Michael Gottlieb
Selections from Collected Memoirs
from THE COLORAMA, 50s - 60s
5. The Miracle of Garth Road
I put down my nickel and from the display beneath the cash register I select a pack. The first one at hand. The one on top. It didn't matter.
From the soft give, the ply of it, the supple accommodation as I bend it back and forth, clearly, this gum is still fresh.
If stale, the flat pallets of pink resound and crack. Jagged shards, a hazard to the dentine as you try to fold them into your mouth. Friable. Low, base tricked-up cardboard, the sugar going, distinctly somehow 'off.' But this one gives nicely. The dusting of dry powder that coats the gum fairly leaping up to the taste buds. Only then do I bother with the five baseball cards lying there, face down, waiting, in my palm.
Old enough to go out by myself, but not old enough to go to camp. Nine or ten years old. 1960 or 1961.
I left my aunt and uncle's apartment, pushed the down button for the elevator and walked down Garth Road, past the rest of the half-Tudor, mock gothic apartment houses. Past the Plaza, where my mother used to drop me off on Saturdays for matinees while she had coffee with her sister. Past the A&P, that's gone now too. To the little stationery store sitting in the row of modest shops, halfway down the hill to the Scarsdale train station.
Hot. Past the end of the real season. Indian summer.
A few years earlier my father had taken me to an actual game. The thundering subway up to the Bronx. Dark green buses and black and green and white police cars. Soot everywhere. Emerging from the dark streets beneath the El, pulled through the echoing Stadium tunnels. Then the green revelation of the outfield. The incredible buoyant roaring. Jumping up from the seats. The pitcher, so near. The shouts for food. The close violence implied in every swing. Men in hats and suits. And Mantle hit a homer.
The beauteous, Indian Summer blazing-in-glory of the New York Yankees. A Yankees fan? Of course. So is everyone I know. Are we not but three towns north of the Bronx? It was not that many years ago that my parents moved up from there. And I was born there. Of course, it is more than that. It is natural to be a Yankee fan. The Yankees are to baseball as New York is to America, as America is to the rest of the world. This is the natural order of things.
I turn over the cards.
Right there, on the top: a Yankee team card. Each and every one of them, lined up, squinting at the camera, in front of the Stadium's cast iron-white picket ornament. All of them, our gods. Rising above them in the distance, the upper decks' girders, the painted I beams and rivets – like the IRT line, only taller, more noble.
I catch my breath. This is a card you wait years to get. If you got one, or had one passed down to you, you held on to it. It's for your children. I leave the store, stepping out into the hard sunlight of the fall afternoon. I want to go back and tell the grown-ups about my great fortune. This miracle. Not that they can be expected to comprehend the enormity of it, but there's no one else around.
First, I must thumb through the rest of the cards.
Nothing else in the pack can be worth anything, I know that, but it is foreign to my nature, to any boy's, to take a step further without seeing, knowing, having, and by eyeing owning, the rest of the cards in the deck. There's that greedy hunger, that necessity – I have to know. That eager, consumptive shuffle. Even the inevitable disappointment doesn't much dim it. You never know. Just not knowing makes it worth buying. All those second-rate Cleveland utility outfielders no one has ever heard of, the first time they appear in your hand, fresh, perfumed with the sweet musk of the gum, even they have an immense power, clean, new, the sun glinting on the black-out streaked beneath their eyes, standing with their bats cocked before empty Florida grandstands, or awkwardly crouching in a simulacrum of attentiveness. Knees bent, hands, gloved and bare, open, receptive, forever waiting for that screaming grounder up the middle.
I shuffle the team card to the back of the pile.
Bobby Richardson. The next card is Bobby Richardson. I gasp. I smite my forehead. Matrons passing by study me suspiciously. Bobby Richardson, the artful, the matchless, the small, sleek and errorless. The infielder nonpareil. That seeking, merciless glove. The precise, inhuman arm. The Yankee of Infielders. His neat, even, compact features, supremely confident, gaze back at me.
A Yankee team card and a Bobby Richardson in one deck. A wave of unalloyed, unearned bonhomie and shameless self-esteem washes over me: I shall be able to dine out, or the child's equivalent thereof, on this, this moment, for years, forever. I am a made man. I am compleat.
Bobby goes to the back. I have no expectations. I have been blessed enough for one day. I almost don't want to see what there next, looking up at me: his wracked and weary face, the beatific, accepting eyes, the discreet bulge of chaw in one corner of the jaw, cocking a jaundiced, knowing look beyond the camera. Casey Stengel. Casey, the Bunyon, the Runyon, the Durante of our, our – quick, I flip back to the team card – yes, somehow it is clear– these were snapped the same afternoon: the muss in the bristle of his crewcut, the way his jersey sags over his belt. He was ancient even then. He was always old. This was what managers were supposed to be. They wrote poems about him, he knew Ruth, played with Ruth, coached Ruth – something to do with Ruth. He was Casey, our Casey.
