Imperfect: An Improbable Life (9 page)

But, you know, there was no grand plan for sports to rescue me from a lifetime of bullies and insecurities. My father was a good high school athlete and still quite young, so naturally we’d wrestle around and we’d figure out a way to play catch and he’d talk about growing up playing stickball, so we’d try that, too. But, it was no different from the day he presented me with my first fishing rod with the Zebco reel, the kind where the whole thing would work with one hand and one thumb. And it was no different from working scissors for a class project. Or letting the line run free on a kite, then gathering it all back in. Or doing the dishes.

Nobody pushed me to become an athlete—a ballplayer—because they hoped it would make me one of the guys, and certainly not because they believed I’d someday make a living doing it. I played sports because that’s what the boys in Flint did. When Sammie Phillips and Chris Cole were led by their moms down Copeman Boulevard,
past the porches and the waving neighbors and our yellow Volkswagen station wagon, it was to play ball, some kind of ball. And when years later the older boys went hand-over-hand on a bat to see who could pick first, and they chose their teams, and I was the leftover kid standing there, I’d go home dispirited, only to have my dad tell me to get back out there and find a way into the game. So much of my childhood seemed to be spent riding my bike to the playground, my baseball glove looped through the handlebars, knowing I wasn’t going to be the first pick or even the last, but yearning for a way to prove myself.

It seemed like a lot to hope for, but I had plenty of hope, and plenty of help.

D
ONN
C
LARKSON WAS
born not far from my neighborhood in 1925. The family doctor came to his parents’ house to deliver him, and when Donn resisted the doctor insisted, pulling him with forceps into the world and to his first breath. Donn used to say with a worn laugh that the doctor was in a hurry to get home for supper, because as it turned out those forceps crimped a nerve that led to Donn’s skull, so that he’d forever have limited use of the right side of his body. He walked with a limp. He grew up and went to work for NASA as a Space Science Education Specialist, lecturing in schools, churches, and to service groups about the space program. Eventually, Donn—Mr. Clarkson, by then—became a teacher, my third grade teacher at Dye Elementary School, the kind who’d hand out cookies and posters of rocket ships and every Friday afternoon turn down the lights and show a movie. I’d sit next to Mr. Clarkson while he ran the films, close enough to the projector so I could feel its heat against my face.

Mr. Clarkson knew what it meant to stand out in a room of kids. So, him with his limp and me with my arm, we shared a bond we almost never talked about. When he was young, he’d been told he’d probably never ride a bike and certainly never drive a car. He spent half his childhood on a bike. By the time he retired from NASA, having spoken to small gatherings in small towns all over the Midwest and beyond, he’d driven maybe two million miles, then became a licensed pilot and flew at least that far. I knew none of that. His wife, Jean, was a local occupational therapist for forty-four years, twenty-five of them working with handicapped children at another elementary school in Flint. They spoke often of me and my challenges. I knew none of that.

What I knew was when a girl in class looked me dead in the eye and told me she didn’t like my hand, I ran near tears to Mr. Clarkson, whose advice was, “Next time you tell her you don’t like her face, because she can’t change her face any more than you can change your hand.” Different era, you know.

And what I knew was that Mr. Clarkson had an eye for detail, for the sorts of things that might not be bothersome for most, but perhaps would have been for him, and therefore might be for me. Every morning before school I’d stand mostly still while my sneakers were tied, this being one of those learned skills that, at eight, I hadn’t quite gotten around to yet. Mom or Dad would double-knot, triple-knot those Keds so they’d be all but soldered on. I really hadn’t thought much about it, but Mr. Clarkson greeted me one morning with a great smile and a hand on my shoulder. “I’ve got it!” he said. “I figured it out!” And I had not the slightest idea what he was talking about. “I know how you can tie your shoes,” he said, and I looked down at the tangled messes of laces piled atop my shoes and thought,
This could take a while
. Seems Mom had mentioned something to Mr.
Clarkson about the daily shoe-tying experience, and he had gone home and worked on a strategy that night. The following morning he turned on the projector, occupying the rest of the class, and dragged two chairs into the hallway. Through open classroom doors, other kids in other classes watched what surely must have been some disciplinary drama going down.

