this moment—my father laughing, holding a gun under my nose—if I live to be one hundred.
When he puts the gun back into the glove box and throws the car into drive, my father turns to me. Don’t tell your mother, he says.
I can’t imagine why he says this. What would my mother do if we told her? She never raises a word of protest. Does my father think there’s a first time for everything?
On a rare rainy day in Vegas, my father is driving me to pick up my mother at her office. I’m standing on my end of the bench seat, horsing around, singing. My father gets in the left lane to make a turn. A trucker honks at my father. My father apparently forgot to signal. My father gives the trucker the finger. His hand flies up so fast, it nearly hits my face. The trucker yells something. My father lets fly a stream of curses. The trucker stops, opens his door. My father stops, jumps out.
I crawl into the backseat and watch through the back window. The rain is falling harder. My father approaches the trucker. The trucker throws a punch. My father ducks, deflects the punch with the top of his head, then throws a blazingly fast combination, ending with an uppercut. The trucker is lying on the pavement. He’s dead—I’m sure of it. If he’s not dead, he soon will be, because he’s in the middle of the road and someone will run him over. My father gets back in the car and we peel away. I stay in the backseat, watching the trucker through the back window, rain pelting his unconscious face. I turn to see my father, mumbling, throwing combinations against the steering wheel. Just before we pick up my mother he looks down at his hands, clenches and unclenches his fists to make sure the knuckles aren’t broken. Then he looks in the backseat, directly into my eyes, though it feels as if he’s seeing Margaret. Somewhat tenderly he says, Don’t tell your mother.
Such moments, and many more, come to mind whenever I think about telling my father that I don’t want to play tennis. Besides loving my father, and wanting to please him, I don’t want to upset him. I don’t dare. Bad stuff happens when my father is upset. If he says I’m going to play tennis, if he says I’m going to be number one in the world, that it’s my destiny, all I can do is nod and obey. I would advise Jimmy Connors or anyone else to do the same.
THE ROAD TO NUMBER ONE goes over Hoover Dam. When I’m almost eight years old my father says the time has come to move from backyard sessions with the dragon and hit-arounds at Cambridge to actual tournaments, against real live little boys, all over Nevada and Arizona and California. Every weekend the whole family piles into the car and drives, either north on U.S. 95, toward Reno, or south, through Henderson and over Hoover Dam, across the desert to Phoenix or Scottsdale or Tucson. The last place I want to be, other than a tennis court, is in a car with my father. But it’s all settled. I’m condemned to divide my childhood between these two boxes.
I win my first seven tournaments in the ten-and-under bracket. My father has no reaction. I’m simply doing what I’m supposed to do. Driving back over Hoover Dam, I stare at all the water bottled up behind the massive wall. I look at the inscription on the base of the flagpole: In honor of those men who, inspired by a vision of lonely lands made fruitful…I turn this phrase over in my mind. Lonely lands. Is there a land lonelier than our house in the desert? I think about the rage bottled up in my father, like the Colorado River inside the Hoover Dam. Only a matter of time before it bursts. Nothing to do but scramble for high ground.
For me, that means winning. Always winning.
We go to San Diego. Morley Field. I play a kid named Jeff Tarango, who isn’t nearly on my level. But he wins the first set, 6-4. I’m stunned. Scared. My father is going to kill me. I bear down, win the second set, 6-0. Early in the third set Tarango twists his ankle. I start drop-shotting him, trying to make him run on the bad ankle. But he’s only faking. His ankle is fine. He comes bounding in and smashes my drop shots and wins every point.
My father screams from the stands: No more drop shots! No more drops!
But I can’t help myself. I have a strategy, I’m sticking with it.
We go to a tiebreak. It’s best-of-nine. Back and forth we trade points, until it’s 4-all. Here it is. Sudden death. One point for the whole match. I’ve never lost and can’t imagine what my father’s reaction will be if I do. I play as if my life hangs in the balance, which it does. Tarango must have a father like mine, because he’s playing the same way.
I haul off and rope a fizzing backhand crosscourt. I hit it as a rally shot but it comes off my racket bigger and hotter than I intended. It’s a screaming winner, three feet in but well beyond Tarango’s reach. I howl in triumph. Tarango, standing in the center of the court, bows his head and seems to cry. Slowly he walks toward the net.
Now he stops. All of a sudden, he looks back at where the ball hit. He smiles.
Out, he says.
I stop.
The ball was out! Tarango yells.
This is the rule in juniors. Players act as their own linesmen. Players call balls in or out, and there is no appeal. Tarango has decided he’d rather do this than lose, and he knows there’s nothing anyone can do about it. He raises his hands in victory.
Now I start to cry.
Bedlam breaks out in the stands, parents arguing, shouting, nearly coming to blows. It’s not fair, it’s not right, but it’s reality. Tarango is the winner. I refuse to shake his hand. I run away into Balboa Park. When I return half an hour later, all cried out, my father is furious. Not because I disappeared, but because I didn’t do what he said during the match.
Why didn’t you listen to me? Why did you keep hitting drop shots?
For once I’m not afraid of my father. No matter how angry he is with me, I’m angrier. I’m furious with Tarango, with God, with myself. Even though I feel Tarango cheated me, I shouldn’t have put him in a position to cheat me. I shouldn’t have let the match get that close. Because I did, I’ll now have a loss on my record—forever. Nothing can ever change it. I can’t endure the thought, but it’s inescapable: I’m fallible. Blemished. Imperfect. A million balls hit against the dragon—for what?
After years of hearing my father rant at my flaws, one loss has caused me to take up his rant. I’ve internalized my father—his impatience, his perfectionism, his rage—until his voice doesn’t just feel like my own, it is my own. I no longer need my father to torture me. From this day on, I can do it all by myself.
MY FATHER’S MOTHER lives with us. She’s a nasty old lady from Tehran with a wart the size of a walnut on the edge of her nose. Sometimes you can’t hear a word she’s saying because you can’t take your eyes off that wart. But it doesn’t matter, she’s surely saying the same nasty things she said yesterday, and the day before, and probably saying them to my father. This seems to be the reason Grandma was put on earth, to harass my father. He says she nagged him when he was a boy and often beat him. When he was extra bad, she made him wear hand-me-down girl clothes to school. That’s why he learned to fight.
If she’s not pecking at my father, the old lady is squawking about the old country, sighing about the folks she left behind. My mother says Grandma is homesick. The first time I hear this word I ask myself, How can you be sick about not being home? Home is where the dragon lives. Home is the place where, when you go there, you have to play tennis.
If Grandma wants to go back home, I’m all for
