It would seem simple for most: my brother, who still lives in Boston, has managed to get tickets to game two of the American League Championship Series between the Red Sox and the Yankees, enough for me to take my son and two friends. But after leaving work, I stop before entering the subway: I have a momentary lapse of faith, and it keeps me from going underground.

I hesitate for different reasons: The first is that I’ve always been scared of riding the New York City subway—being greeted by the turnstile arm to the genitals, and then the blast of inhuman-human odor, mixed with dead rat in the walls: like the filthy mop-head smell I remember from being a stock boy in a grocery, it reminds me of being a chump.

The second is that I have a plan, and going under symbolizes my commitment to it—that I believe, on some level, it will work. Back in my drinking days, before I had children, I would’ve stopped in a bar and thought about it over pints and shots until it was too late to do anything—a foolproof system for a fool—keeping me and mine safe from any notion that my ideas make sense, that they matter, and are good.

But I haven’t had a drink in nine and a half years, and in that time I’ve come up with all sorts of plans based on my involvement in theater, film, music, multimedia, modeling, athletics, restauratuering, construction, social activism, academics, and, of course, literature. All of which have helped land me in the spot I’m in: I’m a mercenary—a marginally employed carpenter/adjunct professor with three children—who rarely comes close to making his monthly nut, traveling in social circles I ran from as an adolescent and young adult, married to a woman who deserves better.

Even under the best conditions, my plan leans towards the Byzantine—and the conditions aren’t good at all: It’s 5:35 and I’m in lower Manhattan. I have to make exceptional time to Brooklyn, dump my bags, change and get in the car with low gas and one headlight to drive deeper into Brooklyn and get Alex from a dental appointment not covered by insurance that I’m almost sure I can’t pay for. I have two dollars and some change and I know, in my gut, because I’m too scared to look at the balance, that the bank account is thin.

I have to call someone—my wife, my friends, my brother—to tell them something. I look at my phone, old before its time. It only seems to work when Sprint leaves a text message warning of imminent shut-off. Other than that, the graphics are usually inscrutable, making answering risky for one who’s avoiding creditors and needs to recognize who’s calling. That, along with willfulness—refusing to hold a charge, shutting off when it wants to and turning back on only when certain buttons are pushed in a proper sequence with the right amount of pressure—has, in my mind, relieved me of my obligation to pay them in a timely fashion.

And the last message I got, when putting the kids to bed last night, was from my brother saying that he’d “…sent two and the other two should be in… bar after five.” I wish I hadn’t let it slip—that there was a possibility of going to the game. Between closing the book and turning out the light, the possibility had morphed into a promise. I haven’t physically seen the tickets and I need empirical proof of their existence because my brother is a ne’er do well, an indigent, junkie, liar, who, at the height of a bipolar, megalomaniacal, grandiose delusion, could convince himself that if Pedro wasn’t ready to pitch, then perhaps he should get the starting nod. Mike, my oldest best friend, and Mauro, my newest, know him, know better than to involve themselves in anything that originates with David. But the last contact I had with either, both had similar reactions—boyish optimism. Can you really get them?

So the plan should be simple: Collect whatever tickets exist and scalp them. Then tell everyone that David lied. Watch the Sox on tv; they’re going to lose anyway—the game, the series—they’re already down a game. I pocket my phone, look at the people streaming down the Canal Street station stairs and try to picture the four of us celebrating in the Bronx. I shake it off like a pitcher refusing his catcher’s sign, and consider the worst part of this plan: I’m a black Boston Red Sox fan—the son of one—teaching my own son, my oldest child, while raising him in Brooklyn, to be the same.

And that boy—last year he cried himself to sleep and awake after Aaron Boone drove Tim Wakefield’s pitch over the left field fence. Alex ran upstairs, Mike, Mauro and I went outside. I wasn’t going to drink, but I was thinking about buying cigarettes, and had already bummed a pinch of Mike’s chew. No one spoke, not even a curse. I was swinging a pee-wee metal bat, spitting in the gutter. My wife appeared at the top of the stoop and announced, “Your son is in bed with me. He’s inconsolable.” I went and got him, carried him to his room, laid him on his bed, his younger brother asleep and unburdened—at least by baseball—on the bunk below, and stood while he repeatedly asked the unanswerable question: “Why do the good always lose?” Brown boy, in the dark; I didn’t tell him that our team was the last to integrate—Pumpsie Green—fourteen years after Jackie Robinson debuted in Alex’s home town. I grew up cheering in Fenway’s bleachers along with people who I knew despised me. My father used to bring me there—tell me nothing. My father’s team; my team; my son’s team: I told him, for comfort, “Next year.”

Now he wears his red Damon tee like a shirt of flame and blood and his navy hat like a crown while walking the Brooklyn streets, getting nods from other Sox fans and doubletakes from everyone else, trying to convince himself along with his parents that the northeastern fall is still plenty warm for short sleeves. That boy—thick and wavy shoulder-length auburn hair and bright, new-penny skin. Long-bodied. Languid. His heart-shaped face would be stoical, if not for his big, sad eyes. When he looks at me I think that it’s irresponsible, even cruel to dump my feelings onto him, that I’ve bequeathed him with an inheritance of failure, and that everything I ever said to him is wrong.

But he loves them—whatever it is they are—and I promised him we’d make it. So I go under, for Alex, my boy.

To calm myself on the platform, I stuff my mouth full of gum, trying to create a minty respirator, something to transform the stink into tolerable air. Then I try to think about time in a linear and reasonable way: If a train comes in the next three minutes and it takes four minutes to travel between stops including boarding and disembarking passengers, then I will reach my destination at…

The 2 comes, but I can’t force myself on, only silently curse the folk who refuse to fill the many gaps between them, to answer a call from the mouth of the greater good, to willingly be inconvenienced—although I could think of nothing better at this moment than my own private car: in the chest of every would-be Thoreau exists the fascist-elite heart, longing for the rabble to conform to his vision. So I miss that train and force my way, a man of the people now, onto the next.

