For instance, he often reaches a thumb and forefinger inside his nostril and, bracing himself for the eye-watering pain, pulls out a thick bouquet of black nose hairs. This is how he grooms himself. In the same spirit, he shaves his face without soap or cream. He simply runs a disposable razor up and down his dry cheeks and jaw, shredding his skin, then letting the blood trickle down his face until it dries.
When stressed, when distracted, my father often stares off into space and mumbles: I love you, Margaret. I ask my mother one day: Who’s Pops talking to? Who’s Margaret?
My mother says that when my father was my age, he was skating on a pond and the ice cracked. He fell through and drowned—stopped breathing for a long time. He was pulled from the water and revived by a woman named Margaret. He’d never seen her before and never saw her again. But every so often he sees her in his mind, and speaks to her, and thanks her in his most tender voice. He says this vision of Margaret comes upon him like a seizure. He has no knowledge while it’s happening, and only a dim memory afterward.
Violent by nature, my father is forever preparing for battle. He shadowboxes constantly. He keeps an ax handle in his car. He leaves the house with a handful of salt and pepper in each pocket, in case he’s in a street fight and needs to blind someone. Of course some of his most vicious battles are with himself. He has chronic stiffness in his neck, and he’s perpetually loosening the neck bones by angrily twisting and yanking his head. When this doesn’t work he shakes himself like a dog, whipping his head from side to side until the neck makes a sound like popcorn popping. When even this doesn’t work, he resorts to the heavy punching bag that hangs from a harness outside our house. My father stands on a chair, removes the punching bag, and places his neck in the harness. He then kicks away the chair and drops a foot through the air, his momentum abruptly halted by the harness. The first time I saw him do this, I was walking through the rooms of the house. I looked up and there was my father, kicking the chair, hanging by his neck, his shoes three feet off the ground. I had no doubt he’d killed himself. I ran to him, hysterical.
Seeing the stricken look on my face, he barked: What the fuck is the matter with you?
Most of his battles, however, are against others, and they typically begin without warning, at the most unexpected times. In his sleep, for instance. He boxes in his dreams, and frequently hauls off and punches my dozing mother. In the car too. My father enjoys few things more than driving his green diesel Oldsmobile, singing along to his eight-track of Laura Branigan. But if another driver crosses him, if another driver cuts him off or objects to being cut off by my father, everything goes dark.
I’m driving with my father one day, going to Cambridge, and he gets into a shouting match with another driver. My father stops his car, steps out, orders the man out of his. Because my father is wielding his ax handle, the man refuses. My father whips the ax handle into the man’s headlights and taillights, sending sprays of glass everywhere.
Another time my father reaches across me and points his handgun at another driver. He holds the gun level with my nose. I stare straight ahead. I don’t move. I don’t know what the other driver has done wrong, only that it’s the automotive equivalent of hitting into the net. I feel my father’s finger tensing on the trigger. Then I hear the other driver speed away, followed by a sound I rarely hear—my father laughing. He’s busting a gut. I tell myself that I’ll remember this moment—my father laughing, holding a gun under my nose—if I live to be one hundred.
When he puts the gun back into the glove box and throws the car into drive, my father turns to me. Don’t tell your mother, he says.
I can’t imagine why he says this. What would my mother do if we told her? She never raises a word of protest. Does my father think there’s a first time for everything?
On a rare rainy day in Vegas, my father is driving me to pick up my mother at her office. I’m standing on my end of the bench seat, horsing around, singing. My father gets in the left lane to make a turn. A trucker honks at my father. My father apparently forgot to signal. My father gives the trucker the finger. His hand flies up so fast, it nearly hits my face. The trucker yells something. My father lets fly a stream of curses. The trucker stops, opens his door. My father stops, jumps out.
