The first thing my father did in the morning was comb his hair. He combed it straight back, smooth and flat behind his ears. Then he exercised. He opened the window. My mother told him not to stand by the window in his underwear, in front of all the neighbors. “What neighbors?” he said. “Who’s looking?”
He stretched, he took deep breaths, everything deliberate and slow. He bent his knees, straightened up, then touched his toes. Then he combed his hair again.
He rubbed his hand over the bristle on his cheeks, then took out the shaving cream and the razor. That was the part I liked best. When he was done, he’d hand me the razor, but without the blade. I foamed up and ran the razor up and down and all around my face like a sled in the snow.
One time I decided I was going to teach my father how to play. We were on the street together, and I was bouncing my ball. “Catch,” I said. “What?” he said. I showed him the ball. I put the ball in his hand. “Now you give it to me, Pop.” He handed me the ball, then wiped his hands on his white handkerchief.
I bounced the ball on the sidewalk, then threw it to him, nice and easy. He caught it. “That’s the way, Pop, good.”
My dream was that my father would learn about games and play catch with me. He could pitch to me and I could practice my batting, which was not too great. I threw the ball again, and it got away from him. He was wearing a coat and a hat, and he couldn’t bend. The ball slipped like water through his fingers and rolled out in the street. “Grab it!” I yelled. But he didn’t move. He stood there like a dope.
I dove for the ball. It was my pink Spaldeen, the best ball in the world. I saw the car coming, I had plenty of time, but my father went nuts. “Stop!” His voice was like an explosion. “Are you crazy?”
Top, my ball…” The car rolled over it and split it in half. “My Spaldeen…” I picked up the pieces. The in-sides were pink like bubble gum and it smelled like new rubber.
“How many times do I have to tell you: Stay out of the street,” my father said. “All you do is play. Play is not important. School is important.”
I didn’t say anything. Underneath everything, I knew I didn’t have to listen to him, because he wasn’t a real American. When I thought that, it made me feel sorry for him. I was born here and he wasn’t. I knew I was going to leave him behind.
There was never a moment when I felt he understood. He was from another world. He had nothing to teach me. I learned from my friends, from Vicik. There was nothing I needed from my father, except maybe to teach me how to shave or make a tie.
• • •
On Saturday I was out of the house early. Out of the dark rooms, the corridors, the tension. “Stop! Stand still a minute.” They were both on me. Mother and Father. One of them says, “Where are you going?” The other one says, “You didn’t eat anything yet.”
I hardly heard them. I was out, up the stairs and over the roof. It had rained overnight and there were puddles in all the dips. The air was clear and clean and taut as a wire. I couldn’t breathe enough of it. One last breath and I dove down another dark, spooky staircase. I pounded on a door. “Let’s go, Mutt.” He was my real friend.
He wanted me to come inside. I looked past him down the dark corridor of his apartment. His mother was in the kitchen, and he had to finish eating before she’d let him out.
I waited in front of the building. Mutt and I were handball partners. I was left-handed and that was an advantage, because our strong arms were on the outside. I liked to watch the older guys play. They played the same game we did, only they played with gloves and a small hard black ball. Those were things I really wanted, a pair of leather gloves and a regulation handball.
I had a ball in my pocket. I bounced it, threw it up, caught it. Besides the ball, I carried marbles in my pockets, trading cards, a pocketknife, coins. We played marbles in the dirt. I used my biggest, smoothest marble as a shooter. The little ones were emmies, and there were steelies and dearies you held up to the light. We matched pennies, playing odds and evens, or pitched them against a wall. Or you could put a coin on the crack in the sidewalk, then try to hit it with a ball to the next crack.
Sometimes, if no boys were around I’d play potsie with the girls. You chalked the game on the sidewalk, eight numbered squares. You dropped a bottle cap or a stone into square one, hopped on one foot through all the squares, picked up the marker, and hopped out.
Mutt and I played handball all morning. When I got home my hands were swollen, my fingers fat like sausages. Nobody was home, but my mother had left me a sandwich, a glass of milk, and a big piece of yellow sponge cake. I ate and then fell down on the bed, sank down into pillows and quilts. I heard cars honking through the open window, sirens, kids calling. The window curtains blew in and out.
