Page 6 of Angry White Male

  Stan Taylor was born on February 1, 1964 in Los Angeles. Shirley and Dan still lived in the little beach house in Hermosa when he was born, but shortly thereafter, as Dan’s salary escalated at Adams, Duque & Hazeltine, they moved into a gorgeous home in Palos Verdes Estates. Nowadays, only the truly rich could afford to buy there, but back then a young lawyer could move his family in.

  The house was too big for a family of three. It had a swimming pool, and possessed an incredible, sweeping vista view that extended from downtown Los Angeles to the east, to the Hollywood Hills and Santa Monica Mountains, the glorious L.A. Strand to the north, and finally the blue Pacific and, on a clear day, Catalina Island to the west. It was a 45-minute commute from Dan’s downtown office, only minutes from the crowded, eclectic beach communities of Redondo, Hermosa and Manhattan. It was not far from the grittier neighborhoods of Torrance, Gardena, Lawndale and Wilmington that were already becoming populated by minorities. The hilly peninsula, however, was a world removed from these places.

  Near-stone silence enveloped the neighborhood at night. The sound of freeways was not in evidence up there. Instead, there were the stirrings of animals living in the nearby woods. At night in the Winter one could hear the surf pounding the coast.

  People respected each other’s privacy, but were close to each other. Neighbors knew neighbors. They knew about them. The isolation of living in L.A. is not an exaggeration, but it is different in P.V. To live in P.V. meant that you were special. Kids growing up there were a breed apart. They were well educated, in many ways a weird combination of East Coast preppie and California surfer dudes with their wild blonde hair, rich suntans, and dedication to the beach life.

  Kids in Palos Verdes participated in all sports and the teams were always competitive. They were well read, versed in the works of Shakespeare and Hemingway. They were conservative Republicans and as patriotic as they come.

  P.V. people were not the same crowd that lived in Hollywood, Beverly Hills and the Westside - liberal elitists, artsy and fuzzy about their allegiance to this great nation, especially during the Vietnam years. Palos Verdes was home to executives in the aerospace industry that fueled America’s Cold War military build-up. Their factories dotted the landscape that ran parallel to the 405 Freeway from Long Beach to El Segundo. FBI agents moved their families there. The Federal Building was built in Redondo Beach, across the street from TRW, and this place was Spy Central. No doubt the Intelligence Community had their biggest presence this side of Langley, Virginia at the corner of Aviation and Pioneer.

  After Stan’s birth, Dan and Shirley tried to have more children over the years, but Shirley mis-carried three times. Stan would be their only child.

  Stan was four years old in 1968 when Martin Luther King was assassinated in April, then Robert F. Kennedy in June. These events were very vivid to him. For years after, he claimed to have had visions of their deaths in dream form. Later, he determined that what probably happened was that he had heard the television, and his parents talking about it, while half-asleep, and had awoke with “knowledge” of the events. He recalled the funerals on television as some of his earliest memories.

  Stan loved animals like any other kid. His mother would read to him every night. She often read books about dogs. One such book had separate chapters about brave, courageous dogs who saved the lives or did great deeds for their masters. Each night, Shirley would read a chapter. The theme was the same every time. Brave dog saves man, and dies trying.

  Finally, after reading about a loveable Saint Bernard who kept an injured man alive in the snow by licking him with his warm tongue, until help arrived, only to be left behind and killed in an avalanche, Stan threw the book out of his mother’s hands.

  Crying, he told her never to read about dead dogs again. He was pissed at her.

  Shirley usually was dressed in her nightgown when she read the stories. She never noticed Stan’s gaze, which was fixated on her bosom. Stan was not sure what these things were all about, but he knew he liked ‘em. He would be a notorious breast man his entire life.

  Stan loved his parents very much. They were great parents, but there were bumps in the road. Once he and Shirley entered a grocery store. She was walking in front of him, and he was pushing the shopping cart. Suddenly, she stopped to look at something, and Stan plowed the cart into her from behind. Shirley turned and screamed at Stan, embarrassing him badly in front of everybody, including other kids, and worse, girls his age.

  Stan had been ready to apologize, but before he could she had been on him, so he lashed out, showing a fighting side. He was not pre-disposed to just take abuse.

  “I hate you,” he told his mother. He did not mean it, and later apologized.

  Stan was the tallest kid in every class he ever was in, and always felt conscious of this fact. He was taller than his teacher in pre-school. However, he was a good athlete and a natural exhibitionist when it came to displaying his sporting skills.

  Once, he was sick and had to stay at home. Four cute girls from his first grade class came by the house to wish him a speedy recovery. He really did not know the girls well, but it made him feel great. They thought he was cute, and nothing could be better than that. He was still too young to really formulate sexual feelings. Boys that age are still supposed to hate girls, but the reality is that the mating dance of acceptance and attractiveness to the opposite sex is well in place even at that age.

  Shirley made fun of the situation, which ruined it for him. His face got beet red with embarrassment.

  “Oooh, cutey,” she would taunt him, to his great chagrin.

  For some reason, sex was a subject that Stan was never comfortable with around his parents. It was a mystery to him, something dirty yet exhilarating. On a family vacation, the car stopped at a roadside diner. A cute high school girl was flirting with four horny high school boys. She was dressed provocatively. The sexual tension was tremendous. Shirley was obviously pissed to have her family in the presence of what was obviously the local tramp in this small town. Dan looked at the action, turned on. Stan was so embarrassed he just wanted out of there, but he could not help but be fascinated. He overheard her name, Linda.

  In the bathroom, Stan saw a crude drawing on the wall of a girl providing oral sex.

  “Linda gives great head,” was scrawled in pen, next to “For a good time, call Linda 864-1136,” and “Linda puts out.” Stan was years from puberty. But in his memory, these words, the high school girl, the whole filthy, sexually charged roadside diner scene, repulsed him and turned him on.

  Once, Shirley made a lame attempt to explain the “birds and the bees” to him, while driving alone in the car. She more or less gave up and told her son, “If you ever have any questions about anything, like where babies come from, feel free to ask.”

  The Taylor’s were not particularly religious people. Stan had been baptized as an Episcopalian, out of tradition, but the family did not go to church. Shirley had been a churchgoer, but her husband was not into it. She was tired from raising her son and taking care of the house. She lost the drive to make it on Sundays.

  One Easter, they visited the family of one of Dan’s old baseball teammates, and a movie depicting the life of Christ was playing on television. This bearded man fascinated Stan, but he was sickened by the torture he was put through, carrying the cross that he would be nailed to, and then left to die. Stan was made to feel like an outsider when it came to religion. “Christians” were somebody else, some kind of sect that he did not belong to.

  That day, eating on the outdoor veranda of a beautiful restaurant overlooking the ocean, the grown-ups began discussing some horrible events in the Middle East, involving a man who had been discovered to be a traitor to his people. The man had been held down, and his tormentors poured oil through an open vat down his throat and into his stomach. The poor, wretched man had died immediately.

  This description haunted Stan. Sitting in the warm car on a hot day while driving home,
he became sick to his stomach, and associated acts of horror and torture with this nauseating feeling the rest of his life. The idea of killing a person and the person knowing about it while it was happening, particularly by drowning or fire or suffocation; these represented his worst phobias.

  Shirley, who had pretty much given up her career plans to marry Dan and raise Stan, did develop a nice hobby, which was to paint. She would paint pretty rural scenes from the Palos Verdes hills, or from snapshots taken during vacations to the desert, or Tahoe, or skiing. Eventually, she became brave enough to show her work.

  The local Jewish Community Center allowed her to hang some paintings in their main lodge, so one day she took her work down there, with Stan in tow. Stan accompanied her inside, where she hung her work. Stan observed the people at the center. He went by the pool, where children his age were playing. He was just a kid, with no sense of religion, but to him these Jewish kids looked different. Something about their eyes. They seemed to have a haunted expression on their faces. He heard the word “Jewish.” It seemed like a strange word to him. They just seemed different.

  On the way home, out of nowhere, Stan turned to Shirley.

  “The kids there looked different,” he said.

  “What do you mean, different?” asked Shirley, annoyed.

  Her tone was angry, so Stan let it drop, but to his six-year old mind, they were not the same as he was.

  That same year, Shirley took Stan to Europe. Dan stayed home because he had a big case to deal with. The trip took them to Holland, Italy, Germany and England.

  In Holland, Shirley took Stan to a park located next to an apartment building. A bunch of Dutch kids were playing baseball, which was a sport of surprising popularity in that country. Stan immediately recognized the sport, and being American, took on the role of being one. He entered the group, speaking in English. Dutch children are often raised bi-lingual, and several understood him. He was invited to play, and was an immediate hit. He came to bat and hit a home run, only the ball broke the window of the nearby apartment. A Dutchman came running out, screaming. Stan just stood there listening to the man swear in Dutch. The other kids fled, for the most part. Shirley tried to apologize through the language barrier, and managed to give him money to repair the window. It was a very proud moment in young Stan’s life. He felt like he had represented his country by hitting a home run that caused a ruckus.

  In England, they were invited by friends of friends to a big lawn party at a mansion. It seemed to Stan to be more of a castle. It was in the countryside outside London. There were many people in attendance, and lots of kids. Many of the children were girls, and immediately Stan was determined to impress these English girls with his American athletic skills.

  A huge German Shepherd dog overshadowed the fun, however. Stan was a tall child, but the beast was taller than he was, even standing on all fours. This was a mean bastard, the kind of dog the Nazis used to keep Jews in line at Auschwitz. The master of the house, who owned the dog, explained the rules of conduct.

  “Just don’t run or lift your arms around the dog,” he told the 20 or 25 kids who would soon be let loose on his garden estate for the next several hours.

  The dog came right up to Stan, growling ferociously, and Stan was scared out of his mind.

  “Mommy,” he said, moving slowly backwards to his mother, because he just knew if he moved quickly the beast would attack him without mercy.

  “I really wish you’d put the dog away,” Shirley told the owner. “I’d feel much better and safer.”

  “Oh, he’ll be fine,” said the man dismissively.

  “Whatever you do, don’t run or lift your arms,” Shirley told Stan, who would in a matter of minutes be playing with other kids.

  After dinner, the kids went off to do just that, play. First, they found a pond where they caught minnows. The dog was not seen, and Stan forgot about the animal. He gazed at the green expanse of grass, which looked to him like the outfield at Dodger Stadium the first time he had walked through the tunnel and seen it with his dad. He decided to sprint across the grass. He had caught the attention of a cute little English lass with glasses. He would impress her with his sprinting ability.

  Stan began to run. The next thing he knew, he was being tackled, like a running back getting nailed in the open field by a faster cornerback. Then he was on his back. He was pinned down, unable to move his arms. In his face was the beast-dog, snarling, ravenous and angry, teeth bared, drooling with lust for the flesh of children.

  The dog attacked. He bit a chunk of Stan’s left bicep. He looked at Stan. What next? If he went for his throat, Stan probably would have died. The dog took a second bite out of his little arm. Now, the throat. Stan was screaming, helpless. He was in shock, not actually feeling pain. It was almost unreal, but it was real. That would make it surreal.

  Then he saw the dog lifted off him. The owner had rushed to the scene and saved his life. Of course, if he had just put the dog in a room or in an enclosed area earlier, it would not have been necessary. Stan was carried in his arms. Shirley arrived, screaming out of her mind. Stan looked at his arm, and saw a hole where the muscles of his biceps had been. He looked right at the inside of his arm, the sinews, the blood, the vessels, the muscles, the pink flesh. It was damn weird.

  Then Stan went nuts.

  “I’m going to die,” he said about 175 consecutive times, to the horror of all. He saw the cute English girl watching him get carried away. Anybody there that day carried the memory of this event the rest of their natural lives.

  Next, Stan found himself in an ambulance. Something about the fact that he was in an ambulance and was not dead struck him with great calm. He stopped screaming, “I’m not going to die,” he said, and smiled at his mother, who was still out of her skull.

  “It’ll be okay, Mommy,” he said.

  “You’re so brave,” she told him.

  He was. For the rest of his life, Stan would look back at this day and marvel at how calm he had become, after the initial “I’m going to die” tantrum had subsided. He somehow felt that if he was ever in a combat-type situation, he would find calm. There was no explaining it. He just was able to maintain calm.

  He maintained his poise through the harrowing ordeal of the hospital, where he had to endure shots and emergency surgery. After it was discovered the beast had never been vaccinated, he had to go through the difficult process of rabies shots.

  The needles, the knife, the doctors; nothing bothered him. None of that was the beast snarling inches from his throat. The medical care was free since England had socialized medicine. Stan braved the whole process like a champion. It is hard to truly emphasize how stalwart he had been, how re-assuring he was to his mother, who went through hell through the whole, horrid thing. She blamed herself for letting Stan go off by himself knowing that animal was lurking somewhere on the grounds. Stan just told her it was not her fault. He was going to play and run and nothing was going to stop that.