I crawl into the backseat and watch through the back window. The rain is falling harder. My father approaches the trucker. The trucker throws a punch. My father ducks, deflects the punch with the top of his head, then throws a blazingly fast combination, ending with an uppercut. The trucker is lying on the pavement. He’s dead—I’m sure of it. If he’s not dead, he soon will be, because he’s in the middle of the road and someone will run him over. My father gets back in the car and we peel away. I stay in the backseat, watching the trucker through the back window, rain pelting his unconscious face. I turn to see my father, mumbling, throwing combinations against the steering wheel. Just before we pick up my mother he looks down at his hands, clenches and unclenches his fists to make sure the knuckles aren’t broken. Then he looks in the backseat, directly into my eyes, though it feels as if he’s seeing Margaret. Somewhat tenderly he says, Don’t tell your mother.
Such moments, and many more, come to mind whenever I think about telling my father that I don’t want to play tennis. Besides loving my father, and wanting to please him, I don’t want to upset him. I don’t dare. Bad stuff happens when my father is upset. If he says I’m going to play tennis, if he says I’m going to be number one in the world, that it’s my destiny, all I can do is nod and obey. I would advise Jimmy Connors or anyone else to do the same.
THE ROAD TO NUMBER ONE goes over Hoover Dam. When I’m almost eight years old my father says the time has come to move from backyard sessions with the dragon and hit-arounds at Cambridge to actual tournaments, against real live little boys, all over Nevada and Arizona and California. Every weekend the whole family piles into the car and drives, either north on U.S. 95, toward Reno, or south, through Henderson and over Hoover Dam, across the desert to Phoenix or Scottsdale or Tucson. The last place I want to be, other than a tennis court, is in a car with my father. But it’s all settled. I’m condemned to divide my childhood between these two boxes.
I win my first seven tournaments in the ten-and-under bracket. My father has no reaction. I’m simply doing what I’m supposed to do. Driving back over Hoover Dam, I stare at all the water bottled up behind the massive wall. I look at the inscription on the base of the flagpole: In honor of those men who, inspired by a vision of lonely lands made fruitful… I turn this phrase over in my mind. Lonely lands. Is there a land lonelier than our house in the desert? I think about the rage bottled up in my father, like the Colorado River inside the Hoover Dam. Only a matter of time before it bursts. Nothing to do but scramble for high ground.
For me, that means winning. Always winning.
We go to San Diego. Morley Field. I play a kid named Jeff Tarango, who isn’t nearly on my level. But he wins the first set, 6–4. I’m stunned. Scared. My father is going to kill me. I bear down, win the second set, 6–0. Early in the third set Tarango twists his ankle. I start drop-shotting him, trying to make him run on the bad ankle. But he’s only faking. His ankle is fine. He comes bounding in and smashes my drop shots and wins every point.
My father screams from the stands: No more drop shots! No more drops!
But I can’t help myself. I have a strategy, I’m sticking with it.
We go to a tiebreak. It’s best-of-nine. Back and forth we trade points, until it’s 4–all. Here it is. Sudden death. One point for the whole match. I’ve never lost and can’t imagine what my father’s reaction will be if I do. I play as if my life hangs in the balance, which it does. Tarango must have a father like mine, because he’s playing the same way.
I haul off and rope a fizzing backhand crosscourt. I hit it as a rally shot but it comes off my racket bigger and hotter than I intended. It’s a screaming winner, three feet in but well beyond Tarango’s reach. I howl in triumph. Tarango, s
tanding in the center of the court, bows his head and seems to cry. Slowly he walks toward the net.
Now he stops. All of a sudden, he looks back at where the ball hit. He smiles.
Out, he says.
I stop.
The ball was out! Tarango yells.
This is the rule in juniors. Players act as their own linesmen. Players call balls in or out, and there is no appeal. Tarango has decided he’d rather do this than lose, and he knows there’s nothing anyone can do about it. He raises his hands in victory.
Now I start to cry.
Bedlam breaks out in the stands, parents arguing, shouting, nearly coming to blows. It’s not fair, it’s not right, but it’s reality. Tarango is the winner. I refuse to shake his hand. I run away into Balboa Park. When I return half an hour later, all cried out, my father is furious. Not because I disappeared, but because I didn’t do what he said during the match.
Why didn’t you listen to me? Why did you keep hitting drop shots?
