Robert Butler - Mr. Spaceman

He sits before me now and I am — I hear how words create their own states of being and this one I wish were true — I am Lucky. I am an all-American guy, through and through red white and blue, and that is the fact. I don’t even remember Vietnam. Not even a little bit. My mother and father, they talk about it all the time while I am growing up. You should have seen the clouds in the sky at twilight. You should have seen the teakwood furniture in our house. You should have seen the Emperor of Jade pagoda. And I say, Right. You should see the Astros play the Cardinals. Maybe you can get lucky and see Mark McGwire hit a home run. I go to one game this past season and he hits a ball about ten rows into the upper deck. I root for the Astros but I like to see big home runs and this one was about as big as they get.

See, even my name is Lucky. I could call myself Joe or Ed or Bill or anything I want since I am an American and since my parents gave me a Vietnamese name. I don’t blame them, understand, I was born in Vietnam and all, but things went bad over there, as everybody knows, and my parents and my sister and me ended up running away. And you can’t carry your teakwood furniture on a sampan stuffed full of refugees in the South China Sea. So we came to the USA with basically the clothes on our backs — realize, I don’t have a single memory of any of this — and then at some point it became clear that the communist government wasn’t just going to up and topple over and we were pretty much stuck here — stuck is how my parents saw it — and they realized it was time for me to have a name that my fellow Americans would understand. So they let me choose. It was when I was twelve years old.

Knowing how they feel about what they lost, that must have been a bad day for them. We all of us sat around our kitchen table in our little condo out in the Bellaire part of Houston and we had a stack of name-your-baby books and we all chose new names. Our family name was Nguy n. For sure, nobody American could say that. But when people tried and just chose to duck that Ng sound at the start, they often ended up saying something that sounded like an American name: Wynn. So my father made the family name first order of business and that’s what he said it was going to be. Wynn. Which was fine by me. I was already a baseball fan and I knew about my Astros even back to when they were the Colt 45s, before I was born, and one of the early Astros greats was Jimmy Wynn, who hit ninety-six home runs in the three seasons from ’67 to ’69. He was a little guy and they called him the Toy Cannon. I like to think of him all through those bad years of the war out there in the air-conditioned comfort of the Astrodome, this little man, getting just his pitch, guessing just right on the fastball or the curve ball and he’d swing and be right on the money, right on the sweet spot on his bat, not a millimeter off — there is some guesswork to good hitting, you see; it takes some luck to hit the long ball — I like to think of him hitting big home runs in 1967 and 1968 and 1969 and him jogging around the bases, not having to rush because everything was already decided in his favor. It was like he was preparing a place for me. I’m sorry for my parents and what they lost and its never being okay for them, but Jimmy Wynn was laying down this track for a guy who looked to be Vietnamese but ended up an American, cheering his Astros and free to chase his own luck. Me.

So my sister goes first on that day and she doesn’t even look in the books. She’s fifteen and it’s clear she’s been thinking about this for a long time, probably been wanting to ask my parents for this very thing but she’s too good and obedient and old-fashioned a daughter to open her mouth. She even claims to remember the furniture and the sunsets some, back in Vietnam. Nancy, she says.

Nancy? I say. From Nancy Reagan?

This is after almost four years of Ronald in the White House, 1986, the year the Astros finished ten games ahead in the Western Division and then lost to the Mets in the playoffs. Real bad luck. And the Mets go on and win the World Series that year only because a guy lets a slow, good-hop ground ball go through his legs, a ball he’s going to catch nine hundred and ninety-nine times out of a thousand. And because of that, the Red Sox don’t win the World Series, which they hadn’t for seventy years and they still haven’t, to this day. One chance in a thousand they lose in 1986 and that’s their luck.

So my sister says, Yes, I admire her.

I also, says my father, who wants this to go smoothly. That is a good choice, he says.

Then my dad says, Fred.

Is that you? I say.

That is me, he says.

Is that from Fred Flintstone? I say. Which is this cartoon character caveman.

And my father gets angry. You do not take this in the right spirit, he says to me. It is plenty hard already, all these things that happen to us. You are spoiled child. You are not Vietnamese at all.

He says this last thing like it’s going to hurt my feelings, like I’m going to get upset about it. But of course I’m not Vietnamese. I don’t want to be. I’m on another team now. The ball went through my father’s legs and that was that. Bad luck.

My mother is flipping through the name books and she can’t stand it, my father and me fighting, so she starts calling out names for herself, though she’s not being too choosy, which tells me she’s just trying to stop the two of us.

How about Hildegarde, she says.

My father’s head snaps in her direction at this.

But she’s going on before he can say anything. Maybe Hyacinth, she says.

It should go with Fred, my father says, but his voice is suddenly tiny like he just realized he missed the ball. It’s dribbling into right field and he’s blown it for everybody.

My mother looks up from the book and straight into his eyes. She thinks a moment and turns Fred over silently in her mouth, you can see her shaping it. It’s just a word, after all. Just a stupid word. It’s not going to change who either of them is. And then she says, Ethel.

And she’s serious.

I’d watched some episodes of that old TV show with the screwy whiney wife of the good-natured dodo of a Cuban band leader. Lucy and Desi. And they had these friends, an old miser and a sort of screwy whiney wife assistant. Fred and Ethel. Fred was a geezer. He looked to be about thirty years older than Ethel. They didn’t have any kids, and the only thing interesting to me about them was thinking he married her when he was probably forty-five and she was about fifteen and she’s been waiting decades for him to come through for her some night, but he never does. With that situation running unspoken under the surface, it made everything else really kind of interesting. But there I sit looking from my mother to my father and back again. From Ethel to Fred to Ethel. And I just keep my mouth shut about it.

But it turns out later that my father chose Fred from some big boss he’d never even spoken a word to at Pennzoil. My father is a computer expert there. He hates computers. And my mother chose Ethel from hearing somewhere that Fred and Ethel were some kind of couple, but she didn’t know anything else about them. So when my mother says, Ethel, my father goes, Good. My sister goes, Good, and she’s not even trying to keep from laughing or anything, though she knows the TV show as well as I do. It sounds like she really does believe those names are good, which is a pretty scary thing about my sister, if you stop and consider it.