The Best of Me(61)

“Not without him, they’re not. Donny’s the thunderbolt. Take him out of the picture, and they’re nothing.”

The next time they were on The Andy Williams Show, my father flushed me out of my room and forced me to watch.

“Isn’t he fantastic? Just look at that kid! God Almighty, can you believe it?”

Competing against celebrities, people who were not in any sense “real,” was a losing game. I knew this as well as I knew my name and troop number, but the more my father carried on about Donny Osmond, the more threatened and insignificant I felt. The thing was that he didn’t even like that kind of music. “Well, normally, no,” he said, when I brought it up. “Something about Donny, though, makes me like it.” He paused. “And the hell of it is he’s even younger than you are.”

“A year younger.”

“Well, that’s still younger.”

I’d never know if my father did this to hurt me or to spur me on, but on both fronts he was wildly successful. I remember being at the club in the summer of ’69, the day that men walked on the moon. Someone put a TV on the lifeguard chair, and we all gathered around, me thinking that at least today something was bigger than Donny Osmond and Greg Sakas, who was actually now a little shorter than I was.

That Labor Day, at the season’s final intraclub meet, I beat Greg in the butterfly. “Were you watching? Did you see that? I won!”

“Maybe you did, but it was only by a hair,” my father said on our way home that evening. “Besides, that was, what—one time out of fifty? I don’t really see that you’ve got anything to brag about.”

That’s when I thought, Okay, so that’s how it is. My dad was like the Marine Corps, only instead of tearing you to pieces and then putting you back together, he just did the first part and called it a day. Now it seems cruel, abusive even, but this all happened before the invention of self-esteem, which, frankly, I think is a little overrated.



I’m sure my father said plenty of normal things to me when I was growing up, but what stuck, probably because he said it, like, ten thousand times, was “Everything you touch turns to crap.” His other catchphrase was “You know what you are? A big fat zero.”

I’ll show you, I remember thinking. Proving him wrong was what got me out of bed every morning, and when I failed it’s what got me back on my feet. I remember calling in the summer of 2008 to tell him my book was number one on the Times bestseller list.

“Well, it’s not number one on the Wall Street Journal list,” he said.

“That’s not really the list that book people turn to,” I told him.

“The hell it isn’t,” he said. “I turn to it.”

“And you’re a book person?”

“I read. Sure.”

I recalled the copy of Putt to Win gathering dust on the backseat of his car. “Of course you read,” I said.

Number one on the Times list doesn’t mean that your book is good—just that a lot of people bought it that week, people who were tricked, maybe, or were never too bright to begin with. It’s not like winning the Nobel Prize in Literature, but still, if it’s your kid, aren’t you supposed to be happy and supportive?

Of course, it complicates things when a lot of that book is about you and what a buffoon you can be. Number one in this particular case meant that a whole lot of people just read about my father sitting around in his underpants and hitting people over the head with spoons. So maybe he had a right to be less than enthusiastic.

When I told him I’d started swimming again, my dad said, “Attaboy.” This is the phrase he uses whenever I do something he thinks was his idea.

“I’m going back to college.”

“Attaboy.”

“I’m thinking of getting my teeth fixed.”

“Attaboy.”

“On second thought…,” I always want to say.

It’s not my father’s approval that troubles me but my childlike hope that maybe this time it will last. He likes that I’ve started swimming again, so maybe he’ll also like the house I bought (“Boy, they sure saw you coming”) or the sports coat I picked up on my last trip to Japan (“You look like a goddamn clown”).

Greg Sakas would have got the same treatment eventually, as would any of the other would-be sons my father pitted me against throughout my adolescence. Once they got used to the sweet taste of his approval, he’d have no choice but to snatch it away, not because of anything they did but because it is in his nature. The guy sees a spark and just can’t help but stomp it out.

I was in Las Vegas not long ago and looked up to see Donny Osmond smiling down at me from a billboard only slightly smaller than the sky. “You,” I whispered.

In the hotel pool a few hours later, I thought of him as I swam my laps. Then I thought of Greg and was carried right back to the Raleigh Country Club. Labor Day, 1969. A big crowd for the intraclub meet, the air smelling of chlorine and smoke from the barbecue pit. The crummy part of swimming is that while you’re doing it you can’t really see much: the bottom of the pool, certainly, a smudged and fleeting bit of the outside world as you turn your head to breathe. But you can’t pick things out—a man’s face, for example, watching from the sidelines when, for the first time in your life, you pull ahead and win.