Family & Fatherhood

Me and the Boy

By: Rick Bragg
May 3, 2008 - 4:42:43 PM

In the summer of 2005, I became the closest thing to a father I will ever be, because I loved a woman with a child

A man who chases a woman with a child is like a dog that chases a car and wins. How many times since then have I stared at the boy in dumb wonder and muttered: "Son, if your momma had just been homely, think how much easier my life would have been." The idea of having a boy had always nibbled at me. I could imagine us in a boat in the deep blue, casting into lucky water, talking about life. But the idea of a boy is one thing, while the reality is you spend your last spry years at the Sonic, stabbing at a big red button, then watching him baste the interior of your truck in root beer and barbecue sauce as he squeals, whines, pouts, and punches every button on the radio till all you can get is static and satanic howls.

But I would tolerate the little boy, for the woman. I believed I was catching him at a good age. He was house-trained, past diapering but still too young to borrow my car or ask me questions on sex, about which, of course, I would be forced to lie. I did not expect much. All I wanted was a brave, clean boy who would take out the trash, be kind to his mother, and occasionally bathe the big dog, which also came with the marriage and smelled as if it had already died. It would be nice if the boy was coordinated, had good oral hygiene, could catch a football, did his homework, and did not run buck naked in the house. I should have lowered my expectations a little, to "house-trained." He refused to hold his fork right, transforming me from what I always believed to be a real man into an etiquette-quoting popinjay. I watched him, amazed, as he chased a single green pea across a plate and dumped a mountain of mashed potatoes on the white tablecloth, all of which he would have scooped up and eaten if I had not threatened him with charm school. He showered as if he were running through a waterfall, barely getting damp before shouting to his beleaguered mother, "Where's my pants?" If she did not respond, he would run naked after all. She had to inspect him after every bath because he would not use soap or wash his hair, or else wash only the front or back part of his head, hoping that would be the part she chose to inspect. I was a boy once too, but I did not look greasy after a bath, or festoon the backseat in used tissues, or sprinkle the floor mats with takeout biscuit crumbs as if I needed them to find my way home again.

"Enjoy it," said the woman who bore this troglodyte, "because that little boy will disappear before your eyes."

"When?" I asked, hopeful.

I almost ran the first time I saw him eat pancakes. He covered a table—and his upper body—with syrup, and then spread it like plague across a new day.

In one restaurant, he managed to get a gob of spaghetti sauce on his underarm. "You got some…" I said, pointing.

He licked it off. I did not think it humanly possible.

In another, he blew his nose so loudly at the table it trembled the water glasses.

"He's yours," I said to the woman.

If he did not like the taste of something, he just spit it out.

"He is not unusual," the woman told me, but I saw doubt in her eyes.

I hoped a boy so nasty would be tough, gritty, but instead this was a child of piano lessons and gifted schools, a child once rushed to the hospital with a tummy ache, where an X-ray showed that he had merely overdosed on cinnamon Pop-Tarts and Chick-fil-A.

He yelled for his mother to come stomp a spider.

He wept from a boo-boo or if he was tired.

It seemed too much, that the boy would be gentle, pampered, and nasty. I guess it might have been easier if he had looked, sounded, or at least pretended to be a little like me or the boy I remembered myself to be. But on trips, he traveled with his own pillow and blanket, which he called his "blanky." He needed them, he said, to be "comfy."

"Boys," I said, "do not have a blanky."

"Yes, they do," he said.

"No, they—" and I gave up and walked away.

He was too pampered, too helpless, I thought, to enjoy or endure the company of men like me. He was a sensitive, loving, gentle boy who said his prayers without being told, loved his momma, and, to my horror, attached himself to me with fishhooks I could not pull free. At night, in front of a television frozen forever on Animal Planet, he used me for a pillow, and no matter how much I chafed or squirmed or shoved, he always came back. I would fret and the woman would smile as he dozed on my shoulder, a toxic wad of neon-green bubble gum hanging half out of his mouth. He followed me like a baby duck, stood glued to me in restaurants and stores, and expected me to hug him, as nasty as he was. I hugged, grimacing, as if I had wrapped my arms around a used Porta Potti. He even expected me to tuck him in at night, and as I did I wondered what had happened to me, and who was this nearly neutered man who stood in line for Day-Glo nachos and sticky juice boxes and paid good money to see March of the goddamned Penguins.

I will never forget the first time I saw him. He was still just a roly-poly little kid, playing in the white sand with his cousins on the Alabama coast.

"Hey," was all I said to him, but I thought: You're going to be my boy. I'm going to have a boy, after all this time.

"Hey," he said, with just half a glance, and went back to burying his cousin in the sand. I watched him awhile, then went to the souvenir shop and bought him a shovel. If you're going to bury somebody, bury 'em.

The woman said she never truly worried what kind of stepfather I would be, but I did. Everything I knew about being a father, almost everything, was wrong, twisted.

