Читать книгу The Smart Culture - Robert L. Hayman Jr. - Страница 12

As a kid, I spent most of my summers living with my grandparents, which is even less of a big deal than it sounds, seeing as how my grandparents lived just across the highway. On the other hand, just across the highway sometimes seemed like another world: the houses there had yards on all four sides—“detached” is what we call them now; as kids, we just called them “huge”—and the backyards were big enough for any game any kid could ever want to play. I had a whole different bunch of friends over at my grandparents’, and we played a whole different bunch of games. For a kid, I guess, it really was a different world.

I loved staying with my grandparents. It was a little bit because of the yard and the games but it was mostly because of them. My grandfather was a truck tire salesman and he made his living on the road, and he was great at it and he loved it, until somebody in some regional office somewhere decided that truck tires could not be sold efficiently by traveling salesmen, and they were not confused by the fact that my grandfather was already doing precisely what could not be done. So they moved my grandfather inside a store, and he became an automobile tire salesman, and he was great at this too, but he loved it a lot less. My grandfather was also a repairman—of all things mechanical and of many things familial—and he was like a father to me, and he was, I guess, one of my first real teachers. He taught me how to throw and hit a baseball, and later how to fix a car, and in between he tried to teach me how to ride a bicycle, but at this he failed, as he could not overcome my bike’s supernatural attraction to large inanimate objects like parked cars and brick walls and even, with an odds-defying accuracy, the goalposts on a football field. He also taught me my first complete sentence—“Pop-pop can fix any damned thing”—as well as my first lesson in manners, a lesson I proudly displayed to my mother on a city bus one Saturday morning, after a well-dressed man stumbled up the steps and fell to the floor: “Fall down,” I shouted helpfully, to my mom and all concerned riders, “and bust the ass!” For this, I had to wash my mouth out with soap, and my grandfather had to wash our new used car.

My grandmother was my teacher too, and in a sense had to do double duty, as she had to help me unlearn a great many of my grandfather’s lessons. My grandmother was an executive secretary, and she could type and take shorthand and take minutes and balance books and edit correspondence and I hardly know what else, except that it seems to me a safe guess that she was as much responsible for her company’s success as was the company president she worked for, even if he got paid fifteen or twenty times as much. And if my grandfather could fix anything that was broke, my grandmother could heal anything that was hurt: there is no word big enough to describe the love she had for her grandchildren, and none good enough to describe the comfort we felt in her arms. She taught me a lot of things—little things like not to say “ain’t” (I still don’t), and big things like taking care of the people who need you (I try), but above all, she taught me what it’s like to feel safe, and that’s just about the best feeling in the world.

I seemed to know all the people in my grandparents’ neighborhood, and they all seemed to know me. The Burkhardts lived on one side, and they were sometimes my baby-sitters when my grandparents were at work, and their house always smelled wonderfully like tomato sauce, which was, my grandfather explained, because Mrs. Burkhardt was an Italian. The Sanderses lived on the other side, and they also were sometimes my baby-sitters, and Mrs. Sanders always wore white clothes, and that was because, as my grandmother explained, Mrs. Sanders was a nurse. This simple order could have become mighty complicated on the day that Mrs. Sanders made spaghetti for dinner, but it was soon overwhelmed by a more fundamental truth. Mrs. Sanders, according to my grandmother, worked at St. Francis Hospital because she was a Catholic, and it turned out that Mrs. Burkhardt was also a Catholic, and Tommy Sidowski, who was a kid about my age who lived behind my grandparents, and whom I knew pretty well, and who was, according to my grandfather, a “Polack”—well, he was a Catholic too. Suddenly, the bewildering fragments of identity had yielded their common denominator, and that is why, at the age of six, I became a Catholic, a development that, unfortunately, went completely over the heads of my grandparents, who could not understand why I kept saying that I was a Catholic when, they insisted, I was hardly even a Methodist. My grandparents and I eventually reached an understanding on the matter, and it was agreed that I could become a Catholic later on if I still wanted to, and that arrangement was basically satisfactory to me, though it did not keep me from dipping into the ashtray for the next few Ash Wednesdays. My grandparents even let me be Italian—though only partly, and on my mother’s side, whatever that meant—but on my subsequent desire to become a Polack they remained uncompromising. Which was fine, because Tommy Sidowski wasn’t even my best friend.

The Sanderses had two boys, Huey and Michael, and Huey was just a year younger than me, and it was Huey who would become my best friend in the world. We started playing together in my grandparents’ backyard when I was barely five, and for as long as I can remember, we were playing baseball and baseball-related games. Most of these games we made up, partly because, with just the two of us, it would have been difficult to field two standard teams, but also because it was our unspoken desire that in the games we played, neither one of us should really win or lose. We played some games that we copied from other kids—Wall-Ball was not one of our originals—but also some games that we made up from scratch over the years, games like Up Against the Wall, Off the Roof, Perfect Game, Double Play, and Rundown.