  Later, it was discovered that the beast had attacked another child prior to Stan. Shirley wanted to sue the rich people who owned the beast, but was dissuaded by her friends, because they were friends of the dog’s owners. Besides, she would have had to initiate action in the unfamiliar British civil court system.

  Dan recommended against it, too. He was naturally not pre-disposed to portraying his family as a victim, probably because all the “victims” he came in contact with as an attorney disgusted him.

  After Stan returned home, the dog attacked a third child at another lawn party. It was then, and only then, that the beast was put to sleep.

  When Stan arrived home, he looked outside his window seat at an American flag flying at Los Angeles International Airport. He turned to Shirley, and said, “I love America.”

  Shortly after they came back, Shirley discovered the telltale evidence that Dan had been having an affair while she was in Europe. He moved out shortly, and she went into crisis mode.

  P
icking up Stan from school on an appropriately rainy day, she started to cry, which scared Stan a lot more than the snarling beast. She told him flat-out that his father was seeing somebody else, and that they might get divorced.

  To the six-year old, this held the potential of disaster greater than all other possibilities. That Sunday, Stan went to church for the only time he could recall in his pre-adult life. Shirley went to pray for her marriage and urged her son to do the same thing. Stan recognized the Christ image on the cross from the Easter movie he had seen on TV. Somehow, he ended up in Sunday school. He went twice, and had no idea what they were talking about. All the other kids were up to speed when it came to the religious phraseology. Stan felt like a moron. He hated feeling like a moron. This was something that he often felt, the concept that he was in a room filled with other kids, all of whom were clued in to some kind of inside information that only he was excluded from. Eventually, Dan ended his affair, and the marriage persevered.

  Feeling isolated happened to Stan a lot in school, especially in math. The teacher would start giving instructions. He would quickly fall behind and not know what was being discussed. All the other kids would seem to be following along at warp speed. This feeling would descend over Stan, a pit in his stomach, his head spinning, vision blurred, heart pumping. It was pure desperation, and Stan would pray only that a benevolent God or force of nature would hide his stupidity from all around him.

  His teachers could not quite figure him out. At parent-teacher conferences, they always had the same thing to say.

  “He’s a bright boy,” they would tell his folks, “but he doesn’t pay attention. He makes jokes and draws attention to himself, but this prevents him from following instructions. He has great potential, but he isn’t reaching it.”

  Indeed, Stan did bring attention on himself. He was a class clown, probably to hide the embarrassment he sometimes felt when he was sure he was the only guy who did not know what was being discussed.

  Misery loves company, or so they say, and never was this term truer than in Stan’s case. He would search for some other lame kid who did not seem to understand the instructions, and he would latch on to him. Other “dumb” kids were his life raft in a classroom of supposedly “smart” children.

  Shirley introduced Stan to culture. She used to take him to the opera, to plays, and to highbrow films like “Dr. Zhivago”. Stan developed respect for people who might be termed Renaissance Men; athletes and soldiers who were also intellectuals, and dressed with class when not in uniform.

  Stan’s childhood was a duality of shyness when he felt inferior, and outgoing behavior when he felt superior. There was not a lot of middle ground. His tendency to show off manifested itself in school plays. He always starred in them. He was the Pied Piper in the play of the same name, memorizing all his lines, playing the role with style and wit. His classmates dumbly mumbled and stumbled over held scripts because they were unable to remember the words, much less read them. Stan could feel helpless and stupid in school, and he also could be brilliant, displaying that brilliance for all to see. He liked attention when he was doing well.

  Stan floundered, thrived, was often bored, and occasionally knew more than his teachers, most of whom he did not particularly like or respect. No teacher stood out as being influential in his upbringing. Stan barely hid his delusions of grandeur. His opinion of himself was strong enough to withstand his lapses in school and the vagaries of difficult parents.

  Dan loved books and he loved baseball. He had kept all his old books. His father had handed down to him a series of books written from the early 1910s until the 1920s by an author named Lester Chadwick, called the “Baseball Joe” series.

  “Baseball Joe” was based on Christy Mathewson, and the books barely disguised other players. Rogers Hornsby, for instance, was known simply as Mornsby. Stan fell in love with these works. An interesting thing happened as a result. He became an expert on baseball in the early days of the century. He got his hands on a book, “The Glory of Their Times” by Lawrence Ritter, an NYU history professor who interviewed numerous old-timers who had played from 1900 to 1930.

  Stan loved this stuff. By the time he was in the third grade, he could recite verbatim facts about Connie Mack, Jimmie Foxx, Ty Cobb, and anybody else in baseball history. He knew all their statistics and almost every fact about their lives.

  Stan loved to read, and found refuge in books. Being an only child during a time before cable TV and video games, books were his sanctuary. At school, he preferred the solitude of books to his peers. He did not seem to be able to find a happy medium between class clown and recluse. He was either one or the other. He found a book in the school library called “Baseball’s Greatest Heroes”. It had been written in the 1930s or ‘40s, and had a chapter on each great star of the first half of the century. He read that book over and over again, memorizing everything in it.

  Whenever he had free time, he ventured to the library to read that book, or others like it. There were certain times when regular class work would be relaxed. For instance, on the last Friday before Christmas vacation, or the final day of school prior to Summer vacation, the kids would get to listen to rock music on the radio and involve themselves in some kind of fun activity, like making macramé designs, painting murals, or cooking chili con carne. Stan disdained the social scene, and instead went to that library to find comfort in books.

  Eventually, his love of baseball books and baseball history would translate into a love of books and history in general. Stan started to read books on things other than baseball. At age seven he read Jules Verne’s “Mysterious Island”. At a young age, he saw the film “Patton”, starring George C. Scott. He became incredibly patriotic and military-oriented because of it. He developed great interest in military history, and read Ladislav Farago’s “Patton: Ordeal and Triumph” while still in grade school.

  By the time he was in the seventh grade, Stan could have sat down with a professor from West Point and held his own in a discussion of the merits of Patton, General Sir Bernard Law Montgomery and Field Marshall Erwin Rommel, and how these merits played themselves out in North Africa. He knew the politics and the military strategies of the Sicilian Campaign, understood how close the Germans had come to a break-out during the Battle of the Bulge, and took Patton’s side regarding the issue of whether he should have been unleashed on Berlin before the Russians.

  Living up on the hill, Stan was a little bit isolated from other kids. He had to walk up and down the hill to get to the school playground for sandlot baseball and the like. Other children were loath to trek up the hill to get to his house. Therefore, Stan had to find ways to amuse himself. Stan read the Los Angeles Times sports section religiously, each day. He subscribed to sports magazines, mainly Sports Illustrated and The Sporting News.

  The Sporting News was his favorite. It came every Friday, and Stan could not wait to get home from school to read it cover to cover. He kept old editions, and pored over them to glean information that he either had missed the first time, or to re-enforce certain memories that he cherished about sports.

  Summer time is always a great time for kids, but for Stan it was magic. He tried to milk every ounce out of the Summer, but inevitably time would win out. Stan wanted to have the best possible time in the Summer. He loved warm days with The Sporting News. It meant baseball season, and all the languid joys contained therein.

  Sometimes at school, Stan would come across old newspapers with accounts of baseball games from the previous Summer. He would read them and imagine that it was Summer again, and that baseball season was in full swing. When Summer started to wind down, Stan would get very depressed. At first, it was not so much that he disliked school, but he could not help himself. Being an only child he did not share in a lot of the camaraderie of youth, and did not enjoy the joys and expectations that usually come with being that age. Summer represented baseball and some solitude from the ravages of youth. In his own private circ
le, Stan could be what he wanted to be. He used his imagination a great deal.

  The family would take vacations to various mountain-fishing lakes, often in the Sierra Nevada range. Stan would think nothing of taking a walk all by himself, and he would use this time to think, to imagine, to tell stories, and to fantasize. He was fully capable of amusing himself. There was no boredom in it. The power of his mind was rich enough to supply vivid imaginary scenarios, involving many different things.

  Perhaps it involved girls, or baseball, or war heroics. Stan was a dreamer. He imagined what something would be like in a year. He could forecast a little league baseball season, going down the schedule and predicting the score of each game, and how it was his star play that would produce victory for his team. He was into mental focus and imagery long before he had ever heard a sports psychologist talk of such things.

  Girls were a complete mystery to him. Stan would have been much better served if he could have had an older sister, somebody who would bring her friends around and give him some perspective of what these strange creatures were all about.

  There was a cute blonde girl at school, one year older than he was. To Stan, she was a pure vixen, and she was totally off-limits to him. He had no chance, and she did not have the slightest clue who the hell he was. Over Christmas vacation, Stan was riding in the car with one of his parents, and they passed the school. A boy in a grade higher than Stan was riding his bicycle, and the cute blonde was sharing the seat with him, holding him around the waist from behind. The sight was erotic to Stan, who imagined what total joy it would be like to have a girl like that share the bicycle seat with him, and put her hands around his waist.

  Around first grade, Stan learned how to swear. He figured that would impress girls. One day when class broke for recess, a new girl, whose family had just moved there from Australia, was within earshot. He let loose, to nobody in particular.

  “Fuck, shit asshole, fucking drinking fountain,” he said just before getting some water.

  “What’s the matter with you?” asked the girl, in her accent. She was appalled.

  Stan was a handsome blonde kid, but there was something about him that did not work around girls. He had no rapport, no style, no pizzazz. His parents were no help. The subject of girls, sex, the birds and the bees, was seemingly impossible to talk about in the Taylor household.

  Everybody just froze up. There was no comfort level. No levity or humor to it. Dan tried to bring up the subject, but his efforts were torture to Stan. He desperately wanted the subject avoided. Dan had “been around,” as they say, but locker room talk just did not happen between Dan and his only child.

  Dan would make comments about women and sex, but all it ever did was make Stan turn beet red. Dan would see a woman with large breasts and say, “There’s enough there for two.” Dan would stare at women while driving his car, and Stan would eye women without appearing to observe them. Dan would almost wreck the car when he was looking at girls.

  On a vacation in the mountains, they were driving on a steep dirt road near a camping spot. The road was narrow, with a steep drop-off. If the car were to swerve off the side, it would crash down the ravine. As the Taylor’s got closer to the camp ground, they started to see people. A girl, maybe 18 years old, a Lolita in a halter-top, wearing cut-off shorts, stood on the side of the road, and waved at the Taylor’s. Dan waved back, and stared at her. The car swerved to the very edge of the precipice. Stan screamed for his life from the back seat.

  Shirley had a way of screaming that reminded Dan of documentary footage of World War II bombs called “Screaming Meemies.” That’s what he called Shirley, to her great disdain. When Dan came within inches of killing the family because he insisted on staring and waving at a half-naked teenie-bopper, Shirley sounded like one of those “Screaming Meemies.”

  “Dear God,” she yelled, hitting her husband with the newspaper.

  “You’re an idiot,” Stan told his father from the backseat, in a tone that was not judgmental, but rather matter of fact. It was as if he simply possessed the knowledge that Dan was an idiot.

  There were times in which Dan could destroy his son with words, but these events seemed to have a life of their own. This was not one of those times, and Stan got away with calling his old man an idiot.

  Dan’s affair had passed by, and his parents had stayed together. Stan wondered if the time spent in church had been helpful in this regard. Shirley was content to be Mrs. Dan Taylor, and forgave her husband his indiscretions. He even told her about his trips to a Nevada whorehouse, explaining that it was just a diversion. Shirley just accepted it and was thankful she did not face the consequences of divorce.

  Stan had heard a great deal of what went on between his parents, and knew of Dan’s “activities.” He would often stand at the foot of the stairs and listen to them talk, or argue. They did not know he was there, and did not realize he could hear them. Stan had an ear for information. He never did find out exactly who the woman had been, or what forced it to an end, other than Shirley finding out. He was never sure if Shirley had threatened to leave, or Dan had just ended it in a pique of guilt. He had listened in on phone conversations between his old man and the “mystery woman,” though. She called Dan “sweet thing.”

  As much as Stan coveted information, and as much as he loved gossip and inside dope, he could not bring himself to listen to this woman sweet-talk his father. He would surreptitiously hang up the phone, bringing himself to a lather of hate for this woman. He viewed her as the mortal enemy of his mother, and therefore of him.

  When Stan was eight years old, he entered little league. He had demonstrated athletic skills in school, where he was usually the first one picked for dodge ball, kick ball, flag football, and softball. His father had been a ball player and had given him a love of baseball. He had gone to Dodger Stadium and Anaheim Stadium with his father and his grandfather, who he had a special relationship with. The first time he entered a baseball stadium, he had been awestruck by the greenness of the grass.

