by Casey Gerald
Have you ever watched the losing team at the end of a high school football game, especially the seniors after the very last game of their very last season? If not, you’ve missed the clearest sign of how many tears are trapped inside so many boys. All that sobbing, all that hugging, all that snot going all over the place, all those boys muttering I love you to one another—you would think their best friend has died in their arms, so struck with grief are they. This spectacle is just a shroud. Don’t buy it. Football simply ain’t that sad. But nobody’s ever judged a boy for weeping over a ballgame, so the moment comes and he squeezes his rag while he can. Then moves on.
It’s a masterful sleight of hand and a real virtue, until it isn’t. I can only liken it to something I later witnessed and will soon tell you about—when the whole world almost came tumbling down behind a similarly noble idea: if you take a small piece of bad debt and wrap it up with other little pieces of bad debt and maybe a slice or two of good debt, the debt ain’t so bad anymore. It might even be an asset! Until one piece of debt falls. Then another. Then the stock market and the pensions and a few prime ministers. Now how about the human heart? When you bundle its little nicks and cuts, can you turn a broken boy into a stoic? No, you’ll turn him into a ticking time bomb, and, probably, a fool. Which I was.
The most foolish thing in this charade of an article, which I loved so much and carried around like I was a breathing scrapbook, came right after the lede:
Casey Gerald knows some folks are still fascinated with his father. It’s fine by him if he’s referred to as Rod Gerald’s son . . . But being the son of a troubled former SOC superstar accounts for but a sliver of who Casey Gerald is. He has carved out his own identity.
The journalist didn’t make this up. I helped him with my doozy of a quote: “I don’t really focus on trying to be like him,” Casey said of his father. “I focus on being myself. Hopefully I’m better.”
That’s me, lying through my teeth so convincingly that I believed it at the time. My saving grace was not that I was good but that I was inadequate—I avoided having my life ruined by the high-stakes gamble of big-time college football because I was not better than my father. Not even close. As the article went on to point out: Casey, while talented, is not as gifted an athlete as his father was. So like thousands of other seventeen- and eighteen-year-old boys across the country, my stream of letters and recruiter visits dried up to a few real and disappointing options to play football. There was a glimmer of hope that I’d go to Texas Christian University, as SOC’s last great player had done, until Coach Price confided that TCU’s head coach was wary of recruiting boys from the inner city. Then TCU’s head coach came to my house with the truth: he could not spend one of his athletic scholarships on me, but would let me walk onto the team as a regular student if I wanted. I wasn’t about to go live in Fort Worth to carry some other bastard’s shoulder pads, so TCU was out.
My best shot, Coach Walker stressed—aside from the US Air Force Academy which, when I visited, seemed less appealing than going to prison—was to head east to Yale, where I didn’t have to worry about earning a football scholarship because they didn’t offer them anyway.
Son, just take your visit up there and see how you like it. Ain’t no harm in that.
chapter NINE
No harm my ass, I thought on that long ride south from the Hartford airport to New Haven—the snow stacked up to sternums in the fields, battering the windshield, nearly blocking the view of all the factories that lined our route.
Don’t worry, guys, said the tall pale man with sunken eyes, the coach who’d visited SOC to see my tape. The weather doesn’t get much worse than this.
I rolled that comforting lie around in my head and stared out at the storm and at the smoking boxy factories and all the no-people in the streets of the little New England towns. Before long, the black van mounted a slope and came down on the other side to ease off I-91 and onto Grove Street, lowering us into a valley lined with buildings cast in the mold of old-world castles, a mold meant to lend an air of grandeur but which made me think, only and immediately, of Harry Potter.
Through the valley we crept at parade pace past the Grove Street Cemetery and Eli Whitney’s body, past Payne Whitney Gym (named after one of Eli Whitney’s descendants), and on to Vanderbilt Hall (Vanderbilts being Whitneys’ kin by marriage). Mr. Vanderbilt’s hall was just a pit stop to drop off my luggage and meet the boy who would host me for the weekend—with his clipped midwestern accent; the photograph of a black man, white woman, and him, a family portrait, on his mantel; and his best friend (another mixed-race boy from the football team) in the common area. Since I went on to host many recruits in my time at Yale, I can tell you that the coaches pulled out all the stops to make sure I was paired with the closest things they had to my own kind.
