Major League Baseball 3

We visited my grandfather once a week. During the baseball season, he would be watching a game on TV in the living room. The TV turned off, the grownups moved to the kitchen to talk. I studied the pattern of the oriental carpet on the floor. I flipped through the pages of an illustrated dictionary on the small table in the hall. I was bored.

My father took me to a few games at Ebbets Field, and when I became a turncoat, Yankee Stadium. I remember both places. I remember being able to see, from inside, bits of the city beyond the walls, and not being able to see, from outside, anything of any interest inside. I remember seeing Duke Snider, Roy Campanella, Yogi Berra, all the others.

What I don’t remember is how important it was to me. Jackie and Allen were important, but they weren’t true friends. Later our friendship seemed more like a transaction. I contracted to become a Yankee fan, and they agreed to supply me with a surrogate family less problematic than my real one—plus free baseball cards.

When summers ended, I returned to school, which at first was an elementary school across the street from the Dyker Beach Golf Course, one of the few public ones in the city. Walking home one afternoon, fog from the bay was so thick I was afraid I’d get lost. I was supposedly the smartest kid in my graduating class, so I got a pen and pencil set embossed with my name—misspelled, of course. It was the last time I would do well in school.

The last empty lot sprouted more nearly identical houses. I went to Edward B. Shallow Junior High School, which meant a bus commute back to my old neighborhood. There I could skip a grade. Allen didn’t do well enough to skip a grade, so he went to a different school. Jackie, intending to become an engineer like his father, passed the exam and went to Brooklyn Tech.

The three of us had joined the Boy Scouts. Our troop met in the basement of a Lutheran church on 85th Street. It was a small troop. Once we went to Staten Island to camp overnight. When we got off the ferry one of the boys fell and got a deep cut in his hand. No one else seemed to know what to do so I took charge, first leading the injured boy to a barber shop, where we borrowed a towel to stanch the blood, then finding a doctor who would stitch up the wound. I was proud of having acted with such competence and authority, which seemed so uncharacteristic to everyone, myself included.

Inevitably, I was the troop scribe. I had a thin composition notebook, but I don’t remember what I was expected to write in it. Once, though, I wrote a parody of Hemingway, even though I had probably only read other parodies of Hemingway. I also wrote one or two stories—and my first poem—which I showed to a teacher.

In the fall of 1955, during the World Series, I was on a bus coming home from school. The 18th Avenue sidewalks were crowded with people not going anywhere, just screaming and laughing and jumping up and down. The news of the final out caromed around apartments above stores, then shredded into ribbons in the sky, and was ultimately reconstituted in outer space, where Venusians and Martians shrugged whatever Venusians and Martians shrug in lieu of shoulders. Dodgers? What are Dodgers?

A couple of years later, I entered high school, the same one Sandy Koufax went to. At that time he was in the limbo between apprenticeship and greatness. I was in a different limbo—adolescence. Then three desultory, mediocre years before graduation. As a senior, however, I began to make new friends and hang out with the staff of the literary magazine, Marquis (It was Lafayette High School). Poetry was a new doom, and I began “wending my maze” (in Peter DeVries’s phrase).

The brothers and I drifted apart. I had other friends. I went to college—CCNY—which involved subway commutes of more than an hour each way, so I was out of the neighborhood a lot. I didn’t improve as a student.

Allen later became an accountant and moved out west. Jackie had gone to Brooklyn Polytechnic University before becoming some sort of engineer. He got engaged to Ruth, a woman who lived across the alley in back of his house. (“She has fat legs,” my mother commented.) He got his own apartment, in a basement a few blocks away. Shortly before he and Ruth were to be married, my mother called me. I was living on Avenue B by then. She said that Jackie had been discovered hanging from a ceiling in his apartment. I remembered him fooling around with nooses in the Boy Scouts.

Alfred and Anne didn’t buy the suicide explanation. They thought it was murder, maybe involving the Mafia. I don’t know if anything came of that theory. The Topps Company relocated to Pennsylvania. Alfred and Anne moved there too.

Major League Baseball 2

My closest friends were Jackie and Allen, brothers who lived around the corner on 16th Avenue. Though they were Jewish too, they were German Jews, therefore somewhat suspect to many of the mainly Eastern European Jews of New York. Anne and Alfred came to the United States before World War II. They originated in north Germany, Hamburg, I think.

Jackie was three years older than I was, about my sister’s age, and Allen was a few months younger. There was a competitive element in our relationships. Sometimes I was closer to Allen, sometimes I was closer to Jackie. Who was competing for whose favor? Maybe it’s something automatic about relationships.

I was at their house a lot. It was like ours, but different in certain ways. They had a finished basement too, but where, in the rear, we had a laundry room, they had a kitchen, where they ate most of their meals. I ate mayonnaise there for the first time in my life.

