There, now. That, by God, is really good.
Roger and Me
I came up with the idea for this essay in the mid-1980s, but I did not write it. It had to be published on a specific day that was years away.
I am chronically disorganized. I keep no calendar. My memory is terrible, and in this case it didn’t kick in until the last moment. I wound up writing this in one hour, on deadline.
October 1, 1995
DURING THE AUTUMN of 1961, I was in Sal’s every two weeks or so. Haircuts were short and required maintenance. They all cost the same, a buck seventy-five. They all were the same. In the South Bronx in 1961, every man and boy walked the streets looking like Howdy Doody.
In Sal’s, I was not permitted to speak. I was nine years old, and the floor belonged to men my father’s age, men who arrived in topcoats and fedoras. As they got their hair cut, they smoked cigars with the bands still on. Sal’s smelled of Hav-a-Tampas and witch hazel and sour grapes.
All they talked about in that fall of 1961 was the disgraceful thing that was happening day after day a mile or two down the road, in Yankee Stadium. A kid with a sneer on his lip and fear in his eyes was closing in on a record that was thirty-four years old. Damn record was older than he was.
It was the Babe’s record. A nobody, chasing Babe Ruth. Like he coulda carried the Babe’s jockstrap. Like the pitchers today wasn’t all cream puffs. Like there was anyone in the Bigs who could throw like Feller anymore.
Every last one of these men, it seemed, had watched the Babe hit his sixtieth home run. They all had been at the Stadium to see it, thirty-four years before.
Sal was Italian. He talked like Chico Marx. His Jewish customers talked like Jackie Mason. His Irish customers talked like leprechauns. These men shared nothing in their lives, but on this issue of Roger Maris’s inadequacy, they were in agreement.
Thirty-four years. A record lasts that long, it’s supposed to last forever. It’s not supposed to be broken by some putz. By some donkey. By some goombah.
To me, thirty-four years seemed like another epoch, so remote it was unreal. I knew it only from pictures in old baseball books. Uniforms fit like pajamas. Gloves were small and lumpy, as though they were made of modeling clay. The players had bad teeth and stubble.
In the fall of 1961, I was a Roger Maris fan, but in Sal’s Barber Shop I kept my mouth shut.
I understand now that it was not Maris that these men hated, but the thirty-four years. Time was crowding them. You look up, and pretty soon thirty-four years are gone, and the Babe is dead, and what does that make you, going to the same barbershop for the same haircut? With every home run Roger Maris hit, the men in the barbershop suffered a loss. They were grieving for themselves.
On the day that Maris pulled a 2-1 fastball into the right-field bleachers, I was in my back yard, listening to a staticky transistor radio, not quite sure what had happened until Red Barber repeated it twice. I remember running in circles, drunk on the moment, until I collapsed.
The next day was my tenth birthday. I would get a birthday party, and for my party I would get a haircut. For once, I couldn’t wait.
These days, when I take my son to the hairstylist, no one talks sports. No one talks at all. The place is too big and too impersonal. Not like in my day.
My son is eleven. He humors me, but the truth is he doesn’t care much for baseball. He’s into Nintendo.
“Into” Nintendo. Listen to me.
I still root for the Yankees, though it’s not the same anymore. Players are mercenaries who hop from club to club. You find yourself rooting for a uniform now, not a team. I’ll still watch the games, sometimes. Sometimes, I’ll be smoking a cigar.
Roger Maris is dead now. When I hear someone say he was a bum, a one-year wonder, it gets me pretty burned. I saw the man play. In person. At the Stadium. He played with heart. His arm was a howitzer.
When was the last time you saw a right fielder throw two men out at home in the same game?
When was the last time you saw someone hit sixty-one home runs in a season?
I’ll tell you when, kid.
Thirty-four years ago, today.
The Armpit of America
I am a smartass. The malady was diagnosed at an early age and appears to be incurable. And so, when a quick Web search discovered that dozens of different cities and towns have been at times contemptuously described as “the Armpit of America,” I knew instantly that this was a problem that needed to be rectified. So I set out to find, and officially designate, the One True Armpit.
