Wisdom From Above

Kenny Davis As Perry Mason was pretty convincing in making the case of neither of us as team captain, and of course he was right - all down the line, too, as Tommy Konwinski was, indeed, named captain by our coach.

So, Kenny was world-wise, at age 7 (or 8?). And I was world-weary, with this dispiriting development.

The words I couldn't quite find with Kenny, or anyone else, about the situation, I found with my mother. I had briefed her earlier. Now I was coming home with the dread conclusion.

"He's captain. Tommy Konwinski, big guy, conceited jerk. What good does that do anybody?

"He's the strongest player. But he doesn't lead anybody. He doesn't talk to half the kids. They're not good enough. He only talks to other kids who don't need any help and don't like anybody, like him."

That was the gist of it, although the un-gist was (rest assured) protracted.

At one point, my mother got up from the dining room table. "I'm still listening," she said, as she went into the kitchen.

She came back with a plate with four Oreos and a glass of milk for me. Uh-oh. That meant this was serious in her mind, for me. I had a raw vice for Oreos, which I tried to fight, so this was like opening a bottle for a bad drinker, This One Time.

I was done talking. Now was my mother's turn.

"This all reminds me of something," she said. "Some things," she decided. "That I've been thinking about since you first discussed this with me.

"Do you remember," she asked, "when they had you reading the Bible by yourself in school? Because you were too far ahead for Reading class?"

"Uh-huh," I said. That was in first grade.

"And how some of the stories disturbed you? In some it was the language. In some it was the thought."

"Mm-hmm," I said. I knew not where she was heading.

"One was the story of the lepers and the tax collectors. And how Jesus welcomed them and stayed with them, even though they were shunned by society. And you said," and she was laughing - editing herself - "well, you said you couldn't live up to that example.

"I told you not to worry, that Jesus only expects - well, I told you not to worry and we would talk about it someday when I thought it would be easier for you to understand. Today is that day.

"Jesus wants us to take care of each other, and think of others before yourself - or along with yourself, at least. He uses the example of lepers just to shock us into thinking. We can't do what he did. But we can follow his example.

"On your team, you don't try to aggrandize yourself by staying with the better players. You spend time with the boys who are not so good, and try to help them get better."

"I spend the most time with my friend Kenny Davis. He's my best friend and he's one of the best players."

"But you are friends. You don't hang around with him because he's good? He's talented but he also helps the other boys - you told me. He's modest. Like you. I bet you would like him if he was modest but not good, and you wouldn't like him if he was good but not modest."

I turned an Oreo on the plate.

"You always knew all this, in your heart, and I knew you knew. But it wasn't until you had enough experience in life, that I could talk to you about it clearly.

"My next thought, the story that really disturbed you - that was 'disgusting' - was Jesus saying if your hand leads you to trouble, cut it off, or if your eye, pluck it out. Remember?"

I did, like a story from a horror comic.

"Well," my mother said, "again, Jesus was making a point. Dramatically. And again the point was to people like Tommy Konwinski.

"It's a message with a lot of levels. But one simple level is to boys like Tommy. That if God gives you a gift - like a good hand, or eye, or you're good at sports - and you don't use your gifts generously, then it's better that you never had them. Because God expects things of us based on our blessings."

"To whom much is given, much is expected," I said.

"Exactly. So I don't want you to worry about the injustice of Tommy being named captain. That isn't as important as the work you do.

"And that's my final point. The story - this is not one that bothered you - that Jesus tells of the Pharisees who pray out on the street, or loudly in the temple, so everyone will hear, and think good of them.

"Jesus said, those men already have their reward.

"He told us to pray in private. And then we would get our reward, the important one we're praying for, not the cheap one in men's eyes."

I nodded - solemnly, perhaps, but vigorously enough, I hoped.

"You see, don't you?," my mother asked.

"I do," I said.

"Good," she said, smiling. "Now, I've talked a lot. Do you want to talk more? Or ask anything?"

I thought. "No," I said simply.

"You get it, right?"

"Right," I said, and I knew she knew I meant it. "I'm just going to go upstairs a while."

"You haven't eaten those Oreos," she said.