Outdoors we played box baseball, stoop ball, and stick ball. We also went bowling now and then. In the summer I took a couple of buses with them to the large municipal pool in Sunset Park, where I learned how to swim. But Jackie and Allen preferred more cerebral games, like chess and bridge, which I tried to learn, but had little enthusiasm for.

Their major continuing project was the creation of a model train system in the large front room of their basement. It was extraordinarily elaborate, with looping tracks and miniature buildings and people, arranged on a plywood board that filled a large part of the room. It was on hinges, so it could fold up out of the way against the wall. They had figured out transformers, wiring, and so on.

Though we played some card games, like gin rummy, and some board games, our major obsession, at least during the summer, was All-Star Baseball. The game was based on the actual records of real players. For each player there was a round card, its rim divided into unequal slices—each with a number in it—and a four-sided hole in the middle that fit over a thick cardboard cut-out mounted with a spinning metal arrow. You spun the arrow and the number it pointed to determined the play. One meant a single, two a double, and so on. Other numbers meant walks, ground outs, strikeouts, and other kinds of plays. I remember that Pete Runnels’ number one slice was greedily wide. We kept statistics for each player and played whole seasons, one at bat at a time.

Anne, Alfred, and their sons moved to Brooklyn from the Bronx, from which it can be inferred that the boys were Yankee fans. Having always lived in Brooklyn, I didn’t question Dodger supremacy. My new friends, however—especially Jackie—had an air of authority. They were the kind of kids who liked to know what thing was the best in its category or what the right way was to do certain things. And they were proud of knowing what they knew and felt superior when they could tell someone something he or she didn’t know or didn’t know with equal certainty.

I didn’t know anything with certainty. For instance, I didn’t know if Truman would be a better president than Eisenhower, even though he had already been president for most of my life. Jackie and Allen, probably mimicking Alfred’s opinions, were certain that Eisenhower would go to Korea and end the war and would therefore be a better president than Truman. I was convinced. Similarly, I was persuaded that the Yankees were better than the Dodgers. In 1952, I suppose the Yankees were better than the Dodgers, but I didn’t understand then that that was not a sufficient reason to root for them.

Why did these fervently rationalistic Yankee fans move to Brooklyn? I believe the reason was that in Brooklyn Alfred would be nearer to where he worked. The company he worked for was located in one of the Bush Terminal buildings along Brooklyn’s waterfront south of Red Hook. He was the chief engineer of the Topps Chewing Gum Company.

(I wrote the above from memory and got some facts wrong, in particular, about the All Star Baseball board game. For instance, the number 1 on a player card meant “home run,” not “single,” which was number 7. I’ll leave the text as is as a reminder that other errors of memory are likely to exist, perhaps more substantial ones.)

IHOP

I’m wandering around Paris. I’m supposed to return home on Sunday, the day after tomorrow. I just left some friends, among whom was J. I hadn’t seen her in years. I was in love with her then. She retreats into the building where she works, through an enormous marble and glass lobby.

Broad plazas, monumental buildings, not the kind of Paris I like. One street is flooded with turbulent rapids. I think I know my way around, but I’m really lost. Finally, I come across the Palais Royal and duck into it, hoping for some peace and quiet. Its spaces are indeed peaceful, of different shapes and sizes, but more like a Roman ruin—like the Palatine—than the Palais Royal. I keep thinking, “This is where Head of State A met with Head of State B and resolved Major Conflict X.”

But even within this odd “Palais Royal” I’m getting lost. I ask someone who works there if he knows a good inexpensive restaurant in the neighborhood. He does and says he would like to have lunch with me, but I suspect that all he wants is to take advantage of a tourist. Then I remember that I have too little cash on me and it’s in US dollars. We wait for a signal, a bell, from a tower, which will let us know when the restaurant has a free table. I talk about preferring Paris and New York to Boston. Other friends of mine show up. They all want to have lunch with us. One of them is M., another woman I used to be in love with. I tell the others that I’d rather have lunch alone with M. She agrees, so the two of us wander off, but the landscape is becoming more and more confusing, more like a ruin, more like places in Rome, this time the Colosseum.

M. is distressed. She went to a meeting this morning where people described conditions of extreme poverty and oppression, and inhuman atrocities. I am at a loss to respond. I suspect that these things could be understood, and that suffering could be eased, but I can only acknowledge their existence. I can’t say anything comforting.

Street musicians and actors are performing everywhere. "Healing the Feeling" from Ornette Coleman’s Virgin Beauty is going through my head. M. is very hungry. She says she wants pancakes. She nibbles at food in a stall, which I discourage because I want to sit down with her in a restaurant. But where? Finally, at someone’s computer, I search for “pancakes Paris.” Fortunately, there are a lot of IHOPs in Paris.