  The players were playing catch in front of the dugout. The Dodgers were playing the Giants, and Willie McCovey, wearing the Giants’ road grays, with black lettering and orange trim, was playing toss. From his perch in the stands, Stan could see McCovey’s throws make their way from his hand into the glove of his partner, as if guided by string. He would watch pitchers throw in the bullpen, and was struck by the same illusion, as if the baseballs they threw defied gravity. The skills demonstrated by these big leaguers awed him.

  In 1972, Stan entered midget league. His team was the Dodgers, a great thrill for him. The Dodgers, for obvious reasons, were the team everybody in L.A. wanted to play for. His father did not coach the team. Instead, some high school kids did, and they were “cool cats.” As far as Stan knew they were not homosexual child molesters like Mike Lodeen. They called him “Stan baby,” which made him feel good about himself. Dan would often attend practice. He showed more interest in his son than any of the other players’ dads. One of the high school kids who coached the team once referred to Dan as “your old man” to Stan. Stan immediately identified this reference as being disrespectful. He could think disrespectful thoughts about his dad, but he would not tolerate it in others. To young Stan, Dan Taylor was god.

  “You mean my father,” Stan corrected the high school kid.

  “Sure, your father,” the kid replied, smiling. There was something about Stan, even then, that indicated to the high school kid he was a piece of work.

  Since his “old man” had been a good player, it was assumed that Stan would be a chip off the old block. He was not at first. Stan might have been the worst player in the league. They stuck him in right field, and in midget league you can go a whole season in right field without fielding a ball. Dan and Shirley sat in the stands watching little Stan’s knees shaking every time he came to bat.

  He hit ninth in the order, and never hit the ball. He never hit a fair ball, he never h
it a foul ball, he never even tipped one. He did draw some walks, and was hit by a pitch once, but it did not count because he swung at the pitch that hit him, so it counted as a strike instead of a hit-by-pitch. His team lost every game. It was a very dismal effort.

  That Summer, he went to a place called Cloverleaf Ranch, which was located out in the desert east of L.A. He missed one week of the midget league season.

  Cloverleaf Ranch was a typical boys dude ranch. Stan learned how to ride horses there, and was quite good at it. He had problems fishing. His line always got tangled up. He was all thumbs when it came to tying his flies. Things went pretty well until the last day. Stan got into an argument with one of his bunkmates, another kid who had shared his cabin. Stan did not particularly have a beef with the kid all week, and was not sure what the argument was about, but it turned into a fistfight. Stan hated to fight. He was scared of fighting, afraid of fists, and thus always backing down like a coward.

  However, there was a point where Stan would fight. A line would be crossed, where Stan would get mad. Throughout his life did not happen much, but when it did, pity the poor bastard on the receiving end of his wrath! That was the way it was with the freckle-faced little prick who picked on Stan the last day at Cloverleaf Ranch.

  Stan beat the squib within an inch of his life. The other kids stared in amazement. All week, Stan had been meek and, for the most part, weak. In the pecking order of kids’ camps, Stan was a follower who chose to maintain as low a profile as possible. However, Stan also had that show-off, braggart side, and this had gotten him into trouble.

  The freckle-faced kid had taunted him while Stan packed for the trip home. Stan had taken it. The other kids had started to gang up on him because he had not defended himself. At some point freckle-face had shoved him. Stan took it. The shoves continued. Some punches were thrown. Freckle-face made the mistake of landing one, and this was what it took to get Stan off his ass.

  Stan punched the kid right in the freckles. The kid was stunned and tried to fight back. Stan already had the battle won. Once he “got his back up,” it was over. He did not feel pain. He did not feel fear. He just went after what had tormented him. He was driven by inner demons. The feelings that ran through his mind during these rare, violent episodes were love for the act of inflicting pain on another. He was briefly a sadist, and freckle-face was his victim.

  As an adult, Stan tried to analyze this. He would reach the conclusion that it was the devil who instilled these kinds of feelings, the desire to hurt others. Only decency and goodness held most people back.

  The fight, which had started in the cabin, rolled out to the dusty square surrounded by cabins. Soon the chant of “fight, fight” drew a healthy crowd. Stan loved that. It meant he could not just hurt freckle-face, but offer him up for public humiliation.

  Stan continued to pummel the little pissant for a few minutes. He was aware that with each thrust he was soaring in the hierarchy of the pre-teen campers. The fight finally broke up when Dan and Shirley arrived. They pulled their rampaging son off the other kid. Freckle-face’s parents arrived at the same time. They were appalled at how the “bully” Stan had beaten up their little prince.

  They yelled at Stan, and screamed at Dan and Shirley. Freckle-face wanted none of it. He had been humiliated at the hands of Stan Taylor. His folks screaming on his behalf in front of a hundred laughing children was cause for psychological pain.

  Stan and Shirley offered great apologies for the aggressive nature of their son. It was a complete surprise to them. They offered to pay for the other kids’ medical bills, which stung the other kid even more.

  Finally, Stan left with his parents. Aside from some perfunctory questions about how camp went and why in hell he had gotten in a fight, it was pretty much a silent drive back home.

  Stan Taylor loved every minute of it. He was still bloody and dusty, he had kicked ass, and he was damn proud of it. Dan and Shirley may not have said anything to that effect, but they were proud of him, too. There was some fear in their hearts that Stan had a touch of the pansy in him. His public kicking of freckle-face’s ass had helped alleviate this fear.

  Stan’s Cloverleaf Ranch experience did not make him a fighter. There was a timid side to him that never really went away. It took a lot to get him to a fight. He was afraid of getting hurt. Once a fray began, though, something would happen to him. He became exhilarated. His normal feelings disappeared.

  When Stan returned for the end of the midget league baseball season, he had renewed confidence. In the final game of the season, Stan enjoyed a major breakthrough. He actually hit a fair ball - two of them. One was a bouncer back to the pitcher, the other a ground ball to second. He was thrown out both times, finishing the season with a .000 average, but the feeling of contact was great.

  An older kid named Charlie lived up the street from the Taylor’s. He had a paper route. Sometimes Stan accompanied him. For some reason, Stan got Charlie mad at him. Stan was taunting him, calling “Charlie Weener.” Charlie hit Stan. Stan just kept it up.

  “Charlie Weener,” he said again.

  Charlie punched him in the nose. Charlie was not the strongest kid ever, and Stan was at the point where the pain was replaced by adrenaline.

  “Charlie Weener,” he said again.

  Boom. Again with a punch to the face.

  “Charlie Weener,” Stan repeated,

  “Shut up,” said Charlie, frustrated.

  “Charlie Weener,” said Stan.

  Charlie punched him again.

  “Charlie Weener,” the younger kid repeated. “Charlie Weener. Charlie Weener. Charlie Weener. Charlie Weener.”

  A punch to the face.

  “Charlie Weener Weener Weener Weener is a weenie,” taunted Stan, whose nose was now bloody.

  What had started off as a single punch, followed by another one, just to shut Stan up, became a crescendo of violent assaults. Charlie punched Stan, each thrust meant to hurt him. Charlie was older, and he was above average in size, but his punches failed to hurt Stan. Stan simply did not feel pain. As this became evident, the more emboldened he became.

  Stan did not fight back. He simply took the punches, and taunted Charlie every time. Then Stan started to get into Charlie’s head. He played off Charlie’s insecurities and analyzed him.

  “You have no strength,” Stan said matter-of-factly.

  Another punch.

  “Shut up,” Charlie screamed.

  “You simply lack strength,” Stan said, as if he felt nothing. “You’re a very weak weenie of a human.”

  “Shut up,” said Charlie, hitting him again.

  Stan did not sway. He took the punches as if they were nothing more than a stiff breeze.

  “If I was your age and was as weak as you I would be most embarrassed,” said Stan, clinically. “You are a zero. Your mother should take you to a doctor to see why you are such a weakling. I’m really very sorry to inform you of your weakness.”

  Boom.

  “Shut up,” Charlie said in exasperation.

  “Dear Charlie Weener,” said Stan, as if reading a letter, “I regret to inform you that after being tested, it is determined that you have a case of weakness. This is a condition you were born with. You were born weak. There is no cure for weakness. You are weak. It is our recommendation that you move to France. Signed, The American Institute For the Prevention of Weaklings.”

  “Shut up,” said Charlie, unable to say anything else. He punched Stan, again with no visible effect.

  The entire episode by this time had drawn neighborhood attention, and not to Charlie’s benefit. He was seen as the bully beating up the younger kid, when in fact it was Stan who was doing permanent psychological damage to him. Stan was literally sticking his face into the punches. They hurt, but not that much. Stan was past the pain anyway. Shirley came running up and ended the “fight.” She screamed at Charlie, who was chagrined. Stan just laughed at him from under his bloody nose.

&
nbsp; “Don’t worry, Mom,” Stan said, as if he was telling her it was okay to have franks and beans for dinner. “Charlie has no strength, and therefore he cannot inflict pain.”

  “Shut up,” said Charlie, lunging for Stan. He was so damaged by now that “shut up” may have been the only thing he was capable of saying until he reached majority age.

  “Get away from him,” screamed Shirley.

  “But - ” said Charlie.

  “No, really, Mom,” Stan said. “Charlie is inferior, and you need not be concerned with the likes of him.”

  It went on like that, all the way to Charlie’s house. Charlie did not try to hit Stan again, because Shirley was standing between them. By this time he had given up on getting any satisfaction. He believed every word Stan said. He was inferior. He was a weakling.

  At his house, Shirley confronted Charlie’s mother. She explained that Charlie had been hitting young Stanley. She was mortified and excoriated her son for doing such a thing.

  “But he kept calling me Charlie Weener,” Charlie said weakly.

  “It’s quite alright,” said bloody Stan, as calm as could be.

  The women just looked at him.

  “You shut up,” said Charlie.

  “No, you shut up,” his mother scolded him.

  “No, really,” said Stan. “Charlie lacks so much as an ounce of strength, and therefore his punches were not harmful to me. You see, Charlie is simply…”

  At this point, Stan leaned forward and looked around, as if conveying an embarrassing secret that, for the woman’s benefit, nobody else would hear.

  “Well, they studied about Charlie,” Stan whispered, “and he’s, well, I’m really sorry.”

  He looked around, and reduced his voice further.

  “He’s a weakling,” he whispered. “I’m sorry to have to tell you this.”

  “Shut up,” screamed Charlie.

  Charlie’s mom grabbed him and turned him around.

  “Go to your Goddamn room until I come in,” she said.

  She turned around.

  “I’m so sorry,” she said. “I’ll take care of any medical expenses -.”

  “No, really,” repeated Stan, “that won’t be necessary. As I say, Charlie inflicted no damage, as he is simply weak.”

  “Shut up,” repeated Charlie from down the hall.

  It went on like that a few more minutes. Charlie’s mother just stared at Stan. She had never seen the likes of him, a young boy using clinical vocabulary. His words had a cutting effect on her son she could not explain. She began to actually believe that there was such a thing as “weaklings,” and that her boy was a bona fide member of the fraternity.

  At home, Shirley continued to express concern over Stan, but he just brushed the whole incident off as if it were nothing. He took a shower, and after washing away the blood, was happy to discover that once his bloody nose coagulated he was fine. He had small cuts, a little discoloration, but no major bruises.

  Charlie disappeared into the woodwork. The family moved out of the state a couple of years later. When he turned 17 he had his first sexual experience with a girl, failing miserably in his frenzied attempts to achieve erection. In subsequent trysts with girls, he never came close to getting it up. Charlie never thought he was gay, although out of desperation he tried that once, also without success.

  He could masturbate to erection and orgasm, but never attained penetration or completion with a man or woman. In his 30s, he attempted suicide, but failed at that, too. He finally went to a shrink, and after much prodding, Charlie broke down sobbing, and told the “Charlie Weener” story.

  “That little bastard was the devil,” he told the psychiatrist.

  A couple of years of therapy was unable to exorcise the demon Stanley Taylor from his tortured mind. Charlie eventually just had to accept that he fell into that category of humans who were weak.

  Stan had done some minor bullying, but after “Charlie Weener” he never bullied again. He did not show great love for babies or little kids, but he never felt the compulsion to take advantage of weaker kids. So long as they did not try to pummel him.

  Despite his first-year midget league woes, Stan had a love for baseball that was ingrained very deeply. His father and grandfather taking him to games and hitting balls to him made the difference. Stan had hit wiffle balls over the garage at the age of three. Despite his poor showing as an eight-year old midget leaguer, he had demonstrated talent.

  Stan would walk to the playground and get into sandlot games. It was total joy for him. Hitting the ball, playing the game, everything about baseball thrilled him like nothing ever had or ever would. He was born for this game. He loved it with his every breath. All his thoughts were directed at the game, the game, the game.

