by Mark Harris
“I am the boss,” Pop would say.
But I would stick fast, and after a bit his face would crease up in a smile, because I had done the right thing and he was just testing me. Pop always told me you are libel to find yourself pitching to a lunkheaded catcher, and if that happens you have got to set him straight. No need to be made to look like a fool just because your catcher happens to be 1. Pop played dumb many a time and put on the stupid act so I would learn to play it smart. I was not only growing in the body but getting more brains as well.
Then there was just a general way I knowed I was growing, nothing you could put your finger on, but just a general thing. 1 day you are not allowed to do something, and the next day you are doing it, and nobody told you you could, but you do, and nobody stops you or says you are too little. It might be just driving a car. Pop was tinkering with the school bus 1 day, and he said what he needed he needed his welding cap that he left over at the Observatory, and I said I would get it, and I jumped in the old Moors and buzzed down, 1 mile there and 1 back. Somewhere along the way I passed over from being a mere child and become a man. At least I thought so then. Looking back now, however, I see that there was still a good deal to be learned about life.
I begun to be pretty itchy in school. It struck me as all a waste of time, and nothing took, or at least if it took it done so in such a way I never noticed. Now, as I read back over what I have wrote so far I can see where grammar might of come in handy. It is definitely on the weak side, and the punctuation no doubt smells. When in doubt I punctuate. 1 thing that beats me, though, is when somebody says something that somebody else said. Where in the world do you put the quotation marks? For instance, suppose Perry Simpson was to say to me, “I seen Dutch and Dutch said, “Perry, you made that play very good on that slow roller in the second inning last night”.” I do not recall Perry ever saying any such thing. I am only trying to discuss the punctuation of it. Christ!
Anyhow, school pretty much sizzled past—history and geography and algebra and geometry and civics and French. French floored me, though there was 1 thing I could rip off like I was born and raised in Paris itself. J’habite dans une ferme a cinquante kilometres de Marseille. (I live on a farm 50 kilometers out of Marseille.) I quit French after 1 year and elected Spanish. That floored me, too, though I afterwards wished that some of it took for I might of been able to know George Gonzalez better. As it is he is always a mystery to me and to all the Mammoths, all except Red Traphagen. Red learned it at Harvard plus which he also spent some time in Spain in the war there. If I was to tell you all the things that went against my grain in school it would take a book. I would start in in the fall, and the first thing that would happen would be that the World Series come up. It is impossible to sit in school when the World Series is going on, and I would lam out of there and sneak down to Borelli’s and sit towards the back on the shoe-shine chair not far from the radio. If anybody connected with school would be passing they could look in the window and never see me. Just about game time Pop would show up. There was several years running when the Mammoths was in the Series, and it was about this time that Borelli got his hands on the big picture of Sad Sam Yale that hung up over the coat-hooks. Pop would lay in 1 of the empty chairs with his head back on the shaving cushion, and the whole shop would be full of people listening to the game. Pop would figure out the strategy as the game moved along. If somebody was to be give an intentional base on balls Pop knowed it before the announcer ever did. Sometimes there would be a pause in the game and the announcer would dip back in history and mention some event, and Pop would bolt up in his chair if the information come in wrong, and sure enough a little while later the announcer would announce that he had pulled a boner and was sorry and so forth and Pop would lay back down. Sometimes some of the men in the shop would argue over a date or a rule or something of the sort, and if they couldn’t settle it they shouted over at Pop, and he would tell them, and they looked on Pop as the final word.
Soon the Series would be over and school would be staring me in the face again and the whole long year would stretch ahead.
October, after the Series, was like death to me. The ground would begin to get hard. The leaves would float down from the trees and pile up all over, red and yellow and rotten, and the wind would whip in off the fields, and then about December there would be the first snow. You would get up in the morning and look out the window and the snow would be laying in the fields, all white like a corpse.
