VARSITY DEBUT

1959

     A contingent of neighborhood pals, most of whom I’d known since grammar school, were in the stands of the windswept pasture of our Compton High ball field for my debut. My father was nowhere in sight. He had a delivery route in the afternoons that included South Central LA, San Pedro, Long Beach, South Bay, San Gabriel Valley cities, Huntington Park and clear out to Pasadena and Burbank and Hollywood and downtown LA. He usually got home around 6 in the evening or later, exhausted, having been up early and opening his store at 7:30 in the morning. Instead of sending out salesmen working on a commission and making shoemakers pay shipping costs, he worked as a mostly one horse, nonstop operation, taking orders and delivering free in a day or two, cutting everybody’s throats on prices and discounts, a big fish eating the little fish as he proudly described it, allowing him to finally “get over the hump” profit-wise.

  

     I got up four times and banged out three singles, walked, stole a base, and played errorless in the field, and we won. Coach Edgmon flashed me a fatherly smile afterwards and patted my butt. Coach Armstrong pulled me aside and told me he was happy I’d made a decision to play only baseball. My friends stood after my last hit, gave me an ovation, and left. Walking home by myself, I was literally floating along the sidewalk about half a mile from home, on Alondra, when Dad pulled alongside me in his Nash Rambler station wagon. He stopped and I got in and instead of starting out he just stared at me with an expression indicating he was severely disappointed.

     “I went three for three, Dad,” I exclaimed proudly, hoping to wipe the look off his face. “I stole a base, walked, no errors, and we won.”

     “I know,” he said.

     “I didn’t see you there,” I said.

     “I was there. I saw everything. Saw you looking all over the place when you’re supposed to be paying attention to the game. I saw you visit Bowlin on the mound twice and tell him how to pitch. An infielder NEVER goes to the mound unless he’s called in to discuss strategy by the manager. Who the hell are YOU telling Bowlin how to pitch! You want your team mates telling YOU how to play? Bush! A disgrace. Just because you got a couple hits you’re telling everybody how to play the goddam game…since when does a 15 year old hotdog tell everybody where to play?” I started to answer but he cut me off. “That’s Edgmon’s job. Next thing you’ll be telling HIM how to run his goddam team.”

      My stomach churned with instant hot nausea. “Guess nothing I do satisfies you…”

      “It’s not just about playing the goddam game, it’s about conducting yourself like a ball player, not strutting around like some rooster who acts like he invented the game, craning his head all over, looking at the girls, looking at your friends, looking at the scouts…I’ve never in my life seen such horseshit behavior on a ball field.”

     He started the car and headed home in silence. I went straight to my room and slammed the door shut, lay on my bed staring at the ceiling, wanting to punch savagely

the face of the man which told me it didn’t like me, nor what I’d become, or was becoming. Oh, maybe like most fathers he loved me, but that didn’t prevent him one iota from finding me disgusting and even revolting.

     When I finally got to the dinner table, mother looked agitated and unhappy. I’d heard them arguing from my room. Mother had made pork chops and mashed potatoes and peas and I speared three pork chops off the platter and slapped them onto my dish. Dad flashed me the beady eye.

     “What have I told you before?” he growled. “Take one. You eat one, then take another. You don’t take three. Those chops aren’t going anywhere.”

     “I always end up eating three,” I protested.

     He speared two off my plate and dropped them on the platter. “You always take the three biggest chops. A pig. It’s time you learned some goddam table manners.”

     “Murray,” Mom protested. “Do you have to notice everything he does? Let the boy eat!”

     He pounded the table, rattling dishes, causing sister Susie to wince and come close to tears. “You stay out of this!” he snarled viciously at Mom. “I’m in charge here! Stop protecting him! His manners are a disgrace and if it’s the last thing I do, if I have to starve the wise-ass, I’m gonna teach him some goddam table manners!”

     As I poised my fork to spear my chops back, the identical murderous look was on dad’s face as when I was beating him in hand-slapping.

      “Don’t do it, I’m warning you…”

      My fork was barely in the chop when the lights went out. Next thing I was all the way into the living room, on my back, shaking out the cobwebs, feeling at my jaw. Mother hovered over me, and Susie was crying and had out her baton, ready to do battle in defending me from Dad, who sat in his dinner chair, a gloating grin on his face.

     “That was just my Betsy Ann shot,” he called. “A love-tap, bird boy, not my Susie Q.” He doubled up his left-hook fist.

     I stood and began screaming at him. He rose and came toward me and I picked up his windbreaker as he came over and whipped it across his face and ripped a small chunk out of his bald head. He grabbed his head and his eyes flashed with murder and I took off out the front door with the old man on my ass. Of, course, he couldn’t catch me. I stood out on the sidewalk while he threatened to “break me into a thousand pieces” when he caught up with me. I gave him the finger while he reached up to halt the flow of blood from his head. Evidently I’d gotten him with the zipper-end.

     I turned and began trotting. I wandered over in the darkness to Roosevelt Junior high and ended up walking down Long Beach Boulevard and then Atlantic, just walking, boiling, thinking about taking out my savings and allowing Susie to break open her piggy bank and give me what she had and hitch-hiking off into the sunset, and the only reason I wouldn’t was because of baseball. I was exhausted and starving and thought of visiting my grandparents on my mother’s side a block from us, but knew my dad would be looking for me there. I knew also that after he cooled off he’d calm down, though this was the first time I’d ever struck back at him. He’d had me on the ground a couple times over the years and Susie always clobbered him with the baton while mother screamed and beat on him.

     Later, much later, on the verge of collapse, I reasoned Dad was in bed because he had to mind the store so early, and knocked on the back door of my grandparent’s house. Grampa was up—a night owl who went to sleep in the wee, wee hours, slept late, ate eggs and only eggs; then, in his white short-sleeve shirt, black baggy pants, Dobbs Fifth Avenue hat and black shoes, walked all over Compton and clear into Long Beach and sometimes into South Central LA where he was known as “the walking man.” He smoked a pipe and cigars. He studied religion and hated them all and cornered door-to-door preachers and corrected them on their spiels. He read the Russian authors, the German philosophers, listened to classical music, had played the oboe and flute in small town bands back in Wisconsin and was a tailor all his life who had no patience with customers and terrified all my cousins in his house and wouldn’t let them make any noise or touch anything but favored and spoiled me because he’d been my surrogate father for two years while Dad was away in the war.

     Mother always said, “Grampa loves you and knows you better than anybody.”

     He was the only non-Russian Jew in the family, a French-Belgian born outside if Liege, who came to America as a child and had no accent.

   . He let me in, smelling of pipe smoke. He was completely bald and because he seldom wore his false teeth, his chin nearly touched his nose. Dad claimed he looked like the cartoon character, Snuffy Smith. He knew why I was here. Gramma got up and made me bacon and eggs and poured as much milk as I could drink. Dad had come looking for me earlier. He was angry but they calmed him down. Gramma went to bed and grampa put me up on a couch in the den, which had a piano. He liked to sit in his den alone and read and listen to Rachmaninoff or Beethoven or DeBussy or Amos and Andy on the radio and smoke his pipe. Tonight we sat and talked.

     “Your father, he’s a good man,” he explained, “but this baseball stuff, it’s crazy. It’s just a game, Dell. You don’t know it now, but you’re a scholar, and an artist.” He grinned at me, false teeth out, puffing his pipe. “Like your mother.”      

     (Next Sunday installment: “A Silent, Gnawing, Brutal Feud.”)