In memory yet green : the autobiography of Isaac Asimov, 1920-1954

by Asimov, Isaac, 1920-1992

  I bundled up and started out but I had not gone half a block before I turned back. It took a lot of cold to push me into telling my father I couldn't make it, but a lot of cold was what we had. I thought the papers might well be undelivered that one day, but my father thought otherwise.

  "Watch the store," he told me, and off he went and delivered the papers. Of course, he had been brought up in Russian winters, but it still made me feel rotten to think that the cold that had stopped me had not stopped him. I therefore forebore to suggest that it was not the kind of day on which it was essential that anyone go to school. (In those days schools were never closed whatever the weather—these days, a heavy dew or a light mist is enough.)

  I walked the four blocks to Halsey Street, waited for the streetcar to come in its own good time while I chattered and shivered and stamped my feet and tried to shrink into my clothes. (By then, though, the temperature had risen to a mild —10, I imagine.) I got on the streetcar just before I froze solid, and I had barely thawed out when I had to get off to walk the three blocks to the school. There was a long line of frostbitten youngsters at the nurse's office—but I was spared that.

  Another thing about Decatur Street was that by that time I had finally become old enough for my parents to be willing to let me out after sunset. Well, they weren't exactly willing, but the vociferousness of my insistence finally overcame their conviction that if I vanished into the darkness I would somehow find some river, fall into it, and drown—or do something else equally disastrous.

  As soon as I won the right to be out till nine or even ten o'clock, my sister won the same right, even though she was 2V2 years younger

  than I. I felt it profoundly unjust that she wasn't imprisoned until she reached the age at which I was liberated.

  My father was unsympathetic. He said, "All right. So let's go back in time 2V2 years and let you out at that time." Then he laughed. At that, he laughed.

  Night was a wonderful time in Brooklyn in the thirties, especially in warm weather. Everyone would be sitting on their stoops, since air conditioning was unknown except in movie houses, and so was television without exception. There was nothing to keep one in the house. Furthermore, few people owned automobiles, so there was nothing to carry one away. That left the streets and the stoops, which were thus full, and the very fullness served as an inhibition to street crime. People were everywhere, talking, laughing, gossiping, and the roadways were relatively empty.

  I would walk all over the neighborhood, daydreaming. In later years I channeled the daydreams into material for fiction, but in Decatur Street, I still hadn't reached that stage of practicality, and my daydreams were just invented and thrown away.

  As to what those daydreams were, I can scarcely remember. Some were megalomaniac in nature. I think I used to imagine, in great detail, waking up someday to find that I could play the piano beautifully, and surprising everyone with my ability; or being a master swordsman a la d'Artagnan; or in other ways demonstrating an unexpected and impressive virtuosity.

  Oddly enough, I'm quite certain I never imagined myself to be a prolific writer.

  Then, too, I would imagine myself a character in some book I had read and would continue it past its ending. I've already mentioned I had done this with the Iliad. I remember also doing it with Louisa May Alcott's Little Men which somehow impressed me more than her Little Women. —Perhaps that was because I read Little Men first.

  My good friend and fellow writer, Frederik Pohl, whom I was not to meet for some years yet, but who was growing up in Brooklyn contemporaneously with me, was more systematic about his walks. He got himself a street map of Brooklyn and began taking long walks. It was his ambition, he said, to walk through every single street in Brooklyn, and mark them off on the map as he walked through them till every one of them had felt his step.

  I don't know that he ever completed this monumental task, for there are hundreds of miles of streets in Brooklyn, but the point was that he was not afraid to walk anywhere. There was not a street in the

  borough that he imagined would be unsafe, and probably none of them was. Nowadays, of course, only a person intent on suicide would harbor Fred's ambition.

  It never occurred to me to take on such a task, but there were other ways of indicating that I (and my father) thought the streets safe.

  Even when we lived in Essex Street, and I was a preteen-ager, he thought nothing of sending me to the bank. This was always a complicated transaction because he had to deposit the week's earnings in cash, together with any excess in coins. He would wrap this excess in special paper marked with the coin and the total worth. For instance, 50 pennies were wrapped up in rolls marked "50&" 50 dimes in rolls marked "$5.00," and so on. The paper had to be wrapped tightly and the paper pressed in on either side. When my father was finished they were as tight as though they contained a solid bar of metal, and as heavy. (I could never do it. My rolls were always mushy and useless.)

  All this I had to deposit. I also had to withdraw a quantity of coins of those denominations in which he was short (mostly nickels, whereas pennies were the usual superfluity). Week after week, I would go to the bank to make a complicated deposit and an equally complicated withdrawal. My father never worried that I would make a mistake, or that I would get lost, or that I would let anything inveigle me into doing anything but going straight there and straight back—and he was never disappointed.

  What he never thought of and what I never thought of was that a skinny subteen-ager, carrying several hundred dollars in bills and coins in a brown paper bag to the bank and then quite a bit in coins coming back from it, might be waylaid and held up. I just went there and back, swinging the bag, and was never afraid—though thinking back on it, I get shaky with ex post facto terror.

