King of the Mild Frontier (15 page)

“She cried all the time,” he said. “My wife walked out the door and she started crying and I couldn't shut her up for more than fifteen minutes at a time till Deeana got back. I felt like a shit, you know. I should have been out there making a living while Deeana took care of the kid. I swear to god the minute Deeana would walk back in that door, Shauna would shut up. I started thinking the kid hated me.

“I already knew I had trouble with my temper,” he went on, “but I was doing pretty good. When things got too bad, I'd lock myself in the bathroom until I could pull it together, then go back out there and perform my matronly duties.”

I knew what was coming. Using willpower to control rage is like building a house with a ball-peen hammer and thumbtacks.

“One night Deeana comes home and I'm out back smoking a little dope to calm myself down 'cause Shauna has been bawling and fussing even more than usual, and Deeana gets on my case because I'm not watching her. I am, just from a distance. We get into a fight and then Deeana tells me she picked up another shift. We need the money,
but I don't want her to go because I'm about to the end of me. Shauna shut up the second Deeana walked in, as always, and she started up again the second Deeana walked out.”

He stopped and gripped the arms of the chair. “I gave her the bottle and checked her drawers and nothing was wrong, but she just wouldn't shut the hell up. I should have walked off; I didn't want to hit her, you know, but I was a little too far gone, so I just kind of grabbed her and…” His voice trailed off.

“You shook her,” I said.

“Yeah.”

“Where is she now?”

“This place in New Mexico,” he said.

“Did you go to jail?”

“Sure did.”

“How long?” I asked.

“Not as long as I should have. Six months. I'm still on parole.”

I took a deep breath. “So, what do you want to do?”

He
took a deeper breath. “It's what I don't want to do,” he said. “Deeana's pregnant again.”

Oh,
man.
“You guys are still together?” Not many relationships withstand this incident. Not many
should.

“Yeah,” he said. “We're still together. Been apart a
couple times…” He looked at the stack of charts on my desk. “You can't be writing any of this down,” he said.

“I don't have a choice,” I said. “I'm already famous around here for not having my charts up to date.”

“Then this should make you immortal. Actually, I don't want anyone even knowing I'm here. I'll pay you straight out cash.”

I said the center didn't allow us to do private practice from there.

“You can do anything you want in this place,” he said. “Nobody knows.”

I asked how it was he knew so much about this place.

“You kidding? No matter what else I got sentenced to, growing up, I always got sentenced to here. Law figures they got to put you in counseling if you pee in a doorway.” He didn't hold counseling in particularly high esteem. I said that.

“Hey, man,” he said. “You ever checked this place out…I mean, get to know your colleagues? Hell, I bet I've stormed out of more doors in this place than you know exist.”

He was right. It was a real crapshoot when a client came through intake. The center was where people went who had the means for nothing else.

“But you're here.”

“That's because my buddy told me about you. He said it helped.”

I reminded him that that particular buddy ended up leaving his family so the kids wouldn't be removed.

“I know that,” he said. “But he said coming here helped him see he didn't have a chance, that it was best for his old lady and kids if he just stepped away.”

He was right. His friend had at least left with less rage and a better understanding of his anger; a knowledge that he probably wasn't going to get it under control and would, without divine intervention, be dangerous to his family if the stars lined up right. Like everything else, success is relative.

“Okay,” I said. “You don't want to be leaving tracks all over the mental health center. I'm assuming Child Protective Services knows your wife is having another baby. Are there stipulations; are they requiring you to move out when the baby comes?”

He shook his head. “I completed the anger management classes they made me take and went through a program through the department of corrections. I'm cured.” He said the word with a certain amount of sarcasm.

“So what do you want?”

He said, “I want to make sure I don't hurt this new baby.”

Within a very few sessions it was clear Jonah was less risk to his new baby than he feared, and a lot less risk than many guys who would be allowed around their kids. His sense of regret and shame was so great that it was highly unlikely he would let himself get that far out of control again; plus, he had thought at the time that shaking the child was a lot less dangerous than hitting her, which is, of course, not true, but which said he could call on a certain amount of restraint. He also had learned to keep himself out of situations that could lead to long periods of caring for the new baby alone. He had gone back to selling drugs on a limited basis, and Deeana would be the primary caretaker for the new baby.

