Against All Odds

by Scott Brown

  But by 1970 the historic downtown, largely abandoned for the ease of strip malls and bypassed by the snaking highways, was scheduled to be razed. Some people even wanted to put another strip mall along the water. The town had fallen into such a state of disrepair that owners could hardly give their properties away. Only at the last minute did the wrecking ball stop, and the downtown was saved. Instead, a federal grant helped pay for renovation and restoration, and my father had helped to secure that money. I knew that my father was involved in the restoration efforts, but what I knew most was that he had joined with a partner to buy a boat.

  Christened the Sabino, it was a 1908 coastal steamer that had plied the Damariscotta River of Maine and traveled among the scattered islands of Casco Bay. It had a coal-fired engine and could hold fifty-six passengers. One summer while I was in junior high, my father let me spend a week with him working on the boat. I scrubbed the rusty toilet bowls, collected tickets, fed the coal for the engine, and hung off the lower reaches of the decks as the steamer chugged along the river channel, the spray from the churning waves coating my dangling legs and arms. I loved the feel of the boat and the freedom of being away. At night, I slept on a living room couch amid the photos of Robyn and Bruce.

  Back in Wakefield, I imagined Newburyport. And when my mother screamed in anger and frustration, “Why don’t you go live with your father? See how you like it!” it didn’t help that I had already begun running away.

  In truth, I had been running since my days at Aunt Nancy’s on Redfield Road, when I would hop onto my bike and pedal to my grandparents’ house. Before that, I had run out the door on Eastern Avenue. I was a runner, a bolter; when trouble hit, my first instinct was to move. When my mother and I battled, all I wanted to do was run. And I did.

  At first, I’d run to friends, and I’d ask if I could stay the night. Sometimes, I took clothes; other times, I arrived with whatever I had on. The parents would call and say that Scott is here, and there would be a cooling-off period before I went back home. Then came a particularly vicious fight when my mother threatened to break the few things I owned, including what I treasured most—my trophies. In that moment, all of Wakefield seemed too small. I called “Sorry” to Leeann, who was still in the apartment, looking stunned and trying to sink into the woodwork as our small war was waged around her. This time, I was thinking, I would be gone for good.

  My feet thundered down the stairs and out the door. With only the clothes on my back and $1 in my pocket, I raced for my bike, and I rode. I expected my mother to chase me. I expected that any minute I would glance back and see the white Impala sailing over a hill and glimpse my mother, her hands clamped to the steering wheel and her foot gunning the engine. I pumped my legs furiously and fixed my mind on a new destination. I would ride to Newburyport, to my father’s home. It was thirty-five miles away. I followed Salem Street as it snaked out toward Saugus and Route 1, the highway mecca of the Hilltop Steak House Restaurant and Kowloon Chinese, Hilltop’s giant cactus facing off against Kowloon’s fearsome imperial dragon. Farther down along the commercial strip, the once-swank Caruso’s Diplomat, where my mother had worked, was slowly being overcome by strip stores and discount-tire marts.

  I merged onto the busy highway, riding like the wind. I thought my mother would follow me. My only choice was to be faster, to outride and outrun her. The cars and trucks whipped by. I passed Newberry Plaza, the Golden Banana strip club, with its windowless walls and neon sign, a quick-lube shop, and a mobile home park. Some ten miles out the traffic fell away, merging north onto the multilane interstate. Route 1 broke off by itself and became quiet, hilly, and green. It had always been the Newburyport Turnpike, but this stretch felt more like an old colonial road, with the roar of the trucks largely gone.

  There were apple orchards and the spreading grounds of the Topsfield Fair, the oldest agricultural fair in the nation. I had been there as a child with my grandparents, to see the cattle, sheep, goats, and horses paraded in the show ring. But all I could think of now were the hills. The road into Topsfield rose and dipped like mountainous camel humps. I felt the burn in my legs as I pushed up each hill, and then the brace of wind as I coasted down. Once, on the narrow road, a truck passed with a chain wildly swinging off its back. The metal whipped with the wind and nearly clipped me on the side of my bare head. But I kept pedaling.

