The Crowd Sounds Happy

by Nicholas Dawidoff

  In March of 1978, now fifteen, I was one of three freshmen to travel to Florida with the high school baseball team for a week of spring training at a youth baseball complex in St. Petersburg. All the way down from New Haven to the airport in New York, and then boarding the airplane, I was silent, in the thrall of the adventure. Once we were seated, our two coaches on the trip began talking baseball, and when one of them discovered that I knew such things as the starting lineup for the 1934 Detroit Tigers, the third baseman in the Cubs’ famed Tinker-to-Evers-to-Chance infield, I was soon reciting them, so enjoying the opportunity to retail names I had only read like Marv Owen, Billy Rogell, Charlie Gehringer, and Hank Greenberg of the Tigers, and Harry Steinfeldt at that Chicago hot corner, it took me a while to notice that some of the older kids had different ideas about what a week in Florida might mean—had the uneasy expressions of people anticipating life spent in the close company of a music box with no off switch.

  We slept as a team in a dormitory on bunk beds, awakening to eat in a dining hall and then play baseball all day together, at first hitting off batting tees and then building up to live competitions against other schools later in the week. I always liked being around the ballplayers, hearing the crude, manly hilarity of kids like Chris Cogguillo, a jovial pitcher who reveled in being called Pisswackman Cockswallow, and might himself conduct inspections to make sure you were wearing a protective cup in your athletic supporter by calling out, “What’s the capital of Thailand?” and bestowing the geography lesson with a knee to the groin as he bellowed “Bangkok!” That week there was a trip to a major league spring training game where it seemed only half real to encounter the Mets of New York and the Cardinals of St. Louis in a quaint little downtown ballpark ringed by palm trees. After the first few innings, familiar faces like Lou Brock and Tim Foli gave way to players with high numerals on their backs indicating names we couldn’t recognize. The best part was the chance to listen to the talk of the high school juniors and seniors who would comprise the varsity’s starting lineup. They had nicknames like Milo and Deals and Woogie and a funny, squeaky, nasal way of talking to one another, and some of them talked to me that way too.

  I came home tanned and thrilled, and when, on the first day back in the boys’ locker room, I spotted one of the seniors from the trip, I bounced up to him, greeting him by his nickname, which was Gordo.

  “Get away from me,” he said. I thought I’d misheard or that he was teasing me. We’d all had such a good time together. “Hey, Gordo!” I said again, this time adopting the nasal intonation. He was tall with broad swimmer’s shoulders, feathered blond hair, and the pouting good looks of a daytime television actor.

  “I said get away from me. Get this kid away from me.” He’d raised his voice loud enough that some of the other seniors now were turning from their stalls to look at what was agitating him. That I was an insect to him was not quite registering with me. In my mind there had still existed the idea that these boys who would start for the school varsity were special, like big leaguers, and that a coefficient of their baseball skill was a personal nobility. It seemed that I should attempt to revise his thinking, but I had no idea what I’d done, was too shocked to say anything. Later that afternoon, I ran into my friend Randy, whose older brother, Mark, had been on the trip. Randy couldn’t resist telling me that among the seniors I had become known as WBP. So I too had a nickname. What did it mean? Randy wouldn’t say. Finally, I convinced him. “After you grounded into double plays twice in a row off a batting tee, they decided you were the worst baseball player they’d ever seen. You know, worst baseball player, WBP.”

  Besides the wounding shock of it, a lot of other things went through my mind at such a moment. I wanted to find a way to get them to retract it, even as I wondered, did everyone think that? Then I tried to imagine what else was going to come around a blind corner and hit me below the knees. I remembered the part of My Turn at Bat where, after the young and gawky Ted Williams spends his first spring training in Florida getting a lot of riding from the older Red Sox veterans, he is demoted to the minor leagues by the team and, as he leaves, he sends the veterans some parting words: “Tell them I’ll be back.” Finally, out at practice and turning it all over for the fiftieth time, I just thought, “Am not.” Because there, on a field, you could have some say in the matter, and after that I kept what they said in mind, using it.