When I woke up, I didn’t know where I was. I staggered out to the other room. My mother was cutting a pattern for a dress on the table. My father was telling her she was going to ruin everything. I ate noodle pudding and washed it down with a glass of milk.
“I’m going out.” I had the door open.
“Where are you going? Shut the door and come back inside.”
“My friends are waiting.”
“You’ve been out enough. Sit. Read something.”
My father read the paper. I went to the refrigerator and got the white bread and butter.
“Are you eating again?” he said. “If you’re eating, sit down. Only animals eat standing up.”
I sat down. My father turned a page, wet a finger, and turned another page. I could hear the kids outside through the open windows. It was getting dark. I leaned on my elbow. In the distance, along the horizon, along the edge of the sky and the rooftops, I saw a train creeping along the elevated track.
The paper rustled, then slipped from my father’s hand. I waited till his eyes closed. I had my sneakers off. I held them up for my mother to see as I tiptoed out of the room.
In the bedroom, I looked out the window. The sky was still bright above, but below in the courtyard it was dark. I hung out the window and saw Vicik’s blond head shining. I bird-whistled. “Vicik, up here.”
I dangled my sneakers out the window, let one go, and then the other. They fell five floors, straight down. Vicik caught them. He motioned for me to come down. I went out the fire escape window, down the narrow metal stairs. On the last landing, I was still too high. Vicik reached up. “Leggo.” He had his arms out. “Leggo, Lenny.”
I let go, fell into his arms, and we both went down. I laced on my sneakers, and we ran off to find the others.
There were a million moths around the streetlights. The best game at night was Johnny on the Pony. We divided into two big teams. I was on Vicik’s team. Dov’s team made itself into a horse first.
The fattest boy, the pillow boy, stood with his back to the wall. The other boys on his team bent over and locked together, head to tail, making the horse. The last boy tucked his head between the legs of the boy in front of him. “Anyone who farts gets killed.”
Our team was across the street. I was the first one to run, because I was the smallest. “Go, Lenny!” Vicki yelled. I sprinted, picked up speed. I got my knees high, let my arms swing. “Go, Lenny!” I vaulted over the bent back of the last boy and threw myself as far forward on the horse as I could. I came down hard on somebody’s bony back. The next boy landed on top of me, and the next, and the next, one on top of the other, digging in, hanging on.
I looked back. There came Vicik. His arms were pumping. His feet were shooting out like a duck’s. His eyes were popping out of his head. He went up higher then anyone and came down on top of us like a ton of bricks. It was like an earthquake. The horse trembled. It started to shake and crack and fall apart.
“Johnny on the Pony,” the other team chanted. They had to say it three times. “Johnny on the Pony.…Johnny…” But they couldn’t. The horse swayed one way and then the other. And then it fell. We won.
After the game broke up, a bunch of us hung around the cand
y store. Vicik sat on a fire hydrant and poked at his teeth with a straw. He was telling us a joke and laughing in the middle of it. “What did the moron say when he jumped off the Empire State Building?” Vicik was laughing so hard he could hardly get out the punch line. “He’s falling, and someone says, How’s it going? And the moron says, So far so good.”
Gradually, everyone went home, but I was still there with Vicik. I knew I should go home, but it was Vicik, and I couldn’t. He bought a candy bar and we shared it. We walked around Allerton Avenue, all the way up to Boston Post Road. It was late and there was almost nobody on the street. Vicik’s house was off Mace Avenue. I’d never been on that street. The sidewalk was all broken up, and there were no apartment houses, just a lot of trees and old wooden houses.
The lights were on inside his house, but he didn’t go in. “Is your father waiting up for you?” I knew my father was going to kill me. Vicik just shrugged.
We walked along the edge of the curb, talking a little. I kept waiting for him to say he was going in, so I could leave. He kept talking, telling jokes. He sat down on his steps, leaning forward with his head in his hands. He stopped talking.
“What’s the matter?” I said. He shook his head.
