Still Pitching

by Michael Steinberg

  Right around that same time, I began hearing rumors again that the Dodgers might soon be leaving Brooklyn. Just the thought of it made my stomach churn. It was a double whammy—too much to absorb all at once.

  In the spring of ‘57 the newspapers reported that Walter O’Malley had peddled the Dodgers’ minor league parks in Fort Worth and Montreal for a million dollars apiece. He assured the fans and press that the money would go toward operating expenses for a proposed new ballpark—a domed stadium in downtown Brooklyn, above the Atlantic Avenue Long Island Railroad station.

  At first I thought it was a P.R. stunt—a front office maneuver designed to drum up more interest in the team. Major League baseball teams didn’t just up and abandon their cities, especially New York, where baseball was practically a religion.

  Why would the Dodgers leave? Why now, right at the height of their success? For the past ten years Brooklyn had had one of the best records in baseball. Only two summers before they’d won their first World Series title. Wasn’t this precisely what the head honchos had been aiming at for the past five decades?

  And what about the millions of fans who’d suffered through the heartbreak collapse of ‘51? What about the succession of excruciating Series loses to the Yankees? And all of the dog seasons in the 20s, 30s and 40s—when the Dodgers were the sad-sack losers of the National League? How could the team brass ignore the fans’ loyalty and devotion? I thought about Donna’s warning of a year ago, when she chided me for caring so much “about a team of professional athletes.”

  To add still another piece of bad news to the mix, I learned from my mother that my father’s sales commissions had fallen off drastically. Translation: I needed to bring in some money to help out at home. Normally I’d already be working by now. But in the last few weeks I’d been too busy sulking and feeling sorry for myself. There were mornings when I didn’t even want to get out of bed.

  I supposed I could fall back on Neiman’s Pharmacy. But the thought of it was so demoralizing. I was too old to be pedaling my ass all over town for minimum wage and twenty-five cent tips. If I could have driven the pharmacy’s car, it might have been another story. But at seventeen you can’t drive inside the city limits without a supervising adult, and that would have been even more embarrassing than riding the bike.

  I was still pondering what to do, when one night after Legion practice Ronnie Zeidner approached me with a curious proposition. It seems there was a last minute opening for a senior counselor at Grove day camp. One of Zeidner’s prep school buddies had just backed out because his parents were sending him on a tour of the French Riviera. There was no irony in Ronnie’s voice when he told me about it.

  As far back as grade school, Zeidner and Rob Brownstein were the two guys in our neighborhood who commanded the most respect. They were the best athletes in our crowd. Both came from wealthy families. Even before they went to prep school, they carried themselves with an air of assurance and poise, like characters right out of The Catcher in the Rye or an F. Scott Fitzgerald novel.

  My main contact with them was through baseball. That was until I started receiving those camp post cards in which Ronnie and Rob boasted about their escapades with the jc’s across the lake. I’d wondered at the time why they were sending them to me. When it came to girls and dating, those guys were lifetimes ahead of me.

  While I was throwing hundreds of baseballs at my garage door, spending Saturdays at Ebbets Field, and playing summer league ball, the popular guys were hanging out at the beach, showing off and flirting with girls. At night they went to parties and out on movie and bowling dates. Some were already driving their parents’ cars and having sex with their girlfriends—or so the rumors went.

  Now that I had some free time, it slowly began to sink in. I was only a year away from college, and I’d never even been in love, and except for a brief fling with Ellen Wiseman in the spring, I’d never had a real girlfriend. What’s worse was that my only sexual encounter had been an embarrassing disaster.

  Zeidner’s offer, then, had come along at just the right time. If I took the day camp job, I’d be around girl counselors all summer. Maybe I could make up for some of that lost time.

  The first few days of camp I hung around on the fringes—just like I used to do at dances and parties. But this time I was sizing up the situation, looking for a safe opening or a welcoming invitation—neither of which were forthcoming. At the daily staff meetings I stood back and watched the coalitions form. God knows, I’d had a lot of practice being on the outside looking in.