In the middle of the dark tunnel, somewhere under the East River, conditions get worse. We stop, get a garbled announcement that could either be apologizing for a faulty signal or warning of a bomb on the tracks. We, save for tinny music hissing through headphones, wait in silence. And my fellow passengers, in their amazing difference, react in conforming accordance, as if the muscles of each and every face belonged to a large shoal of collected unconscious emotion. They do different things—some squint, raising their cheeks and lowering their brows like blast shields; others exhale and let them go slack, resigning themselves to this crypt forever; some don’t react at all—but they all seem to stare inwards, as though the information they need to negotiate this route is inside them.

I try to steal a glimpse at a watch: 5:40; but another says it’s closer to 5:45. I try to recalculate the timeline, but all I come up with is an Olympic-like clock, counting up seconds by the hundredths, the overall and my split time, and the disembodied commentator assuring the audience that “…you can’t make up that kind of time…”

So instead of the clock, I look at the map, the branching lines throughout this city’s improbable underground and trestle system. I fix on the A train, Harlem to Flatbush, to Ebbet’s Field, and see Jackie Robinson motoring around the diamond with impossible speed—speed without regard for his parachuting uniform collecting the air behind him—then his daring lead from third base, the slow side steps, then the spring, turn and dash home, and the unbelievable verdict there.

Coming home is always strange. I have conflicting reactions—feelings—about it. It’s an old townhouse. We came back to New York City after graduate-school exile and rented the first two floors from an old couple who had shepherded it through the ages of heroin and crack. We bought it from them and spent the next three years trying to keep it from falling over. We had some savings, then my wife inherited some money, but as it turned out, not enough to finish the job. So, half built, equity-bled, it exists for me as either our great failure or our great potential, our albatross which some days waddles and others, soars.

Today, I get past it. Action requires a divestiture of emotional baggage, positive or negative. I open the gate, see the oversized envelope, and remember why I sprinted from the Fulton Mall—the fruition of action. But when I pick up the Fed Ex package, I don’t believe the tickets are there. Then I feel deep shame for not believing in my brother, even daring to wish him here, as problematic as he is, he, at least on some level, knows. There’s a wonderful comfort of not having to speak about certain things that one can’t share with the most intimate of friends, in not having to translate for another, sharing knowledge and history in silence. He is from the place nearest to where I am from. And although we’re so horribly far apart on this night, with, unknown to me, an even greater distance to come, our points of origin, in my unguarded, honest moments seem permanent. I have always found a secret comfort in that. It’s a lucky thing to have a brother.

I open the package and the tickets look strange, feel wrong—counterfeit—as though he’d made them himself with a cheap graphics program and a low-resolution printer, neither of which he possesses, which leads me to believe that he’s stolen them. David can’t seem to ask for anything straight, there always must be some current of subterfuge. Perhaps it’s because he doesn’t believe he deserves anything—easily deduced from his upbringing. He didn’t get much, certainly nothing he really wanted, from either of our parents, whether he asked implicitly or explicitly. My sister and I always knew better, when we were young, our mother was a harridan and my father was a bum, but David had experienced something different, a golden-age of Thomas life, which was taken away as my father, assisted by drink, racism and the realization he’d married the wrong woman, chosen the wrong profession and was living the wrong life, slipped down to the low end of his bipolarity, and could never, being so anesthetized by the ugly cocktail he’d been consuming, generate enough mania to shinny up from there.

And I feel myself sinking into nostalgia—a place of apology and forgiveness—which, considering the time just won’t do. I’ve got to get my boy. I cut showering, changing and food. I kick open the door, throw my tool bag in, feel the pump and pulse of my unburdened arms and I’m off to the lot, jaw out. I don’t even recheck the gate as I usually do. Nor do I get despondent that I still have my school bag on my back. I throw that into the car and go: through the local snarl, west to get east, trying to keep my anger down at the first gridlock encounter—that city bus that runs the yellow light to fully block the intersection.

When I reach Park Slope, the Olympic clock comes back—I’m twenty minutes behind, and it will grow as I search for a parking space, stop for gas, or get pulled over for the blinded headlight. And I’m not sure where the dentist’s office is. I start to chide my wife, another brief loss of faith, for having scheduled the appointment, but I curse the appointment instead, and then all dentists—high falootin’ tooth-brushers; criminals.

It takes too long to find a spot so I park at a hydrant on Eighth Avenue, and run down Second Street trying to catch glimpses of names I might recognize, believing that the south is the right side of the street. He’s there, ready, excited, in the way only an eight year old can be; cognizant enough to know what’s happening, but naïve enough to openly tremble with anticipatory joy. More importantly, he’s ready, a sign of mature commitment—no grumbling or barking needed from me. Even his mother is excited—fearfully—in an unknowing way; she knows how inefficient her husband is.

“Any news?” she asks. The question leaves me, in front of my children, with strangers in the next room, to answer discreetly, calmly, about the status of the manuscript of my first novel, which is allegedly on the desks of several major editors. Any news? The phrase makes me bristle. I’m asked several times a week by anyone who knows about it. Some use the question as a conversation starter, some actually care. It has replaced the query: Is it done? Six months of, Almost. Now it’s, No news. People ask, but don’t receive the expected response—enthusiasm or dejection—and look at me strangely (Aren’t you excited? Aren’t you devastated?) I can’t make anyone understand that the book is a very different thing for me—it functions in the world in a different way. For me, it may be art, I’m not sure, but for most, it’s certainly commerce, but we, my family, have everything riding on it, an esoteric manuscript written by a literary nobody. Michaele has even begun to attach numbers to it—big numbers—a dangerous, but strangely comforting exercise for her of quantifying the unknown: the word made flesh.