Finally, I couldn’t stay another second. “I’m going,” I said. I knew I was letting him down, but I couldn’t help it. When I looked back, I saw him go into his house. I didn’t know why, but I went back and stood on the sidewalk and looked in the window. I saw a man. He looked like Vicik, only bigger. I saw him push Vicik against the wall. Vicik fell back. He didn’t raise his hand. He didn’t defend himself. He stood with his back to the wall, his eyes on his father. When his father swung at him he ducked, and ducked again, but his father kept hitting him.
I ran all the way home. There was no traffic, nobody on the streets. When I got to my building, I took off my shoes and went up the stairs like a burglar. I turned my key in the lock and slipped inside. Then stood there, just inside the door, listening. I didn’t hear anything but my own breathing.
Where were they? What if they were gone? It was the same thought I scared myself with sometimes when I woke up in the middle of the night. What if they said, Enough! They were sick of waiting for me, sick of my games, sick of trying to make me be good.
Then I heard something from the living room, where they sleep. Something moving, something big and dark, and creeping toward me. “Who’s there?” It was white and big, and in the doorway. A ghost wearing white underwear.
“What are you doing?” my father said.
“Nothing.”
“What are you standing by the door for?”
“I’m not.” I laughed. It was dumb to laugh. I should have been sorry. Made an excuse. There was an accident.…We had to go to the hospital…and the police station….
“You’re laughing? You come home at this time and you’re laughing?”
From the other room, my mother called, “Don’t get excited.”
My father held the alarm clock. “You see what time it is?”
“I don’t know.”
“It’s twelve on the clock. What were you doing till twelve o’clock?”
“Playing Johnny on the Pony.”
“With horses, you play with horses at twelve o’clock?”
“We’re the horses, Pop. It’s only a game.”
He sat down. “You’re a horse now? What kind of game is that?”
“It’s teams, Pop. It’s like tug-of-war. It’s fun.”
For a long time he sat there, rocking forward and back with the clock in his lap. “A game.” He repeated it several times, rocking back and forth.
“Gonif,” he said, finally. “American gonif.” American thief. “In this country, you can get away with anything.” Then he told me to go to bed, and I did.
Harry Mazer
Handball was Harry Mazer’s favorite sport when he was a kid—one-wall handball against the side of buildings, until the city built six courts in his New York neighborhood. After school and on Saturday mornings he lived at those handball courts, he says. He played four-wall handball for years, until he dislocated his thumb and switched to racquetball. After tearing his ankle a few years ago, he reports, he only “plays catch and throws rocks and hard green apples at signposts” near his home in central New York State. “I love throwing things,” he admits.
He also enjoys writing novels for teenagers, something he has been doing for nearly twenty-five years, starting with Guy Lenny, a story about a boy who lives with his divorced father. Snowbound, a winter survival story that was made into an NBC television movie, remains one of his most popular books. Among his other novels are The War on Villa Street, The Dollar Man, When the Phone Rang, The Island Keeper, The Last Mission, and Someone’s Mother Is Missing. Romance plays a role in several of Mazer’s novels, including I Love Tou, Stupid!, The Girl of His Dreams, and City Light. With his wife, Norma Fox Mazer, he has published The Solid Gold Kid, which the American Library Association named one of the 100 Best of the Best Books for Young Adults published between 1967 and 1992; Heartbeat; and Bright Days, Stupid Nights. His most recent novel, Who Is Eddie Leonard?, is about a boy who believes Eddie is not his real name and that the Leonards are not his real family.
“Falling off the Empire State Building,” Mazer says, was inspired by the recent death of a neighborhood boy he knew in childhood. “He was a good athlete, and like all the really gifted, physically, he seemed to live in a state of grace, like a prince, relaxed and easy. Nothing got him excited and he never got mad. He was so good, an ideal person… somebody to admire.”
There’s money to be made in sports. If you can’t be a professional player pulling down several million dollars a year, you can still purchase a little piece of those superstars. Sports memorabilia is where the action is.
The Hobbyist
You were not born into physical greatness and all the love and worship and happiness that are guaranteed with it. But fortunately you were born American. So you can buy into it.
