An Accidental Sportswriter Read Online Free

for a book with pictures of naked women and found instead that masculinity chart. I couldn’t even discuss the chart with Dad because he was a schoolteacher. I didn’t want to make him feel bad.
    Now, of course, I wish I had. He could have taken it. I would have learned something. Maybe I was less concerned about his feelings than about appearing soft and weak to him. I saw Dad as a tough guy. He may have loved to read philosophy, but his career—from middle school English teacher through principal to director of the city’s several dozen schools for troubled kids—had been in rough neighborhoods bristling with switchblades and zip guns. He usually worked several jobs at a time. That’s how he managed to get us to an apartment in a comfortable, safe Queens neighborhood, afford a weekend house in upstate New York, and send me to Columbia University and my sister to the University of Wisconsin. My mother was a teacher and guidance counselor, but she subordinated her own career to his. For years she was a stay-at-home mom, which was conventional then, but she still chafed at the role. They had met in the early thirties as lab partners while taking master’s degrees in psychology at Columbia. Both of them harbored literary ambitions. The house was crammed with books. They read voraciously and encouraged me to read and write.
    For such a bookish boy, You and Heredity was a psychic land mine. It blew me sideways. Years later, from photos and eyewitness accounts, I figured out I was nowhere near as fat as I thought I was. But that book was there, and so were the bullies.
    My worst tormentor, my regular bully, was Willie, who had staked me out in elementary school and followed me to Halsey. At P.S. 139, teachers had been alert to predatory kids, and because I lived near school I could waddle home while Willie was being detained for questioning and then bury my shame in peanut butter sandwiches, Hydrox cookies, Three Musketeers candy bars, and a glass of chocolate milk.
    But in the laissez-faire atmosphere at Halsey, where Willie found support among other fag bag kickers, I didn’t stand a chance. At least once a week, he found me and pushed me around. Nothing that I ever reported or complained about—at worst a bruise, a little blood, a pocket torn off a shirt—but plenty to feel bad about. Willie may have been a pathetic dork who had found a scapegoat for his unhappiness, but at the time, he was Grendel and I was no Beowulf. I was a fat kid trapped at the bottom of the masculinity chart.
    It was a book, of course, that sprang me loose.
    After I returned You and Heredity , I began trolling in sections of the library I had rarely visited. It was some weeks later in Travel that I was drawn to the blue cover of The Royal Road to Romance , by the adventure travel writer Richard Halliburton. The book, a best seller, was published in 1925, when Halliburton was twenty-five, a slim little Princeton grad, apparently gay (an authentic fag!), who disappeared at sea at thirty-nine.
    In rereading Halliburton recently, I realized he could be accused of being an imperialist and Orientalist, condescending toward women and indigenous folk, not to mention an extreme tall-tale teller, but when I was twelve, when it mattered, his energy and enthusiasm lifted my spirit. This was no writer you could keep at the bottom of your masculinity chart. He climbed mountains, stowed away on freighters, hunted man-eating tigers. It was easy to imagine him swimming across crocodile-infested waters with his typewriter strapped to his back and a knife in his teeth. He’d carve up anything that tried to stop him. And then he’d write about it.
    Even then, I didn’t totally buy his stories, and eventually they seemed as spurious in their way as that masculinity chart. But all I knew in 1950 and all I needed to know was that his stories filled me with possibility.
    When I finally returned The Royal Road to Romance several