My older daughter and I were biking around Brooklyn’s Prospect Park to her last soccer game of the season, she in her pale green uniform. The spring of 2003, this was. I had turned forty a couple of months before. My daughter was nine. As I recall it, it was during this ride that she asked if I played sports as a kid, if my father was involved, what all of that was like.
“My father thought it was important for me to know how to play baseball,” I said as we pedaled in the pleasant air around the park’s paved inner loop. “People in his generation thought there were some things boys should just know how to do. So he tried to teach me. We spent a lot of time playing catch in our backyard. I wasn’t very good at it at first. And he wasn’t well—he was a good dozen years older than I am now, and he was in pain a fair amount of the time. He died within a couple of years of that. But he thought it was important for him to do this while he still could, because he knew he didn’t have a lot of time. When I messed up, he got impatient, and sometimes a little nasty. He was in pain, like I said. I understand it all now, but at the time I hated it, and I resented it. So, that was my experience with sports as a kid.”
We came to what I called, in my head, Dead Man’s Hill—the steep decline we had to bike down before exiting the park at the Parade Grounds. This part of the ride always made me nervous. I worried that my daughter would panic at how quickly she was moving and lose control of her bike somehow; I pictured a horribly scraped or broken arm, a head injury despite her helmet. But I didn’t tell her to be careful, as I was tempted to do, because I didn’t want her to be afraid. We coasted down the hill in silence, slowing as we always did when the road mercifully flattened out. Soon we reached the field where her team would be playing.
On the soccer field, parents and uniformed girls stood around, mostly quiet, waiting for the doughy, brown-haired coach. “Good morning,” I said, for some reason, as he and his daughter, who was on the team, walked onto the field. Old habits die hard, I guess. “How are you,” he said as joylessly as usual, no question mark, because it was the very last thing he wanted to know. The team photo, which we would all receive later, told me I should not take it personally: his face, as he stood by the girls, was the face of someone who has spent hours outside the operating room and is finally about to talk to the surgeon.
The coach, as always, asked for a parent volunteer to be a linesperson. I took a couple of steps back. I had done this before, and I hated it. When the ball went out of bounds, as it frequently did, the linesperson called which team had last had contact with it, determining which team should have it now. You could say the stakes were not high. Still, this was a job that called for someone with complete confidence in his judgment or, failing that, the belief that being decisive was more important than being right.
I was the opposite of that person. I once heard liberal defined as someone who won’t take his own side in an argument, and to some extent that was me, a person who would do anything before he would risk being in the wrong. This seeming self-effacement may in fact be a kind of egotism, the conviction that one knows what the rights and wrongs of a situation are, that one is above the rest of squabbling humanity.
Convictions are tricky. To be without them is to live, at best, a meaningless life. To follow a conviction too devotedly—say, the conviction that your son should learn to play baseball come hell or high water—can do more harm than good.
How had I managed this balance in my life, up to age forty? The answer could lie, or not, in a quick glance at that life. I had a decent job and was happily married and raising two girls I adored in a beautiful neighborhood. At the same time, there were things I dreamed of and pursued but felt very far from achieving. Did I have the balance right, or had I gone wrong somewhere, followed the wrong conviction or not followed the right one? There were times when I thought of my life as a giant machine, one that I had built but that was now controlling my actions with merciless regularity, regardless of what I might want or any convictions I might have. There were other times, in the few hours I had to myself, when I wrote or read or watched a film or listened to music, when I felt as one with the creative spirit.
What would my father have done?
This is the person I was, this was the life I lived, these were the questions I asked as I stood on the sidelines and cheered for my daughter’s soccer team. After the game was over, the parents and kids all met at the coach’s house to have pizza and celebrate the season. The coach and his daughter lived not far from my apartment—one street over and a few blocks down the hill that gives Park Slope its name. The house, a brownstone, was near the bottom of its block. The house number seemed familiar. When we walked in, I looked around at the layout and the high tin ceilings. In the same moment I realized, and said aloud to whoever was nearby, “I used to live here.” And for a moment, like a character in a science fiction series, I was transported to another time, another life, another self.
The time was seventeen years earlier, the late summer and early fall of 1986, when I was twenty-three and new to the city and living on the top floor of this brownstone. I shared it with another man, a thirty-year-old who, like me, was named Cliff. This all might have come from the mind of a sitcom writer, since our first names were the beginning and end of what we had in common. Actually, that’s not true—we were both thin, and neither of us was exactly tall. Otherwise, imagine The Odd Couple with both guys named Oscar. I was introverted, quiet, and, incidentally, black, with close-cropped hair; my roommate was extroverted, loud, and, incidentally, white (and Jewish), with stringy blond hair that came to his shoulders. Cliff rented the top floor from the family downstairs, and I rented the larger of the two bedrooms from Cliff (his room was tiny); we shared a kitchen, bathroom, and living room. When I moved in, my roommate cheerfully changed the message on the answering machine to say, “This is the home of TWO Cliffs!” We shared other things, too. I had a turn-table and a stack of albums—rock, R&B, a few classical—that I put in the living room. One day Cliff told me he had rearranged my albums. “It’s a simple system,” he said with a grin. “See if you can figure it out.” When I couldn’t, he told me: he put the ones he liked on top. He felt I should be free with his things, too. Once I asked if I could borrow or use something, I forget what. “You don’t gotta ask,” he told me. “Just do.” Cliff’s laugh sounded a lot like a car engine revving. When a friend of mine from back home visited, he and I and Cliff and Cliff’s girlfriend went to see She’s Gotta Have It at the old thea-ter on Flatbush Avenue; the movie made Cliff laugh, and my friend was more entertained by my roommate than by Spike Lee. “Coolest white boy I ever met,” he later told me.