  When he emerged into adulthood, he would look back on his baseball experiences, his passion for the diamond from his earliest childhood, and realize that to love something in this world that much is a real gift. Few people feel for anything like he felt for baseball. He was lucky.

  Stan made “friends” with a kid named Dick Maslin. Maslin never played on his team, because his father managed his teams. The sons of the managers ended up on their dad’s teams. They did play on all-stars a few times, although Dick was not all that good. He had all the right moves, though. Maslin’s uniform fit him just right. His cap was worn professionally. He played catch, chewed bubble gum, and knocked dirt out of his spikes with his bat, just like a big leaguer. Then the game started. Dick could barely hit his way out of a paper bag, and his expensive, perfectly oiled glove might as well have been made out of tin. Dick’s older brother, Mike, was an excellent ball player who might have gone somewhere in baseball if he had not become a heroine addict by his late teens.

  Their parents were ‘60s liberal Democrats who thought of the Republican Taylor’s as Neanderthals. Maslin would devastate them when he announced he was a Republican. Maslin really had no philosophy, though, except what was good for Dick Maslin.

  He was a smart kid, and a smart ass. Dick was a baseball expert. For this reason he and Stan had something in common. Dick was not really a pal, but he and Stan impressed each other with their mutual knowledge of Lou Gehrig, Carl Yastrzemski, Hal Newhouser and George Sisler.

  Dick made fun of Stan behind his back. He jeered him mercilessly during games. But there was a sense of professional courtesy to him. He showed Dan none of the regular boy-man respect, calling him Dan instead of Mr. Taylor, to name one example. But he admired the Taylor’s, in his perverse way. Dick played to win. He was willing to cheat, lie and steal to win, or in order to get his way in anything. In this respect, he was different from his older bro, who was laid back like their folks. Dick liked the competitive nature of the Taylor’s. Dick’s old man coached his teams, but was always about fair play and good sportsmanship. Dick was an adherent of the Al Davis philosophy: “Just win, baby.”

  Dick’s father occasionally took him down for some extra practice, but not often. Dick saw that the Taylor’s were getting in additional work whenever they could. He used to see them and join in, offering to shag Stan’s batting practice in return for some BP for himself, or a few extra grounders. Maslin would have done anything to have Stan’s athletic ability, but his highest ground was never going to be high enough.

  Stan was never big on comic books or cartoons. To the extent that he watched any of that stuff, he enjoyed the “Adventures of Superman”. There was a cartoon version on Saturday mornings, which Stan watched. He liked the color blue, which was the color of Superman’s cape and the Los Angeles Dodgers’ uniforms. More than the cartoon, however, he liked the actual TV show starring George Reeves. Stan was finished with cartoons at a very early age. For the rest of his life, he considered anybody who watched them to be a Dumbellionite. He would be amazed at how many college roommates and baseball teammates watched them.

  He also enjoyed anything that had to do with the U.S. Cavalry. Again, this had a lot to do with the color b
lue, which was the color of the Army’s uniforms during the Civil War, and during the Indian campaigns of the 1870s. He had an interest in warfare, as embodied in his interest in anything to do with George Patton.

  While Stan was a product of the “cowboys and Indians” culture in which the cowboys always won, he was still quite fascinated by the Indians - their war paint and shrill cries. He admired the way they entered battle with bows and arrows.

  Shirley and Dan bought him a bow and arrow set. It was not the real deal. The arrows could not do major damage, but they would still hurt if one was struck by them with enough force behind it. They could also take an eye out. One day, Dan came home drunk. Stan was lying in wait, like one of Geronimo’s braves. When Dan walked in the door, he fired his arrow at his father. It missed and struck the wall behind him. Dan became enraged. He slapped Stan upside the head, and Stan flew halfway across the room. He slammed into a lamp stand, causing the lamp to fall down on him, and the lampshade to land on his head.

  Dan saw what he had done to his young, cherished son, and immediately realized he had done something very wrong. Still, he was not the kind of person who could see himself doing wrong. His personal wiring was out of kilter. No matter how horrendous his own actions, or egregious the thing he did, he not feel guilt, anguish and regret. Instead, he just treated the object of his own bad behavior worse.

  He continued to yell and scream at Stan, infuriated beyond comprehension by the fact that he had hurt the poor boy. Instead of hating himself, he heaped venomous hate on his victim for having the temerity to be evidence of his own wrongdoing. The sight of Stan, lying on the floor in pain with a lampshade on his head, shocked and stunned that his own Daddy - the man he loved and revered like a god - could do such a thing to him, just made Dan more enraged. It was as if the boy was taunting him by exposing his faults.

  Dan’s personal flaw would manifest itself thousands of times in a lifetime of confrontations with Stan. It would be the great dividing line between them. Shirley came to his rescue during the lampshade incident. It was the last time he could remember her taking his side. To add to the tragedy, Dan’s flaw became Shirley’s. Many times she would see Dan act like this. So ingrained in her did this behavior become that, as if by Osmosis, eventually she was unable to separate herself from reality. She could not judge right or wrong when her husband decided to lay some hell on her son. The possibility that Stan was right became an impossibility. Rational thought and the instinct of motherly protection went out the window.

  Stan Taylor was doomed to face this upside down conundrum over and over again. Stan recalled, for the rest of his days, the feeling of lying bruised and abused with the lampshade on his head, while his father had his mouth clenched in a tight ball, bearing his teeth like the German Shepherd who had eaten his bicep in England.

  Stan’s duality - shyness mixed with an ache to be noticed once he felt comfortable with his surroundings - made for awkwardness. He could be the class clown, a cut-up putting on a show for others, especially girls. He could do this in a public situation. Then he would later find himself alone with people, and lose his personality. He would become embarrassed easily. Stan could also be a smart ass. Kids played a game called “I eight it.” One kid would say, “I saw a slug and I one it.”

  Each kid after that would say, “I two it,” “I three it,” and “I four it,” until the eighth kid was forced to say, “I eight it,” as in “I ate the slug.” Stan was too smart to fall for it. When it came his turn to say, “I eight it,” he looked the others right in the eye and announced, “I seven point fived it!”

  Stan and Dan practiced baseball consistently in the off-season between age eight and nine. Dan pitched batting practice to his son, hit him grounders, had him shag flies, and caught him in the bullpen. Stan read baseball books and studied the game. He took it to heart. At the age of nine, he went from being the worst player in the league to one of the two best. In the first game of the season, he pitched a no-hit game. In his first at-bat, he hit a home run. He threw extremely hard. Once, he accidentally beaned a little kid, breaking his ribs. The kids’ mother came rushing out of the stands, hysterical, and it reminded Stan of the way Shirley had acted when the dog had bitten him. Stan tried to apologize, but he had taken a new role, that of villain. He dominated. He also learned a lesson that would stick with him forever. He had worked for something, and attained it. Hard work pays off. Diligence has its rewards.

  Dan did not coach Stan in the midget league, but he did coach him in the minors, which is for 10-year olds. This was where the trouble started. Dan did not seem to grasp what little league baseball was all about. He had been a star who had played for Rod Dedeaux at USC, a pro who had been destined for the big leagues. He was a competitive athlete. His conception of sports was something you tried to win at.

  Right from the get-go, Dan ran into problems with other parents. By this time, he had been passed over several times for the big promotions at work. He was drinking heavily. He had not made a splash in politics, although there was some relief in this. Nixon was knee deep in Watergate, and all the “USC mafia” had been swept up in the scandal.

  Dan felt some sense of relief that he had been passed over in, avoiding Watergate. Instead, he had decided to get into the “Stan Taylor business.” His son was going to be a baseball star. He was going to achieve all the things Dan had not. Dan would live his life vicariously through his son. He would guide Stan’s progress, controlling the environment that Stan would operate in. Stan would not repeat the mistakes and pitfalls that had derailed Dan from sports greatness.

  Home Market sponsored Stan’s minor league team. Stan continued to be a great little league player. He was tall and athletic, a hard-throwing pitcher, and a skilled shortstop when not on the mound.

  Dan ran disciplined practice sessions, based on his experience as a college and pro player. He had many supporters among parents and kids, who loved being involved in a winning program with structure. However, there were those who disagreed with his approach, saying that youth sports should be about fun and games, not winning. These were usually the parents of the kids who were not any good at baseball. There was also a liberal ‘70s attitude that pervaded around that time. An “I’m OK, you’re OK” mindset that tried to de-value the importance of winning.

  Dan could have gotten away with structured practices and controlling games with winning strategy. His sin was that he yelled at the kids. A lot. He criticized them. He screamed at them to run faster. He scared some of the kids and a fair number of the parents.

  Shirley did not help matters much. She would yell and scream from the stands, echoing her husband. They were the “loud couple.” The worst part was when she would yell encouragement for her son.

  “C’mon, Stanleee,” she would yell in her “Screaming Meemies” voice.

  If only this could have been avoided. If she had called him Stan, not Stanley, others might have had one less thing to pick up on and mock Stan mercilessly.

  “Stan-leee,” he would hear when he came to bat.

  Being a star player helped, but if he had not been a star, the attention would not have been on him. Jim Spector coached the Chapel of the Hills team. He was a plumber or an electrician or something. He got up at three in the morning to go to work, for some reason, and coached the team that both his sons, Mike and Steve, played for.

  Jim was a red-ass about baseball, but avoided the sort of tantrums that Dan could not help having. His kids were good athletes, but quiet, and they garnered respect from their peers. This peeved Stan. A natural rivalry between the two brothers and Stan, between Jim and Dan, and between Shirley and Jim’s wife, Sophie, was inevitable. What peeved the Taylor’s was the way Sophie would call out encouragement to “my Stevie,” without incurring any raspberries, while Shirley calling her son “Stanley” was the cause of much mockery.

  “Stan-leeee.”

  Dan would go bananas, and his attitude seemed to infuriate others. One o
f his players would round third base, heading for home, and Dan would yell, “Go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, GO YOU BASTARD, GO!” It could be heard all the way to Portuguese Bend.

  These kids were 10 years old.

  Stan would be booed when he came to bat. He had seen a picture of former Major Leaguer Jimmie Piersall thumbing his nose at a crowd. He scored a run, and as he crossed the plate, he looked up at the stands and thumbed his nose. Standing at the screen, a foot away, was Steve Spector, who was above taunting and jeering. Stan’s thumbing of his nose appeared to be for him. The boos got louder.

  Stan was 10 when his grandfather passed away at the age of 74. Charles, Jr. still lived in Beverly Hills, and every Sunday Shirley would put Stan in a car and drive him to see the old man. Dan never made this visit. Dan and his father had an estranged relationship. Charles, Jr. had favored Charles III over Dan. Just when Dan had felt that it was time to “forgive and forget,” he had run into problems entering politics, while Charles III had become a powerful political advisor and Congressman. Nixon had once held a fundraiser in Orange County. Dan had tried to make contact with Nixon, but to no avail. He called his brother, but he never heard back.

  The next day, he saw a photo of his father and brother with Nixon, schmoozing it up. He was pissed.

  For these and other reasons, Dan and his father were not close. Stan, however, loved the old man. They had an incredibly close relationship. Stan never got tired of seeing his grandfather. He was never bored. He never chafed to leave early. He loved spending time with him.

  Charles, Jr. had a natural affinity for Stan, who was a historian right from the get-go. Charles told him stories about Babe Ruth and Lefty Grove, and Stan knew all about these guys. Charles gave him old books, old magazines, and old games. They were treasures to Stan.

  Charles’ other grandchildren, nieces and nephews would visit. They could not possibly have cared less who the hell he was, where he had been or what he had done in his life. They gave him obligatory love. Stan loved him thoroughly. He was genuine about it, and he had deep respect for him.

  Stan read the old books Charles gave him. He absorbed the information and retained it for the rest of his life. This would contribute to his education more than any college courses he would take.

  Stan had a board game called All-Star Baseball. It was, by later standards, quite archaic. A round card represented each player with a whole in the middle. The cards were marked by various areas for “single,” “double,” “ground out,” “strikeout,” and so on. The card would be placed in a holder and an arrow would be spun with a flick of the finger. The arrow would land on the card, determining whether the player had struck out, hit a home run, or whatever. The pitcher was no factor, although their cards existed for offensive purposes.

  Dan had bought Stan the game. Stan played it, although its limitations frustrated him. Dan had bought Stan the modern version, featuring players of the late 1960s and early 1970s. They included Willie Mays, Hank Aaron, Willie Stargell, and the like. One day at Granddaddy’s, Stan was taken into the garage, where Charles showed him his version of All-Star Baseball. It was like opening up a whole new world. Charles’ game must have been from the 1930s or ‘40s. He had Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig. Ruth’s card had a huge swath for home runs, and almost as big a swath for strikeouts.

