Big Money

With my father recovering, Karl began to transfer his complaints about the lack of big money on to me. Unlike my father, however, I had no natural way of responding. I couldn’t promise him that big money was coming and I didn’t particularly care if it did. One afternoon he confided in me out of nowhere that there had, in fact, never been such a thing as the Holocaust. It was an invention of the Jews who were also running America. We argued briefly, but of course there was no way of winning and I was certain that if I had probed deeper I would have found a host of other things that he hated or looked down on, including – even if my father and I had been been excluded – blacks. It was easy to make sure I never had a sustained conversation with him again.

I still held on to the Cubs, however, even though the pattern I thought I had detected had proved itself to be as foolish as I had always suspected. From the same bar in the Ukrainian Village I drank and cheered as if much more were personally at stake as they won their division. All they had to do now was beat the Florida Marlins in a seven-game series to make it into the World Series. By mid-October they were up three games to one and everyone in the city was elated. The Cubs were just one game away from taking the conference championship, the second best thing to winning the World Series itself. When they lost game five some of that elation vanished and there was an encroaching sense that perhaps we were all being set up for yet another disappointment. On the television and on the radio announcers talked frequently about the Curse of the Goat, a story dating back to 1945 when Billy Sianis and his goat were allegedly kicked out of Wrigley Field during game four of the World Series. Sianis, after being evicted, reportedly said that the Cubs ain’t gonna win any more; fifty-eight years later millions of people across Chicago seemed to be busy speculating as to whether or not that was still going to be true.

The last two games of the series, which only a week earlier had seemed unnecessary, were scheduled to be played in Chicago. An old childhood friend who now worked as a reporter for the Chicago Tribune, and with whom I had spent much of the past month watching the games, called me on the day of game six to say he had won two tickets through his office lottery. I considered it more than just an act of good luck or fortune that we were going, and even though I may not have been willing to admit it to myself at the time, I’m sure I saw it as a form of compensation for what had been a long and difficult month. The Cubs were going to win and the equation I had concocted earlier would finally work itself out to my satisfaction.

The first eight innings of game six were the best moments in baseball that I will most likely ever see live. The Cubs’ pitching kept the Marlins from scoring a single run while the rest of the team added one glorious point after another. Every hit or deep fly ball was a minor victory, with everyone in the stands erupting accordingly. We were hoarse from screaming and singing and, of course, drunk on beer. When the eighth inning began we were up 3–0 and anyone there would have said that only a cruel act of God could have stopped us.

What happens next is now already part of the city’s lore. In the eighth inning, with two outs, Luis Castillo, batting for the Marlins, hits a high fly ball to left field. The Cubs outfielder, Moisés Alou, jumps to grab it at the same time that a fan leans over the stands to reach for the ball, making it almost impossible to catch. The Cubs’ management cries for a call of fan interference, but the umpires are unmoved. Rather than a third and final out, Castillo remains at the plate. He’s walked on a wild pitch, sending him to first base and another runner to third. Two more batters come to the plate, each one driving home at least one run so that by the time the inning is over the game is tied and a stadium full of Cubs fans are pointing to left field at the fan who leaned over the railing and are chanting ‘asshole’ in unison. The Cubs, in a manner and style that seem wholly unique to them, go down quickly. They give up five more runs in the final inning, losing the game 8–3. The following day they are crushed again in game seven, bringing their almost glorious season to what in retrospect seems like a fitting, if not inevitable, end.

Three weeks after that game I returned to New York, at least one month earlier and, in my mind, several years older than I had expected. While the Cubs had blown it, my father’s recovery had moved along steadily. The surgeon even later reported how lucky they were in catching the tumour when they did since it was just millimetres away from attacking the lymph nodes. He predicted a full and rapid recovery and by the end of October my father was already managing most of the business with his cellphone from his bed. Even though I was no longer responsible for answering the calls, I felt a pull inside my stomach and heart every time the phone rang.

I would like to say that my father returned to work effortlessly, but that seems unlikely. I’m sure that it took a great amount of effort and will to do so, certainly even more than before. I stayed around long enough to understand that he would manage just fine without me before I left to go back to New York. I returned to my normal life with a slightly naive promise to myself that I would return to Chicago frequently, in part to be reminded of the great efforts taken by my parents on their children’s behalf. I sometimes joked with my friends that it was hard returning to the real world: real work, real life, real responsibilities, which was to say by extension that everything else was artifice, a sentiment which I still partly believe in even as I’m quick to reject it.

Before we moved to Chicago we spent our first seven years in America living three hours south in Peoria, Illinois. We attended a Southern Baptist church; my father worked in a Caterpillar factory, famous for making tractors, and my mother worked at the local university. A summer night out was to a drive-through ice-cream stand that also had benches near the side of the road. When I lived in Chicago, I often thought of that time in Peoria as somehow having been more authentic to what we think of when we picture life in America because of its seemingly wholesome nature; because I could tick off all the boxes that came with that picture of an earnest and hard-working American family. Chicago was too big, too aggressive and violent to fall into that category, until, of course, I moved away and returned and saw a fraction of it from my father’s perspective. Now, even though no one in our family lives there any more, Chicago still seems to me like the very heart of the heartland, for reasons having nothing to do with geography and nothing to do with size.