For each of our games we made up rules. The object of Up Against The Wall was for the fielder—we always imagined we were some Phillie outfielder, usually either Johnny Callison or Tony Gonzalez—to make a great leaping catch by hurling his body against the brick wall of my grandparents’ house; the “batter” would accommodate by throwing the ball just over the fielder’s head. We had a scoring system for the catches: one point for a catch, two points if you juggled the ball and caught it, three points if you caught it above an imaginary line on the wall, and four points if you caught the ball and hit the wall with sufficient force or friction to draw blood. We scored each catch, but did not keep a running tally; the game ended when we had drawn too much blood, or when we broke one of my grandparents’ windows.

Off the Roof was our variation on Wall-Ball. The “batter” threw the ball onto my grandparents’ roof, and the fielder tried to catch it when it rolled off. This was tougher than it sounds, thanks to my grandparents’ rain gutter, which, we discovered one day, caused the ball to hop at impossible heights and angles. You got a hit if the fielder missed the ball, were “out” if the fielder caught it, and lost your turn at bat if you threw the ball over the roof. We scored it like a regular game, but never completed an official one, each effort being called sometime in the middle innings, when my grandfather got tired of getting the ball out of the gutter.

Perfect Game was an effort by a pitcher—usually Huey, as either Jim Bunning or Chris Short—to throw one, that is, to record twenty-seven straight outs. The catcher called the pitches as well as the balls and strikes—and, for that matter, also the play-by-play—which meant that every game ended with the nearly intolerable suspense of a full count on the twenty-seventh batter. Almost every effort was successful, thanks mostly to the propensity of the imaginary batters to chase and foul-off even the wildest pitches. The only exceptions occurred when the pitcher would refuse the benevolent products of the catcher’s imagination; the pitcher would then show remarkable fortitude in overcoming the adversity of one walk or sometimes even two.

Double Play was really not much more than our practice of that baseball play. Whichever one of us was the first baseman would throw a groundball to the other fielder, who could be either a shortstop or a second baseman, depending on his identity on that particular day: when Huey was Bobby Wine he played shortstop, when he was Tony Taylor he played second base; I was always Cookie Rojas, who could play any position. The middle infielder, whoever he was, would tag second base, and relay the ball to the first baseman, who would decide, based on a very complex mathematical calculation involving various laws of physics and also little kid’s moods, whether the throw was in time to complete the double play. The middle infielder did not always agree with the call, and that prompted occasional rhubarbs, as the infielder went nose-to-nose with the first base umpire, who, of course, used to be the first baseman, but who had now assumed a distinctly antagonistic persona. Things would get particularly heated—and complicated—when the first baseman would rematerialize and join the fray, and sometimes the combined force of their arguments would persuade the umpire to change his mind. This rarely happened, however, and the rhubarbs were mostly just an excuse to practice cussing. Double Play usually went the full nine innings, the exceptions occurring only when games were suspended on account of the adults overhearing the rhubarbs.

All but one of our games were designed to be played by just two people; the exception was Rundown. Rundown required two fielders and a baserunner: the fielders, stationed at first and second bases, threw the ball back and forth, and the baserunner would at some point attempt to leave first base and get to second or, once caught in a rundown, at least make it safely back to first. There were no points and no scoring; the runner either made it safely or not.

Huey and I could be the fielders in Rundown, but we needed a baserunner, and neither my grandparents nor Huey’s mom were generally up to the task. Fortunately, however, Huey’s folks had planned ahead, and they provided Huey with a kid brother named Michael, and while Michael was generally no more useful than any other kid brother or sister—his primary function seemed to revolve around whining, which was either the cause or effect of our general indifference to his existence—-still Michael made a perfectly adequate, and eventually an absolutely perfect, steady runner in our game.

What was so perfect about Michael was that he was always “out”: in all the games of Rundown we played, he never once stole second, nor even made it safely back to first. This required, admittedly, some ingenuity on our part: he seemed, sometimes, like he was going to be safe, as when one of us made a wild throw, and he seemed, on other occasions, like he might actually be safe, as when he appeared to be standing on second base before the ball’s arrival, but invariably fortune intervened, and Mike would accidentally trip in the base path over our outstretched arms, or overrun the base, propelled by some mysterious natural force that looked strangely like Huey or me. When these physical phenomena were not denying Michael his due, fate nonetheless conspired against him; either Huey or I had invariably called “time-out” (whether or not Michael actually heard us), and “time-out” meant, by rule of course, that the game had to start over. It is a wonder, given his steady misfortune, that Michael continued to play with us, but he did, and he always seemed to have fun.

For Huey and me there was something a bit too crude and obvious about our schemes against Michael, and I suspect we would have soured on them over time. But it never became an issue, thanks to Richie Ashburn, who was a radio announcer for the Phillies, and who explained, as Huey and I listened intently to what was probably another Phillies loss, that some hapless Phillie player had been tagged out at first even though he had apparently singled because, after crossing the bag, he had turned the wrong way. Huey and I looked at each other the instant we heard the call, and we smiled.

