August 2022

No Man’s Land

by Anthony D’Aries

“I’m 36 years old, I have a wife, a child and a mortgage and I’m scared to death I’m turning into my father.”

I press pause and lock eyes with Kevin Costner. A tiny ball of thorns forms in my throat. My ears are ringing. My face is hot. Though I haven’t seen Field of Dreams in nearly 15 years, I can still quote entire scenes. But after learning that the 25^th anniversary of the film falls on the exact day my first child is due to be born, this line is new to me.

Three sleepless hours later, it’s almost five a.m., and my father is everywhere: The coffee, the streetlights, the men in work trucks idling in driveways, the classic car show I’ll attend alone today. A Dad kind of day. But he wouldn’t call the Starbucks Instant I’m drinking “coffee,” and my streetlights illuminate cracked concrete, not dew-glistening grass, and he still owns his ’67 Chevy pickup, while my ’66 Dodge Coronet has long been replaced by an ’09 Honda Fit.

Five years, 30 interviews, 72,000 words later and I’m still writing about my father. When I finished my first book, The Language of Men, a memoir about Full Metal Jacket, Bob Seger, taxidermy, The Swimsuit Issue, and all the other filters my male-dominated family used to communicate, I was relieved. I had a lot questions for him: his lurid tales of young Vietnamese prostitutes, his 40 years as a deli manager, his elusive father who always appeared half-shadowed in photographs. My father never complained — at least not to me — about my curiosity or my writing, though he occasionally offered a few clipped comments when my questions violated an unspoken code, pressed too firmly on bruises of work or love or dreams: You off in No Man’s Land now, boy.

I covered a lot of ground in my book. My wife Vanessa and I traveled to Vietnam, where she led sexual health and reproductive rights classes for former sex workers, while I searched for my bored and horny nineteen-year-old father; to Maine and Boston, Texas and San Francisco, returning with old letters and photographs like souvenirs; but ultimately back to Northport, the little fishing village on Long Island where I grew up, armed with a tape recorder and a list of questions.

“I never forgave him for getting old,” Kevin Costner says, in a tone that makes his statement sound more like a question to his younger self. “He must have had dreams, right?”

As I crawl toward fatherhood, what frightens me, what I think is the reason I had to pause and replay several of Costner’s lines, is the word “dreams.” The question that left me stranded in No Man’s Land wasn’t racy or voyeuristic; I had asked my father what he wanted to be when he was my age. The question every adult had asked me since I was six years old. My father shrugged and chewed the inside of his lip as if no one had ever asked him that.

No Man’s Land was flat, desolate country. Wind blew across shallow canyons like breath over empty beer bottles. The more questions I asked, the deeper I traveled into No Man’s Land, until I reached that cold-sweat moment in a long hike when you realize the end is far away, but the beginning is even farther.

***

When I was in elementary school, my family and a few of my aunts and uncles and cousins rented an RV and drove from New York to Georgia to visit my Uncle Richard. HBO had recently run a National Lampoon’s Vacation marathon, and as we geared up for our trip, we referred to my Uncle Richard as Cousin Eddie. Cousin Eddie is Randy Quaid’s character in the movie, an obnoxious redneck who owns a worm farm, has a pack of kids (one born without a tongue), and serves up a barbecue of processed seasonings and condiments: I don’t know why they call this stuff Hamburger Helper; it does just fine by itself. Our Cousin Eddie, my Uncle Richard, bore a certain resemblance – an overgrown plot of land outside Atlanta pock-marked with rusty cars on cement blocks, ATV engines, and a crippled swing set. He shot Roman Candles at his neighbor’s house, ate SPAM, drank Royal Cola, and loved his kids. My uncle shared Eddie’s perverted sense of humor, his punch lines often hinging on a particular sex act or female body part. Not that I understood what he was talking about at the time. The men would laugh and the women would shake their heads and the kids would stare. I preferred the part of his act when he leaned to one side of his chair at the dinner table, bit his lip, and asked if somebody stepped on a duck.

