Willie, My Father, and Me
I never asked much of my father, and he never asked much of me. I never asked him how his jobs were going or why he worked all night, and he never asked me how school was or if I was dating anyone or what I liked or didn’t like.
One thing I knew he didn’t enjoy, which I did, was baseball, and particularly Willie Mays, my baseball hero, the “Say Hey Kid,” who played stickball with the neighborhood kids in the streets of Harlem, at least until the Giants abandoned New York for San Francisco before the 1958 season. We lived very close to Shea Stadium in Queens, home of the Amazin’ Mets, who were, of course, completely hapless. When Willie Mays and the San Francisco Giants came to town in 1964—I was almost 12—to play at the new stadium for the first time, I asked my father to get tickets. I’m sure he didn’t want to, but he knew I did, so he did, without complaining. I remember getting to our seats, surrounded by 50,000 screaming fans, waiting with great anticipation for the great Willie to come to bat.
I remember looking at my father’s face at the exact moment Willie’s name was announced, when the crowd got even louder, and there was my father, asleep, with a cigar hanging from his mouth, a long burning ash ready to drop on his lap. At first, this was kind of a wondrous sight to me, maybe just as wondrous as seeing the great Willie Mays hit a home run.
My father worked double shifts in a podiatry clinic at a hospital in Queens. I never questioned it, but I did wonder why a podiatrist had to work in a clinic all night. Did people come to the hospital at three in the morning because their corns were acting up? But I never let myself think about it too much because I was afraid of what the truth might really be. Was my father having an affair? Was he a murderer who cut corns and calluses by day and stalked the streets of Queens by night?
I should have realized how tired my father would be. That despite the fact that he did not even like baseball and couldn’t care less about Willie Mays, he still came here tonight with me.
Shouldn’t that be enough? Yet, when I saw the ash on his cigar getting longer and longer, I feared that any moment security might come by, pull it out of his mouth, and kick us out.
Real things like family and money were abstractions or distractions to my father, while abstractions or distractions like movies and TV and collecting stamps, like his own hero F.D.R. did, were the real things. I saw the sacrifice he was making for me, giving up a night of his favorite Westerns watching all that blood and gore in the comfort of his own living room, sitting on his big easy chair, having my mother serve him a giant bowl of spaghetti and sauce, eating his favorite ice cream, and falling asleep whenever he wanted to because it was his one night off.
My father, despite being a contradiction to me, was my real hero. Isn’t that how it’s supposed to be? After all, it took a tough guy to work so many hours, make very little money, get no sleep and still take me to the ballgame on his night off. And that cigar. What other father did I know who even smoked a cigar, let alone do the miraculous things my father could do with one like blow smoke rings straight up into the air.
He hated baseball, is that the worst thing? Not enough violence, not enough death. I hated stamp collecting, didn’t I? It made no sense to me like baseball made no sense to him. So, he didn’t know a damn thing about Willie Mays. He was still my dad. I should have accepted that.
Baseball didn’t seem real to him. It seemed made up like novels or plays, other things he didn’t like very much. He didn’t understand why people were making a big fuss about a game. He didn’t care about fiction or fantasy unless people killed each other. To be fair, he always preferred good people killing bad people, Americans killing Nazis, Police killing criminals or Cowboys killing Indians.
And now here we were, and it was all my fault that the cigar was going to fall out of his mouth and that he might burn himself and set fire to everyone around him. At least I thought, at least let Willie come up just once. Let my father see him just once before all hell broke loose.
I did not wake him. I left it up to him whether to wake up or not. I got him here. But I couldn’t force him to watch.
The managers had already come out to show the lineup cards to the umpires. The Mets pitcher, someone I was sure Willie would hit a homerun against, ran out to the mound. The crowd went wild. I looked at my father, the ash was even longer now, I gave it just seconds before it would collapse and fall on my father’s lap. The managers went back into their dugouts and the umpires took their positions. The pitcher threw his last warm-up pitch and the first hitter came up to bat. Willie was only three batters away and my father was already asleep.
Then something strange happened. It was that moment of the game when the pitcher looks towards the catcher for the first sign, and the batter stares back at the pitcher in anticipation of that first pitch of the game that suddenly lulls the crowd into absolute silence. My father opened his eyes, surprised at the sudden silence, looking at a world that for the moment he did not recognize, and when he saw the joy in my eyes, how happy I was that he was awake, I thought, I hoped, he might stay that way for the rest of the game.
“Your cigar,” I said to him. He took the cigar gently out of his mouth, flicked the ash on the ground and put it back in his mouth again. Then he looked out at the game. Willie Mays was up and there were two strikes on him. Then Willie struck out.
