Roger Clemens has been indicted for perjury. On the one hand, I think this is a huge waste of taxpayer money. While lying to Congress is a serious crime, the likelihood of conviction seems iffy at best. The feds have been trying to nail Barry Bonds on a similar charge without success for years, and the evidence against Bonds appears to be much stronger than that against Clemens.

On the other hand, Roger Clemens is one of the worst human beings on the planet. Not enough bad things can happen to him to sate my schadenfreude.

Last week, in a post about Chipper Jones, I wrote about how I can usually separate my personal feelings from objective reality. Emphasis on usually. I could cast a Hall of Fame vote for Chipper Jones. I don't think I could do that for Roger Clemens. And not because of steroids. Simply because I hate him with a white hot passion. I hate him more than some people who have done actual, tangible wrong to me. If I could harness this hatred and turn it into energy, I could power a steel mill for a year.

The worst thing about Clemens (even worse than the fact that he literally tried to kill Mike Piazza by throwing a 95 mph fastball at his head): His craven, psychotic need to be not just loved, but worshiped. That is often the sign of a man who deep down knows he is horrible, and thus demands love from others. All so he can say, "How can I be a bad person--look at how many people love me!"

In another life or another nation, Roger Clemens would have been a crime lord or a dictator. Someone who snatched power by force. Someone who demanded absolute fealty and craved absolute love from everyone. Someone who can never be told that he has done wrong, for it is impossible for him to be wrong.

I can easily imagine Roger Clemens commanding cowering citizens to perform grand, choreographed games in his honor, as North Koreans do at Kim Jong Il's behest. That is exactly the kind of sick, depraved person he is.

Keep in mind that the Congressional hearing from which the perjury charge stems would never have happened in the first place if he hadn't demanded one. It wasn't good enough for him to quietly deny the charges of the Mitchell Report. No, he had to loudly protest his innocence to the nation's lawmakers and force us all to shower him in love once again. This maniac was so obsessed with being adored, he laid his own trap.

Joe Posnanski wrote an amazing column (as usual) about Clemens at SI.com, in which he takes us back to the infamous Game 2 of the 2000 World Series, when the Rocket flung the bat at Mike Piazza. Posnanski's observation: Clemens has no interest in smoothing things over with Piazza, but instead focuses on proclaiming his innocence to the home plate umpire.

That is the essence of Clemens. He had no desire in doing right or being right. His sole focus was on getting over, being absolved. It reminds me of Pablo Escobar, the infamous Colombian drug lord who could have lived fat and happy on his cocaine billions, except that he had an insane craving for respectability. He desperately wanted to be elected to Congress, and didn't care how many bribes he had to hand out or judges and policemen he had to kill in order to do it. As if becoming a Respectable Person would somehow erase the fact that he'd murdered his way to the top.

To this day, I'm still infuriated by the thought that Clemens received absolutely no punishment for this bizarre, dangerous act. (As Posnanski points out, Piazza very easily could have been injured by the shattered bat.) No ejection, no fine, not even a tsk-tsk from Bud Selig. It still blows my mind that someone did this in a World Series game and was allowed to continue to play in that game.

Karma might not really exist, but I like when it makes a select appearance in the lives of folks like Clemens. His life is over, for intents and purposes, and he's not even 50 yet. Even allowing for Americans' microscopic memories, and even if steroid use becomes accepted in the future, I can't imagine his image ever recovering. God, that's beautiful. There are people more deserving of cosmic payback than him, but he'll do until they get theirs.

In honor of another instance of Clemens' spiritual de-pantsing, here's a trip down Scratchbomb memory lane of The Rocket's various falls from grace.

Take Your Medicine, 12.13.2007
Wherein I discuss the Mitchell Report and touch on Clemens being exposed for the fraud that he is.

60 Minutes with Roger Clemens, 01.03.2008
Mike Wallace interviews a not-at-all contrite Roger Clemens, with a guest appearance from Hank Steinbrenner.

