Testosterone Enough for Two

Ch. 3 of An Evening With God

More dads had volunteered to manage Little League teams than there were teams. Given his years of adoring study, Eric was confident he’d be a far better manager than he’d been a player, but was intent on introducing the novel concept to his young charges that winning isn’t everything, especially for those aged between nine and 12. He intended to give the less adept players assigned to his team lots of encouragement, and to require — not just request, but require — that his star players treat their less gifted teammates with kindness and respect. But then the whole thing got pulled out from under him when the league’s governing body of team sponsors — the local veterinarian, a local body shop, a bakery, a video game store, and a landscape architect who paid for the privilege of having their business’s names on the players’ jerseys — gave the one remaining manager’s job to Chris Burton, who’d been All-State in baseball 11 years before, been signed by the Cincinnati Reds, and celebrated his signing by getting his 17-year-old bride pregnant with his son Donnie, now 10.

Eric and another dad would be his assistant coaches, in charge of conducting infield practice and hitting fly balls to the outfielders and collecting all the team’s balls and bats and batting helmets and so on into big canvas bags at the end of practices and games.

There was a problem with that. Eric might have acquired a nuanced sense of the game, and to have strong ideas that he could have eloquently defended about the futility of the sacrifice bunt and the much greater foolishness of placing the team’s most reliable hitter third in the batting order, but he was nearly as bad at tossing the ball up in the air and hitting it as he’d been at hitting pitched balls. He actually hit the ball around 40 percent of the time, and then not nearly as hard or as far as the various defensive players needed. The second day he was trying to hit fly balls to the outfielders, he missed completely three times in a row, and then finally managed a weak ground ball that died in the grass 100 feet short of any of the outfielders, one of whom loudly informed nine-year-old Junior, “Your dad’s hopeless, dude,” inspiring much merriment among the other outfielders.

That night, driving home, Junior at first refused even to speak to Eric, When he did speak, it was to demand how Eric could have embarrassed him as he had.

On getting home, Junior got a bat and four baseballs out of one of the big canvas bags and went out into the middle of the driveway. He threw each of the balls up in turn and whacked it almost out of sight down the middle of the street. He turned to Eric and said, “Now is that so friggin’ hard?” He dropped the bat where he stood and went inside, leaving Eric to retrieve the three balls he was able to find.

A neighbor from near the corner had apparently seen Junior hitting the balls. “If my kid had pulled something like that, he’d not only chase the balls himself, but also mow every lawn on the block.”

Eric tried to pretend they were two suburban dads sharing a joke, the. “Well, he’s high-spirited, Eric Jr. No question about that.”

*

If there was one thing Eric Sr. had ached to be when he was his son’s age, it was athletic. Athleticism was the master key to which all doors eagerly yielded. If you were athletic, there was no need, off the field of play, to be self-confident. If you were athletic, you didn’t need to be witty or charming. If you were athletic, you didn’t didn’t even have to be good-looking, acne-free, and firm-chested, unlike Eric, whose genetics thought it would be hilarious to inflict on him saggy boy-boobs where other boys had latent pecs. If you were athletic, other boys wanted to be your buddy, and girls, though they might not realize it at the time, for want of having taken Biology with Mr. Traynor), wanted to bear your children. Mr. Traynor had explained that animals instinctively tried to mate with those most likely to help them perpetuate the species.

If there was one thing Eric wasn’t at 14, it was athletic. Through elementary school, he’d been chosen next to last (because there was usually someone even less well coordinated) in his class for every team. Other boys, playing kickball, would kick the ball halfway to the stars. Concentrating with every fiber of his being, Eric would try to will himself, just once, not to make a fool of himself. Taking a running start at the ball being rolled toward him, he’d commonly shank it, in the tennis sense — that is, strike it with the wrong part of his foot, causing it to stop its pathetic bouncing even before an infielder could field it. On one occasion, the memory of which promised to torment him to his deathbed, he somehow managed to miss the ball entirely, and to wind up flat on his back, lashed by gales of ridicule.

In softball, he was invariably assigned to right field, to which the ball was least likely to be batted. In football, he would be a lineman, either failing to prevent a defensive player to hurtle right past him, or, on defense, being knocked on his butt by an offensive lineman intent on injuring the quarterback. In basketball, he would go whole games without what the television announcers referred to as a touch, as none of his teammates would pass him the ball.

Every semester he, as all his classmates, would be timed in the 50-yard dash. Eric would invariably be the third or fourth slowest boy in the class, and on two occasions threw up from nervousness while awaiting the humiliation of being timed.

