Matt Mendelsohn

Saturday, Aug 13, 2011 5:01 PM UTC

Daddy is a wimp

I can't throw a ball. I'm afraid of heights. But my biggest fear is looking like a coward in front of my daughter

By Matt Mendelsohn

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“Daddy, can you win me a Domo?”

My daughter and I were walking briskly through a gigantic amusement park, past a huge pegboard loaded with bizarre, oversized dolls resembling Sponge Bobs on steroids, when Alexandra popped the question I was dreading.

“Please, Daddy! I really want a Domo! Puh-leeze!”

In her six years on this earth, the word “Domo” had never before left my daughter’s lips, not once, not ever, but that’s the nature of the beast. Silly Bandz and Uglydolls yesterday, some Japanese TV mascot called a Domo today, a yet-uninvented fad tomorrow. But the problem wasn’t my daughter’s fickleness. The problem was something else.

I glanced at the arcade in front of me. Not one of those ring-the-bell-with-brute-strength things. Whew. I’m no weakling, but strength has never been my, well, strength. Nor, thank God, did it involve a hoop. The last time I played basketball, Captain & Tennille were topping the charts. And I was quite relieved to see this particular game didn’t require shooting anything with a gun. My scientist father played tennis my entire childhood: white sneaks, white socks, white shorts, white shirt. An NRA family we were not.

Nope, in this case the skills necessary to win said Domo were pretty straightforward. A bucket of baseballs, painted strike zone, canvas muslin backdrop. And in an instant — because those of us who spent half of junior high gym period in the boys’ room pretending we had to go reaaallllllly bad will tell you it only takes an instant — I figured a way out.

“I thought you wanted to go on the Zoom Flume,” I said, seamlessly changing gears. It sounded plausible. Plausible enough, because what I should have said was this: “Daddy can’t throw to save his life.” Of course, you don’t say things like that to your 6-year-old. You just think them, over and over.

——

I used to love amusement parks. Places like Adventurer’s Inn in Farmingdale, N.Y., where in my mind Billy Joel will forever be singing about some bottle of red. No death-defying rides back then; today’s coaster industry was just on the verge of exploding when I was a teenager. But you didn’t go to places like Adventurer’s Inn for the scary thrills anyway. I’d go to see if Raina, my first crush, was there that night with her friend Laura; or to discuss Emerson, Lake and Palmer’s newest 11-minute song, and how it compared to ELP’s previous 15-minute opus; or to spend an hour engaging in an intense grammatical debate with my friend David over whether the place was named Adventure’s Inn, Adventurers’ Inn or Adventurer’s Inn, singular. Geeks Gone Wild.

Mostly what we did there, actually, was play Skee-Ball, the bowling game with the wooden balls. Those tickets spitting out like sausages! I was a bit of a prodigy, carefully mastering the art of the bank, the only way to nail the big scores. Fifty-six consecutive plays, 790 tickets and that puka shell necklace would be mine.

Something in those nights must have left an impression. Later in life, as a news photographer, I was a risk taker. I raced across Panama’s Bridge of the Americas during the U.S. invasion, 90 miles an hour in a Humvee, screaming with excitement the whole way. Though my wife doesn’t believe me, I’ve jumped out a plane. Twice. I wriggled my way through an Egyptian tomb that hadn’t seen a torch since 1200 B.C. and had rocks thrown at my head during the Los Angeles riots. Like any good journalist, I kept the rocks, which now sit in a plastic tub in the basement, “L.A. Riots ’92!!” scrawled in Sharpie upon them.

Now, as the half-century mark looms, those things seem comical if not downright impossible. The reason my wife doesn’t believe that I jumped out of a plane is that she’s had the unfortunate luck of having to sit next to me in turbulence on one too many a cross-Atlantic flight. Errol Flynn? She’s convinced I’m Elmer Fudd. And she may well be right. I don’t even have to be airborne to be a mess of anxiety. Driving over the Chesapeake Bay Bridge will do just fine.

But of these phobias, the one that fills me with the most fear has nothing to do with heights or bridges or small spaces, or pretty much every ride at the amusement park in which we currently find ourselves. What I fear most is being a chicken in front of the one person in my life whose brain is still soaking things in, not leeching things out.