Roger That, 02.08.2008
An attempt to understand Roger Clemens through old clips from a baseball special called Grand Slam, which you can not watch because Clemens helped shut down my old YouTube account.

Joe Torre Revisits History, 02.04.2009
While promoting his book on Mike Francesa's show, Joe Torre rethinks his opinion of Roger Clemens, using an amazing piece of equipment called his brain.

Michael More, Roger, and Me, 03.26.2009
Wherein I discuss why I can love Mike Piazza and hate Roger Clemens.

In my brief time working in the Wall Street area, I've discovered that the shortest route between two points is not always a straight line. Certain streets are completely choked with tourists and narrowed by incessant construction, and should be avoided at all costs unless you want some homicidal inspiration.

Broadway is particularly awful, so if I need to get somewhere on that street, I will often double back on a parallel avenue, walk as far up- or downtown as I need to go, then cut back to the main drag. Though this might seem unnecessarily complicated, it's actually much faster than trying to wade through acres of gawking Midwesterners (no offense, Midwesterners).

On Tuesday, I ventured away from the office to grab some lunch, and on the way back, I walked uptown on Trinity Place. While not completely crowd free, you can actually move along this street faster than a snail's pace. It runs behind Trinity Church, at a lower elevation than Broadway. A majestic stone wall marks the church's western extremity, and a beautiful walkway connects it, mysteriously, to a much more modern office building across the street.

As I walked past the stone wall, I noticed one entrance--called Cherub's Gate--was wide open. I realized that I'd never been to Trinity Church, somehow, and that nothing was stopping me from going now. So I climbed the stairs and found myself on a tiny little green island of the 18th century in the middle of downtown Manhattan, filled with crumbling headstones, most of which are more than 200 years old.

It was bizarre to walk among the dilapidated tombstones and read their somber, weirdly spelled inscriptions. ("Here lyes Goodye Price, ded of Consumption aged thirty-fyve yearf.") It was even weirder to see people spending their lunch there, yapping on cell phones, chowing down on deli buffet food in clamshell trays. Though odd, this didn't seem disrespectful, really. It was a surprisingly quiet, calm oasis in a very noisy part of the city, and one of the few spots in that neighborhood where a person could truly get away from it all for a little while.

I should also add that as I strolled between the graves, I was listening to a Jean Shepherd show from 1960 on my iPod. During that period, Shep's shows were particularly philosophical and dark. The setting plus the soundtrack combined to give me an eerie, melancholy feeling.

And then I felt something else. Actually, I smelled something else. Something acrid and pungent. Such smells are not unusual in New York, of course, but this smell was not bad per se, just unwelcome. And yet also strongly familiar.

And then I remembered: There was a Subway franchise right next to Trinity on Broadway. I was smelling the unmistakable reek of pickled Subway vegetables wafting through the churchyard. I have smelled that smell many times, coming from my own hands, several hours after eating a six-inch Veggie Delight. I don't know what they use to preserve those vegetables for longhaul truck travel, but you need auto mechanic-grade abrasive soap to remove that stench from your fingers.

This smell was not faint. The churchyard was drenched in it. The final resting place of Alexander Hamilton and Robert Fulton, overshadowed by the olfactory shadow of five-dollar foot-longs. If such great men can be overtaken by the thorny talons of Jared, what hope is there for a rest of us?

In the current political landscape, the Republican party is like a really bad prop comic. They reach into a trunk full of hut-button issues, pull one out, and rattle it in front of the crowd for laughs, because it's a lot easier than having ideas.

The latest prop being used by the Blueberry Heads in the GOP is the Ground Zero Mosque. A more accurate name would be The Couple of Blocks from Ground Zero Muslim Cultural Center, but no good comedian lets the truth get in the way of a good punchline.

The joke, I mean, argument goes something like this: Ground Zero is hallowed ground and therefore can not abide the presence of a Muslim-y thing in its vicinity. My counterargument is this: Go fuck yourselves, you hypocritical human garbage.