The thought of being in an RV for several days with no television was enough for me to convince Dad to pack a tiny black and white portable TV that was more gray plastic than screen. I hooked our VHS video camera (the size of a Ghostbuster’s proton pack) up to the portable TV so I could watch movies. While everyone else was packing sunscreen and tank tops, I scanned our movie collection. We had an eighteen-hour drive, so I divided that by two, and determined I’d need nine movies for each leg of the trip. I packed Goodfellas and The Untouchables, Willow and Caddyshack, Back to the Future and Lethal Weapon, Tango and Cash and Easy Money — all the movies I knew by heart. I didn’t want to watch anything new. I wanted a steady dose of the familiar, the expected, the lines and scenes I could predict and reenact. And I packed Field of Dreams.

Field of Dreams was one of the rare movies we purchased brand new – the rest were recorded off HBO and labeled in Dad’s chicken-scratch handwriting. On the box for Field of Dreams, Kevin Costner stands before an emerald corn field in sun-bleached jeans, white t-shirt, and worn brown leather jacket, hands on his hips, a slight grin on his face. Over the corn, a massive full moon rises, almost touching the movie’s tagline: If you believe the impossible, the incredible can come true.

Dad chewed a cherry cigar and drove us over the George Washington Bridge. Mom sat in the passenger seat swiping an emery board across her nails in quick, scratchy strokes. With his palm resting on top of the steering wheel, Dad played air piano to Seger’s “Katmandu.” My mother sang along. Sarah and Shannon, my teenage cousins, wore headphones and braided each other’s hair; my older brother, Don, a freshman in high school, slept. For the first hour or so, I tried to make tractor trailers blow their horns, but I eventually got bored and started watching movies. Robert De Niro, then Rodney Dangerfield, then Sylvester Stallone ran across the screen like extras in a Charlie Chaplin film, their voices squealing like The Chipmunks. Each tape seemed to be stuck on fast-forward. I soon realized that there was an issue with the play-back speed on our video camera. The only movie that played at the correct speed was Field of Dreams. Eighteen hours, divided by two. Lots of fields. Lots of dreams.

Though Dad and I played catch from time to time — and I joined Little League for a season or two in elementary school — I didn’t care about baseball. It was no different than basketball or football or street hockey or any of the other sports I played with mediocre skill and mild enthusiasm. I couldn’t name a single professional baseball player, I’d seen Billy Joel play more times at Shea Stadium than the Mets, and given how rarely we ventured into New York City, Yankee Stadium might as well have been a desert island. Dad didn’t listen to games on the radio or watch them on TV, except when ESPN re-ran old World Series games. Then he watched them as if they were a Clint Eastwood western, jabbing me in the ribs before a home run the way he would when a burlesque dancer jiggled across the saloon stage or an outlaw was about to get pumped full of lead.

***

I park my ‘09 Honda Fit next to a jacked-up Hummer with pink plastic testicles dangling from the tow hitch. Across the parking lot is a baseball field full of muscle cars. A few Cub Scouts walk by carrying boxes of raffle tickets. A heavy-set man in a train conductor’s cap uses a stainless steel spatula to push a pile of sausage and peppers onto a grill. GTOs and Road Runners, Camaros and Thunderbirds, 442s and Corvettes roll up to the registration booth. They idle for a moment, as if the rumbling exhaust were haggling over the admission price, then roll through the gate and onto the field. They add themselves to the necklace of cars in the outfield, snarling like wild cats as they approach each other, before the drivers kill their engines. I smell exhaust from across the field, coffee brewing in tall stainless-steel canisters, Armor-All and cigarettes, Windex and leather and aftershave. I unclip the keys from my belt loop, partly to avoid scratching any of the cars, but mostly to hide my bulky black Honda key.

Vanessa likes car shows, but this one is too early for her. I’m glad I’m alone today, wandering from car to car in a quiet Massachusetts suburb not far from the prison where I teach men older than my father how to read, a town not unlike Northport: million dollar horse farms sloping to weathered ranches or capes, then farther down to the faceless brick apartments behind Main Street. On my morning drives to work, the farms and apartments seem abandoned, as if I were a laborer arriving too early at a massive job site.

The early morning reminds me of Costner rising at dawn to tend his corn. After watching Field of Dreams the night before the car show, I’m surprised by how much of the film is about identity and purpose, how we expect work to define us. I’ve always admired the outcasts, the underdogs, the square pegs. The high school stoner athlete, the female race car driver, the professor in scuffed work boots. Or Costner and his wife, the young married couple whom the town considers crazy for plowing under their corn and building a baseball field, cashing in their crop for what W.P. Kinsella calls “dream currency.”