  Stan thanked the old man profusely, and cherished that game. Dan saw how much the old board games meant to him. He broke out some of his old, mostly bad football games. Charles, Jr. had passed down to Dan an old game called Howard Jones All-American Football, endorsed by the famous USC coach from the 1920s and ‘30s who the old man had been friendly with. Dan said it was a great game, much better than what he still had. His mother had thrown it out one day when Dan was off fishing.

  Dan rushed to the garbage cans, which had not yet been picked up. The game was there, and it could have been saved, but it had rained hard and it was ruined. Dan never forgave his mother for that.

  Later, Stan bought a game called Strat-0-Matic Baseball. This may have been the finest board game ever conceived. Stan had the 1976 version, which consisted of six teams from both the American and National Leagues. He had the Reds, that year’s World Champions, with Pete Rose, Joe Morgan, Johnny Bench, and the rest of the Big Red Machine. He had the Dodgers, his favorite team, who had trailed Cincinnati by a large margin in the Western Division despite having a talented squad that included pitcher Don Sutton and first baseman Steve Garvey. The American League included the Yankees, who were swept in four straight in the World Series; the Royals, the Western Division champions; the A’s, who were in their last year of contention during the Charlie Finley era; plus a few other clubs.

  Stan did not just play Strat-O-Matic, he absorbed himself in it. He did it all out, which was the way he believed all good things deserved to be done. Stan organized an entire league, and the thing that he loved so much about Start-O-Matic was that he could do it all by himself. He needed no other Dumbellionites to amuse himself. He was on his own. Oh, the glory of this, not to have to rely on anybody else to create fun and excitement. There was nothing else more precious than to have this ability at your fingertips. Strat-O-Matic embodied this concept to him.

  He could not wait to get home from school to play Strat-O-Matic. It was even better than reading The Sporting News. He could play this game in the Winter, when his beloved baseball was off the radar screen. In the guest room, where he would set the game down on the big furry rug, it was mid-Summer. Stan kept meticulous score of each game in a Wilson scorebook that Dan bought him. Dan had taught him how to keep score at a very early age. The ability to do this was one of the things that separated worthy people from the unwashed masses.

  Dan had also bought Stan a microphone and a tape recorder. Stan would announce the games, pretending he was Vin Scully. He enthused the broadcasts with great hype. On a Tuesday night, Stan would go into the broadcast with, “Good evening, everybody, and welcome to Dodger Stadium, where a capacity crowd of 56,000 is just sitting in to enjoy tonight’s pivotal division contest between the Cincinnati Reds and the Los Angeles Dodgers.”

  Stan fantasized that every baseball game was one of deep meaning and purpose. He loved the game, preferring it to all others, but was frustrated by the everydayness of baseball. A football game, played once a week, took on great importance and drew capacity crowds. Even basketball, especially college hoops, had that “event” feel to it. But baseball was played almost every day from April to October. No single game, especially during the regular season, had that important and exciting feel to it like a big Saturday college football game between USC and their opponent (who in those days received ritual beatings).

  Stan gave the games importance in his mind and in the official recordings of the league. The Wilson scorebook had a line for attendance, and Stan loved this statistic. He filled it in with large capacity or near-capacity crowds for almost every game.

  This seemed to make sense for the Dodgers, who did draw very well, as they always have. Oakland drew dismal attendance, but not in Stan’s league. He liked the A’s. They were his favorite American League club, and in the attendance line for A’s games Stan would write 39,414, or 40,202, some high figure that did not jive with the reality of the Oakland Coliseum crowds of that era. The real attendance was more likely to read something like 6,214. Even if it was a Friday night in July of the early 1970s, with the first place A’s sending Catfish Hunter to the mound against the first place Orioles’ Jim Palmer.

  Stan would announce every pitch with flair. He was meticulous in his upkeep of statistics, keeping the player’s season stats on separate sheets of paper. At the end of the season, the Reds had won the National League with a 16-4 record, but the A’s had upset the apple cart in the A.L., defeating New York with a 13-7 mark against the Bronx Bombers’ 12-8. Stan never cheated or did anything that outwardly favored one team over another, but he probably managed the Dodgers and the A’s a little s
marter than he managed the Yankees. In the “World Series,” any favoritism he may have felt was of no value to Oakland. Nobody was going to beat Cincinnati, who swept the three-out-of-five series in three straight.

  Stan’s favorite pitcher was Tom Seaver of the Mets. There were many reasons why he liked him so much. For one, Seaver was a USC Trojan, the highest form of human being in the Taylor household. But there was another reason. Stan valued intelligence and order, right from the get-go. Seaver embodied this. Stan was influenced in this regard by his father. As a lawyer, Dan was required to stay organized, to be well read, and to be an educated, professional man.

  Shirley had become the polar opposite. She was haphazard in the way she kept the house, forgetful and disorganized. Stan vowed to never be like that. He liked things kept clean and legal, so to speak.

  Seaver was smart and very articulate. At that time, some players wore stupid long hair halfway down to their butt. Many uniforms looked awful. The A’s, Padres, Astros and, God forbid, the White Sox of the 1970s looked like softball teams. Seaver kept his hair trimmed nicely. He wore the uniform the right way. The Mets never varied from the traditional look. Neither did the Reds, the team Seaver would be traded to in 1977.

  Seaver was everything Stan wanted to be. Dan had adopted him as his favorite. It was because Stan had already done so. Whenever Seaver came to pitch in Los Angeles, Stan and Dan were there. Stan had even met Seaver at USC alumni games, which Dan pitched in every season. Seaver was not particularly gracious, but the Taylor’s overlooked that.

  In the Strat-O-Matic league, Seaver was the ace with a sterling 7-0 record, leading in every category - strikeouts, earned run average, and shutouts. The game calculated pitching prowess, pitting the strengths and weaknesses of each hitter vs. each pitcher. However, there was no accounting for fatigue or rest. If Seaver or Palmer was the best pitcher on his staff, statistically he remained the best pitcher all the time, even in the late innings when the real Seaver or Palmer would be tired and required to leave the game in favor of a reliever.

  Stan was very careful not to over pitch his guys. As a pitcher himself, he understood this concept well. He admired a manager like Sparky Anderson of the Reds, who was nicknamed Captain Hook because he liberally went to his bullpen and “played percentages” - right-handed pitchers vs. right-handed batters, and so forth.

  Stan played Strat-O-Matic in this manner, even though it did not factor in whether a right-hander faced a lefty or a righty. However, he loved Seaver so much that he overused him. This never hurt the card Seaver, as it would have the real flesh-and-blood person. In a 20-game regular season, he was able to usurp Jon Matlack and Jerry Koosman enough times to get seven starts, all of which he won. It also explained how Seaver and the Phillies’ Steve Carlton both pitched complete games in an incredible 13-inning, 1-0 victory by the Mets over Philly. Seaver struck out 17. The game was as thrilling to Stan as if he had watched it at Shea Stadium.

  Stan liked other sports, all right. He enjoyed college football and was gaga for the Trojans. He had a friend named Dave Bailiff, who lived nearby, albeit down the hill. Bailiff was no athlete, but smart as a whip. His parents were Cal-Berkeley liberals, both teachers, and they knew Stan’s family were rock-ribbed Republicans. They always treated Stan with suspicion, but the children were friends, so they overlooked this “fault.”

  Bailiff and Stan argued some over politics, but this issue did not divide the friendship. All Stan knew at that time was he was a Republican. He had not developed the intellectual artillery to deal with Bailiff if they got into the nitty-gritty.

  There were more important things to get into, like Bailiff’s college football game. His board game was not unlike Strat-O-Matic, but did not involve cards representing individual players. His game featured all-time great college teams, such as the 1945 Army Cadets, the 1956 Oklahoma Sooners, the 1966 Notre Dame Fighting Irish, the 1971 Nebraska Cornhuskers, and Stan’s fave, the 1972 Southern Cal Trojans.

  Stan and Dave played various combinations of the teams at Dave’s house over the course of several years. The biggest rivalry was Stan’s ’72 Trojans vs. Bailiff’s ’66 Fighting Irish.

  Bailiff had an argumentative side. He was a quiet kid who wore glasses, but he hailed from a family of skilled debaters. Bailiff got it from them. He was not Catholic and his parents probably viewed Notre Dame as being a bunch of imperialists, just like USC. But Stan had the Trojans, so by God Dave would be the Irish.

  Bailiff was a smart “coach” who knew his strategy. He played Stan real tough. Nobody really knows who won more and who lost more, but the ’66 Irish played the ’72 Trojans at least even up. This bothered the hell out of Stan. He required victory and undefeated seasons.

  In school, Stan was never popular. By junior high he would be downright unpopular, a fact that he blamed on his father. Dan was partially responsible for this predicament. Unpopularity in junior high school is a fate worse than death at that time in one’s life. Stan had relationships with other kids, but he could not trust anybody. Almost everybody who acted like his friend would turn on him like a two-time loser dropping a dime.

  One of these “relationships” was a kid named Frankie Yagman. Yagman was the son of a plumber. In those days, there were still working class families living on the peninsula. These families had lived in houses there for 20 or 30 years.

  Yagman was white trash, not because his old man was a plumber, but because he was an untrustworthy loser with no class. Yagman’s was ye-high to a grasshopper. He was badly infected with a terrible condition that every man over six feet tall knows all about, called “little man’s disease.” His father never stood more than 5-5, and he passed it on to his only son. In the full plume of adulthood, Frankie would never be more than 5-5, either. Frankie hated being short, and was at war with all tall people. Stan was the tallest kid in the class.

  Yagman had some abilities, but he was so badly infected by little man’s disease that he could not take any pride in those abilities. Yagman was not a bad-looking kid. He was not stupid. He was an excellent athlete. But he was a pain in the ass.

  Years later, he would see Stan around town, wearing a suit. Yagman had just gotten parole after being caught driving with a bunch of cocaine in the back seat of his car. It would be Dan Taylor who would represent him in court, getting his sentence suspended. Yagman, like the child molester and addict Mike Lodeen, never did pay Dan. Dan took cases like these, representing the last remnants of white trash to occupy the P.V. Peninsula, out of some strange sense of noblesse oblige.

  Frankie was good enough to make all-stars in baseball. Despite his size, he competed at a high level in every sport he participated in. He was tremendously aggressive, kind of a childhood Pete Rose, who was his favorite player. The fact that Rose was Yagman’s favorite and Seaver was Stan’s number one describes their differences in a nutshell.

  Frankie’s teams never beat Stan’s, which frustrated him to no end. Years later, in the darkness of his jail cell, Frankie admitted to himself that he did stupid things to get noticed, like getting arrested for drugs. He traced this back to an unfulfilled desire to beat Stan Taylor.

  Long before the coke arrest or any of that, Frankie would be one of the few classmates of Stan’s to trudge up the hill to his house after school. He did not want anything to do with that hike, but Stan did it every day, and challenged the little grommet to do it, too. It was irresistible to Frankie, simply because the challenge came from his rival.

  The two would play catch, shoot some hoops, and play still another board game, called Foto-Electric Football. This game was not as intricate as the college game that David Bailiff had. In Foto-Electric, there was no differentiation between pro and college. There were no teams (Raiders, Rams, Trojans) or individual players. What it came down to was that one player would guess what kind of play the offensive team would run, and place a card designed to defense that play, upside down (so as not to be seen by the offensive player), on the screen, or fiel
d, with emphasis either to the right side, left side, or up the middle.

  The offensive player would choose a play (wide-out, off-tackle, halfback option), and emphasize a side of the field. When both players had placed their cards on the screen, one would illuminate the field, and the action would play itself out like the X’s and O’s on a coach’s diagram board.

  Stan loved the running game. His beloved Trojans emphasized the run. Those were the days of “Tailback U.,” when SC had All-Americans and Heisman Trophy winners at the position every year. He also admired Woody Hayes, whose offensive philosophy was the famed “three yards and a cloud of dust” at Ohio State.

  There was something primal to the running game that appealed to Stan’s sense of order and military discipline. If Patton had been a football coach, he would have stayed on the ground. To run the ball with everybody knowing it ahead of time, and to still win, was to thoroughly dominate. That did not occur when the ball was put in the air.

  Yagman liked to pass. He tried trick plays, option reversals, anything. Stan played it close to the vest, staying on the ground. Yagman would be convinced that his rival would go to the air. It could be third-and-long. Surely Stan would pass. Nope. Stan would run it for the first down, to the increasing frustration of the little pipsqueak.

  Yagman never beat Stan Taylor. Many times he trudged up that hill, only to get his butt kicked in Foto-Electric Football. It wore on him, grated him. It had a lasting impression on him. To the extent that Yagman “went bad” at some point, the 42-7 thrashings he regularly had handed to him by Stan in Foto-Electric had a lot to do with it.

