The Crowd Sounds Happy

by Nicholas Dawidoff

  One weekend that same year, Mom, Sally, and I went to spend a day in Hamden, where a favorite colleague of my mother’s lived. The colleague had a son named Ricky who was three years older than I and an ice hockey player. Hamden was a big hockey town. Everywhere you went in Hamden you saw kids wearing jackets with crossed sticks patches and their names embroidered at the breast. When we arrived, Ricky told me that I was needed for a street hockey game he and his friends were getting up nearby against a group of boys from another neighborhood. We walked to a playground where the members of the other team were shooting around as they waited for us. All of them were teenaged mesomorphs, big mothers with lots of biceps and acne, except for the kid I was assigned to cover, a chesty little guy for whom the score didn’t seem to matter. He was in it for agitation, poking at me with his stick, ragging and chipping, filling every interaction with accumulating tension. I had listened to Marv Albert call enough New York Rangers games on my transistor to know what “Gentleman” Jean Ratelle, the classy Rangers center, would do. Ratelle had recently been presented the Lady Byng Trophy, awarded annually to the most sportsmanlike player of the year, precisely because he could disregard invitations like this one. I tried to ignore and outplay the kid, but here these were negative integers that only emboldened him. Now he was telling me “I could beat your butt” and wanting to know whether I agreed. Suddenly I became conscious that the progress of these communications had been followed with interest by all the others. The game stopped and everybody looked at me. I felt as though I had been thrust alone into a circle of light; the others on my team seemed now to be standing far away from me. I had an idea of what was expected of me. I began to think my way out of it. Was I really supposed to show up for somebody else’s hockey game and start swinging? Why would I want to fight this kid? I wasn’t even sure how to punch, whether my thumb should be tucked inside my fingers when I made a fist or wrapped along the knuckles. Was I trembling? Could the kid tell? What made him so confident about challenging me? What had he detected? It would be humiliating to lose to someone smaller. The kid, fully energized, bouncing loose with certitude, his breath avid, inflamed, level with my chin, told me he would make me swallow my teeth unless I admitted that he was tougher. Well, wasn’t he? Choosing my words, I said, “I guess so if you say so.”

  A low, sickly groan traveled behind me and the day seemed to hang its head and fall away. Whooping with scorn, the kid turned to his teammates, who welcomed him back to their ranks, patting and congratulating him as though he’d scored his tenth goal of the day. The one thing worse than finding out that you are scared is seeing that others know it too. Ricky and his friends were looking at the ground, flicking at pebbles with their stick blades. The game started up again, but halfheartedly—the score was no longer of interest. On the walk home, the others on my team all avoided me, keeping ahead, talking with one another in low tones, except for Ricky, who kept shaking his head, repeating the fatal words every few blocks until I finally burst out, “But what was I supposed to do?” Ricky stared at me so flushed with outrage it took him a long moment to get control before finally, in a spasm of affliction, he cried, “But we were all there right behind you.” Up ahead there was a curse and somebody battered his hockey stick on the sidewalk. I had disgraced them.

  Walking down Livingston Street, I saw two flaxen-blond heads crawling out from under a front porch. It was a boy and a girl who lived on the block. Grime smeared their faces and clothes, and spiderwebs clung to their hair, filmy against the whiteness. I thought they had been playing Hide-and-Go-Seek except that we hadn’t played that in years, and, besides, nobody ever hid together, especially a boy and a girl. Then it occurred to me that where they had just come from was a place I knew nothing about.

  One afternoon, on my way down Orange Street, eleven-year-old I came upon a pair of garbage cans at the curb beside which someone had placed a stack of Penthouse magazines bound neatly together with twine. There must have been a couple of years’ worth. I circled around them. Yes, they were all Penthouses. I had no idea what a naked woman looked like and didn’t have any clue what I would see if I opened the magazines except that it was what boys were supposed to aspire to see. I checked the sidewalk and the windows of the house. Nobody was watching. I took the Penthouses. All heated with upcoming experience, I moved from block to block. As I walked, I began to feel a strange remove in which I was aware of myself as a person to whom things were on the verge of happening. All the way home I carried the bundle of magazines, until I was climbing the steps of our house, passing through the front door, greeting my mother, and then the spell was broken. I was carrying something I should not have, and I was extending my arms as I said, “Mom, look!” Almost in the same motion, as though we were partners in a relay and it was now her baton, I handed the magazines to her and she went through the house and out the door, holding the bundles away from her slightly the way a cat owner does while walking to the trash after being presented with a dead mouse. When she came back inside, the magazines had never existed.