When I knew him, Cliff didn’t have a job—“I’m livin’ on spit,” he said at one point—and/but he was an aspiring pop musician. “If it’s not Top 40, I’m not interested,” I heard him tell a potential collaborator. He sang—yowled, really—and played guitar, and he would play me the songs he wrote. That was how I discovered that you can get songs stuck in your head, and find yourself singing them, whether you like them or not.
What about the other Cliff, the one speaking to you now? I would write short stories, typing them up on the manual typewriter I had bought for seven bucks at the local flea market. (On a few occasions my roommate read and critiqued them, thoughtfully.) I worked for a company in Manhat-tan, where I was my department’s low man on the totem pole—that may have been my title—a job in which, unlike future jobs that involved more responsibility, I never knew from one hour to the next what would be coming at me. I didn’t like that much. I didn’t like the pay, either. One of the measly twice-monthly paychecks covered the rent, or most of it, and the other covered everything else, or didn’t—I can remember stuffing laundry into a pillowcase because a pillow seemed beyond my means.
The unpredictability of life in those days, at work and outside it, had the occasional upside. I recall going out for the evening with a casual female friend, an occasion I didn’t think of as a date until, as we were having coffee, our hands accidentally touched on the table, and neither of us pulled away.
All of this is to say that I hadn’t yet built the machine, the one that ran my life with such regularity. That had its problems. If I didn’t know from day to day what was happening in my world externally, that was partly because I wasn’t too sure what was going on inside, either. I had convictions—about the unimportance of race, the oneness of people—that I had not thought through very far. What would later be my interests in film and music were more impulses then, blind groping. To put it more succinctly, there was a lot I didn’t know about who I was, and knowing who you are makes difficulties on every level easier to deal with.
I wonder, now, if that accounts for the inordinate fright I felt late one night in my room, when summer had become fall, when I was on the edge of sleep and suddenly heard a rustling I thought was a rat under the floor or in the wall. I went to get the other Cliff. As we stood in my room, he explained in a groggy but kindly voice—I had woken him up—that the heat was coming on, that there was nothing to worry about. In that one moment I felt comforted, cared for. Fathered.
A young woman I was close to at the time said once that Cliff had a big heart. I realized she was right. I liked him, though if I was being honest I would have said that I liked the idea of him, that there were days I wished he would practice his big-heartedness, and his loudness, and his voice exercises (“I-love-you-TRU-u-u-ly”), and his midnight sessions with his girlfriend, and his freedom with other people’s things, away from where I lived. I was beginning to learn that much about myself. So I wasn’t altogether dismayed when Cliff told me after three months that the landlord wanted to give the top floor to a family member, and the two of us needed to leave. “Welcome to New York,” he said. I moved out, in the casual way of the young—that brownstone was the third of five places I lived in when I was twenty-three—and went elsewhere in the neighborhood, and then places out of the neighborhood, starting on the road that brought me, seventeen years later, to an afternoon pizza party with my daughter and her teammates and their parents and the coach.
As we sat and stood eating pizza, the coach talked about the people who volunteered as referees for the American Youth Soccer Organization. “It’s one thing if your kid is on the team, and you’re a coach for that reason,” he said. “But being a referee—that’s just pure altruism.”
So, this man’s being a coach was an extension of what he saw as his responsibility as a parent. Being deeply uncharismatic, he was better at some parts of this job than others. But who fills all roles equally well?
And I thought of something I had witnessed earlier in the soccer season. The team’s win/loss record was not impressive, but during a break near the end of one game, the coach gathered the girls and told them, “It’s looking like we’re going to win this game. So it’s important for us to be gracious about it.”
We learn gradually about ourselves, and our selves, and we do what we can. Sometimes it works better than other times, this rising of our different selves to meet different roles. My old roommate had called the top floor of the brownstone “the home of two Cliffs”; my body was, is, the home of more than two Cliffs, probably many more, and who knew how many other people. Somewhere in me was my father, a man I never really got to know, and he was only the beginning. Occasionally I think of the people I will never know about. Was there, centuries ago in Africa, an ancestor who watched his daughter climb higher and higher in a tree, who felt afraid for her but did not want to make her afraid by saying so? How much of the machine is genetic? From time to time I look in the mirror and wonder what other people are looking back at me.
But we can deal only with what we know. At forty I began to think of my father not as one who had made my life miserable for misguided reasons, but as one who thought he had a job to do and tried to do it the best he could. As I looked more kindly on him, I began to father myself. I’m not sure I ever told my daughter that part of the story. I will have to, one of these days.
Clifford Thompson is the author, most recently, of What It Is: Race, Family, and One Thinking Black Man’s Blues. His graphic novel Big Man and the Little Men is due out from Other Press in 2022.