A quick fugitive thought: actually we, us boys, we ponder this often… how is it determined what cards to slip together into each deck? Is it random? How random can it be? What are the odds? And now I think: every once in a while, do they, whoever they are, some white coated types at Topps, do they purposely stack one deck, just like this? Put together one dreamy, immensely fantastical wonder of a deck,just to drive us mad, keep us buying, hungry, ever hoping, and somehow make sure it ends up in the right town? This deck would be wasted in St. Louis. Can they do that? Is it possible?
Then, unbelievably, the next card is Mantle.
Mickey Mantle, the sum of all our perfections. Our Apollo. The sun in his face. His sun.
In a way, back then at least, a Texan was the most typical American, in the same way, California soon took over that role, and at the same time, the most typical New Yorker. Of course, he was a Yankee. What else could he be, a Senator? Those same modest American cheekbones and dimples. You saw them in every DC Comics hero. The tousled hair, the prototypical cowlick, the white teeth. That grin, abashed, a little crooked, modestly boastful, and who had more reason?
That flashing grace and hurtling, massive, controlled fury as the throw came hurtling back from the far reaches, past the cut-off man right down to the catcher's ankles, just in time. Or batting, like that time I saw him, as he swung and connected, and I stood, found myself standing with the thousands that flawless afternoon, as the ball rose and rose and flew off, slowing as it lifted, describing an arc that never seemed to fall, impossible that your eye could still see this tiny whiteness – if he had not drawn your eye along its path with his bat. As if he was saying to us all: look, here, this is where I am sending this one.
With Maris, that doomed, flawed, mortalled deity, the deck would have been perfect. Perhaps it was better without him. More fitting certainly. Poor Roger, that lost look in his small eyes, you could see it there even in that miracle summer when they battled. As if he somehow knew, saw it all unfolding before him. It would all be downhill from here.
The fifth card was some Brave or Cub or Tiger or Philly or some such lesser being deserving of little or no note. It was almost comforting, a gentle return to earth. I looked about me. The traffic on Garth Road seemed unchanged. The tailor down the street and the consignment store just past it, all the trim discreet shops, they all remained as they were, as they always had been, looking for all the world as if nothing had happened, altogether unchanged. Only I had changed.
And no one seemed to notice. My parents, my aunt and uncle, they just didn't seem to understand. And my friends, as I rapturously poured out the news, the words tumbling over themselves, at least the first few times I recounted the tale, they didn't quite seem to buy it, buy into it. What were the odds of this anyway? I had older brothers and cousins, that was known. How much more likely was it that these had been handed down to me? Such things were not unheard of.
"But these are this year's cards," I expostulated. No one seemed to believe me. "Look. Smell. You can still smell the gum."
24. The Parable of the Olives
I have long been of the opinion that it all comes down to a single turning point, one moment at the crossroads. That is what sets a person off on the path that becomes his life.
Tommy was a big kid. Not the biggest in the class but big enough to have something of the bully about him. Though, in ways that only the conscience of a young boy can compass, Tommy was capable of generous acts of compassion and comradeship.
A wide, crooked smile. Always with a half-healed cut on his forehead, an unruly lock of hair hanging down. There was a wild streak, a strain of vagrant syndicalism, a cock-eyed willingness to go just a bit further than the rest of us, and, of course, a great deal further than a timid soul like me, combined with an astounding creativity in channeling that willingness down avenues hitherto undreamed of by grown-ups or children.
There was nothing remarkable about the lunchroom at Hillcrest School, nothing out of the ordinary about the lunches served there. Except the olives.
There was the hot lunch and there was the cold lunch, or your mother made your lunch. The hot lunch invariably came with two small black olives on the side. I don't know why. Maybe the purchasing agent for the school district had a Greek brother-in-law. An arbitrary value had been attached to these olives, a gourmandizing halo, for some reason we found them particularly savory. They didn't taste all that great. Perhaps it was because, compared to the rest of the fare, only they had any taste whatsoever.
The fourth grade all had lunch together. Over the year we had developed a lively trade, a kind of curb exchange, in such items as Cheez Its, Fritos, Ring Dings, Devil Dogs, Eskimo Pies, Creamsicles, Fudgsicles, the odd Flav-straw or Atomic Fireball. Tommy had hitherto displayed only a fair grasp at the intricacies of this market. That day was different.
The hot meal was some substance, some material, long strips lying of it there in an ominously shining puddle, gray mist rising, alleged to be roast beef. Accompanied as usual by a cratered thwack of pulverized, not mashed, potatoes. The pool of clotting gravy disappearing without a trace into its middle. Some wilted green beans. Something utterly wrenching for dessert, like tapioca. Milk, of course. And on the side of each and every plate, sitting primly next to the conjectural roast beef, lay the two regulation black olives.
What possessed Tommy that day? All of us at his table sensed immediately that he was engaged in a special mission. Most of the hard-bitten haggling was passed by the board. Perhaps it was the novelty of the quest. Even the girls gathered round to watch him bargain and wheedle. By the end the whole lunchroom was cheering him on.