"You will spend time with him," she said. "That's all you have to do."

But I didn't recognize this kind of boy.

"He's not different, he's just little," said the woman. "You never were that little, were you?" I hate conversations like this. Am I 12 now, but I wasn't 12 then? Hell, I can't keep up.

This woman protected her son from everything sharp. She even cut up his apples, lest he come into contact with a paring knife.

He had never lit a firecracker and run away.

He had never fired a BB gun at a tin can.

She still ran his bathwater, lest he be chilled or scorched. She sat on the edge of the tub and talked to him, so he would not be alone.

"He likes it when I talk to him," she said.

"Well, I hope he gets tired of it before he goes to college," I said.

I have read of boys in plastic bubbles who had more adventure. The woman and boy lived on a dead-end street, what suburban people call a cove. The boy was allowed to ride his bicycle only on that street, never out of sight. I would watch him, circling, circling. I thought of a hamster on a wheel.

I had believed that being a boy was about getting away with things, just short of murder, and if you got lucky, you could still be a boy when they lowered you into the red clay. What troubled me most was not that he was bound, but that he did not seem to mind it.

I was born into a people who could cuss the horns off a bull, before revival and after dinner on the ground, but he lived in a world rated G, with candy sprinkles on top. Once, in the car, I let slip a damn or hell or some other entry-level curse, and the boy puffed up like a toad and said his mother would not allow me to speak in such a vulgar fashion.

"Well," I said, and looked up, down, left, and right.

"Is she here?" I asked.

He told on me.

He asked for me at bedtime to tell him a story, but I never felt comfortable. Even though I made a living telling them, I knew few suitable for children. Most bedtime stories I told involved loose women and began with "And she was so damn drunk.…" I finally told him he was too big to be tucked in. The woman cornered me, breathing fire. "If he tells me he does not want me to tuck him in, if I lose that, because of you…" she said, and left the rest unsaid. I thought she was going to cry, or punch me in the nose.

We battled like that, good and evil, for the boy's immortal soul.

I had always loved speed, and as I turned 40, I bought myself one last rocket ship. It was low and sleek and the color of a silver bullet, and James Dean died in one like it. The first time we were alone together, the boy and me, I put the top down, told the boy to buckle in tight, and we left that safe middle-class neighborhood behind in a hot wind. I let the engine roar before shifting, and as I popped the clutch, it felt like we were riding on a pulled-tight rubber band that had been let go. A boy who doesn't thrill to speed could never be a boy of mine, and as we flashed over the asphalt, he oddly raised both hands heavenward, as if pleading for deliverance or a soft landing.

I wanted to twist that engine up to a hundred, to show him how it felt to fly, but it seemed wrong to torture a boy who was calling to the Lord, so I eased off. I knew that if I hurt the boy, the woman would kill me and drag my bones behind a minivan, so I eased off some more. He looked like he had something to say, so I asked him what was on his mind.

"Rick," he said, "why am I here?"

I had just started seeing his mother. I wanted to tell him the bald truth: 'Cause I'm after your momma, son. But I didn't.

"'Cause your momma is my friend," I said. "So I want to be your friend too."

He didn't say anything to that, but I could almost smell the smoke from the gears spinning in his head as we swooped off the four-lane and geared down, growling into a turn.

He raised his arms again, as if in surrender.

I told the woman about it, how he raised his hands, like he was giving himself to God.

That wasn't it, the woman said.

When he rides in a convertible, she said, he likes to shut his eyes and pretend he's on a roller coaster.

He raises his arms, she said, to show her how brave he is.

"Rick," the boy asked, "how do you punch somebody?"

We were supposed to be taking a walk.

"You never punched anybody?" I asked.

"No," he said.

I did not know what to say.

"Will you show me?" he asked.

I guess I should have told him there is rarely a good reason to punch someone, that it is better to turn the other cheek. I should have evoked Gandhi and King. I should have told him that the meek inherit the earth and all that razzmatazz.

"Make a fist," I said.

I tapped the bridge of my nose.

"You hit here, one time, hard, and it's over," I said.

"Why?"

"'Cause it hurts real bad," I said. "Their eyes will water, and they will cry."

"Then what?" he said.

"Then they will run to their mommies," I said, "and tell on you."

"What if they don't run away?" he asked.

"They won't be able to see good after you thump 'em good that first time, right?"

He said he supposed so.

"Well, thump 'em again."

He was named, this boy, for a man who wrestled an angel, but had lived a life free of contention, free of consequence. I wished I could tell him it would always be that way, but all I could do was teach him how to bloody another little boy's nose.

"Repeat after me," I said.

"Hurt 'em quick.

"Make 'em cry.

"Go home."

Father of the year.

"What if they try to step back when you swing?" he asked.

"You try," I said, as I reached out to tap him on the head. He lurched back but could not move. I was standing on his foot.

"Oh," he said.