  On a hot day Brad and I decided to go fishing out by the falls at the foot of the Lake Whitney reservoir beyond East Rock Park. We had rods and a gun-metal-blue tackle box filled with fresh- and saltwater lures and plugs between which I couldn’t tell the difference, as well as red and white plastic bobbers, snell hooks, purple fake worms, and my multi-bladed red Swiss Army knife recently given to me by Tony and Susi. Brad and I were full of the optimism that has yet to be complicated by expertise; neither of us knew a thing about fishing. When we got out to the falls, I put a fake worm onto a hook and began casting. In the clear water I could see my worm; it looked very purple and very alone. Alongside us appeared a group of several kids I didn’t know. Quickly they began to cast advice our way, one kid in particular. “Come over here, it’s better,” he said after a little while, motioning to the far side of the falls. When I followed him around, the kid began offering rapid counsel while the others drifted away. Soon I heard laughter and saw them riffling through the tackle box. Moments later they were all running off toward the park with my Swiss Army knife.

  Brad and I walked back to his house where we told his father what had happened. Brad’s dad was a Yale professor, and, while not a large man, he had a blunt mustache and, I now saw, a decisiveness to match. “Brad and Nicky, get in the car,” his father said. We drove out to the reservoir, turned onto the park road in the direction the kids had been taking when we’d last seen them, and began to retrace their route. The road circled the base of East Rock with wooded escarpment on both sides. Not many people walked around here; it would have been hard for anyone to miss the kids if they’d continued in this direction. Which they had. Every time we came upon someone, Brad’s father would stop the car and we’d describe the kids and they’d nod and point down the road. Brad and I were getting very excited. We knew we were on to them. The road wound around and finally emptied into a dead-end huddle of houses on Cedar Hill. Brad’s father kept up the procedure and soon enough we had a name and an address. Then we three were walking up the front steps of a weather-beaten white house and knocking on the door. With Brad’s father beside me I felt expansible in my righteousness. The kid who’d been advising us about fishing opened the door. “You want your knife,” he said to Brad’s father, as though he had been waiting for us. He disappeared from the door, returned a moment later, and wordlessly handed it back to me. The knife had been out of my hands for no more than an hour.

  The last time people had been looking for something they’d lost around East Rock, it was for a little girl, and they had been too late. The difference, as I saw it, was Brad’s father, how quickly he’d mastered the situation, how calmly he’d decided on the best course of action and proceeded. I’d always liked him; now I liked him more. I hoped he liked me, wanted him to.

  Another day Brad’s father got out a baseball and bat and took Brad and me into East Rock Park for some fielding work. He hit us grounders and we did our best to stop them. On
lawn littered with divots, stones, roots, bark, Johnson grass, and fallen branches I acquitted myself well enough that Brad’s father said, “Nicky, if you can make those plays here you can make them anywhere.” He did not say such kind words to Brad, never talked that way to Brad around me. Later I wondered if it bothered Brad how well I got along with his dad.

  Visiting my father in New York, at times we took the bus instead of the subway, and once, on our way up Madison Avenue, an older woman boarded and came walking down the aisle. Her hands were filled with shopping bags, so I stood up and offered her my seat. When I looked over at my father, his face was vibrating with rage. “You didn’t have to do that,” he hissed, and then he refused to speak to me for the rest of the ride.

  We were probably on the way from a visit to my grandmother’s. My grandmother was unfailingly pleased when Sally and I came over with our father, sitting everybody down and fussing over the three of us, feeding us carrot sticks and black olives and Jarlsberg cheese, artichoke hearts, and ginger ale or Sacramento tomato juice, and then, at dinner, looking out from her place at the head of the table to announce how “glad” she was “that the family is together.” My father would glare or make a noise in the back of his throat when she said that, and she’d refuse to notice, would steadfastly go on in jaunty tones, describing how “wonderful” it all was. He was the only person I knew who didn’t seem to think well of her. It was like encountering someone who hated the smell of a bakery.

