Happy August from Works Progress. This month’s story is a gutpunch from Matthew Daddona about fatherhood, a high school football star, and home videos. It’s also a reminder of what we’re doing when we watch tape, in the sports world and more metaphorically: “to watch and rewatch and then register my mistakes, to do better.”
-The Editors
The memories I’m prepared to divulge occurred before my wife left me forever and after I dropped the baby. But memories no less, the pain they’ve caused is as real and lasting as any video evidence that may contain them, though let me be clear on this point: I only dropped the baby once and never on video.
My best friend, Howie, the quarterback of our high school football team, used to say that video tape is the best resume a player has. Howie died in a car accident last year while driving an expanse between Yellowstone and Glacier National Park and encountering sleet that sent his car rolling into a brown abyss. If tape of his accident had been made available, authorities would’ve seen him embracing for the unknown like he had a collision in football: head pitched, shoulders worn like a secondary helmet, eyes closed but seeing through their dime slots, ribcage expanding and then collapsing. Howie there and then not, buried under a body of metal.
I was channeling Howie, perhaps, when I decided to rewatch tapes of myself as a first-time father, at 33. The first thing I noticed was that I was skinnier than I am now, at 44, but in possession of the same tight clothing that these days do little to accommodate an aging, poorly metabolizing body. Then I noticed the baby, Max, now twelve and blessed with good looks, like the transformation from chubby toddler to polished pre-teen was a baptism of efficiency. I noticed myself in connection to Max, the invisible line that threads us—our eye contact, his tiny index and middle fingers tugging at my blonde arm hairs, the notion that what’s mine is his and his mine. How does one ever make sense of that?
I noticed something else, though this came from repeat-viewings: my inadequacies and how appalled by them I was. How I held Max with too much slack, or sometimes too little. How I burped him incorrectly and could hear my wife Elle’s criticism off-screen (“Easy. Easy. Easy.”) How I liberally placed him on the sofa, only for a moment, I thought, so I could open a beer, but how, in watching this movement years later, I saw that it was longer than a moment, that it was, I could count, several moments (thirty seconds sometimes), an eternity for a crying, stubborn thing. And who was filming this ordeal? Was it Elle? Could Elle have been so negligent as to let me put down Max so I could open a beer? Did that say more about her than it did me?
I’ve already said that I never dropped Max on camera. Prying eyes wouldn’t have allowed for that, and the tapes would’ve been destroyed long before I had the nerve to watch them. Not that I would have, the nerve. I should also reiterate that Max is currently thriving—beautiful child he is. If I had dropped him in a way that impaired him—a scar that stretches from his bottom lip down to his chin, for instance—I would not be able to live with myself.
Yet, “the drop,” such is what Elle called it, did have its share of consequences. How could it not? You drop a baby even while sober and you quit drinking for a year or more. In my case, two years and four months. You drop a baby and doubt you were ever meant to be a father in the first place. Not even a good father but a father, generally. You think that your own father, who raised you with utmost care, is better than you’d ever be—that even if you hadn’t dropped the baby, and you did, asshole, you’d still be less than. Dad never dropped a baby. Dad had three babies and never dropped one. You think your instincts to conceive a child in the first place were borne from selfish intentions, though that feeling never goes away regardless of what happens to the child. Really, it doesn’t.
For years after “the drop,” I thought that Elle’s decision to leave was a result of my error, like how the entire high school thought it was Howie’s interception in the fourth quarter of the state qualifier that cost us the game and a trip to Pittsburgh. What my fellow teammates didn’t see—and I have to admit that I didn’t either for some time—was that Howie’s three touchdown passes that game put us in contention to begin with; if it wasn’t his touchdown passes, it was his ability to protect the ball before then, to make read after read, to inspire us on offense and defense to keep our heads in the game. Critics of his performance couldn’t see that winning and losing is the sum of their parts; to believe that success is dependent upon a single play is as shortsighted as it is insane.
I thought that Elle was under the same impression that my teammates had been, that she couldn’t get herself to see past “the drop” and had blamed me for all of it, even if it was determined—by numerous doctors as well as her hyper-vigilant friends—that Max was okay, more than okay, kid is a natural problem solver, an angel, okay, sure, I’ve made my point, let’s move on.
No, “the drop” was the final miscalculation in a series of bad games, if the series had occurred over months and the games over years. For the purposes of carrying through this football metaphor, let’s imagine an existence in which Howie was a bad quarterback, a putrid one, but coach had no one else to replace him with, such that choosing the lesser of two evils was coach’s only option. And maybe it was Elle’s too, choosing to stay with me because options felt limited (her reads were cut short, she saw ghosts in the defenders) and because, together, we had created a baby and together we’d see it through, even if it wasn’t perfect. Even if some days it was god-awful. But this metaphor is incomplete because, despite the team’s loss, Howie received a scholarship to a Division II college and had a worthy football career. When college ended, so did his time in the sport, but at least he saw it through. Unlike me and Elle, who signed a contract we couldn’t maintain. You don’t get points for trying, inscribe that on my gravestone.