  Finally, on a stretch of open road past the thick woods, where it was easy to imagine woodland Indians silently stalking their prey, I stopped at the Agawam Diner, a silver building planted by the roadside, low to the ground, with bright awnings. I had my dollar in my pocket, enough for two Hershey bars, and I was starving. I paid the cashier with my matted bill, tore open the wrappers, and shoved the chocolate into my mouth, barely chewing, barely tasting anything. I was so desperate for the sugar, I didn’t think about drinking anything.

  I pedaled past the marshlands on the south of the town, past the turnoff for Plum Island and onto High Street, then down to Prospect, which was bisected by Fair Street, then Federal, and then Lime. It was dusk when I arrived; the ride had taken me all afternoon. Panting, exhausted, and parched, I stepped down from the bike and knocked on my father’s door. Nothing. The place was black. It had never occurred to me that he wouldn’t be home. I got back on my bike and rode to the wharf, every muscle in a state of rebellion, to where the Sabino was tied up. But the steamer was empty, its coal engine cold. My hair was plastered to my head with sweat; my face was red and windburned. Night was falling, and it was starting to rain. I was near tears. One of my father’s buddies spotted me, and he must have called a bar or somewhere because about fifteen minutes later, C. Bruce Brown appeared to take me to his home.

  He called my mother to say, “Scott’s here,” and she was utterly stunned that I had reached Newburyport in an afternoon. She had just let me go, assuming I’d turn up somewhere in Wakefield, never actually contemplating where else I might have gone. My dad fed me, told me to take a shower, and gave me a pillow and a blanket for the couch. It was all he had to offer, and I don’t know what more I was expecting. My legs were like rubber from the thirty-five-mile ride, a stew of lactic acid, flesh, and bone. I had found a way to burn off some of the anger; for me, the path to inner peace was through sheer physical exhaustion. By shutting down my body, I could also shut down my mind.

  I stayed at my dad’s for a day or two, and then he strapped my bike to his car and drove me home. I was never going to live with him. I was never going to be more than a week in the summer, a day trip, or a quick overnight on the weekend. He had already made that abundantly clear on the Sabino, when I, the toilet scrubber, deck cleaner, and eager apprentice coal man, was introduced by my father as “Scott, my son, who lives with his mom.”

  I ran away to Newburyport one more time after that, making the same perilous ride along the highway and then the older, hillier Route 1. I rode again like a person possessed, convinced that my mother and the Impala were behind me the entire time. But except for a few cars bound for other destinations, I was alone.

  Even back in Wakefield, I did not stop running, although after that last trek to Newburyport, my excursions stayed closer to home. My mother and I kept fighting, and now I would pack up my few things in a footlocker, hoist it onto my shoulder, and start walking, a mile or two at a time, down Salem and over to 22 Valley Street, where Audrey, one of my old babysitters, lived. She was younger than my mom, she had her own kids, and she was a free spirit who wore 1960s-style beads that clicked lightly around her neck. Her silver-streaked hair hung down to her waist. It swayed and moved of its own accord whenever she turned around. I’d stay at her small place for a few days or even a week until the furor had subsided, and then she’d drive me and my trunk back home. Sometimes I’d go to the house of one of my mom’s childhood friends, Judy Vining. She had two kids, Lenny and Dana, and we had a lot in common, and they always welcomed me when things got tough and I needed to run.

 
At home, I papered my walls with posters of my basketball heroes and KISS and stared up at Gene Simmons’s caked makeup and oversize tongue. I had a mother who found the world more tolerable with a generous pour of Popov and a lit Marlboro, but who often couldn’t find me tolerable, and who hated the disappearing man who had given me my last name.

  I lost myself in school. At the start of junior high, I joined the seventh-grade basketball team and made cocaptain. The next year I was on the eighth-grade team, again as cocaptain. I was responsible for leading the calisthenics and the drills, and for making sure that everyone showed up for practice. At the start of the game, I was the one who had to go up to the referee to get instructions. I had to make sure that the balls were on the court. If practice was canceled, added, or changed, I was at the head of the call list. It was my responsibility to make sure that everyone else on the team knew. My coaches were teaching me responsibility and giving me structure, although I didn’t recognize it then.

