by Tim Howard
This house we sat in every Thursday, with its tidy lawn and middle-class comforts, was testament to Poppa’s success in America—proof that freedom and hard work made everything possible.
My Nana, my father’s mom, lived in a neighborhood where the air was rife with danger and the threat of crime; it was nothing like Poppa’s East Brunswick.
I never knew my paternal grandfather, who had left Nana and their five young kids to fend for themselves. Somehow Nana managed to support those kids working on cafeteria wages; she served meals in the dining hall at Rutgers University. Nana’s children stayed near to her, and then had their own kids. We cousins met up at Nana’s—sometimes fifteen of us all at once. We ran around screaming and shouting at each other, slamming doors as we tore around her apartment. When the chaos got to be too much, Nana called out, “Where’s my switch? I’m getting my switch.” Then she opened the back door, snapped off a branch from a scrubby bush growing outside her door, pulled off the leaves, and started waving the thing around. If we didn’t move fast, we’d feel that switch hitting the back of our legs. So we burst out of the house, running for our lives, this huge caravan of kids all scared to death of the strongest, toughest grandmother imaginable.
Still, for all her switch-waving, Nana seemed to have more internal peace than anyone I’ve ever known. Nana’s life had been a hard one, yet she had a quiet calm, as if none of the troublesome things around her—the gang graffiti or worries about her kids or long hours scooping stew into bowls—could bring her down. That peace came from faith. Nana took us often to her church, Mount Zion African Methodist Episcopal in New Brunswick. It was one of those congregations where people seemed to take in the Holy Spirit with every breath, where the choir belted out gospel tunes for hours at a time, stretching their arms toward the sky. I was mesmerized by the sheer joyfulness of it all, by the voices uplifted in song, by the wildly dancing feet. It was so infectious I couldn’t stop myself from clapping along.
I was no stranger to churches. Mom’s family was Catholic, and my favorite night of the year was Christmas Eve. When I was little, I climbed up into my mother’s lap during midnight mass, drifting in and out of the service dreamily. Even as I grew older, I’d sit close to my mom, lean against her as I heard her voice singing that all was calm and all was bright. There was a such beauty to these Catholic services, a quiet reverence shrouded in mystery that to this day I can’t separate from the feeling of being protected and loved by my mother.
But Nana’s church was something altogether different—what with the dancing and shaking of tambourines, and people singing and calling out Amens and Mmm-hmms and That’s rights at the top of their lungs as Reverend Hooper stood at the front of the church, praying with outstretched hands.
I remember the first time I saw someone overtaken by the spirit there. It was an old woman who’d been dancing and singing like everyone else, until something strange began to come over her: her hands shook, then her arms, and soon her entire body. Her mouth opened, and she began to wail in a kind of ecstasy, stretching her arms toward heaven. That’s when her wails turned into words—rapid-fire words like none I’d ever heard. It wasn’t my mom’s Hungarian, or any of the languages people spoke in Northwood Estates. It didn’t sound like an earthly language at all. She shouted up at the sky in what seemed to be a secret tongue known only to her and God.
I glanced nervously at Nana, but she wore a knowing smile on her lips.
“She’s caught the Holy Spirit,” Nana said.
Whatever this woman had caught, it was electric. It was pure. It was unlike anything I’d ever seen.
That was my New Jersey: Sikh immigrants and the sprawling lawns of Fox Hill Run. Hungarian paprikash, and scrappy games of pickup basketball. The force of Jimmy’s fist, and the sting of Nana’s switch. Pathmark coupons and flea markets and old ladies suddenly speaking in tongues. The idea that you could start a new life as a janitor, and bit by bit work your way up and into your own split-level in the heart of East Brunswick’s middle class.
New Jersey was promise. New Jersey was the American Dream. New Jersey was the world, and the world could be yours for the taking—all you had to do was show up, day after day, give it everything you had, and keep the faith.
It was in New Jersey that I first understood this: anything is possible.
