The Keeper: A Life of Saving Goals and Achieving Them (2 page)

W
e didn’t have much. My mother raised me and Chris in a small, one-bedroom apartment—my “bedroom” was supposed to be the dining room, and my brother’s room was in the basement. Mom paid for food and rent from her meager earnings
working for a distributor of packing containers—an hour commute in each direction. By the time I got older and we needed money for travel soccer teams and uniforms, Mom had to supplement her day job with shifts at a roadside home furnishing store.

Mom’s worry about money was constant. “Turn off the lights!” she always pleaded as Chris and I tumbled from room to room, wrestling and smacking each other in the head. “You’re wasting energy!”

She clipped coupons before our weekly trips to Pathmark, and then filled the cart with generic-brand boxes of food. For housewares, we’d head to U.S. 1 Flea Market, where we found garage sale prices. For clothes, it was always Sears; the knees on their pants were reinforced with double the fabric, so they lasted longer.

On winter mornings, we’d wake up shivering and walk into the tiny kitchen. There, Mom turned on all four stovetop burners for us to huddle around and get warm.

Mom’s long hours at work meant that Chris and I were latchkey kids, left to our own devices after stepping off the school bus. After seven hours struggling to sit still in the classroom, these wild, unstructured afternoons were blissful freedom.

In Northwood Estates, we could always find a game being played somewhere—street hockey or touch football or Manhunt in the woods. Chris and I dashed over to the basketball hoop to play some pickup, or headed to the scrubby field to hit a baseball. Sometimes we tossed footballs while dodging cars in the parking lot.

I wanted to play everything.

I wanted to
win
everything.

It didn’t matter to me that most of the kids organizing the
games were years older than I was, bigger and tougher and more skilled in every way. I still wanted to be as good as they were—
better
than they were—so I jumped in and played hard, no matter how much I got knocked around.

And I did get knocked around.

Once, on the basketball court, a kid named Jimmy fouled me so hard I dropped to the ground. Jimmy was three years my senior, and a terrific basketball player, tough as nails. I’d seen him get into a fistfight with another player, a brawl so rough that Jimmy had started bleeding from the eye and lip—only to return immediately to the game as if nothing had happened.

From the ground, I looked up at Jimmy, and he stared back at me, unblinking. It was as if he was saying,
I don’t care how old you are. I’m not going to let you win this game.

I met Jimmy’s stare.
Well, I’m not going to let you win by knocking me down.

I got up. He tossed me the ball, and we started playing again.

If things got out of hand, though, Chris was right there for me. My brother might have punched me regularly around the house—often delivering a blow to the gut so hard it knocked the wind out of me—but he was also always the first to stand up on my behalf. He was fearless that way. During another basketball game, I got into a scuffle with a wild kid named Darren. Chris was on crutches at the time, but when Darren hit me, Chris was off his crutches in an eyeblink, punching the daylights out of him.

“Quit messing with Tim!” Chris cried as he pummeled Darren. He punched that kid so hard we would later learn he’d broken Darren’s nose. “Just play the game.”

Later that night, though, Chris punched
me
in the gut. “I saved your butt, jerk.”

I hit him back, so fast I barely tapped him, then turned on my heels. If he caught me, he’d start pounding me the way he did Darren. So I ran like hell, knocking over lamps and books as I barreled through the apartment with Mom begging us to please, for goodness sake, calm down.

It was business as usual for the Howard boys.

E
ach night when Mom got home from work, she set her purse down and headed straight for the pantry to scrape together some sort of dinner for us. By now Chris and I were hungry as bears. We devoured anything and everything she put in front of us: hot dogs, mac and cheese, cans of beans, bowls of Pathmark cereal for dessert.

After dinner, we were at it again, wrestling and rolling around on the carpet.

“Please, no Clash of the Titans tonight,” Mom might say. She called us that—Clash of the Titans. We were both big kids, all limbs and elbows and energy, and we did a lot of damage when we got brawling.

Mom longed to put a record on, hear a few bars of Joan Baez or close her eyes and sing along with James Taylor’s “Fire and Rain” before doing the dishes—enjoy a few minutes of peace in her own home. She begged us to settle down, please,
please
be a little quieter. When we didn’t, she finally broke. She started shouting in Hungarian, her native language—throaty curses that neither Chris nor I understood. To us, her words sounded like gibberish. And although she was steaming by now, ready to toss us out the apartment window, we couldn’t help ourselves: we’d start laughing at all of Mom’s crazy sounds.