The real prop here isn't the mosque itself. It's New York City. Neocons have used New York as a prop for the last nine years, and will doubtless continue to use it for as long as they can. The terrorist attacks were the rationale for everything on the Republican agenda during that entire time. Flash pictures of Twin Towers collapsing, then tell everyone we need to invade Iraq. We need to curtail civil liberties. We need to waterboard suspects. We need to shoot elderly men in the face. Why? Because LOOK WHAT HAPPENED TO NEW YORK IS WHY!

Of course, this concern over the fate of New York doesn't extend to making sure the state gets its fair share of federal money, particularly when it comes to Homeland Security funds. Hey, why would we want to protect the city that's already been attacked and will surely be the number one target for future attacks? And it certainly doesn't extend to ensuring the health and well-being of first 9/11 responders.

The Republicans don't give a shit about New York. They hate it, because it's full of dirty foreigners and liberals, the kind of people who don't really care if there's a Muslim center two blocks from Ground Zero. They just recognize that this issue can galvanize people and maybe win a close election or two this November. If the GOP could gain one Senate seat by nuking all five boroughs, they'd do it this afternoon.

I was in Manhattan on September 12, while the streets were still filled with eye-stinging smoke as far north as 14th Street and you needed a face mask to breathe and I was more terrified than I've ever been since I was a child. And a Muslim community center near Ground Zero doesn't bother me in any way.

If you lived in New York then and were directly affected by it, I won't tell you how to feel. But people who don't live in New York, and weren't in New York on 9/11 have no right to dictate what happens here. Don't tell me you have to stop this project from going forward because of some Magic Heroic Dreamspace that Ground Zero occupies in your brain. For most of the people who are upset by this news, downtown New York might as well be Narnia.

You're like Star Wars nerds arguing over what George Lucas did in the prequels. Actually, you're worse, because Star Wars nerds had to see the prequels. I don't give a shit if you don't like the idea of a mosque near Ground Zero when YOU WILL NEVER HAVE TO SEE IT.

Why don't I pick a random construction project I don't like and protest it? Boo, Waffle House being built in Charleston, South Carolina! There's already a perfectly good Waffle House just up the road! I will probably never go to Charleston but this angers me deeply! My personal feelings trump your ability to decide what's best for your own town!

And boo to Harry Reid, who's apparently trying to win his election by kowtowing to these morons. If you're trying to out-crazy Sharron Angle, don't bother--it can't be done.

Not to mention that the area immediately around Ground Zero is about as un-hallowed as New York gets. Fast food restaurants and OTBs and strip clubs, and all the other kind of garbage that litters the touristy areas of Giuliani's Manhattan. The tourists who flock there are so humbled by the sacred ground that they buy cheap t-shirts and postcards and prints and coloring books about 9/11 sold within in its glowing aura.

I remember going to a printer's conference in the Midwest. This was at least two years after 9/11. When I told other people on the conference that I worked in New York, they got all quiet and whispery. What was it like? they asked, low and conspiratorial, as if curious about some strange sex act they'd never tried before. It, in this case, was That Day, which they couldn't even bring themselves to say.

They wanted all the gory details I could provide, just so I could assure them that living in some place safer was the correct way to live. Like I had chosen to live on some terrorist fault line. Oh you know, I could never live in New York, what with the traffic and the noise and the Islamo-fascists flying planes into things...

That's all this "debate" is. A way to dredge up the Terror Envy that every other city felt in the early 2000s. Scare ourselves with the reflective horror of 9/11 one more time. And then forget that New York still has a huge gaping hole in the ground and thousands of people who died and became ill when that hole was made.

My father was not a Sports Guy. He had almost no interest in athletic endeavors. In high school, he ran track, and he had a self-made mosaic of medals to prove it, the trophies glued to a field of black felt and hemmed in by a wooden frame. Once in a blue moon, he'd demand to watch some running event on The Wide World of Sports, as that sport still held a grip on him long after he was able to actually run, or even jog. But he could care less about the big, all-American team sports (my mom, a huge Mets fan, is solely responsible for that sickness).

