The Mariners Harbor Messiah

by Todd Daley

  “Why’s that? You got something to hide, girl?” Barry snapped.

  “Shut the fuck up!” she screamed.

  “You want to make me?” Barry yelled, getting up from his seat.

  “Calm down, both of you,” Tom said firmly, walking down Barry’s aisle.

  Moving on, Tom asked, “What about the emphasis on family and social class? Is that just a phenomenon of the South, or does it also exist in the North?”

  “That’s just snobbery. It exists everywhere,” said Wendy, whose good looks were matched by a sharp mind.

  “I agree,” said Barry. “Look at Mr. Haley. He comes from a long line of whiskey drinkers, but he became a renowned Curtis High School teacher.”

  “Mr. Haley is cool. And he has cool friends, like that messiah man from Mariners Harbor,” Lora replied.

  “You ought to invite him here to talk to us,” someone called out from the back of the room.

  “Is he white or black?” Barry asked.

  “He’s mixed, like most of us,” Tom replied. Actually, Tom wasn’t sure of his friend’s ethnic background. Lately, he surmised that Amon was a Native American.

  Glancing at Mrs. Murray’s notes, Tom asked what Harper Lee meant by the term “fine folks” in her book.

  “That’s just another name for white people,” Barry replied.

  “Actually, the author defined ‘fine folks’ as those with the good sense to do the best with what they’ve been given,” Tom read from his notes.

  “Why does everybody have to have a label? White, black, Spanish, Italian, Irish, Polish, Chinese—down deep inside we’re all the same,” Lora asserted.

  “That’s a profound sentiment,” Tom concurred, folding up Mrs. Murray’s notes.

  “C’mon, people, now, smile on your brother. Everybody get together, try to love one another right now,” Barry crooned off-key as the bell sounded, ending the class.

  Amidst the good insights, irrelevant comments, laughter, and derision, and the Youngbloods’ song on brotherly love, Tom’s fill-in lesson for his well-endowed colleague seemed to go fairly well. Of course, how much his restless teenagers carried away from Harper Lee’s memorable book about social justice in the racially divided South was questionable. From Tom’s remembrances of his own high school experiences, he believed that students took away useful insights that would remain with them through the years. He recalled reading Charles Dickens’s novel A Tale of Two Cities in high school, which began with the line “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness … it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair.”

  CHAPTER 60

  Stickball Game

  On a foggy Saturday afternoon in April, Tom pulled up at PS 21 in his old gray Pontiac, with Amon at his side. Unhappily, he noticed Harry the Horse warming up earnestly on the pavement, firing blazing fastballs and sharp knuckle curveballs. His blazing pitches hit the rectangular strike zone marked on the paved handball court wall, filling the school yard with loud rhythmic thuds as the rubber Spalding smashed against the rigid concrete wall.

  “Looks like you got your good stuff today,” Tom called out as he and Amon walked toward the concrete wall, which faced south toward Walker Street.

  Tom carried several Spaldings, two broomstick bats, and his well-worn baseball glove. Amon had a kid’s baseball glove, which was made of plastic, plus an old Brooklyn Dodger baseball cap. Fortunately, the sun began to peak through the low-lying clouds, and broad shafts of sunlight illuminated the paved school yard.

  “Damned right. You better start swinging with my windup, ’cause you’ll never catch up to my fastball,” the Pied Piper of Elm Park replied.

  After a coin toss, which Harry won, Tom and Amon batted first. Tom struck out on three pitches. Amon managed to foul off two of Harry’s fastballs and was fooled on a changeup, swinging too early.

  Smiling at his own ineptitude, Amon exclaimed, “You’re a tricky pitcher, Harry. But I’ll get to you eventually.”

  “It’ll never happen. I’m undefeated at fast-pitch stickball.”

  “Ain’t true, Harry. Mike Palermo and I beat you when Mike hit a ninth-inning home run off you a few years back,” Tom retorted.

  “Ten bucks says it’s not going to happen today.”