  Finally, Yagman thought he had Taylor’s tendencies figured out. He knew Stan would run and stopped him cold. He made smart plays on offense instead of going for long, wild gains that in the past had resulted in heartbreaking interceptions. He had Taylor beaten, 14-0, entering the fourth quarter, and he was in full Little Man Complex. He danced, he sang, he howled. He told Stan in no uncertain terms what he thought of his lanky ass, now that he had him beat.

  “Whaddaya think now, Stan-lee?” Yagman ragged his host. “Huh. Not so proud now, are ya? Fuck you, Taylor.”

  Stan Taylor was that rare kid who understood what discipline was all about. He lived up on that hill with no siblings and few neighbor friends. He had learned how to amuse himself. He had endeavored to engage in activities that required hard work and dedication. If one put effort into it, one saw the payoffs.

  Stan had seen the payoffs. He was the worst player in the Palos Verdes Midget League at age eight. He and his dad spent every chance they could practicing the game prior to the next season. At age nine, he was close to the best player in the league.

  Stan would not panic. He would not give in and change his strategy. Plus, he knew that Frankie Yagman was counting on that. Midway through the fourth quarter, Stan got the ball on his own 24, trailing by two touchdowns. There was no time to grind it out on the ground. He had to go to the air, and Yagman was ready.

  So, Yagman arranged his prevent defense to stop the pass. Still, Taylor kept running. Even on third-and-eight, his off-tackle would be good enough for eight, sending Yagman into red-faced apoplexy.

  Taylor drove the field on nine running plays to score a touchdown to make it 14-7. He held Yagman, got the ball back, and again defied the smaller kid with his all-ground attack, pushing up field for a field goal to make it 14-10. Yagman was sweating it out, but there was no time. Except that Stan forced a fumble. He drove for another first down, and now had one play left. He needed 21 yards. Yagman knew the tall boy would throw a pass. Surely, now he would pass. He put all his eggs in one basket, looking for that pass that never came.

  One can imagine the response Napoleon gave his marshals when, as day divided into night, he received word that the Prussians had returned, and that Wellington had won the day at Waterloo. That was what Yagman acted like when he saw the play develop on that green electric “field.” His safety was ready to meet the ball carrier at the two. Stan’s man moved past the ten, to the five, to the two, and at the last second, as if God was telling him “screw you, pal,” the ball carrier veered away from the safety for the score. 16-14, Taylor over Yagman.

  Frankie went crazy. He tore up things. He threw things, which of course pissed off Stan, because they were in his room. But Stan had triumphed. He had done it by keeping his cool and sticking to the plan. A life lesson learned.

  Yagman ran upstairs, crying like a baby, straight into Shirley’s arms.

  “I can’t beat him,” he bawled.

  “Oh, sure you can,” was all Shirley could think to say.

  “He’s better at me in everything,” continued Frankie. “I get a B+, he gets an A. I finished second, he finishes first. He’s taller than me and everybody hates me. It ‘s just not fair.”

  “Life’s not fair,” Shirley told the kid. It was not the best statement she could make. It just reinforced Frankie’s conviction that he was the little man and he would always be the little man. The world would be run by big men, like Stan Taylor, with his blonde hair, his blue eyes, with his powerful right arm that threw strikes, and with that mind of his that had beaten him in Foto-Electric Football.

  The bastard.

  Frankie was the first person to realize that Stan was a true survivor. Their “friendship” was based partly on the fact that both of them were outsiders, for various reasons. Both of them were unpopular in school. Both of them were egotistical pricks who paid for their personality flaws in the schoolyard jungle.

  Frankie loved it when the other kids would gang up on Stan. He would happily fan those flames whenever he had the chance. But he was always frustrated to see Stan come back. Just when it looked like the tall kid was down for the count, Taylor would find a way to survive. The child jackals could not beat him. Frankie saw this, and grudgingly admired his rival for this reason. He knew he did not possess this capacity of inner strength. Few did.

  Frankie was determined to get better grades than Stan, too. One semester, he was all A’s in English, while Stan floundered around F. Then, as the semester neared the end, Stan rebounded and made the obligatory comeback that was his trademark. Just like he had in Foto-Electric Football.

  The teacher had called in Stan’s mother. He was a handsome, gay Latino man named Mr. Alvarez. She was told that if the kid did not pull it together he might flunk. Stan had been in a terrible funk, unpopular with the other kids, harassed and depressed. Mr. Alvarez was very sympathetic towards his young student. He explained to Shirley that the other kids made life very miserable for her son.

  Instead of giving in to it, though, Stan decided to show everybody that the cream rises to the top. He did it through Excellence. When Shirley visited Mr. Alvarez towards the semester’s end, she asked if her son still was getting an F.

  “He’s getting an A,” he announced.

  This infuriated Frankie Yagman.

  One day, they were talking together about some project, and Stan used the word “miscellaneous.” Yagman just laughed as if he had heard the funniest thing in his life. He had no clue what the hell “miscellaneous” meant.

  Stan Taylor just looked at him as if was a Dumbellionite, which he was. Stan was prejudiced from early in life. He was biased against stupidity.

  Stan had another friend. He was a sensitive, dark-haired kid named Richard. Richard was of Italian descent, a good-looking boy who was immediately popular with the girls. He was the first person Stan Taylor ever knew who had a girl friend. This was probably around the fourth grade. Richard’s girlfriend was a tall, dark-haired girl named Maggie. Maggie, at least in Stan’s eyes, was a “dirty girl.” She was not especially pretty, but had a “knowing” quality to her. Stan imagined that she kissed Richard. She spoke in grown-up terms of “going steady” and “going with” Richard. All of this made Stan jealous. However, he and Richard were pals. In a weird way, Stan lived vicariously through Richard. Richard would tell him about Maggie, and in this regard Stan was getting great i
nside information.

  Stan often hung out at Richard’s house after school, and Richard would occasionally come up the hill to Stan’s. One weekend, Richard stayed for a sleepover. It was a hot Summer night. The two boys slept in the same room. They lay there and told revealing secrets to each other.

  Stan desperately wanted to have a girlfriend, but having a friend who had one was almost as good. When Richard started talking about Maggie, Stan felt a rush of exhilaration. It was as if he had a girlfriend, as if Richard was describing Maggie kissing him.

  They were pre-pubescent fourth graders, curious about sex. Stan knew that he liked girls. As he got older, his heterosexuality was reinforced at every twist and turn. At every possible test, he passed with flying colors. Deep in his heart and soul, where people know what they are, he knew what he was.

  One other friend was Al Erlanger, who lived up the street from him. There were never many kids his age that lived on the hill, but Al did. Al was a fair basketball player, and they would play one-on-one. Stan always won, which worked out perfectly. Al accepted the defeats graciously, so his place in Stan’s world was secure. Until, one day, he was beating Stan. As he was driving for the winning lay-up to the garage-hung basket, Stan body slammed him into the driveway pavement. Al did not make the shot. He realized how ugly Stan was. They shouted and called each other horrible names. Al stomped off. At first, Stan was smug with the satisfaction that he had not “lost” the game, since Al never officially scored the winning hoop.

  Later on, however, Stan realized he had screwed up. He had very few friends, and Al had been one of them. Now he was gone. Stan was ready to apologize to Al at school on Monday, but Al had joined up with a group of his tormentors.

  “Pussy, pussy, pussy boy,” he taunted.

  “You’re a pussy,” Stan returned to Al, lamely.

  “Pussy boy pussy pussy pussy pussy boy,” Al continued.

  Stan was enraged. He had lorded over Al. In the hierarchy of things, he had stood higher. Stan was the better athlete, but now Al had caught up with him, at least in one game of driveway hunch. Now he was turning things around.

  Throughout the rest of junior high school, Stan felt the tingle of green envy when Al actually had a girlfriend. Nothing could be better revenge than to have a girlfriend, while Stan had nobody.

  Al and Stan would go to different high schools. Al played freshman and junior varsity basketball, and the local paper covered the games with small blurbs. Stan would die when he read about Al scoring 12 points to lead his team to victory. Worse, Dan, who knew Al, would always comment on Al’s latest hoops triumph. Stan just wanted to remain silent, as if by saying nothing it did not happen.

  Dan would exacerbate the situation by remarking, “If it’s not you, you just don’t care. You don’t want anybody else to have success. You’re the most selfish kid I’ve ever seen.”

  “He’s right,’ Shirley would just pile it on. “You’re self-centered. It’s sickening.”

  Of course, they were right. Stan would die a little bit at a time. As the years passed, whenever Dan would bring up the accomplishments of a kid they knew from little league, Stan would pretend he did not remember.

  “Bullshit,” Dan would remark.

  Stan had as close a relationship with his father as any kid ever had. It was too close. They were too intertwined with each other. They loved each other totally, but it was with an unhealthy intensity. Stan idolized the old man. He wanted his approval. He wanted to be like him. He lived his life to shine in Dan’s world. When he failed, his world would crumble around him.

  Dan was all about his son. He talked about Stan constantly with friends, acquaintances, clients, barroom pals. At the Elk’s Club, Stan would introduce his red-faced son as “the young man who struck out 16 of 18 Pirates on Sunday afternoon.” In little league, there was very little to disappoint the father. Stan was one of the best players ever to come out of the Palos Verdes Little League, almost a legend, a guy who they talked about for years after he had left.

  By the time Stan established himself as a little league icon, Dan’s own personal ambitions had gone down the tubes. His political ambitions had been dashed. He had imagined that he would ride his success as an athlete to greater glory. He felt that being a baseball and football star who had gone on to become a lawyer and an associate of Nixon, was the first step. But he had not taken it all the way.

  Somewhere along the line, he found that the train left the station without him. His brother had become a rich and famous Republican, but he had never lifted his finger to help his younger brother. The two never even spoke any more. There was a rift in the family. Dan had become the “black sheep,” his alcoholism and foul mouth making him appear to be a buffoon that nobody wanted to be around.

  Dan just isolated himself. He tried to take comfort in the fact that Watergate had occurred and he had not been one of the “unindicted co-conspirators.” Still, he saw some of those “USC Mafia” that Donald Segretti talked about and almost wished he had been one of them, if only for the sake of the fame and notoriety that he had once coveted.

  When Stan came along and started hitting home runs and pitching no-hitters, Dan lost most of his self-identity. He no longer washed his car, and did not fix the various dents that accumulated on it. He just kept driving an old clunker Impala that was an embarrassment. Dan developed an “us vs. them” philosophy and passed it on to his family. Everybody else was an “asshole,” a “cocksucker,” a “shanty Irish bastard,” “a Kuyke Jew,” or a “black asshole.” In his view, this new Affirmative Action world was now against him, and by dint of that, against his son, his family, and his kind.

  At school, Stan was taught about the civil rights movement. One day Stan came home and made a remark to his dad that Martin Luther was a “great man.” Dan was caught somewhere between amusement and annoyance.

  “I’m not so sure about that,” he told Stan.

  There seemed to be strong evidence that Dan was a racist, but it was not that easy. The old man was a complex character, and making the judgment that he was racist was not, pardon the pun, a black and white issue. Like most things in life, his opinions regarding race were colored with gray areas.

  Somewhere along the line, he had reached the conclusion that there was too much reverse racism. Too many guilty white liberals. Too many militant blacks. Too many foreigners. Too many ungrateful, unpatriotic Americans.

  Dan was a man who loved his country, right or wrong. He had grown up in the 1940s and ‘50s, when America could do no wrong. He felt unequivocally that the United States had saved the world from Nazism, from Japanese Imperialism, and was now the thin red line between freedom and Communism. He had supported the Vietnam War, and viewed the hippy protesters as traitors.

  He thought Nixon was a great a President, and blamed the liberal media for bringing him down. He was furious that Bob Woodward, Carl Bernstein and the Washington Post had devoted all their energies to exposing Watergate.

  “Where were they,” he wanted to know, “when Joe Kennedy, Jim Daley and the Democrats were stealing votes in Illinois and Texas? Stealing the 1960 election from Nixon for that fair-haired boy Kennedy? That’s the worst political crime ever committed in this country.”

  The Kennedy’s were the target of his greatest vitriol. He viewed John and Robert Kennedy as martyrs whose deaths covered up their numerous flaws. He pointed out that while JFK might have done a good job during the Cuban Missile Crisis, Nikita Khrushchev never would have put missiles on the island had Nixon been President.

  With John and Bobby gone, he directed his hate towards Teddy Kennedy. Dan was infuriated by the fact that Teddy got off “Scot free” after killing a girl at Chappaquidick. He was a “shanty Irish bastard.” Where Dan got his strong anti-Irish, anti-Catholic sentiments is unclear. Maybe it was because he admired Winston Churchill and the pluck of the British in surviving the Blitzkrieg. He was pro-Monarchy, and had nothing but contempt for the IRA. It had nothing to do wit
h his religious views. He had none. By the 1970s, Dan was an admitted “agnostic at best, if not an outright atheist.” He despised Notre Dame, which was understandable only because, as a USC man, the Irish were his team’s rivals. However, most Trojan and Notre Dame fans have mutual respect for each other. The rhetoric that surrounds their annual bloodletting never takes on religious overtones.