  It didn’t take long to see what the pecking order was. At the top of the pyramid were the head counselors—all high school seniors. These guys all went to prep school or Five Towns high schools like Lawrence and Hewlett. Zeidner and Brownstein were easily the top ladies’ men. While most of us underlings rode the camp buses to work, they took turns driving matching candy-apple red ‘57 Chevy convertibles that the other guys called “pussy wagons.”

  One step below them were the head counselors like me who attended public high schools. The jc’s, all fifteen and sixteen-year-old girls, were another notch lower, and at the bottom were the waitresses and kitchen staff—high school freshmen and sophomores. The male counselors all referred to them as “fair game.”

  At the top of the girls’ food chain were three attractive and classy high school juniors from Woodsburg, the most exclusive village in the Five Towns. They were cheerleaders at Hewlett High, and each one had her own car. Their parents belonged to the Hewlett Yacht Club and to El Patio, a trendy Atlantic Beach cabana club.

  I was immediately taken with them. Even in ratty camp T-shirts and cut-offs, blonde and well-tanned Linda Price, Joanne Morse, slender and elegant, and sexy, kinetic Julie Rabin all looked and carried themselves as if they’d just stepped out of a teen fashion magazine. Like Ronnie and Rob, they epitomized the privileged and exclusive milieu I was so ambivalent about.

  I couldn’t tell which of the three I was most drawn to. They were all prototypes of the unattainable girls I’d been dreaming about since grade school. That they seemed so far out of reach only added to their mystique. How could I even hope to attract their attention?

  When I asked Ronnie and Rob what they knew about the three, Rob said, “Don’t get your hopes up. They’re strictly off limits.”

  I should have known better than to ask.

  Zeidner and Brownstein loved to parade their entitlement. They’d acknowledge the likes of me, but only so long as I was content to remain in their orbit. If I deferred to them, then every so often they’d allow me brief glimpses into their privileged world—like those post cards, and now this job. Guys like them cultivate devotees, if only to reinforce their own perceived superiority. In my desperate state, I was all too willing to comply.

  Come to think of it, I’d always had a tendency to subordinate myself to those who had more power or stature than I did. Back in sixth grade I let Elaine Hirsch and Alice Rosen humiliate me at the Beth El dance. In seventh grade I played disciple to Manny and his boys. And I let those two girls from the yearbook staff intimidate me. A year ago I allowed Donna to dictate the terms of our relationship, and for three years I’d willingly done Kerchman’s bidding. The price you pay in that tradeoff is the loss of your integrity. Yet, here I was doing it again.

  From the beginning of summer league I’d channeled my anger and disappointment into pitching. When you think you have nothing left to prove and nothing to lose, it’s a lot easier to let go of your restraints. So in those early season Rec games I was more assertive than I’d ever been before. Whenever a hitter crowded the plate, I’d buzz the ball right under his chin. If I sensed any fear, I’d brush him back again and then snap off an outside curve ball or a low slider.

  That summer I pitched better than I ever had—especially whenever I faced my now ex-high school teammate Andrew Makrides. It was well known in local jock circles that Makrides was one of the best young pitchers on the peninsula. Coaches and players talked
about him as a potential big league prospect. That’s why I’d always taken a special pride in out-pitching him. But this time, I had even more incentive. Next season he was certain to be one of Coach Kerchman’s top three starters.

  In early July, my team, the Wavecrest Democratic Club (a.k.a., “The Donkeys”), beat his team, the Guardians, 2-1, to win the first-half championship. But I didn’t see it as a payback or a vindication. Andrew and I always had a mutual admiration for one other. He was one of the few guys on the high school team who’d showed me any respect.

  “You were a cool customer out there, Mike,” Andrew said after the game. “Who do you think you are, ‘Sal the Barber’?”

