
“Take it easy, take it easy,” I tell her, and carry him properly.
“Jiggle him a little,” she says. “He likes that.”
I keep running into Lorenzo on the street. I’m beginning to think it’s not by accident. I think he enjoys our little conversations. I think he knows he makes me nervous.
“How’s the class going?” he asks me one evening.
“Oh, fine,” I tell him.
He sighs. “Those were the days, man. I was happy, you know? Getting an education. Going somewhere. The future was looking good.”
“Lorenzo, you were flunking. You hadn’t even turned in a paper yet, not one.”
“I was getting ready to—a big paper, you know? Hundred pages, man. About life on the street. What it’s really like. It was gonna blow your mind.”
“You could still write it.”
“What for? I’m gettin’ outa here.”
“Oh?”
“I got a cousin down in Phoenix.”
“Arizona?”
“That’s right, man. He’s givin’ me a job.”
I tell him that’s wonderful. “I envy you. I really do. All that sun. All that good heat.”
“Dry heat,” he adds.
“The best kind.”
“You wanna come, man?”
“Hey, I’m tempted.”
Malcolm begins growing older, faster and faster. He’s in and out of the terrible two’s in a few days. Then he’s “fwee years ode.” Then he’s this many, Patty holding up four fingers behind his paw. Then he’s in kindergarten, where the other boys pick on him because he’s so small—tiny, in fact.
I tell Patty I think we’re going to have to face the fact that our son is a midget.
Lately when I say things like that she gives me this scrutinizing look, to see if I’m raising a possible Real Child issue or making fun of her.
She usually decides I’m making fun of her.
My students’ papers have shown a certain improvement and I tell them about it. The papers are definitely, without a doubt, more clearly organized than before. I also tell them, as nicely as I can, that their papers have become more and more boring as well.
I mention it one evening to Lorenzo, who’s still around. I’ve lost a lot of my nervousness with him.
He says he’s not surprised their papers are boring. “Buncha boring people, man. What do you expect?”
“I don’t think that’s it.”
“Then maybe it’s you, man. It’s like paint-by-numbers with you, you know? My grandmother, she used to do that shit.”
“Paint by numbers?”
“About one a day. She had ’em all over the walls. Clowns, and little girls with baskets, and birds on a branch, and some deers drinking from a creek—I hated those pictures, man. She’d show me the box, with the picture on it, you know? And then the picture she did, right? She’d say, ‘See?’ And I’d be thinking, Why don’t you just hang the box on the wall? Save you the trouble. I’m freezing, man. Gimme a dollar, will you?”
“What for?”
“So I can go. I’m freezing.”
Patty and I are in the middle of making love when she whispers hotly in my ear, “He’s watching us.”
She means Malcolm.
I roll off her. “Where is he? Where is he, Patty?”
She glances towards the closet, where the sliding door is open about an inch. I start to get up but she says, “Honey, don’t. Come on. Think about it.”
She’s right. What am I, goofy? I’m pissed off at a teddy bear. I flop back down beside her. “You’re right,” I tell her.
She gives a sly little smile, lays her leg over me and whispers in my ear, “You were thirteen once. Didn’t you like to spy?” She’s pretty worked up. In fact, she’s sort of writhing against me. I’ve never seen Patty writhe before.
I’ve always wanted a woman who writhes.
I whisper, “You little snake.”
She likes that.
I go further: “You little slut.”
That really sets her off and she gets on top, which she never does, and goes wild up there, glancing now and then towards the closet.
I tell all my classes I want them to write like mad for twenty minutes. I tell them I don’t care what they write about, where they go with it, where it leads. Just write. “You never know what’s down there,” I tell them. “So just start putting words on the page and see what happens. See what comes up.”
They want to know if this will be graded.
“Yes.” Or else they won’t put out.
They want to know how I’ll determine the grade.
It’s a fair question, but I don’t want to answer it. Instead I tell them about my Aunt Mary and her paint-by-numbers kit, how I used to think to myself, Why don’t you just hang the box on the wall? Save yourself the time and trouble.
They don’t get it.
“Just start writing,” I tell them.
Patty comes up to me as I walk in the door. She looks very upset. I hope it’s not Malcolm. She takes my hand and leads me towards the bathroom. “I got home and found him like this,” she says.
I’m hoping he’s hanged himself.
He’s lying face down over the toilet, apparently barfing his little guts out. There’s an empty wine bottle on the floor.
“What’re we going to do with him?” she says, leaning against me, all limp and weepy. I can smell the wine on her breath. “Honey,” she says, “what’re we gonna do?”
I tell her it’s going to be all right. I hold her and tell her everything’s going to be fine.
“Where did we go wrong?” she says.
I tell her I’m not sure.
I explain to Professor Reynolds that I won’t be able to return for the spring semester. I tell him I have to go to Arizona.
“It’s my little boy. He’s asthmatic. The doctor says the dry climate can make a real difference.”
He says he understands.
I have a feeling he knows I’ve been living all semester with his receptionist-secretary, that the little boy is really a teddy bear, and that I’m running out on them.
Afterwards, I stop at Patty’s desk and she gives me a sheet of paper on which she’s calculated exactly how much money I owe her for the Nash, which I can take, minus half the cost of items for the apartment we purchased together, plus compensation for the emotional damage of my leaving her. I would like to ask her about that last figure, which is a hundred and forty-eight dollars and thirty-seven cents. I’m not saying it’s too high. I’m just curious, that’s all.
We shake hands. I want to say something nice, something encouraging. “I never told you this, Patty, but I’ve always thought you look a little bit like Mary Tyler Moore, from a certain angle.”
“Thank you,” she says quietly.
Driving across Illinois, I tell the whole sad story of me and Patty and Malcolm.
“You shoulda let him choke on that penny, man,” Lorenzo says. “You had the right idea there.”
Field Worker
CASA GRANDE, ARIZONA 1977
Reason for Leaving Page 7