But he did make an effort to get involved with his kids' sporting endeavors. He told me his father--who was a legendary soccer player back in his hometown in Ireland, or so I was told--never went to any of his track meets, and that always bugged him. He rarely expressed any resentment about his father, so it was remarkable to hear him express something close to hurt about his upbringing.

He went along with family trips to far-flung outposts of the tri-state area and beyond, as my brothers played in an endless series of soccer tournaments, outdoor and indoor. Parsippany. Binghamton. Katonah. Danbury. We even went to Montreal once. Dad was delighted by the Quebecois translations in the local McDonalds.

He was willing to pitch in, especially when it impacted our pocketbooks. We could all get discounts on joining the CYO basketball league if a parent volunteered to work Bingo Night at St. Mary's, so dad took one for the team. I don't think it was a hardship for him, because he'd come home with harrowing tales of the sad sacks he encountered there. Like most comedians, he found other people's misery almost as hilarious as his own.

At some point, he thought it might be fun to be a little league umpire. The reduced membership fee for three kids was a factor, too, but I think he honestly believed it would be enjoyable. Which was off because, as with most sports, baseball's charms eluded him, and he'd grown up with immigrant parents who had a similar lack of interest in the Great American Pastime.

He told me he actually went to a game at Ebbets Field, not long after he first came to New York from Dublin. To Little Kid Me, that was like saying you'd been to Heaven itself. I was obsessed with old-timey, sepia-tone, classic Subway Series baseball. I was fascinated by the fact that Brooklyn--Brooklyn! our Ancestral Home!--once had its very own major league team. I was a ten-year-old Ken Burns.

What was it like? I asked.

Dirty, he said. Smelly. Loud. Full of drunks. Full of puking drunks. People screaming the most horrendous things at the top of their lungs. I had no idea people would go out in public and do things like that.

That wasn't the answer I was looking for.

When my dad decided to do something, he did it. He studied the rules of the game. He went to the mandatory umpiring class. He brought home a handheld pitch counter, and often clicked through it with one hand while completing a crossword in the other, as if the balls and strikes were each another bead on a rosary.

Dad's umpiring career started out fine. At first, he only had to man the amorphous middle infield position. Every now and then, he had to call a close slide at second base. Otherwise, it was as easy as summer work out in the sun could get.

The little league wouldn't let parents umpire their own games, because, duh. So he would often be umpiring some other game, and mine would finish, and I'd have to wander over his field and wait for his shift to end before we could go home. It was very strange to sit in the bleachers and listen to him declare OUT and SAFE with extreme authority, in stark contrast to the backseat he took in most family affairs.

He certainly sounded like an umpire. He was an excellent mimic, and he knew having the right voice is half the battle. Sounding authoritative is 75 percent of being so.

Things began to change when he started umpiring behind home plate. Because that's when he had to call balls and strikes, and as anyone who's been to a baseball game can tell you, everyone in the stands thinks they can call a strike zone better than the man in blue behind the plate.

He started to get hassled by angry parents, which he did not enjoy. He was still adjusting to sobriety. He couldn't handle simple annoyances like getting stuck in traffic or jostled in a crowd, and he certainly couldn't handle being yelled at by angry parents who disagreed with the strike zone he called for their Precious Babies.

After each game, he became less and less enthusiastic, until he began to dread his work behind the plate. What happened was inevitable, really, but it was still horrible/awesome when it happened.

It was already a bad day in the household. Though I had played catcher for the vast majority of my little league career, I got it in my head that I wanted to pitch. I still don't know why I thought I could do this. I still don't know why I wanted to do this. I really enjoyed being a catcher. It didn't matter to me that it was an unglamorous position. In fact, I liked doing a necessary but hard job no one else wanted. It made feel tougher than everybody else.