  He was teasing me. Sal Maglie had been an old Dodger nemesis. His nickname was “Sal the Barber” because of his penchant for “shaving” the corners of the plate, as well as for brushing hitters back. Maglie was also known as a “gamer.” He was the pitcher who Leo Durocher gave the ball to whenever the Giants needed to win a big game. So I took Andrew’s remark as a compliment, of sorts.

  The only place where I felt aggressive and confident was out on the mound—more so now than ever before. When I was pitching well, I could erase that sorry image of myself as the short, chubby kid who the popular crowd shunned or overlooked. As a result, I relished the opportunity to surprise the skeptics who didn’t think I had the goods. But put me in the middle of a social gathering—a party or a dance—and I was paralyzed with self-doubt.

  I knew I’d have to reinvent myself if I were to have any chance of impressing those Woodsburg girls. I’d have to display the same kind of chutzpah and assurance that I possessed when I was pitching. And what better opportunity than now? Nobody at Grove day camp—except for Ronnie and Rob—had had any previous dealings with me. So far as those girls were concerned, I was an unknown quantity. And that’s just the way I wanted to keep things for a while.

  For the first few days of camp, I spent a lot of time getting to know my co-counselor, Steve Katz. Something began to spark when we started commiserating about our high school coaches. Steve was a junior on the Lawrence High basketball team, and he was still waiting for his chance to play. I was in the same bind, I said, with my baseball coach. But I didn’t mention that I’d just quit the team. I didn’t know this guy well enough to trust him yet.

  Shortly after that, we started up what would become a daily ritual. Just before reveille each morning, we’d take off our shirts, shoot baskets on the camp’s makeshift court, and make small talk. We knew we were also out there to show off—to impress the girls and let everyone know that we were jocks.

  At seventeen, both of us were in the best shape of our lives. Steve was about five ten, with short blonde hair and a lithe, wiry build. He was proud of his physique—almost vain about it. I was more tentative, but I readily followed his lead.

  In the previous six months I’d become much less self-conscious about my physique. My chest had filled out, my stomach was tight from doing sit-ups, and my legs were strong and firm from all those years of running on the beach.

  Each morning, just after the last bus pulled in, the girl counselors, jc’s, and kitchen staff all walked past us on their way to the locker room. To attract their attention, every few days we’d challenge Ronnie and Rob to a game of two-on-two. Some mornings we managed to draw a pretty good crowd of staffers and kids.

  Those games quickly turned into fierce competitions—a lot of pushing and shoving and flying elbows. To Steve and me, that court became a kind of proving ground. We cast ourselves as the scrappy underdog kids from public high schools, and we were going to vindicate ourselves by taking on the privileged preppies who we envied and disdained.

  It wasn’t long before we became close allies. We both had similar backgrounds—not fully middle-class or blue collar poor. Lawrence High was an upscale Five Towns school, but Steve’s parents lived in the low-rent district. Their house, a run-down old clapboard, was situated right across the railroad tracks that divided Lawrence from Inwood, the only working-class village in the Five Towns.

  Another thing that drew me to Steve was his swagger and savvy with girls. I also knew that he had a connection of some kind to the Woodsburg trio, because I saw all four of them get out of a car together on the first day of camp. I was dying to ask, but I didn’t know how to bring it up.

  I imagine he knew what I was thinking anyway, because one morning when we were shooting around Steve casually mentioned that he was going steady with Annie Lieberman, the fourth member of the Woodsburg clique. I tried to hide my excitement. Since the first day of camp, I’d been trying to find some pretense that would allow me to talk to even one of those three. Now it looked like I had a possible “in”—a direct line to these previously unapproachable girls.

  For the next few days I fired one question after another at Steve. At first, I was worried that he’d think I was too much of a snoop. But the more I asked, the more forthcoming he was. According to Steve, Linda was the self-proclaimed jock of the group. In his opinion, she was something of a show-off. Joanne was “the brain, the intellectual.” And Julie was what Steve called a “provocateur,” a social operator.