What happened between my reporting the story and writing the story was something no smartass could anticipate or preempt: the 11th of September, 2001. The country was united in sorrow, and suddenly, the snotty story I intended to write became unthinkable.
I told my editor that I thought we should kill it, but he refused to let the smartass off the hook. Go back to the Armpit, he ordered, and find its heart.
December 2, 2001
MY LITTLE PUDDLE jumper begins its descent into Elko, a charmless city of 20,000 in the northern Nevada desert. Eighteen seats, all filled. This is not because Elko is a hot tourist attraction; it is because almost everyone else onboard belongs to a mariachi band. These guys have identical shiny blue suits and shiny blue shirts and shiny blue ties and shiny blue-black hair, like Rex Morgan in the comics, and they seem embarrassed to have accepted a gig in a place as tacky as Elko.
Compared with my final destination, Elko is Florence during the Italian Renaissance.
When I tell the Elko rental car agent where I am headed, she laughs. Elkonians, who proudly sponsor a yearly civic event called the Man-Mule Race, consider their neighbor seventy miles west to be an absolute clodhoppy riot.
“Don’t sneeze,” snorts the rental car woman, “or you’ll miss it.”
Yeah, I know. I’d been to Battle Mountain five weeks before, to see if it was dreadful enough to be anointed, officially, “the Armpit of America.” I was exorbitantly convinced.
That first visit was in late August. This second one is in early October. In the interim, Everything Changed. With the nation united in mourning and at war, with the Stars and Stripes aflutter in places large and small, slick and hicky, the idea of poking fun at any one part of us became a great deal less funny. The Zeitgeist had shifted. Snide was out.
I had to go back, to rethink things.
The road to Battle Mountain is flatter than any cliché—even pancakes have a certain doughy topology. On this route, there is nothing. No curves. No trees. It is desert, but it is lacking any desert-type beauty. No cacti. No tumbleweeds. None of those spooky cow skulls. The only flora consists of nondescript scrub that resembles acre upon acre of toilet brushes buried to the hilt.
You know you have arrived at Battle Mountain because the town has marked its identity on a nearby hill in enormous letters fashioned from whitewashed rock.
I have returned to this place to find in it not America’s armpit, but America’s heart. I am here to mine the good in it, to tell the world that Battle Mountain doesn’t stink. That is my new challenge.
I hang a right off the highway at the base of the hill, which proudly proclaims, in giant letters:
BM
Man. This is not going to be easy.
Take a small town, remove any trace of history, character, or charm. Allow nothing with any redeeming qualities within city limits—this includes food, motel beds, service personnel. Then place this pathetic assemblage of ghastly buildings and nasty people on a freeway in the midst of a harsh, uninviting wilderness, far enough from the nearest city to be inconvenient, but not so far for it to develop a character of its own. You now have created Battle Mountain, Nevada.
The letter was signed by Seattle resident Peter Hartikka, one of 220 people who mailed in their nominations for the nation’s foulest place. I had invited these letters in my humor column after discovering on the Web a dismayingly indiscriminate use of the term “Armpit of America.” Hun
dreds of people were describing dozens of locations they happened to dislike. It seemed an unacceptable anarchy of scorn.
The nominations were, literally, all over the map. There were predictable urban cesspools (East St. Louis, Illinois; Elizabeth, New Jersey). There were places of idiotic purpose (Branson, Missouri; Las Vegas, Nevada). There were places of legendary lack of class (Buffalo, New York; Fargo, North Dakota).
The winnowing proved easy. Several nominees bit the dust because they are proximate to someplace immeasurably better. Gary, Indiana, and Camden, New Jersey, two of the nation’s least appealing locales, won reprieves because of their nearness to Chicago and Philadelphia. The armpit must smother. It can permit no escape.