Whether it was a desire for the spotlight or the general delusion of Little Kid-Dom, I begged to take the mound, and my coach let me do it. My first start, I did okay, good enough to earn another shot. My second time out was disastrous. Several hits, several runs, and then walk after walk after walk. It was as if the ball was afraid to go near the strike zone, because it knew it would be smacked around.

The league had rules in place: each pitcher could only issue so many walks. After that point, he could run up an endless full count if the batter wasn't willing to swing. It was supposed to save the poor pitcher some shame, but all it did was emphasize how terrible I was. I could feel my team becoming silently furious behind me. The coach finally, mercifully yanked me. I stalked back to the dugout, humiliated. The rest of my baseball life would be spent on the other side of the battery.

By the time my game ended, my dad had begun umpiring another one. I sat in the bleachers, not far from a ragged looking man who decided to make his life a living hell. Every single pitch, this guy bitched about it. His voice was high-pitched and ruined, either from years of smoking or drinking or both. No matter what decision my dad made, this man hated it. I was still ambivalent in my feelings towards my father, but I still didn't want to see him slandered by this jerk. But I said nothing. I sat and seethed about my hideous pitching performance, and this loudmouth.

Finally, after a few innings, my father had had it. He pulled off his mask, dropped his chest protector to the ground, and stalked off to the fence that separated the field from the stands.

You think you can do better?! he yelled at his tormentor. The man was stunned. He hadn't expected to be directly confronted, and he had no answer. I've always had it in my head that maybe dad knew this man, that perhaps he was a member of his Other Family. It was odd that the man would stop being such a jerk just because my dad, not an intimidating man in any sense, took of his umpire's mask.

You think you can do better?! my dad repeated. The jerk looked around, as if my dad might be addressing someone else.

My father began walking up the foul line, and he kept on walking. Past third base. Past left field. All the way out into the gravel parking lot. You can't leave! screamed one of the coaches, but my dad strenuously disagreed.

I ran after him because he was my ride. We didn't say a word all the way home. My father never umpired again and, as far as I know, never willingly watched a baseball again for the rest of his life.

Larry Wayne Jones, known to most people (and himself, for some reason) as Chipper, has a torn ACL in his knee and is out for the rest of the season. At his age, and given his injury history, there's every reason to think his career may be over. (The mere fact that I'm writing this means he'll be fit as a stallion by spring training next year and hit 72 homers against the Mets.)

Let's assume what everyone else is assuming, that his playing days have ended. I should be relieved, even ecstatic about this news. If all the evil I wished on him over the years could be rendered in corporeal form, it would stretch from here to Jupiter. And yet, upon hearing the news, I feel oddly sad.

When it comes to baseball, I can separate my personal feelings from objective reality. And the objective reality is, Chipper Jones may be the best switch hitter ever not named Mickey Mantle or Eddie Murray. Much like Mantle or Ken Griffey Jr., you can only imagine what his numbers would have been like if he hadn't lost so many seasons to injury. Plus, he played a physically demanding position that is underrepresented in the Hall of Fame. If he never plays another game, he's still a lock for Cooperstown.

Do I hate him? Oh god, yes. I've despised him ever since that immortal (to me) year of 1999, when he clearly delighted in beating the Mets at every opportunity. You could tell he relished the thought of eliminating them from postseason contention, as the Braves nearly did in their last series at Shea that season. When an excruciating extra-inning loss left the Mets two games out of the wild card spot with three games to play, Chipper told the press that Mets fans should "go home and put their Yankee stuff on".

For that statement alone, if I ever see him in the street, I will hit him in the face with a shovel.

