The Patriots Made a Man of Me, in a Manner of Speaking

I embarked on an intense weight-lifting routine, for example, and returned to the kind of swimming I once had done competitively. My body went from the poverty-induced proportions that had inspired a couple to solicit me as a hooker on Hollywood Boulevard (I thought they wanted directions) to a build that was more rugged, more imposing. Maybe I also incorporated some bad-guy-like behavior—open scratching, audible burping, a more earthy sensibility—but that was just icing. These transformations were more natural than they sound, which is why I didn’t wonder at all when I began tuning in Sunday afternoons. Watching football was an aberrant manifestation of my already aberrant condition.

That’s when a strange and unexpected thing happened. As a result of my more masculine disposition, men started liking me—straight men, I mean—and at last I was ushered into that foreign land of guydom whose borders had been long closed to me.

In my second N.F.L. season, I showed up at family gatherings and found myself contributing quiet gems of football statistics, rumors, and insider knowledge. I had signed up for the Patriots’s listserv by then and read all the hyperlinked articles, so I knew Tom Brady’s quarterback rating (and also that if a “big guy” like him could highlight his hair, so could my cousin). I knew the answer when somebody who assumed he was more alpha would frustratingly snap his fingers looking for the right player to prove his point. With these small displays, I suddenly found arms around my shoulders and myself in corners of rooms inside a familial huddle that included other men. I was becoming more fluent in their language, though they had yet to speak mine.

Fast forward to the beginning of my third N.F.L. season, this one. I was over at Lynn’s sister’s house, where I still hung out now and then. Her brother-in-law and I were scraping paint outside, shirtless but wearing lead-filtering biohazard masks and listening to heavy metal. Still, although I’d made strides in my acquisition of malespeak, he and I were not talking. I was enduring yet again that awkward man-with-man silence I so longed to break out of, when suddenly, from behind his mask, came a question. And not just any question. A football question: “You think the Patriots are ever going to solve their running game?”

I teetered on my ladder for a second. Did this guy—a construction worker and a rabid Pittsburgh Steelers fan, he of the numerous football magazine subscriptions and full N.F.L. cable package—really just ask me that?

“I think we did solve the running game,” I said, swaggering down the ladder for a drink of water. “We got Corey Dillon, and he’s going to be a thousand-yard rusher, trust me. And I hear Brady worked on his arm all summer. They’re not going to be the dink-and-dunk team they had to be last year. Plus, they’re the defending champs.”

The Metallica song faded out, and during the lull made by the idle guitar licks and silenced vocal rage, he said: “How’s your novel anyway? I always mean to ask; it’s just, with all this stuff I’ve been dealing with, well, you know.”

“It’s good. I mean, it’s coming.”

I had long finished the water in my mug, but I faked sips to stall for time and strategy as to what to say next. I had a feeling he was doing the same. We pointed our gazes in multiple directions: the ladybug on the boom box, one of their dogs in the shade, the tire swing that still held the rain from two days before.

“How about the baby?” I asked him. “How’s that going?”

He shook his head and inhaled deeply. They’d been trying for a while, and the struggle hung over the house like some Greek curse. “I don’t know. Do I really want to bring another life into this world?”

His question was less the luxuriant musing of an expectant parent than the sad weariness of a long-denied one.

I put down my mug and fixed on him. “Tell me why you want to be a father.”

And, much to my surprise, he did. He talked about the influence one individual can have on a human and how a parent’s role must be to ensure that influence begets a humanity. He mentioned the tough years he had experienced in school and explained what kind of education he envisioned for his son or daughter—a mind that was less trained than open and a spirit that overruled the cultural values he deplored today: ambition, selfishness, and indifference.

“You know,” he said, suddenly realizing he had been holding the floor for a while. “It’s really nice to talk like this.” Then he laughed. “It’s not standard fare at the construction site.”

I laughed back. He and I had traveled across our respective boundaries; we’d been both natives and tourists, and we’d found common ground at last.

These days, I have a passable Manglish—I seek out every opportunity to use it—but you can tell I still have an accent. This Christmas, when I received DVDs of the Patriots’s previous Super Bowl seasons from Lynn’s brother-in-law, I said I hoped there would be lots of interviews with the telegenic Mr. Brady. He just smiled.

Ah, well. With this Super Bowl, I like to think that between the nachos and flan, I’ll be able to offer a couple more guys a place to be both a native and a tourist. A place to speak the languages that are, in fact, innate to all men. Somewhere that’s the best of both worlds.