(Scrolling back to 1949 in this memoir will provide baseball junkies with the very essence of the game and the father/son relationship to it)

                                “THE KID’S BLOWING SMOKE UP MY ASS”

1963

     In the quiet of my room, mother made sure nobody disturbed the genius as I continued to churn out pages on my typewriter, having no idea where the words, ideas and scenes came from. I was influenced by everybody and anybody I read, and especially the last author I read. At class I was infuriated when Mills dismissed my new idol Steinbeck sneeringly as “written out, contrived, embarrassing…”

     “You should like Steinbeck, Mills,” I stood and shouted as he scrunched around in his seat to regard me with the same superior sneer. “He fought for social justice and the underclass all his life. They even called him a Commie, like they do you!”

     “Steinbeck’s lost his way,” he said calmly. “Just like you’ve never found your way, suburban hotdog. Get over yourself.”

     Where was my best pal, the plain-speaking plain thinking Angus when I needed him? How I missed The Big A’s simplistic views on everything. My father, like Mills, was equally repulsed by the “suburban hotdog” and mystified by his seemingly overnight transformation. There was no discussing anything with me now, especially since we’d never really talked about anything except baseball; though he often went to great lengths to impress upon me the benefits and joys of running his own business, watching it bloom, being his own boss answering to no one, a sly Jew out-witting his fellow Jews in competition and stealing their customers with better deals and cunning tactics, proudly screwing the government with ingenious and outrageous write-offs, putting people to work and providing them a living, possessing the freedom and new affluence to vacation in Hawaii with mother and buy an El Dorado Cadillac and eat in swank restaurants and fit mother in diamond jewelry and designer attire and put my sister and me, if I wanted, through 4 years of college!

     I would have none of it. I’d make my own way, my own money, thank you. The business to me was a waste of time compared to aspiring to be a writer. I mocked all the appliances, gadgets and gizmos he brought home on special deals with a sense of accomplishment and excitement. His sporting of success, his starting a business from rock bottom, “making gelt from dreck,” was, to me, no big deal. To my mind his journey emanated not out of choice, but necessity, so that he was just another number punching a clock—be it his own—and controlled by a system drowning in material excess while wallowing in the American propaganda machine brainwashing us all into thinking having all this shit made us the greatest and happiest people in the world, when in truth our blatant consumerism made us obscene and spiritually bankrupt in the eyes of great philosophical writers like Henry Miller and Jack Kerouac and most of Europe.

     “Jesus Christ, where did all those big words come from, bird-boy?” Dad demanded to know as we sat at the dinner table. “You talk like a kid with a paper asshole. You don’t know from nothin’. Go out in the world. And since when does a son of mine become so goddam uppity?”

     Like mother and grampa, now that I took a music appreciation class, I darkened the front room and listened to Beethoven, Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninoff, and even my sister gazed at me like I was off the reservation.

     Dad turned to mother, his face red. “The kid’s living under MY roof, eating MY food, he’s making fun of his old man, and blowing so much smoke up everybody’s ass we’re all choking on it.”

     Mother retorted, “What you must understand, Murray, is Dell’s finally finding himself.”

     “Bullshit,” Dad groused.

     (Next Sunday installment: Back to baseball)