Tommy was trading everything on his tray for black olives. Not only the entrée, the dessert, the vegetables, but even the milk, under normal circumstances a fungible commodity in which there had never been a secondary market. Towards the end the silverware went and, to climax it all, the napkin too.
This was triumph. This was an Olympian achievement. Tommy had traded his entire lunch for forty-nine black olives. A sum that seemed stunningly incalculable to us. They lay there on the plate, blackening it completely, a few spilled onto the tray. We stood in a circle, applauding. A crooked, modest, glowing smile creasing his guileless features.
And then, Mrs. Bennett, swooping down from nowhere. She had lunchroom duty that day. No one liked Mrs. Bennett. There was something corpulent about her. Her swollen features like some mid Fifties Buick with those thrusting, aggressive, bullet-like bumpers. And that large mole on her chin. Mrs. Bennett was the least popular teacher in school. After this, not even her own students would stick up for her.
She took Tommy by one hand and his lunch tray by the other. She marched him to the back of the cafeteria. There, before the assembled grade, in a ceremony that gave away nothing to the breaking of Dreyfus in that hollow square, she forced the weeping, protesting Tommy to dump the entire contents of his tray, all forty-nine miraculous, gleaming black olives, in the garbage. Then, deaf to our jeers, gripping him by the shoulder, slowly, with a horrible stateliness, she guided him back through the lunch line and picked out for him a regular lunch with milk, napkin, straw, one entree, one vegetable and two black olives.
Tommy was never the same.
After ninth grade we went off to different high schools and I never saw him again. I wonder how he turned out. Every time I pick up a Wall Street Journal, I half expect to see that odd, askew smile of his on the front page, picked out in the paper’s trademark illustration style, all those Benday dots, instantly recognizable after all these years. I just can't decide whether the article will be covering some takeover Tommy has engineered or the stretch in Allentown he's just been sentenced to.
30. The Mighty Zalooms
The mighty Zalooms appeared in huge, quart sized waxed paper sacks, like the bags that Eight O'clock Coffee was sold in at the A&P, but larger. This was the good stuff.
My family was mad for pistachio nuts. All of us. Even the cheapest, smallest, most cheaply dyed red rejects that left us looking like painted women out of de Kooning. None of those tawdry little cellophane tubes ever lived to see the dawn in my house.
Eventually, a guy who worked for my father started coming across with the goods. Zaloom Brand, straight from Iran. Lightly salted and delicately roasted. Undyed, of course. Someone he knew, or was related to was an importer.
By now both of my brothers were long gone to college. It was just my parents and me. After dinner my mother would do the dishes, my father would go into the living room to read the paper and I would go to my room to finish my homework. Except for the nights we played Scrabble.
I don't remember my parents ever playing cards, or any other board games. Scrabble was their game. Fast games, two or three a night, rapid fire.
Years later, ascending a grimy staircase in Chinatown one Sunday morning, I found myself suddenly struck by the most bizarre, yet fugitively familiar, sound. The building itself was roaring. A frenzied, unfolding, careening thunder echoing from floor to floor, seeping out through every closed doorway I passed. The Chinese men were playing mahjong, it was explained to me, and they were gambling. Then I placed it: it sounded just like my parents playing Scrabble.
An old maroon box, held together with masking tape. And old gray felt bag for the letters, from some lost piece of stereo equipment, meant to hold a mike perhaps. Some slips of paper and small pencil, for scoring, and the tile holders, fancy ones with scoring holes on top and pins, which we never used, intended for cribbage. And we always had to have to have something to eat. Some fruit, a cookie, the candy my father would bring home from Barracini's. Often it was ice cream. No matter how much I complained, my mother always bought the Van Choc Straw. Or we might be blessed with pistachios. Big, ripe succulent pistachios.
They were ranked according to some sort of grading nomenclature, like olives, like American bombers from World War II. The smallest were Large and they went up from there. There was a little chart on the back of the bag. Our Zalooms were at least Super Colossals, maybe even Jumbo Dreadnoughts.
The delicate, shimmering chartreuse of them. The fragile paper-thin skin between the shell and the meat, almost every single one ridiculously easy to open.
It was the first time I found myself unable to stop, simply unable to stop myself from doing something. I could not push them away. Aware that control was slipping. Alive to the realization that the ecstasy of the first bite, of the first crack of the first shell was, incrementally but inevitably, diminishing with each additional nut. Nevertheless, entirely helpless to stop myself. One after another after another. Searching the dish, a quick aerial survey, then the swoop, the snatch, the snap between the thumbnails or the longer, sweeter, crack between the molars followed by that unearthly pleasure.
