The Boys of Summer (4 page)

The two men chattered on and it began to seem less strange, my father talking to a toothless man without a jacket. The Dodgers would finish a poor fifth. The Braves would fire Ruth and finish last. But amid the spellbinding conversation of grown men, these inglorious teams transfixed me. What did it matter, Babe Ruth or Jersey Joe Stripp? If vector analysis was beyond me, I could still watch a ball game. I studied Stripp and Frenchy Bordagaray and Buzz Boyle and Tony Cuccinello. Stripp flagged a line drive backhand. That was something. He dove and reached across his body for the ball and rolled over twice and didn’t drop it. My father and I and the straw-hatted man jumped up and cheered together. In the dead sunlight of a forgotten spring the major leaguers were trim, graceful and effortless. They might even have been gods for these seemed true Olympians to a boy who wanted to become a man and who sensed that it was an exalted manly thing to catch a ball with one hand thrust across your body and make a crowd leap to its feet and cheer.

Now the streets beckoned and ball games ruled streets before the automobile pandemic. Interminable, fierce, ingenious improvisations were set on asphalt every afternoon. Stickball is famous. Willie Mays played stickball, and Duke Snider maintains that never, not even the year that he hit .341 for the Dodgers, could he match locals at stickball in his summer neighborhood, Bay Ridge. “I couldn’t hit the damn thing with the damn skinny broomstick,” Snider says. You needed a stick and a red rubber ball manufactured by Spalding, sold for ten cents and called, no one knew why, the Spal
deen
. The pitcher threw the Spaldeen on one bounce at a manhole-cover home place, and by pinching the ball, “fluking it” we said, he made the bounce eccentric. You could run up and swing the light stick like a whip, but you looked ridiculous if you whipped the stick and the squeezed ball fluked into your chest. A ball walloped to a roof was lost, so on the roof was out. Stickball produced centerfield hitters, who had seldom touched a bat, could not recognize
a curve, but with broomsticks were murder against fluked Spaldeens.

If there were no sticks, or if the police were running one of their sporadic campaigns against stickball (“Now look, son, you could hurt a
lady
hittin’ one hard with a stick”), there was punch ball. The police tolerated punch ball. Somewhere, in the windy heights of Fiorello H. La Guardia’s administration, a command decision had been taken. Attention: All Precinct Commanders, Desk Sergeants, Undercover Men. Calling All Cars. Punch Ball is Okay. Legal, even on St. Marks Place, Brooklyn West. But no stickball. Repeat. No stickball. Stickball is forbidden. Be on the alert for stickball players, particularly in the area of St. Marks Place. Be prepared to seize sticks. Use necessary force. A kid could hurt a
lady
hittin’ one hard with a stick.

The stick was crucial. Punch ball was not much of a game because you couldn’t punch a ball very far without Popeye forearms. Slapball, played in a chalked triangle, was delicate. Girls played slapball. Sometimes, you threw a Spaldeen against the white cement steps of 907 St. Marks. In stoop baseball, a Spaldeen rebounding safely from the steps to the street was a single or a double; a rebound reaching the far sidewalk was a triple. One carrying clear into Mrs. Beale’s yard was a home run, but perilous. Mrs. Beale always called the precinct. Attention Cars Eleven, Eight and Four. Proceed at once to Kingston and St. Marks. Boys playing stoop baseball. Spaldeen has landed in Mrs. Beale’s privet. Break up game. Confiscate Spaldeen. Be careful of hedge. Watch crocuses, Cars Eleven, Eight and Four. That is all.

In alleys safe from the prowl cars we played pitching-in, the only street game really close to baseball. The hitter held a stick. The pitcher threw a tennis ball, from which the fuzz had been shaved, at a chalk rectangle behind the hitter. A good pitcher made the shorn tennis ball jump, and a killer pitch was the high
overhand curve. It passed the batter above the brows, then dropped down into the rectangle for a strike. If the tennis ball struck you, it stung briefly, but no one was afraid of a tennis ball. That was all the difference. Soft dream and hard reality. Once hit by a real baseball, a boy (or man) crumpled.

Bleacher seats at Ebbets Field cost fifty-five cents. You sat in the upper deck behind center field and felt right in the game when you shouted at Goody Rosen, “Come on, Goody, get a hit, get a little
bingle,
next time up.” (“Yeah, Rosen,” called a blackeyed, black-haired Irishman, “bring home the bacon for Jakey.”) Rosen heard. At least he heard the Irishman. You could see Rosen’s shoulders stiffen. Then he spat.