Years ago, when the croc guy, Steve Irwin, died tragically, his young daughter Bindi said, “Everyone thinks they have the greatest dad in the world. But I really did.” Except for the crocodile part, which I would never do, needless to say, that’s pretty much how I feel about my own daughter. From Alexandra’s first memorable, cohesive sentence at 3 — “Daddy, I think I need to ask my doctor about Lunesta” — to her dutiful memorization of Bruce Springsteen’s “Thunder Road” at 4, sparing me at least a year of the Wiggles, my daughter is pure joy. And each year brings more: a twig of a kid playing ice hockey, a wicked sense of comic delivery, a love of artichokes, the way she pronounces the word AWE-some, all first syllable.

Because of her, I know what a narwhal is (a whale that’s apparently been crossed with a unicorn), what owl pellets looks like (regurgitation souffle), and who’s hot on Radio Disney (I sometimes find myself listening to Selena Gomez and the Scene a good 30 minutes after I’ve dropped her at school). And because of her, the thought of looking like I can’t walk up the stairs of a silly water park ride, no matter how many there are, or how high and unprotected they may be (Hello?!? Is there an OSHA inspector in the house?), is out of the question. Alexandra may have a short memory — “win me a Domo!” has morphed into “Zoom Flume! Zoom Flume!!” now — but her daddy remembers everything.

And some of what I remember is this: The reason I spent so many gym periods hiding in the bathroom back in the mid-70s is because I didn’t know how to hit or throw or catch. I never once played catch with my own father.

——

“Are you sure you don’t want to get some frozen lemonade?” I ask, which I’m told in Swahili means, “Daddy is terrified of heights.”

As I say this, I happen to be standing underneath a gigantic, two-story bucket of water near the kids pool, one that slowly fills itself until dumping its load on the bathers below. My kind of ride. I look across the park at a line of people in bathing suits snaking up an endless set of stairs and my pulse begins its own steady climb. A minute later we’re ascending, ever so slowly, me fixated not on the thrilling raft ride down but on the dizzying ascent up. I chat up a father and son who are in line behind us, mainly to take my mind off the fear, though it does give me a chance to do the requisite, manly there’s-nothing-to-be-afraid-of spiel in front of another parent. “This is gonna be AWE-some!” Alexandra squeals and I, lying through my teeth, concur wholeheartedly. Half an hour later, giggling down a raging rapids, the fear finally turns to fun. “Again!” Alexandra yells, though I thoughtfully remind her about that lemonade.

And that’s when I fell into the trap, how I met my Waterloo at the water park. You see, to get to the frozen lemonade, you’ve got to walk right past the softball toss game, which, like its baseball pitch cousin, had disaster writ large. “Daddy, can you win me something? Please, Daddy?”

No escape this time. One softball into a basket wins. Easy. I hand the kid $6, but like a Vegas croupier he points to a slot and motions for me to push the bills through. The attempt ends as quickly as it starts: three balls, three misses. Alexandra looks a bit crestfallen, but I’m just getting started. “Let’s go again,” I tell the kid, a circular motion of my finger, and another six bucks are pushed through the slot.

Pffft! goes ball number 1 as it hits the surrounding straw. I’m sweating now and it has little to do with the brutal heat. I toss again. Pffft! Last ball. Pffft! This is just like Vegas, I think — it’s a freaking money pit. I reach deep into my cargo shorts, still soaking wet from the Zoom Flume fiasco, and pull out my last six ones.

But wait. My guy is trying to tell me something. This young kid, not some grizzled carny but a name-tagged teenager destined for the Ivy League, or at the very least a William and Mary, a young man whose own parenting days still lay light years ahead of him, leans in.

“Don’t go for the basket,” he whispers, like a guy giving a tip at the racetrack. “Hit the top rim. It’ll deaden the throw and the ball will fall straight down without bouncing.”

The Rosetta Stone! The secret of the Houdini’s water torture trick! Who “You’re So Vain” is about! For the first time in my life I’m on the inside, and with my last three tosses I will finally reclaim my rightful place in the pantheon of fatherhood.

Pffft! goes number one.

Pffft! goes number two. I look around — Roy Hobbs nowhere in sight.

Deep breath. I line up my throw, steady my hand, and aim straight for the top collar of the basket. Deaden the throw, he said. I release the ball. But this one doesn’t just miss the basket, it misses the actual game, rolling on the asphalt path that lead back towards the water rides.