  Growing up in the West, Dan was supposed to be free of the ancient ethnic rivalries that dominated the boroughs and wards of the American East Coast, or the racial baggage that had emerged from the Reconstructionist South. Where did he go “wrong?”

  The conundrum of Dan Taylor’s racial views was as confusing as the strange, loving, hateful way he acted towards his only son, or the way he came to treat his wife with equal parts contempt and idolatry.

  Dan did not like himself. Why not? He probably had, at one time. He had been a golden boy. He was destined to be a mover and shaker, but his ship never came in. His personal failures coincided with a period of great upheaval in American history, the 1960s. This created a convenient excuse for him. He could blame the disparate elements of the Radical Left for making it politically inconvenient for a man of his traditional moorings to rise above silent membership in the Silent Majority.

  Except, he was not so silent. He found little but contempt for many blacks and minorities. This was odd, because he had never been prejudiced. He was not raised to be prejudiced. His parents, his grandfather, his brother; his family was completely lacking in prejudice, especially considering their times. Dan was just like they were.

  He took great pride in the fair way he felt about minorities. He was a huge fan of Jackie Robinson breaking the color barrier. In his playing days, he had black and Latino teammates. He had gone out of his way to befriend them, sometimes to the detriment of his relationships with the Southerners, and guys from rural areas. He viewed himself as a fair-haired Californian, above the evils of bigotry.

  On a number of occasions, he had invited minority teammates to his home in the off-season, never thinking twice about it. His family always welcomed them with open arms. He would show them around L.A., taking them drinking, chasing women together like he was Frank Sinatra hanging with Sammy Davis, Jr. and his gang was a version of the Rat Pack. He was never offended when one of his black pals hooked up with a white chick, sometimes even a girl he had eyes for.

  He was a smart guy, inquisitive of other cultures, anything but close-minded. Stan had met a number of blacks and Latinos who had known his dad, played with him, gained his trust and friendship. They raved about his father.

  The changes were incremental. One such change occurred at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum. Dan took Stan to see the U.S.-Soviet Union track meet. A distinguished black man was in attendance, and Dan pulled his son in front of the man.

  “Stan,” Dan said, in front of the bemused black gentleman, “I want you to meet one of the greatest athletes of all time. This is Jesse Owens.”

  “Jesse Owens!” exclaimed young Stan. “Wow.”

  “Jesse Owens” just looked at Stan and Dan with a wry look on his face.

  “I’m not Jesse Owens,” he said. “I’m Mack Robinson.”

  Stan look confused. Dan turned red with embarrassment.

  “I’m so sorry,” he stammered. “I thought you were Jesse Owens. You look just like him. You look like an athlete, which of course you are. I played football against Muir, after you left of course. I’m Dan Taylor. I played at USC. This is my young son, Stan. He plays in the Palos Verdes Little League, quite a pitcher. Uh, yes, at any rate, I’m sorry. Take care.”

  Mack Robinson just looked at Dan as if he was a Dumbellionite. Dan had spoken to him obsequiously, and felt like every word he said was digging him farther into a hole. Stan was confused by the whole situation. He also knew who Mack Robinson was. The whole thing was odd.

  Mack was Jackie Robinson’s brother, and for that reason alone he carried a certain animus towards white folks. He had been a tremendous athlete in his own right, growing up with Jackie in Pasadena, where they starred at Muir High School and Pasadena City College. Over the years, he had dealt with the stigma of being Jackie’s brother. It was a stigma because, if one loved Robinson, well, Mack was simply not Jackie. If one hated Jackie, then Mack was sure to get a dose of that hate. Either way, the fame and success of his brother had escaped him.

  Now, this white buffoon was confusing him with Jesse Owens. Typical white man, they think all blacks look the same.

  In his entire life, Dan had never felt like a black had viewed him as anything other than a friend and ally, until now. He was angered at the way Mack Robinson had acted towards him, as if he was stupid or something, and in front of his son at that. He did not like that “chip on his shoulder” attitude.

  Dan was seeing it more and more now. Blacks in the streets who eyed him suspiciously. Sullen looks. Militants. Black Panthers. The Symbionese Liberation Army. More and more, Dan would watch the news, read the papers, listen to the commentators, the pundits who bayed and barked and complained. Increasingly, he was made to feel like he, personally, was being accused of racism. Dan, like many white people who were not prejudiced, took particular exception to the notion that he was.

  No longer on the fast track at the law firm, he found himself assigned to some low rent housing discrimination cases in which he had to go to the Federal projects on several occasions. He would enter the squalid buildings, where human urine, feces and garbage could be found in the fetid, stench-infested staircases. He had no respect for these people, who had no respect for themselves. He found it more and more difficult to make excuses for them, and was ineffective as an attorney arguing their victim hood.

  Hanging around at the downtown Joe’s, he had seen the neighborhood go from bad to worse, and he viewed blacks as the cause of this decline. He saw them hanging around the street corners, pimping their women, selling their drugs, committing their crimes, and eschewing the notion of work. He had little respect for any blacks, even successful ones. In his view, successful ones were an exception.

  In the 1970s, the downtown area became home to a number of Vietnamese boat people. Dan observed, over a period of years, how these people had come to America with nothing. The new immigrants were on the low end of the totem pole on the streets. Then he started to see liquor stores and restaurants owned by these people. He would see them driving nice cars and enjoying success. Over time, he got to know some of the shop owners and small businessmen. He became acquainted with their children, and periodically would inquire where one of them was.

  “She’s at UCLA now,” would be a typical proud answer. Then Dan would leave the store, besieged by the same black faces begging for money. Pimps and whores. Drug peddlers. It did not have a positive effect on his assessment of the black race.

  The kicker occurred on a trip to Washington, D.C. Dan had business at the downtown courthouse, and afterwards went to dinner at Blackie’s, a famous restaurant and watering hole where the politicians would meet to hammer out deals or make liaison with women, not necessarily their wives.

  After dinner, Dan went to his rental car, opened it, and had just slid into the driver’s seat when a black criminal opened the unlocked passenger side door. He entered, and stuck a shiv, which is what they called knives in prison, into the side of Dan’s neck. There, shouting distance from a restaurant where Congressmen at that moment were eating dinner, and just a few blocks from the White House, the black criminal robbed Dan of his gold watch and the money in his wallet.

  “Move an’ I’ll kill yo honkey ass,” the criminal told him. “Hear me, yo white muvafucka? Gimme dat fuckin’ watch.”

  Dan very carefully took the watch off his wrist. He thought about his blonde-haired son and his lovely wife. He acted with deliberate caution, all the while feeling the knife pressing against his carotid vein. He sensed that the robber was not there to kill, but that he would kill if he must. Dan knew he was vulnerable to circumstances. He was care
ful not to look at the man, because he felt like the robber would murder him if he thought he was being eyeballed too closely for positive identification.

  The robber demanded his wallet. Dan removed it carefully from his coat pocket, took out his cash, and handed it over. In a flash, the man was gone, running like the wind into the night.

  Dan sat there, shaking. It was a life-changing experience. He filed a police report. The cops were sympathetic, but not helpful. They were all white and expressed nothing but contempt for the blacks that had “taken over” the streets of the nation’s capitol. Dan knew that these police dealt with black crime every day, and were hardened well beyond the point of excusing blacks of their criminal behavior. The police saw too much to give much credence to the social causes of the black underclass.

  Dan Taylor had sympathized with the plight of blacks. He had watched the black-and-white televised images of their violent confrontations with rednecks on the bridge in Birmingham and the courthouse in Montgomery. His heart went out to the memory of slaves. He had what he thought was a good understanding of the disadvantages of being black in America. He desperately wanted very much to be part of the solution for black America, not the problem.

  This event was not on television, however. There were no reporters, no camera crews. Just him, all by himself. Dealing with reality. At first, he was in too much shock to make much sense of it, or put a social spin on things. The next night, however, after cash advancing his credit card at the bank for emergency money, Dan was invited by some business associates to a baseball game between Baltimore and Washington at Robert F. Kennedy Stadium in D.C.

  The crowd was sparse and lacked the excitement of a Redskins football game. The team would soon depart for Arlington, Texas due to lack of fan support. When the game ended, the men made their way to the car in the parking lot. A palpable sense of danger set in. Roving bands of black youths were moving through the parking lot and adjacent streets. Various cries, shouts and menacing threats could be heard. The men said nothing, but moved with deliberation to the car. They eyed the vehicle for vandalism, quickly opened the doors, and departed. They passed several of the groups of roving blacks, in the parking lots and on the streets. The blacks checked the car out, as if looking for vulnerability, potential value and making a risk assessment. They were predators.

  The three men in the car, all white men in suits, shifted in quiet nervousness. Not a word was spoken. The man driving the car, a corporate lawyer from Fairfax, Virginia, was sweating bullets. He was charged with properly finding the correct exit to the freeway - and safety. The tension in the car was unmistakable. If he failed to find the freeway exit, if the car were to take a wrong turn and they found themselves lost in the neighborhoods, they would find themselves in a modern day “Heart of Darkness”. All the rules of civilized society, their accomplishments, education, all the barriers they had put up to insulate their families from danger, would be of no value to them should they be stranded in such a place.

  The freeway was found, and soon the car was picking up speed on the Washington Beltway. The silence was finally broken when the other lawyer in the car remarked, to no one in particular, “I can see why the Senators don’t draw well.”

  It was then and there that Dan Taylor’s attitude towards blacks, and all things that represented this changing world - all things that did not side with his conservative view of the America he had grown up with - hardened in his heart.

  In the succeeding years, after never having done so in his entire life, Dan found himself using words like “nigger.” He was a smart guy, a lawyer for Christ’s sake, given to examination. He sometimes found it necessary to justify his newfound attitude, as if he had discovered certain facts after a long study.

  “I hate to admit it,” he would say, “but I’ve become prejudiced. I just feel differently now about blacks.”

  Dan had become, ironically, what he hated being accused of. Prejudice and bigotry are said to be products of ignorance. Dan was not ignorant. He had arrived at his conclusions and attitudes after years of experience. The question is whether his analysis was faulty.

  He was also an alcoholic in charge of a highly dysfunctional, volatile family. Still, Stan Taylor could never say his old man was not there for him, all the way. Maybe too much, but he was always there. Never, not one single solitary time in his memory, did Stan ever recall his father not having time for him. Stan loved baseball. It was healthy and beautiful, and even at the early age of 11 he sensed that his life was not beautiful, that a cancer was gnawing away from the inside.

  But the green little league fields were a place where things could favor him, where the game was still pure. Stan dedicated himself to it. He practiced it. He lived up on a hill, and by the time he was a kid, baseball had ceased to become the sandlot game of myth, when kids would gather like ritual clockwork on an empty lot to play. By his time, kids were riding bikes and getting in trouble. Baseball was either organized or not very available. He had gone to the fields when he was a little kid and found pick-up games, but that sweet memory cruelly eluded him when he would venture to the field with his spikes and glove, waiting around in vain for a game to develop.

  So, the kid asked his dad to practice with him. He asked him after school. He asked him on weekends. He asked him during the season and during the off-season. He called the old man at work and asked him to come home early to practice.

  Maybe there was a time when Dan told the kid he had other plans. Maybe, but Stan never remembered that ever happening. The old man was there every single time. Dan was a flawed man and an imperfect parent, but there is no way of downplaying the goodness of such a man who would devote so much of himself to his son. In a world of deadbeat dads, of fathers who ignore or abuse their kids, the love and care that Dan Taylor showed his only boy is immeasurable. Events, time and personality conflicts would create a split between father and son, but the times they had together on the dusty P.V. fields are the tie that binds. The arguments, the yelling, the blaming…powerful elements pulled them apart, but baseball and its memories always would have the power to bridge their differences.

  Dan did not just practice with Stan and coach his teams. He took his boy to games, too. Adams, Duque & Hazeltine had a season box at Dodger Stadium. Dan became the caretaker of the seats. It became something of a joke at the firm, that while he had not made partner and probably never would, Dan had the Dodger season tickets, and he made full use of them.

  Occasionally, Shirley would come along. Sometimes one of Stan’s teammates would accompany them. But most of the time it was Dan and Stan. When father and son went to games, all was right with the world. The petty confrontations, the problems and differences were part of something else. The experience of the outing was their special world, not to be infiltrated by other things. It was, and would always remain, sacred.