Likewise, many promising candidates succumbed to personal knowledge or basic research. Terre Haute, Indiana, a bland and sullen city popular with the KKK, offers too many cultural opportunities to make the cut. Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, may be awful, but next-door neighbor Scranton is awfuller, and Scranton has a certain likable pugnacity that comes from knowing you are famously crummy and not giving two hoots. The otherwise leprous Bridgeport, Connecticut, was spared because it produced my wife. (The winnowing was not entirely without bias.)
Butte, Montana, may have surrendered its soul and much of its natural beauty to rapacious mining interests, and its citizenry may be congenitally inhospitable, and the city may resemble a suppurating chancre sore and smell like the sulfurous Stygian River of Woe, but… actually, there is no but about Butte. Research confirmed its foulness and it might well have become the Armpit had it not been blown out by the competition.
There is a maxim in journalism that some stories are just too good to check out. What that means is that the juiciest of tips, when subjected to research, tend to desiccate and crumble. I feared this with Battle Mountain, but after two days of research, I was ablubber in juice.
The town began as a lie. Prospector George Tannihill christened it in 1866 as a mining district, saying he chose the name to commemorate the fierce battle he and twenty-three settlers led by a Captain Pierson had heroically won against marauding Indians there in 1857. Nevada historians have since poked a few holes in this story: There appears never to have been a Captain Pierson, or twenty-three settlers, or any attacking Indians, or a battle, or pioneer heroism, or, for that matter, a mountain. (There does appear to have been a year 1857.)
According to David Toll’s Complete Nevada Traveler, the Battle Mountain area has two famous alumni. The first is W. J. Forbes, the Mencken of the Southwest. His was a brilliant if quixotic journalistic march across California, Nevada, and Utah, culminating in the creation of a Battle Mountain newspaper named Measure for Measure in 1873. Unfortunately, it was designed to appeal to people who liked to read and knew how to think. When it failed, Forbes spiraled into depression and drink. As summarized half a century later by Carson City journalist Sam Davis: “A friend found [Forbes] stiff and cold across his shabby bed. He had fought a fight against all odds all his life, was one of the brightest geniuses the coast had ever seen, but he… lived in communities where his mental brightness was more envied than appreciated.”
Battle Mountain, where genius comes to die.
But no Battle Mountaineer past or present reached the level of fame attained by Civil War General James H. Ledlie, who retired to the area after the war, and even has a railroad siding named after him. Ledlie’s name actually found its way onto the lips of a president of the United States, and in a startling superlative. Ulysses S. Grant himself called General Ledlie “the greatest coward of the Civil War.”
A notorious gambler and drooling drunk, Ledlie had been in command of a division of Union soldiers in 1864 when a group of Pennsylvania coal miners boldly dug a tunnel underneath Confederate lines protecting Petersburg, Virginia, packed it with explosives, and blew it up. Ledlie’s troops were to have stormed the confused enemy, but the general was soused in his bunker and refused to come out. His men mounted the attack in leaderless disarray and were slaughtered like rabbits.
Battle Mountain was built as a mining town, and still survives as one, but just barely. Gold prices have lately been low, and the local mines have been cutting back. The population has recently sunk to just under 4,000. Without money from mining, there isn’t much to recommend it. Even God discourages visitors: In the summer, Battle Mountain temperatures hit 100 by day and plummet to 45 at night. Winters typically see a month or more at subzero.
It is valuable to research a town through published material; it is far more valuable to talk to people who know it well. I found that the surest way to get a spirited defense of a place was by phoning a reporter who works there. Journalists may be notorious for their negativity, but when the Washington Post calls to say it is thinking of identifying as the Armpit of America the city or town in which your career is unspooling, negativity often yields nicely to sputtering indignation. At least, that was the way it usually worked.
I telephoned Lorrie Baumann, editor of the Battle Mountain Bugle, and told her my idea.
“The Armpit of America?” she said.
“That’s sort of the, um, concept.”
Silence.