Our job was to help him find a way to live with himself. While his rage was—while nearly all rage is—focused on self, his was now
clearly
focused on himself. The amount and intensity of self-contempt for what he had done was palpable, and at its greatest intensity he was in danger of losing almost any relationship he might have. We worked through his life: Received his allowance in grass—marijuana—from the time he was six years old, could sell it or smoke it. Held the record for being the youngest child ever locked up in juvy—eight. Thrown out of school at least three times per year up until his freshman year in high school, when he took the hint and simply didn't go back (though he was more
knowledgable and articulate than many high-school or even college graduates I've known). Everything about him smacked of loss, of
not good enough.
Left by his father, neglected by his mother, ass kicked by his brothers. He spoke of Deeana as if she were a fairy-tale goddess, far prettier than he deserved, far smarter than he deserved, far more honest, and far more loyal. She gave him a family, and he broke it.

“She's just down there,” he said of his firstborn. “She'll never be any better or any different; just bigger. Deeana and I stayed down there awhile. After I got out of jail, I went to see her every day, but finally Deeana made me stop because most times I couldn't quit crying, and when I did, I'd get mean, like I was trying to make her leave me as some kind of punishment. I hated my own wife because she was willing to be with me after what I did.”

The baby was born. Jonah was very uneasy. He loved her with the same fury as the guilt that ravaged him. Weekly we met, and weekly we stayed in exactly the same place. I don't know how many times I required a nonsuicide pact before letting him walk out of the room. Deeana came in with him several times, carrying her beautiful, soft, gurgling baby, and Jonah would sit in the far corner of the office and stare.

Finally one week when he came in alone, I said, “Jonah, we have to figure what we can salvage here.”

“Well, I'm not forgiving myself, you can forget that.”

“That's up to you, but we still have to salvage something. You've got another little girl there. You've got a wife. They're waiting for you, Jonah.”

“Maybe I ought to leave.”

“And maybe you will,” I said. “But you came here for a reason. We haven't talked about one thing you didn't already know before you came in. And you came anyway.”

“I think I have to leave.”

I said, “And go where?”

“Streets,” he said. “Back to dealing full-time, I guess. I can make a lot of money doing that, keep Deeana and Shyla in style.”

“Some style,” I said. “Living on drug money that could dry up in a second because the old man gets busted. Tell you what, before you decide on that path, you think long and hard. I want you to come back when you've thought of one thing we can salvage. If you haven't come up with it by this time next week, don't come in; wait until you do. If you come up with it this afternoon, call and I'll get you in. Whenever. The next thing you and I are going to talk about is what you can salvage.”

Two days later he called, and I canceled my next client.

“I know what it is, Doc.” He knew I wasn't a Ph.D.

“Shoot.”

“It's not much.…”

“Shoot. It's more than we had two days ago.”

“It's this. Now it isn't worth it, and you'd never prescribe it, but…Shyla's going to have a lot better dad because of what I did. There's nothing I can do about Shauna now. Nothing. But I can give Shyla everything I was going to give her anyway, and everything I was going to give Shauna. I mean everything. All the love. All the toys. All the clothes.”

He was quiet a minute, waiting for me.

“One more thing. I can give her mother the same. I can work and hold my temper and love her and make sure she gets to go to chiropractic school and whatever else because that will make her a better mother because she'll be happy.” He waited again. Then, “Well, what do you think?”

I said it was more than I could have thought of, which was the truth. I said it was the best.

“It won't stop hurting,” he said.

I agreed.

Jonah stood up and shook my hand, and that was the last time I saw him. I wish I thought his predictions all came true, that he provided and loved and gave his way to redemption. If that's true, however, it would be my first experience with that. More likely he limped along doing his
best when he could find the best in himself. Statistically, his chances of making it with his family aren't good. But he lives in my writing heart. A hero is only a hero for the moment, only a hero when he can sift through the pieces of his life and find something to hold on to, something that is him.

So my heroes are like Jonah and they're like Michael Jordan on his knees
after
the heroics, showing us who he is. They're Chris Crutcher with the balls to pull on that coonskin cap one more time, believing he can turn his pimply face into that of a rugged frontiersman. They're Jewell Crutcher living her final seventeen years in sobriety, brought on by the fear of never being able to care for her grandchildren. They're Arthur Ashe having lost his physical grace to the ravages of a coldhearted virus, only to show twice that grace in his humanness. They're twenty years of men and women forced by the law or child protective services to come to the mental health center for “help” who finally stood up and said what they did and who they were. What an amazing place I've been given to stand and watch. What a rich pool for stories.