  On the court, I was not always the fastest kid, but I was considered one of the hardest workers and one of the toughest. I never quit. I was always dribbling and driving to the basket, working on my game. I wasn’t much of a passer because when I got the ball, all I wanted to do was move, head down the court to the basket, and rise up off my toes. I played and I studied. Sometimes Brad Simpson, the eighth-grade coach, would watch me, even though I was only on the seventh-grade team. I was a lefty, constantly dribbling with my left hand. One time, he told me that if I wanted to get really good, I needed to be able to dribble right-handed. After that, everywhere I went with the ball, even through the village green downtown, I dribbled with my right hand, willing the muscles on that side to become as quick and as strong.

  That summer after seventh grade, tragedy struck our team. Our seventh-grade coach and his pregnant wife were killed in a fiery car crash. Their funeral was on a weekend. It happened to be one week that I was with my dad, working on the Sabino. I told him about the wake and the funeral, and how everyone on the team was going; it was particularly expected of me, as a captain. But my father wasn’t interested in driving me back to Wakefield. It didn’t fit with his plans. So I didn’t go. I heard from Brad and Judy and from the assistant coach how disappointed they were in me. I felt like crap. I hung my head and said nothing. I never told them why: that it was my dad; that it was his decision, not mine; that he would not let me go. I didn’t like excuses and I wasn’t going to make them. I should have found my own way home. Even now, I have in my scrapbook the yellowed news clippings about the accident and the funeral, which my grandmother pasted in, a page or two down from my commendation certificate that Coach George Geyer had signed.

  In eighth grade, Brad Simpson was my coach and Judy Patterson was my social studies teacher. She never seemed to mind how many times I raised my hand. The fall of the year coincided with the 1972 presidential election between Nixon and McGovern, and she organized a mock vote in our classroom. I wanted to participate in everything, from writing the ballots to standing at the ballot box when the votes were cast to counting up the tallies.

  But Judy also was not afraid to rein me in. Once, when she overheard me walking down the hall and making a cutting comment to an unpopular girl, she grabbed me by my long hair, pulled me into her classroom, and slammed the door shut. “You know what?” she said. “You’ve got everything in the world going for you. You’re tall, you’re good-looking, you’re athletic. You could be smart if you put your mind to it. But you’re a jerk. How dare you say that to that poor girl? How do you think she’s going to feel now for the rest of her life?”

  The question hung there. It was as if she had just smacked me upside my head. I was the kid who always felt like a loser, who felt I had nothing going for me, and Judy said I had everything in the world going for me. She was holding me accountable. I looked out at her from under my unkempt hair. I veered from wanting to be a rock star to wanting to be a starter for the Celtics, although I had never been to a game where the crowd sat on anything other than pullout bleachers or where the floor varnish was not being slowly stripped away by PE classes and full-court basketball. I listened and I felt ashamed.

  And I knew that she was the first person in a long time who actually cared. In one of the universe’s strange ironies, she and my mom had been given the same first name.

  When classes ended, Brad took over on the court. He held practice every day after school and sometimes on Saturdays in the morning. Back then, eighth-grade basketball was a pretty big deal. Reporters came to see us play and wrote weekly dispatches highlighting our games. There were local newspaper photos and boxes of stats showing off the high scorers.

  Brad never talked about what was in the paper; he simply directed every last bit of his towering intensity into making us play to win. He was tall, with Irish good looks, and a face that turned plum red when he was racing around the court. Most days after practice, I would play him, one-on-one or two-on-two with his assistant coach, Jay Connolly, and other kids from our team, such as Bob Najarian, Billy Cole, Mark Gonnella, or Hacka Healy. Brad was bigger and stronger, if not always quicker, but for years, he won every time, and I watched all his moves, studying him. Jay was much taller, a bruiser, using his elbows, pushing to the floor; no-nonsense play was his style. He made us all tougher. When we came close to beating Coach Simpson and him, they stopped playing us. After we got better, we would have to beg, tease, criticize, and humiliate them to goad them into playing. Coach especially, after all those years, wouldn’t give us the satisfaction of winning.