We are broke and the book is supposed to fix us. It is all we have to barter with in this world, but I’m not sure if my manuscript is the old family cow I’m supposed to trade for the magic bean, or the bean itself, which, of course, would mean it was only the means to a different kind of peril.

It’s what I have. It’s what I have of value. And because, as Auden wrote that “…poetry makes nothing happen…” late at night, I walk, incanting to myself, in the Brooklyn streets “…where executives would never want to tamper…” wondering what alchemy will transform the book, make it useful, so it can, in turn, transform us.

I’ve received rejections. Writing to be published, to sell, is a curious endeavor: one eye on the manuscript, the other on everything else—the darting vexed eye. I pretend to comprehend what I perceive through it, but I’ve never understood what it is to be a professional anything, only an amateur—doing things for love. There is a moment when I fix both eyes on the text, and it becomes unified—achieves a momentary wholeness, but that is only a moment, a heartbeat relative to the strange and uncertain hours, which preceded and are to follow. And then it’s just me—while others, still trying to make me see it as they do—staring into a thousand miles of emptiness.

These early rejections hit doubly. My agent has solicited the large houses first, and as they go, so goes the chances for a large advance. The possibility of a biding war—irrational exuberance in my favor—dwindles with each no.

The second hit is the reason. My first rejection was a three page ode to the greatness of my writing, and that I possessed “…a uniquely African-American male voice… which reminds me of Barbra Kingsolver…” I read it while installing a lockset in a door at home. There were many more contradictions, ill-conceived phrases, and pseudo-intellectual belches, all well-intended, I’m sure, but their overall effect made me want to speed-bore a one-inch hole between my brow to relieve the pressure those jangling viral phrases caused. Michaele watched me with the drill in one hand absentmindedly pulling at the trigger, while holding the letter in the other, gazing dumbly at it. It was the first of many to come.

The hygienist enters the waiting room and does a double take. My wife is white, my children, at least Alex, are obviously biracial, but seeing me is almost always difficult to reconcile. She tries to look at me, closely, covertly, then she scans the kids: The youngest, my daughter, Ella, has blonde ringlets, bronze skin and dark brown eyes. Miles, our middle child, has my big forehead and square jaw. His eyes, usually blue-gray, are tending to the green of his shirt. Next to his mother his skin looks dark, but beside his siblings, he could be anybody’s white boy. But he’s not: he’s my boy. Although now, after saying a bright hello he looks away—a mix of shyness and shame—just five and a half he’s announced many times how much he hates baseball.

The hygienist, having regrouped, calls Miles in for his cleaning.

“Did he really get them?” Michaele asks of my brother. I pat my pocket and she frowns, aware of my propensity to lose things. But I’m not hurt by her misgivings about him—and me—she’d be fool to think otherwise. “Have a great time,” she says, cooling already. Her thoughts turning to our other children and the trip home in the dark with them. “Have a great time,” she repeats, as though to release me. I look at her face. Although we’ve been together for fifteen years, married for eleven of them, I sometimes, still, cannot read it; although if she were being facetious, or even sardonic, I would understand. She, by now, has probably had enough of my schemes, which always require the completion of nebulous and difficult tasks wherein several unlikely events have to take place in order even to begin. And not for the fulfillment of a simple goal—she learned a long time ago that I’m incapable of completing those—but one of high stakes.

Of course, the stakes of this evening could be argued either way—many ways—but what we must now do is get back to the car quickly while praying it hasn’t been ticketed, or robbed. “I went down to my prayin’ ground / fell on my bended knees.” Prayer: a strange endeavor on an autumn night. At times I feel as sure as Mahalia: “My God is Real…” but somehow, by the end, I always feel profane. I’ve always believed that prayer is for giving thanks rather than asking for anything other than forgiveness, but I often catch myself muttering into my shoulder, whispering into my hands, a coded message even I can’t break. Lawdy, lawdy, lord… I sometimes think I keep secrets from myself in prayer, utterances of deals I’d rather not know of and impossible promises to honor, boxed in metallic praise. “I ain’t cryin’ for no religion, lawd, / give me back my good girl please.” Blind Willie McTell, the Broke-Down Engine, petitions God to “… give me back my baby / I won’t worry you no more…” And me: If you sell my book… If you let me win. And who is the appropriate deity for such matters anyway: the god of ambition—inscrutable texts? The god of fire hydrants and motor vehicles? Of bright orange things? Whoever it is she has been merciful: the car is clean, the glass intact, and the bag’s still there.

“Thanks,” I whisper quickly.

“What?” asks the boy.

“Nothing.”

We get in without another word and go.

I lose more time weaving back to the west to avoid the gridlock on Flatbush. Along the way, I alternate between swearing and remembering my child in the back. In Boston, there’s always alternate route, some diagonal side street to speed down. Grids only offer the illusion of choice. When I say things like this to New Yorkers they usually accuse me of geographical bias, but that isn’t so: I’m a Red Sox fan, yes, but not because I’m from there. I don’t like that city. I never really have: from the Metro Police to the T’s early shutdown. I only like the way the Charles looks at dusk as it winds east past Alston—summer—as you follow the twist of Storrow Drive.

It’s really the only way—the bridge to FDR Drive. The anti-terror police who guard the Brooklyn Bridge never seem to move, or even look up at the oncoming traffic, but their presence makes me put down the broken phone, and wonder what they will do with my boy when they lock me up keeps me from trying to resuscitate it.