“Enough,” she snapped. “Downstairs.” She chased us out of
the kitchen and out of the living room, down to the basement, where we fell to the floor holding our stomachs. We were laughing that hard.

T
hursdays were spent with Poppa and Momma—my mom’s parents—in their split-level home in the nearby town of East Brunswick.

Poppa had this crazy trick; he could fall asleep in an instant. It was something he picked up while he was prisoner of war, a forced laborer, in 1944–45, given no rest.

Once he was released, he tried for almost a decade to go to a university. But under Soviet communist rule, only peasants and laborers could earn a higher degree; he labored on factory floors instead. During the 1956 Hungarian student uprising, the first major threat to Soviet control of the country since the end of World War II, Poppa had helped organize factory workers. The uprising had inspired a revolution, then the revolution invoked a backlash. Poppa was informed he would be tried for treason—a certain death sentence. So Momma and Poppa escaped Hungary under the cover of night with my mother, then six, and her infant brother, Akos, in tow.

Poppa told us these stories as my Momma and my great-grandmother—my Poppa’s mom—bustled around the kitchen preparing stuffed cabbage and dumplings and meat dishes heavy with paprika. My great-grandmother was a tiny little thing, always in an apron, the wrinkles on her face deep and hardened. As the food bubbled on the stove, my brother and I listened, completely rapt, to Poppa’s thickly accented tales. Later, I’d drift off to sleep, wondering about the kind of strength it took to survive a prison camp, to march with your hands on the shoulders of the prisoner in front of you so that you could sleep standing up.

When Poppa had arrived in New Jersey with his family, they had nothing whatsoever. He found a job as a factory janitor at Johnson & Johnson, and over the next three decades he slowly worked his way up through the ranks of the company. By the time he retired, he’d become a senior research scientist, a number of patents in his name.

This house we sat in every Thursday, with its tidy lawn and middle-class comforts, was testament to Poppa’s success in America—proof that freedom and hard work made everything possible.

M
y Nana, my father’s mom, lived in a neighborhood where the air was rife with danger and the threat of crime; it was nothing like Poppa’s East Brunswick.

I never knew my paternal grandfather, who had left Nana and their five young kids to fend for themselves. Somehow Nana managed to support those kids working on cafeteria wages; she served meals in the dining hall at Rutgers University. Nana’s children stayed near to her, and then had their own kids. We cousins met up at Nana’s—sometimes fifteen of us all at once. We ran around screaming and shouting at each other, slamming doors as we tore around her apartment. When the chaos got to be too much, Nana called out, “Where’s my switch? I’m getting my switch.” Then she opened the back door, snapped off a branch from a scrubby bush growing outside her door, pulled off the leaves, and started waving the thing around. If we didn’t move fast, we’d feel that switch hitting the back of our legs. So we burst out of the house, running for our lives, this huge caravan of kids all scared to death of the strongest, toughest grandmother imaginable.

Still, for all her switch-waving, Nana seemed to have more
internal peace than anyone I’ve ever known. Nana’s life had been a hard one, yet she had a quiet calm, as if none of the troublesome things around her—the gang graffiti or worries about her kids or long hours scooping stew into bowls—could bring her down. That peace came from faith. Nana took us often to her church, Mount Zion African Methodist Episcopal in New Brunswick. It was one of those congregations where people seemed to take in the Holy Spirit with every breath, where the choir belted out gospel tunes for hours at a time, stretching their arms toward the sky. I was mesmerized by the sheer joyfulness of it all, by the voices uplifted in song, by the wildly dancing feet. It was so infectious I couldn’t stop myself from clapping along.

I was no stranger to churches. Mom’s family was Catholic, and my favorite night of the year was Christmas Eve. When I was little, I climbed up into my mother’s lap during midnight mass, drifting in and out of the service dreamily. Even as I grew older, I’d sit close to my mom, lean against her as I heard her voice singing that all was calm and all was bright. There was a such beauty to these Catholic services, a quiet reverence shrouded in mystery that to this day I can’t separate from the feeling of being protected and loved by my mother.