That said, Chipper will be missed because he may be the last of the Great Baseball Villains. He loved being a thorn in a certain team's side. This was once very common in the game, when rivalries were real and deeply personal, rather than the trumped-up sports hatred of the ESPN era, where The Worldwide Leader inflates artificial rivalries as much as they can even if they haven't evolved organically. Or obsesses about actual rivalries to the point where everyone becomes sick of them (see: Yankees-Red Sox)

In ye olden days, every team had a villain or two. Someone to boo and project all their hatred on. Dodgers fans hated Juan Marichal. Giants fans hated Don Drysdale. Yankees fans hated George Brett. And everybody hated Barry Bonds. The recent Reds-Cardinals kung fu exposition notwithstanding, we don't see much of this in baseball anymore.

The mere mention of the Braves fills me with anger. But when I watch them now, there's very few people who inspire actual anger within me, because all of the villains of the late 90s/early 00s are gone. No more Greg Maddux. No more Brian Jordan. No more John Rocker. No more Eddie Perez or Ryan Klesko or Andruw Jones. Every single one of those guys hated the Mets, and you could tell.

In their place, the Braves are now a team with a disturbing amount of fresh-faced young'uns. Guys like Brian McCann and Jason Heyward and Matt DIaz, guys who just put their heads down and play and just wanna help the team win, by golly. They don't even have the decency to be hateable. And to top it all off, Bobby Cox is soon to retire. If the Braves didn't cling to their horribly racist Tomahawk Chop, there'd be nothing to hate about them at all.

Chipper held himself as a beacon of Hate, and he did not mellow as the years went on. He named one of his kids Shea, because he hit so well there, as a giant genetic "fuck you" to Mets fans. He bitched about David Wright winning a Gold Glove. In more recent years, he professed enjoying his visits to New York and even had not-terrible things to say about Mets fans, which I think he did for the sole purpose of driving them nuts.

Earlier this year, I went to a Mets-Braves game with my daughter. When Chipper strode to the plate, the crowd erupted in its customary mocking chant of LAAAAAAAAA-REEEEEE!. 

"Why they saying Larry?" my daughter said, knitting her brow in confusion.

"Because he likes to call himself Chipper, but his real name is Larry," I explained.

She scowled. "Why?" She sounded annoyed. She had no idea what hell this man had inflicted on the Mets. She just knew, at age three, that a grown man shouldn't call himself Chipper. So she yelled LARRY! along with everyone else and laughed.

I wouldn't have had that moment without you, Larry, so thanks. And also, go die.

King James: You take a fellow like this Michael Jordan, I notice--he is always creating something, isn't he?

Bosh: He incidentally is on--you shouldn't get involved in this, but he's on our list, too.

King James: Good.

Bosh: They're going after a couple of ex-ballers. They're going after Charles Barkley, too.

King James: Like what? Have they been making any money on the outside?

Bosh: Those two? You kidding me? We think they might have something on them, yeah. I think we can finally get [NBA commissioner David] Stern to admit he really suspended Jordan for gambling that time when he pretended to play baseball. Just want to harass them. Just give them a little trouble.

King James: Exactly. Pound these people.

Bosh: Just give them something to worry about.

King James: It's routine.

Bosh: Yeah. Oh, that's right, you talked to [Dwayne] Wade today, too. He was trying to dig up some dirt of Kevin Durant. I can't even remember why.

King James: That subdued extension announcement of his. No ESPN special. No dry ice. Nothing. Just tweeted about it, like he's trying to out-humble me. Pissed me off.

Bosh: Should we sic Jim Gray on him? The man's loyal.

King James: Gray? He ain't no attack dog.

Bosh: Are you kidding? Dig you see him rip apart Corey Pavin?

King James: Alright, but do it through the proper channels. We can't have this shit coming back to me.

Bosh: Of course.

King James: [inaudible] Delonte West?

Bosh: He was traded with Sebastain Telfair, then released by the Timberwolves. Haven't we done enough?

Do you have any details about K-Rod's altercation with his father-in-law? What was the fight about?

Probably just looked at him funny. You don't look at Frankie funny. He'll cut you.

So there was no real cause at all?

