Not far north of 12 is Marine, where I lived for four years, and where an old friend I haven’t seen for seven years got into a big, ridiculous argument with me that I now think was actually caused by my hitting him across the shins with a softball bat hours before during a game. I walloped a high pop-up and tossed the bat aside in disgust and nailed the catcher, my friend, who hours later accused me of something—insensitivity, perhaps—and we quarreled at the end of my driveway until he stalked away into the night. So long as I lived in St. Paul, there was a chance we might bump into each other, and smile, and our friendship click back on, but when the river is crossed the break becomes permanent, along with all the other dumb things I did here. I felt like stopping for a moment. The bridge was coming toward us fast. Then the Chevy thrust forward, and, flaps down, we rose up and over the river, landing in Wisconsin, heading east.
That evening, the Minnesota Twins won their division championship in the American League, down in Texas, against the Rangers, 5-3. By the time Herb Carneal came on the air with the play-by-play, we were in Oshkosh, and WCCO (The Good Neighbor to the Great Northwest) was long gone from our dial. I read about the Twins’ big win the next morning in the Milwaukee paper, which was not so excited about the event, and neither was my wife, for whom baseball is a book in a foreign language, interesting but not informative. So I didn’t suggest that it might be fun to stop in Chicago and look for a Minneapolis paper.
Tuesday, we poked around Oshkosh with friend Thatcher, who showed us the truck factory, and said Farvel and drove to Sandusky, Ohio. Night reached us near Gary, Indiana, and as we sped east on the turnpike we heard part of a White Sox broadcast as it faded out and part of another one, perhaps the Indians, fading in. Long pauses in the broadcast booth, a quiet crowd in the background, ruminating: you could tell that their team was out of the running. That night, the Twins lost to Texas. They lost again Wednesday and went north to Kansas City and lost three there. We reached Pittsburgh on Wednesday (Three Rivers Stadium was lit up for a Pirates doubleheader, and I told my wife it was probably her last chance to see a game this year, and she agreed that it probably was) and New York on Friday evening. The moving van arrived Saturday. Sunday, October 4, the last day of the season, as the Twins got shellacked 10-1 in K.C., we looked around at our apartment that resembled a landfill, and took a long walk. A warm evening, and the streets full of people, a river of yellow taxis flowing uptown on Eighth Avenue, and a sky almost full of skyscrapers—graceful old brick and stone ones—lit up. She was so happy. We walked and walked. “What are you thinking?” she asked. “Do you miss Minnesota?”
“Sure, and I miss Pall Malls, too,” I said. But I was thinking about my team. You stick with a team for years, like a not-so-great marriage in which you’re still loyal and hopeful, and then, the day you break up, she loses fifty pounds and gets a haircut and becomes an overnight success. I wished I were in Minneapolis to see all the phlegmatic Swedes go wild.
The Twins arrived in Minnesota in the spring of 1961 from Washington, D.C., where they had been the hapless Senators, but that didn’t matter to us. They were ours, and we were proud to have them—Camilo Pascual and his big tabletop curve, Pistol Pete Ramos, Bob Allison, and the mighty Harmon Killebrew, America’s nicest power hitter. It was my first year in college, the same year my friend was killed. In 1965, the Twins made it to the World Series and lost to the Dodgers, and then, for years, the Series looked as remote as the America’s Cup, Minnesota not being a major center of yachting, but even those thin years—when the team lost, and attendance fell, and the careful owner, seeing the gate receipts dwindle, reduced his payroll costs by ridding the team of star players like Rod Carew and Lyman Bostock—seem like a bright, green paradise compared with the gloom that fell on the Twins when they moved from the old ballpark in Bloomington to a domed stadium downtown for the 1982 season. In Minnesota, a Northern state, where one is forced indoors for much of four months of the year, the idea of spending a summer afternoon in an immense basement is deeply depressing; it was a fundamental heresy, just as if the Lutheran Church were to incorporate Mammon into the Godhead and make the Trinity a Quartet. I tried to like the dome for two years and gave up. It was, is, and ever will be a godforsaken, unnatural, and unhappy place to play the game of baseball, and right there my old team and I parted company.