If I can get my phone to work, I have to decide who to call. My friends are disparate: Both are the over-educated children of immigrants, but Mauro is a corporate IP lawyer; Mike’s just hanging on. They like each other, ask after each other, but like most of my friends, they have to speak through me—the domestic bohemian—the spoke at the center of their strange orbit. Calling Mauro makes sense—he’s the most responsible the most together of the three: his life is scheduling and planning—a staff of associates, meetings around the world. He has a digital organizer/phone amalgam that he constantly manipulates and from which instantly retrieves information. Somehow though, calling him would be disloyal to Mike, copping to the societal charge that the both of us are flaky. I rely on dubious rhetoric: If Mauro had my life, how would he do? I decide to call Mike, knowing it’s wrong.

When I get it turned on I negotiate the phone book blind—counting the entries until I think I have Mike’s number. I think for a moment that it may be redirected to collections. The call goes through, however my small thrill is erased by the three ascending tones that connote his phone has been disconnected. I call Mauro. His voicemail picks up. I get a quick hit of panic—another curse—and I babble his mission into the phone.

We keep pushing uptown—off the drive—First Avenue, then Third. I keep trying to call Mauro. The phone keeps shutting off. I throw it, curse, speed, stop, turn, search for the phone—my boy sits quietly, taking it all in. What do children hear? What do they see—staring out the window watching the city flash by? The blocks give way to one another. The buildings change. The faces change. Does he place his own in the crowds? In the windows: shopkeeper, sidewalk sweepers? The gamut of city life: I used to feel a part of the lights and bodies, but its impact has faded—its newness. And I have faded to it—another lone, random, transparent man who can no longer claim his place in this land’s orgiastic future. I wonder what promise my boy sees, what he believes he’s promised. What will happen to him when it’s broken? What will happen to us when it’s kept? How will he negotiate his failure or success?

I never saw my father rush. But I rarely remember him ever being on time. He missed many things—pee wee games, recitals, plays, parties—and made us miss many things. I certainly never saw pre-game batting practice and never made it for the first pitch until I was old enough to take myself to Fenway. He always moved at the same pace. And I don’t mean this in a petty way, he could certainly walk quickly or drive fast, but I never, as a child, remember his actions having any urgency to them. Perhaps it’s because my mother seemed to always be on the verge of hysteria—flailing about, slamming things, grabbing her children by the wrist, skipping octaves and volume levels on her way to revelatory anger.

When he’d come for visits I watch for him out the window. Sometimes he’d be two or three hours late, but he’d climb out of the car and saunter towards the door unharried, unruffled, without showing a hint of guilt or shame. I remember feeling conflicted inside: I was happy to see him, but frustrated and angered by his pace—hurt. Those slow steps seemed to say I didn’t matter much to him. And at that time, I was sure that we were the only people who understood each other: it made sense.

My sister, Tracey, was included—she got a mitt, posters, the same things as the boys—but only marginally so. And though he made gestures towards some kind of proto-feminist notions, he was too much the philanderer—he didn’t have much use for women who were smart, or elegant or strong. My brother, his namesake, and my father never seemed to get along, perhaps because David looked so much like our mother. He acted like her too: impetuous instead of measured; openly fearful instead of stoic. That fear made them tend to be immediately cruel to whatever made them feel vulnerable, helpless, or small. And by the time my father left, David was already somewhat solid, a fixed entity who didn’t display the traits my father so desperately wanted in his children: Emerson’s pragmatism; Thoreau’s recalcitrance; a Kennedy-like ambition, and a Robinson-like fire, equipoise, and grace. I was that child. I read as well as he could’ve wanted, ran as fast as he could’ve hoped, and valued the things that he believed he did. I looked like him: and I was the son who perhaps most fathers hope for—the son who listens and learns.

As we grew older, my siblings became closer to him. I was the one who left him behind. His small, weekly failings combined with his later partial abandonment must have added up to a larger sum than I could tolerate. By the time he reached middle age he was toothless, homeless, and the great ideas of the great men he read to me when I was a child seemed to have been nothing more than appropriations—a cover for stepping out on my mother and weekday afternoon beer. I’d go months, and for one stretch, years without speaking to him. I’m the only one of his three to have children, which ironically, brought me closer to my mother, and made my father and the choices he made seem all the more strange.

We make it to Eighty-ninth Street and double park in front of Mike’s building. Whenever I tell people he’s moved out of Brooklyn to here, they raise their brows, revealing two things: they don’t believe that Mike could ever afford the Upper East Side; that they don’t really know the neighborhood—it isn’t the one they think of with towers and doormen blowing whistles for taxis. This is an old ghetto—German immigrant I believe—composed of tenement walk-ups and side streets piled high with trash, corners with grimy bodegas or diners serving bad meat.

He buzzes us in. Alex is transfixed by the dim and flickering fluorescent sconces along the hall. His apartment is at the end. His door is cracked open. He pokes his visor out, then a hand, and waves us in, slowly. I almost call out for him to rush, but out of the traffic, I realize that the frantic drive was to get here. Alex senses the new calm as well. He exhales, making me realize he isn’t immune to the stresses that weigh on me.

Mike is putting on an old coat of mine, and gathering things at the same time: chew, pens, wallet. He picks up what looks to be a dirty mug, half-filled with coffee I sense to be old, and instead of dumping it in the sink of the makeshift kitchen, he finishes it with one pull. He straightens his coat, feels for his keys and finally acknowledges Alex.

“You wearin’ that hat, Mush?”

Alex nods, suddenly shy around a man he’s known all his life.

“Good man. Proud man. Brave man.” Mike says with gravity that would call for a hand placed on the boy’s shoulder, or at least a pat on the head, but, with a hint of his own shyness, he straightens his own hat—at least twenty years old—and points to the door.