*
Elle reminds me of Max, and he of her. They are quiet, thoughtful, outwardly simplistic though not simple. They are patient when they don’t know what they want, and they are ravenous when ambition outperforms common logic. Those are the times when Elle’s pragmatism abates, when she is so committed to problem-solving that she forgets all manners and sense of process, as in the third trimester of her pregnancy when she decided that she was “letting go” of her OB-GYN and replacing him with a less prestigious but amicable doctor who demonstrated what she called an “expert level of empathy” after he told her, in no obsequious terms, that she should “care less about her own patients at this moment and more about her own health.” The prestigious doctor, meanwhile, who was her actual friend in addition to her colleague, told her that her pregnancy was “causing questionable decisions at work.” Elle had made the choice, without consulting anyone, least of all me, that her friend was toast, had been making decisions based on his own stress level and not hers, and, anyway, shouldn’t a decision about a woman’s stress level be made by the woman herself? But what of the amicable doctor, I asked, the one who said you should work less? Doesn’t that mean that he too was trying to decide for you, I asked? Well, you know what, she said, at least he was nice about it.
And similarly, Max, who until this year was wracked with anxiety about his social position on the ladder of middle school-popularity, when he decided to commit himself fully to his hobbies, including but not limited to classical guitar, acting studies, reading, and magic. His conviction to magic, as brought to you by Internet videos (the screen being a sort of magic trick in itself) became so intense that at one point he had alienated the few friends he had, resulting in a letter that he wrote to himself and placed on the outside of his bedroom door so his mother could see (Max lives with his mother full-time and I get to see him on weekends). The letter outlined his goals for the upcoming year, headlined by the opportunistic but heartbreaking message: “Find Better Friends.” I’d expected Elle to call me upon discovering Max’ heartbreaker of an objective, but she never did. Max told me about it.
He cried. I remember this. The first time I remember him crying of his own volition and not because something was done to him. And though perhaps inaccurate, I have since convinced myself that he didn’t cry from “the drop,” that the pain was so fast as to not have given him time to process. Quickness being the difference between pain realized and pain felt.
It was August when he had broken down, we had just come from a Malaysian food festival, and I was thinking about ice cream (as if the present and past melted into a Sno-Cone of memories). I knew he was too old for ice cream cones, even if he wasn’t. His hands were still so small. I wanted him to be the Statue of Liberty with an Ice Cream Cone, to grow tall and hold something, to have something to show for it.
“Max,” I said, “what makes you think you need friends? Your father, I mean me, I don’t have many friends.”
“But you have a job.”
“And?”
“And you show up and everyone has to treat you nice, even if they don’t want to.”
“So?”
“And they don’t have to do that in school.”
“Because why?”
Max sobbed between breaths—were his breaths sobs? I swear, right then and there, I expected him to teach me a lesson on the difference between school and work—and how powerless I would’ve been standing there and listening—but maybe Max was waiting for his dad to answer, for me to exert some ingrained wisdom, but I only said, “Maybe we should talk to your mother. She was the popular one.”
In saying that, I had admitted to the very notion over which he was crying in the first place—that for as long as people have kids, and their kids have them, there will be winners and losers; that insofar as one can change their social status, they will forever be perched on that crag of uncertainty.
I’ve said too much, have oversold my case. Max, a year removed from this episode, has settled into a healthy flow of self-worth and outward projection, such that the friends he does have, who are as quirky as he is intelligent, have helped balance out his insecurities with a healthy dose of theirs. When they come over my house now, they use the basement door. They aren’t hiding anything—I can assure you that—but have realized that any degree of small-talk with their friend’s dad (me again) takes away time that could be spent building rockets, playing video games, and putting on homemade costumes resembling their favorite fictional characters. They don’t do magic anymore, magic is gone.
After Howie died, I thought of all the associations that also leaves with one’s body. Sure, the soul, but that’s some Judeo-Christian bullshit. I’m talking about memory. I’m talking specifically about my memories of Howie. I feared that his absence would also strip my memories of him. Think about it this way: you see a person, even once a year, and the associations with them come flooding back, pick up where they left off, add to the stories we tell ourselves. But what happens when you don’t see them, not even just intermittently but ever again? The stories we tell ourselves become frozen, starved of momentum. And since it’s been a year since Howie’s death, and many years more than that since our high school football days, when those memories were birthed in the first place, I tell myself, and anyone who asks, that Howie was the greatest quarterback I’ve ever seen. A heck of a guy. My best friend. An unparalleled loss to our community.
Nobody would’ve said that about me and Elle: an unparalleled loss. People get married and divorced every day. People give up on the idea of forever far too easily, chalk it up to percentages. Say they’ll do better next time around.
