off Highway 99. All my brother’s friends were there. Clarke introduced me to Hank, a longhaired, longbearded cattle inseminator on his way to Nicaragua to work with farmers. He asked me about Danny and the Mauler’s training camp and suddenly, because Jim Plunkett was being interviewed on the big screen, asked me if I knew that both Plunkett’s parents are blind. And Indian. I was stunned. Blind? I could see the Indian. The game started. The place was packed, the excitement about the game, intense. To be raised by blind people would give you tactile, kinesthetic genius. The best players are kinesthetic, . my sister Donna Eden, the Ashland healer says. They can feel the whole field in motion. They know from the feeling where everyone is, what’s happening to them. Visuals learn the fastest. The speed of light is quickest. Auditories are second. Kinesthetics pick up vibrations. The speed of feeling is slowest. Football players get reputations for being slow or dumb because they’ re such great feelers. It takes time to feel. It’s impossible to feel anything as fast as you receive light and sound. I started to share this with Mark and Clarke, but Mark was suddenly saying that Danny probably won’t make it because he’s lazy and Clarke was agreeing—he’s really up against it now, pro camp ain’t no circus. I exploded. “Lazy!” I spit, popcorn flying. “ Lazy? The boy is in Florida in professional football camp playing with a broken ankle! Lazy! That’s the first thing you ever said about that boy, Mark, when he was five, and you’ve never been able to say anything else. Lazy is what you’ve always called your younger brother too, the one you ’ re so jea lous of! Lazy? and I chugalugged some beer to drown nearly twenty years of anger at this man and crunched down on a mouth full of popcorn and broke an upper right tooth com- ■pletely off. My dog Moonlight was whining for me at the door, everyone was pretending I wasn’t yelling. What is it in the love-hate relationship of the parents that makes a football player? Sundays are cut days. That night at Clarke’s we called his father, George. “ He’s playing with a brace but he hasn’t been cut yet.” February 19, 1984 —Santa Monica Midnight Special Bookstore I was standing at the podium about to begin my dedications, my “ prayers,” when the phone rang. I waited, intuitively knowing it was for me. When the clerk hung up he walked over to me, handed me a tiny slip of paper. “ The guy on the phone said you’d know what this meant.” It said, “ Danny made the team.” Squealing, I leaped over to Shawn, who was with me, and showed her. We jumped around, holding each other. It was the happiest poetry reading I ever gave. February 26, 1984—Manhattan Beach, L.A. The First Game All alone in my ex’s bedroom, propped against the foot of his waterbed to watch my kid’s (our kid’s) game on TV. His first pro game, if he plays. Imagine. This is the kid I wouldn’t allow to have a television. Now I’m sitting here waiting to visit him on television. They were playing the Oakland-Arizona game, offering occasional updates on the others. George’s walls are covered in posters from the mid-sixties when we split and he moved in here. Big breasted blondes. Can’t help but notice they all look like me at 15 when we met. Don’t know where he is. “WELCOME TO THE SECOND SEASON OF THE UNITED STATES FOOTBALL LEAGUE!” UPDATE: The Pittsburgh Maulers 0, The Oklahoma Outlaws 0. Driving rain here in Tulsa. Rozier: five carries, one yard. A shot of the Maulers on their goal line. I’m certain I see Danny. (Not really certa in.) Rozier, the announcer says, is having a hard time. Shit. My child has a broken ankle and a bad cold. Halftime. The phone rings. Mark! “Yeah, it's me alright. No, I don't know where he is. Yes, Danny’s excited he made the team, though he found out he got the lowest contract of the team.” “Well, $24,000 is more than I make.” Same old tone in his voice, that I baby Danny. “The important thing is he made it.” “Yes, of course. It’s wonderful. Still, it’s demoralizing at this point. He hangs up abruptly. Imagine, my ex calling my other ex. As if he’s their son together. He’d have talked about football if I’d have been George, a guy. Now remember Danny, you’ re a feminist. I cbugalugged some beer to drown nearly twenty years o f anger at this man and crunched down on a mouth full o fpopcorn and broke an upper right tooth completely o ff What is it in the love-hate relationship o f the parents that makes a football player? Final score: Pittsburgh 3, Oklahoma 7. Pittsburgh lost. I sit here, unable to