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.

Passing Out

Like a lot of kids, I could sit and watch ants a long time. Ants were great. They were industrious. On the move. A team. They had their own thing. They didn't need people.

Clouds were good too. They weren't alive, of course; but they always changed. Like ants, they came and went on some whim or power that had nothing to do with people.

Getting older, I was starting to feel less connected to people, myself.

I began to notice, and to mind, how unfriendly adults were to kids.

My nuns and family were fine, and spoke as if kids had minds. But so many adults were either bossing you around about something inane, or patronizing you, or ignoring you altogether.

I remember talking to a neighbor one time, Mr. Rohaly, while he was gardening his meager plot. I figured I'd do the guy a favor, kill a little time with him as he puttered.

In the middle of an off-the-cuff soliloquy, about someplace I'd recently been, he looked over his shoulder at me, on his hands and knees in the dirt. His head was furrowed. (He was completely bald-headed. Mr. Nolan lived next door to him and didn't like him. He called him Beetle-Head Rohaly.)

"Really, Stevie?," he said. "Did they have pickles there?"

This threw me for some seconds as I realized this is a remark by someone who really doesn't feel like talking to you.

He must have forgotten about it a few days later, when he was painting a patch of his garage as I walked by, and he said, "You know, Stevie, in the Army, we had the saying, 'If you own it, paint it'." I thought about asking him if he painted pickles in the Army, but just kept walking.

Meanwhile, getting older, kids were also becoming more tiresome, or difficult, or both.

In school wasn't so bad. There was order, and you were occupied.

But out of school, games were getting rougher, or abandoned altogether, for meaningless - what? I couldn't even put a name to it. Hanging around, on the street, on stoops, on bikes, ranking each other out, as it was called; doing nothing.

Talk was getting stupider. Younger kids aren't ashamed of what they don't know. Older, they want to fight about it.

"Your God can't take Hercules and Atlas at the same time," a Jewish kid named Scotty (improbably, but so)once challenged me.

"He can take everybody," I said, although I was not eager to explore anything at this level of idiocy. "He made everybody."

"He can't take Hercules, Atlas, and Superman at the same time," Scotty said, with an air of rigorous triumph.

"Maybe not," I said.

If Scotty was stupid, how about James Conley, who told me Superman was real, because he saw a Superman parade on TV?

"Didn't you see that on the Superman TV show?," I said. I knew the episode.

"They can't fake a whole parade," he said.

Or, relatedly, Robert Packus, who told me his brother was Superboy, because his brother told him so, and then raced down the street tearing off his shirt, into an alley from which he (presumably) flew away?

I started spending a lot of time alone.

I could throw a ball against a wall for hours. I would create a ballgame in my head, with two teams, 27 outs apiece. Sometimes they played two.

Walking alone, I could look at an old wire fence, say, buried in a hedge behind a building, and think, no one has ever seen this before in quite this way. That means it never existed this way before. It never will again. I'd stare, and work myself into a real state of Being and Nothingness, until I thought I'd pass out; if I hadn't already. Had I?

On the normal side, I drew, read, and wrote. But things were closing in on me. That's a funny feeling at age eight.

The Day I Was Jewish

One case where the idea of not talking to strangers made sense was with religious people.

I found out one September. I was walking to the bus for school and a guy stopped me at 52nd and Lenox.

"Excuse me," he said. "Are you Jewish?"

If I was, I was a little early for Halloween, in my costume of a Catholic school kid.

"No," I said.

He looked relatively Jewish himself, with a yarmulke and a beard and all that, so you figure he would know the difference.

What did I care, though, and I turned to go, when he stuck out his arm like a bar and said,

"Wind my watch."

I was pre-bad language in my life, so it might have been the first time I accommodated a thought like, "What's with this crazy bastard."

Crazy people were common in Brooklyn 3, with the mental hospital, and were no worry, because they knew they were crazy, and knew you knew. All they had to do to be reminded was to glance at their pants, which they did not select themselves, and were stenciled with the words "Brooklyn State Hospital."

Non-hospital crazies were common, too, but were also little worry. They tended to be foggy and benign.

But a religious crazy person was a sudden puzzle. Where does the religion end and the crazy begin? No doubt they don't know. They just think they're religious.

So it's up to you to decide. In this case, I didn't have much time, so to speak. The guy was nuts and there was no one else on the street.

He still had his arm stuck out. I thought about grabbing his wrist and kicking his feet out from under him. Or whipping off the watch, throwing it, and running in the opposite direction.

But first, I thought, try the easiest thing. Wind the watch and see if that's all he wants.

So I did.

He looked at it, and at me, and said, "Thank you."

"Don't mention it," I said.

I walked away, without turning my back completely. I made a left on Lenox, not the right direction, because I didn't want him to know my right direction.

That should have been enough crazy Jewish action for one day, but there was more that afternoon.

More craziness, but essentially the same thing, on the same block. On my way home from school this time, I'm stopped by a guy with a long beard, dressed in robes.

"Excuse me, " he said. "Are you Jewish?"

What is this, National Jewish Confusion Day? This guy is more Jewish than the other, by a lot, with the robes, straps, a scroll, and a pillow with Hebrew on it. What's he going to ask me, to fish him a herring?

Fool me twice? Forget that. So I simply say, "Yes."

"Good," he says, and starts moving. Not away: unpacking stuff.

He produces a yarmulke and puts it on my head. He takes a strap and wraps it around my arm. He opens his scroll, tells me to repeat after him, and starts reading.

Now what? I'm stalling for time while I figure this out. Meanwhile I have to speak Hebrew. Luckily I was good at accents, like a little Sid Caesar.

The guy is chanting; me too; and actually I am starting to enjoy the scene a bit, until I look up and see a bunch of my older brother's friends round the corner. Jewish kids.

They get a look at me in my regalia.

"Hey!," screams Mickey Kravitz. "He's not Jewish!"

Uh-oh. My rabbi looks quite alarmed, as the kids are running towards us, waving fists.

"See you," I say to the guy, whipping off my yarmulke and straps, and taking off in haste.

"You bastard! We'll kill you!"

Bigger kids, they are fast, but I am pretty swift myself, motivated as I am.

I tear up 52nd Street and take a right angle into the first alley I reach, to elude their sight; then another, and another. I hop an old wood fence and hide behind it.

Quiet for a while. I've lost them.

Now I have time to think, and realize what's happening.

It's September. Jewish holidays.

Religious Jews are out proselytizing: that was the p.m. guy. Regular Jews are out walking, and not working, and in fact are not allowed to work at all - not flip a light switch, not wind a watch. That was the guy this morning.

I found this situation quite ironic, but wasn't sure I could convey the humor of it all to Kravitz and crew. What they saw, or think they saw, was me in rather elaborate blasphemy on their faith.

So I sat there a while. I figured my mother would enjoy the story later - provided I arrived home alone, without a bunch of baying kids behind me. "What did you do this time?" was a question I heard enough already, without being chased home or converted.