GOALS THAT MATTERED
If only you’d apply yourself, Tim . . .
You’re a good kid, but you lack ambition.
If only you worked as hard in the classroom as you do at sports . . .
I wasn’t much of a student. Actually, that’s an understatement: I despised school. I couldn’t sit still, couldn’t focus, desperately wanted to be anywhere but at my desk.
Mom always said that as a baby, I’d been oddly alert to the environment around me, sounds and sensations somehow amplified. I screamed every time I was changed, because I hated the feel of cool air on my skin. I hollered when I was bathed; the water was either too warm or too cool. I didn’t sleep through the night until I was seven. Mom might spend hours getting me to sleep—playing Chuck Mangione records, stroking my face, trying in vain to help me calm down enough to close my eyes. When I finally did, she’d tiptoe out of the room, praying that I’d stay asleep. Twenty minutes later, though, if a floorboard creaked or a faraway police siren sounded, my eyes popped open again.
I was terrified of heights. I startled easily. I was acutely sensitive to even slight changes in light. It was as if, Mom has always said, all my nerve endings were outside my body instead of tucked safely under my skin.
Nowhere did the environment around me feel more horrible than the classroom. I hated school, hated everything about it—the tick tick of the clock on the wall. The hum of the fluorescent lights overhead. The screech of chairs scraping across floors, the hardness of the seat beneath me.
And worse: all those long, long hours of sitting still.
I couldn’t understand how other kids tolerated it all like it didn’t even bother them. For me, the school day was unbearable.
I escaped the only way I knew how: I became the kid who raised his hand five, six, seven times a day, asking to go to the bathroom. When it wasn’t the bathroom, I’d say I needed to go see the nurse—not because there was anything physically wrong with me, but because anywhere, even the nurse’s office, was better than being stuck in the classroom. I’m pretty sure that the first record I ever set was Boy Most Likely to Leave the Classroom—and I wasn’t even in second grade yet.
“Oh, Tim,” my teachers would sigh when I squirmed in my seat or failed to answer a question. “If you’d only pay attention . . .”
I wasn’t a troublemaker. I wasn’t impertinent. The teachers liked me. But year after year, the comments on my report cards and summer-school forms basically came down to a single point, and it was 100 percent accurate: I seemed to get nothing whatsoever out of all those long hours I spent in the classroom. To me, the days at Arthur M. Judd Elementary School were just something to be endured. They were what I had to do until I could burst into the open air and get to the things that really mattered: sports.
When I was six, my mom signed me up for sports leagues. First, she signed me up for T-ball. Because I was a big kid, standing head and shoulders above all the other boys my age, the coach put me in the outfield.
But nothing happened in the outfield. I stood there and waited as a bunch of short kids swung and missed. At best, they might send a ground ball rolling toward first base. So as I stood around in the field, I’d make up an imaginary game in my head. “And he hits the ball into the outfield . . . it’s over the center fielder’s head . . . he’s rounding third base and the crowd goes crazy . . .”
By the time the other team had gotten three outs, I was running wild all over that outfield, waving my arms and shouting, completely caught up in this imaginary game.
Then we tried recreational soccer. My first team was called the Rangers, and we wore green T-shirts.
I had no skil
l whatsoever. None. I couldn’t dribble or trap a ball or even complete a pass. But I was fast. I ran past the other kids, got to the ball first, and blasted it up the field.
During one early game, I remember an opposing player’s dad—one of those type-A parents on the sidelines, the kind coaches can’t stand—kept shouting to his son, “Don’t let the jolly green giant get the ball!”
Then, a minute later, “Go get that jolly green giant!”
He was talking about me, of course, the tall kid in the green shirt. I looked over at the sideline and met my mom’s eyes. It’s okay, Tim, she seemed to be saying. You keep playing.
It was only when I heard the dad yell, “Don’t let that Puerto Rican giant get the ball,” that I stopped. I turned to the man.