You have Paul Molitor’s special rookie card from 1978. Who knew he’d be such a monster when he got to be thirty-seven years old? Alan Trammell’s on the same card. Again, who knew? Those two could just as easily have wound up like the other two rookie shortstops on the card, U. L. Washington and Mickey Klutts. Mickey Klutts? Was he a decoy? A you-can-do-it-too inspiration for the millions of Mickey Kluttses in the world?
So nobody knew, which is good for you. You got it at a yard sale, along with a thousand other cards that some scary old lady was dumping. Her scary old man had died. As far as she was concerned, he’d taken all the cards’ value with him. She didn’t know. Bet there was a lot more she didn’t know.
You have complete sets of National Hockey League cards from everybody for the last three seasons. Fleer, Topps, O-Pee-Chee, Pinnacle, Leaf, and Upper Deck. Two sets of each, in fact, one you open and look at, one that stays sealed in the closet to retain its value because you’re not stupid. You’re a lot of things, but you’re not stupid. Hockey, understand, is the wave. That’s where it’s at for the future, collectiblewise.
Anything that has Eric Lindros’s picture on it, or his signature, or his footprint, you own it. Big ol’ Eric Lindros. You own him.
Ditto Frank Thomas. Big ol’ Frank Thomas. You own him.
You just don’t own you. Because you’re not going to be on any card. Because you have to be on a team first, and you’re not going to be on any team, are you? Six inches. You were so close. “You’re a good kid, boy, and you busted your ass harder than anybody who’s ever tried out for me, no lie. If you were just six inches taller, you’d have made that final cut for the jayvee.”
You’re six feet six inches tall. Thanks, Coach.
When you’re six feet six inches tall, everybody asks you, “You playin’ any ball, kid?” If you cannot answer yes to that question, looking the way you do, you let everybody down. It’s like asking an old man, “So how’ve you been?” and he answers, “No good.
Prostate’s blown to hell. Incontinent. Impotent. Death’s door.” You bring everybody down.
You can’t do that. Bring everybody down. Because even though they don’t know it, when you bring them down, you bring you down. Only lower. You always go lower down than everybody else. Where no one else goes, where no one else knows. So you learn. You go around the whole thing.
“So, you playin’ any hoops?” your uncle asks when he comes by to take his brother, your father, to the Celtics-Knicks game. You don’t answer yes, you don’t answer no. You smile sagely, nod, and hold up a wait-right-here finger to your uncle with the beer and the electric green satin Celtics jacket. You go to your room and come back with a ball. The ball is a regular $20 basketball with a $295 Bill Russell autograph on it.
“Holy smokes,” your uncle marvels. “That bastard? You actually went to that card show for this, huh?” He pretends, like a lot of people in Boston, to hate, or at least not care about, Bill Russell, who is famous for hating, or not caring much for, Boston. “I heard they had to pay him two million damn dollars just to come back here for two lousy card shows,” he says with obvious disgust. But he doesn’t let go of the ball. He stares and stares into it, turning it around in his hands, as if he’s reading his future or his past in there. He shakes his head and mutters something about watching, as a kid, Russell eating Chamberlain alive. Then he offers you $100 for the ball.
You take your ball back with a silent knowing smile. You feel the power and satisfaction, exactly the same rush as blocking a shot, swatting it ten rows up into the stands, you are sure. You get a little crazy with cockiness and attempt a dribble on the kitchen tiles as you head out. You bounce it off your instep, then chase it down the hall feeling stupid, tall and stupid.
Your father does not get the autographed picture of Patrick Ewing you ask him to get at the game, even though his brother, your uncle, explains the whole Russell-Ewing historical continuum. Your father just doesn’t get it. Oh, he gets Russell, and he gets Ewing. What he doesn’t get is the whole “autograph thing,” the “collectibles thing,” the thing where a big healthy kid can reach over the protective fence around the players’ parking lot at Fenway Park to get a hat signed by Mo Vaughn, but that same kid could not learn to grab a rebound. Couldn’t even rebound. “Even Manute Bol catches a rebound once in a while, for God’s sake,” your father points out.
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