Free Home Game by Michael Lewis Page B

found one, but he lived six hours away. He was on his way, but he’d be late.
    You had to admire the commitment. In six hours you can get from our house in Berkeley to Reno, Nevada. Some poor guy who lived, in effect, in Reno had tossed his Mickey Mouse costume in the trunk of his car in the wee hours of that morning and was now hauling ass across the country to humor a room full of three-year-olds. And he wasn’t even the real Mickey Mouse. He was an understudy.
    An hour or so later Quinn was off on one side of a large deck playing with a dollhouse. The other kids and adults mingled on the other side. I was munching a raw carrot and glancing across the deck every four seconds to ensure Quinn hadn’t fallen off. Suddenly, onto the deck, between Quinn and everyone else, burst Mickey Mouse. He wore all the official gear. But still there was something off about him. In the first place, he wasn’t alone. Trailing him was a ghoulish assistant, clutching balloons and sweating so profusely that one of the children turned to his mother and said, “Mommy, the man went swimming!” Together the two of them looked as if they had jogged, not driven, from Reno.
    But the real problem was Mickey himself. He wasn’t the cute little Mickey you think of when you think of Mickey Mouse. He was a large man, stuffed into a small costume that didn’t quite fit. His giant mouse head tilted this way then that, as if partially severed. His white gloves failed to disguise the thick black hair on the backs of his hands. Even his black mouse slacks looked to be loaners; bending over hurriedly to greet the first child he saw, he flashed a rear, vertical smile. The first child he saw was Quinn.
    I tried to imagine this scene from Quinn’s point of view. The fact is that while she had pretended to be delighted that she was going to meet Mickey Mouse, she had never actually heard of the creature. God knows what she thought she was getting into, but it wasn’t a six-foot rodent with a greaseball sidekick. Instantly—so quickly that Mickey didn’t have a chance to lay his hairy mitts on her—her face dissolved in terror and she began to scream. Not a playful scream. A Janet Leigh in the shower in Psycho scream. I raced across the deck, clutched her in my arms, and spent the next five minutes consoling her. When she’d calmed down she squirmed away from me and ran into the house.
    â€œWhere are you going?” I hollered after her.
    â€œTo find Mickey Mouse!” she said.
    For the next hour or so she enjoyed Mickey Mouse in a way that was new to me and I assume also to Mickey. Mickey Mouse, to Quinn, was not an endearing character. He was a serial killer. This was Disney with a twist of lime. She’d sneak right up to him and then, when he noticed her, dash away screaming bloody murder. It was strange to see. Her mother and father can’t bear scary movies, and I’ll bet money that when she grows up she won’t like them, either. But in her current state of mind she likes nothing more than the toddler equivalent of a horror flick. If she weren’t so much like every other small child, she’d be considered insane.

ONE OF THE many surprising things to me about fatherhood is how it has perverted my attitude toward risk. It is true that there are many kinds of risk—emotional, social, financial, physical. But I can’t think of any I enjoy taking more than I did before I had children—unless you count the mere fact of having children as a kind of celebration of emotional risk. Otherwise, I’m rapidly becoming a wimp. There are little risk-averse things I do now that I never did before and little risk-averse feelings that I have now that I never had before. To wit:
    Item: The other night Tabitha and I went to see Minority Report. It’s the sort of movie that just a few years ago I would have cheered and Tabitha would have at least tolerated. But in the middle of the