by Roy Blount
And suddenly Berkey grabs me, drags me off into the tunnel. I can’t believe it, I’m about to fly into smithereens and Berkey is yelling, “If you tell anymbody what I’m mbout to tell you I’ll mbeat your ass”
I’m going Whaaaat and he’s saying, “Mbefore I was mborn my father was hunting with a preacher named Harding Earth. That preacher stood up at the wrong time and my father shot him in the temple, killed him outright. Preacher was to mblame mbut my father swore right then he’d have a son, and name him Harding Earth mBerkey and have him mbe a preacher. He had that son. It was me. Only he never told me. Till the day he died. He told me then. He told me he had done everything in his power, without telling me, to make me grow up to want to mbe a preacher. Mbut I grew up to want to play mball. That’s how much I wanted to play mball. If you don’t want to play mball, I don’t want you around.”
And he leaves me and I ease back to the bench with my brakes jammed on, and I’m sitting there dazed next to Roe Humble—yeah, he’s okay—Humble says, “He give you the shoot-the-preacher story?”
And I just nod and I have no idea the status of the game and next thing, Berkey is standing in front of me, trembling. And he says, “Let’s see you mbunt.”
And he’s sending me up! I don’t even know who I’m hitting for. I’m in the game! Against—you know who pitched tonight for the Yankees?
Tommy Damn John. My first up in the big leagues. Only, I’m not thinking Tommy John. I’m thinking, “Five milligrams!”
And here comes this pitch—well, you know Tommy John don’t waste any time but it seems to me he is idling very low, and I’m jumping up and down and “Five milligrams!” and here comes this dippy-do sinker, wandering up to the plate like its heart’s not in it, and I square off to bunt, which in my present state means I am holding the bat like it’s an alligator, and, dum, de dum, Sink, the ball drops and I miss it a foot.
Yeah. I know Pop taught us. But—and the same thing happens the second pitch. “Five milligrams!” is blasting in my head and then, oh-and-two, he wastes a fastball up and away. And you know, Jim, I like that pitch. I could even hit you, when I was nine, and you threw me something up there. Went with it. And Jim, I got it all.
Jim, I took Tommy John out of Yankee Stadium at the three-eighty-five in right center. Two men on, we’re only behind one run for some reason, and WOOOM I put us ahead. I’m circling the damn Yankee damn Stadium bases, and you know, on the postgame shows they always ask ’em, “What were you thinking about, rounding the bases?”? I’m thinking, “FIVE MILLIGRAMS!”
And I cross the plate and Boom Holmes gives me a high-five—Boom Holmes gives me one, Jim—which, a high-five, is appropriate as shit. And he says, “I didn’t know you was that strawng.”
And all I can think to do is, now everybody’s slapping at me, is open my mouth and holler, “FIVE! FIVE!”
And Junior Wren and Hub Kopf are rolling around in the dugout, and acourse, what the hell, we don’t hold the lead, Jim. But in the dressing room afterwards everybody is hollering, “Five!” “The Big Five!” “Five Ives!”
“Why’re you calling him Five?” this reporter asks Boom, and he says, “Well, that’s ghetto talk, you know. That’s some street talk, there. Means … Means he got the full five faingers on it, you know,” and Junior Wren and Hub and Uribe and everybody else except maybe Berkey knows the truth—they’re yelling, “Full Five.” “F. F. Ives.” And—
Well, yeah, I guess it is a shame, sort of. Never know, yeah, whether I could’ve done it just straight, first time up. Yeah. But, Jim, you know, if I’d been straight I’d’ve sacrificed.
You’re right, that’d been sound baseball.
So, yeah. So, sorry I woke the baby—tell Sharon. I guess I better go, I’m in this restaurant somewhere. I’m still up, Jim. And Jim, there’s this honey at the bar—
Yeah, maybe they don’t call them honey in New York. I’ll call her something else.
I took Tommy John out of the Stadium, Jim! No, not all the way out, nobody ever—I know. But that’s the expression … uh-huh.
So … Well, thanks. I will. I’ll watch it. Yeah. Hey Jim, don’t, you know, don’t tell Pop.