But Nana’s church was something altogether different—what with the dancing and shaking of tambourines, and people singing and calling out
Amens
and
Mmm-hmms
and
That’s rights
at the top of their lungs as Reverend Hooper stood at the front of the church, praying with outstretched hands.

I remember the first time I saw someone overtaken by the spirit there. It was an old woman who’d been dancing and singing like everyone else, until something strange began to come over her: her hands shook, then her arms, and soon her entire body.
Her mouth opened, and she began to wail in a kind of ecstasy, stretching her arms toward heaven. That’s when her wails turned into words—rapid-fire words like none I’d ever heard. It wasn’t my mom’s Hungarian, or any of the languages people spoke in Northwood Estates. It didn’t sound like an earthly language at all. She shouted up at the sky in what seemed to be a secret tongue known only to her and God.

I glanced nervously at Nana, but she wore a knowing smile on her lips.

“She’s caught the Holy Spirit,” Nana said.

Whatever this woman had caught, it was electric. It was pure. It was unlike anything I’d ever seen.

That was my New Jersey: Sikh immigrants and the sprawling lawns of Fox Hill Run. Hungarian paprikash, and scrappy games of pickup basketball. The force of Jimmy’s fist, and the sting of Nana’s switch. Pathmark coupons and flea markets and old ladies suddenly speaking in tongues. The idea that you could start a new life as a janitor, and bit by bit work your way up and into your own split-level in the heart of East Brunswick’s middle class.

New Jersey was promise. New Jersey was the American Dream. New Jersey was the world, and the world could be yours for the taking—all you had to do was show up, day after day, give it everything you had, and keep the faith.

It was in New Jersey that I first understood this: anything is possible.

If only you’d apply yourself, Tim . . .
You’re a good kid, but you lack ambition.
If only you worked as hard in the classroom as you do at sports . . .

I
wasn’t much of a student. Actually, that’s an understatement: I despised school. I couldn’t sit still, couldn’t focus, desperately wanted to be anywhere but at my desk.

Mom always said that as a baby, I’d been oddly alert to the environment around me, sounds and sensations somehow amplified. I screamed every time I was changed, because I hated the feel of cool air on my skin. I hollered when I was bathed; the water was either too warm or too cool. I didn’t sleep through the night until I was seven. Mom might spend hours getting me to sleep—playing Chuck Mangione records, stroking my face, trying in vain to help me calm down enough to close my eyes. When I finally did, she’d tiptoe out of the room, praying that I’d stay
asleep. Twenty minutes later, though, if a floorboard creaked or a faraway police siren sounded, my eyes popped open again.

I was terrified of heights. I startled easily. I was acutely sensitive to even slight changes in light. It was as if, Mom has always said, all my nerve endings were outside my body instead of tucked safely under my skin.

Nowhere did the environment around me feel more horrible than the classroom. I hated school, hated everything about it—the
tick tick
of the clock on the wall. The hum of the fluorescent lights overhead. The screech of chairs scraping across floors, the hardness of the seat beneath me.

And worse: all those long, long hours of sitting still.

I couldn’t understand how other kids tolerated it all like it didn’t even bother them. For me, the school day was unbearable.

I escaped the only way I knew how: I became the kid who raised his hand five, six, seven times a day, asking to go to the bathroom. When it wasn’t the bathroom, I’d say I needed to go see the nurse—not because there was anything physically wrong with me, but because anywhere, even the nurse’s office, was better than being stuck in the classroom. I’m pretty sure that the first record I ever set was Boy Most Likely to Leave the Classroom—and I wasn’t even in second grade yet.

“Oh, Tim,” my teachers would sigh when I squirmed in my seat or failed to answer a question. “If you’d only pay attention . . .”

I wasn’t a troublemaker. I wasn’t impertinent. The teachers liked me. But year after year, the comments on my report cards and summer-school forms basically came down to a single point, and it was 100 percent accurate: I seemed to get nothing whatsoever out of all those long hours I spent in the classroom. To me, the days at Arthur M. Judd Elementary School were just
something to be endured. They were what I had to do until I could burst into the open air and get to the things that really mattered: sports.