"It's alright?," I said. I didn't want to seem ungrateful. "I'll have them tonight."

"Okay," my mother said.

I went upstairs to the bedroom I shared with my two brothers.

The sun streamed in and our bedsheets were bright. Eddie's was orange, Paddy's was yellow, mine was NFL, with logos. I guess the different sheets helped us stay personally distinct, in a small space.

I looked out the window at our yard and the alley and the street. I turned around and knelt down at my bed. I put my forehead to the bed, on my folded arms, and said Thank You. I didn't want anything but to say that.

Non-Commissioned

So maybe Kenny Davis and I would be Best Men at each other's teenage weddings, rather than go to Vietnam, but that was in the future.

In the present was the issue of team captaincy.

About halfway through the season, coach announced that he would name a captain. To formalize leadership, recognize ability - maybe acknowledge valor; I don't remember. Easy to make fun of (it's only Little League), but there it was, a real thing, status conferred, so you had to take it seriously.

Or I did, as that kind of kid.

Coach was going to wait a while to decide. He hadn't yet, he said. We would each have the chance to step up and earn it for ourselves, he said, or to lobby for someone else.

"What do you think?," I said to Kenny. "Should it be you, or me?"

"What do you think?," Kenny said. "We either have a chance?" His look said No.

"What do you mean?," I said, responding to that look. "Of course we do. Who plays harder than us?"

"We get dirty," he acknowledged. "But, come on. Konnie is the boy."

"Konnie" was Tommy Konwinski, our star pitcher. Big and strong, he also had a mean streak that intimidated foes.

The trouble was, it affected teammates just as much, if not more. Make a bad play and he might show you up on the field. Make a key out at bat and he'd rank you out on the bench.

"Konnie," I said derisively. "He don't lead, he - ", and I stopped, lost for words, for once.

"He leads the way coach sees it," Kenny said.

"Me and you are out here every week early and late, helping other kids with their game," I said.

"I'm not saying me or you don't deserve it. I'm saying we're not going to get it."

I frowned. No words.

"And me," Kenny said. "I got an even extra reason." He touched his fingers to his face.

"Oh, man," I said. We had never discussed race before. This was a hard place to start.

"Come on, man," he said. "It's like your grandmama said about wishing."

Huh. I had told him once how our grandmother helped raise us. And when we'd say, as kids will, that I wish this, or I wish that, she would scowl, comically, and glare, and bark in her brogue, so heavy with native - or immigrant - fatalism, "Well, wish in one hand and shit in the other, and see which one fills up first."

It surprised me that it stuck with him - enough to remember it, now?

"Kenny, she didn't mean that. She was just being funny."

"Well, it is funny. It's funny because it's true."

I got the feeling he was telling me something, that he knew more about than I did.

Fathers To The Men

Kenny Davis's father worked for the Transit Authority. "Not a driver or engineer," he said, as if expecting the question. I didn't ask. I knew better, as my father worked for Pan Am, but in an office, not a plane.

Likewise, Kenny's father worked in an office, he said, but doing exactly what, he didn't know. "He sure gets up early, though," he said.

He was proud of his father, as I was of mine. About military service, too. Kenny's father had been in the Air Force; mine was a Marine.

"Never would I be a Marine," Kenny said. "They make you dig holes, and if you don't do it fast enough? They hit you in the head with a shovel. Then they make you hold up big bags of sand 'til you cry." We both laughed. "I swear, I saw it in a movie."

"That's what's good about the Air Force, I guess," I said. "They can't make you dig holes in a plane."

"My father told me he ate good in the Air Force," he said.

"My father said in the Marines, if they didn't eat fast enough, they got hit in the head with a pan." More laughs.

"I don't know about the army, now, though," I said. I meant the military in general. "You know about Vietnam?"

"Mmm," Kenny said, which could have meant yes or no.

I followed politics. I wrote in the streets in chalk for LBJ in 1964. I was in the crowd when he campaigned in our neighborhood, driving through in a huge flatbed truck.

I read the News and the Post every day, cover to cover. I watched talk shows on Sunday mornings - and took notes. Oh, yes I did. Aged 7. I knew about Vietnam.

"It's supposed to be a war," I said. "But it's not a war."