Then just when it looked like winter was fading there would be a fresh snow piled on top of the 1 before. There was nothing to do. Such time as it was light I was supposed to be in school. For my part it could of stood dark all day and nobody the loser, and I begun to take off for town more and more, spending the day in the Embassy Theater or talking baseball in Borelli’s or hanging in Mugs O’Brien’s gymnasium or in the Legion hall or sitting in the back of Fred Levine’s cigar store and reading the literature there.
I also took to reading books. I had begun to think there wasn’t any books worth spending time on, for I had went all through Aaron’s, looking for things to kill time until spring, but there wasn’t a 1. I come across a book called “Giants in the Earth” which I thought at first might have to do with baseball, but it turned out to be a dud. There was others such as books with the word “Yankee” in the title, and “Reds” and “Senators” and such, but when I took them off the shelf they turned out to be something else, and I begun to give up.
Then 1 day I was roaming down in Perkinsville. There was a girl there that I begun to take up with. I had a date to meet her in the Rexall, but when I got there she was not there, and afterwards some of the girls she hung with come with their schoolbooks and I asked them where she was, and they giggled amongst themselves but was too idiotic to give a straight answer, so I slammed out and started walking around. I swung over towards the library, knowing she sometimes went there to look up things for school, and I hunted for her there, looking behind all the shelves and waiting outside the ladies room, but she didn’t show up, and I was about to leave when my eye caught a book on a table called “How to Play First Base,” which is a part of a series of 9 books, “How to Play Second Base,” “How to Play Shortstop,” and so on and so on, each of them wrote by a famous player. There was a grayheaded lady name of Mrs. Thompson at the desk, and I asked her if she had a book called “How to Pitch,” and she looked it up and said she did and give me a wide smile and took me down to where it was. My eyes just about jumped out of their socket. There was not only this book, “How to Pitch,” by Michael J. Mulrooney, once an immortal and now the manager of the Queen City Cowboys, where I played for 2 years before going up with the Mammoths, but the whole shelf was full of books about baseball. Mrs. Thompson asked me if that was what I wanted, and I said it was, and she went away, and I sunk down on my knees by that shelf and tore them out of there. I forget all that was there, but there was the 1 by Sad Sam Yale called “Sam Yale—Mammoth,” and I read it clean through crouched there on my knees. I suppose every boy has read that book at some time or another so there is no sense going too deep in it here. You will remember that in the front there is a picture of Sam from the shoulders up, looking right out at you, and then on the page beside it is a little bit of writing, telling about him and what is yet to come. I studied the picture, noticing every little detail of how his nose was shaped and his eyes and his mouth. I looked real close and seen a little bit of hair sticking out around the sides of his cap. The writing said:
My name is Samuel (Sad Sam) Yale. I was born in Houston, Texas, on March 13, 1918. I had the good fortune of becoming a member of the world-famed New York Mammoths five years ago. I pitched my first game for the Mammoths on Opening Day, April, 1938, shutting out Boston, 4–0. In the five years since that memorable occasion I have pitched and won 112 games, while losing only 63, and have been acclaimed by baseball experts as one of the game’s outstanding pitchers.
This book is written in the hope that
every American boy now playing the great game of baseball in his home town, wherever that may be, will take inspiration from my straightforward story. Some of my readers, in the not-too-distant future, will be wearing the uniform of one of the big-league clubs. His success or failure in reaching that goal, and in remaining there once he has reached it, depends on him and him alone.
I have three simple rules which I live by:
1. Take the game seriously, playing it for all you are worth every inning of the way.
2. Live a clean life, shunning tobacco and liquor in all forms.
3. Follow the instructions of your high-school coach, for he is a man of wisdom gained through experience.
Most important, have faith in yourself, for the road lies before you, and success will be yours. By the grace of God you will succeed.
I studied the words over and over again, and the picture, and I knowed that moment and ever more that some day I would be a Mammoth and all my dreams come true. I took the book and an armful of others and started out the door, and then I felt a hand on my shoulder and I turned around and it was Miss Thompson the grayheaded lady. “You have not checked out your books,” she said. “Can I have your card?”