Alex follows Mike’s finger with his eyes. He doesn’t show it, not this quickly, but he’s always been fascinated by Mike, how he can appear or disappear at any time of the day, how he seems unattached, even to me, but at the same time, in spite of his mystery, he’s a constant—always there when needed, a ditch to be dug, or something to be moved in or out. Loyalty. Trust. Intimacy. We’re a model for his relationships: Mike’s been my friend for almost twenty-five years, and I can tell that Alex sees it’s both comforting and awful—growing older, with the joy and sorrow it brings, takes a long time.

Things slow down and coalesce, or are simply forgotten. Mike and I have this effect on each other, sometimes so much that we lose sight of the task and get caught up in something else—a sudden realization of the importance of human contact and community.

Mike isn’t part of the program. He doesn’t have the life almost every adult male Alex knows, he doesn’t condescend, doesn’t pander to the young. And as Alex approaches his teen years, he’s demonstrated a world-weariness and disdain for order that most of his friends seem to need. He celebrates anything that will jerk him from the mundane. And so Mike’s ramshackle apartment makes sense—the sprawl—books, CDs, scribblings, sweets, manuscripts, projects at various stages of completion or abandonment. Mike’s been a painter, sculptor, actor, novelist, playwright, entrepreneur, fiancé, and hobo. Now he’s an English teacher in Harlem, where to his students and colleagues, he’s just a weird white guy. Alex feels at home here: the smells must be familiar, though concentrated, as though this place was the epicenter of all things wild, creative, subversive and free.

Mike, one of the last people I know without a cell phone, has borrowed his girlfriend’s. He takes it from his pocket when we get outside. My brightly blinking hazards snap us out of our contentment and we share an awkward, anxious moment in which we are alert, but aren’t sure what to do.

“We need to call Mauro. We’ll try him on the way.” I volunteer.

Mike nods continuously, from stepping off the curb around the car to the passenger door. “Yeah,” he finally drones. We both curl our brows and nod our heads as though he’s said something profound. I break this trance by starting the car. He flips open the phone. It’s strange seeing Mike using electronic devices. He’s not a Luddite: he has a keen interest in technology. I suppose it’s because I’m used to seeing him with a paintbrush, or a ball of clay that watching him manipulate a mouse, or peer into a small, lighted screen and fiddle with tiny buttons looks wrong.

He negotiates the technology and planning—a few quick words to Mauro—with such ease that I feel ashamed to have doubted him in this or any other moment that’s passed; old friends, how they, thankfully, can sometimes let us down.

“He’s meeting us outside the stadium.” He says calmly.

I can’t help myself. “He’s got the tickets?”

Mike can. “He’s got the tickets.”

I almost question him again, but I relent and shift into drive. He exhales in an exaggerated way, then tries to recline his seat, but all he gets is the futile buzz and click of the broken power seat.

He inhales, “This car is diminished.”

“Where’s yours?” I ask, omitting the expletive.

Mike snorts, and from the back Alex offers, “We’re getting a new car.”

“Really,” answers Mike. “What kind?”

“I think a minivan.”

“Your father would wear a Yankee hat before he’d drive a minivan, pal.”

I can hear my son smile. I check the rearview for confirmation. It reconfigures his face, makes it open and bright. And he looks like a boy, full of energy, optimism, and trust. “I know,” he giggles, uncool, but uncaring. “My mom wants one. When the book sells, we’re going to buy one.”

I check the mirror again. The smile is gone, replaced by an open mouth—the moment before speech. He’s squinting too, as though trying to recognize a familiar object in the dark distance.

“Well,” says Mike. “Diminished or not, this is a fine car.” He lowers the window. “See, this works.” And he spits from a pinch of chew we hadn’t seen him take. A poor shot; it doesn’t clear the car door.

“Dude!” I bark.

“Sorry.” He hunches and starts rubbing at the dripping stain with his sleeve, swirling it with the suede, giggling as he does. Alex pipes in with a lighthearted whisper, “Gross,” and we’re off.

For twenty blocks nothing matters, not even getting there. Alex gives us an impressionistic retelling of his last trip to Fenway, getting the Damon shirt from the store where we’d gotten the Nomar shirt two years earlier. “Well, you’re a little short, but ya got the right hairdo. Can ya grow a beard yet, Mush?”

Alex doesn’t answer, but as though remembering other drives to other games asks if there will be a lot of traffic. Mike says, “Nah,” but I swing the car back downtown and start trolling the blocks for a spot. “We’ll get the 4,” I chirp, as though the notion of going underground is a reasonable one. Everything’s fine until were all on the curb and I see my glowing bag and whisper, “Fuck.”

“You can probably leave it—stuff it under the seat or something,” offers Mike, but I’ve had, over the years, enough car windows smashed. And even in this golden age of gentrification—this newly benevolent city—even I know it’s a stupid idea. Glowing orange juxtaposed to the charcoal interior. I take it out and suddenly feel its weight. It’s filled with seventy-odd uncorrected papers on Huck Finn. I remember the puzzled looks on the faces of my students when I asked them if they could come up with their own topics, and the greater bafflement when I asked why they thought Huck and Jim float south on the Mississippi to get north when they could have simply crossed over to the Ohio side of the river from the start.