Mr. Clarkson was a tall man with big hands. We sat across from each other, knees to knees. He untied his shoe and mine. It took him longer to untie mine. He then clenched his right hand into a fist, nearly mimicking mine, pinned the right lace to his shin with his right hand and nodded for me to do the same. With the right lace taut, he curled the left lace with his left hand around the right lace and looked at me. I was following. By looping it under and through, it made a loose knot. His did. Mine sort of did.

He repeated the process, this time with loops. With his left hand he pulled at the right lace, then slackened it, allowing the bottom of the lace to fall into a circle. That, then, he held against his leg while he drew a second loop through the first. With a little tugging, it all became a knot. He looked at me and smiled. His shoe was tied. Mine could have passed for the nest of a small sparrow. He laughed and we started over again. After a couple days, I could tie my shoes.

This certainly wasn’t brushing my teeth with my feet. My victories were so much smaller than that. But, they were mine, just as the insecurities were. I’d left Mary Free Bed in Grand Rapids and within days was in elementary school down the block. Had I been capable of broader perspective, I might have wondered why I could find my way in both places, but felt I belonged in neither.

My place seemed to be in the desperation to stand alongside everybody else, in that area in boys’ brains where we kept score, and in that corner of our hearts where we knew when we were being tested.
Because of that, for a long time, maybe forever, I would view myself through the things I didn’t want to be.

I didn’t want to be that kid.

I didn’t want to be different.

I didn’t want to be pretty good, you know, considering.

I didn’t want anyone feeling sorry for me, or treating me special, or looking past me.

And I didn’t want to wear that thing on my arm.

So, I stayed at it, whatever it was. That was my whole plan—to show up. Nearing the end of elementary school, I’d undergone surgeries that were supposed to expand the range of motion in my right arm but didn’t. And I’d fought the morning battle with my parents over whether I’d really have to wear that arm again, when all the other kids were calling me “Captain Hook.” We’d moved more times, my young parents seeking their footing, better neighborhoods and school systems, and for a time settled into the end unit of a townhouse. Outside, a brick wall wrapped around the bottom floor. There, out of sight, away from the world, I was free to dream. With no one staring or judging, I’d stand in front of the brick wall, a rubber-coated ball in my left hand, my Dusty Baker glove hooded over my right wrist, and I’d throw, and catch, and chase, and switch the glove back and forth. The yard was quiet except for the thump against the wall and my footfalls and thick breaths that followed, all in pursuit of the baseball. When the glove transition grew more comfortable and I became better at it, I’d move closer to the wall, throw the ball harder, test myself. Then I’d retrace the chalk rectangle on the bricks, step off the distance to a pitcher’s mound, and throw at that.

Inside the house, Mom was becoming a lawyer, working through her studies to the tune of the
thump-thump-thump
from behind the far
wall. From down the block, Dad would drive up in the Volkswagen van, his workday done. Chad and I would play our games, our backyard baseball and football, and I’d keep throwing. It felt right, even in the dark, even in the cold, even when Mom had already announced dinner, twice, and then Dad had to stick his head out of the door.

They were encouraging and instinctual as parents. They never pushed, but they never said, “Don’t, that’s not a good idea.” There was never any dissuasion. Mom was an optimist. She sort of had this “Well, if that doesn’t work we’ll do this” attitude. Dad was a why-not guy. He sometimes didn’t see the consequences of things. Where I was a worrier, he’d buy the rubber boat with the motor next to the side of the road and say, “Let’s put it on the beach, it’ll be great.” And I’d say, “Dad, where are we going to store it? What are we going to do with it?” He’d look at me and say, “Why not?”

Dad loved Al McGuire, then the Marquette basketball coach and one of the great personalities of the sport. Well, McGuire told this story on TV one time about going to Marquette’s basketball practices, day in and day out, for more than a decade. And every day, when he came to an intersection near campus, he would turn right. Left was a part of town he’d never seen, because he always went right. The basketball court was right. One day, out of curiosity and restlessness, McGuire went left. His quote, according to Dad, was, “Sometimes you gotta take a left.” Dad sort of lived by that. Dad went left quite a bit.

By the time I was nearing high school, Dad worked for an Anheuser-Busch beer distributorship. He was in sales and drove a route. He was an on-premise manager, meaning he was in the bars, slapping hands, making sure everybody had what they wanted and making sure Budweiser was well-placed.