He was smart, though. As a fifth grader, competing against sixth graders, among others, he’d finished second in the school spelling bee. He had beautiful penmanship and wrote well. He sketched better than two-thirds of his classmates. And none of it impressed anyone at all except Jill Renfrow, the only other member of his seventh-grade English class called upon to read her short story to the class. Pity that Jill Renfrow was Eric’s female counterpart — an utter failure at the girls’ equivalent of athleticism — beauty. At the end of Jill’s reading, some of the girls said, “Aww,” in that sympathetic way that girls did when shown photos of adorable puppies, kittens, or ponies, except with a tinge of mockery.

Three of the cooler (more athletic) boys pretended to have been bored into noisy slumber by Eric’s story, and then it got even worse, as Jill followed Eric out of the classroom to tell him how much she’d enjoy collaborating with him on a story. Eric, to his eternal discredit, reacted as cool boys commonly did when he tried to join their ball games, with contemptuous incredulity. “Maybe not,” he said, hoping, in the depravity his self-loathing had engendered, that maybe the cool boys would overhear him putting Renfrow in her place, and admire him a little bit.

The funny thing was his implacability. No matter how many times he was humiliated (or pre-emptively forbidden to set foot) on the field of play, he kept coming back for more. He adored baseball like life itself. He spent endless hours throwing a tennis ball at the curb in front of the house he shared with his parents and sister, and then fielding the rebound. (The problem being that the curb, at six inches high, was easily overshot, and overshooting required having to tromp across the breadth of the front lawn, which Daddy wasn’t crazy about anyone stepping on unnecessarily.

In sixth grade, Eric lived in terror of the school bully, the enormous, enormously hateful “Cuckoo” Collier, son of the local Catholic high school’s head football coach. It was generally believed that athleticism and courage went hand in hand, so the better coordinated boys were rarely tested. As one of his school’s least well coordinated boys, though, Eric had to develop a repertoire of strategies for staying out of Cuckoo’s range of vision, and no one would have expected him to challenge “Cuckoo”, who took particular delight in tormenting stammerers, wearers of glasses, and the school’s wheelchair boy, Teddy Schneider. It fell on the school’s best male soccer player, Jaime Montañez, a fifth grader whom Cuckoo probably outweighed by 50 pounds, to finally tell Cuckoo in his tentative English to lay off Teddy. The two had a well-attended staredown on the playground after lunch one April afternoon, and it was Cuckoo who blinked first, suddenly declaring himself a big fan of Jaime, and wondering what on earth two athletes of their distinction were doing arguing over a spas like Teddy Schneider.

Decades later, Eric, noting his son Junior’s athleticism, hoped Junior would follow in Jaime Montañez’s footsteps and stand up for those unable or disinclined to stand up for themselves. When the father of a shy classmate phoned Eric to request a meeting at which they’d discuss Junior’s apparently merciless bullying of the guy’s son, it was as though someone had punched a hole in the overflowing jug in which Eric kept his pride in Junior. The classmate’s father had proposed coming over to Eric’s and Leanne’s, but Eric suggested a Starbucks for fear of the guy threatening to drown Eric in his own swimming pool if he didn’t rein Junior in. It was, and had always been, Eric’s way to imagine that anyone who challenged him had more productive testes and harder fists. He couldn’t take a chance of being humiliated in front of Junior, not after the endless pep talks he’d given the boy about never allowing anyone to push him around.

He needn’t have worried. The other dad, Roy, was cordial and almost apologetic about having requested the meeting, and seemed not even to have considered trying to intimidate Eric. But then he spoiled everything by confiding that, as the son of alcoholic parents, he, Roy, had been a bully himself as.a kid. “There was a period there when I was lashing out at everything and everybody,” he said, as Eric’s heart descended a little bit. It had taken sports to give Roy an outlet for the rage he felt. He’d won a college scholarship as a star of his high school football team, as which it had been his job to make the opposing quarterback too nervous to perform well.

“How about you?” he asked Eric collegially. “You play ball in school?”

Eric didn’t answer, but instead said he would definitely have a word with Junior, and that he needed to go.

Junior’s first reaction to the revelation that Roy had contacted Pop was to snort with disgust. “What a complete friggin’ pussy he is. Can’t fight his own battles? Has to run crying to Daddy. Well, I’m going to make him wish he hadn’t. He’ll find out what happens to snitches.”

Snitches! Did the boy imagine himself and his classmates to be prisoners, and not middle school students? “Don’t do it, Junior,” Eric said. “Honestly. You don’t improve your standing by picking on weak kids. You want to improve your reputation, pick a fight with another jock, with a badass.”

“You think I don’t?” Junior said with contemptuous incredulity. Last week at after-school basketball, this eighth grade dude stole the ball when I was driving the baseline. I got right in his face — right in it! Coach and a bunch of the guys had to separate us.”

