As I was getting dressed for the evening, I heard, “Playing first base for New York and batting second, number ten, Rod Kanehl.” After a brief tug of indecision, I slipped my baseball-shaped radio into the orchid box, then transferred it to my jacket pocket once I was in the cab. From then on, two entities pulled my taffy brain in polar directions: a tall dark girl with bright red lipstick in a backless dress and Kanehl’s at-bats.
The evening never got in sync: a procession of antithetical intentions, missed opportunities, stolen chairs, and a legendary class wolf I barely knew flirting and then dancing with my date. As he did, I slipped away to the bathroom to hear (at the precise click of the “on/off” dial), “Now here’s Rod Kanehl, a rookie who’s had himself quite a night. He has a single and his first Major League home run in four trips to the plate.”
“Yes!”
But how could I return to the table from that—Sharon twisting on the dance floor, sitting down, silently regarding me? The evening was unreclaimable.
I was part of a group headed to a Basie Street club. I was sitting through a long, banal show. Then the rest of them were going to a party and I was in a limousine taking Sharon home. I had chosen the rookie over the girl, since there was apparently no having both.
It would be years before I began to decipher the baseball muddle. It was no longer a child’s fetish or even a primitive attempt at individuality. In fact, I was embarrassed enough after an Amherst classmate called me “Mr. Baseball” that I tried to hide my addiction as tantamount to pornography. Baseball had become other things by then: it was a vehicle for tribal loyalties, a clan ceremony (when no others were at hand), and a container for primitive rage—gestation in a family that was mainly against things, who hated more than loved and wished ill on others routinely. The radiation of that had to go somewhere, be stored in a safe vessel through its half-life so as not to contaminate the rest of my life. Baseball gave me a repository for anger, envy, and greed, for revelling in another’s failure, something a fan does every day. In later years, baseball was a way to cheer for the redemption of the outcast (the underdog Mets), to reclaim the waif I was. I was never truly a baseball fan; math-physics clued me it was just a convenient abacus, a quadrant of Cartesian coordinates with a moving spherical mass, totemic spacing, Topps ikons, and statistically delectable probabilities. I was a fan of energy, magic, restitution.
I watched the seventh game of the rainout-delayed Series alone in the basement of Mientka’s TV repair shop in the village of Amherst, my brain a nubbin as I paced out Willie McCovey’s ninth-inning at-bat, 1-0 Yankees, two outs, tying and winning runs on second and third. “I feel sorry for you,” snapped a technician, “if you care so much about this.” Bill Stafford had said almost the same thing a week earlier. Was my neurosis that obvious?
The game ended in a line-drive out—too fleet even to think about the consequences if it had been hit a foot higher or to Bobby Richardson’s left or right—probably having to face my alienation from just about everything else a few weeks sooner. Instead I jumped with clenched fists and raced onto the street.
I was alone. There was no evidence of a climax anywhere in smalltown New England. Ringing with pride in my team, I headed back to James to write the day’s English paper. But the Mientka serviceman had spoken prophecy. By the 1963 Series I no longer cared what happened to the Yanks.
Autumn came abruptly, red and blood-orange trees, squirrels burying nuts in the quad, the ground littered with a patchwork of leaves following a night rain, relics that crinkled under footsteps after days of brisk transparent cold. Dusk began in late afternoon. Then snows covered it all. I sat in my room Friday evenings, harmonizing quietly with Johnny Horton, dead in a plane crash while I was still at P.S. 6:
Today I’m so weary,
Toda-ay I’m so blue,
Sad and broken-hearted,
And it’s all because of you….
I imagined Betsy leaving Bob and suddenly showing up in Amherst, running across the quad to meet me after class. She had a twinkle in her eye as we hugged, oblivious to the crowds. She’d tell me she was fleeing the lunacy of Miami Beach. We’d move into the village and make our home in one of those cottages on Pleasant Street. A classmate my age was actually married and living in town; perhaps Betsy was wealthy enough to support us both till I got my novel published. In the end I settled for mailing her an Amherst sweater with a big felt “A,” unlikely as she was to wear it around Dade.
