Stephen Dixon - 30 Pieces of a Novel

His father drove them to a football game just over the bridge in New Jersey — the old Brooklyn Dodgers football team, he thinks. They sat on the sideline on a special bench set up for them, though he doesn’t know how his father got it and doesn’t remember asking him. After the game, some man — he thinks it was the coach of one of the teams — introduced Gould to some of the players. He doesn’t know where his father knew this man from, if that’s how it came about — there could have been other ways (his father was often initiating conversations with strangers and getting friendly with new people and they had sat fairly close to one of the teams’ benches) — nor how they had even come to go to the game. His father wasn’t interested in any sport but boxing. He’d been an amateur boxer while in high school and had once bought, before he got married, a piece of a featherweight and helped manage him. (“A bum. Lost four out of four, had a teacup for a jaw, and for each bout wanted us to buy him new trunks, gloves, and a bathrobe with his name on it. A bad investment, though my partners were the right kind of guys, so we had some fun.”) Did he buy the football tickets or get them free but choose to use them because he knew Gould would like seeing a professional football game? Again, nice thought and something Gould would have liked to have happened, but not something his father ever did. He also went to the fights with him in St. Nicholas Arena — only ten blocks from their building. They sat somewhere way up; there was lots of smoking and shouting and betting going on right in front of them and plenty of money being exchanged and the place smelled of cigars, and they left after the third or fourth fight, maybe because it was getting close to Gould’s bedtime. So why’d his father take him in the first place? Especially when he liked boxing so much — went to the fights at St. Nick about once every other week — and would no doubt miss the main event. Maybe the main event was between a couple of palookas, as his father called them, so he didn’t mind missing it. Or he’d bought an extra ticket or had been given one and couldn’t get anyone else to go with him on such short notice and didn’t want to waste it — hated to waste anything: paper bag he took his lunch in, wax paper he wrapped the sandwich in, sometimes even half the sandwich if he didn’t finish it and which he’d take to work the next day — so he asked Gould. That’d be more like it, taking him as a last resort, even if he probably knew Gould wouldn’t like the fights or atmosphere they were held in — all that smoke and foul air. He hated it when his father puffed an occasional cigar at home, worse were his mother’s constant cigarettes; he’d frantically wave the smoke away and sometimes open the window if they were both smoking at the same time. “Close that!” his father would say. “What’re we heating the house for if you’re going to freeze it back up? And don’t be such a sissy with the smoke. It’s one of the facts of life you have to learn to live with, and two gets you five you wind up smoking cigarettes or cigars yourself. Nah, you’ll be a pipe man — I can see it now; a definite refined pipe type.” Or maybe he was hoping Gould would like the fights and want to go with him again. “Like father, like son,” he could then say, something he never did and might never even have had the opportunity to, as far as Gould can remember. That true? Too much to think back about; he’d be exploring his mind forever. Though he was at first excited at going to the fights but disappointed once they began. He couldn’t see much from where they were sitting: people jumping up in front of him or just standing, arms waving, and the distance to the ring. And something about the place—“a real joint,” as his father would say: the noise, smells, smoke, cursing, and catching every now and then the boxers pounding each other, and their spit and sweat flying off — made him feel sick. (“I’m sorry, but I want to go home; I’m not feeling well.” “Wait. This is only the second fight. Try to hold out a little longer; you’ll feel better. And if it’s only that you got to make, I’ll take you to the boys’ room when the bell rings or you can run back and find it yourself now. It’s safe enough; there are plenty of cops.”) He also took him to a movie of a Shakespeare play — one with several battles, or at least one big one, and dark skies and English accents and long boring speeches he couldn’t understand — shown in a Broadway stage theater for some reason. And to a play version of Alice in Wonderland —lots of gauzy curtains and a pretty blonde who played Alice but looked to be around twenty — in Columbus Circle when there were still theaters there. His father didn’t like anything on stage but musicals and Yiddish theater — Gould went with him to one of those too and didn’t make out a word but shiksa, shaygets, shmendrick , and putz , or words like that, used around the house, and his father was too busy laughing or didn’t want to miss anything onstage to translate or interpret for him when he asked, so why’d he take him? Again: free tickets, his mother didn’t want to go, and he was unable to get anybody else, so instead of wasting the second ticket he took Gould? But he’s getting away from what he was thinking before, and that’s that with all these events they either walked, drove, or took the subway or bus, so he never, with any of them, got to see his father walking on the street alone from any distance except close up.

He once thought he saw his father on the subway when they were both coming home from work. He wanted to shout, “Dad, Dad!” but there was a earful of people between them, so he made his way to him. It was a man about the same age, height, and build of his father, wearing the same kind of fedora he wore and in the same way, brim pulled down over most of his forehead, and reading the same large afternoon newspaper his father read when he rode the subway home, and folded to one-quarter its width and held straight up about six inches from his face, but in a sport jacket and open-neck shirt, clothes his father never wore to work: even when he went in only to do paperwork it was always in a suit and tie which, no matter how hot the street and subway were, didn’t come off or get loosened till he got home. They worked near each other in the Garment District for a couple of years when Gould was in high school, his father selling linings to women’s coat-and-suit houses, he pushing a handcart through the streets for a blouse company and then one that made belts for cheap dresses and then another that only made skirt crinolines and, when they went out of style, other lingerie. Sometimes when he got off work late he’d go to his father’s office, usually wait around awhile doing his homework, and then go home with him. When they got near the subway turnstiles his father, coins already in his hand, would scoot in front of him and pay both their fares. They’d stand or sit together during the ride, Gould sometimes reading the newspaper article his father was on but not as fast, so he usually missed some of it when his father turned the paper over or continued it on another page. If there was only one seat available, his father would urge him to sit—“You’ve had a long day at school and work and you never get enough sleep, and you still got your homework to finish and dinner to eat and then to help your mother clean up after”—but he always made his father take it: “It’s good exercise for me, standing…. I like looking around at other people from this position, and you can read your paper better from a seat,” and so on, for he could see his father was tired — he was overweight by now, way out of shape and always seemed beat when he came home — and really wanted to sit. “I’ll hold your books on my lap then.” They’d leave the station and walk home, but again it wasn’t seeing his father from any big distance, walking up or down a block or from anyplace that way outside. That, he’s almost positive, only happened the one time he mentioned.