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cornbread and makes fat omelets packed with slabs of Velveeta in her iron skillet, but she has been borderline senile and hunchbacked for as long as I’ve known her. Unable to keep us “rascals” straight, Gramma ends up hiding a cheat sheet next to her chair, stuffed in her eyeglass case. An investigative journalist in the making, one day I find a piece of notebook paper, on which what appears to be her attempt at listing us Baker boys in the correct birth order:
    Kevin ✓
    Keith ✓
    Kyle ✓
    Kenny ✓
    Kris ✓
    Kevin, the oldest of the Baker boys, is the inaugural draftee into Dad’s manhood military. Unfortunately—for Kevin and Dad—Kevin isn’t a good soldier. Kevin butts heads with Dad over his hard-ass parenting methods. In the summertime, I often watch Dad play catch with his eldest son till dusk, coaching him on his baseball technique. How to pitch a curveball, a sinker, a knuckleball. How to field a pop fly. How to pick off a guy on first base. How to steal second.
    Dad sometimes teaches with great patience. I feel then like we are one of those happy TV families where the dad is a kindhearted, unconditionally loving gentleman and the sons are compliant and respectful. Just as often, though, Dad’s coaching sessions degenerate into a shouting match between two hardheads.
    One time Kevin, who was twelve, complained that his throwing arm was getting sore.
    â€œLet’s take a break, Dad,” Kevin whined.
    Dad has always hated whiners. He rocketed the ball even harder into Kevin’s glove, punctuating his bullet by saying, “I’ve been working my ass off all day, and I’m not tired.”
    Kevin dropped his mitt down and stomped toward the house. Dad chased after Kevin, shouting into his face, “Quitter!”
    Kevin—surprise, surprise—soon goes AWOL from my father’s army and drops out of organized sports altogether. He decides he instead wants to be the lead guitarist in a rock band. Ted Nugent, not Ted Williams, becomes his idol.
    Kevin takes me and Kyle to a Kiss concert at the dry-ice-shrouded Buffalo Memorial Auditorium. As Gene Simmons is spitting blood onto the audience, I sneak a glimpse of Kevin puffing on a joint and handing it back to a girl sitting in the row in front of us.
Holy . . . shit! That is so illegal.
“If you breathe in deep,” he shouts to me over the music, “you can catch a contact buzz.” I am nine years old.
    Kevin has spent his teens growing things—his hair, midway down his back, and a forest of marijuana plants in his basement closet under a heat lamp, just as he read about it in
High Times.
Dad never finds the plants or the magazines. Kevin is lucky: Dad probably would cut his balls off if he ever knew that his son was growing the best copycat Colombian in western New York right below his bedroom.
    Keith, who is christened Dad’s favorite until he follows in what Dad calls Kevin’s “druggie footsteps” in his early teens and starts having sex, smoking pot, dropping acid and skipping school, ends up officially on Dad’s so-called shit list the year he quits baseball.
    Kyle, a year older than me, possesses a personality 180 degrees opposite of mine. Despite being a year apart, we have very different relationships with our father.
    Dad has never been Mr. Affection with any of us. We never got a good-night peck on the cheek (that was Mom’s job). Out of our hundreds of childhood photos, never is Dad pictured hugging or kissing any of us. In fact, the most intimate photo is from when I am three, standing shirtless on the beach holding a fishing pole after having just caught a fish. Dad is resting his arm on me, his wrist awkwardly curled around my upper arm as if he’s hugging Pig Pen.
    The only time I’ve ever heard of Dad changing a diaper was when he had to baby-sit me and Kyle, who was about two years old. As the family legend goes, my