move. March 3: Pittsburgh at Michigan, 24-27 Lost March 11: 30-18 Lost Birmingham at Pittsburgh, know me. I love the boonies.” In the basement where I sleep I read all March 18: Pittsburgh at Washington: 16-7 Won March 24: Philadelphia at Pittsburgh, 25-10 Lost April 1: Oakland at Pittsburgh, 14-28 Won April 8: Pittsburgh at New Orleans, 24-27 Lost II of March I holed up at my brother’s house in Modesto to prepare an EcoFeminist paper to be delivered April 17 at the University of Wisconsin. The time I while later the same thing. Imagine. My spent with my brother was good. I lost s o n is person in the t it t . I l t Danny more during this period than any other part of the season. Cramming, reading a hundred books, trying to understand how man’s fear of nature is the same as man’s fear of women. The paper I I finally wrote is called “ Mama Coyote Talks to the Boys.” In a stray note from this time I find: “ Rural is not wilderness. Football is not war.” March 15: Phone call before the Wash- ing ton game. I asked him abou t girlfriends in Pittsburgh. “ I remember you said just wait. I’ ll find her.” April 11—8 pm, Pittsburgh Burst through a tunnel, suddenly Pittsburgh, glitter of jewels on the junction of three rivers. Where the Allegheny and Monongahela birth the Ohio. “ There’s Three Rivers Stadium,” someone says. Danny doesn’t know I’m coming. I decide not to call him. The bus station is typically raunchy, typically frightening. Finally a taxi. A rattletrap. The guy about fifty, skinny and black. We talk. I’m high, excited. Feel safe in here with him. “ I thought this city was supposed to be ugly. It’s beautiful!" “I ’m still trying to understand why men so universally turn awayfrom women. I ’ve come to understand that this ultimately becomes a turning from life, from nature, that it’s the root o f war. Men create war to compete with women who create life. ” He points out the Libby Glass Building. A million square sheets of shining glass. Back across the Ohio, he points out Three Rivers Stadium. My son ’s a Mauler, I tell him gleefully. We go across rivers, down into hollows, dark and mysterious folds. We are out in the sticks. He’s worried. His first week on the job. The miles tick off. “ Look, why don’t you pull into the next restaurant and I’ ll call my son.” We pull right in. I wait in the lobby. The music is Paul Simon’s— “ the mother and child reunion, is only a motion away.” Suddenly Danny is here. Always I’m shocked by his size. His arms when we hug. And something else. The sweetness is gone. “ Mom, what are you doing here?” That old exasperation. “Where’s Moonlight, where’s the van? I gotta go to practice, you know. I can’t visit. I’m gone all day. The house is out in the boonies. What are you going tojdo out there?” “ I’ll just be here till the game. Don’t worry about me. I’ ll read, write, walk. You night about the Pittsburgh Maulers, about the USFL, of players who have ricocheted back and forth to different teams for years. The story of Michigan’s David Tipton has me in tears. "Thank God,” his wife said, “ for the USFL.” This from Kickoff, the official league magazine. I keep looking at the photos of the individual players. Some of their faces are wide open, clear and ebullient. Danny’s is serious, mean, sneering—a real mug shot. April 12—Thursday Waking. To their deep voices above me. Getting themselves up and off to work. Shredded wheat. How do they maintain their weight? Danny's voice gruff and serious. “ Has anyone ever vacuumed this place?” In another minute, “ Listen. We gotta pay the rent.” A little Friday the Thirteenth * Four of the boys just came home. Now they’ re watching Loving, their favorite soap. “Written by the same lady who wrote All My Children,” the Free Safety, Dave Langlois, #22, tells me. Now Dave is vacuuming. His parents are coming from Palo Alto for the Denver Gold game on Saturday. “ My mom is ultra conservative,” he explains, as he sucks under my feet. “ She’ ll give the place the white glove test.” Now Danny and I are driving the city. “ I can’t believe it. I finally have enough money to buy a pair of pants,” he says, u te stuff. wheeling me over the Ohio. “ Nowhere in “D o y o u t h i n k j t 's morale?" “ Maybe. I don’t know. But we still have a good chance.” this whole town can I find any. Always too tight in the thighs, too big in the waist.” “ I have exactly the same problem,” I tell him, as I have all his life. Let s eat something, he says. We find a deli. We both order hamburgers, fries and beer. “A vegetarian,” he teases. “ I don’t consider