As I walk from car to car, I see a young woman pushing a boy in a stroller back and forth beside a blood-red ’68 Cobra. The boy runs a Matchbox car along the stroller’s railing, flipping and twisting, then landing the car smoothly on his plastic seat belt. The woman talks to a man spraying wax onto a rag and polishing the Cobra, as the Everly Brothers sing about how much time can do. I never paid much attention to this song, but it’s hard not to when the speakers are the size of box trucks. Is it optimistic or pessimistic? Does time allow us to sand and prime rusted metal, give it a glossy coat? Or is time the rust itself, the deterioration, the cement shoes on the Buicks and Toyotas on my uncle’s front lawn?

Sixteen years ago, when I followed my father’s ’67 Chevy pickup in my ’66 Dodge Coronet to the fairgrounds on Sunday afternoons, the cars and music and people we saw were the same I see now. Leather-bound ‘Nam vets with hats stabbed full of pins; obese food vendors wheezing over sausage and pepper heroes, skinny rat-faced and sunburned bikers telling loud stories in front of their chromed-out Harleys; teenagers smoking mentholated cigarettes, boasting about their Civics’ new sound systems; mahogany-skinned Indian or Middle Eastern men with gold hidden in furry wrists posing next to Lamborghinis or Teslas; baby-faced professionals in new leather jackets eyeing For Sale signs; Cub Scouts bragging about their fathers, like the one today: “Oh yeah? Well, my dad’s gotten carbon monoxide poisoning twice this year!”; the brittle Elk’s Club members in full regalia collecting admissions, stamping the backs of hands, and drumming up business for the 50/50 raffle. All of them pinned to the same evolutionary line like overalls in the breeze.

My father is retired now, no longer bound to the one-day-off-a-week schedule he had for forty years. When I was a kid, I was fascinated with his job. On Sundays, he’d wake me at 4:45 in the morning. Time to make the donuts, boy. Then 7-Eleven and coffee and the black shimmering asphalt leading us to Great Neck. Not Gatsby’s Great Neck – my father’s Great Neck was owned by Waldbaum’s supermarket. On a good day, he’d stop along the way and scrape a raccoon or rabbit off the highway, store it in the supermarket’s walk-in refrigerator, and bring it home to work on alone in his taxidermy workshop in our basement. I remember stepping through the supermarket’s glass doorway and wandering the empty, dimly-lit aisles. We were alone in a giant warehouse of shiny, colorful food. As we made our way to the deli counter, my father let me choose any box of cereal I wanted – just grab it off the shelf and open the box. I always hesitated because it never seemed right. Relax, will ya? Delivery guy’ll get credit for it. I decided I wanted to be a cereal delivery man when I grew up.

Now, whenever I visit my parents, I still hear him making his coffee at 4:45. The sliding glass door, the Winstons in the garage, the razor and Artic Blue aftershave. Take the job out of the routine, and the routine remains. I’ve inherited his routine – the mornings, the coffee, the quiet. Like the Roadrunners and Cougars and Stingrays in the outfield, my father and I are solitary animals.

***

“Not Field of Dreams, again,” my cousin Sarah said, holding onto the walls of the RV. We were somewhere outside of Washington D.C.; I was on my third viewing.

“It’s the only one that works,” I said.

“There needs to be a rule for how many times we watch that,” Sarah said, and as the word “rule” came out of her mouth, Dad shouted from the driver’s seat like James Earl Jones: “There are rules here? No, there are no rules here.” And I was Kevin Costner, stumbling backwards, as if Jones were right in front of me delivering his lines. Dad laughed. Sarah shook her head and joined her sister in the RV’s cramped bathroom.

As the cars and trucks zoomed around our oil-burning RV, I walked through corn fields, wondering how far I’d get before I disappeared like Shoeless Joe Jackson. I only knew Shoeless Joe because Dad and I had watched Eight Men Out a bunch of times, not because I knew anything about the real Joe Jackson. But the Hollywood version was enough for me to feel like I knew all about Joe and the 1919 White Sox World Series scandal. I wasn’t concerned if Joe was a hero or a thief or if one man couldn’t be both; I was lost in the magical realism of Field of Dreams — one moment Costner and his wife are unpacking groceries, the next dead baseball players are standing on their front lawn. I wanted a farm, a VW bus, and a magic corn field. I wanted a voice to tell me what to do.