WHY THERE WILL NEVER BE A GREAT BOWLING NOVEL
I HAVE AGREED THAT from time to time the weight of this column will be thrown behind, or on top of, or just slightly to one side of (due to unavoidable human error) some “participant” sport. God knows why. Oh, there is some notion in the magazine business that participant, as opposed to spectator, sports are the coming thing. Myself, I would define a participant sport as one that is not being done very well. When you write about such a sport you must either advise people on what is the best shaft for a niblick, pay tribute to some anonymous fool, or write about yourself. And I hate to expose myself to my pitiless scrutiny. It is true enough that I have at times been as good a softball player as I have ever seen. But by and large as I participate in a sport, I watch myself with no pleasure other than the perverse satisfaction one might derive from reading, years later, one’s high-school diary.
But what the hell. Bowling. A bowling alley was where Jack Nicholson picked up Sally Struthers in Five Easy Pieces, but I’m married now so that’s out. I once talked to Satchel Paige at a party following one of Willie Stargell’s sickle-cell-anemia-benefit bowling tournaments. Paige said something about liking fried chicken. “I thought you advised people to avoid fried foods, which angry up the blood,” cut in a listener.
“I said, ‘Avoid ’em.’ I didn’t say I avoided ’em,” explained Paige.
That’s about all the bowling lore I have to offer from my own experience. But I figured I could come up with some by consulting friends in the media. Here are the responses I received to the question, “Know any good bowling stories?”:
“My roommate’s mother was bowling champion of West Virginia.”
“I was forced to bowl in the Army.”
“Good boring stories?”
“‘Rip Van Winkle.’”
Bowling just doesn’t seem to come alive somehow. There has never been a great bowling novel. (What would it be called? Three Finger Exercise. Rumble!) There has never even been a great bowling song, to my knowledge, except of course for “Proud Mary keep on bowling.”
Even my friend and mentor Vereen Bell in Nashville let me down. Usually Vereen will tell you a good story. For instance, when he was playing basketball for Quitman High School in south Georgia, his team traveled to a larger school, walked out on the court, and saw, for the first time, transparent plastic backboards. “They don’t have a backboard!” cried one of his teammates. “I can’t play without a backboard!”
Just the other day Vereen was at his health club watching one of the instructors there advise a man on bench pressing. “Take deep breaths,” said the instructor. “That’s good in bench presses and in all walks of life.”
But the best Vereen could come up with in the way of a bowling story was: “The other day I overheard a woman telling about how tired she was the night before. She said, ‘I was so tired I couldn’t go bowling!’”
Well. My friend Kim Chapin did say that he once heard a professional bowler tell about a party at his house at which the bowler’s mother wound up getting thrown into the bathtub, nude. His mother? “The bowling tour is wilder than people realize,” said Kim.
“Also, bowlers go to séances. To find out how they’re going to do. Race-car drivers’ wives and professional bowlers—big on séances.”
Now I can’t imagine a livelier column than one that would accompany a bowler to a séance at which, while he is trying to divine whether he will convert a 1-10 split in the big tourney tomorrow, the spirit of his drowned mother appears crying, “You son of a bitch!” But remember, this month we’re into participant, not professional, sport.
All right. A friend of the family, Maggie Johnson of New Zealand, disclosed that she had never been bowling. Never been bowling! And people from New Zealand talk funny—say “Git it togither” in
stead of “Git it together.” Ought to be something in that. To make sure, we took not only Maggie but also the kids out bowling. Kids add a lot to a bowling evening. It may take five minutes for the ball to reach the pins. While it is rolling, they ask for another Coke. We hit the nearest alley, which at the time was on the West Side of Manhattan.
Stepping through the street-level door, we were confronted with a narrow staircase. The word Kill was scrawled prominently on one wall and a scrofulous-looking shopping-bag lady was sitting crumpled on the first step.
My children challenge all direct orders. When the television tells them, “Eat Wheaties,” they cry out immediately, “Why should I eat Wheaties?”
Why should I kill?” said my son Kirven.
“It is easy enough to take moral stances at your age.” I told him. “Now step over the shopping-bag lady and—.”
“Why should I step over the shopping-bag lady?”
“Because she is there. Now let’s go upstairs and bowl.”
When we reached the alley, however, the proprietor said the kids could watch but not participate. “City ordinance,” he explained. “No kids can bowl after six o’clock. Inspector comes in and checks, we get a ticket. Thirty-five dollars. Kid gets a ticket. Thirty-five dollars.”
“What’s the point of that?”
“One of these old blue-laws,” he shrugged.
We all left. The shopping-bag lady was still there. Writing a good bowling story in a puritan society is not easy.