hamburgers say, grinning. “ Hamburgers are mustard, pickles, lettuce, tomato, onion and bun.” While we eat I tell him about the paper I just wrote. He listens to me. For the first time this visit he seems to relax with me, dropping down into the real relationship. “Well, I’m still trying to understand why men so universally turn away from women. I’ve come to understand that this ultimately becomes a turning from life, from nature, that it’s the root of war. Men create war to compete with women who create life. It seems that it has a lot to do with the males seeking gender identity, how the boy, unlike the girl, must differentiate completely from the mother. He must pull back from his first great love, the first God, withdraw and see her, learn to be like the distant, probably absent father. This is the ‘ natural’ origin of mother hate, of woman hate, of the male’s embrace of everything opposite from the mother: war, mechanism, mastery, control, abstraction, the intellectual propensity toward anti-matter. Matter comes from mater, that is mother.” He is listening. He is actually looking at me. I never dreamed I’d get this much out. So I hurry on. “ Ever since you were born I’ve tried to understand why since women birth and raise the boys, they grow up to be soldiers. Why isn’t the world a more sensuous, loving place. A more feminine place? And you know what Danny? There’s not a single book that I’ve been to find on this subject. Women and war, mothers and soldiers. Not one! The most fundamental, crucial issue. . He nodded at his burger. I looked at mine. “ But there s one book, the one I want everyone to read. Dorothy Dinnerstein’s The Mermaid and the Minotaur. She goes into all of this. She describes the great love the helpless infant feels for its mother while still so dependent on her, and how it inevitably suffers humiliation and betrayal when it discovers that it is not her only love. I rememl ten that happened to you, and to Shawn too. Din- nerstein shows so clearly how and why we are on this nuclear brink. I mean it’s that heavy. We are finally going to destroy ourselves in the oldest war, the war between the sexes. “So?” he says, signaling to the waitress for two more drafts. What’s to be done?” “ Dinnerstein says the men must raise the babies. She says that the only way we will survive is if half of the babies on earth are raised by men in the first year or two of their lives so that the first turning from the parent—a necessary step for ego deve lopm en t— is n ’ t un ive rsa lly from from the feminine.” we finished, I reaci women, When purse. “ I got it,” he says, laying down a twenty. It’s the first food he’s ever bought for me. It’s hard to let him do it. And not once in this outrageous conversation did he ever ridicule me, show his customary exasperation, or even tease me. He listened. It’s dark. We're crossing the Liberty Street Bridge. I ask him about the Maulers. How it all feels. “ The team’s actually doing good,” he says. “We’re a tot better than the win/ losses say.” He cites statistics, but I’m still a football idiot. I understand what he’s saying, but probably as he understood my mother-son rap, in a general, intuitive way. “We’ve almost won every game. It’s just weird we haven’t. LastminMy kid’s great spirit. The greatest. April 13—Friday night, Skyvu Drive The ^Mother and Child Reunion Danny's pleased now, or so it seems, that I am here. I sit on the living room floor, he in the recliner. We drink Irontown Beer. The guys come in, sit down with us. Now we’re on our third beer. We are getting down to it. “ I tell guys about you. Mom, and they don’t believe me. You know, most of the time I have no idea where you’re at.” He gets to talking about Mendocino, his high school years. A story about Coach Mastin making them all run until they puked. “You didn’t know that, did you? I was the only one who didn’t.” He tells about the time I did know of when everyone on the basketball team quit except him after the Cloverdale Tournament when Mastin threw the second place trophy at them. “Second place?” he sneered, holding the trophy up in the locker room. “ Second place?” This after graciously accepting the trophy in the crowded gym above after going into four overtimes. “ Second place? You know what I think of second place?” “ I saw it coming,” Danny says, “ I barely ducked in time. It whizzed right by my ear, slammed against the locker room wall, shattering into a hundred pieces. Monday morning back at Mendo High 36 Clinton St. Quarterly
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