WHEN MY NEW EDITOR,
Virginia Duncan, finished reading the foregoing chapters, she quickly e-mailed me with: “You write about athletes and athletics all the time. You still play basketball; you've even entered triathlons. How did you get from the dweeb I read about to what you are today? Something is missing.” I wrote back: “Hey, nobody told me an autobiography had to contain the truth. Jeez.”

I do sign off on those foregoing chapters as true to the best of my knowlege under penalty of perjury, but of course there's more. Living in Cascade, Idaho, was like living in a Larry McMurtry novel, only it was small-town North
instead of small-town South. There were precious few avenues to “become.” I grew up idolizing athletes from Mickey Mantle to Michael Jordan, but none of those superstars stands any taller or takes up any more space in my memory than Jack Hull and Dick Earl and Jerry Ready and Dave Lowry and the Bilbaos and the Hirais: the guys who stood on the Rambler sideline, helmets in hand, sweat running from their foreheads, nodding at the coach, then tearing back to the huddle with the plan that would bring our purple-and-gold eight-man football team to triumph. These guys brought hundreds of our townsfolk out on the dark, freezing nights of the long Idaho winter to watch them go to hoop wars with the Vandals or the Rangers or the Lumberjacks. Some of my best grade-school memories are of simply standing around after a game, listening to those guys recount their heroics. But it was hard to measure up. With a July birthday I was young for my grade,
and
what little athletic DNA flowed over the generations splashed mostly on my brother, John, and my sister, Candy.

My ninth year, 1955, was the first year of organized Little League in Cascade. I already knew from playing backyard baseball with the kids in my neighborhood that I wasn't much of a ballplayer. I couldn't keep my eye on the ball at bat or in the field. When I saw it coming in my
direction, it might as well have been a bullet. But everyone was excited when the adults began forming teams, and I had to be excited, too. I wasn't hot for practices or games, but I couldn't wait to get a pair of cleats to hang over one handlebar and a glove to hang over the other, and though we weren't allowed to wear our T-shirts anywhere but to games, we could wear the caps anywhere, and the idea of being identified as a member of a sports team was about as good an idea as there was.

I started working for my dad at the service station that summer, and though my parents always worked hard to make ends meet, the paycheck I earned might have made me the richest kid my age in town. My folks required me to deposit half my paycheck in the bank for future college tuition—or bail money, whichever came first—but the other half was mine to spend as I pleased. I talked myself into believing I would be a much better ballplayer if I had primo equipment, and down at the Cascade Merc, which is like a general store, was a genuine leather, Warren Spahn-autograph model baseball glove. I would have much preferred a Mickey Mantle or Willie Mays model, but Warren Spahn was what they had and Warren Spahn was what I saved for. I waited through three paychecks, bought far less candy and no forty-five rock-and-roll records. I
dreamed about that glove, saw the tiny horsehide growing as it came toward me from the sky, then landed with a plop in the webbing, saw my teammates cheering and slapping my back. When I'd finally saved the dough, I pedaled down to the Merc, walked through the front door, and laid hard cold cash on the counter in front of Bob Gardner, later of Fourth of July fame. My brother showed me how to massage the glove with neat's-foot oil to soften and toughen the leather, then gave me a hardball to place in the webbing so I could wrap the glove in twine overnight to form the perfect pocket. For the first three games of the season I'd used one of John's old gloves out in right field, and though I hadn't come within ten yards of catching a fly ball, this was going to change things. Warren Spahn, whoever he was, wouldn't let me down.

I hung the glove on my handlebars and pedaled all over town the day of the next game, hoping people would notice. None did, but undaunted I showed up early at the field to play catch with anyone who would throw the ball with me, then took outfield practice when the other players began to arrive.

Just after Coach turned in his batting order, he called me in, put his hand on my shoulder, and said, “Chris, Charles forgot his glove tonight and we don't have anyone here to go get it. It's a lot more important to have a glove on second
base than in right field, so I want you to give him yours just for this game.” I stood speechless. I don't think Coach knew the glove was new or had any idea what was happening inside me. “Stand farther back than usual,” he said. “You can always run up on a ball faster than you can go back to get it. Don't worry about catching the fly balls; you haven't been too successful at that anyway. Just don't let anything get behind you.”