  On baseball fields my small size could be compensated for with enthusiasm and with effort. In New Haven, our seasons began under low, chilly skies the color of well-used flatware, with those grungy piles of old snow still ringing our outfields, and then ended in August on glass-strewn city infields burned to dust by the sun. My hands and feet seemed to crave infields. I’d play anywhere and I did, turning up all over New Haven with my spikes dangling from one bicycle handlebar, my glove looped over the other. The day back in seventh grade when I led my junior high school team to victory, got into the back seat of our car, wriggled out of one uniform and into another as my mother drove me across town, and then had several more hits in a Pony League game, felt like the latest climax of my life. My virtues then as a player were agility, cleverness, and such a boundless, unquenchable appetite that I became lost in the play. My swing was precious to me. To preserve its delicate mechanics, I now refused to play tennis until my baseball season was over or to play Wiffle Ball ever. After I saw a photograph of Pete Rose sliding, his low-flying body parallel to the ground with his hands extending before him toward the base like struts feeling for a carrier deck, I too slid headfirst on forearms whose scars I wore with pride like cuff links. Standing at shortstop, between pitches I’d tend the soil, smoothing it with the toe of my spike, sifting out stones and small rocks and tossing them away beyond the foul line. There was a logic to this groundskeeping; I’d read about the infield-pebble-inspired wayward hops that had turned both the 1924 and the 1960 World Series, but the truth is that there I was proprietary—this was my domain.

  My summer league coaches were invariably the fathers of one or more of my teammates. Somehow, those teammates always played whatever position they liked, batted high in the order, even if they had failed to make their school squads, a casual nepotism that galled me. At fifteen, when I joined a new Babe Ruth League team that had three coaches, each with a son on the roster, our lineup also included several close friends of those sons, and early in the season I rarely played. One day, we were winning by a substantial margin and they sent me in to pitch. Heading toward the mound I felt insulted, resentful, so out of my head with accumulated grievance that when I began pitching I couldn’t overcome it. I threw every pitch as hard as I could, growing more and more distressed out there until I was having a tantrum on the mound. I wanted to stop it, but I couldn’t pull myself together. The catcher would return the ball to me, I’d hurry through my windup and heave it back at him. I’d never behaved that way, had never seen anyone else behave that way either. The field got very quiet. All you could hear was the sound of me disgracing myself, walking batter after batter. Eventually they removed me from the game. “Don’t worry,” one of our coaches consoled me. “Thirteen-year-olds don’t play as much. You’ll play more when you’re fifteen.”

  “But I am fifteen,” I wailed, and when he looked startled, I felt my eyes brim. Sitting next to me on the dugout bench was Reggie, my former Pony League teammate. “I’m not crying am I, Reg?” I asked him.

  “Maybe a little, man,” he told me.

  “Reg, those are not crying tears. Those are tears of rage.”

  “Okay, Nicky, man.”

  The next week I was put into the lineup and I batted over .400. “As soon as I taught him to hit, Nicky’s been great,” one of our coaches told the team as he awarded me the game ball after we won a playoff round.

  The shower area in the boys’ school locker room was shaped like a capital E with a space between the stem and the unattached middle stroke, so that with several nozzles lining all five pale-yellow-tile interior wall sections, w
herever we stood we were exposed to one another as we washed. If you were, like me, the only boy in the high school baseball program not yet to have reached puberty, this fact was conspicuous—visible to all.

  I played third base for the junior varsity that ninth grade spring, and every day during practice, as a team we did our running together, circling all of the school’s upper athletic fields at a canter quick enough to keep in condition, but not so brisk as to preclude conversation. It was during these transverses that I acquired another new nickname. A leading golfer on the professional tour in those days was Hubert “Hubie” Green, and one day a teammate was inspired to meld freshman and fairway so that from then on, to all but the softest-hearted members of the group, I became Pubie Green. As soon as the taboo of mouthing such an explicit word was overcome, it was a name that became irresistible to them. They never tired of saying it, lengthening the lubricious vowel, interlacing the Pubies with the occasional “Kojak”—after the television detective played by baldheaded Telly Savalas—so that very quickly I wanted to die. You heard about men who too soon lost their youth. Had there ever been someone who never came of age at all?