But wait. I hadn’t given up. My brother-in-law Rick Ackermann once got his name posted on the bulletin board in an alley in Ibiza for his achievements on a lane which sloped sharply off to one side for part of the way and then sharply off to the other side for the rest of the way.
When I heard that I thought: Perhaps what bowling needs is a more interesting terrain. Maybe even bridges or water obstacles, like in miniature golf.
Or psychological obstacles. Ah. Bowling as an existential act. If I’d been in Paris when all this came to me I would have hotfooted it right over to the Deux Magots and challenged Sartre to a few lines. Unfortunately I happened to be in a small town in southern New Mexico.
I was interviewing a horseman. “I think I’ll go bowling in town tonight,” I told him.
“Huh. Watch out for sharpies,” he said.
Sharpies. What would a bowling sharpie—a cowboy bowling sharpie—look like, I wondered as I stepped into the Bowl-a-Matic that evening. I don’t know about you, but when I walk into someplace like a bowling alley in a small western town, I expect to be pounced on and stomped any minute. And if some kind of heavy hustling was going on to boot … If I beat somebody, what measures would be taken? Would somebody try to break my fingers? Inside the ball?
Oh, no. I couldn’t type with a bowling ball stuck on my hand. One hand would be all right, but my lead might go something like: “(Smash)(Smash)t(Smash)(Smash)(Smash)ed aga(Smash)(Smash)st a b(Smash)(Smash)e(Smash)gra(Smash) (Smash)ct(Smash)ber s(Smash)(Smash) …” The best doctors in the country would be trying everything—scooting my hand and the ball with a hose—to get me loose.
There were some rough-looking old boys, and girls, in there, all right. They eyed me. I rented some shoes, I put them on. I went over to the ball rack; started sticking my fingers into the town balls. Sure that any minute a chill would fall over the room. Somebody would come over with his hand on his gun. “Stranger, that’s the sheriff’s ball. …”
I made my selection. I began to bowl. Nobody said anything. Well. Maybe I have the kind of presence that keeps sharpies away. I knew I didn’t have as much presence as a guy back home who once, after knocking down only two pins with two balls, slowly walked the length of the lane and kicked all the others over with his foot; but maybe there was something about the way I blended all those hard surfaces in one fluid interface climaxing in explosion, vum vum vum vum rml rml rml rml ESCHATOLOGY!, that earned the homespun respect of these people.
I bowled several lines. The crowd thinned out. At last, it was just me and the two guys I figured must be the sharpies. They both had toothpicks in their mouths.
My confidence began to wane. Maybe they would try to stomp me with a bowling ball.
Why stay on, then? To test myself. When I was but a lad shooting baskets by myself in the back yard in bad weather, I would say, “Okay, sink six out of ten and then go in.” I would hit five. That would piss me off. “All right, I’ll show you—seven out of ten. Or we’re not going in. Ever.” My hands would get cold and wet and muddy. Darkness would approach. Swish. Thunk. I would grow to hate myself, and the ball, and the rim, as strongly as one is supposed to hate an opponent in order to win. I learned a great lesson out there on that small muddy court: Don’t participate seriously in sports.
But here in New Mexico I had my column to do. How many games would it take to prove something? Going into the last frame of the seventh game, I decided to forget about it. It looked as if nobody was going to try to sharp me.
“I make this spare,” I said, “I call it a night.”
I missed it.
And when I looked again at the two guys I had thought were sharpies, I realized what they were: the guys who had to close up. They had changed into their boots and they were squinting at me hard. They wanted to go home.
Pressure.
“Okay. You got to bowl a one-forty before you quit,” I told myself.
Eighth game: one-thirty-seven.
Ninth game: one-twenty.
Frankly, now I’m worried. It must seem to the two guys that I am trying to be a smart-ass or something. They aren’t saying anything. Just chewing their toothpicks. What if they make me back down from myself?
I start the tenth game. Pick up a couple of spares. Couple of strikes—great sounds in bowling, I’ll give it that: vum vum rml rml rml rml DEBACLE!
Sweating. Arm very tired. Come to the last frame. Hear one of the two guys call the other one “Vern.” Never let a cowboy named Vern think you are having fun at his expense. Vern, I swear to you, I’m not. I am bowling blood.
Need a spare. Rommel rommel rommel rommel KRAKA-TOA!
One pin left.