"Nobody attacked us, right," Kenny said.

"Yeah," I said. "It's a little country with and jungles and swamps. Steaming hot. People wear pajamas and flip-flops. There's Communists and not-Communists. But nobody has anything.

"It's a million miles from here. We have soldiers over there. They don't even know who we are. But we're killing them, so they're killing us back. They have, like, bayonets. We have bombers, bombing everything. It's insane. It's a sin, even, I think."

That slowed the talk a bit. Kenny was Catholic, too. Sin is serious.

"Why are we doing it?"

"To show who's boss." I paused. "Even to ourselves. They're making kids go. Go over and kill people, and get killed, maybe, because we said so. If you don't, you go to jail.

"But if you go to college, you don't have to go. That's for rich people. Although I'll go to college, some way."

"Me, too," Kenny said, bouncing a ball on the ground. "I mean, I want to go anyway."

"Or if you're married? Then you don't go."

"Shit, I'll do both," he said. We both laughed. We generally didn't swear. This was for comic effect, as I think we were starting to scare ourselves. "I know two girls to get married to. Three."

"That's good odds," I said. We were back to joking, I thought; but Kenny said,

"You talk to your father about this?"

"No," I said. "My mother."

"What's she say?"

"We talked all about it. I told her I ain't going to no Vietnam. She said she don't intend to let us. Me and my two brothers."

"It's good to have your mom on your side," he said.

I nodded. "Best," I said.

Team Depth And New Vernacular

Not to discount our coaches, but it is pretty easy putting together a Little League baseball team.

You make the most athletic kid the pitcher. He is your workhorse, in the parlance. He will have to throw and move the most.

The catcher is basically a target. So is the first baseman; so you put big kids there.

The outfielders don't do much, at least in Little League. Not many kids hit soaring rockets out there. Basically, it is helpful if outfielders do not sit down while playing, do not wear their gloves on their heads, and have the presence of mind and the ability to throw balls hit to them back to the infield.

The infielders - second and third base, and shortstop - must be nimble. Most balls will be hit to the shortstop, who is also part of most double plays and relay throws, so he must have a brain, to anticipate moves.

Second base will see less action, as will third; but the third-baseman plays closest to the batter, and will get hard-hit shots, so needs quick reflexes.

Coach noticed, although how could you not, that my reflexes were cat-like, practically supernatural, and I was installed at third base.

I would have been disappointed at not being shortstop - the star position - had the post not gone to Kenny Davis.

He was better, and we had rapport, so I was happy to play next to him.

The level of skill at this level of play was not high, so you mostly just had to pay attention to play well. Kenny and I were set, with laser-like intensity. But we also liked to laugh, and did. We started to emerge as team leaders, in tandem, and became friends.

We talked a lot. I remember him asking me once about errant throws. I made very few. He asked if I had a secret or something.

In fact, I did.

"I don't want to make an error."

"Yeah?," he said, wide-eyed and wagging his head: sarcastic.

I laughed. "Yeah," I said. "But I don't want the other kid to make an error, either. So I think about that when I throw. Make it so he can get it. Help him make a good play. Help the pitcher, too, with the out. If I was doing it just for me, I might mess up. But it's harder to mess up if you're doing it for other people too."

He looked out at the field, then at me.

"You really think like that?"

"Sure," I said.

"That's deep," he said.

I shrugged, one-shoulder. We stopped talking a while. Kenny was looking at the field again. I was thinking about what he said; new vernacular to me.

The Little Foreign Legion

Little League was away from the neighborhood, and devoid of anyone I knew, so it had the aspect of the French Foreign Legion: a sterling opportunity to become new; to find (or reinvent) oneself, through stirring heroics to last ages. That was for me.

Of course, my father accompanied me to every practice and game (he had the car), but didn't seem to recognize the full weight of my goals, nor the signs of my transformation. I suppose they were rather oblique.

We were driving home one night from one of our first practices. I was tired, and had my cap pushed back on my head to emphasize it. I had had a pretty good night.

But not as good as one other kid I saw. His name was Kenny Davis.

He could do anything I could do, except much better, but what really impressed me was his demeanor. He had a sense both of concentration and ease, which I strove for myself, so certainly recognized.