  The stickball game proceeded uneventfully, with Tom baffling Harry with an assortment of overhand and sidearm fastballs, mixed with tailing curveballs and some sharp knuckle curves. Harry was unstoppable as a pitcher, with Tom managing only some foul tips and one ground ball single. Amon hit two screeming line-drive doubles and a towering pop-up, which Harry caught after a long run. The game remained a scoreless tie until Amon got hold of one of Harry’s fastballs in the eighth inning and sent it over the fence, across Walker Street into the cemetery.

  “Holy shit!” Harry yelled. “I’ve never seen anybody hit a Spalding that far. It must have traveled three hundred feet.”

  In the bottom of the eighth, Tom felt something give in his shoulder when he tried an overhand fastball. Changing to a sidearm delivery gave no relief to the skinny science teacher, so Amon had to relieve him. Beckoning to the Mariners Harbor resident, Tom ran to the outfield while Amon warmed up, using an unorthodox no-windup delivery. His first few warm-up tosses were off the mark, missing the rectangular strike zone by a lot. In addition, his pitches appeared to lack the velocity of Harry’s and Tom’s heaters.

  Eagerly setting himself at the plate, Harry called out, “Just get ready to duck, Amon. Harry’s gonna give that baby a ride!”

  Then Amon cut loose with a fastball that whizzed by Harry at blinding speed. Harry had swung hard but did not connect. The same result occurred with Amon’s next two pitches.

  “Are you friggin’ kidding me? Where did you learn to throw like that?” Harry exclaimed, completely overpowered by Amon’s fastball.

  Amon replied that he was a novice at stickball. “We didn’t play stickball where I came from.”

  “The guy throws like Sandy Koufax and never played the game before. Shit, you should go to Shea Stadium and show the Mets your stuff. They’d sign you with a bonus—no questions asked.”

  “Beginner’s luck. Besides, I have no control throwing baseballs. Just ask Mrs. Eggert on Pulaski Street. I broke her window.”

  “Good for you. I hate that woman. She was gonna call the cops on me after that guy broke her window,” Harry replied, pointing at Tom.

  “Amon fixed her window and did some home repairs. Now she loves him,” Tom declared. “Even Granny Schmidt smiles at him.”

  “And you lifted that heavy beam off my chest like it was a plywood plank. No wonder they call you the Mariners Harbor Messiah,” Harry said, scrutinizing Amon for the source of his physical powers.

  “That came from the local papers after I rescued someone who jumped off the Staten Island ferry,” Amon replied quietly.

  “I think his girlfriend, Mary, was the first to use that pseudonym talking to a newspaper reporter, and it stuck,” Tom chimed in.

  Tom suggested they go for a few beers at K. C.’s to cool off, to which both men agreed—Harry emphatically and Amon reluctantly. Tom chose K. C.’s rather than Kaffman’s because of Bonnie Rosolio’s remarks about his frequenting that busy saloon on weekends.

  Entering the hazy, sour-sweet–smelling bar, the three men were greeted by Pat McDean, owner of K. C.’s. “Well, the prodigal son has returned with his entourage. What are you drinking? The usual Ballantine beer brewed right here on the Island or something a little stronger?”

  “Ballantine’s good. There’s nothing better than an ice-cold beer to celebrate a big win,” Tom exclaimed.

  “Don’t rub it in, Teach. Without this guy, I would have beaten you easily.”

  “You’re absolutely right. I had thrown
out my arm, overhand and sidearm.”

  “It could have gone either way. The main thing was that it was an enjoyable experience. You can’t call yourself a New Yorker unless you’ve played stickball,” Amon said.

  “I wonder if they play stickball in Chicago or Detroit,” Tom replied.

  “I tell you what, Tom. You go to those cities and find out for us. Next time I visit those bush-league places, I’ll bring my stickball bat with me.”

  Amon said he had never heard of stickball before coming to the Island.

  “Amon’s a pretty good basketball player too. Gave me fits under the basket, and from the outside there’s no stopping him,” Tom commented.

  “Basketball’s a game I haven’t played in recent years, though I like watching it on TV. I saw those big guys Chamberlain and Jabbar going at it the other day,” Harry observed.

