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"Playground" Excerpt

"Playground" excerpt

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247 views3 pages

"Playground" Excerpt

"Playground" excerpt

Uploaded by

Here & Now
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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p l a y g r o u n d 9

I’M SUFFER ING FROM W HAT we computer folks call latency.


Retreating into the past, like my mother did in her last years. This
curse doesn’t always run in families, but sometimes it does. Who
knows? Maybe my mother had it, too. Maybe the undiagnosed
disease lay behind the accident that killed her.
As more recent months and years grow fuzzy, the bedrock
events of my childhood solidify. Closing my eyes, I can see my
first bedroom high up in the crow’s nest of our Evanston Castle
in more detail than memory should permit: the student desk clut-
tered with plastic sharks and rays. The shelf of deep-­sea books.
The globe of a fishbowl filled with guppies and swordtails. The
closet piled high with masks and snorkels and dried sea fans and
chunks of coral and fish fossils from the Devonian Period, bought
at the Shedd Aquarium gift shop.
On the wall above my bed hung a framed article from the Trib
dated January 1, 1970: “First in Line for the New Decade.” I must
have read that thing a thousand times, growing up. The black-­
and-­white picture showed me, newborn Todd Keane, delivered in
Saint Francis Hospital, Evanston, in the barest fraction of a sec-
ond after midnight, staring at the camera with infant bafflement,
trying to focus on the great mystery looming up in front of me.
Mr. First in Line: My parents called me that for years. It put
some pressure on me when I was small. An only child, I took the
title and the birthright seriously. I bent under the obligation to
become the first person to reach the Future.
And here I am, successful at last.

MY MOT HER DIDN’ T WA N T to wreck her perfect body with child-


birth, but my father needed someone he could play chess with at
home, any time of day or night. I don’t know how they settled the
matter. Maybe rock, paper, scissors. Feats of skill. Moot court or
Oxford-­style debate. Maybe I was born by a roll of the dice.

Playground_txt_final.indd 9 5/22/24 12:42 PM


10 R i c h a r d P ow e r s

One continuous war game between the two of them dominated


my entire childhood. Their tournament was driven as much by
lust as by hatred, and each of them took their different superpow-
ers into the fray. My father: the strength of mania. My mother: the
cunning of the downtrodden. I was a precocious four-­year-­old
when I realized that my parents were locked in a contest to inflict
as much harm on each other as possible without crossing over the
line into fatality—­just enough pure pain to trigger the excitement
that only rage could bring. It was a kind of reciprocal autoerotic
strangulation of the soul, and both parties were generous givers
and grateful recipients.
My father was a quick man, so quick that he found much of
the rest of the world tedious. He worked in the pit at the Chicago
Board of Trade, in the age before electronic trading. A warrior of
the open-­outcry system, he stood in the heart of the octagon as the
furious waves of capitalism crashed all around him. Casting a cold
eye on others’ fears and turning them to a profit, his brain knew
no difference between thrill and stress. Keeping his head while
others swelled and broke, making and losing insane amounts of
money all with little twists of the palm and flicks of the finger
(backed up by delirious screaming), had long ago flooded his cor-
tex with so many surging neurotransmitters that he could no lon-
ger function without constant low-­level threats to his well-­being.
These my homemaker mother dutifully supplied.
Other doses took the form of a souped-­up 450SL convertible,
a Cessna Skyhawk that he kept at Midway and liked to take out in
rough weather, and a mistress who carried an unregistered Smith &
Wesson Model 61 in her Louis Vuitton leather shoulder pochette.
My mother was a closet romantic. When she found out about
my father’s secret life, she hired a private detective to hunt down
a boy who had doted on her at New Trier High School and who
went on to play utility infielder in the Cubs’ farm system for sev-
eral years before buying into an AMC dealership in Elk Grove.
She was constantly breaking up and furiously reuniting with this

Playground_txt_final.indd 10 5/22/24 12:42 PM


p l a y g r o u n d 11

man in semi-­public places, all but begging my father to put an end


to it. My father rose lovingly to the bait, time and again.
Don’t get me wrong: If being rich meant having feckless par-
ents, I accepted that. I loved being rich. The consolation prizes
were many and outstanding. But I hated my father for betraying
my mother, and I hated my mother for betraying me. I wasn’t old
enough yet to know how to pretend that everything would be fine.
The secret seemed to be to find some other place to live.
I found that place under Lake Michigan. When my mind raced
and the future rushed at me with knives, the only thing that helped
was looking out from the castle and seeing myself walking across
the bottom of the lake.
All dramas sounded muffled, under the water. I knew this from
summers on the Lee Street and Lighthouse Beaches. All friends
and foes looked fluid and subdued, crawling through liquid resis-
tance with a languid blue-­green cast. On the floor of the lake,
there were no people. I couldn’t imagine a better place to live.

MY FAT HER W R ECKED HIS BACK while skiing with his mistress
in Big Sky. He came within millimeters of full paralysis. The pain
crippled him, and he needed immediate surgery. My mother took
me to Montana to see him as he never was—­prostrate and almost
benign. They gazed at each other and grabbed hands, fused again
by near-­disaster. But the minute the ICU nurse stepped out, they
were at each other’s throats.
“You told me you were in New York for a convention.”
“You’re so gullible! Why would a Chicago pit trader go to New
York for a convention?”
She whispered, as if I couldn’t hear, “You are a piece of sordid
shit and I’m divorcing you.”
“Too late!” His bright eyes danced with oxycodone. “My law-
yers are working on the papers already.”
My mother gasped, and her whole body folded. You can’t play

Playground_txt_final.indd 11 5/22/24 12:42 PM

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