A little knowledge can be dangerous, and the knowledge we gained that day was certainly hazardous to Michael’s hopes for Rundown success. We had Michael caught in a rundown early in our next game, when Huey’s throw bounced off my glove and rolled to my grandparents’ fence. I retrieved the ball and threw it to Huey, but Michael had arrived at second base well ahead of the throw. Mike stood on the base and waited. He must have been surprised that Huey did not try to drag him off, and then downright stunned that I did not start yelling, “time out.” And as the seconds passed, his bewilderment must have yielded to a sense of triumph, as he stood there on second base, and turned to revel in his victory over his former oppressors. And all of that must have merely compounded his sense of frustration, when Huey slapped him in the chest with his glove, and said, matter-of-factly, “You’re out; you turned the wrong way.”

Mike, relentlessly gullible, buried his head in his hands. “Good try, Mike,” we said, probably less to console him than to maintain his interest in the game. But it was hardly necessary: we could not have deterred Mike if we had tried. With grim determination, Mike dug in for another try.

But, of course, there was no hope. All day long, try as he might, he simply could not avoid turning the wrong way. To his left, to his right, clockwise, or counterclockwise, every way was the wrong way. First base or second base, off the base or on it, he was “out.” And what stands out most about that day is how Huey and I ended up laughing about it, soon hysterically, and then so hard that we could barely sputter out what had become Mike’s motto. Eventually we didn’t even need to say it, we just started laughing and walking toward Mike with the ball, except for the times that we were laughing too hard to walk, and had to crawl. And Mike was laughing so hard that he ended up on the ground with us, and I thought that it was just because Huey and I were laughing so hard, but now I realize that he always knew exactly what we were up to, and that the joke all along wasn’t really on him, or even on Huey and me: it was really our joke—it belonged to all three of us.

For a brief while, Huey and I tried our rules outside my grandparents’ backyard. We played baseball one day with a bunch of other kids, and Huey was playing first base and I was at second, and a kid on the opposing team got a hit, and I, with uncharacteristic bravado, yelled that the kid turned the wrong way. Huey marched up to the kid and tagged him and said, “you’re out,” and eventually all the kids on our team caught on, and they started yelling, “that’s right,” and “he’s out,” and “he turned the wrong way.” And the kid complained a little, but it hardly mattered: he was out—he had turned the wrong way.

We kept this up for about a week. Once a game, no matter which way some kid would turn, Huey or I would yell that the kid turned the wrong way, and Huey would tag the kid out. The kid would look puzzled, and somebody on our team would say something about how you have to know the rules, and the kid’s teammates would shrug like “hey, what can we do,” and sometimes they’d even get mad at the kid for not knowing which way to turn. Then one day I yelled that a kid had turned the wrong way, and Huey went up to tag him, and the kid yelled back, “I only took one step, you idiot!” He was very sure of himself, and he was also very big, and Huey and I both knew, without needing to consult on the matter, that the kid was safe, and that we had a new rule. We decided instead to drop the old one: “you turned the wrong way” was fun with Michael, but it was just a hassle outside my grandparents’ backyard.

When I was eleven my mom remarried and we moved away, and I pretty much lost touch with Huey and Mike and the whole gang of kids in my grandparents’ neighborhood. I didn’t get to spend summers with my grandparents anymore, and Huey made other friends, and I really got to see him only at Christmas. For a few years I still got him Christmas presents, like some baseball cards or comic books, but then he seemed too old for those, and I didn’t know what to get him, and then I didn’t go see him at all.

It was 1976, and I was a sophomore in college in North Carolina, when my grandparents called me with the news about Huey. He had become the first kid in his family to go to college, and he was nearing the end of his freshman year at the University of Delaware. He was on his way to Florida for his spring break, and he and his friend stopped for gas in North Carolina. They filled the tank and looked for somebody to give their money to, but as the witnesses later explained, there appeared to be no one there. So Huey and his friend got tired of looking and waiting, and they got back in their car, and drove away. At that moment the gas station owner showed up, and he had a rifle, and he shot my friend Huey in the head. Huey died. He was eighteen years old.

The gas station owner was at first not charged, but the attorney general of Delaware intervened, and the man eventually pled guilty to manslaughter and served a year or so in prison, and was reportedly much aggrieved even at that. He was, after all, merely defending what was rightfully his.

Huey and I had played a lot of games when we were kids, and we made up a lot of rules. Some of them were good, and some of them were bad, and, looking back, some of them could have been both, depending on how you used them. But there is in my mind nothing doubtful or contingent or equivocal about this: it’s a bad rule—a terrible, vicious, hateful rule—that says it’s basically okay to shoot a kid who doesn’t pay for a tank of gas. And I cannot help thinking when I remember Huey that somebody, somehow, has us playing a really stupid game, and that somewhere along the line, we—all of us—turned the wrong way.

I didn’t go to Huey’s funeral, but my grandparents did, and they said it was a pretty rough thing, especially for Huey’s mom. But probably nobody took it harder than Michael. Mike was always kind of shy, but after Huey’s death, he seemed to close off completely from the rest of the world. It wasn’t until his mom died, some twenty years later, that Mike really went outside again. He was thirty-four when he got a job and learned how to drive. It was my grandfather who taught him.