We continued to the athletic department headquarters, which was attached to Payne Whitney Gym and looked as divine. Literally. If the tour guide wasn’t lying, then the Payne Whitney Gym was supposed to be a cathedral, per the terms of Mrs. Payne Whitney’s gift to the college. But the college didn’t need another church at the time. It needed a gym. So somebody hatched the idea to build a gym that looked like a giant church, and pray that the Whitneys didn’t protest when they discovered the truth, since it would also be the largest indoor gym in the world, which might please them all the same. It did, apparently.
From the athletic department headquarters, we—now thirty or so boys—went on to see the Gutenberg Bible at the rare books library, and the statue of Nathan Hale at Connecticut Hall, and the tomb of the secret society Skull and Bones. None of these meant much to me but they were nice enough. Then we filed back onto the tour bus to take a drive down Whalley Avenue—ignoring the homeless people along the way—and out to West Haven to see the Yale Bowl, the first and almost the only sign that some semblance of respectable football existed at this school.
Here was a stadium, said the short grim Italian tour guide/coach named Larry Ciotti, that could pack more than sixty thousand people on the wooden benches that loomed end to end above a playing field sod with the grass of history—a field where the game was invented, where the first pass was thrown and two of the first three Heisman Trophy winners had run and twenty-seven national champions had been crowned (never mind that all but one of those championships came before the First World War). Here was a stadium that had inspired the Rose Bowl and housed the New York Giants when Yankee Stadium could not do the job—a stadium that would still be standing, likely without lights or turf, for many years to come because it meant so much to the country that the Yale Corporation would not allow any changes to be made.
You young men will have the privilege—Coach Ciotti paused to look away from us and out into the distance so that we, too, would look into the distance and see the privilege for ourselves—to play on that field. To wear the Yale Blue. It’s a privilege. An honor. You know, a Yale coach once walked into the locker room before his team took this field. And he told them—Coach Ciotti sniffled and grimaced and turned to us—“Gentlemen, you are now going to play football against Harvard. Never again in your whole life will you do anything so important.” He turned and strode back to the bus in silence.
If Coach Ciotti had not been a Connecticut high school football legend, as we were constantly told, he could have been one hell of a used car salesman. And I would have bought his old jalopy on the spot, just like I bought into his big Privilege speech. I would never be good enough to walk on the field of the Horseshoe and play Michigan as my father had done, not good enough to get a taste of the Red River Rivalry between Texas and Oklahoma or even line up for Stanford against Cal. But if there was any truth to the things Larry Ciotti said—which I couldn’t be sure of because he was a Catholic and I’d never met a Catholic who was open about it—then, without even trying, I had stumbled onto something even grander, older, and more important than all the things I thought I wanted. And if my vi
sit had just been this first day, then Yale would have only been buildings and history to me, and that would have been fine. But the second day came. With it came people. Parents.
When I was young, I’d walk into Granny’s kitchen in the middle of the night. I’d stand on my tiptoes and reach for the light switch and brace myself for what was to come: a frenzied march of roaches, little ones about the size of a half fingernail, jetting across the floor and flitting over the stove and into the sink, headed somewhere with the remains of yesterday’s dinner and a first taste of tomorrow’s sandwich. There was nothing very threatening about them, and as long as I stayed on my tiptoes I could avoid smashing our little friends with my bare feet, and they’d go on about their business.
But every now and then, in the stillness of the dark, I’d lie on the couch or my mattress and hear a violent thud in the corner of the room. A winged scurry, like baby scratches on a cardboard box. I’d jump out of bed in a blind panic, reach for the shoe whose place I’d noted before lying down, and gird my loins before turning on the light and lunging at a prehistoric flying cockroach that might have only been the size of my big toe but seemed to be as big, at least in terms of danger posed, as an atom bomb. Recalling these battles still causes the heart to speed and the breath to catch and the hand to reach for something hard and the will to reach for violence. I had at eighteen, and still often have now, a similar reaction to parents.