“Sounds about right,” she said.
But it’s a such a big country, I said, with so many crappy places. How could I be sure this was the ’pit?
Lorrie’s response was as dry as a desert full of toilet brushes.
“I think a quick drive around downtown will answer any questions that might be lingering in your mind.”
I ordered up a plane ticket.
Still, I had one more call. The tough one. I couldn’t very well arrive unannounced. Sharlene “Shar” Peterson is the executive director of the Battle Mountain Chamber of Commerce. She told me a little about the town, and then I told her what I was proposing to do.
She laughed, then didn’t say much of anything for a bit.
The Battle Mountain Chamber of Commerce was thinking.
Shar?
“Well, I mean, who wants to be called an armpit? But, you know…”
I sensed where she was going. I wanted to kiss her.
“. . . This could be an asset. We’re just a dying, ugly little mining town without a real identity. It could be an opportunity.”
Is this a great country, or what?
“Listen,” Shar said, a trace of concern creeping into her voice, “I have to tell you we now have a Super 8 Motel and a McDonald’s. I hope that doesn’t knock us out of the running.”
AND SO I went. It was my first trip, the one where cynicism was still allowed.
Signs are designed to convey information, and the signage of Battle Mountain speaks with eloquence. I’m not just talking about the big, thundering messages, like the enormous BM. Humbler signs have their stories to tell, too.
Downtown Battle Mountain boasts three principal business establishments, each with its own marquee, each a triumph of misinformation. The most elaborate sign adorns the Owl Club; it is a huge neon triptych featuring a smiling hoot owl proudly serving up a tray of piping hot food, a cow dourly contemplating the words choice steaks, and a big, blocky, authoritative FAMILY DINING.
The Owl Club serves no food. It’s a bar. Its restaurant is closed.
Two doors down is the Nevada Hotel, where several placards inside, yellowed with age and indifference, caution against “obcene” language. Outside, the Nevada Hotel’s marquee is 20 feet high and transforms nightly into the defiantly gap-toothed NEVADA HO EL.
It is not a hotel. It’s mostly a bar and restaurant. There are rooms, but they have no TVs and no phones and they don’t rent them out.
But my favorite sign is the one down the block, at Donna’s Diner. If there exists in America a more eloquent testament to the Jughead shrug, a better paean to intellectual lassitude and inertia, I demand to see it. At some point in the past, evidently, Donna’s Diner ordered itself up a fancy illuminated sign. And the sign came, and the letters came, and the time came to put the letters on the sign, and wuh-o
h. Not enough room.
Now, there are several ways to deal with such a situation. You can order yourself up a bigger sign, or you can buy some smaller letters, or you can do what Donna’s Diner did, which is this: DONNA’ DINER.
According to The Complete Nevada Traveler, Donna’s Diner is “a local treasure.” I headed there dubiously, because in my first half-hour in town I had not observed much in the way of riches. I’d seen age, but no quaintness. I’d seen buildings, but no architecture. There was a coin-operated community car wash, but no community park. There was a store that sells only fireworks, but none that sells only clothing. There was a brothel, but no ice-cream parlor. There were at least seven saloons, but no movie theater.
(There were entertainment opportunities. A flyer advertised an event at the upcoming county fair, where a cow is led over a grid of numbered squares, and you bet on the numbers, and you win if the cow poops on your number.)
Sensing there must be more to Battle Mountain—a hidden sophistication behind its bucktoothed rustic front—I bellied up to an oilcloth-covered table at Donna’s and signaled for service. I picked up a humor book that sits on every table and opened to a list of “Things That Will Not Impress City Women.” One was “Leaving the hanky from your nosebleed stuffed up there when you go dancing.”
I told owner Jerry Williams I was trying to get a feel for the soul of the place, and I wondered if he could be a sort of ambassador for Battle Mountain and tell me what there was to do.
“Do?”
“Right.”
“In Battle Mountain?”
The Fiddler in the Subway Page 8