E-Male
Two Days Off

     I stick my head into Howard's office at 4:30. "If it's OK I'd like to duck out a couple minutes early," I say, "and head to the hospital." Howard is a hell of a guy. He has a son; the boy is in the navy, near Iraq.

"Have fun," Howard says. "Tell Alex I said hello."

     On the A train to the hospital, I feel like I'm headed to a date: that panting tingle when every minute brings you closer to feeling something that you feel nowhere else and with no one else. At the desk of the hospital lobby I announce myself to the guard: "I'm here to see my son Alex." A crowd funnels into the one elevator and the doors rattle closed, and the thing stops at every floor on the rise to 11.

     In his room a woman is sweeping the floor and smiles at me. Daddy's here, she thinks. It's beginning to dawn on me what women think of a guy who spends nine months leaning over a metal crib and saying "Who's daddy's little guy?"

     There's the crib -- no doctors, thank God -- and the lights are off. Someone has tipped Tinky-Winky onto his side, and the doll's legs hold up the heavy plastic air tubes behind my son's head. Alex is asleep, dressed in gray with little white animals, his legs making a fine diamond that meets at the toes of his blue Old Navy socks.

     Does Alex know who's here? The man who would be dad, the endlessly older man to be loved and even worshipped until about the year 2010? A hero who will gradually degenerate into an unreasonable pain-in-the-ass lording it over access to the Internet and, later, the car keys? I don't know. I know that I'm here, Alex is here, and there's one thing to say.

"Eh-oh, Awecks. Eh-ho!"