  Each day he fed me another piece of information. Linda and Joanne were dating Ivy League college guys, he said. And last summer Julie had made it a point to let all her friends know that she was going steady with the Long Beach High basketball ace, Larry Brown. Before long, I knew all about the girls’ dating histories.

  Steve was having a good time playing off of my curiosities. You could see that he relished his role. I wasn’t sure why he was deliberately trying to demystify the three girls, and, it surprised me that he was so forthcoming about his own relationship with Annie. They’d been sleeping together on the sly, he said, for nine months.

  He talked about it with an edge of pride in his voice, as if what he had going with Annie was something he took for granted. It had always confounded me that some of the most well-bred, sought after girls were suckers for guys like Steve and Manny. Their attraction seemed to derive from a practiced indifference, an attitude that said, “Don’t mess with me. I’m bad.” It was the kind of reckless pose I admired but was never able to bring off.

  Whether it was conscious or not, I began to look at Steve as a kind of mentor. Aside from his swagger, I was drawn to his unbridled, almost childlike enthusiasm. If there was such a thing as a connoisseur of girls, he was it. He studied their mannerisms and analyzed their behavior with the same kind of passion and intensity that I brought to baseball.

  As a rule, I’d been too self-conscious, too ashamed to let other guys my age know about my inexperience and my fear of girls. I didn’t want to risk the sarcasm and ridicule. Whenever I’d talk to a guy about girls or sex, it almost always turned into an uncomfortable competition. Up until now, my only confidante was my friend Carole. For years I’d been looking for a guy like Steve to help guide me through my confusions.

  I trusted Steve because so far he hadn’t tried to use my naiveté against me. And when he discussed his own sex life, he didn’t act like he was rubbing it in or trying to make me feel inferior—the way Ronnie and Rob did. My biggest worry was that I’d grant him too much power over me, the way I’d done with Manny back in junior high.

  Midway through the summer, Steve and I were out shooting baskets, as usual, when the buses pulled in. It was two days before the night of the staff beach party. All week it had been troubling me that I hadn’t gathered the courage to approach any of the three girls.

  The early morning sun was already heating up the court. Even with our shirts off, we’d already started to break a sweat. As the staff started to shuffle by, I spotted Julie, Joanne, and Linda coming up the path. They were swinging their lunch bags and chatting away. Just as they were passing the court, they turned and looked at us. My mouth went dry. I kept on shooting baskets and talking to Steve, pretending not to notice them. When they moved up the path, I heard what sounded like a wolf whistle, followed by a chorus of high-pitched voi
ces.

  One of them said, “Pretty sexy, you guys. You oughta be in the Charles Atlas ads.”

  The blood rushed to my neck and face. When I turned, I saw them pointing their fingers at us and giggling. I suddenly felt exposed and shamed. It reminded me of that awful sixth grade dance.

  “What was that all about?” I asked Steve.

  “They think you’re cute,” he said. “It’s their way of letting you know it.”

  His reply seemed too flip. Was this a set-up that the four of them planned? A way of making me look foolish?

  He must have seen the look on my face, because he dropped the basketball and started to explain. He’d gotten a ride home with the girls the night before, he said, and all three pumped him for information. His story seemed way too contrived. I was becoming even more suspicious.

  “They were asking me if you have a girlfriend, where you’re from, where you go to school, where you live—that kind of stuff.”

  I wanted to believe that he was telling the truth, so I decided to test him.

  “How come you didn’t tell me all this before?”

  “I was going to, later on.”

  I still wasn’t buying it.

  “What did you tell them?”

  “That you were taken. That you had a girlfriend.”

  “But, it isn’t true. Suppose one of them asks me?”

  “What are the chances of that?” he laughed. “You’re not exactly Mr. Personality, you know. You haven’t said a word to any of them since camp began.”

  Steve shook his head, like he was scolding a kid brother for not picking up his toys.