Charles Boots stood waiting for my glove. I handed it over and turned to hustle to right field so no one would see the tears streaming down my face. I stood way, way back, almost to the jungle gym; Julio Bilbao or Gary Hirai couldn't have put one behind me. I stood there, hating Charles for being so stupid as to forget his glove, imagining he knew mine was new and that Coach would let him use it if he left his dried, cracked, no-pocket, no-autograph piece-of-shit glove on his back porch. I vowed to become a famous athlete and come back to this town and sign not one autograph, except for the next poor schmuck they stuck in right field because he couldn't catch a cold, much less a fly ball. I hated everyone: Charles for being stupid, Coach for taking the glove, my parents for letting me buy it in the first place. But mostly I hated myself. I hated myself for not being good enough to play where I'd need a glove. I
ached
to be good.

Fact is, in baseball it was not to be. I never had the reflexes for it and could never redefine a hardball as anything other than a hard leather projectile launched to hurt me. By the time Ellen Breidenbach batted out my teeth at fourteen, I'd had enough. But I didn't shine all that much at the other sports, either. Determination and temper turned me into a pretty good hitter on the football field by the time I was a senior, but I never had the speed or agility for high-school basketball, and only shone at track when the fast guys graduated.

I never lost that ache. In college I joined the fledgling swim team and turned my body over to the G. Gordon Liddy, the Bobby Knight of swim coaches, and used the memory of my athletic embarrassments to push me until I gained respectability on desire alone. During the two years I taught in a public high school, I befriended the basketball coach, a fabulous athlete named Randy Dolven, who had played basketball in Europe after college, and let him coach me as he might one of his high-school players, picking up skills I would have died for back in my teens. I took those skills to the outdoor court, playing three-on-three basketball at least five days a week on the concrete courts of Berkeley. My grandmother's and mother's obsession with counting each and every calorie that passed your lips, coupled with the demand
to clean every crumb from your plate, kept me running and/or swimming daily from the time I graduated college until this very day. It was the only way to burn off the calories. If you burned more, you could eat more. Somewhere in time, accelerated heartbeats and sweat-soaked T-shirts simply became habit. I'm nearly fifty-six as I write this and am probably still three times the athlete I was in high school.

But sometimes on the court, or three miles out on a run, or ten hundred-yard freestyle sprints into a set of fifteen, I allow myself to become young again, to let my imagination create an arena where
I'm
Jack Hull or Julio Bilbao or Gary Hirai, where some young kid is standing in awe of me as I pull on my helmet and sprint back to the huddle, where I call the play. I can never tell that hero's story, however, without also telling the story of the young, ungifted ballplayer, his imagination full of wishes, pedaling down the dusty backstreets of Cascade, not knowing necessarily that they'll take his glove, but that they might.

For every bit of humor and compassion I put into a story, I put in an equal dose of anger. The athletic backdrops to my stories are significant to me because of the struggle athletics has always provided. I look back and wish my athletic mentors had been able to present a larger picture and had celebrated the sport relative to the ability of the
individual athlete. I wish they had made it clean, wish they hadn't made it patriotic, religious, moral. A sport has its own built-in integrity, doesn't need an artificial one. Athletics carries its own set of truths, and those truths are diminished when manipulated by people with agendas. So, in my stories, I let my characters try to find the purity, the juxtaposition of mind, body, and spirit that I discovered in athletics at a much later age.

There is as much missing from this autobiography as there is written, but I suppose that's the way it has to be. Random chance as much as anything else dictated what I was thinking each day when I brought myself to the keyboard, and who knows what forces dictated its direction from there. What I know from writing it is this: As predictable as life seems, as many times as I have done things over and over and over, hoping for a different result, it is, in fact, not predictable. In my youth I could never have imagined seeing my name on a book unless I had carved it there with a sharp instrument, could never have predicted the nature of the humans who would turn out to be my friends or my enemies, those who would teach me or those who would hold me down. And I could never,
never
have imagined that in the last half of the decade of my fifties, I would own a genuine coonskin cap.