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last. He likes that I’ve started swimming again, so maybe he’ll also like the house I bought (“Boy, they sure saw you coming”) or the sports coat I picked up on my last trip to Japan (“You look like a goddamn clown”).
    Greg Sakas would have got the same treatment eventually, as would any of the other would-be sons my father pitted me against throughout my adolescence. Once they got used to the sweet taste of his approval, he’d have no choice but to snatch it away, not because of anything they did but because it is in his nature. The guy sees a spark and just can’t help but stomp it out.
    I was in Las Vegas not long ago and looked up to see Donny Osmond smiling down at me from a billboard only slightly smaller than the sky. “You,” I whispered.
    In the hotel pool a few hours later, I thought of him as I swam my laps. Then I thought of Greg and was carried right back to the Raleigh Country Club. Labor Day, 1969. A big crowd for the intraclub meet, the air smelling of chlorine and smoke from the barbecue pit. The crummy part of swimming is that while you’re doing it you can’t really see much: the bottom of the pool, certainly, a smudged and fleeting bit of the outside world as you turn your head to breathe. But you can’t pick things out—a man’s face, for example, watching from the sidelines when, for the first time in your life, you pull ahead and win.

A Friend in the Ghetto
    I was in London, squinting out my kitchen window at a distant helicopter, when a sales rep phoned from some overseas call center. “Mr. Sedriz?” he asked. “Is that who I have the pleasure of addressing?” The man spoke with an accent, and though I couldn’t exactly place it, I knew that he was poor. His voice had snakes in it. And dysentery, and mangoes.
    “I am hoping this morning to interest you in a cell phone,” he announced. “But not just any cell phone! This one takes pictures that you can send to your friends.”
    “I’m sorry,” I told him. “But I don’t have any friends.”
    He chuckled. “No, but seriously, Mr. Sedriz, this new camera phone is far superior to the one you already have.”
    When I told him I didn’t already have one, he said, “All the better!”
    “No,” I said, “I don’t want one. I don’t need it.”
    “How can you not need a cell phone?”
    “Because nobody ever calls me?”
    “Well, how can they?” he argued.
    I told him I was fine with my landline.
    “But if you have a cell phone, people will look up to you,” he said. “I know this for a fact. Also it comes with a free trial period, so maybe you should think of it as a temporary gift!”
    Hugh would have hung up the moment his name was mispronounced, but I’ve never been able to do that, no matter how frustrated I get. There’s a short circuit between my brain and my tongue, thus “Leave me the fuck alone” comes out as “Well, maybe. Sure. I guess I can see your point.”
    This, though, was out of the question. “Listen,” I finally said. “You trying to give me a camera phone is like me trying to give you…a raccoon.”
    There was a pause, and when I realized he didn’t know what a raccoon was, I tried substituting it with a similar-sized animal that lived in a poor country. “Or a mongoose,” I said. “Or a…honey badger.”
    “I am going to send you this phone, Mr. Sedriz, and if you’re not happy you can return it with no penalty after three weeks.”
    “But that’s just it,” I said. “I won’t be happy. I won’t even take it out of the box, and what’s the point in receiving something I’ll only have to send back?”
    The man thought for a moment and sighed. “You, Mr. Sedriz, are down to the earth, and I appreciate that. I can see that you do not want a cell phone, but I did enjoy speaking with you. Do you think I could perhaps call you back one day? We do not have to discuss business but can talk about whatever you like.”
    “Well, sure,” I said. “That would be great.”
    The