The rough, slightly misshapen pod of meat: rolling it around on the tongue. Easing off the crackling skin, sometimes having to pry it from the roof of the mouth. Then milking the nut dry again, extracting the last of the juice, sweetly perfumed, lightly salted, finally biting into the intoxicating core. Sometimes latitudinally, usually along its axis, splitting the nut into its constitutive twins. The doubled, slightly concave interiors of them, taut yet luxuriantly smooth, like the stretched stomach of some delightful being I was years from stroking. Then biting down, impatient, finishing them off, first one, then the other, grinding the fruit down, pulverizing it between my teeth, releasing the last of the goodness, then swallowing. Gone.
Then a sip of ginger ale. My mother allowed only ginger ale in her house. No other soda. Yukon Club ginger ale. Unless it was a birthday. Then what we called flavored sodas were allowed: cream soda, root beer, cola, but Yukon Club only. Only house brands in our house. Yukon Club being the private label at A&P. Something left over from the Depression, I always assumed. No Coca Cola or Seven Up or Dr. Pepper, ever.
A quick sip, then another pistachio, and again that thrill, once more commensurately diminished. Opening up another sweet one, and the concomitant tinge of... what? Anxiety? Of knowing that I could not stop, that I didn't need another, that each was just that much less pleasing than the one before. Perhaps it was a function of the salt, deadening the taste buds, and not some more metaphysical satiety at work. Knowing, accepting, that this one was nothing like the last, much less the first, but I was just as incapable of stopping now as I had been a moment before. I had to have another. A feeling I came to know many times over the years, with many other things I held in my hands, gazing down at, then raising to my lips. But this was the first time.
Eventually my father would bang on the table, "Go. Go on, you're taking all night."
My mother would halfheartedly pull away the bag of nuts and the clinking, overloaded ashtray, muttering, "You'll make yourself sick with those. You never know when to stop."
And all too often the best I could come up with would be some pathetic single letter tacked on to someone else's word: a T added onto G-O, for a measly three points. At least it wouldn't be my turn anymore.
As we lay down our tiles, each of us had our own way of expressing the merriment or despair, as appropriate, that accompanied our turn. My father's unmitigated glee, his war whoop, his whole face worked up into a beaming smile, his round eyes squinting in triumph as he laid down his coup. My mother's deceptively modest and retiring smile, as if this was just another dinner of pot roast and mashed potatoes she was serving, setting the plates on the table, as she quietly plunked down some stultifying seven letter, triple word score with a Z, a Q, and two Ms in it.
As for me, I always got embarrassed. It was always easier when I had a poor hand, when all I could summon up were those feeble two and three letter combinations, T-I-N or H-A-D or F-A-T. Three points, seven points, five points. Then there would be no comment and the game would move rapidly along. But now and then, almost despite myself, I would look down and see, swimming up from the jumble of characters on my slate, a long, intricate, fully formed word, some charming, stylish creature. S-Q-U-A-L-O-R, say, or S-Y-Z-Y-G-Y.
The first pairing, S-Q, would suggest a word, a word I might not even be certain the meaning of. Then the hurried swapping of tiles and the rush of pleasure as the letters sorted themselves out and indeed, it was so, a word entire, right there. Then, another dampening. Where can this go? Where can it fit in? But, yes, I find a place for it. It can, it can go right there. Hoping no one else will snatch away the opening before my turn comes round. Waiting, trying not to stare at the beckoning, alluring, all too obvious space. Each of us at the table were entirely capable of tracking the others' eye movements and making a purely defensive, spoiling play, just to ruin another's set up.
Whiling away the intervening moments, surreptitiously adding up the potential payoff. Trying to act cool, bored, unsatisfied with my letters. Shifting them about some more, putting them out of order, as if I was continuing to cast about for some combination, fruitlessly. And then, miraculously, it is my turn and the space is still there, waiting for me. And that is when I would get red in the face.
I never knew what to do. I would deposit the letters. The first one, and then the next, and then another. And as I kept on going, laying them down, my parents' eyebrows would start to go up. When, finally, it became clear, my mother would pronounce it out loud. "QUORUM," say, with a little wonder in her voice.
"Ah," my father would echo as he toted up the score, "QUORUM."
He'd pronounce the word with that same wonder. As if it was some rare monster, like a sailor's legend. Or a precious alpine sprig, long believed extinct, I had brought back from the far ends of the earth and laid before them on the kitchen table. And I never knew what to say. Face red, looking down, waiting for play to resume.
And then, when I was around thirteen, we sat down one night after dinner for another fast, furious game of Scrabble.
As this game wore on, I knew it would be close. At the end my father finished the scoring, debiting the remaining letters from those who had tiles left when the first of us, it might have been me, got rid of all his letters. He finished the sums in his tidy, precise accountant's hand, running the pencil point quickly up and down the columns, checking his addition, which never needed checking, and then he looked up.
He studied me with a marvelously gentle smile on his face.
"My son," he said, "You have won."
I had won. I had beat my parents. Now I really did not know what to say.
My mother let out a little, "Ah," of joy.
My father was still looking at me, his eyes shining. My mother got up and kissed me on the forehead.
