there over the years, back in the days when the star Phillie was one Jim Bunning, a man who many years later would be described by Time magazine as one of the country’s five worst senators and quite possibly mentally ill. He was no longer in a Phillies uniform by the time my father and Lloyd Goodyear and I showed up in 1970, though, to watch as the Phils beat the Expos in ten innings, and all around us, fans tore apart the stadium. Well before the ninth inning the place was echoing with the sounds of sawing and hammering, boards snapping, men yelling. It was more than a little bit frightening, and I remember my father looking around us, a hot dog in one hand, with an expression that made it clear he wondered if coming to see the last game in the old stadium was a good idea. I was frightened by the violence, afraid that before the game was over, we’d be thirty thousand people sitting in a giant pile of splintered wood.
But my friend Lloyd just looked around at the melee with delight. I think he was undaunted by the prospect of trouble. It had been a long time since he’d felt safe in the first place.
Lloyd got up at one point to go to the men’s room and inject himself with insulin. My father and I sat there watching the game, watching the men in front of us taking a crowbar to their entire row of seats. How did they get into the park with a crowbar in the first place? As their seat splintered free from the floor, they cheered. My father looked over at me. “We’re here for history,” he said.
Lloyd came back after a long absence. “You okay?” I asked. He nodded.
The Phils finally prevailed in the tenth inning. After the victory, fans poured onto the field as others snapped the slats out of the seats in which they had been sitting. “Mr. Boylan,” Lloyd asked, his eyes wide, “can we go down on the field?”
It had never occurred to me that we would want to join in the fracas. My father, fortunately, shook his head and ushered us out into the streets in search of our car. Everywhere you looked there were people carrying pieces of wood.
We got in the Ford Falcon and headed back toward Newtown Square. Lloyd looked out the window as we drove down Broad Street. “That was the greatest baseball game I ever saw,” he said.
On our way to Lloyd’s house we passed the cemetery where his father was buried. It was late at night by now, and long shadows played over the graves. No one spoke a word.
Sometimes, when I think back on the world of men, it’s this night that comes first to mind. All that jubilant destruction, and in its wake, our silence. It was a world in which the most important things could rarely be spoken out loud, and had to be inferred, instead, through the alternating tongues of raucous, boneheaded stunts (on the one hand) or eloquent, painful silence (on the other).
I cannot ever remember my father saying, “I love you,” although I never doubted the fullness of his heart. Once, when he was trying to show me how to use a soldering iron (I had broken a toy flying saucer), he accidentally scorched one of my fingers with the iron, and I cried out in pain. My father dropped everything and clutched me to his chest. “I’m so sorry,” he said, his voice trembling. “My boy. I’m so sorry. I just want you to be all right.”
If my father, like many men, was reluctant to spill his goobers, he had no such reservations when it came to Playboy, whom he fed chicken from the table, with whom he got down on the floor and wrestled.
Maybe my father, like a lot of men, was able to express for dogs what he could not say to people.
It wasn’t just Playboy Dick Boylan was adoring when he rolled that dog upon his back and scratched his belly until the dalmatian’s back leg thumped against the floor. It was all of us—his children, his wife, and the ridiculous, glorious life we shared. Maybe that’s what he was trying to tell us, as he carved a drumstick from the chicken and gave it directly to Playboy. I am playing with this terrible dog because I love you.
* * *
We’d gotten Playboy from a kennel called Whispering