The American League playoff began Wednesday night in Minnesota, against Detroit. Gaetti hit two home runs, and Reardon struck out the side in the ninth with two men on base. The Twins won, 8-5, and again Thursday night, 6-3, Blyleven going seven and a third innings. I didn’t watch either game—too busy, and our TV didn’t work.
“I’m not really a Twins fan,” I explained to people in New York who congratulated me on the team’s doing so well, and I tried to explain about the dome, but it sounded like sour grapes. Everywhere I wrote a check and offered my Minnesota driver’s license for an ID, people said something about the Twins, such as “Hey, how about those Twins?” The man at the bank where I went to open a checking account treated me as if I were applying for welfare, but when he saw my former address he smiled and said I must be pretty excited. I wasn’t, but I was grateful. The man at the newsstand, whose sister is married to a man from Excelsior, Minnesota, greeted me like an old pal. “Hey, your guys won!” he said, and they did. On Columbus Day, they beat Detroit to get into the Series.
I started running into former Minnesotans, who recognized me from my maroon Golden Gophers sweatshirt. They couldn’t believe it, they said—the Twins in the Series! I waited in the 23rd Street subway station at Sixth Avenue with a man from St. Paul, who asked me twice if I thought they could win the Series. Not if they would but if it was a possibility for them, as if a mysterious spore we had ingested in our mothers’ tuna hotdish made us constitutionally unable to be fans of a winning team. Those four times the Vikings lost the football championship took a heavy toll on him, he said, and he didn’t want to be fooled again.
Friends called from Minnesota, including a woman I went to college with who had never been to a Twins game in her life. She said that Minneapolis was feverish, full of noise and banners—on the tallest building in town one night, lights spelled out “WIN TWINS”—and strangers in the street talking baseball. “You should come back for the Series,” she said. “I’ve never seen people behaving like this. God, I’ve never been like this. I’m excited, and I don’t even like baseball.” A friend called to offer Series tickets, and called back the next night to cancel that—the friend of his who knew someone whose brother worked for the Twins was not returning phone calls. “The town is nuts. You wouldn’t believe it. It’s great. You just want to go out and walk around and grin at people. You better come back and see it. You’ll never forgive yourself if you miss it.”
I still hadn’t watched a single game. Our TV set had worked in St. Paul, but in Manhattan it was receiving triple and quadruple shadow images, each human figure a chorus line, against a soup of colors—it looked like video art. We were busy unpacking boxes anyway, and trying to fit the furniture from a big old Minnesota house into a skinny three-bedroom apartment, and in the evening, when most of the games were played, we felt like getting out of our mess and walking the streets and seeing the city that had lured us away from the Midwest.
The first game of the Series was on Saturday night. When I woke up Saturday morning, I found myself thinking about the game and how much fun it would be to be in Minnesota, soaking up all that jubilation and floating good will and good-humored anxiety, and go to Russell’s house to watch the game, to sit jammed together in a den with ten or twelve people who all felt exactly as I did, so that if I said, “I really believe that they can win,” they would all know the exact gravity of the sentence. We could mention a former player or manager, and instantly all of us remember that man vividly. We could recall games, we could reminisce about notable seasons, and not much would need to be said to call them to mind. When all of you have lived in a place forever, you’re able to touch each
other with a few slight words.
My wife had friends to go visit that night, so I sat down alone to watch, in a living room where we had piled quite a few things to be sorted out later, including a big brown jug I’m embarrassed to be still carting around—a trophy that went to the winner of an annual church softball game between single men and married men, a series that ended twenty-some years ago. The church was a pretty strict fundamentalist outfit, whose younger members tended to drift away into larger, more moderate churches, and by the early sixties so many players on both sides had been lost to heterodoxy that the summer Bible-camp classic came to an end. The scores of all the games are painted on the jug. I forget why it wound up with me; I left the church as soon as I could, sooner than most of the others.