"No more nuts for you," she said, putting the bag away.
from THE COLORAMA, 50s - 60s
5. The Miracle of Garth Road
I put down my nickel and from the display beneath the cash register I select a pack. The first one at hand. The one on top. It didn't matter.
From the soft give, the ply of it, the supple accommodation as I bend it back and forth, clearly, this gum is still fresh.
If stale, the flat pallets of pink resound and crack. Jagged shards, a hazard to the dentine as you try to fold them into your mouth. Friable. Low, base tricked-up cardboard, the sugar going, distinctly somehow 'off.' But this one gives nicely. The dusting of dry powder that coats the gum fairly leaping up to the taste buds. Only then do I bother with the five baseball cards lying there, face down, waiting, in my palm.
Old enough to go out by myself, but not old enough to go to camp. Nine or ten years old. 1960 or 1961.
I left my aunt and uncle's apartment, pushed the down button for the elevator and walked down Garth Road, past the rest of the half-Tudor, mock gothic apartment houses. Past the Plaza, where my mother used to drop me off on Saturdays for matinees while she had coffee with her sister. Past the A&P, that's gone now too. To the little stationery store sitting in the row of modest shops, halfway down the hill to the Scarsdale train station.
Hot. Past the end of the real season. Indian summer.
A few years earlier my father had taken me to an actual game. The thundering subway up to the Bronx. Dark green buses and black and green and white police cars. Soot everywhere. Emerging from the dark streets beneath the El, pulled through the echoing Stadium tunnels. Then the green revelation of the outfield. The incredible buoyant roaring. Jumping up from the seats. The pitcher, so near. The shouts for food. The close violence implied in every swing. Men in hats and suits. And Mantle hit a homer.
The beauteous, Indian Summer blazing-in-glory of the New York Yankees. A Yankees fan? Of course. So is everyone I know. Are we not but three towns north of the Bronx? It was not that many years ago that my parents moved up from there. And I was born there. Of course, it is more than that. It is natural to be a Yankee fan. The Yankees are to baseball as New York is to America, as America is to the rest of the world. This is the natural order of things.
I turn over the cards.
Right there, on the top: a Yankee team card. Each and every one of them, lined up, squinting at the camera, in front of the Stadium's cast iron-white picket ornament. All of them, our gods. Rising above them in the distance, the upper decks' girders, the painted I beams and rivets – like the IRT line, only taller, more noble.
I catch my breath. This is a card you wait years to get. If you got one, or had one passed down to you, you held on to it. It's for your children. I leave the store, stepping out into the hard sunlight of the fall afternoon. I want to go back and tell the grown-ups about my great fortune. This miracle. Not that they can be expected to comprehend the enormity of it, but there's no one else around.
First, I must thumb through the rest of the cards.
Nothing else in the pack can be worth anything, I know that, but it is foreign to my nature, to any boy's, to take a step further without seeing, knowing, having, and by eyeing owning, the rest of the cards in the deck. There's that greedy hunger, that necessity – I have to know. That eager, consumptive shuffle. Even the inevitable disappointment doesn't much dim it. You never know. Just not knowing makes it worth buying. All those second-rate Cleveland utility outfielders no one has ever heard of, the first time they appear in your hand, fresh, perfumed with the sweet musk of the gum, even they have an immense power, clean, new, the sun glinting on the black-out streaked beneath their eyes, standing with their bats cocked before empty Florida grandstands, or awkwardly crouching in a simulacrum of attentiveness. Knees bent, hands, gloved and bare, open, receptive, forever waiting for that screaming grounder up the middle.
I shuffle the team card to the back of the pile.
Bobby Richardson. The next card is Bobby Richardson. I gasp. I smite my forehead. Matrons passing by study me suspiciously. Bobby Richardson, the artful, the matchless, the small, sleek and errorless. The infielder nonpareil. That seeking, merciless glove. The precise, inhuman arm. The Yankee of Infielders. His neat, even, compact features, supremely confident, gaze back at me.
A Yankee team card and a Bobby Richardson in one deck. A wave of unalloyed, unearned bonhomie and shameless self-esteem washes over me: I shall be able to dine out, or the child's equivalent thereof, on this, this moment, for years, forever. I am a made man. I am compleat.
Bobby goes to the back. I have no expectations. I have been blessed enough for one day. I almost don't want to see what there next, looking up at me: his wracked and weary face, the beatific, accepting eyes, the discreet bulge of chaw in one corner of the jaw, cocking a jaundiced, knowing look beyond the camera. Casey Stengel. Casey, the Bunyon, the Runyon, the Durante of our, our – quick, I flip back to the team card – yes, somehow it is clear– these were snapped the same afternoon: the muss in the bristle of his crewcut, the way his jersey sags over his belt. He was ancient even then. He was always old. This was what managers were supposed to be. They wrote poems about him, he knew Ruth, played with Ruth, coached Ruth – something to do with Ruth. He was Casey, our Casey.
