Read an Excerpt
Daylight had started to creep through the blinds of the waiting
room. The tan vinyl couches and pallid green walls had the look
of a bad hangover. There was a little too much of yesterday left
in it. Yesterday's newspapers, yesterday's coffee cups, and
yesterday's occupants, all in assorted modes of pacing or
sleeping or staring dourly at the TV.
"Chuckie," my mother nudged, "come ON!"
Christ, I hate being Chuckied. I am forty-four years old, and my
name is Charlie. Charlie Feldman. No one gets away with
Chuckie-ing me anymore. No one but the fabulous Sophie. Who, like
all mothers, acknowledges only under duress that I am an adult.
Her preferred vision of me still involves little brown corduroys
and cowboy suspenders.
Of course even the most cursory reality check should alert our
Sophie to other signs of my being full-grown. Such as the fact
that I am six feet tall (okay, five-eleven), weigh one hundred
eighty pounds, and am beginning to gray in a way that I don't
exactly pull off as distinguished. Further proof that I am a
certifiable adult is the fact that I have spent nearly twenty
years covering sports for the Chicago Sun-Times.
Unfortunately the assholes masquerading as editors have refused
to give me the column that I, like all sportswriters, feel I
deserve. Even so, I have won some national writing awards, and my
byline is not unknown.
Except maybe to Sophie. Who does know it. But doesn't read it a
lot. Sophie has a hard time getting into sports. Abe, on the
other hand, the one currently on the respirator and who maybe has
seen my byline for the last time, reads every single word. Twice.
Maybe three times. The old man can hardly get enough of my
dazzling prose. Part of it is that my younger brother Roger is a
podiatrist. There is not much conversational follow up when you
tell people your son is a podiatrist. But when you tell them your
son is a sportswriter, you can have a conversation for days.
Abe and Sophie have been married forty-seven years. Most of that
time was spent behind the counters at Feldman's Children's Shop,
formerly of Rogers Park, subsequently of Skokie, currently
extinct. Since then, they have happily divided their time between
Florida winters and Chicago summers, causing Abe to marvel, "Who
ever thought I'd be living year round in white shoes?"
However, right now Abe was the only person in the room without
white shoes. He was surrounded by three nurses on monitoring duty
when Sophie and I pushed open the door. It was six-thirty a.m. on
Sunday, and Sophie and I had been at the hospital since four the
afternoon before. Roger and his wife Elaine had left at ten last
night to go home to their three kids.
I hadn't seen the old man since four in the morning, and wished
like hell that waxy, gray look he had would go away. "Dad. Hey,
Dad," I whispered from the foot of the bed, "you're looking
great. How ya doin'?"
Abe looked like he was trying to be doing good. It wasn't that
easy. I'm sure all he wanted was for it to be the way it was. The
way it was Friday before he collapsed with a massive heart
attack. Or the way it was three years ago when he and Sophie went
to Roger's kid's bar mitzvah. Or the way it was thirty years ago
when he and Roger and I would sneak away from the store, take the
El down to Wrigley Field, and play hooky for the day. I bet Abe
didn't care which "way it was" he went back to, just so it would
be anytime but now. Now he must be scared shitless. I was.
There hasn't ever been a whole lot of talk in the Feldman
household about dying. But now, if we got through this part
without the dying really happening, we would never be able not to
think about it again. We all knew that.
"Abe-y," whispered Sophie, "it's Chuckie."
"Mom, he knows. Right, Dad? She just can't believe that she
finally has you where she's always wanted. With all those tubes
down your throat so you can't tell any of those lousy jokes."
Abe almost smiled. But it was more than he could handle. His eyes
closed )mmediately. Sophie and I spent the rest of our allotted
five-minute visit standing in a conversation-less holding
pattern. And hoping the next time we'd be allowed in, we'd get a
little more of Abe back.
As the morning progressed, the hospital began to take on more of
a full Sunday look. Pre-church and post-church families with
straight-from-the-supermarket cellophaned carnations started
streaming in. This group to see their dying father, that group to
see their dying grandmother...The thing I noticed most was
that they all arrived in groups. Sunday is always a big group
day. When you're alone, you feel Sundays in a tough way. Tougher
even than Saturday nights. At least Saturday nights are dark. You
can hide. Or you can hang out with a buddy. Granted, in my case,
I'm usually hanging out with a bunch of guys in face masks at
some hockey rink. Or I have for the last three years. That's when
they took me off baseball, and I started covering the Blackhawks.
But even during the summer when I'm off, Sunday is the day that
you notice your oneness the most. Everybody shows up in some
version of a unit. Nuclear families, extended families, divorced
dads with their kids, divorced moms with their kids, divorced
dads with their kids and girlfriends, divorced moms with their
kids and boyfriends, straight couples with no kids, gay couples
with no kids, and kid couples who you hope like hell are smart
enough not to have kids. Just about every kind of demographic
mutation always seems to show up full-force on Sundays.
Except singles. Single guys, anyway. Single women get together on
Sundays. But not us guys. Not guys my age. No way am I going to
call up a guy and say, "Let's get some brunch and watch the game
at the bar." For Chrissakes, I'm forty-four. My friends aren't
available for games. My friends are married. Or they are
divorced. But on Sunday they all have some version of family or
fatherhood to deal with.