***

Since I’m alone and have no car to show, I only stay for a few hours, unlike the full days my father and I spent wandering the field of cars and rummaging through the swap meet. I toss my empty coffee cup into the garbage and walk across Main Street. I keep walking, past my Honda, past the Hummer’s plastic balls and follow a narrow street through a quiet neighborhood and instead of cars I’m thinking about how the hell Vanessa and I will ever afford a house and if we even want one and what’s so bad about raising a family in an apartment? Field of Dreams is still stuck in my head, but not the scenes of Shoeless Joe side-stepping in left field or Costner’s VW bus cruising to the Doobie Brothers. Instead, I see Costner at the kitchen table with his glasses balanced on the tip of his nose, him and his wife staring at a stack of bills, as if more money money might suddenly appear. I see his pushy brother-in-law telling Costner the bank is ready to foreclose. I see Costner’s little girl choking on a hot dog.

When I told my father Vanessa and I were having a baby, he took a step back and sat down. I thought I’d given him a second heart attack. He was thrilled, but surprised.

“To be honest, I thought it was off the table for you two,” he said.

“Really? Why?”

“I don’t know. I thought you were both into your careers and that was that.”

I was surprised to hear him say this — Vanessa and I had been together for ten years, married for five. Later, I thought about my father’s reaction. He was twenty-three when my brother Don was born, only a few years home from Vietnam, back slicing cold cuts at Waldbaum’s where he’d worked before he was drafted. College was off his table. I used to think he missed out on something, or that war and work restricted him from doing the one thing he always wanted to do, but perhaps these thoughts were less about him, more about me.

My parents did well for themselves, for me and my brother; a housecleaner-receptionist-accountant and a deli manager would be hard pressed to build a similar life on Long Island today. One summer, as Don and I floated on giant packages of Oscar Meyer hotdogs or wheels of Carlsberg cheese in our above-ground pool — promotional items companies gave to all the deli managers — my father and his father re-landscaped our backyard. At the time, my grandparents were caretakers on a farm in Mattituck, a small town at the east end of Long Island, on the north fork. I remember afternoons sitting on the cold tractor in the barn, listening to what I thought were Army helicopters passing overhead. I later learned that the helicopters carried people from Manhattan to the Hamptons on the opposite shore of the island.

The farm job arrived a few months after Grumman told my grandfather they no longer needed airplane mechanics. The sun and the corn and the animals coaxed him off the couch and away from his Budweiser; the cool nights and crickets and lingering scent of soil on his hands lulled him to sleep.

That summer, for a week or so, my father stopped at a construction site near Waldbaum’s each day and brought home piles of large stones. Don and I watched Dad and Grandpa unload stone after stone from a rusty wheelbarrow. I don’t remember why we didn’t lend a hand – normally my father would have told us to get our asses out of the pool – but instead we watched them pour soil along the fence. Grandpa brought large hedges from the farm; he and Dad transplanted them from black plastic pots into the new soil, their roots dangling like dirt-caked tentacles. Then they edged the yard in white and gray stones, some smooth and round, others rough and jagged. Before dinner, they sat on the steps of the deck sipping iced tea, pointing and nodding like fans in the bleachers.

***

During my interviews with my father, I wanted him to articulate his dreams, but if he had asked me the same question, I wouldn’t have been able to answer either. My grandfather didn’t know he wanted to be a farmer — he became one and it gave him a purpose again – so perhaps he wouldn’t have been able to answer my question either. My dreams seemed to change daily – cereal delivery man became mechanic became archeologist became writer. I wanted my dream and my job to be the same, or to at least find a way to create a life where work and dreams were not mutually exclusive. Maybe that’s what I was asking my father to do – to tell me what to dream. Perhaps explaining a dream is like telling someone your wish while smoke twists from your birthday candle.

Was I asking for too much? Are my father’s dreams a crop better left unattended? Is “No Man’s Land” barren, or had I only visited during planting season?