"Hey, Dad," I said, riding home. "Who did you think was the best one there tonight?"

"You," he said, after sort of a long pause.

"No, come on," I said. I appreciated his kind loyalty, but I was looking for an honest answer.

"I don't know," he said, which I suppose was honest as you could get without actually saying "I wasn't watching that closely." I appreciated that, and his subsequent willingness to listen to my scouting report.

"Who?," he asked.

"I think that kid Kenny Davis. We were catching at the end."

"The colored kid?," he asked, by way of clarification.

This was the word used at the time. It was not black or African-American or of color, yet.

As it happened, Kenny Davis was the only "colored" kid in the program.

"Yeah," I said.

"What was so good about him?"

"At bat, he didn't miss a single pitch. Neither did I," I mentioned casually. "But he hits harder. Better swing."

"Hm," my father said, marking an interval.

"Good fielder, too," I reported. "He gets a good jump on the ball. He was in center when I was in left. We kept getting to the ball at the same time. He backs you up if it's yours."

"That's what you're supposed to do."

"Yeah, but did you see the other kids out there? Some of them? They had no idea what they were doing. Did you hear the fielding coach yell? He said, 'Fellas, run, in the direction of the ball.' "

"That's bad, I guess."

"That's real bad!"

"Did the coach say anything to you?"

"Yeah, he did. To me and Kenny. We were playing pretty shallow. He told us to move back. He said it's a lot easier to come in on the ball than go back."

"So did you?"

"Yeah. But Kenny said to me, 'All the same to me.' Quiet, like. We did it, but it didn't make any difference. I can go back or come in." This is because I am Roberto Clemente.

"But you listen to the coach," my father asked.

"Yeah," I assured him, with upturned palm.

Of course, every ball the rest of the day was hit in front of us.

"Good exercise," Kenny Davis said to me as we trotted back to position.

"My legs hurt," I said.

The coach didn't know it, but he was building team spirit.

Signed Up

Little League was in Gerritsen Beach, a neighborhood with fresh shore air, and flat expanse. Mostly private houses, not apartment buildings, there was lots of sky. The streets were wide and empty.

The first night (after school; after work for the fathers who brought us), we got oriented.

We met indoors, in a big gym.

We picked up the hats and t-shirts we'd ordered. We met our coaches.

"All right, fellas, listen up. I want to introduce myself, I'm Coach Lou."

Coach Lou had a gut and glasses. In real life he probably drove a Pepsi truck. Here he was General Patton.

His charges were sitting on benches. I was among the attentive few, not the fidgety.

"We're going to learn two things in the opportunity of Little League baseball for you fellas. One, the fundamentals of the game and the nature of the game. You're going to learn the basics of the game and maybe go beyond the basics a little bit, as well of course as the basics themselves.

"Me and the other coaches and myself are going to do our best to instill in yous, also, in the course of the season, the values of competition, developing and learning your skills and all that, and playing the game the way it should be played, with respect for yourselves, your opponents, and of course the great traditions of the game that we call the game of baseball."

Something like that. Coach Lou put his unlit cigar in his mouth and gave us a meaningful look. He was not just Patton, but Casey Stengel and Winston Churchill, in one. I was smiling, not out of disrespect, but pleasure. Ready for battle, Coach Lou.

Called Up

It was paradoxical, even to myself, that a go-my-own-way kid like myself would be happy in school, and a little lost outside it.

It wasn't that I liked regimentation and rules. I wasn't an altar boy, or a choir boy. I wasn't a crossing guard.

I didn't need structure for its own sake. Some kids did. That was alright, although it seemed most such kids - the door-monitor type - soon were big on NASA, the FBI, and Hitler. See you later to them, although they tended to be polite.

I didn't need authority. I just needed things to do.

What provided that, just in time, was Little League.

It sounds a little square, of course: like, more Pennsylvania than Brooklyn.

But it was practically romantic to me. I was in love with baseball anyway. So, to be able to play with a team? It was like being a musician, and joining your first band.

It was adventurous from the start, because we played outside the neighborhood. You'd have to. There wasn't a single field of grass and dirt in all of Brooklyn 3.