“I’m not Puerto Rican!” I shouted. If he was going to keep screaming about me, he might as well be accurate. “I’m Hungarian!”
Pelé famously called soccer “the beautiful game.” That’s exactly right: it’s an amazing, beautiful game—filled with explosive power and almost ballet-like grace.
I couldn’t have explained back then exactly why I fell so hard for soccer. If asked, I might have said something simple, like “I like running and sliding,” or “It’s fun to score.” But through the lens of time, I can see, even in those early, clumsy moments on the rec field, all I’d later come to cherish about the game.
I could sense, for example, the game’s fluidity, its continual ebb and flow. It’s something I still appreciate—soccer, even in youth leagues, is played without stop, except for a single halftime break. By the time they’re pros, players move back and forth between two goals, up to 120 yards apart, covering as many as seven miles in a single match—more than twice that of basketball players, five times that of U.S. football players, and 14 times as much as major-league baseball players.
I could sense the potential for artistry, although I wouldn’t have used that word at the time. It was so much more difficult to control a ball with one’s feet versus one’s hands. To do this, you had to be nimble and skilled.
I could also sense, even then, how a single moment of brilliance or indecision can change everything. That, of course, is what gives soccer its knife’s edge excitement. Entire games, entire seasons, might turn on a single play—a 60-yard solo run, a deflection in the box, an acrobatic bicycle kick, a goalkeeper’s fumble in the final minutes of a championship match.
Because I was tall, and relatively fearless, the coach of the Rangers wanted me in goal.
But I didn’t want me in goal. Standing in goal was as bad as standing in the outfield in T-ball. It wasn’t where the action was. If I was standing in goal, I couldn’t score.
Playing up front, I was always one goal away from being a hero. As a goalie, I was one goal away from being a villain.
“If you play goalie for half the game,” Coach pleaded with me, “I’ll let you be the striker for the other half.”
I sighed, and did as I was told, restlessly watching the action I wasn’t involved in.
Then suddenly, the other team would race down the field and the ball would sail right at me. At that moment, I felt the weight of the whole team—which, to a kid, meant the whole world—on me.
I wanted so badly to stop the ball. At the same time, I was terrified I wouldn’t.
Often I did stop it. But when I didn’t—and when the other team’s parents started cheering and the kids who weren’t in green began leaping all over the field—I knew what it felt like to be fully exposed, all alone at a moment of spectacular failure.
It was too much. I often started crying right there on the field.
When I did, my mom got up. She stepped closer to where I stood. Then she caught my eye.
It’s okay, Tim, her look said. You’ll be okay.
Mom’s presence was enough to make everything better.
I took one deep breath and got back in the game.
I was ten when the symptoms began to appear.
First came the touching: I walked through the house tapping certain objects in a particular order. Touch the railing. Touch the door frame. Touch the light switch. Touch the wall. Touch the picture.
The pattern might vary, but there was always a specific rhythm, and it had to be followed. Exactly. If it wasn’t—if I tried to resist, or if Chris knocked into me at the wrong time—I had to start all over again, until I got it right.
It didn’t matter if I was starving and dinner was on the table. It didn’t matter how badly I needed to go to the bathroom. I had to obey the pattern inside my head. I had to touch these things, and in exactly this order. It was urgent.
One part of my brain, the logical part, understood that these rituals were irrational, that nothing bad would happen if I didn’t practice them. But knowing that only made things worse. If it wasn’t rational, then why couldn’t I stop?
What was wrong with me?
Then similar things started happening outside of the house, on my way to school. Each day, I walked to school carrying a bag full of books. I remember that bag so clearly: it was an Auburn University duffel bag that my mom had picked up at TJ Maxx. I can still feel it in my hand.
I spotted things along the way—a rock, for example. There was nothing special about the rock’s shape or texture or color; it looked like every other rock. But suddenly, that rock was special, the most important object in the world.
Pick up that rock, my mind commanded. You’d better pick up that rock.
