The Man Who Wouldn't Stand Up

One thing led to another.

That was the only way to explain how Arnold Brinkman, who considered both professional sports and young children unjustifiable, had ended up at Yankee Stadium with a nine-year-old boy. The boy was his nephew, the son of his wife’s younger sister. The child’s mother, Celeste, was honeymooning in the Aegean. The child’s father, now Arnold’s
ex-brother-in-law
, had fled to Fiji—as Fiji did not have an extradition treaty with the United States. It seemed unreasonable, even provoking, that a hustler who’d built his fortune trafficking sex slaves from Eastern Europe should live scot-free in the tropics while Arnold, who recycled scrupulously and overpaid his taxes, got stuck chaperoning this trip to the ballpark, but Judith had promised the kid a baseball game. (Why his wife couldn’t take the boy to the game herself remained a mystery to Arnold—
she’d
done the promising—but when he suggested as much, she just kissed the inside of his wrist and shook her head.) So here he was. Yankees versus Red Sox. It was hard to imagine a more perfect spring afternoon to waste watching baseball.

They sat in the upper deck, near the foul pole. The boy, Ray, had brought along his baseball glove in the hope of catching a home run. He stood up with every pitch
and then sunk back into his seat in disappointment. If the batter made contact with the ball, the child’s head followed its trajectory as though drawn by a magnet.

Arnold found the stadium claustrophobic. It was like riding in an airplane, only warmer—and accompanied by a hostile soundtrack. All around him people shouted down the visiting team with the vehemence of right-wing talk radio. Viewed in the proper context, this enthusiasm was indefensible: Millions of Africans died each year of malaria and AIDS, gluttonous ranchers defoliated the Amazon, rebels in Indonesia cut the hands off prisoners—and these people cared whether Mickey Mantle or Willie Mays was a better centrefielder. Okay, maybe not Mantle and Mays. But whichever self-interested, cocaine-addicted troglodytes had replaced them. Arnold conceded he’d enjoyed baseball himself as a kid—but that was in the days before free-agency and multimillion dollar salaries and the designated hitter rule. It was also before he’d recognized the game for what it was: Bread and circus. “
Panem et circenses
,” he told the boy. Then he checked himself—he didn’t want to put the idea of going to the circus into the kid’s brain.

While Arnold counted down the innings, he eavesdropped on his neighbours. To his left, an overweight couple with nine school-age children had corralled both a pretzel vendor and a hotdog vendor simultaneously. Their conveyor belt of offspring, all sporting team paraphernalia,
distributed the snacks with the efficiency of third world relief workers. Meanwhile, to Arnold’s right, a bald man lectured a girlfriend with a glaring facial rash on the conspiracy to juice up the baseball. “They tie the seams tighter,” he explained. “The media can say it’s steroids, but it’s really all about the ball. My grandmother could launch one of those babies.” This was the amazing thing about democracy, thought Arnold—everybody felt entitled to their own pet theory: That Lyndon Johnson had orchestrated the Kennedy assassination, or that Queen Elizabeth I wrote Shakespeare’s plays, or that Glenn Miller had survived World War II in a Soviet gulag and formed a marching band for prisoners with Raoul Wallenberg. Judith had a colleague at school, an eighth grade teacher in his forties, who taught his classes that Amelia Earhart had been shot down and tortured by the Japanese. If history judged nations by their pet theories, no one could ever doubt that Americans were creative.

The four black men behind Arnold—all in their twenties, all wearing baseball caps—grew rowdier with each round of beers. One of them told a vulgar anecdote about a woman he’d worked with at a bowling alley. Another tossed an ice cube at a Red Sox fan several rows below who’d been criticizing the mothers of the home team players. “If that nigger don’t shut the fuck up,” warned the guy directly behind Arnold—but he kept the threat nebulous. The ice cube skimmed the arm of the Red Sox
fan’s seat. The intended victim didn’t notice.

Ray tugged at Arnold’s sleeve.

“Can I ask a question?”

The child was always asking permission to ask a question.

“You just did,” said Arnold.

“Can I ask another?”

“Sure,” said Arnold. “Fire away.”

Ray stood up with the pitch, but the batter fouled it off.

“What’s a nigger?” he asked.

The boy’s question came at a lull in the action. It carried across their little swathe of grandstand like a cloud of plague. Arnold felt his head grow hot. Sweat matted his shirt to his chest. He hadn’t brought along tanning lotion and now the nape of his neck burned like a slab of meat in the sun.

“I’ll tell you after the game,” he said sharply.

Ray rose for another pitch. A called strike. Arnold felt short of breath.

“Can I ask you another question?” the boy asked.

“If you have to.”

“Why won’t you tell me now?”

“I’ll tell you
after the game
,” Arnold repeated.

“It’s a dirty word, isn’t it?” demanded the boy.