When I turned on the TV, the picture was so blurry I didn’t recognize the place as the Metrodome in Minneapolis, and the crowd waving hankies didn’t look familiar, either, but the voice introducing the players belonged to the old ballpark announcer, Bob Casey, and that stamped the whole thing as authentic and genuine. I started to get good and tense, and by “rockets’ red glare, the bombs bursting in air” I was leaning forward. I said “Go!” as the home team and a crowd of shadows ran out of their numerous dugouts onto the yellowish-blue-green field, and I leaned forward and girded up my innards to will them to victory. Win, team. We really need this one. For all the Lutheran back yards with the rosebushes wrapped and the flower beds covered for winter, and for all the romantic gents in the taverns and all the ladies buying bedspreads in Dayton’s, for all the little grain-elevator towns on the prairie, for the shut-ins, for all the kids in the Twins caps, and for me. I didn’t come to New York to be pitied by a man at the bank because I’m from Minnesota. I don’t want to stand in the station commiserating with fellow losers. Win. When they ask, “Where you from?” and I say where, I want them to smile and say, “Hey. All right. Minnesota.”
(THE TWINS WON THE SERIES IN SEVEN GAMES. A YEAR LATER, I STILL COULDN’T BRING MYSELF TO GET A NEW YORK DRIVER’S LICENSES
BASKETBALL
I GREW UP FAST as a kid and got tall before the others, a long sad boy poking up like a milkweed out of the range of normal children, and when adults met me, they often looked up and asked, “Do you play basketball?” I did, but not very well, because I was too tall: my family lived out in the country, twelve miles from the high school, and when I tried to hitchhike home in the winter twilight after basketball practice, bundled up in a parka I looked too huge and ominous and nobody would stop and pick me up. So I quit basketball. Except for a few hundred afternoons sliding around on gravel driveways and a couple thousand games of Horse, my career stopped for thirty years until a morning in late March when I took a cab up to a gym on East 54th Street to tape a little piece for CBS. According to the script, I’d stand on the court—at the side of the free-throw circle, where I used to have a good jump shot—and talk (holding a ball) for about two minutes and a half about the fun of the game, and then turn and take my shot. CBS wanted to use that piece just before one of the NCAA tournament games they were televising. I didn’t ask why. I’m forty-five and I no longer worry about the motives of people who invite me to do something I want to do. I just wanted to make the shot. The truth is, the shot was my idea, and Doug the producer was cool to it at first and preferred to tape the piece in a studio with me behind a desk. He was polite and never said that he thought I’d look funny with a basketball in my hand, he only said, “You’re a writer, you’ll feel more comfortable at a desk,” but it meant the same thing, so I held out for the gym. I wore black tuxedo pants, a white tux shirt, and old sneakers. The CBS crew was set up at mid-court when I got there at 10:00: Doug, two cameramen, a video engineer, and an audio man who was trying to eliminate a hum in the works, which gave me the chance to practice the shot about thirty times until I was drilling it, bang, bang, bang, and sank six in a row and was all set. It took an hour to shoot the piece, four takes in which I stood and talked about the fun of basketball and then turned and jumped and shot, and I made three of four shots, no lie, which is pretty good work with the camera running and a producer watching. Between takes I even made one backward, over the shoulder, without looking, swish, from twenty feet. No lie either. And then I went home and forgot about the whole thing until the middle of April, when the piece appeared before the Kansas-Oklahoma game. I didn’t see it but a lot of other people did and mentioned to me that they’d seen it and every one asked the same question: Did you really make that shot? My Uncle Don asked, “How many shots did you take to get your swisher?” He assumed the shot had been spliced in, and so did everyone else, television being the sleaze hole that it is. A man stopped me on the street and said, “That was neat how they did that shot, it really looked like it was you.” He was young, early thirties, and seemed to think a twenty-foot jumper is beyond a man my age and requires technical assistance. His remark stung, and so did six more the same day and eight or ten the next week. Despite what had appeared to be me, their friend, turning and shooting and making the shot, everyone was dubious, except the poet Roland Flint, who wrote, “I was impressed with the luck and ease of your one-hander.” My Aunt Eleanor, a scrappy player herself years ago with an excellent two-handed set shot, wrote, “I saw the opening of the NCAA basketball finals. It was a nice shot but did you make the first one?” Not one person said to me what they would’ve said if they’d actually seen the shot: “Nice shot.” And it was a nice shot. It felt so good after reciting my piece and trying to smile and project warmth into the lens and not squint under the lights—it felt good to turn away, see the rim, jump, reach high with the ball, push it off with the fingertips, and know the instant it left, while it was in the air, that it was good.