On Saturdays the dorm floor turned into a nightclub—speakers in the hallway, red bulbs in the ceiling sockets, guys carrying beer mugs, their dates in purple-and-white Amherst scarves…. I sat in my room, dialing in Ranger games from scrambled airwaves, writing this book, playing records:
Life was so sweet, dear,
Li-ife was a song.
Now you’ve gone and left me,
Oh whe-ere do I belong…?
I did homework mechanically and tried to grasp its deeper implications. Since there were none of the usual sorts of yardsticks, details I could regurgitate on exams, it was hard for me to gauge how my teachers thought I was doing. I was surprised to get C’s in history and philosophy and D’s in physics and math. I did well in only two courses: Humanities (in which we read and discussed Greek and Roman classics), and English (in which I was awarded one of two known A’s among the freshman class). But there I was a ringer: I had already written the narratives that served as most of my assignments. I had long known that my present changed my past, that there was more than one truth.
My professor, Leo Marx, a prominent faculty member who didn’t usually teach freshmen, was delighted by my insights, though he warned me (in sharp red) that mere psychotherapeutic interpretation had the effect of freezing and oversimplifying things. He also chided me for sentimentalizing the past. Yet he considered my company worthy enough to invite me to dinner at his home, a privilege for a freshman. I sat with him, his wife, and their young son and daughter, and answered questions about life in the dorms. Professor Marx reciprocated with disclosures of the inner workings of Amherst College. He and some other faculty deplored the ribald aspects of campus life, and he used my reports as ammunition at committee meetings.
He also advised me on the correct approach to a writing career by recounting paths of famous novelists he knew personally—James Baldwin, Norman Mailer, Saul Bellow. He did not think that Robert Penn Warren was of a quality I should imitate. “A poet maybe, but he writes those damn novels just to make money.” I was deflated by this news.
Every few weeks the Marxes invited me back, as their hardwood table and fancy silverware became an Ivy League version of Abbey’s and Dorey’s cabin. I felt the caution of an iconic presence, so I ate slowly and with what manners I had and tried to speak courteously and well.
Yet Marx loved fireworks, so he’d invariably throw out challenges. A placid round of melon before soup would turn into a rousing debate by apple pie. He was a renowned scholar and I was his unruly young disciple. Even as he routinely railed against my notions of mysticism (which he considered “ridiculous”) and my associations with Grossinger’s and baseball—“pure kitsch,” he declared—he continued to praise every paper I wrote and went into helpful detail when he criticized me: “Mawkishness again, Grossinger! What tells you this is more than that?”
Then—after years of false alarms and reprieves—the bomb was back, center stage and at a whole new rung of peril and brinkmanship. The Russians had assembled an arsenal of rockets in Cuba; additional missile-bearing ships were headed there. American destroyers awaited them in a blockade. This was the long-feared impasse that had no diplomatic resolution.
The maniac’s prophecy at Chipinaw had come of age. The moral-rearmament goon, jeered by the student body at Horace Mann, was about to have the last laugh, us wise guys shown to be fools, dead ones at that. It was On the Beach for real, an angry Nikita Khrushchev banging his shoe at the UN hardly the sort of cranky elder from whom to expect mercy or restraint. A night was ap
proaching when the human race would become as extinct as the Arch Oboler’s auk. Only this time it wasn’t science fiction.
Though they would not target Amherst, radiation would blow in with the disturbed air. We would be dying on campus, among the “millions who … crawl the ashened Earth,” as Oboler’s guilt-ridden scientist lamented, “their flesh a ragged shroud around them.” Yet life at Amherst went on oblivious to the approaching holocaust. Sid was mainly obsessed with the fact that he hadn’t made love to Barb or, for that matter, anyone. Al tried to convince him that it no longer mattered, but his roommate was inconsolable (though in a slapstick way that didn’t seem to take the threat seriously).