I haven’t looked at them, nor have I looked at the others: thirty-two on Invisible Man and the difference between spiritual vision and illusion. I wonder if I’ll wind up underground, marginal and ranting, narrating my life to no one and the lives of those who have long since left me behind. The weight hits me—the unpaid bills, the errant past, the uncertain future—and I have to brace myself against the car, hoping that Alex doesn’t see. He does, so I furrow my brow and instead of folding, I straighten and lean, stretch my calves and slowly shake them out. Mike helps by doing a few slow trunk twists and mumbling, “Wicked tight, Mush.” This satisfies my boy, who tries to loosen his already supple limbs as well. Mike copies Alex. He knows the drill. He’s seen many of my public panic attacks: on runs, when I suddenly question my heart rate; in the middle of a movie—the narrow exits, the strange folk, the wall of fast moving light, and in darkness, the heart-shaking tremors. He’s watched me talk myself into ambulances and out of emergency rooms. When we were housemates sometimes he’d be awoken by my pacing and urgent breathing along with the trips to the bathroom to check in the mirror if I could detect imminent death in my reflection.

It’s the other side of tension, the result of too many strange and uncertain moments I seem to thrive on. That pre-panic that makes me feel real, here, a part. It’s difficult for one to fully comprehend the absurdity of one’s existence, but it seems possible to make sense of grappling with the tangible representations of an ironic life. There’s always a collection agent ringing, or some shit job you have to take, or the failed emissions test, or the smug professionals at the birthday party where you lurk on the periphery wondering how they figured it all out. Or some inscrutable form you have to complete to grant you temporary relief from your blues. The understanding becomes (if I could just do this or that; pull two all-nighters; work some double-shifts; punch that fucker in his face) solid. That’s the only thing to get you to action—the real danger.

There can only be so much of this, and then the ironies really do manifest. First, I get weak, afflicted by instantaneous atrophy. My hands become dull claws; my feet, hooves; my limbs and trunk, soggy tubes, and my head is gone—only a slack mouth and vague eyes remain. I’m aware of every nerve though, every hair and follicle. Across my skin crawl various parasites, which disappear with and return after every wipe or scratch. And though I want to drift, “…wander lonely as a cloud…” all I can do is scrutinize the depth of my breathing, count my heartbeats and wait for them to stop.

I have mantras for these times. My favorite is You can’t take me anyplace I haven’t been before. Which in my head sounds more like the second half of an R & B refrain. I never, when I start, believe it will work. But does, sometimes more quickly than others. I can tell the attack is subsiding when I start trying to think of the unknown first half of the line.

When I’m in possession of my body again my senses seem sharpened, but I’m without any kind of emotion or intellectual response to what I perceive. The car exhaust, the strange warm moisture of this October night—I’m an objective observer of my own experience except there isn’t much of me there. The best I can do is liken a panic attack to a system crash, and feeling is among the last sectors to come back on line.

Living like this is easier. I know this is an ignorant statement, because I rarely live like this. The subway entrance, the stairway down, the thick and moody air, even the teeming platform full of bodies is free of metaphorical weight. And from the way my son moves freely, close to my side, following my unseen cues, it is better for him. We are, after all, going to a game—What the fuck? I make sure we squeeze into the next car.

What are fathers supposed to look like? How are we supposed to act? Alex—in primogeniture—leans into me as if I know. He is a quiet boy in public—obedient, stoic, mimetic—he wears his father’s public face as though it is the face to don, with, perhaps, little or no idea of far apart my affect and content are.

The last time I drank was the first day of spring, 1995, three months before we knew he was coming. I remember saying to his mother that I was glad I quit before we knew, that it had been my choice rather than a reaction to impending fatherhood that had caused me to act responsibly. I don’t know. Even now as we use each other to balance as we twist through the tunnels his boy shoulders seem to bear an unfair portion of my weight. My own father burdened me, in the end, with absence. I suppress a panic wave by staring down at him—the shock of auburn hair, still summer-bleached, not fully tamed by the hat; the red one, so that from behind or the side he couldn’t be mistaken for a Yankee fan. His coat tied to his waist; he’d never asked if he could take it off. I squeeze his shoulders, try to transmit something through my hands to him, but he doesn’t respond. I feel the gap between us—the growing gap for him. He wants to be me, but he wants to please me. He cannot do both. And he can’t know—not yet—that this is a trap for him. He may see my mouth move, or hear me whisper, but he doesn’t know that what I pray for is the power to transform, not to be me.

What does my son see? What does he follow? I followed my father because I loved him—cheap-suited and smoke-rank—I loved him. I can’t remember ever saying it to him, though, not even as a ceremonial sign-off, not even when he said it to me. I’d hoped it was my own quiet mimesis, my loyalty to things he loved that told him. Maybe I was hedging, trying not to reveal too much to a man I could never trust—something I sensed. Alex never says it to me, maybe he’s hedging too. By the time he was the age I am now, my father was irreparable, but I remember looking at him, thinking about him. I held out for his redemption way past time because I think I wanted to tell him when I felt he was whole. Maybe Alex feels that way. Perhaps he senses if he said “I love you, Dad” what little of me I’d managed to piece together would fall apart. My boy: I hold him by his shoulders on this crazily rocking train, while we burrow through the guts of Harlem, north.

We get through it: the slow ride; the violent shaking; the white girls with pink hats who try to talk to us through my child; the people who seem to want to force us back onto the train, and the long, open-air passage leading to the stairs. Mike, pressed together with so many milling bodies, can’t help but mooing. His bovine pleas draw looks—his hat, his punk-smirk—but no one says anything to him.

I see Mauro down on the street below. He’s the only person in yellow, a ski jacket, which back in our neighborhood has become trademark for him. His hat is white—nondenominational—nothing he wears speaks of an allegiance to place or team. And when we meet him, he looks to Mike and Alex—their shameless badges—shakes his head slightly, starts to say something, but grins instead. It’s a great American snapshot: the Italian immigrant; the first-generation Irishman, and the brown mutt-folk. What would de Tocqueville have said about this coming together, this momentary commonality?

