“What’s that noise?” I asked after they had taken him from my arms. The nurses and doctors all stopped their work and watched, amazed. He was on his hands and knees, butting his head repeatedly into the glass end of the isolette. A nurse pulled him down and like lightning, like a ram, he crawled to the end again and began beating his head against the glass. In the two days at the hospital he became le g e n d a ry : h is p h y s ica l strength, his advanced maturity. They cut his fingernails while he was still in the delivery room. He held up his head from the beginning—no wobbly neck this little kid—and cried real tears, which infants aren’t supposed to do for weeks. And he watched me as he still does (even as he nursed): questioning. A hint of my father’s annoyance, suspicion. His father George and I separated when Danny was five, his sister two. I would have left much sooner but for the belief of that bygone era that children need their fathers more than anything else. When I left it was on the painful realization that my children were being damaged by their father. Not that he didn’t love them, wasn’t good to them, but that he didn’t love me, couldn’t, ever. I realized that my son would grow up unable to love women, that my daughter would grow up expecting not to be loved by men. This is not to say that they were not hurt. They were, they are, profoundly. The separation served to make the distant, unknown father the object of great longing: romantic, perfect, like God. Danny, more than Shawn, actively, painfully longed for his father all his childhood and I, p o f ’ out of the great loss too, and sensing an unfairness in my ever-present advantage, tried never to discredit him. But though he lived less than fifteen miles away, he rarely visited and never gave financial support. As all parents learn, life is a fantastic surging of all the chaoses, the gifts and the curses. Sometimes, proudly watching my son play football, I see so clearly that his quest is still the quest to find the father. hen Danny was seven, Shawn four, Mark came to us until Danny was sixteen and she was thirteen. Then, very abruptly he left. In that nine-year period we lived what was called a hippy life, the life of the antiVietnam War counter-culture, in Los Angeles, Malibu, Vermont and finally on the Mendocino Coast of Northern California. Shawn and Mark were nearly inseparable, but there was always tension between Danny and Mark, partly Mark maintained, because of Danny’s longing for his father, that man disappeared into straight society. Even so, for the longhaired, radical lifestyle and politics, Mark, ex-con (for refusal of army induction), renegade wildman, was a devoted amd serious stepfather, the living male model and main financial support of our little family. April 26, 1983—the NFL Draft My birthday. I’m dreaming Danny is a small blond man with a butch haircut. He’s not a football player. He’s just a very interesting young man. I wake up with the urgency to tell him—Danny, you don’t have to be a football player. Have I ever made this clear to him? I’m sleeping in my van outside my sister’s house in Ashland, Oregon. I climb out, dial his number in Salt Lake City. “ Mom, that’s a terrible dream. Go back in the van and dream another one. And don’t say ‘fuck.’ You’re hooked up to the microphone and everyone in this room can hear you.” Then he wished me a happy birthday and apologized for not sending me anything. April 27, 1983—Free Agent He signed with the Seattle Seahawks! I can’t believe how excited I am that he’ ll be in Washington, how much he’ ll love it there—all the fishing he can do—how much I’ ll love it with him there. His agent convinced him, though there were fifteen other teams after him and the second one was the L.A. Raiders—L.A.where he’s wanted to play ball all his life—that he should sign with Seattle. They have a new coach, Chuck Knox, they offered him the most money, they’ re trying to build up their offensive line. In the past 24 hours he’s flown twice to Seattle! Now I remember: all year he’s had the Seattle Seahawk’s logo on his University of Utah dorm door. xMay 8, 1983—Ashland, Oregon Mothers Day I got a huge bouquet of flowers today. The card says, “Happy Mother’s Day, Love, The Seattle Seahawks.” I wonder how they tracked me down. July 25, 1983—the moon in Aquarius I’m in Seattle at a women writer’s conference. The Olympic torch has been lit in Olympia, Greece, origin of the Olympic games nearly 2800 years ago. It will be carried by runners and planes to the 1984 Los Angeles Summer Olympic games. I read the sports page every day. Is it my imagination that men look at me oddly when they see this? My boss at the Back Alley Jazz Tavern in Port Townsend, one of my more op- tomistic friends, told me the odds are virtually nil for my boy to make it in pro ball. That was the first time I felt the spirit rise in me. The belief that he will make it. It’s true that I don’t know football but I know my kid. I know him and I’m going to die for him if he gets cut. Days and nights I ’m haunted by the fear that I didn’t encourage him enough in other areas. What will he do if he doesn’t make it? Open a fish tackle shop, he told me once. “You know what I’m really interested in, Mom?” he said another time. “ Oceanography.” I was thrilled. Of course. He loves the sea. I open the sport’s page, as always, check first the Cut List. Daniel Doubiago, OT, “ I was better than the guys they kept,” he said on the phone. “ But there were so many tackles I never even got a chance to show what I could do.” He drove to L.A. to stay rent-free with his father and be near his agent. I think it was his first long journey by himself. In Port Townsend, I felt every mile, every crack in his heart, his soul. In some ways it was the longest, most painful journey of my life. August 9, 1983—Troublesome Mom I wrote Chuck Knox a letter. I thanked him for the beautiful bouquet of flowers and told him he’d made a terrible mistake in cutting my son. I told him all the ways Danny is a great football player. I said it was immoral of him to sign so many guys to one position (twenty, I think, for offensive tackle) so they can’t be signed by other teams. Sandy, his girlfriend of three years in college cut him just days after the Seahawks. On the