  Throughout the years that Stan played little league, Babe Ruth League, and high school baseball, he and his dad attended about 40 Dodger games a year. They had a special route to the stadium, parked in the same space near the exit so as to make a quick getaway, and almost always arrived early to watch batting practice.

  It was a major effort for Dan, and played no small role in his “failure” to move further up the ladder in the legal profession. He simply had made the choice to trade his hours in favor of his son. This meant that if the Dodgers were playing at 7:00 p.m. during the week, Dan would leave the office by three in order to get to Palos Verdes Estates by four. He would quickly change, and be back on the road with Dan. They would not eat dinner. They would battle the L.A. traffic back to the downtown area, where Dodger Stadium is, trying to get there by five or 5:30 for batting practice.

  Dan would drink beers, and they would indulge in some peanuts, but the two of them would starve themselves throughout the game. Dodger fans are notorious for leaving early. Dan and Stan never, ever left early. Not if the score was 12-1. Not if it was a school night. Not if the game went extra innings. Basebal
l was religion, and leaving early was sacrilegious.

  The entire ritual was never complete until they stopped at Joe’s, the one near where they lived, for a late-night dinner on the way home. They would be so hungry by that point that the food was more than just food. It was sustenance, pure Heavenly sustenance. Dan would drink red wine. Stan had milk. The waiters all knew where they had come from, and they would give a rundown on the game’s activities. If it was a Friday or Saturday night game, or during the Summer, Stan knew he had the luxury of sleeping in the next day, and he cherished every second of the experience.

  The Dodgers were their team, but they also ventured to Anaheim Stadium for about 10 games a year. They always made sure to see the A’s when they came in to play the California Angels. They rarely missed any USC football games. They went to the occasional USC basketball game, and even ventured into enemy territory every so often to watch UCLA play at Pauley Pavilion, or a Bruin football game at the Coliseum. Dan also took Stan to see USC’s baseball team play at Dedeaux Field several times a year. They were sports fans. They went to every kind of sporting event whenever they could. They almost never argued or had reason to disagree on these occasions.

  Dan also loved fishing. His father and brother never touched a fishing pole in their lives. They were elitists, but Dan had a natural love for the outdoors. The Taylor’s owned a cabin on Lake Tahoe, and Dan took his family up there every year. He liked to gamble at the nearby Nevada casinos, where he received free drinks from waitresses, who looked like thinly disguised hookers. Dan would lose his money and flirt with the girls with the push-ups bras and too much make-up.

  He also fished the lakes and streams surrounding Tahoe. Mainly, he settled on spots on the Truckee River, or other areas north of the lake. He fly fished the Truckee and the West Walker Rivers, or just used regular rods on the streams and high mountain lakes. Sometimes he fished reservoirs. He bought a boat and fished Tahoe, but did not cotton to that. He preferred to stand, to feel for every pulse of the rod, ready to snap it back and hook a trout.

  Dan was meticulous about fishing. He spent hours getting ready, selecting the rods, tying the flies, placing his equipment in his vehicle, just so. Once at the location, it was all very serious business. Dan did not want anybody swimming where he was fishing. That disturbed the fish. He would yell at the family dog when splashing in the water.

  Fishing in the Taylor family was a ritual of joy and pain. It brought them all together. At night, they would listen to Scully broadcast the Dodger game on the radio, huddled around it as if they were listening to one of FDR’s “fireside chats.” It had its downside, too.

  Once, they went camping. In the middle of the night, it started to rain. Sleeping in the tent, Stan woke up, and said he had to urinate. Dan did, too, but it was wet and muddy outdoors, so he found a nearby pot.

  “I’ll go first,” he announced.

  Dan held the pot in the darkness, and urinated into it. When finished, he dumped it outside. Then he held it out for Stan. Stan tried to figure out his position. He got himself ready. Then he let it fly. No sooner had the urine started to flow, than he knew he had missed the mark. Instead of the sound of urine hitting the pot, he heard it hitting his father’s hand and pajama sleeve, splashing back at him and in the sleeping bags. Once he had started, however, Stan was unable to stop the flow. It was a regular free-for-all.

  “GODDAM IT ALL TO LOUSY ROTTEN HELL YOU GODDAM SON OF A BITCH COCKSUCKING SON OF A BITCH BASTARD PRICK ASSHOLE MOTHERFUCKING GODDAM IT.”

  Stan heard the foul words, all applied to him by his dad. He was at once appalled and amused. He was frightened, yet could not help laughing at his father. This made Dan even more enraged.

  “GODDAMN IT ALL TO HELL YOU FUCKING LITTLE PISSANT GODDAM IT ALL TO LOUSY ROTTEN YOU NO GOOD LITTLE ASSHOLE.”

  There was nothing left to do but go back to sleep. Shirley told Dan to stop swearing, but of course she excoriated Stan for urinating on his father’s arm, which somehow made Stan smile. Why he found it funny, he was unable to understand. He just did.

  The next day, there was no talk of the incident. The Taylor’s had a remarkable quality, really a tremendous survival mechanism. They could yell, scream and swear at each other, and the next day, even the next hour or minute, act as if it had never happened.

  On another occasion, the Dodgers were playing a day game while the Taylor’s were vacationing at Tahoe. At night, they could pick up the broadcasts pretty easily, but during the day the best reception was in the car. Dan went to the car to listen to the game. Stan strolled up there, too.

  They sat for a while listening to the game. Then Stan had to pass gas. He knew that to do so around the old man was a deadly sin. Dan saw no humor in flatulence. So, Stan casually got up as if to stretch. He walked around the car and let a serious gas bomb fly. No sooner had he done that than he could hear Scully say, through the static, “Garvey swings. He connects. This has a chance.”

  Stan hurried back into the car.

  “…and its outta here. My what a clout for Garvey, and that puts the Dodgers back in the…”

  At that moment, he smelled the fart. He had not stayed outside long enough, and it had maintained its presence in his pants when he re-entered the car. Stan knew he was in trouble, for once he smelled it, Dan would get his whiff in one, two, three seconds…

  “GODDAM ALL TO LOUSY HELL GODDAMN KID WITH YOUR GODDAMN SMELLY ASS GODDAMN SON OF A BITCH!”

  The words stung hard. It is a terrible thing for a child to hear such words from a parent. Stan just opened the door and left the car. He could hear his father continuing to swear in the car, mixed with the static-filled sound of Scully exulting the Dodgers taking the lead. Stung, Stan meandered back to the cabin. Despite the pain, a small smile worked the side of his mouth. His father was a source of humor. Dangerous humor, but humor nevertheless. Being able to laugh at his old man was his way of coping.

  When he got to the cabin, Shirley asked how the game was going.

  “There was quite an explosion when Garvey homered,” he said, enjoying his own metaphor.

  Shirley was not inclined to like fishing particularly, but her husband did, and so she learned to like it. She enjoyed the serenity of the high mountains, the clean air and natural surroundings. She eventually became adept at tying flies and baiting her own hook.

  Stan was never into fishing in a major way, but he did find joy in it. He wanted to be close to his father. He wanted that bond. He needed it like air. Stan was not popular at school, and not a whiz with the chicks. He was a loner. He was very traditional. His mother had told him the Beatles were evil, and he had believed her. He was a throwback, not a child of the modern era, the bell-bottom ‘70s, the post-hippy modernists. He was a child who felt comfortable living 50 years before his time, and he never liked his peers. He felt above them, as if he knew things they did not know, and he could not explain it to them because they were too stupid to understand. But the old man knew. He was on to the same things. They were cut from the same cloth.

  When Stan went fishing with him, he let Dan do most of the work. Stan carried stuff, but the technical details, tying the flies, adjusting the rods, selecting the rods, that kind of thing, he left up to the old man. This was Dan’s territory. Dan was anal retentive about it. Nobody else could do these tasks like he could, so he would tend to them, damn it.

  Stan was okay as a fisherman, but he tended to get hooked up too much. His line was always getting snagged on debris. Usually, Dan would put down what he was doing and untangle his son. Stan was never much good at untangling his lines. If the old man did not do it, he would lose everything - hook, line and sinker.

  Periodically, Stan would snag consecutive casts, and he chose not to have Dan bail him out after the first time. He would quietly disengage the tackle, and go for a walk. The kid loved to amuse himself, and these long walks around the lake, the streams, through the woods, were imaginary jaunts of fancy for him. He could keep himself
going merely by thinking of things. Stan was a creative genius.

  He imagined a million and one things. He imagined himself humping beautiful, exotic girls. He would play the whole scenario over in his mind. In these “dreams,”

  Stan always said the right thing. At first, the girls would ignore him. There would be antagonism, but Stan would “break them down” with charm, talking them into bed and passionate sex.

  Sex was not the only thing on this boy’s mind. He imagined himself pitching winning baseball, or leading victorious charges in combat. Most of the time, the object of his fantasy was his own glorification. He would walk along the shore, skipping stones across the water. He had that good arm, and could side wind a stone that would skip 12 times across the lake, dancing like crazy on the top of the shimmering water.

  Periodically, however, the old man would get cantankerous. The usual bone of contention came when Stan would get caught up in a “nest egg” with his line one too many times. Sometimes Stan and Shirley would have all kinds of troubles with their lines, and Dan would spend all his time untangling lines, instead of enjoying a peaceful afternoon of fishing on his.

  This would lead to “the scowl.” Dan’s face would tighten, and there would be just the bare hint of his teeth exposed, like a snarling wolf. His cheekbones would raise, his brow would furrow. He would be pissed, and when Stan or Shirley saw him look like this, they knew the smart thing was to avoid him at all costs.

  “Goddamn it all to lousy hell,” was one of the milder things to come out of the man’s mouth, followed more often than not by some other foul phraseology. There was no compromise to him, no sense that you could rationalize with him, or reason things out.

  One day, after snagging too many lines in a solo fishing excursion resulting in $40 worth of lost tackle and no fish, Stan and Dan were walking back to the car in silence. Stan knew the old man was bitter, so he just stayed quiet. They walked along wordlessly, when Dan just looked at his only son and said, “Close your Goddamn mouth. Do you have to have that fucking mouth of yours open all the Goddamn time?”

  Stan’s mouth was slightly open, the way human beings’ mouths are slightly open during times they are alive, breathing and not dead. He could do nothing except shut his lips tight.

  “What’s the matter with you?” his father said, venom in his voice. “Are you stupid?”

  However, Stan had a way of saying the word stupid. It came out stue-piid. The first syllable sounded like stew, as in fish stew, but there was emphasis on the u, as in stue. The second syllable was emphasized more than the first, as if the stue just led into pidd. The whole word, stupid, when spoken in this way by a man to a child, gave such condescension to the word as to quadruple its effect. To say it the way Dan said it was to use a verbal sneer, and it did not come out the way the word stupid can come out, which is sometimes a putdown but almost a friendly one. The intent was to belittle, to make the recipient of the word feel one and one half feet tall.

  Young Stan Taylor was11 years old the first time he heard it applied to him by the man he idolized. He would never, ever forget what it sounded like on the shores of that infernal man-made reservoir where the fish did not bite and every no-good, lousy-rotten branch and piece of driftwood had found its way across the path of his line.

  Man and boy kept walking in silence. Then the next zinger came out of father’s mouth. Father had a beer in his hand. He had been drinking Budweiser’s all day. He was buzzed, if not drunk. But he was on a tear and his son was the target. Dan could get like this. He was like a great fighter pilot who got his target in the cross hairs and will not let go until the enemy is throttled. The boy next to him had to be belittled beyond recognition.

  “Stupidkid,” Dan would say, half to himself, half for Stan’s consumption.

  Now, this was pronounced in an entirely different manner. This was a one-syllable way of pronouncing a three-syllable two-word word. There was no break between stu and pid, and no break between the word stupid and kid. The result was to personalize the term stupidkid in such a way as to place it on Stan firmly and totally. Stan was the stupidkid. Nobody else. You. Yeah, you. No, no, no, not that other kid. Yeah, you. You’re the stupidkid. You are.

  Stupidkid.

  The result was that Stan Taylor was convinced he was a dumb stupidkid. This was not an easy thing to do to a boy who felt superior to his classmates in school (when he did not feel inferior). He was a kid who some times felt he was ahead of his teachers. He was the best athlete in school and he knew he was handsome. For a man to get a kid like this to agree with the assessment that he was stupid was no mean feat, but Dan Taylor knew how to push his son’s buttons. He could make the kid feel stupid.

  Studpidkid.

  Dan felt the compulsion to make the one person he loved more than anybody on the face of the Earth feel small. This is not an Omniscient work, so nobody will ever really know what motivated the man to cut like a knife. What is known is that the effect of the words resulted in a lonely, only child; a child who otherwise would have been full of hope and promise, confident and happy, who instead was made to feel like he could not do anything right. He could not win for losing. None of his good deeds went unpunished.