I told him most little boys swing wild, from the side, and don't connect with much of anything. I lost as many boyhood fights as I won, but I learned. I tried to show how to block, jab. "You punch straight ahead, like driving a nail," I said.

I could hear my father's voice in my head.

"Is it okay to cry?" the boy asked. It's not even okay to ask that question, I thought.

"Try not to," I said.

I am not, usually, an idiot. I knew I was being a little careless with the boy, the way I was with everything else. It is easy to teach someone to throw a punch in abstract, but it's hard to explain the sick feeling that precedes any violence, even playground violence.

So I told him to walk away when he could.

"Is that what you would do?" he asked.

"Not on your damn life," I said.

He was confused now.

"I have run," I explained, when I knew I couldn't win and the cause didn't seem worth the pain. But I was always sick after. You choose the sick feeling you can stand most, the one before you fight or the one after you run away. But that was complicated for a 10-year-old.

"Son," I said, "I once ran away in a Mustang." I told him that the rules of conduct, from the school, the church, his beloved mom, didn't matter much in the dirt if you were getting hurt.

"You bite," I said.

He looked amazed.

"It's fine to gouge," I said.

Then his mother walked up and I was in trouble again. She would raise a gentle boy if she had to lock me in a shed.

"He doesn't need to know," she told me. I nodded my head, hoping that might spare me.

It never has.

"He's 10 years old," she hissed.

I told her, yes, he was getting started late.

"You are 12," she said. Still, I tried to modulate my behavior around the boy. Once, he asked me how to defend himself against a bigger boy.

"Kick him in the…" and I searched my mind for a Baptist word.

"Kick him in the scrotum," I said.

"What's a scrotum?" he asked. He walked around giggling for an hour and a half. So when his mother was not looking, we boxed in the living room and sparred in the yard. But the boy wanted to be a fighter like I wanted to be a fat Italian opera singer. He smiled when he punched, he giggled, and I knew he might live his whole life, a complete life, and never strike another man in anger.

It was like she drove a tenpenny nail through the last feeble, halting heartbeat of the man I was.

"Can you pick the boy up from school?" the woman asked.

At 46, I drove car pool.

At first I was terrified I would run over half a dozen nut-job children on the way to get him, because when the bell rang, they exploded from doors as if propelled by a cannon. They all wore the same damn clothes and all looked alike to me, at least at first, and what if I got the wrong one? I was always afraid I would be late, or he would perish from the elements or get in a car with a stranger, even stranger than me.

But I always snagged him clean, and we headed for the Sonic, for his tribute. The boy, the woman instructed me, was to have only a small drink, maybe a slush of some kind, so he would not "ruin his dinner."

It was a surreal thing, to hear that, like she was emanating from the speaker of a black-and-white television from 1963.

But the best thing to do, I had learned the hard way, was to make like some bobblehead doll.

Few men get in trouble when they nod.

I know the boy liked it when I showed up. I watched for him in the rearview mirror, and when he saw it was me, he started to grin.

"Hi, Ricky," he always said. Nobody but he and my momma get to call me that.

"Let's get us a treat," I always said. The Sonic was just around the corner.

"What do you want?" I always asked the boy as I punched the magic sugar button and the voice on the other end said hello, and he dutifully gave his modest order, like the good boy he was.

One day, about nine months into our time together, I punched, waited.

Three seconds is a lifetime at the red button.

"May I help you?" the voice said.

"I would like a 44-ounce root-beer float with vanilla ice cream and a corn dog," the boy said.

I just looked at him.

"Please?" he said.

"Your momma won't let you," I said.

"Well," he said, looking around the truck, "is she here?"

I thought a minute about that.

"Well, okay," I said.

Over time we were found out—I would learn that the boy had a perverse need to confess all of his sins to his mother—and she said I had to be responsible, said her son had not inherited a stepfather but a coconspirator.

I told her I would do better.

Not long after that, another driver almost hit us as we drove through town. People in Memphis all drive like God is on their side.

"I know what Rick would say," he said from the backseat.

"What?" she asked.

"He would say, 'What the hell does that damn fool think he's doing?'*"

Then he just grinned, all proud of himself.

She stared into me.

"What?" I said.

"Don't 'What?' me," she said.

I knew I needed some vitriol here, some passion, to get out of this.

"Shame on you," I said to the boy. "Just because you hear me say things, that doesn't mean you can say them. If I were a smoker, you couldn't smoke. If I were a drinker, you couldn't drink. You're a little boy. You are not me. You are not me."

He beamed.

He had root-beer residue on his cheeks.

He had stains on his school clothes I did not want to think about.

His halo hung lopsided on his head.

And in mid-rant, I started to laugh, not at the boy in front of me, but at the boy I was such a long time ago.

From The Prince of Frogtown , by Rick Bragg, copyright 2008 by Rick Bragg. Published by Alfred A. Knopf.


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