Like Bobby. Bobby Tuckerman was my best friend all the way
through Senn High School. Then after college, when I came home
from Michigan and he came home from Madison, we shared an
apartment for two years, until Bobby met Sherry Lowenberg.
Three's a crowd in a one-bedroom apartment. So I moved out,
Sherry moved in, they got married, and now they were the proud
owners and operators of Jennifer, Joshua, and Jason Tuckerman,
ages seventeen, fourteen, and eight, respectively.
I started out pretty involved with their kids, in an Uncle
Charlie way. But once Bobby and the family went suburban out
there in Deerfield, I've been less inclined to show up in their
lives. Bobby and I still talk on the phone regularly, but the
one-on-ones with each other have definitely dwindled. Part of
this has to do with the half-hour drive between us and my being
out of town so much. But it's also his wife-driven social
schedule, the kids' gymnastics tournaments, and soccer coaching.
It isn't that I begrudge Bobby any of this, but it does make it
tough to relate. Tough to connect to this parenthood club that he
and most everybody else seems to belong to. But me.
Christ. I hate how that sounds. I hate guys who gripe. It makes
me seem like some mope vying for a spot in the Lonely Guy Hall of
Fame. But waiting rooms do not bring out the best in a person.
They make a person think all sorts of
who-is-going-to-be-sitting-in-the-waiting-room-for-me thoughts.
It's a little tough not to notice that you are careening toward
fifty and seem to be the only son in the room who hasn't had the
opportunity to be a fine father too.
Watching the couple across from me clinging fiercely to each
other made me feel as if I were at a drive-in movie all by
myself. How hard was it to fall in love with a person, make a kid
with that person, stay in love with that person, have fights with
that person, raise your mutual kid with that person? How hard was
it to stop living in chronic float?
I was still waiting for it to happen. The wife, kids, two-car
garage life. Not that I had been doing much to make it happen
these past five years, with hockey keeping me on the road nine
months of the year...
Dammit. I am not going to blame it all on the job. This job was
always the dream. To get paid to go to ball games? It's the
greatest fucking job a person can have. I love sports. I love the
commitment and the intensity of the athletes. And at some naive
level, this job has always made me feel that I've had it better
than most. For twenty years I have been immersed in a world that
I find consistently compelling. Not everyone can say that. But I
have paid a price. Twenty years on the road catches up with you.
It sure as hell makes it even more complicated than it already is
to hook up with a woman. Unless you're talking about a pretty
low-maintenance type. And women you pick up in saloons after
you've filed your stories might be fine for some guys, but it
isn't the solution to the emptiness gnawing at me.
So there I sat. In the waiting room, in the middle of everyone
else's extended family. And I decided. Enough. I had to get ahold
of my life. I had to stop wishing for something I wasn't willing
to take any risks to try to get. I wanted some roots. I wanted
some connection.
I wanted a kid. A girl, a boy, a baby. Now.
Of course, even if I started right that minute, even if I walked
out of the hospital, fell drop-dead in love with a woman, and we
made a baby right there in the parking lot, I'd still be
somewhere around sixty-four when the kid graduated from high
school.
Christ, it was depressing to do those "even-if" mathematics. But
it was hard to stop doing them. It was hard not to wonder where
your life was going when you were on the road with guys who were
your age, but had kids going to college. Or when you were on the
receiving end of Christmas cards with snapshots of kids going
from babies to braces in what seemed to be three years. Well,
those things had happened to me, and they had me adding and
subtracting like crazy.
But not multiplying.
Truth was, I wanted a kid bad. Nobody ever talks about the guy
biological clock, but it was ticking loud and clear in me. It had
been for years. And I did not have a lot of time left. Not at
forty-four. Nor did I have a lot of options.
Because unlike a woman, who could go to a sperm bank, select the
father of choice, and then ride off into the sunset of single
motherhood, the system doesn't work that way for us guys. A man
who wants a baby can't purchase an egg. It's more complicated.
Eggs come from wombs, and wombs are attached to women. And women
don't like to give up babies. That's one of the great things
about women. So, at some level anyway, a man who wants a baby is
going to be very involved with his co-babymaker. And as long as
you're involved, it might as well be with someone you like. Love
even. Guys don't want to just have a baby. Even when we want one
as bad as I do. We want a package deal. We want the full
catastrophe, not parenthood without a partner. That would scare
the shit out of me. Nope, no way was I about to walk into this
baby-having business alone. But I most definitely wanted to walk
into it. I was ready. I was sure. And my daddy clock was ticking
big-time.
Now, I am not a religious man. But I'll tell you one thing.
Sitting in that waiting room, right down the hall from where my
old man might be dying, I found myself cutting a deal with God.
"Okay," I said, "if You let Abe live, I will do my level best to
get my life in order. I will stop procrastinating. I will get off
my ass. I promise. I know I've let a lot slip by. But I know I
can still put together a life here. Honest, God, I'll do all the
things I haven't done in years. If You let Abe live, I'll get an
answering machine that works every time. I'll learn to like sushi.
I swear it, God, I will even date..."
And then I had to laugh. What the hell was in the deal for God?