A quick fugitive thought: actually we, us boys, we ponder this often… how is it determined what cards to slip together into each deck? Is it random? How random can it be? What are the odds? And now I think: every once in a while, do they, whoever they are, some white coated types at Topps, do they purposely stack one deck, just like this? Put together one dreamy, immensely fantastical wonder of a deck,just to drive us mad, keep us buying, hungry, ever hoping, and somehow make sure it ends up in the right town? This deck would be wasted in St. Louis. Can they do that? Is it possible?
Then, unbelievably, the next card is Mantle.
Mickey Mantle, the sum of all our perfections. Our Apollo. The sun in his face. His sun.
In a way, back then at least, a Texan was the most typical American, in the same way, California soon took over that role, and at the same time, the most typical New Yorker. Of course, he was a Yankee. What else could he be, a Senator? Those same modest American cheekbones and dimples. You saw them in every DC Comics hero. The tousled hair, the prototypical cowlick, the white teeth. That grin, abashed, a little crooked, modestly boastful, and who had more reason?
That flashing grace and hurtling, massive, controlled fury as the throw came hurtling back from the far reaches, past the cut-off man right down to the catcher's ankles, just in time. Or batting, like that time I saw him, as he swung and connected, and I stood, found myself standing with the thousands that flawless afternoon, as the ball rose and rose and flew off, slowing as it lifted, describing an arc that never seemed to fall, impossible that your eye could still see this tiny whiteness – if he had not drawn your eye along its path with his bat. As if he was saying to us all: look, here, this is where I am sending this one.
With Maris, that doomed, flawed, mortalled deity, the deck would have been perfect. Perhaps it was better without him. More fitting certainly. Poor Roger, that lost look in his small eyes, you could see it there even in that miracle summer when they battled. As if he somehow knew, saw it all unfolding before him. It would all be downhill from here.
The fifth card was some Brave or Cub or Tiger or Philly or some such lesser being deserving of little or no note. It was almost comforting, a gentle return to earth. I looked about me. The traffic on Garth Road seemed unchanged. The tailor down the street and the consignment store just past it, all the trim discreet shops, they all remained as they were, as they always had been, looking for all the world as if nothing had happened, altogether unchanged. Only I had changed.
And no one seemed to notice. My parents, my aunt and uncle, they just didn't seem to understand. And my friends, as I rapturously poured out the news, the words tumbling over themselves, at least the first few times I recounted the tale, they didn't quite seem to buy it, buy into it. What were the odds of this anyway? I had older brothers and cousins, that was known. How much more likely was it that these had been handed down to me? Such things were not unheard of.
"But these are this year's cards," I expostulated. No one seemed to believe me. "Look. Smell. You can still smell the gum."
24. The Parable of the Olives
I have long been of the opinion that it all comes down to a single turning point, one moment at the crossroads. That is what sets a person off on the path that becomes his life.
Tommy was a big kid. Not the biggest in the class but big enough to have something of the bully about him. Though, in ways that only the conscience of a young boy can compass, Tommy was capable of generous acts of compassion and comradeship.
A wide, crooked smile. Always with a half-healed cut on his forehead, an unruly lock of hair hanging down. There was a wild streak, a strain of vagrant syndicalism, a cock-eyed willingness to go just a bit further than the rest of us, and, of course, a great deal further than a timid soul like me, combined with an astounding creativity in channeling that willingness down avenues hitherto undreamed of by grown-ups or children.
There was nothing remarkable about the lunchroom at Hillcrest School, nothing out of the ordinary about the lunches served there. Except the olives.
There was the hot lunch and there was the cold lunch, or your mother made your lunch. The hot lunch invariably came with two small black olives on the side. I don't know why. Maybe the purchasing agent for the school district had a Greek brother-in-law. An arbitrary value had been attached to these olives, a gourmandizing halo, for some reason we found them particularly savory. They didn't taste all that great. Perhaps it was because, compared to the rest of the fare, only they had any taste whatsoever.
The fourth grade all had lunch together. Over the year we had developed a lively trade, a kind of curb exchange, in such items as Cheez Its, Fritos, Ring Dings, Devil Dogs, Eskimo Pies, Creamsicles, Fudgsicles, the odd Flav-straw or Atomic Fireball. Tommy had hitherto displayed only a fair grasp at the intricacies of this market. That day was different.
The hot meal was some substance, some material, long strips lying of it there in an ominously shining puddle, gray mist rising, alleged to be roast beef. Accompanied as usual by a cratered thwack of pulverized, not mashed, potatoes. The pool of clotting gravy disappearing without a trace into its middle. Some wilted green beans. Something utterly wrenching for dessert, like tapioca. Milk, of course. And on the side of each and every plate, sitting primly next to the conjectural roast beef, lay the two regulation black olives.
What possessed Tommy that day? All of us at his table sensed immediately that he was engaged in a special mission. Most of the hard-bitten haggling was passed by the board. Perhaps it was the novelty of the quest. Even the girls gathered round to watch him bargain and wheedle. By the end the whole lunchroom was cheering him on.