That’s what I was trying to detect by watching tape. To watch and rewatch and then register my mistakes, to do better. To do as Howie did. Psychologists argue ad nauseam about the fecklessness of trying to do too much too late; they write books in which they scream—or I imagine them screaming—about early adolescence being the time at which kids will have learned everything you could have taught them. How, by Max’s age, it’s too late to teach them anything more. Maybe some technical skills, sure, but nothing pertaining to love and respect and forgiveness.
I like to think there’s still time.
There are three video tapes in total. They are not unique with respect to other family videos, may even lack the comedy that comprise “America’s Funniest” or the horror that has since become a staple of Internet voyeurism. They are so normalized to the extent that, over a two-year period, they show a family—a husband and a wife—loving a newborn son as best they can. The settings occasionally change, the props within them get replaced, the dialogue repeats until, when stale, it’s improvised upon. Still, the method never changes. It’s a process built on love and trust.
That is, until it’s not.
When this occurs, the video no longer runs. It becomes stuck in the VCR or shut away in a box of other abandoned videos and children’s toys. Taken out as a last-ditch effort.
I called Elle after watching the tapes to tell her that there is hope in video evidence, that if nothing else, it represents what we made and what we had, even if short-lived. If she needed reminding, I’d remind her. If she needed showing, I’d show her.
Elle, I said on the phone, do you remember how Max used to hold his head to one side? Hold isn’t the right word, more like his head took him. How big it was. And how thankful we were to have that grey carpet in the living room that me and Howie installed because Max’ big head kept tipping him over. And you on camera saying, ‘Thatta boy Maxwell, that’s how you hold up your head. Good boy. That’s a strong boy.’ You sounded so happy, hon. Sorry, I didn’t mean to call you hon. You were proud is all.
…And on another tape, one of Howie’s game balls that he’d given us, well to Max, who he’d hoped Max would use it one day, and how I kept rolling it to our son as you lay next to him in the crib—you were like the goalie to my tosses, though that’s not right…the cornerback to my passes. Picking my passes off. Not letting Max free. I called interference, but you didn’t laugh. Not once.
…The third tape, maybe the one I watch most, starts with rain. First the graininess of the video and then actual rain, you were filming it from Max’ room. ‘Baby’s first rainstorm,’ you said before the tape cut to…another time, sometime later…was it the same day or night…a party at our apartment. Who was filming? We were all on camera—me, you, Max, your friends. Your friends were taking turns holding Max while I downed bottles and snacked on cheese-things. My friends and I had cigars in our hands, though none had been lit. You would never have allowed it. Then the tape cut, grain again. Rain? Wasn’t anyone’s fault. Reminds me of when…yes, that time. I’m sorry but I have to.
…Max and I had come home from the park, it was raining then too, you remember? Course you do. That morning you told me it was the kind of day that you want to shower off even though you’re soaking wet. I hadn’t had a drink in two days, I told you that too. Really, I hadn’t. Not on that morning either. Some tea at the bagel shop before taking Max to the park. It was raining, but I buttoned him up tight, hood and everything, and put him in the sling. Walked around thinking about what you said a few nights before, about how we must consider our lives as separate but connected events. Before-baby and after-baby, but that after-baby should only mean always-baby—that even if the worst happens, God forbid, we’ll always be parents. I was thinking about that and how I needed to clean myself up. Stop drinking. Maybe never restart. Could forever really be forever this time? And I called Howie to tell him about my plan, but he didn’t answer. He was my best friend, Elle, he’d never judge. Not that you would, I know you wouldn’t, but he had a way of getting through to me in a way I can’t explain—call it conditioning. Call it desire. And because he didn’t answer when I called, I pretended he was there, like in one of those experiments where you imagine Howie in your shoes, a What-Would-Howie-Do in this situation…
…So it was Howie with the baby, it was Howie walking with Max, wiping his slick forehead before they got into the car…it was Howie driving home, taking Max out of the car seat, unbuttoning his jacket because he was no longer cold with rain, that’s what he thought…It was Howie opening the door to the apartment and climbing up the stairs, not bothering to wipe his own feet because he was so excited to see you, Elle, that he just bolted up…He was a quarterback after all, a natural athlete…It was Howie who slipped on the 10th step, we’ve counted them so many goddamn times, made games of them we did, sometimes even saw how many steps we could skip…And it was Howie who dropped Max, fumbled him at such a rate that he had no way of recovering him until the ball hit the landing and didn’t make another sound. Who thought Max would cry and was surprised when Max didn’t.
The ball lay there, didn’t make another sound…It was so wet, Elle, it wasn’t his fault. Couldn’t be. Could it? He really was a great quarterback, the best I ever knew.
-30-
Matthew Daddona is the author of the poetry collection House of Sound (2020) and the forthcoming novel The Longitude of Grief (2024). His poetry, fiction, and journalism has appeared in The New York Times, Newsday, Whalebone, Outside Magazine, Fast Company, Grammy.com, Tin House, Electric Literature, and others. He lives on the North Fork of Long Island.