“That was a good pitch,” my father said.
“How do you know? You never watch baseball!”
“I don’t have to watch baseball to know a good pitch when I see one,” he said.
I didn’t say anything else. I knew he had no idea whether that was a good pitch or not but just that he liked to rile me about things I seemed too certain about, like how good Willie Mays was. I wished my father had stayed asleep.
After Willie struck out, my father and I said nothing to each other for a while. My father drifted in and out of sleep. Sometimes when I looked at him, his eyes would be open, sometimes closed. One time, I looked at him just as he was opening them again, and when he saw me, he had this sheepish, guilty expression on his face like he was saying, “Hey, sorry, but that’s just the way things are. What can I do about it?”
Shortly afterwards, a foul ball was hit hard back into the crowd. The crowd groaned, indicating someone was either hurt or came very close to being hurt. This seemed to really wake my father up for good. The game was getting more real to him. Taking on more significance. More violence perhaps. Yes, it was only a game, but it could also kill you if you weren’t paying attention, if for instance, you were asleep.
As the game went on, my father, still awake, started to become philosophical, not only about the game but about life itself. At one point, he leaned over to me and said, “Look, Mitch, look how perfectly still the pitcher is before he throws the pitch. Look how focused he is. Like one of those pointer dogs. It’s really something, Mitch. What concentration.”
Where, I thought, did this come from? This sudden appreciation for the pure and quiet beauty of life? And at a ballgame? Did he see something in the pitcher that I, who looked at pitchers far more than my father, did not? Was this maybe all he ever really wanted? To just to be left alone and to exist in a kind of perfect solitude? Or was he still somehow shaken up by that foul ball and suddenly felt his own mortality?
I remember how, in a journal he kept during the Second World War, surrounded by death and destruction, he would describe the beauty of a sunset in the Philippines or his love of butterflies, even when they hovered above dead Japanese soldiers. Or when he visited us years later, near the end of his life, barely able to walk, how he would still pick leaves off the trees, later pressing them between the pages of one of his nature books to look at from time to time when no one else was around. Perhaps I would have gotten more attention from my father if I were one of those butterflies or one of the leaves on those trees that butterflies landed on.
And now somewhere between the end of the war and the end of his life, here we were sitting together at this ball game where he seemed to envy the pitcher his focus, his concentration, his absolute steadiness of purpose, all of which and more my father did not seem to have.
But rather than think of how sad that was for my father, all I could think of was Willie Mays coming up to bat again and whether I could just keep my father up a little longer, maybe get him a hot dog with extra spicy mustard, so he might stay awake and see Willie come up to bat one more time.
So far, he had seen Willie come up three times and strike out three times. After the third time my father turned to me and said, “So what’s so great about Willie Mays?”
That hurt all right. That was the mental wallop I was referring to earlier. Here he was making quick judgements about Willie Mays, like he would do about anyone, like he did about me. He was putting me down, dismissing my choice of heroes.
But I wouldn’t give up. The night wasn’t over yet. Willie still had one more chance to bat, to redeem himself in my father’s eyes, and when Willie came up for the last time that night, he hit the first pitch thrown to him! The crowd roared. I’ll never forget the sound of the bat hitting the ball, so satisfying, so loud I was sure all of Queens and even beyond heard it. And the ball itself, soaringly beautiful in the night sky as it headed beyond the 410 feet sign on the centerfield wall. Or maybe I’m mixing things up, Maybe, it never did happen that way. Maybe, Willie never did hit that homerun. But what I am sure of, many years later, is that when I looked over at my father again, he was fast asleep.
Caroline Hagood (https://www.carolinehagood.com/) is an Assistant Professor of Literature, Writing and Publishing and Director of Undergraduate Writing at St. Francis College in Brooklyn, where she also teaches in the creative writing MFA program. She is the author of two poetry books; the essay collections, Ways of Looking at a Woman and Weird Girls: Writing the Art Monster; and the novels, Ghosts of America and Filthy Creation. Her speculative memoir, Goblin Mode, will be published by Santa Fe Writers Project in Fall 2025. Her work has appeared in publications including Electric Literature, Creative Nonfiction, LitHub, the Kenyon Review, the Huffington Post, the Guardian, Salon, and Elle. Christopher Zedano photo.
Come see Caroline read on day two of the Welcome to Boog City 18 Arts Festival on Sat. Sept. 21 at 4:10 p.m. at Block Hill Station in Park Slope, Brooklyn. Details here:
https://wordpress.boogcity.com/2024/09/05/welcome-to-boog-city-18-arts-festival-day-2/