Rmmmbl-I rmmmbl-I rmmmbl-I rmmmbl-I P … L … ONK!
Pick it up.
Last ball, all I need’s a couple of pins, I don’t even concentrate. Nonchalant it. Get four.
One-forty-three. By God, don’t nobody go around saying I’m scared to come into your town and bowl.
Vern doesn’t say that. “Quat a little workout,” he says when I pay. He says it hard.
I’m tempted to say, “Well. Where was all your sharpies at tonight?” But don’t push it. Gracious in victory. “’Ep” is all I say.
I start my exit.
“Uh,” Vern says. I freeze. I have nothing, not even a ball, to throw at them. I turn.
“Them’re ars,” he says:
I look down.
I don’t guess anybody out there has any good “Why I am walking out onto the mean streets of New Mexico wearing the house’s green-and-red-striped shoes” lines.
After this first appeared, Docteur Georges-Guy Maruani of Paris wrote to inform me that there is in fact a great bowling novel: La truite, by Roger Vailland. Imagine my consternation to find that this novel is written entirely in French. Which I read slowly. So as this goes to print. I am taking Dr. Maruani’s word for it. There is one great bowling novel. La truite. And nothing but La truite.
BALLOONING WITH SLICK
THE FAITHFUL READER OF this column, hapless dupe though he be (be? is? were? am?)—hapless dupe though he am—will have noticed that I have not fulfilled my promise to write at frequent intervals on participant sports. I have not done it because—what are you going to say about them? “A large group of us went skiing in Vermont last weekend, including my friend Mayo Whitsett and his wife Amber and several other people you never heard of either, and the snow was good—well, it was pretty good—and we all went wiieeeeeeeeeeeeeeee, and it looks like more and more pe
ople are into these Montagnard X-2’s that will release your feet only when you scream but then will let go of them in two-tenths of a second, according to the specifications, but then there are a lot of pros and cons on that. …” It’s either that kind of thing or you have to get really serious, because spectator sports are fantasy but participant sports—let me put it this way: nobody is watching but God.
Well, anyway, I am up in a damn balloon. I’m skimming the top of a persimmon tree and pulling off a persimmon and biting it. There are only eight hot-air balloons in Tennessee and I am up in one of them, The Ubiquitous Serpent.
Voilà. The above is another first for this column. Last month we participated in a holdout, and this month we have blocked out our lead in a damn balloon. I didn’t have my typewriter up there, to be sure, but I did block out the above lead in my head while, yes, veritably brushing the crest of a hundred-foot Franklin, Tennessee, persimmon tree and looking straight down on the backs of startled rabbits, deer and cattle. And looking down on a man, standing next to his pickup, who hollered, “How y’all boys doin’?” and we hollered down, “Got three gret big persimmons.”
We were in Slick Lawson’s balloon—Slick, my sweet wife Joan and I. Slick, whose formal name is W. E., maintains that he was nicknamed Slick from birth because of his expeditious departure from the womb. He’s a Nashville photographer—shoots album covers, gubernatorial candidates, Tennessee-whiskey ads, beautiful bare-breasted women waving speared catfish and running from an inflated shark (to illustrate the invitations for his annual catfish fry). In his living room he has a picture of himself taken by Johnny Cash. That is the level of Music City photographer Slick is. Also he is the author of the song title “Last Night I Won the Dance Contest (But I Can’t Take the Trophy Home).”
That’s another thing about participant sports. I’m afraid I’ll lose my sense of sin in them. That’s why you didn’t catch Faulkner waterskiing or doing some other damn thing. He’d go out and chase animals and shoot at them, but that’s different—that’s at least about half wrong, and therefore pertinent. The only thing I can think of that is wrong about riding a balloon is that if the Devil had taken Jesus up in a balloon instead of onto a mountaintop—but no, the Devil don’t ride a damn balloon, I don’t believe. Even though Slick, with his frizzly greying hair and beard and nimble, chunky trunk-forward carriage and his face like a mobile bag of little apples, looks more like Pan than anybody else I have ever known personally. And even though the balloon’s burner is like a dragon’s mouth, puts out fifteen million BTU’s an hour, which is enough to heat a small building, and makes this raarrghph sound. Off to our right we could see the other two balloons of our party, Butch Stamps’s and Allen “Deux Rite” Sullivan’s. They were floating, looking prettier than lighter-than-air Easter eggs, and off and on roaring like hoarse lions.