Catch
I had a father for six months.
I met him when I was seven years old. There was a knock on the door of our prefab house, and my mother, who had been in the kitchen throwing cut vegetables into a bubbling pot of Ragu, smiled down at me and said, “Who could that be? Why don’t you go and see, baby?”
She knew who it was, of course.
It was June 5, 1976 and my father had just been released from prison for burglary. I knew none of this. My father had taken a Greyhound Bus from Folsom to Albuquerque, New Mexico. He had been on the bus nearly two days. He had spent his time playing Go Fish with a couple of kids about my age, whose mother wanted nothing to do with them. She had a headache.
I knew none of this.
My mother never had a headache.
I threw the door open.
The man was tall and very thin and a bit pale. He had a bunch of daisies in his hand, wrapped in cheap green cellophane and with the price-tag still on them. He looked around a hundred years old to me, but I was seven and anybody over thirteen was over the hill. He had a red baseball cap on, the kind that’s sized, not the cheap plastic-backed kind with the adjusting tabs in back. He had a baseball glove in his other hand, which he had stolen from a kid’s backpack at the Greyhound station in Phoenix, Arizona, while the kid was in the bathroom taking a leak. He had a big stupid grin screwed to his face, and there was a tooth missing on one side. A bicuspid, knocked out by a prison guard who caught him smoking in the laundry room, instead of folding.
He said, “Hey, buddy. How’s it going?”
I turned around and yelled: “It’s some guy selling flowers!”
He said, “I guess you don’t remember me.”
I was confused because he wasn’t a Mexican like the other guys who wandered around selling Cheapo Flores in Albuquerque.
“Better let him in, honey. It’s hot out there.”
My mom must be nuts, I thought. I’m not letting some jerk in our house.
Some Jerk said: “I’m your Dad. But you don’t have to call me that, just yet. I guess I’ll have to earn that.”
My mom came up behind me, wiping her hands clean on her yellow half-apron, and they stared at each other. I don’t know how long. I was in my room with the door slammed shut, face-down on my bed. It could have been hours.
It was a big shock for me, seeing my father for the first time. My father who had been ‘away’ since before I could remember. Just ‘away’, and somehow I had known never to ask questions. I had seen pictures of him, but pictures are just shapes on paper and this was a man. The glove he gave me helped me get over the shock. You can buy kids off easy.
That evening we played catch in the flat white light of the motion sensor lamp mounted over our front door. He would be still for a moment, and it would go dark. He would move to throw, and the lamp switched on, and there was the ball, already halfway to my mitt, coming out of nowhere. I would catch it most times, or miss it and it would bounce away, out of the light, a dull whitish spot under the half-grown bushes that framed our property. If I caught it he said, “Great catch, buddy!” in a way that made me want to cry and throw myself at him, burrow right into him and stay there loving him, hugging him so he would never go ‘away’. And if I missed it he would say, “Don’t worry about it,” in a voice that made me want to kill myself because didn’t he know I was a failure, a scabby little brat with an upcoming F in math that I hadn’t told my mother about?
Everything was love and death.
When he stopped moving the light went out with a click and he was gone.
When he moved he was there again. Like a magic trick. I scrambled to catch the ball.
He had no glove but caught the ball bare-handed and didn’t even wince. Because he was magic. Because he was my dad already, even though it would take me a month to say it to his face.
Even though I couldn’t stand it when he touched my mother.
We lived way out on the West Side of Albuquerque, where it starts petering out into the desert again. We lived a stone’s throw from Route 66. There were plenty of lumpy vacant lots to go BMXing in with the other kids, but that was about it. The ice-cream man didn’t make it out that way much, but there was a market where you could buy pop-ups and orangesickles. I sped around on my BMX, new that Christmas, jumping off the dirt mounds, spectacularly happy because it was summer, because it was Saturday and because I had a dad. My friend Jimmy said, “Hey, who’s that guy sitting out fronta your place?” and I said, “That’s my dad, you dumb bastard.”