Tears well up in Alexandra’s eyes. Not the tears of a whiny kid who wants a cheap-o stuffed animal, mind you, but of a girl who just wants her father to succeed. (And hadn’t I? Surely they’ve got some prize here for a kid who can singled-handedly expose all of her dad’s weaknesses in one Kings Dominion outing. Perhaps a smaller Domo.)

Panicking, I feel an overwhelming need to rescue her. But Alexandra, frozen lemonade running down her chin, senses her daddy needs a bit of rescuing himself. So with a sigh and a cocked eyebrow, her version of a poker tell, and proving beyond a shadow of a doubt that she is the inheritor of at least some of my DNA, my daughter looks at me and says, “What about Skee-Ball? You’re great at that!”

I look down, past the eyebrow, past the smirk, right into the space where her front teeth used to reside, and the need to win a jackpot evaporates instantly. I know I got that already.

Friday, Jul 8, 2011 1:01 AM UTC

When we dreamed of being astronauts

NASA's last flight marks the end of an era, but for space geeks like me, it's a different kind of loss

By Matt Mendelsohn

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A photo of the author's Major Matt Mason figurine.

With the final mission of the space shuttle looming on Friday, NASA puts a lid on five decades of U.S. space exploration with nary an ace left up its sleeve. Let’s face it, hitching future rides out of a launch facility in Kazakhstan doesn’t constitute a program so much as a glorified car service. And while some enthusiasts might feel a bit of a black hole each time they look skyward, I only need glance at the upper corner of my computer monitor to experience a sense of loss.

For the last 25 years, from the time I landed my first job out of college in 1986, the year Challenger went go at throttle up and then went no more, a small, bendable astronaut named Major Matt Mason has been perched atop my display.

Rescued long ago from the attic of my parent’s house on Long Island, not five miles from the Grumman Aerospace Corp., where the Apollo Lunar Module was built and where my father spent his days scrawling bizarre math figures resembling hieroglyphics on chalkboards located inside buildings I was rarely allowed to visit (“What do you do, Dad?” I once asked, and he replied, helpfully, “You wouldn’t understand.”), this little action figure — never call it a doll — has always been within reach.

His blue eyes fading under cracking paint, his rubber arm dangerously close to amputation, Major Matt looks down at me as I type, though lately I’m the one staring back wistfully. STS-135 may be the end of an era for NASA — for physicists, aeronautical engineers and tens of thousands of other folks who scored 800 on their math — but it’s the end of the line for us non-science space pretenders as well: those of us who don’t know their yaw from their pitch, who get nervous just hearing words like “geosynchronous orbit,” yet whose childhood is inextricably tethered, like Billy Mumy in the opening credits of “Lost in Space,” to all things astronaut.

Like so many other 7-year-olds in 1969, I wanted to be tethered to a capsule, too, right up until the day I rode the Long Island Rail Road into New York City with my grandfather, who, after opening some accounts at Republic Bank and securing some free toasters, took me to the top of the Empire State Building. Couple my newly discovered acrophobia with another crippling disease for a fledgling astronaut, not having a single scientific bone in my body, and my space years were numbered before they ever began.

But it’s impossible to have grown up near Bethpage, N.Y., during that time — in the shadow of Farmingdale’s Republic Aviation, builder of the mighty P-47 Thunderbolt, and a stone’s throw from Roosevelt Field, site of Lindbergh’s takeoff, and, most importantly, in a place that served as the universal answer to any local elementary school career-day question: What does your father do? He works at Grumman — and not come out the other end a space geek. On my block alone, two kids, not one, were building futuristic hovercraft in their garages. Paging Steven Spielberg.

That’s why this English major remembers what doomed Apollo 1 on the launch pad (the capsule was pressurized with pure oxygen), knows what the title of Michael Collins’ lunar memoir was (“Carrying the Fire”), and can still name with ease the original seven Mercury astronauts. Two C’s, two G’s and three S’s, my mental cheat sheet still at the ready. (Glenn and Grissom are easy, but the last “S” is a guaranteed trump card, as few people ever come up with Deke Slayton, and fewer still know that while even though he never flew a Mercury mission, Slayton finally got his chance in 1975 during Apollo-Soyuz.)

Aerospace so dominated life on Long Island that if you said you were from Bethpage, not a single person asked about the Black course or golf — only Grumman. The Black, host to two recent U.S. Opens, was in a bit of disrepair then, and thought of, at least by the under-12 set, only as a good place to sled in winter.

