the entire team quit. They’d told their parents. They said the coach was a bad sport. I spent that whole week talking to every guy, trying to get him to come back. Eventually most of them did, but you have no idea, Mom. You have no idea.” “ Mastin told me once,” Danny says. “What’s worse? A cop or a ref? I never forgot that." I look at my son, a little dumbfounded. This poor kid who was raised by the greatest cop hater of all time, Mark. And now I discover that Danny doesn’t even know, much less understand what happened to Mark. Why he was in jail so much of the ‘60s when he first started living with us. “ I remember waiting in the car outside the jail in downtown L.A. while you visited him. I was five. I was scared.” I tell him about the draft, about Mark’s refusing to go to Vietnam, how they wouldn’t recognize him as a conscientious objector. “You know what made him decide to refuse induction? He imagined himself years later trying to explain to his children why he had killed, why he had gone along with the state, followed orders. “ I think I might have been blackballed, Mom,” he responds.’’Because you made me register for the draft as a conscientious objector.” This is the first I knew that he registered as a conscientious objector. June, 1979. He had just gotten home from his first year in college. Carter was reinstituting the draft. All boys born in 1960 had to register. I took him to see a volunteer counselor. I felt it was my duty to inform him of the alternatives, including not registering at all, and then I let him go. I assumed he had rejected the C.O. status. I never asked. “ I think it might have hurt me in football, caused me some trouble.” “What if there had been a war? Would you have been a soldier? What if there is one?” Oh, I don’t know. Maybe.” “Well, Daniel. That’s why the draft is wrong. An 18 year old doesn’t know his mind. He registers just like his parents tell him. As we drink another Irontown, the years and distances and differences seem to melt away. I am so happy to be here on this floor, connecting with my kid. And he is clearly happy too. Then he tells me the article [’’SON” , Clinton St. Quarterly, Fall, 1983] I wrote about him is wrong. “ All sorts of things in it are wrong.” “ It wasn’t Jan who made that pillow with American Pro crocheted on it” —the one stuffed with panty hose I use in the van. “That pillow was made by Sandy.” He was a freshman in high school, Sand- ywas a senior in love with him. “ I don’t know how to explain it. But after Jan and I had sex I just lost interest. I don’t know why, but that’s what happened. I began seeing things about her I didn’t like. I guess you wouldn’t approve, being a feminist and all, but that’s what happened.” My breath is gone. I don’t know how to respond, what to say. My ears are ringing. I want to cry. “ I didn’t know how,” he goes on, so strong and direct, as if it’s important to tell me this, “ to tell someone I didn’t want to be with them anymore.” I see beautiful Jan wandering lost outside the dark gym where he is playing the basketball game that will make him once again the league’s Most Valuable Player. I know all the heartbreaking betrayals of my own men. I remember the mermaid and the minotaur, those mythical, halfhuman, half-animal creatures so symbolic of the human race. I don’t know how to respond, what to say. I feel like I’m turning to stone. Later I’ ll remember Dinnerstein’s explanation of this common experience, the male’s fear in sex of losing his hard earned distance from the female, of losing his very masculinity. Rejecting Her (his mother) was his first act of will. But now on this floor my heart pounds. I know all too well my part in this scenario. He is telling me I am full of it. I don’t know who he is. He is telling me he is not just my son. He is his own person. He is telling me that his life, his psyche is not so simple as I assume. / am telling you who I am. I am telling you so that you may know me. So that you who are my mother, who are so wise, so full of love, can really love, can make use of love with all the facts, if as you say, Mom, this is the heart of war, of the grief of our sexual arrangements, if this is why we are about to destroy the earth. But will you? Can you? Can you love me? April 14, 1984—Three Rivers Stadium Denver at Pittsburgh, 2:30 pm Mr. and Mrs. Langlois pick me up at the house, an elegant, attractive couple in their fifties. She wears a silver fur. They “A f te r Jan and I bad sex I just lost interest. I don 't know why, but that’s what happened. I began seeing things about her I didn’t like. I guess you wouldn’t approve, being a feminist and all. ” “Is this what I birthed and raised my child for? Football? What would my son be, with his perfect, giant body, in a perfect society? And there remains the other great mystery. What is thefunction o f this game fo r the spectators? Why do Americans love football?’’ don’t seem to know what to make of me. My leather motorcycle jacket, my many earrings, my red punk shoes, my U.S. OUT OF EL SALVADOR button. On the way to the stadium the rain that has been blowing and falling since yesterday becomes a downpour. Turns to hail. She is worried her son will be hurt. “ Danny,” I say from the backseat, trying to lift the mood, trying to connect with the one great thing we have in common, “when he was small, loved to go out and play ball in the mud.” Mrs. Langlois' long red-painted nails, extended toward the father of her child, rise and then fall like rain on the back of the front seat. She turns her perfect profile to him. Dave is her baby. She even says it. At this moment all the world—the car, the beautiful couple, the sky, the rain and hail, the three rivers, the cement stadium as we pull up to it—is silver. They let me off near my entrance. I feel like one of their kids, climbing out of the backseat. Be good I expect them to say. The ushers and stadium workers are on strike. The first picket line I ever walked through. Here comes the sun! I can’t believe it, they’ re playing the Beatles as I come down the aisle. I t ’salright. . Section 222, Row O, Seat 4. The Denver Gold. I feel sort of like a bride. The sun splashes everything. A twelve-year-old girl in an aqua jump suit sings the Star Spangled Banner. I always forget about this. My old vow not to stand for the flag that took us into Vietnam. Why is the national anthem sung at games? As always, it is a near unbearable moment. I feel so deeply the insult to the others, their eyes on me unbelieving. Are you really not standing for the flag? He’s listed in the sta rting lineup: Flowers, Maggs, Corbin, Correal, Lukens, Doubiago, Raugh, Anderson, Carano, t Coles, Rozier. Offense. Now the Flashdancers. “A bit of flash with a touch of class.” Twenty-six purple leotards, red-sashed tits and asses. Silver heels. Maniac! She’s a maniac for your love. Kickoff. First play, the guy gets by Danny. Second play, Danny stops him. Now patting the ref. “What’s worse,” he said, “ a cop or a ref?” End of the first quarter: Maulers 14, the Gold 0. Second Quarter: Danny's never still. Defense is in now. His helmet off, talking to a coach. “ The pressure on these guys is murder,” says Tony, a man behind me. Danny Boy of the Great Spirit runs right into the endfield when Greg Anderson makes the touchdown. Congratulates him. “ On a bootleg rollout. . .a fake. . .the quarterback does it on his own.” Talking the special language of football that is not necessarily self- explanatory. I’m watching Danny’s every move, Clinton St. Quarterly 37
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