  “There will never be another dominant center like Wilt Chamberlain. He once scored a hundred points against the Knicks in 1962. And that year he averaged more than fifty points per game,” Tom replied.

  “Jabbar is a better shooter and quicker. Wilt couldn’t stop his skyhook. But my favorite player is Elgin Baylor, driving to the basket, faking the other guy out.”

  “Baylor is a one-man show. He’s changed the game of basketball from what it used to be. Slow white guys with two-hand set shots and banked layups,” Tom said, ordering another round of Ballantines for his two companions.

  “What’s wrong with the set shot? I had a deadly one in my day,” Harry responded angrily.

  “I’ll have to challenge you to a game of twenty-one next time you’re free.”

  “Shit. You with your friggin’ challenges. Stick to teaching, and leave the ball games to talented athletes like me and Amon,” Harry said, downing his beer and getting ready to leave K. C.’s.

  “Tom’s an instigator, but he’s a good guy. He’s helped me more than I can count and still manages to teach those Curtis kids,” Amon chimed in.

  “Yeah. He’s harmless—like his Elm Park buddies I used to play stickball with on Pulaski Avenue,” Harry replied, shaking Amon’s hand and slapping Tom on the back before exiting the hazy bar.

  Amon also got ready to leave K. C.’s. Tom asked him about speaking to Curtis students about volunteering. “I spoke with my principal. Many of them have heard about you from the local papers. I’m sure you’d get an enthusiastic reception from them.”

  “I don’t know. I’m not much of a speaker,” Amon replied, seemingly lost in thought. “But my time is running out. So I’ve got to do what I can before—”

  “Of course. But what is this weird stuff about time running out?”

  Dalton Trumbo

  Dalton Trumbo was an American novelist and screenwriter whose career was curtailed by his association with the Communist Party in the 1940s. In 1947, Trumbo was summoned by the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) to testify about his activities with the American Communist Party. Refusing to disclose his actions or the identities of Hollywood actors, directors, and writers who were members of the party, Dalton Trumbo was blacklisted—banned from working in the movie industry. Trumbo asserted that the First Amendment of the US Constitution gave him the right to refuse to answer questions about his political beliefs and his personal associations.

  Born in Colorado in 1905, Dalton Trumbo began writing in his twenties while working at a bakery in Los Angeles. Anxious to move away from his menial job, Trumbo worked on short stories, novels, and screenplays. Drawing on experiences while growing up in a working-class family, Dalton Trumbo’s stories appeared in magazines like Vanity Fair and Vogue. In 1934, Trumbo was hired by Warner Brothers to review plays and novels for possible movie adaptation and also to write screenplays. In 1936, Trumbo wrote his first screenplay for the movie Road Gang. In 1937, he wrote the screenplay for the movie Devil’s Playground, which showed his concern for the downtrodden and disenfranchised.

  In addition to Warner Brothers, Dalton Trumbo also worked for Columbia, Paramount, Twentieth Century Fox, MGM, and RKO movie studios. In 1940, he won his first Oscar for the movie Kitty Foyle, starring Ginger Rogers in a role about a poor girl who enters a wealthy family as a result of marriage. In addition to his movie industry success, Trumbo became involved in left-wing political causes. He joined communists and liberals in supporting the anti-fascist coalition against General Franco during the bloody Spanish Civil War.

  In 1939, Dalton Trumbo wrote the antiwar novel Johnny Got His Gun. At that time, the Communist Party changed its anti-Hitler policy to a pro-peace orientation, as a result of the Russian–German peace treaty. The publication of Johnny Got His Gun coincided with the antiwar movement of the far left and far right in the United States. There was a break between President Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Communist Party, until America entered World War II as an ally of the British and the Russians.

  During the Second World War, Dalton Trumbo wrote screenplays for several patriotic war movies, including A Guy Named Joe, Mission to Moscow, and Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo. In 1945, the Trumbo-written movie—Our Vines Have Tender Grapes, starring Margaret O’Brien and Edward G. Robinson—depicted life on a meager farm in Wisconsin. Earlier in 1943, Dalton Trumbo reportedly joined the Communist Party, which had attained the zenith of its popularity in the United States during that era.