  That team had two third basemen, the other a sophomore whose arms were hung with muscles the size of tree fruits. Alongside him at the position, taking practice grounders, I looked like his kid brother, but he already had a twin brother, our center fielder. For all his strength, in actual application, the sophomore’s play lacked art, and halfway through the season he missed a game. In his place I made a couple of diving catches, and after that I became the starting third baseman.

  That there was something vulnerable about me occurred not just to my baseball teammates, but to several others in the school who began to take recreational pleasure in “beating on Nicky.” In the hallways and walkways, my lank shoulders invited them to wind up and deliver. Blue bruises flowered at the peaks of my arms and I became timid, a flincher. Somebody would cock his fist and feint in my direction, I’d duck, and laughter ensued. Childhood has very specific differentiations. Each age and each school grade have great significances all their own, and the days stretch out to hold so much experience. Maybe that’s why the humiliations and reversals then seem to go on and on. In ninth and tenth grades, I felt perpetually singed; futile, foolish, cut-down, stuck with myself. Often I wanted to escape that self, but you can’t escape what is still so unformed that it’s constantly being reinvented. My response to being picked on was simply to take it. I never retaliated and I never snitched. Instead, I tried not to do the things they mocked in others, which is to say I sought to look and smell and speak as they did, to be like them right down to the shampoo they used in the shower—tubes of antifreeze-green Prell.

  But to be like them was also hazardous. There was the day at school I was hurrying up the steep second-to-third floor steps of Baldwin Hall for class, and ahead of me was a kid who was also hurrying until he slipped and fell hard right on his face. I couldn’t believe it. I’d never seen anyone fall on those stairs. What a goober! I started laughing. Three steps later, I slipped and fell. I remember the way the surface of those stairs looked when your face was pressed up against them, the paint worn away in the center from so many footsteps, how blunt and cold and colorless the metal was at the ridge, all the pairs of ankles rushing past my nose. It was an indelible experience and seemed kind of metaphorical. You could fall down at any time. And maybe, I thought, there was some connection: act like a jerk, you’ll fall down.

  On Sunday evenings, back from the panic of New York and preparing to wade through the tar pit of another week of school, I began to be sure that, although they in the locker room didn’t know my secret, they were responding to it. Thinking of myself as the hero of my own life story became increasingly difficult. I believed I had failed as a conformist because I was warped and blemished by my nature.

  The parent who was raising me was the most independent-minded person I knew. My mother’s enthusiastic opinions were expressed with such ferocious candor that after she’d proclaimed “Ye gods! You’re not falling for that crap, are you, Nicky?” it was difficult to think how anyone could admire the Rolling Stones or Cheryl Tiegs or Woody Allen. She had vehement views on everything from Franklin Roosevelt—human perfection—to Jane Fonda—vapidity incarnate—to my erratic use of the proper pronoun—“It’s ‘my friend and I!’ You sound so ignorant, Nicky”—to my comportment, which needed to be more chivalrous. I began to think of her as notoriously on time. I could be anywhere when the corrective voice migrated through my mind: “For crying out loud, son, that’s no way to be,” and I’d hasten to do the right thing because, for the most part, out of her hearing, I agreed with everything she said. Maybe I agreed too much. In her presence, something new in me found those staunch convictions intolerable, and at fifteen I’d reached an adolescent age where I wanted to argue with her, to take issue, find fault.

  The dinner table was the Gettysburg field where week after week we wounded each other. As the clock neared six, cheddar-yellow plastic place mats would come forward from their barracks on the metal shelf in the kitchen, knives, forks, and spoons fell from their munitions drawer into position, glasses left the cabinet and took up watch along the ridge, and, at the whiff of what she was cooking, animus churned through me and I attacked. I’d lower my fork, catch her eyes watching me, searching for a reaction, and sometimes it took only the slightest grimace to tell her that once again she’d failed, that I still did not like her cooking. The dishes she served were assembled from cans and frozen packets by someone who’d been awake and working since five in the morning. Usually they were nourishing meals and they tasted, it seemed to me, the way anyone might expect a meal to taste that did not rely on fresh ingredients, or any seasoning beyond salt and pepper, or any study of the method. But this line of reasoning infuriated her. “Why do you always criticize me?” she wanted to know. “It’s only food. Why can’t you just be satisfied?”