  I don’t know when I realized that she had become my father’s primary source of income. Eventually, when he took me to Polk’s hobby shop to buy me a model Tiger tank or a Big Bertha rocket kit for my birthday, I understood that my grandmother was paying for them, just as I knew that the same must have been true about Bermuda and when he brought us to a Connecticut inn for a lake-side summer vacation. He also had a girlfriend named Lois along for that trip, and they spent a lot of time behind a closed door. Between ourselves, Sally and I referred to her as Lo-down Lo.

  Another time we borrowed his friend’s home in Rockville Centre, Long Island, while the friend was away. My father took us to a movie with lots of violence and killing in it and then slept most of the next day while Sally and I watched television. Had we been with my mother, I would have been jubilant at these activities. Here it concerned me that my father was doing the wrong thing, and I had the impulse to let him know about it, to tell him how to be with us, just as I did when the friend came home and we went out to dinner at a restaurant with him and his kids. The check came, and the friend picked it up. My father loudly insisted on contributing his share. I watched as he put five dollars on the table.

  What was going on with him? I’d wonder and then I’d try not to wonder. He’d become a paunchy, middle-aged white man in disheveled clothing—and very strange. All my mother ever said was “It’s important for you to have a relationship with your father.” So when he did odd things, I just tried to look away and ignore it all and pretend I’d seen nothing until I could go home. By then I was no longer talking with anyone in New Haven about my father.

  One day at school, I did take up the matter obliquely with my baseball friend T.J., telling him how much I hated going to New York. T.J. wore a plastic hair pick that rose out of his afro like a stick in the garden with a seed packet on top. He had a reputation for fearlessness and for being a good fighter—for “going off” on people. Now a look of anxiety crossed T.J.’s face. He said he’d been to New York himself. Rapidly nodding his head up and down and widening his eyes, he told me, “Nicky, it’s different down there. New York is different. They do not fuck around in New York and they will fuck you up.” That he was frightened too was such a relief to me I wanted to hug him for saying it.

  In 1974, before my sixth grade year when I was eleven, my mother brought me to Fenway Park in Boston to watch Dick Drago pitch for the Red Sox against young left-handed Andy Hassler and the California Angels. The Red Sox were thrashed 12–1 that day and earned it. The regular catcher Carlton Fisk was not in the lineup, replaced by Bob Montgomery. While speedy Angels such as outfielder Mickey Rivers went flickering around the bases like moths, Montgomery plodded so slowly that I was chastened for the Red Sox. We left the game early because we were expected at my grandparents’ in Cambridge for dinner, and I didn’t object. My grandfather was unwell and Hassler, a tall, rangy Texan, was dominating the game. He was that rare baseball commodity, a large and talented left-hander, who was expected to emerge as one of the league’s best pitchers. His performance that day must only have made people more certain that he would become a great star. Baseball has a long, 162-game season, and this was only one date on the schedule, but because it was the lone Red Sox game I’d been to, it achieved a significance. They were losers.

  At our new school, Brad and his friend Simon began to have it in for me. It began with nicknames, “Pricky Dawidick,” “Dicky Dickedoff,” “Jack Dawidoff.” Ridicule of me seemed to electrify them. Every day they worked up a new means of torment, for the way I dressed, for whatever I said in class, taking ravening pleasure when others, encouraged, joined in. If they discovered that a dog had pissed in the schoolyard, they rolled a tennis ball through the puddle, picked it up and threw it at me. Even when they weren’t around I felt them in league, out there plotting. During homeroom one day, the door opened and something was tossed inside. Simon’s leering face flashed by the closing door as whatever it was arced through the air, fell on the classroom floor, and the door snapped shut. The thing lay there like an unexploded shell. Everyone looked at it. I sank in my seat. The desk of a girl named Cindy was closest. Getting up, Cindy frowned as she walked over to the object and bent down. She was the last person in that classroom any prepubescent boy would have hoped for sympathy from; she seemed to hold it against us that she had grown large early and towered over everyone else. Disgust now covered the part of her face that wasn’t hidden behind a hood of bangs as she held up in her hand the most obscene and terrible object I had ever seen. It was underpants with no pants, only a crotch. Worse, the crotch was spread with a wide urine-yellow stain. Cindy announced, “This is yours, Nicky.” My name sounded degenerate to me as she said it. She walked over to hand the thing to me. I shrank away, but she pressed it on me. The yellow on the crotch was obviously Magic Marker. Across the waistband they had written my name in black ink. Everyone was staring at me. “No, it’s not mine,” I said. I got up, went to the trash can, and threw the jockstrap away.