Mom had gone through University of Michigan–Flint, then to
law school at Cooley College in East Lansing. Many nights I went to bed listening to her tap at a manual typewriter and awoke to the same sound. She commuted one hundred miles a day, earned her law degree, and became a civil counsel for the City of Flint. She also was in private practice.

While they worked, Chad and I became independent. I’d come home from school to an empty house, make myself some lunch, and then go back to practice for whatever sport was in season.

Our folks, meanwhile, weathered the storm that many do not. They went through what people go through when they marry at eighteen, not really having the chance to experience their own adolescence. They lived apart for short periods, never more than a month or two. We’d live with Mom. And there was always reconciliation, happily.

Dad was a free spirit, but there were times when he was the most responsible person I knew. He instilled solid values; made clear the family was important. In words, he never confused his priorities. But sometimes, he did like to get out and see the world. He is, as I remember him saying a million times, someone who burned the candle at both ends. Maybe it goes back to his dad dying. He’s always had a hunger to see the world, to be a part of it, a part of what’s going on. My mom was almost the complete opposite of that. She was a homebody, very quiet. So there was always that clash.

And then, more often than not, they’d come see my games.

I was no prodigy. I was cut from the freshman basketball team at Flint Central High School. I made the freshman baseball team, but didn’t get a hit the whole season. It was a long time before I separated myself from boys my age on athletic fields, beyond the occasional softball throw. Partly as a result, those early teenage years were perhaps my most difficult in terms of accepting my disability. Yet
even then using it as an explanation for failure held only fleeting respite. Mostly, any thoughts about my hand were private, and when I brought them up it was more often to hide some other pain or anxiety—the typical pains and anxieties of a teenager—and so even then it seemed dishonest.

Meantime, I remember points along the way. I remember the faces, the events, the casual observations of classmates. I remember the long stares. And being glad my jeans had pockets. I remember the kids who took one look at me and said, “Your hand looks like a foot,” observations that amused them to no end and yet for me had become part of the routine. And I remember baseball coming to find me, pulling me along.

My parents were supportive and challenged me and allowed me to bruise, if that’s where the day was headed. Dad sent Chad and me off to school every morning with some variation of the same message: “You’re the best,” he’d say. Or, “Be a leader.” Or, “Don’t let anybody get you down.” Something that would make me feel loved and safe no matter what I was headed out into.

Sometimes, the real tests came in the places where there was not a single spectator. Places like Whittier Middle School came alive many winter nights in a city where basketball—not baseball—was the one and only game.

In my early teens the guys from the neighborhood—Mark “Shark” Conover, Danny Nathan, David “Crame” Cramer, Alex Green—would bang on the front door just after dinner. They’d stand there in their heavy coats, sweat pants, and wool caps, their cheeks already red from the walk down the hill, laughing and pushy to get going. I’d grab my winter gear, leave behind the aroma of one of Mom’s specialties—pork chops, stuffed peppers, cube steak—and the dirty dishes, for the junior high gym. The walk was about a half mile, a lot
of it along Burroughs Creek, which ran through a park that separated the black and white neighborhoods on Flint’s east side.

Dozens of us would wait in the parking lot, often enough breathing steam and bouncing lightly on our toes against the cold, for the community school director to unlock the door from the inside. The games were exactly what you’d expect. All over Flint, city leaders opened gyms in hopes that basketball would be the alternative to all the other nighttime options. The lights were dim and the balls, slick and swollen from use, were dark leather. The courts were dusty except on the edges, where they were damp from slushy footsteps. My first job was pushing a broom from end to end on those courts and collecting one-dollar bills from the folks who came to watch the adult leagues, but what I preferred to do was play. So, we played. Depending on the turnout, we’d go five-on-five or three-on-three, full- or half-court. This was pure pickup ball, rough and loud and sometimes intimidating. Some of the best players in the city showed up at these gyms and, until I was cut from my ninth-grade team, I thought of myself as a decent player who could hang with them. Granted, I had a hard time going right, and everybody knew it, and there wasn’t a kid on that floor who wouldn’t overplay my left side. Oh, I’d fake an unsure dribble or two with my right hand, try to give the impression I’d go right if I had to, but without fail I’d end up on the left side of the floor looking for a teammate or a shot.