Grumman, on the other hand, was bustling. From the legendary Hellcat and Wildcat, powerhouses of the Pacific, to A-6 Intruders of the Vietnam era, the company was a larger-than-life presence in my hometown. For years I dreamed about knowing what was behind all those guard booths that dotted the massive campus, or what kinds of planes were landing at the airstrip off South Oyster Bay Road, excruciatingly blocked from public view by jet blast deflectors. In Plant 3, work was under way on wings for Grumman’s newest fighter, the F-14 Tomcat, the plane Tom Cruise would one day make into a sex symbol. Plant 5 was where the LEM was being built, the craft that would literally save the Apollo 13 astronauts and ensure Grumman’s place in space history. And deeper off Stewart Avenue, Plant 26, the computing sciences/artificial intelligence lab, where my father worked on his … well, I don’t have a clue.

Somehow all of this filtered down to us kids, the ones destined for MIT and the ones destined for Chaucer. Wearing the uniform of the day, plaid shirt matched with pants of long vertical stripes, I perused and re-perused the Estes model rocket catalog in bed, spending my allowance on spacecraft with names like Big Bertha and Citation. Painstakingly gluing and painting these rockets in a basement with no ventilation (“Is the window open?!?” my mother would yell down. “Yessssssss!!” I’d yell back, though in reality the basement window, with 20 bent, rusty nails going in every direction, would have required a regiment to open it), I watched as some of them actually attained altitude, though just as many got toppled by the wind moments before liftoff, taking healthy divots out of the Old Bethpage Grade School baseball diamond.

But more than anything else, we played with Mattel’s kid-toy masterpiece, Major Matt Mason, a 6-inch rubber astronaut figure wearing a helmet with an orange visor. Tom Hanks is an unabashed Matt man, and astronauts over the years have been rumored to have taken him into space with them. I used to pretend that he — me — was trapped with Penny Robinson, of the “Lost in Space” Robinsons, on the rocky surface of Alpha Centauri. I spent hours jury-rigging those flimsy arms, so much so that my playroom sometimes resembled astronaut triage — visors from other Matt Mason characters like Sgt. Storm being affixed to Doug Davis; legs from Lt. Jeff Long, an African-American astronaut action figure decades before a real-life one ever flew, attached to Major Matt. (Nowadays, Transformers and Bakugan toys regularly feature 379 pieces to potentially lose; Matt was as simple as they come.)

Four decades later, Major Matt has survived countless cleaning ladies, the occasional leaky ceiling, and many a move, when he and his rubber brethren are thrown back into their Satellite Locker, a vinyl carrying case I got as a consolation prize after my brother broke my arm in 1970, and carted off to a new base of operations.

My broken arm. My older brother Daniel snapped it while we were wrestling, and he wrote about the incident in a 2006 memoir about the Holocaust, of all things. To him, it was a metaphor for fraternal estrangement, for the distance between two young siblings — one who cared about model rockets and the other who would occasionally dress as an Egyptian pharaoh. But I saw past the cruelty then, and I see past it now. To me that broken arm was one of the great moments in my life. Without the fracture, my father, who is not an effusive gift-giver, might not have taken me to the five-and-dime and let me pick out any toy I wanted. And I went for the Major Matt Mason Satellite Locker.

The space program is grinding to a halt this week — no more T-minuses, no more astronaut walk-outs, no more boring but glorious shots of CAPCOMs hovered over computer screens. My link to it is long gone, too. My dad retired ages ago and Grumman was bought by Northrop in 1994, her Bethpage buildings reappropriated for other uses by other companies. The airstrip was built over, and cavernous Plant 5 is now a fledgling movie studio. I hear parts of “Salt,” with Angelina Jolie, were filmed there. Everywhere else, as far as my memory is concerned, tumbleweed might as well be blowing.

But Major Matt Mason lives on. Last month Tom Hanks announced a deal to make a big-screen movie about my favorite little action figure. But while a Hollywood movie ensures that a new generation of kids will come to know Major Matt, I kind of want him to myself, sitting up there on his perch above my monitor, that right arm forever waiting to break, just as mine did 41 years ago.

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Matt Mendelsohn is a writer and photographer living in Arlington, Virginia. He has worked at UPI and USA Today as a photojournalist, and his writing has appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post and AOL News.