For once I’m not afraid of my father. No matter how angry he is with me, I’m angrier. I’m furious with Tarango, with God, with myself. Even though I feel Tarango cheated me, I shouldn’t have put him in a position to cheat me. I shouldn’t have let the match get that close. Because I did, I’ll now have a loss on my record—forever. Nothing can ever change it. I can’t endure the thought, but it’s inescapable: I’m fallible. Blemished. Imperfect. A million balls hit against the dragon—for what?
After years of hearing my father rant at my flaws, one loss has caused me to take up his rant. I’ve internalized my father—his impatience, his perfectionism, his rage—until his voice doesn’t just feel like my own, it is my own. I no longer need my father to torture me. From this day on, I can do it all by myself.
2
MY FATHER’S MOTHER lives with us. She’s a nasty old lady from Tehran with a wart the size of a walnut on the edge of her nose. Sometimes you can’t hear a word she’s saying because you can’t take your eyes off that wart. But it doesn’t matter, she’s surely saying the same nasty things she said yesterday, and the day before, and probably saying them to my father. This seems to be the reason Grandma was put on earth, to harass my father. He says she nagged him when he was a boy and often beat him. When he was extra bad, she made him wear hand-me-down girl clothes to school. That’s why he learned to fight.
If she’s not pecking at my father, the old lady is squawking about the old country, sighing about the folks she left behind. My mother says Grandma is homesick. The first time I hear this word I ask myself, How can you be sick about not being home? Home is where the dragon lives. Home is the place where, when you go there, you have to play tennis.
If Grandma wants to go back home, I’m all for it. I’m only eight, but I’ll drive her to the airport myself, because she causes more tension in a house that doesn’t need one bit more. She makes my father miserable, she bosses me and my siblings around, and she engages in a strange competition with my mother. My mother tells me that when I was a baby, she walked into the kitchen and found Grandma breastfeeding me. Things have been awkward between the two women ever since.
Of course, there is one good thing about Grandma living with us. She tells stories about my father, about his childhood, and this sometimes gets my father reminiscing, causes him to open up. If not for Grandma we wouldn’t know much about my father’s past, which was sad and lonely and helps explain his odd behavior and boiling rage. Sort of.
Oh, Grandma says with a sigh, we were poor. You can’t imagine how poor. And hungry, she says, rubbing her belly. We had no food—also, no running water, no electricity. And not a stick of furniture.
Where did you sleep?
We slept on the dirt floor! All of us in one tiny room! In an old apartment house built around a filthy courtyard. In one corner of the courtyard was a hole—that was the toilet for all the tenants.
My father chimes in.
Things got better after the war, he says. Overnight, the streets were filled with British and American soldiers. I liked them.
Why did you like the soldiers?
They gave me candy and shoes.
They also gave him English. The first word my father learned from the GIs was victory. That’s all they talked about, he says. Wictory.
Whoa, were they big, he adds. And strong. I followed them everywhere, watching them, studying them, and one day I followed them to the place where they spent all their free time—a park in the woods with two clay tennis courts.
There were no fences around the courts, so the ball would go bouncing away every few seconds. My father would run after the ball and bring it back to the soldiers, like a puppy dog, until finally they made him their unofficial ball boy. Then they made him the official court custodian.
My father says: Every day I swept and watered and combed the courts with a heavy roller. I painted the lines white. What a job that was! I had to use chalk water.
How much did they pay you?
Pay? Nothing! They gave me a tennis racket. It was a piece of junk. An old wooden thing strung with steel wire. But I loved it. I spent hours with that racket, hitting a tennis ball against a brick wall, alone.
Why alone?
No one else in Iran played tennis.
The only sport that could offer my father a steady supply of opponents was boxing. His toughness was tested first in one street fight after another, and then as a teenager he strode into a gym and set to work learning formal boxing techniques. A natural, the trainers called him. Quick with his hands, light on his feet—and he had a grudge against the world. His rage, so hard for us to deal with, was an asset in the squared circle. He won a spot on the Iranian Olympic team, boxing in the bantamweight division, and went to the 1948 Games in London. Four years later he went to the Games in Helsinki. He didn’t do well at either.