“I do not have any card,” I said.
She steered me to her desk and pushed out a bunch of papers for me to fill in and sign, and I done so, and then she said, “Your card must first be put through the process before you can have any books,” and I beefed but she held fast and grabbed the books and give them to some kid with glasses to put them back on the shelf.
I turned away and started out the door, and then I glanced around and seen that she was looking another way, and I circled around with my head hid and went to the shelf and found the book by Sad Sam Yale and crouched down in a corner and opened my shirt and stuck the book in and buttoned it. I edged back out the way I come, and I went through the door in a rush and fairly flowed down the street with the book in my shirt.
That night I read it through again. I didn’t even tell Pop I had stole it, and when I was through reading it I took the blade out of the razor that Pop had used in Cedar Rapids in the Mississippi Valley League and sliced the picture of Sad Sam out of the book, and the inspiration he had wrote, and I folded them and stuck them in my wallet with a picture of Pop in his Scarlets uniform that I clipped 1 time from the Perkinsville “Clarion” and a picture of a girl name of Thedabara Brown that she had took at the beach in the summer and a picture card of Sad Sam Yale that come with bubble gum. I put the book in a secret place in the closet.
Many a book I borrowed that winter from the library after my card was put through the process. I returned them all, all except “Sam Yale—Mammoth,” and I read them all, too, laying on my bed with my feet stretched over the foot, munching on candy bars and milk. I cannot remember all the names. I learned a good deal about pitching and strategy and the ways of big-time players and managers, and after I finished a batch of books I would read through Sam’s again.
There was also some books of baseball stories, such as those by Sherman and Heyliger and Tunis and Lardner, although Lardner did not seem to me to amount to much, half his stories containing women in them and the other half less about baseball then what was going on in the hotels and trains. He never seemed to care how the games come out. He wouldn’t tell you much about the stars but only about bums and punks and second-raters that never had the stuff to begin with. Heyliger and Sherman and some of the others give you a good baseball story that you couldn’t lay it down.
There was 1 fellow name of Homer B. Lester that wrote a whole series of 16 books about a pitcher called Sid Yule, which was just another way of saying Sam Yale. There was “Sid Yule, Kidnaped,” and “Sid Yule, No-Hit Pitcher” and “Sid Yule in the World Series” and 13 more, and all the books had 24 chapters and run 240 pages and you couldn’t skip a 1. There was always a picture in front and 1 on page 80 and 1 on page 160 and 1 right at the end, but I would try not to look at the pictures until I come to them, otherwise I would know what was coming.
I guess I knowed, though, pictures or not, for 1 book got to be pretty much like the next after awhile. In the beginning there would be some plot being hatched against Sid, and it sounded pretty tight and you knowed he was in danger, and you itched to warn him. Usually it was gamblers, or traitors on his own club. Chapter 2 was always a discussion of what went on in previous books, so I always skipped it. Then Sid would come in the picture, unawares that anything was being hatched to do him in, and he would walk right in that trap. He might get a telephone call saying a kid was sick in a hospital, and he would rush over to cheer that kid up and sign a baseball and then some of these gamblers would creep up behind and smash him over the head and cart him off to some dark place in a rough part of town. Then he would come to, and be dizzy, and he would unloose the ropes and fight his way out against 4 or 5 of these chaps.
In the background of your mind you would remember that there was a big game going on this very day, and his club was losing, and he would grab a cab and off they would go at 60 or 70, and Sid would dash in there just in time to pull the fat out of the fire. You never knowed for sure if he would make it because Chapter 23 would bob up, telling you all about what would happen in the next book and where you could buy it or send for it by mail, but then you got back in the story, and he always won out, and there was a moral at the end, such as “Friendship Pays” or “Live Clean and Win.”
I read the whole 16 that winter, and then spring come, and things begun to happen so fast and so frequent that I laid off books and never read 1 again until last summer when I went in a good bit for quarter murders.