Tommy was trading everything on his tray for black olives. Not only the entrée, the dessert, the vegetables, but even the milk, under normal circumstances a fungible commodity in which there had never been a secondary market. Towards the end the silverware went and, to climax it all, the napkin too.
This was triumph. This was an Olympian achievement. Tommy had traded his entire lunch for forty-nine black olives. A sum that seemed stunningly incalculable to us. They lay there on the plate, blackening it completely, a few spilled onto the tray. We stood in a circle, applauding. A crooked, modest, glowing smile creasing his guileless features.
And then, Mrs. Bennett, swooping down from nowhere. She had lunchroom duty that day. No one liked Mrs. Bennett. There was something corpulent about her. Her swollen features like some mid Fifties Buick with those thrusting, aggressive, bullet-like bumpers. And that large mole on her chin. Mrs. Bennett was the least popular teacher in school. After this, not even her own students would stick up for her.
She took Tommy by one hand and his lunch tray by the other. She marched him to the back of the cafeteria. There, before the assembled grade, in a ceremony that gave away nothing to the breaking of Dreyfus in that hollow square, she forced the weeping, protesting Tommy to dump the entire contents of his tray, all forty-nine miraculous, gleaming black olives, in the garbage. Then, deaf to our jeers, gripping him by the shoulder, slowly, with a horrible stateliness, she guided him back through the lunch line and picked out for him a regular lunch with milk, napkin, straw, one entree, one vegetable and two black olives.
Tommy was never the same.
After ninth grade we went off to different high schools and I never saw him again. I wonder how he turned out. Every time I pick up a Wall Street Journal, I half expect to see that odd, askew smile of his on the front page, picked out in the paper’s trademark illustration style, all those Benday dots, instantly recognizable after all these years. I just can't decide whether the article will be covering some takeover Tommy has engineered or the stretch in Allentown he's just been sentenced to.
30. The Mighty Zalooms
The mighty Zalooms appeared in huge, quart sized waxed paper sacks, like the bags that Eight O'clock Coffee was sold in at the A&P, but larger. This was the good stuff.
My family was mad for pistachio nuts. All of us. Even the cheapest, smallest, most cheaply dyed red rejects that left us looking like painted women out of de Kooning. None of those tawdry little cellophane tubes ever lived to see the dawn in my house.
Eventually, a guy who worked for my father started coming across with the goods. Zaloom Brand, straight from Iran. Lightly salted and delicately roasted. Undyed, of course. Someone he knew, or was related to was an importer.
By now both of my brothers were long gone to college. It was just my parents and me. After dinner my mother would do the dishes, my father would go into the living room to read the paper and I would go to my room to finish my homework. Except for the nights we played Scrabble.
I don't remember my parents ever playing cards, or any other board games. Scrabble was their game. Fast games, two or three a night, rapid fire.
Years later, ascending a grimy staircase in Chinatown one Sunday morning, I found myself suddenly struck by the most bizarre, yet fugitively familiar, sound. The building itself was roaring. A frenzied, unfolding, careening thunder echoing from floor to floor, seeping out through every closed doorway I passed. The Chinese men were playing mahjong, it was explained to me, and they were gambling. Then I placed it: it sounded just like my parents playing Scrabble.
An old maroon box, held together with masking tape. And old gray felt bag for the letters, from some lost piece of stereo equipment, meant to hold a mike perhaps. Some slips of paper and small pencil, for scoring, and the tile holders, fancy ones with scoring holes on top and pins, which we never used, intended for cribbage. And we always had to have to have something to eat. Some fruit, a cookie, the candy my father would bring home from Barracini's. Often it was ice cream. No matter how much I complained, my mother always bought the Van Choc Straw. Or we might be blessed with pistachios. Big, ripe succulent pistachios.
They were ranked according to some sort of grading nomenclature, like olives, like American bombers from World War II. The smallest were Large and they went up from there. There was a little chart on the back of the bag. Our Zalooms were at least Super Colossals, maybe even Jumbo Dreadnoughts.
The delicate, shimmering chartreuse of them. The fragile paper-thin skin between the shell and the meat, almost every single one ridiculously easy to open.
It was the first time I found myself unable to stop, simply unable to stop myself from doing something. I could not push them away. Aware that control was slipping. Alive to the realization that the ecstasy of the first bite, of the first crack of the first shell was, incrementally but inevitably, diminishing with each additional nut. Nevertheless, entirely helpless to stop myself. One after another after another. Searching the dish, a quick aerial survey, then the swoop, the snatch, the snap between the thumbnails or the longer, sweeter, crack between the molars followed by that unearthly pleasure.