phone I could hear his heart breaking. Certainly his voice. My own screamed out for him. "Danny— don’t shut your heart down now." I was particularly concerned because of all times, he was staying now with his father, the man whose heart was destroyed so long ago. “ Look at me," I cried. “ You know as well as anyone what my men and love have done to me. And you know I never let them kill my heart, the thing they were all afraid of. If you let them kill your heart, everyone loses.” I repeated what I’d al- ways told him. “Your heart, your great spirit, Danny, is what will make you a great athlete. Your body is small next to how large it must be. If you let it shrivel, die, if you turn bitter, cynical, you’ ll never make it.” His agent sent him to the Ram’s camp where he was tested by the line coach as having the greatest vertical jump from a still position of any offensive lineman he’d ever tested—33 inches. “What does that mean?” “ Explosive power,” he laughed, exaggerating the middle syllable of explosive. His broadjump was impressive too—9 feet, 7 inches. “ Imagine,” his father explained, “ if you got in the way of him in that nine feet.” But he wasn’t picked up. His hope rested with the USFL, the new spring football league. “ People talk to me all the 1 time about the money I can make,” he said one night. “ I don’t care about the money. 1just want to play. I’d pay to play.” December 18. 1983 —Port Townsend The Uptown Bar I ’ve walked here to call Danny. The Seahawks are playing the New England Patriots. The excitement here is something. A funny mixture, not your typical fans, at least as I assume them to be— poets, publishers, artists, fishers, loggers, bartenders, dancers, hippies. Many think my son is still with the Seahawks. “ No,” I explain to Linda, who’s marking the bet board, “ he was cut. He’s going to Pittsburgh. Something in his Seahaw k ’s co n tra c t makes him a Mauler.” “Oh,” she says, the response I will get over and over, “ Is that a semi-pro team?” The guy next to me explains the USFL to her. I listen carefully. I love being in here. I’ll wait for the game to be over. I know Danny’s watching it in L.A. Told him I’d call tonight. A big effort on everyone’s part ing to get the whole family to Ashland for Christmas. “ I have to work out every day, Mom,” he had said to my urging. I found a gym in Ashland, told him to fly up on the 23rd, that I’d drive him down to L.A. on the 26th. He’s broke, almost as broke as me, but I’ ll find some way. I love the excitement in here, the warmth of all these bodies. It’s a really cold winter. Why do Americans love football? The appeal for me is my son. These people love it. I saw a poll that says that football is the favorite of all sports among fans. I’m still so ignorant about the game. How will I ever learn it? Football is a collective effort. I understood that in Utah. A sort of communistic effort. You wouldn’t dare say such a thing, though. Now, on the TV, an interview with a Seahawk who’s a devout Christian. “ It’s God’s will I’m not playing now.” Football is a Christian sport, I’m su re . How many Am e r ican Jews, Moslems, Buddhists, Hindus, atheists, communists play football? "Aw, go back to the seminary,” David Sharp, poet and bartender, spits at the guy. After the game—phone booth on Lawrence Street "Yeah, I saw it.” The hurt in him becoming bitterness. “ Mom, I can’t come to Ashland. I’m on crutches. In a cast.” I die. In the phone booth. Frozen. “ I was jogging Friday night in a park near here, stepped in a hole. It sounded like a tree branch breaking. When I got home, Dad took me to Emergency. That doctor took X rays, said it was broken, put it in a cast. Next day, my agent set me up with one of the best doctors in sport’s medicine. He says it’s just a bad sprain. He thinks it will be ready in five days. It’s some sort of electronics, an electrical program. Expensive. I go back to him Wednesday, Thursday, Friday for treatment. In two weeks, January 1 5 ,1fly out of Carson City for Pittsburgh. “ Shit, I can’t believe it Mom, less than a month. No serious injuries in five years of college ball. I was getting in great shape just working out, keeping my spirits up, waiting. Pittsburgh is really high on me. Dick told me not to tell them. They'll just tell me not to come. Or send me home when I get there." I ’m doodling a heart with an arrow shot through it. “ Did it happen at 7 pm?” "Yeah, exactly. Why? Was it the moon or what? It was full. I saw it rising.” “Yes, full in Cancer and the sun’s in Capricorn. Broken bones, alright. But that's not why I asked. I was running myself and right at 7 pm I twisted my ankle on the ice. It wasn’t serious but it took my breath away. Now I know it shook me up because it was really happening to you.” Oh Christian, Jewish-Mormon-Bud- dhist-Hindu-AtheistCommunistAmerisi f is? can- Football- Hippy-Astrology- Poet Goddess, I pray to you, I beseech you, don't let them make a cripple of my son. December 24, 1983—Ashland ROZIER TO SIGN WITH MAULERS? In my Christmas card from Jack and Shirley Little, my Lakota Indian friends in Crazy Horse, North Dakota, there was an article that Heisman Trophy winner Mike Rozier has agreed to a three-year $3 million dollar contract with the Pittsburgh Maulers. It makes him the second highest paid player in professional football. Danny’s contract is for $24,000. What will it do to his soul to block for a famous millionaire? n January 17 in Ashland, I gave a poetry reading at The Vintage Inn, the beginning of a 1984 tour that included twentyseven readings, several writing workshops, an ecology conference and two benefits for Central America. This tour eventually took me as far south as San Diego and as far east as Massachusetts. Mark showed up at the first Sacramento reading. Since I’ve always felt he left us eight years before because I became a poet—"taking a bath in public” he described my work then—his presence seemed odd and a little wonderful. I learned that weekend that he was keeping as close tabs on Danny as I was. J a n u a r y 22 , 1984 —The Superbowl I followed Mark to meet my brother Clarke in Modesto, two hours south of Sacramento, for the Superbowl in a deli , V 7 • U i- tv David Milholland Clinton St. Quarterly 35
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