And here they were, a few dozen well-dressed smiling talking cockroaches, crowded around me with their sons, who were supposed to be my future teammates. But how was I supposed to trust and bleed and sweat and vomit and weep with boys who hugged and laughed with roaches? At least real roaches kept their mouths shut or spoke softly enough for only other roaches to hear. Not parents. Bastards talked like it was going out of style. And if other parents were around, if they were talking to these other parents about their children, if they were talking about the children they were proud of, you couldn’t shut them up. Then they got to asking questions. I’m not old enough to have witnessed the Inquisition, but I’m willing to bet it was more interesting, if not less painful, than living through a herd of parents who catch the question spirit.
All throughout the second day there were questions—questions about Nathan Hale, about financial aid, about room rates at the Omni Hotel; questions about the last question asked because everybody didn’t hear the question; questions for the coaching staff, and the admissions committee, and for other parents and for sons and, at dinner, for me.
You’re from Dallas?
Yes, ma’am.
And what school do you go to there?
It’s called South Oak Cliff.
South Oak Cliff?
Yes, ma’am.
Hmm. You know, I think my husband went to South Oak Cliff. (Turning to her son) Didn’t your dad go to South Oak Cliff, Alex? (Son looks to mother. Mouth full. Nods.) Yes, yes, I think that’s right. What a coincidence, huh?
Yes, ma’am. That’s crazy.
Well goodness. I’ll have to call him to be sure. He won’t believe this.
The meekly persistent woman who looked like she could be kin to my kin and who spoke in what I understood to be perfect English had come with her son Alex, who not only sounded perfect but also looked perfect—not in the sense of being beautiful, but in the perfect symmetry of his features and the look on his face that made you believe he didn’t sin. Alex had a twin who apparently was also perfect because, toward the end of dinner, their mother turned to me after asking these and many other questions, and said, almost under her breath:
The boys want to go to Cornell . . . She paused to let the horror of that sink in, not knowing I had never heard of Cornell . . . but their father and I have told them that if we are going to spend our money on their education, they have three options: Harvard, Yale, or Princeton. They are free to choose as long as it’s one of those.
Her statement struck me not as the insufferable bragging parents normally do at dinners like this one, but almost as a note passed across the visitation table from the priest to a political prisoner on the eve of his hunger strike: Negotiate. She was firm but did not press the issue. She was, after all, a woman from Albany, Georgia, whose parents had been sharecroppers but whose twin boys had three options—Harvard, Yale, or Princeton—and so I suppose she had long ago learned how to say a lot without risking saying too much.
After dinner she rushed toward me, her phone held out like a piece of fresh hot cornbread.
I was right! My husband, Jimmy, wants to talk to you.
I accepted the phone and prepared to endure a few minutes of parenting. The voice on the other end took me by surprise.
Say, man! You’re Rod Gerald’s boy?
Yes, sir.
Man, listen, I played with your dad at SOC! Seventy-four. He was seventy-five, right?
I think so, mmhmm.
Ack ack ack aw man yeah! That was one cold negro. What a small small world. Listen man I hate I’m not there to meet you, but you just listen to what my wife is saying, okay? And if you need anything, you just let her know. Let us know. All right man?
Yes, sir. Real good to talk to you.
The woman with the perfect English and perfect sons had married this man, Jimmy Bishop, who had grown up right down the road from my family and had played at South Oak Cliff with my daddy. From SOC he’d gone down to the University of Texas and, despite being woefully unprepared for college, he’d looked back at Oak Cliff and decided that by hook or crook he’d stay in Austin until the job was done. He majored in communications and got so good at communicating that when he came back home he was running the TV station. Before long, he left for Baltimore to run the station there, and moved to a nice part of Maryland where he and his wife raised these perfect twin boys who only had three options—Harvard Yale Princeton—but who had a daddy who’d grown up with my daddy and who still sounded, at least when he was happy or relaxed, like me. And his wife, Gloria, must have heard a little bit of him in me when she listened, because she says she took one look at me and knew that I was from Oak Cliff, that I had no idea what to do with my silverware and even less of a clue what to do with my life, so she decided to keep asking questions and pass along some advice: take this ticket, boy.