As the rendezvous approached, my sense of desperation increased. Not only was my own existence at stake but the meaning of all that had ever been: the Middle Ages, cumulus clouds, rose quartz, cosmic rays. I wanted to get off of Earth, but there was no spaceship, no alternate world. My grade-school fantasies mocked me with their facile, apocryphal escapes. The life I had mustered was forfeit, and ultimate Color War, with its psychotic generals, was about to reign forever. I put my anguish into a poem:
If they bomb,
I will be lost
in a frightened puff of smoke,
my head whirling
with questions about the stars,
my mind fighting off visions
of its own burning vitals,
its own roast nothingness,
lying in a heap of blackbones….
My heart is sorry
knowing that
no more will the strawberry girl
give her first kiss
to the rusty boy.
One button
will still the sound
of every mandolin,
will fry the dream of love
into pale cold vapors….
If they bomb,
your violin of brown hair
will turn to straw
and blow as ashes in the wind.
Your wee eyes will melt
into eye juice, dripping
into the random mold of the ground.
The algaed pond will
snap, crackle, and pop
for centuries.
Clouds will sparkle
with strange water.
The land will phosphor
with electric dew.
And Orion will lonely pace
the heavens.
I called my parents, and Bob Towers bargained well with Armageddon; the old pro provided the perfect lines: “Don’t be ridiculous. They’re politicians, not madmen.” I felt momentarily reassured.
With the hour of the converging ships at hand I went dutifully to the holocaust in philosophy (as did everyone else in the class). Professor Epstein opened by asking, “What is the most important thing to do now if this is truly the end of the world?” A titter crossed the room, but he deflected it with a confident smile.
He was maddening to me. I couldn’t get past his (or Charles Sanders Pierce’s) semantic sophistry. At one point in the semester I had summoned up all of my nonexistent psychic powers to try to make the overhead light—still glowing though unconnected to a power source—descend from its socket to just above his head, to force him to give it one of his pat explanations.
“I know what you’re all thinking. You want to run over to Smith, right? Well, I believe we should spend our last hour doing the thing that makes us most human, that allows us to experience the highest form our species has attained—the philosophical dialogue.” Then he proceeded to conduct a normal class on Peirce’s notion of inference, a boggle of equivocations and anomalies.
I couldn’t believe this world. It was all misdirection and casuistry.
I kept glancing at the clock, the minute hand … then the seconds … five, four, three … right through the assignation of ships. No sirens. Class ended, and the ordinary world turned ordinary again. We had been living on borrowed time since Los Alamos anyway, and the real danger was probably buried so deep we would be caught napping when it came.
Now I know (from disclosed documents) how close we came to oblivion: no more life on Earth—no New Moon, none of the decades of unborn folks who followed.
All autumn in physical education we lined up in rows at the outer edge of the playing fields, to be cudgelled through turns on an obstacle course—a series of ropes to climb, bars to swing along, tunnels to crawl through, hurdles to dive under, walls to catapult, broad ladders to scale and descend. Some classmates mastered the maze quickly and passed on, but most of us were left in our purple-striped sweats, waiting in queues to squirm through a tire, then dance on irregularly placed rocks and slither through a ditch, frost sticking to blades of grass pressed under our hands. This was “we will fight our countries baa-aatles / in the air, on land, and sea” to the hilt.
Just when I had given up hope (for the coach had said, “None of you get out of here alive!”) we spazzes were set free. I signed up for ice hockey three times a week.
The Amherst version bore little resemblance to pond scrimmages in Westchester. There were real nets and refs. I wore kneepads, elbow pads, shoulder pads, a cup, and a helmet with a face guard. We tried to pass the puck from corner to corner to set up shots and use our sticks to take it away from the other team. I scored my first goal on a deflection through skates and raised my stick in astonishment.