  Appearing before HUAC in 1947, along with several other Hollywood writers, Dalton Trumbo refused to answer questions or name coworkers associated with the Communist Party. This group of screenwriters, known as the Hollywood Ten, cited the First Amendment in refusing to incriminate other members of the Screen Writers Guild. Charged with contempt of Congress, Trumbo and nine other screenwriters were fined and sent to prison for ten months. In addition, they were blacklisted—prevented from working for the Hollywood studios. Unable to write under his own name, Dalton Trumbo wrote movie scripts for several Hollywood hits—including Roman Holiday, The Brave One, and Spartacus—using a pseudonym. Otto Preminger and Kirk Douglas broke the blacklist in 1959 by openly hiring Trumbo to write the script of Spartacus. He also reportedly wrote the script for Exodus in the late 1950s.

  The Academy of Arts and Sciences (which had supported the blacklist during the 1950s) belatedly conferred an Oscar on Trumbo for his work in writing the screenplay for The Brave One in 1975. Despite his communist sympathies, Trumbo’s writing was populist, depicting the individual fighting the establishment. Dalton Trumbo was not embittered by his ill treatment during the Cold War. He asserted that “the blacklist was a time of evil, and no one on either side who survived it came through untouched by evil … There was bad faith and good faith, honesty and dishonesty, courage and cowardice, selfishness and opportunism, wisdom and stupidity, good and bad on both sides.”

  CHAPTER 61

  Algebra Lesson

  Walking into the Curtis lobby, Tom bumped into Lou Stout, the school’s burly principal, the latter dropping a sheaf of notes filled with algebraic equations. Stooping to pick them up, the skinny science teacher knew he would be guest teaching for an absent colleague.

  “Goody Gootstein has a coverage for me. Isn’t there anybody else capable of filling in for the AWOLs?” Tom complained wearily.

  “Look at it as a compliment. You’re a popular guy. Even Rosie Murray smiles at you in the hallways,” Stout replied.

  “I wish she’d give me more than a smile. Never mind. I’ll do it. What about that assembly program on community volunteering for my friend Amon?” Tom replied, trying to arrange a quid pro quo.

  “I hear you. But there’s a protocol to be followed for outside speakers in the schools. Once I get the go-ahead, we’ll do it.”

  Later that day, Tom walked into a third-floor classroom carrying a large balance scale, along with several half-pound, one-pound, and two-pound weights. In a large shopping bag, Tom removed a couple cans of soup, a jar of peanut butter, and a large box of Wheaties. Th
e skinny science teacher also had a deflated soccer ball. As expected, students reacted with a mixture of dismay, joy, confusion, and curiosity.

  “What are we doing today? Learning how to cook?” Manny called out from the back of the room.

  “Nah. Mr. Haley missed his lunch period. So now he’s gonna eat with us,” Barry chimed in.

  “Not really. We’re gonna do some math. And hopefully show the connection between math and food,” Tom replied.

  “I know the connection between math and food. If the number of calories you eat is bigger than the number of calories you burn off, then you get chubby … like Miss Bracelet over there,” Barry snapped.

  “Shove it up your ass,” Lora responded, rattling her copper bracelets and anklets angrily.

  “Enough, both of you. Suppose I wanted to weigh this big box of Wheaties with the balance scale. How would I do it?” Tom asked the class.

  Ronnie raised her hand. “Put the Wheaties on one scale, and add weights to the other scale until they balance.”

  Following the student’s instructions, Tom kept adding small weights to the pan opposite from the Wheaties until an equilibrium was achieved.

  “It looks like it weighs a little less than a pound,” Ronnie observed.

  “Well, the box says one pound,” Tom read.

  “You sure you didn’t sneak some before class?” Barry asked Lora, who responded by throwing a wadded paper ball at the teenager.

  “Maybe General Mills is cheating the public. Let’s weigh those soup cans,”

  Manny called out from the back of the room.

  The cans also seemed to weigh slightly less than a pound. Tom asked for a conclusion.

  “Maybe your balance scales are inaccurate,” Wendy asserted. She was a pretty teenager whose intelligence was as noteworthy as her appearance.