Arnold didn’t answer. A man of a certain breed—he thought of Gregory Peck playing Atticus Finch in
To Kill
A Mockingbird
—would have been capable of sitting the boy on one knee and instilling tolerance. Arnold didn’t have that gift.

“Nigger,” said the boy. Very loud. “Nigger. Nigger.”

The mother of the nine children shot them a look of disdain.

“You can’t say that word like that,” warned Arnold. He spoke at top volume so those around him might hear his disapproval.

“Why not?” asked the boy, no longer seeking permission for questions.

Arnold wanted to say,
because it’s a racist slur only used by retrograde bigots and shameful morons who don’t know their own history
, but he was fully aware that the four black men behind him were listening, and he was in no mood for confrontation. He suffered a sudden urge to urinate.

“It’s one of those words that some people can use but others can’t,” he said. “It means different things when different people say it.”

“What does it mean when I say it?” asked Ray.

“I don’t know,” said Arnold. “
But don’t
.”

The loudspeakers punctuated Arnold’s answer with a cry of “Charge!” After that, a scuffle broke out in the neighbouring section and police swarmed the walkways. Ray’s vocabulary-building episode was soon forgotten.

Arnold passed most of the sixth inning negotiating with himself over exactly how long they had to remain at
the ballpark. He didn’t want the boy complaining to Judith that they’d left early. It was a tie game, too, so he couldn’t plead the “blow-out” defence. On the other hand, he had no desire to share a subway ride with a mob of drunken hooligans. “We’ll leave after eight innings,” he told the boy. “Eight innings is enough.”

“Okay,” said Ray. “Then you’ll tell me what nigger means.”

The seventh inning stretch couldn’t come soon enough for Arnold. Not that he gave a damn about stretching—or singing
Take Me Out to the Ball Game
—but it marked the beginning of the end, the start of the mass exodus. For him, only nine outs away from freedom. If they caught the express train, Arnold decided, he’d have time to replant his day lilies before their dinner date with the Cards.

When the break finally arrived, American flags appeared on the video screens. The public address system paid tribute to two Bronx soldiers killed in the line of duty. “Please rise and join us,” the announcer said, “in singing
God Bless America
.” All around Arnold, Yankees fans and Red Sox fans clambered to their feet. Beer vendors rested their trays on the concrete steps; crackerjack men stopped hawking. The father of the nine children ordered his clan to remove their baseball caps. Ray removed his too.

Arnold remained seated.

“C’mon, Uncle Arnold,” said Ray. “Stand up.”

“No, I can’t do that.”

He vaguely recalled hearing about this
God Bless America
nonsense, possibly on public radio, but he’d dismissed it as so much jingoistic, post 9-11 claptrap.
The Star Spangled Banner
was bad enough—how many of these nitwits knew what a rampart was?—but the national anthem might at least be justified as a tradition without meaning, akin to printing “In God We Trust” on coins. In contrast,
God Bless America
was new. Propagandic. Also somewhat farcical—part of a musical program that included hip-hop and
Sweet Caroline
and The Village People’s
Y.M.C.A.
That’s right. First they sang about gay hook-ups at the YMCA. Then they asked God to bless their country. Nothing like a well thought-out display of patriotism. Arnold wanted no part of it.

“You’ve
got
to stand up,” insisted Ray.

All around them, the spectators had begun to sing. One of the nine children—a chinless little girl with chocolate-smeared cheeks—pointed at Arnold. Her mother stopped singing long enough to say, quite audibly, “Ignore the bad man, honey.” Then she sang even louder.

Someone behind him shouted: “Love it or leave it.”

“Please,” begged Ray. The boy tried to lift Arnold by the thumb.

“This is bullshit,” Arnold answered. “It feels like a Nuremberg rally.”

It did feel that way, too. He was probably the only person in the stadium not on his feet—certainly the only able-bodied adult. (There wasn’t much overlap, he suspected, between baseball enthusiasts and civil libertarians.) Besides, how did these people know he wasn’t standing because he was an obstinate jerk? He might just as easily have been a Jehovah’s Witness or a paraplegic or a Canadian. His entire body, he realized, was trembling.

Arnold imagined confronting the mother of nine: pointedly informing her that he was a Vietnam veteran and that he had ten sons serving in the military. Not that this was true—
but it could have been
. He had fully immersed himself in this fantasy, exploring its various permutations, when a chorus of jeers and hisses drowned out the final bars of patriotic music.

Arnold looked up. All eyes were glued to the video screen. That’s where he saw himself, enlarged for an audience, sitting through their fascistic song. The boy stood at his side, yanking on his fingers.

How dare they?! It was suddenly personal—an aggressive invasion of his privacy. And the man behind the screen kept the camera focused on him.

Arnold might have raised a fist or flicked his middle finger. That was the macho thing to do—one way to put the incident behind him. He could have played the coward and fled. In the long run, that would have been the wisest course. But Arnold couldn’t help feeling he was being
bullied, taunted, challenged.

He responded instinctively. He stuck out his tongue.