No, it was all part of our plan to make the team less nice. All you writers kept telling me we needed to be meaner, so that's what we're doing. I told K-Rod he should get in a fight with some family members, maybe yell at his kids in public or something. But he really stepped it up. Gotta hand it to him. Beating up a man 30 years older than you, that's some big league hustle.

Are you afraid K-Rod might wind up in jail?

Yeah, I'm afraid for the other inmates. He once showed me how you could make a shank using a plastic cup and a piece of dental floss.

He's really that much a thug?

No doubt. Hell, Mariano Rivera didn't want to be in the same locker room as him, or so Bob Klapisch says. Just think about some of the skells Mo was teammates with: steroid cheats, wife beaters, vehicular manslaughter enthusiasts...so you figure someone's gotta be really bad if Mo don't want nothing to do with him.

So the whole team's getting a new, mean makeover?

Oh yeah. This is why I really wanted us to trade for Brett Myers, but Omar told me he's only willing to beat up women.

How is the rest of the team getting meaner?

You saw what David Wright did to his bat last night? That was 'cause he heard the bat was snitchin'. Carlos Beltran's got a switchblade and couple of throwing stars in that knee brace of his. And Jose Reyes has dropped dancing and taken up krav maga, the deadly Israeli art of self-defense. When you join the team now, you gotta get jumped in. And when we take our next trip to Chicago, we're gonna have a team dinner where we eat a baby.

You mean a baby cow, like veal.

Nope, a human baby. We're living outside the bonds of human decency now. We will become the worst humans on the planet, godless fiends, making a mockery of your so-called laws and all you stand for. Your society is nothing but a sham that will crumble the second you meet the hellish likes of us.

Back to the game. Why didn't you bring in Frankie with two outs in the eighth and the bases loaded as you still clung to a one-run lead?

Because I'm a complete fucking moron.

When I was a kid, my father had friends everywhere. No matter where we went--the mall, little league games, soccer tournaments--he was sure to run into someone he knew. They'd shake hands and trade energetic small talk I couldn't understand. These friends covered a wide range of humanity, from well-dressed professionals to tattooed biker types.

This democratic taste in companions did not gel with his personality, as I knew it. To me, he was a master of sarcasm with snobbish pretensions. He did the New York Times Sunday crossword religiously, tracing block letters with a black pen, then filling in the interiors in red like panes of stained glass. He wouldn't listen to any radio station but WQXR, the Times' classical music outpost. He owned one musical album, a doo-wop compilation. Everything else in his LP collection was comedy: George Carlin and Tom Lehrer, mostly.



He recoiled at his boys' typically kid-like table manners. He'd storm away from the kitchen table muttering "Savages!" to himself when he could take it no more. (To this day, I find the word "savages" to be extremely funny.) If he came home from work and we were watching He-Man or G.I. Joe, he'd demand we "turn that drivel off", in a silly voice that made it clear he was both joking and deadly serious. He preferred to watch PBS, which I found crushingly boring. I called every show he liked "Great Rocks of Our Time".

And yet, in public I'd see him hanging out with total slobs, people I thought he wouldn't be caught dead with. And not just talk with them, but joke and laugh like they were the best of buddies. My dad was a gifted storyteller, someone who could command a room with equal parts rhetorical skill and bullshit. But even so, it didn't seem likely that he'd be swapping stories with many of the "friends" he ran into.

His friends had two things in common: (1) they were all men; (2) I had no idea who any of them were. They weren't people he worked with, and he had no social life to speak of. If asked where he knew these people from, he'd say "around". If pressed further, he'd change the subject.

My mother found this particularly infuriating. For the life of her, she couldn't figure out the identities of these mystery people. After all, the man barely left the house, except to go to AA meetings...