Major League Baseball 1

In 1952 we moved into the first and only house my parents owned. It was in Bath Beach, near Gravesend Bay, Fort Hamilton, and the Belt Parkway. The sounds of the highway and the sounds of the sea were indistinguishable.

Bath Beach is a sort of subdivision of Bensonhurst. There must have been a beach there once, but it had been developed. The houses were postwar, mainly brick row houses, some single or two family, some “garden apartments.” Similar houses made Donald Trump’s father rich.

Our house was separated from the neighbors’ by thin walls. In front, a purposeless lawn and some shrubs, in back, a tiny yard. A cinder block garage opened onto a private alley that cut through the middle of the whole block.

A rhododendron, an azalea, a forsythia, an evergreen—hemlock, I think—and a pink and orange rose with a brisk brewed scent. Before my father, like nearly all of our neighbors, had it cemented over, the backyard had other roses and a tiny crabapple, beneath which I buried my dead Angel fish.

Our living room seemed bigger than it was because the previous owners had installed a large mirror on one wall. There were two rooms in the basement, a laundry room and small bathroom in the rear and a large room in front with green and brown tiles in a shuffleboard pattern. Walls were yellowish knotty pine. There were acoustic tiles and a couple of buzzing fluorescent light fixtures on the low ceiling.

Independence Avenue is short. Before its latest incarnation it had been Warehouse Avenue. It wasn’t completely developed however. When we got there—on February 29, Leap Year Day, which is why I remember it—there was an empty lot a couple of houses away. To me, it seemed bigger and wilder than it actually was. Playing there by myself one day, I snuck up behind a praying mantis, which suddenly swiveled its triangular head and bit my finger.

A dog, a collie with dirty long hair, went on its rounds, unleashed.

We moved there, I think, because friends of my father’s lived one street over. Fritzi and Milton and him had emigrated from Banila Rus in Bukovina. Unlike my politically moderate father, Milton was a communist, and had returned to Europe when, to him, the revolution still seemed viable. Ultimately, he settled in Brooklyn, worked as a furrier, and owned a mandolin that fascinated me.

There were few Jewish families in the predominantly Italian neighborhood. Nevertheless, there were a couple of synagogues and, among automobile showrooms and repair shops on 18th Avenue, a ritual poultry slaughterhouse. The man who slaughtered the chickens (I don’t know the technical term for such a person) seemed plucked unaltered from the shtetl. I saw necks severed, blood running, smelled raw chicken smell.

Bordering 18th Avenue, between Bath and Benson, there was a tiny, totally self-contained black enclave, half a dozen square blocks or so. Only decades later did I learn that it was one of the small communities established in northern cities in the nineteenth century by freed slaves.

The single token of continuity linking our old neighborhood—only a couple of miles away at the edge of Borough Park—with our new one was Ted, the Good Humor Man. Ted was a school teacher. Being a Good Humor Man was his summer job. A major recurring event from my earlier life was watching Ted buy a quart glass bottle of milk at the Kelber’s grocery store across the street from our apartment, then draining it in a single gulp. Ted was a Unitarian, which doesn’t adequately explain it.

Benny Carter's "Synthetic Love"

1
The car is beating. I listen
A Kinglet—maybe—in an oak,
a startlingly healthy sycamore
The rose hips are yellowish
Portable storage containers big enough to live in
hiding deer and rabbits
The humidity stinks, makes things stink

Missiles are totally disinterested
in wind in trees or industrial montage
contending with an atmosphere
not a near “us” or an alien “us”
or an “us” forming in orange clouds

2
Her curls, her exhaustion, her
locks that drip, eyes that look
left and right, a unity
of determination with
functioning fingerless near-hands

From lower thighs
“legs” are undisguised prostheses,
silver and black artificial bones
that walk questionably
more elegantly than what we’re born with
on this muddy planet, an heirloom tomato
with streaming red and yellow fires.

The setting sun fills leafy gel.

Hibiscus kisses

You can analyze a forest
of oak, and the conversation
can give you a clue
to insistencies of will

and the whole forest
and you
will be blighted
you may find.

Some specific tract
of forest, a date
or oak forest, may not
be the whole forest.

It may or may not be
the conversation
you analyze later
to find the clue

to whether insistencies
of specific will
can be whole
or blighted.

To be specific
the wood
whether oak or date
may be a clue to the whole.

You may find the will to be
specific to insistencies
you analyze later
to be not it, the tract.

Some insistencies
may give you a specific date
to find the will
to analyze the blighted whole.

At some date
the oak forest can will
insistencies to be,
to be oak. Oak.