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Sam Damn
by John Sindell

I was Sam at birth, and my very first words were “Sam I am,” spoken on Mom’s lap as she pointed at my favorite book. But as soon as I toddled Dad dubbed me Champ for my heroic deeds with a plastic sword. I remained Champ in preschool, and the other kids bought it. It was not an exclusive preschool—Dad was overruled on preschool selection by Mom, the lone representative of the democratic impulse in our family—and my fellow toddlers absorbed their parents’ deference to Dad’s money and presence and deferred to me. I grabbed their toys with little resistance.

I remained Champ at my pricey day school—Mom’s influence had faded along with her health and the marriage—and the kids were too gentle to challenge the name. “Pampered princes,” Dad called those kids, holding his hands up as targets for huge boxing gloves that swallowed my hands. I strutted around school with my chest thrust out and my head erect, as my father did when he roamed his office looking like a Roman senator with his striated hair that looked carved from white marble. Other kids at Prentiss had nicknames too. There was Robert Wilson, a jaundiced, bloated kid we called SpongeBob, and Twist, a skinny little full– scholarship case whose real name was Oliver, who was taunted by the important boys for his sunken eyes and drawn cheeks and the sandwiches made from store–brand tuna fish on white bread that he ate every day.

*

When I was thirteen, Twist and SpongeBob and I walked over to an ice cream parlor on Fillmore near the housing projects. We were under the supervision of an English teacher with wild frizzy hair and a heavy gray coat who felt it would broaden our outlook to mix with all types. I bought a mint chocolate–chip cone for myself and a strawberry cone for Twist, who rewarded me with his usual monkey–hopping “Thanks, Champ!” routine. We took our cones to a park across the street while our teacher wrote poetry on a bench sufficiently distant to promote our independence. A group of five or six black boys a year or two older than us were lounging on a concrete wall nearby, and Twist said, much too loudly, “How’s your cone, Champ!”

The tallest kid hopped off the wall. “Is that your cone, Champ?”

“It’s in my hands,” I said with a smart smile.

“Ooo!” said another. “He dissed you, Darnell!”

“No, he didn’t. Champ wouldn’t diss me. Champ’s a champ! Right, Champ?”

“Chump,” said a voice.

“Can I see your cone?” said Darnell. Another boy said, “Can I see your wallet,” and reached toward my pocket in a tentative way. They had sliced through the gap between SpongeBob and Twist and were leaning in from every side. I half raised my hands as my father had taught me, but felt silly and unsure since one hand held a cone. “Ooo, Champ wants to fight!” said one guy. “Hey there, Champ, show us what you got!” A guy tapped the back of my head, and I turned and he grinned, and I turned back around to the one called Darnell, and he punched my mouth. Our teacher came clomping over in her chunky shoes, and the boys scattered like birds as blood from my mouth dripped onto my shirt and onto ice cream I’d lost to the ground.

The next day at school, Twist said, “How are you, Champ?” with utter sympathy in saucer–sized eyes. “Don’t ever call me that!” I said, and punched him hard in the shoulder. He never did again, nor did anyone else.

The teacher was fired at my father’s behest.

I withdrew into schoolwork and discovered biology. “I want to be a doctor,” I told Dad. He frowned contemplatively. “A fine field,” he said in the tone he used when appraising a business deal. “Very lucrative, especially in the specialties.” He looked down at me. “And of course helping people.” He bought me a legitimate first–aid kit, and when his girlfriend cut her finger slicing choice tuna for sashimi, he insisted that I dress the wound. She rested her slender hand on the marble top, and I stuck my tongue out the side of my mouth and cleaned the wound, and applied a gauze pad and secured it with tape. Dad appraised my work. “Not bad, Doc.” His girlfriend Christine, a tall, slender young Chinese women from his office, said, “Thank you, Doc,” with a smile that I interpret in recall as guardedly mocking.

I stayed Doc until eleventh grade, when a paid college counselor sat down with my dad and Christine, who was now my stepmom. Having considered my transcript and aptitude tests, and my years of lessons with private tutors, he had determined, he said with a philosophic chuckle, that medicine “might not be the best path for our young friend.”

“But—” I said, fighting back tears.

“Then what is?” asked my dad, his fingers intertwined with my stepmother’s fingers.

“He’s good with numbers,” the counselor said, based on an extremely liberal reading of my transcript.

Dad took me to his eighteenth–floor office. Christine, who had been Dad’s secretary and was now his general assistant, brought in cocktail glasses and ice and said, “I’ll leave you two men alone.” Dad poured one finger of whiskey for me and three for himself. “To the future,” he said. The drink burned my throat but I told Dad I liked it. Dad stood before the floor–to–ceiling window and pointed to properties that he owned a piece of. “See that office building?” he said. “And those luxury apartments out by the water? Those were all built by numbers. Amortization. Prime rate. Capital gains. Tax basis and triple net rent.” He raised his glass to me. “But there’s only one number that counts.” He appraised me narrowly. “That number is one. One like--Ace.” He winked at Ace, and clinked Ace’s glass.

With extra tutoring and post–midnight hours I managed to earn a low B in calculus. I was legacied into the Ivy League, then Dad bought my way into business school, then brought me back home to learn real estate development at the feet of the master. Like my father I dated my secretary, a beauty who gave flattering nicknames to “her private possession:” Iron Man. Redwood. Joystick. Big Boy. I bought her a Big Boy diamond in Carmel on a whim, and we took a honeymoon cruise to Mexico. The moon was so bright off Puerto Vallarta that we could see dolphins leaping in channels of moonlight.

Now I’m forty–four and bald. We have evictions, deals, firings, audits, lawyers, meetings, mountains of money. I eat due to stress, and pouches of fat surround my eyes. Hard–driving men who have made it on their own, lean, hard–jawed men, ambitious and aggressive, see weakness in my eyes and grin with contempt.

Karina, Karina, my beautiful wife, pretends she’s asleep when I reach for her waist, as she has done for years. She keeps a vibrator hidden in her lingerie drawer, and wears scooped–back gowns at the opera and smiles at men when she thinks I’m not looking. But we’ve got a pre–nup, so she’s not going anywhere—not with my son she isn’t.

Dad lingers with a dying liver and a full head of hair that mocks my baldness, and a still–lean jaw that mocks my soft chin, and an appraising eye that refuses to see the defeat in my eyes.

“Ace,” he says, frowning at the Bushmills in his glass. “Whiskey’s cut me down. Are you listening, Ace?”

“I’m Sam, god damn. I’m god damn Sam.”