And when I think about this little coincidence, I realize Jimmy Bishop was the first person I’d ever met who had left Oak Cliff and stayed gone for a good reason, and Gloria Bishop was the first parent I’d met whose questions didn’t make me sick, and Alex and Avery Bishop were the first perfect black boys I’d met that didn’t make me want to punch them in the face. And all these firsts ope’d a space for me to consider, even if I could not know for sure, that here at the other end of the world there might be yet a little room for me.
I didn’t have time to bask in these newfound possibilities, though. By the end of dinner and the close of the second day, the weather and parents and questions had worn me down. I went back to my host’s room coughing and snotting a little and looking around for cold medicine, in part to feel better and in part to force myself to sleep. But there was no respite to be had—my host had orders to show me a good time, which meant taking me to a club and arranging for dances or more with a girl who had a reputation for helping secure prospective recruits. The club was Toad’s Place, New Haven’s version of the Fillmore, except smaller and dirtier, like the dungeon Hannibal Lecter keeps Jodie Foster in toward the end of The Silence of the Lambs. The girl shall remain nameless because she was just a college girl and she went on to have a great dance career and marry an investment banker and buy a renovated brownstone in Harlem.
It’ll come as no surprise that I found all types of phlegm in my throat during the two songs I danced to at Toad’s. The girl was enough of a saint to suggest that my hosts take me home so that I could get some rest. They relented. I suppose that after three years at Yale they had at least learned that it was better to ke
ep a recruit alive than to get him laid.
We trudged through the snow back to Vanderbilt Hall and settled into the heated chambers of my host’s dorm. I was feeling much better by then, of course. I took off my coat, which might as well have been off the whole time, as flimsy as it was against the nine-degree New Haven weather. Sat on the futon to rub my flat feet, sore from walking and my half-size-too-small sneakers. My hosts got comfortable, too. It struck me that now was the right time to ask the only question that had crossed my mind during the visit.
Do y’all not say “nigga” here?
I looked at the two boys much like I imagine little girls look at their mothers the first time they find blood in their underwear. A short quiet nervous laugh came from one of them. They looked to each other. Then at me.
Um, nah.
Oh.
I can’t say for sure that I was embarrassed or disappointed or confused, though I figure I was some part of all three. And I can’t tell you what I did next other than sleep, which I only know because I woke up the next day—and I only know that because I ain’t dead. But something miraculous had to have happened in the waning hours of that night or on my third and final day in New Haven, something to outweigh the error of the first two days, when I was forced to walk in a snowstorm and listen to parents and dance with a girl and sleep in a room with black boys who didn’t say nigga—something to make me ignore how strange and cold and hostile it had been at the eastern end of the world.
But maybe not.
You see, every journey is really two journeys: a going-to and a going-away. And it’s not until the journey is over that you can see what’s what, because you can’t get away from nothing if you’re looking at it all the time, and you can’t go toward something you see too clearly because if you saw exactly what it was you’d have enough sense not to chase it. So you stand there at the shoreline of decision—maybe you are more desperate to get away than to go anywhere, or more eager to find someplace new than to leave the place you know, but you need both impulses or else you’re in trouble. If all you’ve got is a going-away, you might end up lost, since the only thing on your mind is running. And if all you’ve got is a going-to, you might end up sad because what you find is rarely as good as you thought it would be, unless it’s different from what you imagined, so it helps to remember how awful the thing was that you left. It’s a simple equation, really, and the stranger the journey the better the math works. Just plug in what you were trying to get to and multiply it by what you were trying to get away from, and you’ll understand a hell of a lot more precisely why you did what you did. At least this works for me.