  7

  Being out evenings gave me a chance, finally, to talk to girls more intimately than I had ever had occasion to before. Living immediately across the street was a girl a year older than myself who was named Mary, but whom everyone called Mazie. I was thirteen and she was fourteen when we met, and I thought she was an amazingly beautiful woman, for fourteen seemed quite mature to me. (Actually, she looked like Ann Dvorak, the movie actress—at least to me.)

  I did a great deal of following after her and hanging around her

  stoop at night and talking to her. I even went to the movies with her on occasion (Dutch, of course, for negotiating any money out of my parents for anyone other than myself was quite out of the question).

  Aside from the excitement of being with Mazie at the movies were the movies themselves. On a hot summer day, it was a miracle, and a heavenly one at that, to step into coolness, for the movies were the only places where air conditioning existed. Returning to the heat was a purgatory.

  Nothing ever came of this first puppy-love affair of mine, but it was useful, for it gave me practice talking to girls, and this particular girl was always pleasant and subjected me to no embarrassment at any time. Eventually, she married Danny Metta, one of the other boys who hung about the stoop (for I was not the only one who noticed that she was pretty).

  8

  Another puppy-love affair that began about the same time was between myself and baseball.

  I was never particularly interested in sports as a participant, since there was never any chance that I would be good at it. I was too light and too skinny for contact sports, and I was nearsighted besides.

  My nearsightedness was recognized for what it was by the time I was in junior high school, and I was then fitted out for glasses, which I have worn ever since. It came as no great shock to me. My father wore glasses, and my mother wore glasses, and I guess I couldn't have avoided them. My sister and brother also wore glasses eventually. In fact, of the five of us, my eyes are the least bad.

  Once I had eyeglasses, my vision was normal (in fact, rather better than normal when the lenses are correctly fitted). However, I then had to fear damaging my glasses, so sports were out.

  Nor was I a partic
ularly enthusiastic sports spectator. For one thing, I didn't have the money to get tickets to see games.

  When I began to read the newspapers, however, I could not help but see the sports pages, and baseball attracted me, largely because the teams represented the cities, and New York City, toward which I felt strongly patriotic, had the Giants and the Yankees. Naturally, I wanted them to win.

  Once I had a radio of my own, I found I could listen to baseball games, and I soon learned to understand the rules, get the names of the important pitchers and hitters, and, in general, I became a wild fan.

  Of course, I did things the complicated way. At the beginning of each season I somehow managed to get a ten-cent copybook (large, thick, with white pages—nothing but the best), and I filled each double-page spread with a table for the National League on one side and the American League on the other. I had room not only for total wins and losses, but also for a double-entry arrangement that would show me how many times each team beat every other team, or was beaten.

  It was then my aim to listen to the news every evening, find out all the scores, enter them, work out percentages, places in the standing, games behind, and so on. I worked out everything even though I could have found it all in the paper the next morning. I had to do it first.

  The Giants were my idols. Carl Hubbell, their ace pitcher, was king to me, and Mel Ott, their cleanup hitter, could do no wrong. The odd part was that Brooklyn had a team of its own, the Dodgers, but when I first became aware of baseball the Giants were contenders (they won the National League pennant in 1933 an ^ then went on to beat the Washington Senators in the World Series), and they captured my heart. By the time I found out there was a Brooklyn team, it was too late; I was imprinted.

  Since virtually everyone else in Brooklyn was a Dodger fan, I had nothing but trouble. I was a minority of one, and every single male customer my father had was in a perpetual stage of anger with me over my high treason. My father was very upset. I couldn't make him understand that these were just friendly arguments designed to spice up the game. To him, every argument meant a possibly lost customer, and over and over again he would order me to shut up.

  Shut up? Refuse to defend the Giants against the cowardly attacks of a bunch of depraved Dodger fans? Never!

  The year 1934 was tne most exciting baseball year ever for me, and it broke my heart. September opened with the Giants in first place by seven games. Nothing but a miracle could keep them from the pennant. The miracle happened. They went on a losing streak, lost, lost, lost, and LOST. Crucially, they lost two of the last four games to the despised Dodgers, and this after the Giants' manager, Bill Terry, at the beginning of the season had said, "Are the Dodgers still in the league?" when asked about the Brooklyn team's chances at the pennant. Wow, did that remark come back to roost!

  The St. Louis Cardinals took the pennant that year. They were called the Gashouse Gang and they were the most colorful team in baseball history, but the only colors I wished for them were black and blue. They had a remarkable brother-team on the mound, Dizzy and

  Daffy Dean. Together, and almost without help, they proceeded to win the World Series over the Detroit Tigers in seven games. I think that in my whole life I never hated anyone in sports with so malignant a hatred as I did those Dean brothers in September and October of 1934. The baseball mania receded slowly after that Heartbreak Peak, but I remained quite intensely interested through the rest of my teen-age years.

  9

  Nor was it only my Giants fanaticism that proved a liability to my parents' efforts not to lose customers; they were also constantly afraid that my other eccentricities would do the same.

  Let me list some of my eccentricities.