Not even into adolescence yet, and already testosterone enough for two.

At 12, Junior set a new touchdown record for the Pop Warner league he played in, and was so ferocious on defense that one of his team’s opponents forfeited halfway through the second quarter after Junior caused one opposing ball carrer to have to be carried off the field on a stretcher, and then knocked his replacement unconscious. In both cases, he scooped up the ball and ran it in for a touchdown. The one he’d knocked unconscious was significantly concussed, and missed the six weeks of school.

Junior played basketball during Christmas vacation in a little tournament organized by the local playground, and was the third highest scorer — and believed he’d have been the top scorer if the referees hadn’t had it in for him. He led his Little League in batting average and home runs as a batter, and in wins and strikeouts as a pitcher. The highest grade he got on his report card, not counting the inevitable A in PE, was a C. He explained to Eric and mom Leanne that he thought school was for pussies.

As a boy, Eric had taken a circuitous walking route to school so as not to come closer than two blocks to the local Catholic school, whose bullies made Cuckoo Collier look like Mr. Rogers in comparison. San Rodrigo’s Catholic high school, St. Balthazar, rated far above the public ones academically, and known as a basketball powerhouse, now offered Junior a scholarship. They’d get him tutors for his schoolwork. Junior lasted three weeks before he was expelled for telling his adult Latin tutor, the father of the basketball team’s top player, to go fuck himself.

Eric had fallen in love with the idea of his son being feared. When other parents complained to him about Junior’s ruthlessness now, Eric commonly found himself struggling not to grin, and not to say, “Well, like father, like son.” There was too good a chance that someone might laugh in his face. He contented himself with saying, “Well, his mom and I have always encouraged Eric Jr. to do everything in life to the best of his ability, and I think that’s just what he’s doing.” He’d apologize for any injuries, physical or mental, Junior had inflicted, and sigh, “I’m sure I don’t have to tell you that moderation’s one of the things we try hardest to teach our kids.”

Why couldn’t he, Eric, have had maybe a third of his son’s athleticism and fearlessness?

Eric had read about how many of the world’s most notable athletes couldn’t bear to lose at anything, not the seventh game of the NBA finals, of course, but not a game of gin rummy either. Hearing those stories, he’d felt for the athletes’ families. How very exhausting to have to keep playing until the athlete won.

But this was who Junior was. Eric took him to a driving range when he was 15. He’d never struck a golf ball. Eric had been playing for 25 years, and drove the ball farther and straighter. Eric refused to leave until his own drives were superior, which determination didn’t correspond to the facility’s manager’s commitment to observe the posted closing times. “Well, fuck that!” Junior bellowed. He tried to get Eric to bribe the guy to stay open, but the guy wasn’t having it. Eric tried to break his driver over his knee, and succeeded only in bruising his rectus femoris so badly as to be unable to play in St. Balthazar’s crucial last football game of the season.

Coach Dawson phoned Eric, and started the conversation cordially, telling Eric that he was a fan of Eric’s sports highlights program on KSAA-TV, which he’d been watching from the very beginning. “But if you don’t mind my asking, where did this idea of going to a driving range come from? You’re the boy’s friggin’ old man, for crying out loud. Am I supposed to believe you didn’t know he can’t stand not being the best at everything? Huh?”

Eric hemmed, but had only begun to haw when Coach changed out of what turned out to have been second gear. “You going to answer the friggin’ question or what, buddy? Do you not know your own friggin’ kid?” He was fairly shouting now, and Eric was holding his phone a foot from his ear.

Coach regained his self-control, and got 15 decibels quieter. “Do you know how important the game Friday night is? Well, let me tell you how important.” Every one of the 15 decibels was regained. “If we don’t win, I might be out of a job. That’s how important it is. Jesus friggin’ Christ, what were you friggin’ thinking?” He broke the connection.

Junior found it within himself — with some pharmaceutical help, Eric would have been willing to bet — to play in spite of his injury, but wasn’t nearly at his best. It was his first game without at least two rushing touchdowns that anyone could remember. He concentrated on passing, and shredded the opposing defensive secondary, leading St. Balth to a 12-point victory that made everyone but Junior ecstatic. Junior wasn’t pleased with his receivers getting a fair amount of the attention that would have been his alone if he’d scored his rushing TDs.

He accepted Stanford’s scholarship offer, and was one of seven freshman quarterbacks competing for a spot on the bench. Oh, yeah — right. In short order, he outshone all six of his rivals, and was the team’s starting quarterback for each of the team’s last half-dozen games, and the Most Valuable Player in the Cotton Bowl.

And accused of having raped a 17-year-old coed 48 hours before the game. Four days after the university hired the most expensive defense attorney in the Bay Area to represent him, the girl recanted her accusation. It was widely suspected that she was unlikely to leave the university with crippling student debt once she’d secured her degree.