  He, in turn, expected everything from me—rebounding, passing, scoring. He drilled us all, every day, and he took no crap from anyone. Instead, he goaded me with possibilities. “Hey, next year you’re going to play as a freshman,” he would say. “Who knows, maybe you’ll be able to play varsity.” Except that no one played varsity as a freshman. Schools did not allow freshmen to play varsity back then, and most sophomore players sat on the varsity bench. It wasn’t done. But he planted the seed. I wanted to play varsity as a freshman. I wanted to be the first one. I could already feel the polyester jersey on my back. I did his calisthenics, ran his wind sprints, and did his drills, and then we’d play, the entire team, two-on-two, three-on-three, four-on-four; then we’d scrimmage. Then he’d line us up for shots from the foul line. If you missed, you ran five or ten laps around the gym. If you made it, you were done. It was precise and disciplined; for two hours, there was no chaos. It was only the blast of the whistle and the voice of Coach Simpson.

  One day he told me, “You’d be a heck of a lot better player if you could actually see the ball. You look like a girl with all that hair.” My hair was in my eyes, down my neck, and wild. When it got unbearable, I’d cut a few strands with the kitchen scissors. Before practice, I ducked into Judy’s classroom and told her that I had to do something about my hair, so that I could see the ball. “Please,” I said, “cut my hair.” Judy was more than a little surprised and asked about my mother. “My mother won’t even notice,” I told her. “Please.” So she took the scissors out of her desk drawer and took some off the front and the sides, the back and the top, until it was possible to see my face again. After the next game, I had her take a little more off, and I brought another kid from the team for a trim. After the next game, I brought in two more kids for a Miss Patterson trim.

  We played a lot of tough teams: Burlington, Woburn, Lexington. We had eighth-grade groupies, girls who came to watch, and our parents. My mom came to nearly all my games, most of the time with Leeann, who, to amuse herself, tried to turn cartwheels alongside the gym wall. My mother sat there, all frosted blond hair and frosted lipstick, and I don’t remember if she kept her coat on. But I knew she wasn’t quite like all the other moms. One thing my mom always took with her was the shouting. Just as she’d shout at me or at my dad, she’d shout at the referee, questioning the calls, calling him blind or dumb. I could hear her, I was always very glad that she was the
re, but at a certain point, I just stopped listening. I was proud of my mom and her support, but for an eighth-grade boy, it was also at times uncomfortable and even embarrassing. So I tuned everything out. It was only me and the ball. Just as I could train myself to dribble with my right hand, I could train my ears to block out every other sound.

  I distinctly remember that my father was supposed to come to one of our early games. He promised he’d be at our third game. I told Coach Simpson to expect him, that I’d like them to meet each other. But my father never showed up. I spent the first half scanning the bleachers, but no sign of him. The second half, all I did was play. Now he was supposed to come to the sixth game. Again, I scanned the stands; again, nothing. And two games after that, and then the next game. By now, Coach Simpson knew not to say anything. The other boys had their fathers. I had my mother in her frosted makeup and my grandmother, who in New Hampshire cut out my newspaper clippings. Coach pushed me harder. More drills. More rebounds.

  Finally, for the second-to-last game of the season, my father came. He had his latest girlfriend on his arm. My mother was also in the stands, glaring at him when she wasn’t glaring at the referee. Afterward, I took my dad over to meet my coach, but my dad was with his girlfriend, and my mother was standing right there, seething. The air was electric with the tension. Coach Simpson felt it. Everyone was stilted; everyone’s mouth was frozen. I was the high scorer, the team captain, but I had no answer to my own family battles on the sidelines. My father said something about how he used to play in his glory days and my mother made a crack in return. My father and his girlfriend made a quick exit. I, as always, would be going home with my mom, and listening to her string of comments about my dad.