If you had $1.10, you bought a general-admission ticket and sat almost anywhere. Weekdays, when crowds were light, you worked your way so close to the dugout that you could glimpse ball players’ faces. Goody Rosen had a short pug nose. It might have been flattened in a fight.

Without money, you could still assault the ball park. In the deepest corner of right center field, 399 feet from home plate, the concrete wall gave way to two massive iron doors, called collectively the Exit Gate. The base of the doors did not come flush against the ground. Lying prone on the slanting sidewalk of Bedford Avenue, you looked under a crack, twice as wide as an eyeball, and saw center field, left field and two-thirds of the infield. First base lay beyond the sight line, but if you cared enough, you learned to tell whether the man was safe at first by the reactions of the other players. If a man was out at first base, nobody ran to cover second. You had no choice but to learn the game. A sidewalk position was comfortable, except when wind lifted dirt from the outfield and swirled it under the gate and into your eyes, or a policeman poked a shoe into your ribs and said, “On yer feet. Move.” Then you muttered, “Weren’t you ever a kid yourself?” And you moved, sometimes to a garage roof across Bedford Avenue. The garageman, an enormous but
agile Italian, barred the direct route, so you climbed another building and then, at a height of thirty feet, leaped an alleyway that was four feet wide. I did it once, noticing in flight that the alley was paved in pebbled concrete. From the garage roof you could see the entire infield and a third of the outfield, which would have been satisfactory had I not been nagged by the idea that I was going to have to make that jump again. The alley paving was not merely hard. It was rough. If you fell, pebbled imprints would stipple an entire side of your body. In the fifth inning of a Dodger-Pittsburgh game, I sneaked down the ladder to the garage and, while the garageman spoke with a customer, I fled, hearing behind me, “Go wan, run, ya big-nosed little bastard. Ya sheenies wanna own the world.” Anything, even anti-Semitism, was better than trying that leap again, and after a while I made a friend at 200 Montgomery Street. His roof was almost as good a viewing place as the garage, and more congenial.

These adventures helped make plausible the idea of becoming a professional ball player. Ebbets Field was always in reach. There were obstacles—money, the policeman’s shoe, a leap, the greasy garageman—but a boy could contend with them and triumph, if he had wit and persistence and a touch of courage. It was easy and absolutely irrational to relate getting to
see
a Dodger game with getting to
be
a Dodger. Which, in the fine irrationality of boyhood, is what generations of Brooklyn children did.

“Find the tennis ball,” Gordon Kahn suggested. “Let’s catch. You’ve got a hitch in your throw I want to work on.”

We repaired to the long hall.

“Reach back; reach. You want to zip it.”

“Gore-don! Is that child playing ball in the hall again? He should be reading.”

Olga again was exorcising Philistinism. She thrust forward
Little Stories of the Great Musicians,
a large yellow book with “full color” illustrations. “When Franz Josef Haydn conducted at the Court of Esterhazy, he noticed that many of the nobles were dropping off to sleep right in the middle of his symphonies. Well, thought Papa Haydn, placing a hand to his powdered gray wig, I think I shall compose another symphony that will give all the lords and ladies a
surprise!”

“Hey, Dad. Whosa better fielder? Cookie Lavagetto or Joe Stripp?”

“Comparisons are nefarious,” Gordon Kahn said.

“Please, God,” said Olga, who aspired toward atheism, “let him become interested in a book. One book. Please.
Any
book.”

Her large eyes gazed on the off-white ceiling toward Yahweh. And soon, in His infinite humor, the Lord God of Yisroel placed in my hands a book that enslaved me.
Pitching in a Pinch,
bound in dun, published in 1912, was a memoir written (with help) by Christy Mathewson, who, say the canons of legend, is “the greatest pitcher ever to toe the mound.” It appeared one day on a high shelf among botany guidebooks and novels by Frank Norris and Michael Arlen. “A relic of my own boyhood,” Gordon Kahn said, and he fetched
Pitching in a Pinch
and displayed a photograph of “Ty Cobb, the Georgia Peach, sliding. Note spikes high.” Interested in a book? I was overcome.
Pitching in a Pinch
became my constant companion. No one has ever read a baseball book harder or for more hours of a day or with such single-mindedness. I read nothing else, no Dickens, no Twain, no Swift. Mathewson (with help) created a baseball world that added humor to the earnest and heavy baseball cosmos of my fantasy.