A few days later, Eric emerged from the KSAA studio feeling good about having just completed what he thought was one of his best shows, and abruptly stopped feeling good when he saw that someone had spray-painted the word Rapist on the hood of his Prius. On closer inspection, he saw that they’d also smeared what he imagined was dogshit all over the car’s sides and rear, and that someone with a sense of humor had written Wash me! in the shit-smeared driver’s side rear window.

It was apparently the handiwork of the four young women — studenty, radical feminists, from the looks of them— now jeering at him from a safe remove. “Are the sins of the child the sins of the father, motherfucker?” one of them hollered. “Is it like father, like son with you and Junior, asshole?” another of them contributed. “Are you a rapist yourself?” The least imaginative of the four managed only, “Fuck you, dude!”

He couldn’t drive with a shit-covered windshield, and had to Uber home, where Leanne was in tears because she’d answered the phone several minutes before to find herself talking to a woman who claimed to be about to firebomb her and Eric’s house. “She’d started out asking if Junior were here. I said he wasn’t, and she said that was too bad because he was the one she most wanted to — forgive my language — fuck up. She said she guessed she’d just have to settle for us.”

“The girl recanted her story, for Christ’s sake!” Eric raged. “I just hope this person calls again. I’ll explain to her there’s such a thing as an unfair accusation.”

Leanne calmed down. Eric had been married to her long enough, though, to recognize the calm before the storm when he saw it. “I told you when he little,” she said, ominously quietly. “I said you were pushing the sports stuff too hard, at the expense of other parts of his personalty. Didn’t I, Eric? Didn’t I?”

He knew he didn’t need answer.

“Get him excited about learning,” she said, her anger percolating. “Get him interested in reading. Get him to strengthen his mind, and not just his muscles. Do you remember my saying that, Eric?”

Now, as she showed no sign of continuing without one, he did need an answer. He sighed and ran his fingers back through his combover. How many times had they had this conversation? “You’re not a boy, Le,” he said. “I was a boy. I know that status among young men is about one thing. Nobody gives a shit about your mind, or about what books you have or haven’t read. They care about your athletic ability. End of story!”

“That was your truth,” Leanne said, seeming to be considering throwing her ashtray at him. “What made you so sure it would be Junior’s too?” This was at least the one millionth time she’d asked that. Hating the very recent fashionability of everybody being entitled to his or her own truth, Eric attempted a conciliatory tone. “Whatever Junior may be,” he said, “it was pretty clear from early on that he wasn’t going to be one of the best minds of his generation. But he wasn’t out of his crib yet when I saw the jock he could become, and has become.”

“How many times have I asked you not to use that hideous vulgar word around me?” Leanne demanded. Experience told Eric that the point at which she stopped discussing the actual subject matter, and instead focussed on his word choice, was that at which he was best advised to head for his man cave, and there to spend the night.

He woke up on his sofa at 5:50 the next morning with the house intact, but Leanne apparently not speaking to him.

It occurred to him that redirecting his viewers’ focus away from Junior might be a good strategy. For months he’d been considering delivering an editorial about athletes who point skyward, ostensibly thanking God for his role in their home run or touchdown or game-winning three-pointer a millisecond before the buzzer sounded to end the basketball game. He thought what the hell and…went fo it.

“As my regular viewers — bless their hearts! — know very well, I think athletes ought to be forbidden to point up at the sky when they do something heroic. Doing so says, ‘Look how humble I am. I’m sharing the credit with God.’ I’m going to admit that I find that a little sickening. No, that’s not true. I find a lot sickening that anyone would believe in a God who has the bandwidth to help them hit a home run or catch a touchdown pass, but who somehow can’t be troubled to do something about children starving to death in Kabul. And what could be less humble than making a big show of your humility?”

The phones began ringing off the hook almost before he’d finished speaking. The vast majority of callers were incensed. They found Eric’s comments blasphemous and insensitive and infuriating. It was wonderful to see athletes acknowledging God’s help! Who did Eric think he was!

It hardly surprised Eric, and he was pleased with having taken everyone’s mind off Junior’s alleged malfeasance. But then, out of the blue, a former classmate — Eric didn’t remember him — called on the air to scoff, “What qualifies Eric Blumenthal to tell athletes what they should or shouldn’t do when he doesn’t have an athletic bone in his body? I was in PE with him. He was probably the least coordinated boy in the whole school. You know what, Eric? STFU!”

So much for Eric’ having come to feel, as his show attracted more and more viewers, that he wasn’t the loser life had so emphatically and insistently told him he was as a kid. You can run from who you really are, but you can’t hide.

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