Such corny crap as that is all behind me now. I ain’t even interested in Sad Sam Yale no more. You spend a long period with a fellow and he stops being a hero all of a sudden. Sam ain’t all he is cracked up to be. But I didn’t know it then. I wasn’t but a kid.
Chapter 4
IT WAS in May of my junior year at Perkinsville High that I was signed on as batting practice pitcher for the Perkinsville Scarlets, and it was also about then that me and Thedabara Brown begun to go together. She was 16 and as pretty as many a girl that passes for a movie star. She later married Mort Finnegan that was the catcher for Perkinsville High and not bad a-tall but used to drop third strikes an awful lot. He was afterwards killed in the war against Korea and she married a catcher for Sacramento in the Pacific Coast League.
I had not yet had the experience of fornication at the time, although I read a good bit about it in Aaron’s books. When I brung the subject up she did not know what I was talking about, saying she never heard it referred to before in such a vulgar way, and she chased me out of the house and told me never come back.
But I come back the very next night, and her old man was sitting and waiting. He asked me where did I learn my manners and did I think his daughter was a whore, and I said no, and he said he had a mind to punch me in the nose right then and there. Then he rose and seen that I was larger then him, so he sat back down again but invited me to make myself scarce. He went on to say a number of nasty things about young men of my type and ballplayers in particular.
Finally I left. I was shaking all over and quite uneasy, for I was scared of old man Brown. I pretty much duck out of a fight whenever I can. Every time I ever been in a fight I usually always just covered up and left this other chap, whoever he was, whale away at my wrists and elbows and the spaces between. Pretty soon somebody would break it up. Just to see 2 guys fighting makes me weak. When I was a senior at Perkinsville High we had this military training where the class would split up in 2 groups and fight over Callahan Hill in the lot on Callahan Avenue with bayonets with boxing gloves on the end. We must of fought this fight 100 times and I was always the first 1 killed. Not killed really, but I would just lay down and die, too weak to fight, crouching around until somebody stabbed me with the boxing glove. The fellows used to call this my Coward Crouch. Actually the trouble was it give me loose bowels and how in the hell
can you go on fighting with loose bowels? We had this soldier name of Sten Stennerson over from the National Guard that would yell at me, “Wiggen, on account of you we are always losing Callahan Hill,” and finally they sent me to the psychiatrist at the Vets Hospital in Tozerbury. But nothing come of it.
Then about a year later I come up for the draft and went for the examination and seen this same fellow again and he give me a deferment. I was turned down again this past October for the same reason, and to tell you the truth if they never get me that’s okay, too. I mention this for the benefit of the same 100,000,000 boobs and flatheads that read Krazy Kresses column of last September 30th. This used to bother Pop a lot, but Aaron said to Pop, “Why should it bother you? Is it not better for a fellow to go down in his Coward Crouch and live to fight another day?” and Pop said he supposed it was.
I know that it always worried Pop. Yet I cannot help it, and the older I grow the worse it gets until sometimes I think that if they do not stop the wars I am libel to wind up with loose bowels 24 hours a day. I suppose this is a weakness, but everybody has their weakness. About 2 weeks ago a fellow wrote me a letter saying it struck him as very peculiar that a man with so much guts on the ball field is afraid of the war. But throwing a baseball and throwing a hand grenade is 2 different things, and I am at my best with 1 and scared to my toes of the other. Actually when you really stop and think about it it probably wouldn’t be too stupid of an idea if the Koreans and Chinese and Russians and Americans and all the rest come down all at once with a bad case of loose bowels and went somewheres back of the lines and settled down on the John and done some thinking about what fools they were making of theirselves. Where in hell is it getting everybody?
I shouldn’t of gotten off on the beaten track here, for this chapter was supposed to be about Thedabara. Yet when the war comes up I can’t hardly get it off my mind half the time, especially in the winter. All winter long pick up a newspaper and what do you see? War and football, mostly war, until you’re never sure any more how much your nerves can take.