***

Dad pulled the RV into Uncle Richard’s pot-holed driveway. By this point, my brain was a cookie jar of Field of Dreams quotes. I took one look at my uncle working on his shed and whispered: If you build it, he will come, as if some dead shed-building lumberjack, ostracized from his union decades ago for throwing the World Series of Log Rolling, would emerge from the tall weeds edging my uncle’s property and ask him if this was heaven. When my uncle started yelling at his neighbors and threatening to fire his nail gun, I wanted to ease his pain. And when we took a long drive to an amusement park, I thought not about my uncle’s giddiness for a laser-light show, but about the length of the drive: Go the distance.

After we settled in, Dad and Uncle Richard walked around the yard, checking out the cars on Richard’s lawn. He owned several acres of land and nearly a dozen cars, most of them without wheels or an engine, their bodies like Sonny Corleone’s ’41 Lincoln at the end of The Godfather. Grass and weeds grew through bullet holes that Richard or neighborhood kids had blasted into doors and fenders. His lawn was like time-lapse photography of the car shows. If all the Cobras and Mustangs and Broncos broke down in the outfield and never ran again, in fifty years the show would look like my uncle’s front lawn.

Dad and Uncle Richard both shared a love for anything done in a garage. “Putzin’ around,” Dad called it. Anything with tools. But when they worked on houses together, Richard was the demolition man and Dad built walls. Dad was a preservationist — his ducks and owls and rabbits perched on the mantel, his Chevy pickup rebuilt from scratch. While Uncle Richard gazed at the stripped and rusted frames on his lawn like a full man proud of the bones on his plate, Dad saw them as skeletons no one bothered to bury.

***

I stop for lunch after the car show and by the time I get home, the sun is setting. I park my Honda in the driveway and walk inside. Our two cats sit in the fading sun. They see me, arch their backs, and cry for food. Vanessa opens our bedroom door, a nap lingering on her face like morning mist.

“I didn’t even hear you leave this morning,” she says.

“I couldn’t sleep,” I say. Perhaps my body is preparing for the late nights and early mornings we’ll face seven months from now, but I know that’s not entirely true.

“Any Broncos?” Vanessa asks.

“There was one you would’ve loved. ’71. Convertible. Sky blue. It was for sale, too.”

She grins and raises her eyebrows, then pours a glass of water and walks back into the bedroom. I stand in the kitchen, not sure what to do next. Our cheap wall clock above the stove trembles with each tick. It’s too early for dinner and I’m not hungry. My window of time for coffee has closed. I decide to join Vanessa in the bedroom. I grab my book off the nightstand, lie beside her and stare at the first paragraph for what feels like half an hour. Vanessa’s book slips from her hands and startles her out of sleep. Her eyes open for a moment, then close. I turn to her, place my hand on her stomach, and watch it rise and fall.

At the end of Field of Dreams, Kevin Costner discovers that he didn’t build the field to reincarnate Shoeless Joe, but rather his father. The day before they shot the final scene, Dwier Brown, the actor who played Costner’s father, attended his own father’s funeral. He drove all night to make it to the set, threw on his costume, stood in front of directors, cinematographers, sound men, dozens of extras, and pretended to be a dead father.

Is the authentic acting the only reason the movie hits me so hard? If so, then why was I on the verge of tears before anyone even appeared on screen, the opening credits and soundtrack taking the wind out of me? My father’s not dead, though his heart attacks and strokes and Winstons stashed in the garage aren’t easing anyone’s pain. I’d ventured into No Man’s Land with my book, lived to tell the tale, and he and I are both still here. For now.

Perhaps it’s not the word “dream” that pulls at me, but “time.” I’m on the brink. I’m James Earl Jones at the edge of the cornfield, giggling nervously as I push through the tall stalks. I’m Kevin Costner demanding like a child that Joe explain the magic to me.  I’m one of the many thousands of drivers lined up on the highway, headlights twinkling, hunched over steering wheels like old men listening for a whisper.

Anthony D’Aries is the author of The Language of Men: A Memoir (Hudson Whitman Press, 2012), which received the PEN/New England Discovery Prize and Foreword’s Memoir-of-the-Year Award. His work has appeared in Boston Magazine, Solstice, The Good Men Project, Shelf Awareness, The Literary Review, Memoir Magazine, and elsewhere. He currently directs the low-residency MFA in Creative and Professional Writing at Western Connecticut State University.