March Madness

March Madness always makes me think of my dad; never more than now when the dudes are poring over their brackets with the intensity of gamblers at a racetrack, although he wasn’t a bracket guy. He wasn’t a man of any vices that I knew of, other than the pipe he smoked when I was a kid; the smoke curling in the sunlight streaming through the windows; the pock-pock of the TV tennis ball ringing in my ears.

It was all sports, all the time in our house. Once in a while when I couldn’t sleep, I would wander out and join him in front of Sports Center, listening blearily to middle-aged former athletes wax poetic on injuries and projections and the good old days, of which I knew nothing.

Have an apple and some water, he would advise me from the kitchen table, where he held court amongst various bottles. He washed down his heart meds at night with a lukewarm glass of pulpy orange juice, the kind you made from a frozen sphere inside an aluminum can.

I ate the apple and drank the water, marveling at how alike and yet different Bryant Gumbel and his brother looked; like funhouse images of each other; both with the same patronizing tone although the brother seemed nicer. Anyone seemed nicer than Bryant Gumbel.

In March 2000, two years after I graduated college and was living in a squalid apartment on 14^th Street between 2^nd and 3^rd Avenues that my roommate’s grandfather compared to Kosovo, my mother’s close friend was diagnosed with brain cancer. I had no idea what death looked like, but according to my mom hers was imminent and so she flew up with my father to help.

What this meant for me and my father was that we were on our own, left to wander the city going to Paragon Sports and model soldier stores with the occasional drop-in to Saks and Bloomingdales, searching for sales racks and spritzing colognes. That’s nice or too much or smells cheap we told each other, ignoring the ever-eager salespeople eying us hopefully. My father wasn’t one for small talk and we had no plans to buy anything.

My mother’s friend was at Sloane Kettering but she had both a beautiful apartment in the East Fifties and a perfect home on a bay in East Hampton. I packed my beat-up suitcase with the clothes I’d need for the week and joined him in both; leaving for work in the morning and meeting him after for dinner although I can’t remember where we went. Probably Chinese. We took the Jitney on Friday afternoon and then a cab to a house that was out of a Nancy Meyers movie, its bed sheets as crisp and cool as pool water.

It was here that I watched March Madness for the first time with my dad. It was too cold to go to the beach and my book was bad, so I sat on the white cushioned couch, tucked my feet under my legs and listened to my dad get fired up about men I was now too old to date. I was twenty-two and desperately missed my college self; the one who paid no bills and stole fat-free muffins and spent my food money on cigarettes. The one where there was no future to worry about and a bong simmering on the coffee table. The one where boys liked me and didn’t like me according to my vested interest or lack thereof.

My dad would have been 59 at the time, just 11 years older than I am now. He still had the confident swagger of someone who stood upright on legs as sinuous as snakes and hocked lugies off curbs as we walked anywhere and everywhere, much to my chagrin. He smiled, narrowed his eyes and yelled varying cries of affirmation and disgust at the television as I helped him stretch on the floor.

He was a former college baseball player and now played tennis three times a week, and had never stretched in his life, or drank water as far as I could tell, breaks between mowing our corner yard at home notwithstanding. I’d recently taken up running because I was gaining weight at an alarming pace and to be overweight at 22 in New York City in 1999 was akin to having leprosy. It wasn’t that I was eating too much, it was that I was eating anything at all. For the last five years I’d been kept alive by Swedish Fish, the aforementioned muffins, raisins and weed. And water. Sometimes.

It was rare to just be with my dad, he was a professor and was always either quizzing me on a variety of subjects from geography to history to spelling to pop culture or making passive aggressive jokes about my lack of life direction. I never found them funny.

But to just be with him was wonderful; the triumph of the underdogs on the court a metaphor for the values he’d instilled in me: the only thing to fear is fear itself; do unto others as they would do unto you and it’s all about the journey, Jack. These were solid mantras to live by and I really did try. Most of the time.

Leave yourself alone, he would say whenever I over-tweezed my eyebrows or straightened my hair in an attempt to be a different person altogether, and this was solid advice too. I still hear him when I gaze longingly at plastic surgery Instagram accounts but that’s a story for another time.

We returned to the city and every night we’d tune in, still in the apartment that belonged to neither of us: playing the roles of rich Manhattanites happily. My dad had grown up in Forest Hills, Queens and said: no one from New York lives in Manhattan which at the time enraged me but now of course, this too, is true.  Every night I’d trudge to bed at eleven, high on a mix of buzzer beater and exhaustion, wake up and do it all over again. I barely saw my mother that week, her friend was dying but no one was copping to this and if she was in the apartment at all, she was sleeping off her grief.

At the end of the week, the three of us took the train to Beacon, where my mother’s sister lived. She was loud and funny and not a fan of his, although she liked me. She and my mother sat upstairs drinking vodka and Crystal Light as my aunt chain-smoked menthols. My dad and I sat downstairs on a futon and watched The Final Four, high-fiving and screaming. I’d never seen him that happy before and I wouldn’t again until The Hora at my wedding, when he went up in his chair, bobbing in the air like a cork; his smile as big as the disappearing sun in the apricot sky.