  When I was walking anywhere I was invariably lost in thought. As a result, I was only sufficiently aware of my surroundings to keep from being run over and from colliding with trees. It wasn't that I failed to recognize people I passed—I didn't even see them. 3 The trouble was that every customer I ignored in passing felt pained and reported it indignantly to my parents. I was constantly being hounded to say hello ^to everyone I passed. My attempt to explain that I didn't see them was met with profound disbelief.

  My mother also reported to me that I had to do something about the way I walked home from the library. It seems that I had reached the point where I was allowed three books, and it was routine for me to read one of them on the way home. This didn't make it particularly hard for me to walk, since I never saw anything anyway, even if I weren't reading a book. It made it a little difficult crossing streets, but I usually peeked over my book at such times and I was never run over, so what was the difference?

  I had to do something with the other two books, however, and the easiest way of disposing of them was to place one under each arm. Well, would you believe that I was reported to my mother for walking down the street with a book under each arm while reading a third? And would you believe my mother ordered me not to do that? It was apparently too eccentric to be endured by the customers.

  Naturally, I ignored the order.

  Just one more. Once I was walking home from the trolley-car stop in a snowstorm. It wasn't very cold and the flakes were big and fat and I noticed that while they were white against the buildings, they were

  3 This is still true to this day. If a friend doesn't call after me, or physically grab me, I will walk right past, unseeing.

  black against the white clouds. I found this fascinating, and as I watched the falling bits of black, I noticed that they made interesting swirls against the sky. I watched those swirls and got home, taking a bit of time, since I couldn't walk quickly while watching the sky.

  Would you believe that some customer had seen me and raced on to the store to report that I was walking down the street with my head tilted back and my mouth open? And would you believe my mother was furious with me?

  One eccentricity I had that no one knew about, because I was careful not to talk about it, was my love of cemeteries.

  In exploring the Decatur Street neighborhood, I found that three blocks to the southwest lay some cemeteries. The nearest was Trinity Cemetery, a small and crowded Catholic cemetery that didn't interest me. Another, though, v/as a large Protestant cemetery, the Cemetery of the Evergreens, just beyond Trinity. It was perhaps two thirds the size of Prospect Park (Brooklyn's largest) and was very much like a park that was unobtrusively interrupted here and there by gravestones.

  I found that wandering about in it was delightful. It had the advantages of a park without the disadvantage of being full of people. I had been in parks; in fact, when we were younger, and before we had the candy store, a rare treat was that of taking a trolley to Highland Park and picnicking there. Highland Park was, actually, just on the other side of the Cemetery of the Evergreens, but I didn't bother trying to go there.

  Cemeteries are, of course, full of the remains of dead people, but that didn't bother me. Whenever I could get a few hours off in the summer, I would take whatever it was I was reading at the time, preferably a science-fiction magazine, and go off to the cemeteries. (In 1933, Astounding Stories had been taken over by Street & Smith Publications, Inc., and under the editorship of F. Orlin Tremaine it scaled new heights and became far and away my favorite science-fiction magazine.)

  Sometimes I would explore new avenues in the cemetery, and before long I had a whole series of favorite stone benches where I could sit under trees with no signs or sounds of human life or human artifacts in any direction.

  In fact, the only thing that ever intruded into this lonely Eden (it was remarkably like being in a room with the blinds pulled down—just as cozy and separated from the world) was once when the caretaker stopped me as I went in—he knew me well by that time—and asked me, in a rather embarrassed tone of voice, not to whistle as I walked through the cemetery, because it offended the occasional mourners there. For a moment I was astonished that there would be mourners

  there; what could they be mourning? Then I remembered, apologiz
ed, and whistled no more.

  That was another thing. I whistled constantly. Other people might chain-smoke or chew gun; I whistled.

  I whistled popular songs of the day. I whistled Gilbert and Sullivan. I also whistled Italian operatic selections. This undoubtedly bothered the people I passed, and that would occasionally be reported to my mother, and she complained about that.

  The whistling mania has decreased with age, but it never has vanished. In fact, I even sometimes absent-mindedly sing in public. This is all usually interpreted by others as signifying that I am happy (and they sometimes say so in what seems a pettish annoyance, as though I have no right to be). And they are right. I am usually happy.

  Fortunately, none of the complaints lodged against me did anything to repress my ego and individuality, because no matter how many times I was reported, and how many times my mother stormed at me for risking the family welfare by being eccentric, I nevertheless continued to do exactly as I had been doing. I had gathered the notion somewhere that my eccentricities belonged to me and to nobody else and that I had every right to keep them.

  And I lived long enough to see these eccentricities and others that I have not mentioned come to be described as "colorful" facets of my personality.

  10

  I'm afraid I was also eccentric at school. It was no longer just a matter of whispering to my neighbor. I was beginning to have a novel and dangerous thought. More and more it seemed to me I could think faster than the teacher.

  I worked it out carefully. If I said something with a perfectly straight face that was designed to evoke laughter at the teacher's expense, and if I didn't laugh, but just looked surprised—I could plead innocence. There would be nothing to do about it.