Suddenly I adored being in college: colorful hockey garb, snacks of french fries and maple shakes (called frappes in Massachusetts) at the coffee shop, Al, Sid, and the gang at dinner, late hours of camaraderie in the reserve reading room, carting my clothes in a sack to the coin laundry in town, friendly chatter with shop proprietors. A deeper sense of estrangement came only in the undertow.
Weekends were its heartbeat. The partying on the dorm floor seemed to get louder and wilder each week, music and drinking starting as soon as Friday classes ended. I remember a kid nicknamed Jynx twisting up and down the hallway, shot glass in hand, whooping to the beat of Buddy Greco, “This could be the start of something big!”
Girls arrived from Smith and Holyoke, dressed in evening coats—and with them female laughter and perfume. I sat in my room listening to the Rangers at Chicago or Montreal, staccato rushes up and down the rink. The stridency of the sports announcer had kept me company all my life. Now I needed him like air to breathe.
One evening there was a strip show, complete with theme music and hoots, underwear and bras tossed into the hallway. I couldn’t decide, as even in simpler times at Wakonda, whether the girls were the guys’ victims or collaborators. When I caught glimpses of their impassive or sad faces in the hours past curfew I felt sympathy, for they were drunk and helpless as they fought off (or hung onto) guys.
I was heir to the dilemma of Jeremiah Beaumont in Robert Penn Warren’s World Enough and Time, as he stared at a picture of a young martyr tied to a post. Sometimes he fancied he might seize her from the fire and from the crowds cheering her agony; other times he imagined jumping in and perishing beside her. But there were also moments when he imagined himself among those who bore the torches and revelled in the victim’s agony. I was filled with similar reciprocal emotions—wanting to be one of the guys, hating them for who they were, identifying with elusive female energy, as Bing Crosby crooned the ancient ballad in my mind, “Each sweet co-ed, like a rainbow trail / Fades in the afterglow …,” those sweethearts of Sigma Chi.
The next morning James Hall’s sexual successes were scored on bathroom doors. Names of girls were listed in a vertical column alongside deeds alleged, the guys’ initials or insignias. Leo Marx was aghast, as I described this ritual at our next dinner, but he applauded my solitude. Would that it had been so simple! The world around me was receding at light speed with consequences I chose to ignore.
At Christmas, Ray came to transport me to Grossinger’s. There, donning the prestige of my Amherst jacket with its leather sleeves, I went back to the teen disco, the Nightwatch, where I pursued and befriended a g
irl from New Haven named Mackey who turned every guy’s head. She had a tight, wiry body and seductive eyes, dressed in black silk (“no underclothes,” boasted an older kid who had danced with her), smelled like mint and leather, and turned down my New Year’s Eve offer: “Sorry. I’m gonna go to New York, find me the corner of a bar, and get drunk.”
Back at Amherst I sank into Ethan Frome winter. I no longer knew what I wanted to happen. At times I pined for Betsy; at others it seemed important just to get out of this place, or at least out of James Hall, to become a full-fledged writer somewhere. Coursework had become meaningless beside the turmoil in my soul.
Horace Mann was a melting pot of intellectual passions. Now I longed for its collegium—lunch gabfests with Berman, Ervin’s interludes of tarot and poetry, even Clinton’s obscene zeal. Except for Professor Marx, none of my teachers showed enthusiasm for ideas. They seemed to delight in creating petty quandaries, then solving them (or not) with self-satirical egos—all so witty and clever. My rotating batch of history and humanities profs were preppy and cynical. One of them responded to any astute questions with lines like “I guess I just don’t know that one” and “You’ve stumped me. Next?” We read Sophocles, Herodotus, Nietzsche, Peirce, Aquinas, Hume, cracked their crypts and exposed their flaws. Discussions featured rhetorical hairsplitting, my own wordy contributions either critiqued or dismissed. It felt more like a cult of wise guys than a university with professors.
Even our lab atmosphere was smug and ironical, with members of the football team constantly forwarded as models to demonstrate laws of nature to the rest of us.
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