Alex seems to think it’s just fine. Mauro is one of the few men who make sense to him. I wonder what my boy sees there. I always look at my friend and wonder how he came to make the choices he did. I know his father counseled him—people counseled me too—I never listened. Mauro, however, respects his dad still. It’s strange how our fathers embraced the American drive to prosperity in different ways. Frank Premutico brought his young family here in the early seventies, Eamon O’Reilly split time as a boy between Paterson New Jersey and Ireland. I don’t think my father ever left this country, and his ancestry is mixed, dating back from the early nineteenth century to perhaps the first mound-builders of the southeast. He, however, in many ways, can be considered the least American—by fate or choice. Or he perhaps leap-frogged the generations of wealth building to arrive at a strangely entitled transcendental state—released his progeny into the big sea. Mauro, however, is the only of us who can now comfortably indulge in the elegant life of the mind. Mike comes home after school to his two rooms, sometimes enraged, to his drafts and his books and his ill-fitting rear window. And my skin is starting to burn from the gypsum dust fused into my jeans.

I have to check my bag of papers at an arcade near the stadium: if not for that we’d be on time for the first pitch. No one seems to mind though. We’ve made it, here, at least. We all pause and smile at each other. We’d been together the year before for their fantastic win over the A’s in the first round of the playoffs. We’d created rituals together. We ordered the same food, sat in the same places. Every night, I wore a Ted Williams shirt that I’d made for myself with a red marker and an old white tee. We strung together expletive-filled lines of praise and profanation. People have told me in different ways that the celebration of moments like these—temporary, though sublime—is for losers. Losers value epiphany over actualization; thought over action. The idea of the Red Sox winning is beautiful; the idea of cosmic justice is, perhaps, as well. And while I can’t make much sense of conflating the two, being with my son, and my friends on this night, knowing that the odds are against our team—that I probably will never win either—doesn’t, in this moment, matter. And so none of us can believe that the tickets work. Again, there’s a moment: We stare at our stubs, then each other, smile. Alex mumbles, “Thanks, David.” It’s quickly lost though, when someone coarsely bellows at us from somewhere inside the catacombs, “That’s child abuse!”

Alex doesn’t pretend not to hear it, nor does he pretend that it isn’t meant for him. He knows and proudly assumes my affect—a raised eyebrow, twisted mouth—everything except for flipping the bird in the direction of the voice.

This takes the starch out of us though—the microcosmic heckle—as we get a hint of what’s waiting for us at the top of the runway. “This place is awful,” he says. “Fenway is a park: this is a stadium. It’s all wrong.” Mike and Mauro nod. I put my hand on his shoulder. Yankee Stadium, say what you want about its heroes—Ruth and Gehrig, DiMaggio and Mantle—is a shithole. It’s more like a dank, outer-borough subway station than a sports shrine. No one can burnish or brighten those dim catacomb walls. The only thing alerting us that we were going to watch baseball is a vendor of sodden hotdogs—too long for the bun—floating in their lurid, oily bath.

Until we hear the roar. Rather than an approaching train, it sounds like a polyphonic beast in its lair, warning us not to enter. I, out of reflex tug at his shirt and ask, “Do you want to go in?”

He turns and looks up—annoyed—in his stare I see an accusation of cowardice. He looks up the ramp. “Maybe it’s the lights. The sky looks wrong, that’s all.”

“A wrong sky?”

“Yeah, but it’s alright.”

When we reach the ramp, see the residual glow from the thousands of watts, we all pause and tighten as a pack. Alex leans into me. And before I walk into the light, still hidden by the tunnel, I scan the field. Someone is on—Jeter, I think—and the roar, without the protection of the concrete shakes my ribs. The roar morphs into a chant: “Who’s your daddy?” They’re mocking Pedro. New Yorkers, first citizens of the West: I’m always stunned their smug didacticism—their fear-bred surety. Who’s your daddy? The chant is too convenient for our arrival, and the four of us all seem halted by the question.

I motion for the others to hang back and walk into the full light and noise. Pedro’s in the stretch. I turn and face the crowd—not really people, just light and noise—until my eyes adjust. “Who’s your daddy?” Some stomp between the chanting.

Something must happen on the field, perhaps a conference on the mound, because the crowd lets out an enormous collective groan. Then there’s the eeriness of 55,000 going quiet. Then Alex steps out of the tunnel and everyone in the center-field bleachers seems to see him. That coarse voice shouts again—“That’s child abuse!” There’s a whistle a few boos, then that awful quiet again. Alex’s face is blank, giving them nothing. Mike appears, followed by Mauro, who can’t escape being implicated with Mike, who pulls on the bill of his cap and glares blindly up into the stands.

They make their way to their seats, whistled and jeered at the whole way. Alex and I start too, left into the throng. He moves up the stairs as though he instinctively knows to pretend as if he knows where he’s going—that he belongs. And in a strange sense, he does. The faces are like his—different shades of brown—so unlike Fenway, where, when mounting the stairs to the bleachers, it seems that all the white people there, no matter what colors you wear, greet you with a scrutiny reserved for trespassers. “Brave kid!” someone shouts. I almost nod the stranger’s way.

They lose. I remember the game much as though I’d experienced it as an overwhelmed child—through a syrupy haze. It’s odd being a spectator without the appropriate cues—standing only because the view is blocked. I remember my roiling innards. In Sonny’s Blues Baldwin’s narrator speaks of a great block of ice that settles in his belly from which ice water courses through him. Sometimes that block expands as though his guts will burst. Dread. I carry mine in my chest—I always have, even before I knew of the problems of the Thomas heart. There’s tension around the sternum, there’s the feeling that I can’t expand my chest. The horror is the sensation that my heart is on display—no bone, no flesh—that anyone could grab it; like when you’re a child with an open sore on your hand or knee that attracts all kinds of foreign matter—lint, sand, strange hair—to bond with the discharge. The silt in the wind, the humid stink will stick to my heart. And now, being so close to its workings, its tenuous operations, I see no reason for it not to stop—other than faith. I pray: Please don’t let me die here. And I look to my boy who’s staring blankly at the field. I find the strength to raise my hand, touch his back.