The rough, slightly misshapen pod of meat: rolling it around on the tongue. Easing off the crackling skin, sometimes having to pry it from the roof of the mouth. Then milking the nut dry again, extracting the last of the juice, sweetly perfumed, lightly salted, finally biting into the intoxicating core. Sometimes latitudinally, usually along its axis, splitting the nut into its constitutive twins. The doubled, slightly concave interiors of them, taut yet luxuriantly smooth, like the stretched stomach of some delightful being I was years from stroking. Then biting down, impatient, finishing them off, first one, then the other, grinding the fruit down, pulverizing it between my teeth, releasing the last of the goodness, then swallowing. Gone.
Then a sip of ginger ale. My mother allowed only ginger ale in her house. No other soda. Yukon Club ginger ale. Unless it was a birthday. Then what we called flavored sodas were allowed: cream soda, root beer, cola, but Yukon Club only. Only house brands in our house. Yukon Club being the private label at A&P. Something left over from the Depression, I always assumed. No Coca Cola or Seven Up or Dr. Pepper, ever.
A quick sip, then another pistachio, and again that thrill, once more commensurately diminished. Opening up another sweet one, and the concomitant tinge of... what? Anxiety? Of knowing that I could not stop, that I didn't need another, that each was just that much less pleasing than the one before. Perhaps it was a function of the salt, deadening the taste buds, and not some more metaphysical satiety at work. Knowing, accepting, that this one was nothing like the last, much less the first, but I was just as incapable of stopping now as I had been a moment before. I had to have another. A feeling I came to know many times over the years, with many other things I held in my hands, gazing down at, then raising to my lips. But this was the first time.
Eventually my father would bang on the table, "Go. Go on, you're taking all night."
My mother would halfheartedly pull away the bag of nuts and the clinking, overloaded ashtray, muttering, "You'll make yourself sick with those. You never know when to stop."
And all too often the best I could come up with would be some pathetic single letter tacked on to someone else's word: a T added onto G-O, for a measly three points. At least it wouldn't be my turn anymore.
As we lay down our tiles, each of us had our own way of expressing the merriment or despair, as appropriate, that accompanied our turn. My father's unmitigated glee, his war whoop, his whole face worked up into a beaming smile, his round eyes squinting in triumph as he laid down his coup. My mother's deceptively modest and retiring smile, as if this was just another dinner of pot roast and mashed potatoes she was serving, setting the plates on the table, as she quietly plunked down some stultifying seven letter, triple word score with a Z, a Q, and two Ms in it.
As for me, I always got embarrassed. It was always easier when I had a poor hand, when all I could summon up were those feeble two and three letter combinations, T-I-N or H-A-D or F-A-T. Three points, seven points, five points. Then there would be no comment and the game would move rapidly along. But now and then, almost despite myself, I would look down and see, swimming up from the jumble of characters on my slate, a long, intricate, fully formed word, some charming, stylish creature. S-Q-U-A-L-O-R, say, or S-Y-Z-Y-G-Y.
The first pairing, S-Q, would suggest a word, a word I might not even be certain the meaning of. Then the hurried swapping of tiles and the rush of pleasure as the letters sorted themselves out and indeed, it was so, a word entire, right there. Then, another dampening. Where can this go? Where can it fit in? But, yes, I find a place for it. It can, it can go right there. Hoping no one else will snatch away the opening before my turn comes round. Waiting, trying not to stare at the beckoning, alluring, all too obvious space. Each of us at the table were entirely capable of tracking the others' eye movements and making a purely defensive, spoiling play, just to ruin another's set up.
Whiling away the intervening moments, surreptitiously adding up the potential payoff. Trying to act cool, bored, unsatisfied with my letters. Shifting them about some more, putting them out of order, as if I was continuing to cast about for some combination, fruitlessly. And then, miraculously, it is my turn and the space is still there, waiting for me. And that is when I would get red in the face.
I never knew what to do. I would deposit the letters. The first one, and then the next, and then another. And as I kept on going, laying them down, my parents' eyebrows would start to go up. When, finally, it became clear, my mother would pronounce it out loud. "QUORUM," say, with a little wonder in her voice.
"Ah," my father would echo as he toted up the score, "QUORUM."
He'd pronounce the word with that same wonder. As if it was some rare monster, like a sailor's legend. Or a precious alpine sprig, long believed extinct, I had brought back from the far ends of the earth and laid before them on the kitchen table. And I never knew what to say. Face red, looking down, waiting for play to resume.
And then, when I was around thirteen, we sat down one night after dinner for another fast, furious game of Scrabble.
As this game wore on, I knew it would be close. At the end my father finished the scoring, debiting the remaining letters from those who had tiles left when the first of us, it might have been me, got rid of all his letters. He finished the sums in his tidy, precise accountant's hand, running the pencil point quickly up and down the columns, checking his addition, which never needed checking, and then he looked up.
He studied me with a marvelously gentle smile on his face.
"My son," he said, "You have won."
I had won. I had beat my parents. Now I really did not know what to say.
My mother let out a little, "Ah," of joy.
My father was still looking at me, his eyes shining. My mother got up and kissed me on the forehead.
"No more nuts for you," she said, putting the bag away.
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