This is bogus, man! Jerry wants me to platoon just because I'm dangerously unqualified to play in the majors! And just when I'm about to hit my 100th home run, too! That's it, I gotta get a trade outta this dump. Anywhere but here. This is so unfair! Carlos, back me up on this.
Huh? I'm sorry, I couldn't hear you. There's hundreds of angry fans screaming at me for being a clubhouse cancer.
Whoah, that's totally unfair! If I were you, I'd grab a reporter and tell him my side of the story.
I would do that, but the reporters are right at front of the mob, brandishing pitchforks.
You're too uptight, dude. You just gotta take it free and easy, like me.
But if I take it free and easy, the reporters say I'm not hustling.
*pfft* Don't listen to those guys, man. If they write stuff like that, just give 'em the cold shoulder.
Whenever I ignore the writers, they say I'm aloof and unapproachable. Oh, and sometimes they threaten my family.
I don't know what half those words mean and you're old. How about you, Jose? You're a young go-getter. You gotta understand what I'm saying.
I'd like to help you out, Jeff, but I'm too busy trying to explain to the beat writers that me occasionally dancing isn't the worst thing to happen to baseball since the Black Sox.
So you dance sometimes! Big deal! Why don't you just ask for a trade to a different city, like me? You just gotta take what you want! I watched this motivational thingy once where this one really tall guy said that.
Because the writers would throw bricks in my face if I did that.
You guys are too timid. Hey, there's Angel Pagan. This guy gets it.
Yeah, I get it straight up the pooper from the sports press, because I'm having a huge year and yet somehow I don't "play the game the right way". Meanwhile, you swing at everything that moves and get away with murder.
Hey, don't pin this on me, broham! Don't get mad at me 'cause I make an effort to get to know the scribes.
I tried to shake Bill Madden's hand once, and he bit me! On the head!
Wallace Matthews shit in a box and sent it to me, on my birthday.
The only reason I'm still playing baseball is because Mike Lupica kidnapped my children.
That's so weird. You guys are way better players than me. Why would the press give you such a hard time?
Take a guess.
You were all born on Tuesdays? I always heard reporters hate Tuesdays.
Take another guess.
Maybe you don't smile hard enough.
Take another guess. Why do you think reporters might be more receptive to an aw-shucks boy from Georgia than three guys who come from foreign lands and have funny accents?
I don't have time to play your mind games. I gotta split. Me and Joel Sherman are gonna hit the lunch buffet at Temptations. Hasta manana, amigos!
Is it easier being that dumb if you're that white?
Shhh. If you listen hard, you can hear him swing and miss at something.

I have touchstones all over New York that immediately bring back incidents in my life. All it takes is an awning or a doorway to bring memories flooding back. That's that theater I used to go to all the time. There's that bar where my friend pissed all over the window late one night. That's the corner where I pushed a huge metal cog into oncoming traffic.

Right now, I'm working near Wall Street, right in the shadow of Ground Zero. I've never worked in this neighborhood before, which is somewhat unusual in my family (between finance, insurance, and the courts, most of my relatives have worked downtown at some point or another). But I used to go down there every now and then, because my father worked here for most of his adult life (when he was working).

When I was in college, we started to meet up for lunch, and it continued as I entered the workforce myself. We didn't eat downtown too often--as I've quickly found out, the meal options down there are slim pickins. More often, we'd get lunch in the Village--my dad was a huge fan of the Waverly Diner on Sixth Avenue, for reasons that escape me.

But before my current gig, my only ventures into the Financial District area were to visit my dad, and so when I walk around those narrow, sloping streets, I feel haunted by him. Particularly since he used to work in the World Trade Center. I visited him a few times there, when he worked in an office on the 102nd floor, where you could actually feel the building yaw slightly to each side. I can't pretend to know what it's like to have lost someone on 9/11, but I think I know something like it when I look out my new office's windows and see workers below laying foundations, paving things over, removing all evidence that anyone was once there.

I called his death years before it happened, at least in broad terms. I declared to my mother that he'd already put us through too much grief to go easily. It would not be a quick heart attack or car accident. It would be something prolonged and painful and probably crippling to all our wallets. I said these things as jokes, but I was 100 percent convinced they would come true, and I was right.