  Now I was incensed, had been waiting to be. “For dinner you pour Chunky Soup on top of egg noodles and you want me to call you Julia Child?”

  As always, she began to shout: “Other mothers with husbands never cook anything for their children. They give them TV dinners. I cook for you every goddamn night after a long, hard day and this is all the thanks I get. You’re ungrateful, Nicky. You’ve always been ungrateful.”

  “Why are you so upset if food doesn’t matter to you?”

  “Oh, Nicky.” The voice was withering. “You’re the expert around here. What do you think?”

  Every night there was another meal, another opportunity to express my discontent—and to explore it. It was all an imponderable conundrum, only nominally about the flavor of frozen fish sticks and canned ravioli. She did not care about food. I did care. She cared that I cared. I came home the day I’d learned a relevant new phrase and over the dinner she’d cooked, which, as usual, offended me before I tasted it, I suggested that maybe our differences about the meals might simply boil down to my “delicate palate.” Hearing myself say something like this to her embarrassed me, and a smirk crossed my face. She gave me a hard look and said, “When did you get to be so pretentious.” Then she told me, “Susi always said you were a little actor.”

  We never got anywhere with each other. Out in the world, they were all kicking me. Why could she not give in, indulge me, soften the blows? Why was her reflexive response to any new proposal to refuse? Why could she never accept criticism of any kind? Why could I not be right sometimes? Why, on the other hand, could I not, as she said, “get all this out of your system,” accept her as she was, understand how full her plate was, and ease off on the demands? Why did I persist in trying to change her? She would never change her ways, not even for me, and I would never stop trying to make her.

  It made me frantic that someone so self-assured in her views as my mother could be so easily injured when I stated mine. Once, in a sudden whiplash of frustration, I turned from her, snatched the pencil cup off my desk and hurled it
at my bed. The haloed slash it left in the wallpaper above the headboard was forever there to remind me of the way our voices could lacerate the walls. Another night I threw the telephone receiver and now the dining room too was scarred. I hated what I was becoming even as I continued to become it. Then all of it would empty out of me, and I’d curl up on my bed and fall asleep fully clothed.

  The few times she did give in, she gave in to me so completely it was too much. “I’m such a lousy mother and I wanted so badly to do well by you kids,” she’d confess, and, mortified with confusion and shame, I’d rush to reassure her. I was slowly understanding that she was fighting not only for her point of view, but for our sense of her as our one good parent. “You are a good mother,” I’d say. And I meant it, more than anything.

  My mother had always been singular in her habits and attitudes, a complex mesh of austerity and exuberance, but since Susi’s death her great capacity for joy had been depleted, replaced by mourning. Her muscles still pulsed with readiness for all the tasks that an ironing board, a sewing machine, a dustpan, a roll book, a syllabus, and an unbalanced checkbook could offer. She still completed the reading of every book she began, and when I asked her why she stayed with a wide tome she’d announced twelve pages in was “godawful,” she explained that “my sense of duty and order won’t permit me to stop.” As I watched her grimly scrubbing dishes in the sink, slamming the sopping cutlery into the drying rack, she seemed to have retreated under a carapace of anxiety—a need more pressing than ever to change the sheets the moment the day broke, get the thank-you notes written the instant the present was unwrapped. I had long both relied on and chafed against that gift for getting everything done, but now as she grieved, to see her deep ache exposed tipped the balance. Suddenly her deft economizing, her selfless asceticism, the doing without that had sent me to Florida, all of it felt like a reprimand. Because worrying was her weakness, now I couldn’t stand the worrying, was tired of walking on eggshells around her so that she wouldn’t explode. I wanted to detonate her, to make her admit that she was harsh and rigid and inflexible, that there were different ways to do things. I wanted a witness, an advocate, a man with an impartial perspective on the evidence who could help her see herself. If she wouldn’t adjust for me, I imagined, she would for him. I just wanted our lives to be easier, calmer, for every day not to cost so much. It was exhausting.