And what about my stepfather? His mysterious presence shadows -- in many ways frames -- my Bulls years. I'll call him Gene, although it would probably do no harm to use his real name. Gene ran off with Rita in 1985, during my second season with the Bulls. Actually, true to his heavy, clouded conscience, he did not do us the favor of vanishing swiftly: first he moved into a boarding house just a few blocks from us while he did some weeks of dilatory couples counseling with my mother. He also persisted obsequiously in begging my attention if not my pardon. I finally told him I didn't want to see him for a while, and soon he moved in with Rita across town. He sent me a few letters that I didn't answer, I maintained the estrangement, and eventually the letters stopped coming.
I'd like to say that was the end of it, but that's the kind of orderly narrative closure I no longer even attempt to seek. To cite a recent example, I've seen my Dutch friend Lijsa twice since our heady travels in Cambodia. Both visits were fun and light, neither one radically changed my life, and I'm starting to consider her one of my better friends. Closer to home, Gene's daughter from his first marriage is one of my sister's deepest soul mates -- she gave an extraordinary speech at the wedding that nearly annihilated my composure. Earlier that morning, Gene called my mother from Minnesota, as he inexplicably and very rarely does, consumed with worry about something completely unrelated to the wedding. My mother, summoning her innate Taurean motherhood, calmed him down over the phone, and then returned her attention to the her daughter's impending marriage. I can't say we've forgiven Gene -- we never will, at least I won't, not even close -- but somehow we've added a distant wing onto the mansion of our collective life in order to house that depleted man, rather like a former assassin turned invalid.
I've seen Gene twice since 1985. Once was when I was seventeen. I invited him to a Bulls game, and the reunion was noteworthy only for its tedium. Not long after that he jilted Rita. No one was surprised -- except Rita, of course -- although his method was uncommon: he called her from St. Paul, Minnesota, where he was visiting his parents, to announce that he would not be returning to Durham -- Home Again for Gene. He loved and left two more women in St. Paul, and now lives 150 miles north in Duluth. I wonder if he ever saw the Duluth-Superior Dukes play baseball when Dirty Al Gallagher was their manager.
Gene's slow but steady progress northward makes me think of him as some kind of Iceman who, as he ages, keeps moving farther and farther from the sun, as though its warm rays will ruin his arctic constitution after prolonged exposure. I imagine him someday, very old and frozen in the Yukon or Alaska, having long outlived his natural time on this earth; perhaps he will even survive all of us, eternally protected by a carapace of hoarfrost. Icicles hang from his nose as he chops wood in the snow. He limps, speaks to no one, sees no one.