“Do you want to go?”

“No.”

In Fenway, you can see the surrounding city, hear other things, but there’s nothing beyond this mass of bodies—their collective moan, which surges to another terrible roar. We sit. We stand. We don’t enjoy the game, not even in the most masochistic sense. The exquisite anxiety, joy, and dread one can feel when watching baseball—that microcosmic epic, that sensation of being alive never comes. The game happens out there, under that wrong sky. When the Sox are up, I pray for hits—strikeouts when the Yankees are at bat—but I don’t really believe. Nothing feels right. I keep asking him if he wants to leave. He keeps saying no. but there’s less conviction with each reply. Ten rows back to the left, Mike and Mauro look stoned on laced pot. And I check my son again, whose gaze, across the hours, goes blanker, or grows deeper. When Olerud hits his home run, I pray for its annulment. As he circles the bases, the thunder shakes us both: 3-1 Yankees. Alex takes my hand, stares into nothing and mumbles, “This is the strangest night I’ve ever known.” I pull him towards the aisle. He resists, shakes his head slowly. “They just have to win.”

There’s nothing worse as a child than to be more of an adult than your parents; for a boy to be more of a man than his father, adopting stereotypical stoicism, demonstrating magnanimity that you can’t possibly afford. You cannot be in the moment because you cannot survive the moment. Disassociation, though, is only an illusory protection. You may not feel anything at the time of impact but, eventually, you must endure every moment. When the tall ships sailed into Boston Harbor to celebrate our bicentennial, my father covertly asked who I wanted to spend the day with. When I was a boy, my mother seemed to me far tougher than my father, and so I went with him—off to some rooftop inferno, I don’t remember where, but I like to say Charlestown, as I remember, parking the car, walking the foreign streets, and even in the elevator, that dread of scrutiny I always felt going to a neighborhood in which I didn’t belong—West Roxbury, the North End, Savin Hill, Southie (although even my father wasn’t altruistic enough to take his children there). We were to make a day of it, up on some tar-roofed inferno.

There wasn’t anything to eat, at least not for my finicky self, only mayonnaise-laden salads and strange meat, a dangerous raw bar. I scraped the seeds off crackers, and de-crusted the onion bread. He scolded me for wasting food and drinking too much soda. My father’s rebukes were always mild, but they hurt because he was, in spite of himself, my only conduit to reason. He knew things: when to bunt or steal; that it was okay to have pizza and French fries; the way he chuckled when I cracked a joke that no one else seemed to get. His assessment of things always seemed fair, unbiased. He gave me space, trusted my understanding of protocol. And so the rare times he tried to dictate my behavior it hurt, doubly so, because I never wanted to disappoint him, and because I always knew his tension stemmed from the fact that he was doing something wrong.

And up on that roof, in the July heat with all the strange white folk, and no possible way to get a clear view of the incoming ships. I got into the punch. And when he sought me out later to find me in a vertiginous state, he asked, “Do you want to go?” He had a mixed drink, which seemed strange, because he almost always drank beer. He was sweating through his shirt under the arms and at the belly. “David,” a woman said from behind me. She rubbed my shoulders. “This can’t be any fun for him.” I wanted to wriggle out of her grasp. But that would’ve been rude. She took my stillness as acceptance and started rubbing my neck. I didn’t recognize her ice or her touch. And even if I had, it wouldn’t have mattered much—with my father, along with the dynamism, the freewheeling comes the blurring of definitive roles. I never knew who anyone really was. There was never my friend or girlfriend, only uncle and aunt.

And he left me with aunt whomever. She found a pair of binoculars for me and pointed me to the general direction of the boats. And when I got tired of looking at the magnified sweaty napes of the partiers, I retreated to the darkness of the stairs to drink my punch and watch the wavering scene. Sometimes my father would come into view through the half-open door. No one seemed to be doing much though but occasionally sip at their drink or stare out at the unseen harbor.

I remember his face, his breath when he found me asleep in the stairwell. I was too big to carry by then, but he helped me up, made sure I said goodbye to the strangers, the hosts I didn’t remember meeting. Then, finally out in the late afternoon streets, hot and thick with bodies. I threw the blood-red punch up on my shoes.

Who’s your daddy?

I look at my boy again: I don’t know what he can stand. I take him by the arm. He politely pulls away. “Are you okay?” He nods, but I don’t know if he’s lying, and if so, why. His eyes aren’t blank anymore. He’s back from wherever he’d escaped to. Now he just looks young, sad. I don’t know if that rift from self has already begun.

To be desperate: It’s awful, the quiet negotiations one makes inside oneself—the secret bargaining no one else is privy to. Afterwards, can you strike the brokering from memory—renegotiate, or at least, rephrase what one whispers to oneself. And what is the wish, what is the world you desire when you return from those inner chambers? What becomes of the one who descended to make that deal?

I pray again, though I have nothing to barter with, no guarantee to extend to whomever may be listening. I’m not sure what it is I’m praying for: not to die, not to lose—my team? myself? And perhaps it’s the thunder that keeps it from being heard. I shake that notion off: the highest order of prayer is unspoken. I close my eyes. I squeeze his arm. I see my half-built house, my manuscript on a strange desk. I feel that surge of momentary terror, as when the phone rings and I know it’s a collector, confirmed by the foreign condescending voice that follows my wife asking callers to leave a message. I hear my voice in my head: If you let them win, I won’t ask for anything else, ever.

So there, in the thunder, under the wrong sky—to win—I give what I have away.