In
Pitching in a Pinch
, Johnny Evers of the Chicago Cubs studied “deaf-and-dumb sign language” after learning that John McGraw, who managed Mathewson and the Giants, was using it to flash signals. But Evers, “no match for McGraw, threw a finger out of joint in a flash of repartee.” According to Mathewson,
Silk O’Loughlin, “the umpire who invented strike tuh,” always kept his pants so perfectly pressed that “players were afraid to slide when Silk was close for fear they’d bump against the trousers and cut themselves.” Jinxes caused bad luck and “seeing a cross-eyed lady” brought about a jinx of terrible power. To kill an ordinary jinx, “you spit in your hat,” “but when a cross-eyed girl fell in love with one of the Giants and began going to the ball park every day, McGraw told the Romeo to find another Juliet—or go back to the minors.” Mathewson’s opening to Chapter Ten, “Notable Instances Where the Inside Game Has Failed,” was a particular favorite.

There is an old story about an altercation which took place during a wedding ceremony in the backwoods of the Virginia Mountains. The discussion started over the propriety of the best man holding the ring and by the time it had been finally settled the bride gazed around on a dead bridegroom, a dead father, a dead best man, not to mention three or four very dead ushers and a clergyman.

“Them new fangled self cockin’ automatic guns has sure raised hell with my prespects,” she sighed.

That’s the way I felt when John Franklin Baker popped that home run into the right-field stands in the ninth inning of the third game of the 1911 World Series with one man already out. For eight and one-third innings the Giants had played “inside” ball, and I had carefully nursed along every batter who came to the plate, studying his weakness and pitching it. It looked as if we were going to win the game, and then zing! And also zowie! The ball went into the stand on a line and I looked around at my fielders who had had the game almost within their grasp a minute before. Instantly, I realized that I had been pitching myself out, expecting the end to come in nine innings. My arm felt like so much lead hanging to my side after that hit. I wanted to go and get some crape and hang it on my salary whip. Then that old story about the wedding popped into my head, and I said to myself: “He sure raised hell with your prospects.”

It is 1936. Gordon and Olga are embarking on a tour of Mexico by boat, leaving the children and housekeeper in care of Dr. Rockow. For one month I am the ward of the continental dentist.
“It won’t hurt you to be apart from us for a time,” my mother says. “And at least you’ll find something to do beside playing catch with your father in the hall. But we want you to be happy. We’ll leave your grandfather money for tickets to games during August.”

“How many games?”

“How many, Gore-don?”

Gordon Kahn pursed his lips. His new mustache had grown in three-shaded, brown and black and like the herring sometimes red. “There are two home stands. One game each should be sufficient.”

“Bleacher seats?”

“No,” Gordon conceded, “general admission.”

“All right, all right, you’ll miss your boat,” Dr. Rockow said.

On the next day, I sat behind home plate and saw the Dodgers lose to the Cubs. Then I spent an afternoon at stickball. On the day after that, I sat between third and home while the Dodgers lost to the Cubs again. August was three days old and I had exceeded my quota of major league baseball.

“All right, allrrright, if it means so moch to you,” Dr. Rockow said, “we can both go Thursday afternoon when I don’t practice.” I saw four more games before my parents returned, two by myself and two with my grandfather. Dr. Rockow began to root for Johnny Cooney, a very smooth center fielder, and drew from me an oath never to tell my parents about the games or his own rooting. “Don’t ee-wen speak too moch of Cooney,” he said. “Bahtter these games be jost between us.”

It is 1937. The family considers sending my sister and me to camp. The camp director, “Uncle” Lou Kleiderman, visits and asks what I like best.

“Baseball.”

“Wonderful,” says Uncle Lou Kleiderman, a stocky mustached man who limps and smiles. “We like boys who like baseball.”
Boys? Baseball? Uncle Lou Kleiderman likes families with two parents teaching and a grandfather pulling teeth, who pay the full tuition in advance. “We have three baseball fields,” Uncle Lou says.

“Diamonds,” corrects Gordon J. Kahn.

“And”—the camp director is spieling, not listening—“I have pictures of them in this folder right here.”

“A hardball diamond,” I cry.

“That’s right, son,” says Uncle Lou, smiling, “and the baseball counselor, Uncle Iz Brown, once had a tryout for the major leagues.”