  One morning at the breakfast table, I looked at my foggy glass half full of orange juice and thought, These are the times that people tell you you will look back on and laugh about one day, but I know I never will.

  It did not occur to me to seek revenge. Instead, I devoted a lot of time to trying to understand what I had done to anger Brad and Simon. It wasn’t simply that I was unaware of the time-honored male code—a boy doesn’t have to win, but he has to fight—it was that, more than ever, I believed I had to remain in full control or far worse would happen. Always, I saw enormous risks, the event of worse, future possibilities I couldn’t handle. This I could handle.

  On an afternoon when I was out biking with Foltz, my closest friend that year, I rode off the sidewalk into Edwards Street, and then behind me I heard a thud, the sound of something falling and a cry. A car had hit him. A few bad bruises were the extent of his injuries, and soon Foltz was all right. But where had that car come from? I’d looked both ways and had seen only a clear street. It was my fault. But how could I have known? The world felt ever more full of unpredictable sources of harm.

  I did not tell Sally about Brad, and I never knew until years later that during those months he and Simon were tormenting me every day, some girls in her class, one of them Brad’s sister, were giving my sister a very hard time. I remember breakfast then at our round table, both of us silent as we ate, neither aware of what the other was going through.

  At home at night, I reread my favorite books, the pages turned so many different times, they
slowly disintegrated, the bindings collapsing, losing their grip, releasing the yellowed, crumbling paper. One of those books was My Turn at Bat, Ted Williams’s autobiography, a small volume that seemed somehow to have absorbed the sensations of my own life; more than any other ballplayer’s story, this one felt like mine. I liked to hear about Williams’s big home runs, his feuds with sportswriters, and how, after the game, he would head off by himself, find a movie theater and watch two or three Westerns alone, and then go have milk shakes—two or three of those too. But what I liked best was the way the book had seemed to grow with me, remaining so responsive to my developing preoccupations that it all combined indissolubly with my existence. That Williams had endured a messy and troubled boyhood in San Diego was to me a great consolation. Growing up, he lived in a shabby bungalow filled with busted furniture, and rarely saw either his father or his mother; the two eventually divorced. His brother was always in trouble with the law. At my age, twelve, Williams was finding refuge from loneliness and shame about his family in baseball games at the local North Park playground where he was always the first to arrive and the last to leave. He tried to share other kids’ dads, drove himself furiously, cried a lot. All of it later made him both moral and flawed, a frantically motivated self-made man who decribed himself as “all bottled-up,” both exuberant and enraged, sulky, high-strung, and persecuted—and honest about all of it, frank even about his problems getting to know girls, his sense that other people disliked him, and his envy of Red Sox teammate Bobby Doerr’s closeness to his father. He said he hated the Yankees, and also hated New York, thought the city was an ugly and inhuman place. I loved that voice of his, how intimate and masculine and older it sounded, a heroic man talking to me in a way that was affectionate and tough, had high standards, but was there for me in my struggle to meet them. Williams’s story was moving in its sadness, a person living such a magnificent life who had to try so hard to enjoy it. I felt grateful to him and nostalgic for his times as a player, for times I had never lived in. Maybe I kept reading about Williams because I couldn’t do what I really wanted, which was to watch him play, and then be with him, have him tell me more stories, tell me that it would be all right in the end for me, that he was there for me and why don’t we clear out of this little room, Nicky Boy, and go catch a couple of cowboy movies together. Three milk shakes after.