I tried my damnedest not to. I gritted my teeth and stared ahead, trying to convince myself that everything was okay, that I could leave the rock. I might manage to walk a few steps before my heart started pounding.
Go back, my body urged me. Pick up that rock.
If I resisted, I became physically uncomfortable. My stomach churned. I might break out into a sweat. I started to breathe harder, feeling like the oxygen had been sucked out of the air around me. Sometimes I wanted to throw up then and there.
For some inexplicable reason, the fate of the universe rested on this one act: picking up that rock.
Finally, I gave in, I turned around, got the rock, and dropped it in my bag. I felt a flood of relief.
Everything was okay now. The universe was back in control again.
Over the following weeks, my Auburn bag became filled with rocks and acorns and dirt and flowers and grass stems—all the crap I was driven to pick up on the way to school. As I arrived, I waved to the crossing guard, as if having to haul this enormous bag around was perfectly normal—Oh nothing, just my books and things, have a nice day! As if I hadn’t just lost a fierce battle with my own brain. As if I didn’t feel these compulsions to do things I could never in a million years understand, much less explain.
Next came the tics.
Each started the same way: with an uncomfortable sensation in some part of my body—a heightened awareness, an urge. The feeling could be relieved only by some specific motor action. I started blinking, for example—forceful, deliberate blinks that I couldn’t stop. I began to clear my throat over and over.
Then there were facial jerks. Shoulder shrugs. Eye-rolling. With each of them, it was the same pattern: that awful sensation welling up, the one that could only be relieved, inexplicably, by some action. As soon as I did it, I felt normal again. Seconds later, the cycle would repeat itself. Terrible sensation. Buildup of stress. Action. Relief. In school, teachers snapped at me in class—Sit still. Stop clearing your throat.
Other kids laughed. What’s going on with your face?
At home, Mom stayed quiet, but I could feel her watching me. I saw how her eyes zeroed in on whatever part of my body I’d moved, the flicker of concern that passed over her face. It was the same look that she had when she realized Chris and I had outgrown our winter coats and needed new ones. It was the same look she had when she pulled out her checkbook and a calculator, opening one bill after another and sighing.
I could tell it worried the hell out of her.
I
hated that I was adding to her anxiety. I hated that I couldn’t knock it off, be a little easier on a woman who deserved some peace of mind.
But, of course, that was impossible.
On the soccer field, though, my whole world changed. While the ball was far away, my mind might still order me around (touch the ground, twitch, snap the Velcro on the goalie glove, cough, touch the goalpost, blink). But the closer that ball came, the more my symptoms receded. The tics, the crazy thoughts, the conflicting mental messages—poof! They were gone in an instant.
So were the details around me. Players, colors, people on the sidelines, they all blurred and fell away. Only one thing remained in sharp focus, its every detail vivid: the ball, moving toward me.
I would kick it or catch it or parry it. Or it would elude me and I’d have to pick it out of the net while the other team celebrated.
Either way, whether I had succeeded or failed, that’s when everything became crystal clear again—players, colors, spectators, scoreboard.
And then, too, the intrusive thoughts. Touch the ground. Touch the post. Twitch, jerk, cough.
When I was 11, I developed a new symptom, the worst one yet: I had to touch people before I talked to them. When I say “had to,” that’s exactly what I mean: if I didn’t touch them first, I literally couldn’t form the words.
It was like touching the person opened the door to my thoughts, allowed vague ideas to flow into concrete words. But if I didn’t touch the person, everything in my brain just kept thumping against the door, unable to escape.
At school, I tried to hide this tic through casual touches—I might punch a kid lightly in the arm, or tap him on the opposite shoulder from behind, as if trying to make him look the wrong way. Sometimes I faked bumping into them.
At home, I touched my mom on the shoulder. One tap. Then I could talk.
She glanced down at the place I just touched. She didn’t say a word.
After a while, when I stepped toward her, she began stepping backward, slightly out of reach.