The judges, he grumbles. They were crooked. The whole thing was fixed, rigged. The world was very biased against Iran.
My father, Mike, as a scrappy eighteen-year-old bantamweight in Tehran
But my son, he adds—maybe they will make tennis an Olympic sport once again, and my son will win a gold medal, and that will make up for it.
A little extra pressure to go with my everyday pressure.
After seeing a bit of the world, after being an Olympian, my father couldn’t return to that same single room with the dirt floor, so he snuck out of Iran. He doctored his passport and booked a flight under an assumed name to New York City, where he spent sixteen days on Ellis Island, then took a bus to Chicago, where he Americanized his name. Emmanuel became Mike Agassi. By day he worked as an elevator operator at one of the city’s grand hotels. By night he boxed.
His coach in Chicago was Tony Zale, the fearless middleweight champ, often called the Man of Steel. Famous for his part in one of the sport’s bloodiest rivalries, a three-bout saga with Rocky Graziano, Zale lauded my father, told him he had tons of raw talent, but pleaded with him to hit harder. Hit harder, Zale would scream at my father as he peppered the speed bag. Hit harder. Every punch you throw, throw it from the floor up.
With Zale in his corner my father won the Chicago Golden Gloves, then earned a prime-time fight at Madison Square Garden. His big break. But on fight night my father’s opponent fell ill. The promoters scrambled, trying to find a substitute. They found one, all right—a much better boxer, and a welterweight. My father agreed to the fight, but moments before the opening bell he got the shakes. He ducked into a bathroom, crawled out the window above the toilet, then took the train back to Chicago.
Sneaking out of Iran, sneaking out of the Garden—my father is an escape artist, I think. But there’s no escaping him.
My father says that when he boxed, he always wanted to take a guy’s best punch. He tells me one day on the tennis court: When you know that you just took the other guy’s best punch, and you’re still standing, and the other guy knows it, you will rip the heart right out of him. In tennis, he says, same rule. Attack the other man’s strengt
h. If the man is a server, take away his serve. If he’s a power player, overpower him. If he has a big forehand, takes pride in his forehand, go after his forehand until he hates his forehand.
My father has a special name for this contrarian strategy. He calls it putting a blister on the other guy’s brain. With this strategy, this brutal philosophy, he stamps me for life. He turns me into a boxer with a tennis racket. More, since most tennis players pride themselves on their serve, my father turns me into a counterpuncher—a returner.
· · ·
EVERY ONCE IN A WHILE my father gets homesick too. He especially misses his oldest brother, Isar. Someday, he vows, your uncle Isar will sneak out of Iran, like I did.
But first Isar needs to sneak out his money. Iran is falling apart, my father explains. Revolution is brewing. The government is teetering. That’s why they’re watching everyone, making sure people don’t drain their bank accounts and flee. Uncle Isar, therefore, is slowly, secretly converting his cash to jewels, which he then hides in packages he sends us in Vegas. It feels like Christmas every time a brown-wrapped box from Uncle Isar arrives. We sit on the living-room floor and cut the string and tear the paper and shriek when we find, hidden under a tin of cookies or inside a fruitcake, diamonds and emeralds and rubies. Uncle Isar’s packages arrive every few weeks, and then one day comes a much larger package. Uncle Isar. Himself. On the doorstep, smiling down.
You must be Andre.
Yes.
I’m your uncle.
He reaches out and touches my cheek.
He’s the mirror image of my father, but his personality is the exact opposite. My father is shrill and stern and filled with rage. Uncle Isar is soft-spoken and patient and funny. He’s also a genius—he was an engineer back in Iran—so he helps me every night with my homework. Such a relief from my father’s tutoring sessions. My father’s way of teaching is to tell you once, then tell you a second time, then shout at you and call you an idiot for not getting it the first time. Uncle Isar tells you, then smiles and waits. If you don’t understand, no problem. He tells you again, more softly. He has all the time in the world.