WOODLAWN
DULL, MORBID THOUGHTS ARE ON MY MIND these days: the usual ones—disease, decrepitude, and the big “D” down in the basement. Monday morning, I walked my wife to her job near Union Square, kissed her goodbye, and headed up Park Avenue toward my office. It was a bright cold day. I was okay until I looked up at 24th and saw, in stone, a man’s head in the mouth of a lion. At 27th, I ducked into the New York Life building and down a subway passage marked “UP AND DOWN TOWN” as a herd of passengers came pouring through two revolving doors revolving so steadily that the doors looked like a machine that stamps out office workers—whump whump whump. That and the herd getting off the uptown local with me at Grand Central made me want to duck out, and, for no reason except that I hadn’t done this sort of thing for much too long, I ducked across the platform and got on the No. 4 Woodlawn-Jerome Ave. express just to see where it goes. Owing to the specialized nature of my work, my company doesn’t miss me if I arrive a few hours late. Nobody there knows what I do.
The express stopped at 59th and at 86th, then put its head down and raced up to 125th, and around 160th it came up out of the ground. Yankee Stadium slipped by—a slice of green field and the famous overhang—and a couple miles of Bronx, and at the last stop I got out and looked around.
It was magnificent, exactly how the end of the line should look: wide open, like the edge of town, where the buildings end and the woods and pasture begin—the Manhattan-Wisconsin border. Except the pasture turned out to be the Mosholu Golf Course, where some bulky guys on a nearby green were practicing their short putts, and the woods was a cemetery.
I crossed Jerome and walked in the gate. Woodlawn Cemetery. A man sat and eyed me from a guardhouse, and I tried to look purposeful: marched straight by and down one fork as if heading for my own crypt. It’s a fabulous cemetery. The roads wind among ornamental groves and solemn granite temples to the dead—twelve-and fifteen-foot-high mausoleums spaced like tourist cabins in the trees and interspersed with stone catafalques and pedestals and obelisks the size of ICBMs. One temple contained Kresges, another some Woolworths guarded by a pair of sphinxes, and, farther on, a stone archangel with trumpet in hand gazed down upon eight members of the Martens family whom he had summoned, presumably to a rich reward. One
temple boasted glass windows with actual draperies inside (bleached by years of sunlight); others had stained glass. A weeping female figure strewed flowers. A bronze maiden clutched at the door to a tomb. Figures sagged in grief, heads bowed at the immensity of the loss, and a girl with long hair sat pensively in front of the Oelsners’ tomb as if waiting for them to come out and go to the movies.
The tasteless excess and gargantuan self-worship and ostentation of grief were making me silly. When I came around a bend and saw a line of black limousines parked on a crossroad and a crowd of people at the far end, I decided to go up and attend the funeral. I straightened my tie and shot my cuffs. Then I heard a squawk, and a kid with a walkie-talkie in his jacket pocket stepped out from behind the last car. He said, “Pardon me, sir. I’m sorry, but I can’t let you come up this way. Thanks. Thanks a lot.”
I asked what was going on up the hill.
“Making a movie,” he said.
“Really? What’s the name of it?”
“Sanctuary. It’s a feature picture.”
So I took the next road over, walked up the hill and cut around behind some temples, and ambled toward the movie-making—toward a bunch of men in blue-and-green parkas, their backs to me, watching a funeral. A mahogany-brown metal coffin decked with dozens of scarlet roses sat on a bier draped with green, a silver-haired Catholic priest at the head of it with a teen-age acolyte in a white smock, and forty-some mourners, all in black, stood in four rows to one side, a short woman in black to the other. She wore a long black veil. Uphill from the priest, in front of a ten-foot stone cross, sat an angel, hand over its heart as if reciting the Pledge of Allegiance. Nearby, a woman perched on a stepladder, holding a mike boom, and behind the veiled woman were a camera, on a dolly resting on a short steel-tube track, and two sheets of white fabric on steel frames, like two upright trampolines.
We Are Still Married Page 20