Dead Languages (14 page)

Zorn Scores
36
Points on
18
–
18
from Field;

Redwood’s Highly Touted Center a Washout;

Baxtrom Snatches
22
Rebounds;

1200
in Attendance

The story continued—with summary, then analysis, then quotation, then poetic outpour—for twenty-seven triple-spaced pages, but Mother quit halfway through the third paragraph and broke into laughter, which sounded eerie so close to midnight.

I was standing over her as she read. I stepped back into the lamplight and asked, “What’s so funny?”

“Well, for one, honey, the clichés,” Mother said. “Every sentence is a tissue of sportswriting platitudes.”

I’d thought sportswriting was a wonderful convention and the best you could do was follow its formulae. I made a mental note to exploit the convention next time I wrote a sports story. I sat in a chair across the table from her and asked, “What else?”

“Well, the immodesty is not very becoming. Will your by-line appear on this article?”

“Yes.”

“Won’t people object to such self-publicizing?”

“No. Everybody already knows how good I am.”

This last remark struck her—this last remark struck me—as a little too proud. She handed back the article, saying the rest of it seemed fine. She put Bruin in her basket and I was a good boy: I didn’t kick her in the rib cage. Mother turned off the lamp and walked with me down the dark hallway, carrying the rough draft of a book she was writing called
Every Generation Must Win for Itself the Right to Be Free: Civil Liberties for Young People.
It was Mother’s hope that “some of the readers of this book will be the lawyers and judges and legislators who will help make the Bill of Rights stronger for the next generation.” Nicky was just pulling into the carport. At the end of the hallway the stairs to my bedroom began and a white door gave onto the bedroom. Father was snoring. Beth was reading, oh, I don’t know,
The Tibetan Book of the Dead.
Mother whispered: “Sometimes when people ask me if all you do is play basketball I want to tell them, ‘At least he’s devoted to
something,
at least he has an activity which he loves and at which he excels,’ but other times I wish you were obsessed with something a little more permanent, that you had a devotion which was a little more dignified.”

I whispered: “Yes, I know.”

“Sometimes I just want to tell those people: ‘Leave me alone. Leave him alone. He’s like a dancer on that damn court. That’s where he’s king,’ but what I usually tell them, what I really feel, and I guess what I’m trying to tell you now is that I wish you’d dedicate yourself with the same passion to a slightly more refined endeavor.”

“Yes, I know,” I whispered again, turning and trotting off to sleep.

THE SLIGHTLY
more refined endeavor I decided to dedicate myself to was trumpet. This didn’t meet with Mother’s approval, either, for not only was music, as she’d said before, one of the performing and hence one of the lesser arts, but the trumpet wasn’t even a stringed instrument. Furthermore, most of the band members were black. Although Mother was doing all she could to desegregate the school and loved the way I mingled so well with minority students, she believed each race finally had, as she also said, a discrete realm, had something it did better than any other race did. Band music, even more than basketball, was
theirs.

I proved to be worse as trumpeter than I’d been as back-bench Christmas choir boy. I was always ready to slave away at transcendent sound and spent long spring nights alone in my room, sitting before sheet music, blowing my golden horn, but the mouthpiece would yield nothing, the keys would collapse, the spit valve would spit back at me, and I remained eleventh chair in a ten-chair trumpet section. At the one concert I was allowed to participate in—a flu epidemic had taken the first four chairs—I got so excited I played right through a seven-measure rest. The conductor, a tall, extremely beautiful black woman who wore short skirts and drove a pink Corvette, told me where to put my instrument.

I informed Mother I was quitting the band—not a dignified enough discipline to devote my time to—but I continued to associate almost exclusively with black boys, especially after Nicky’s withdrawal. I liked their addiction to addictions, their disruption of ordinary syntax, their desire to seize idiom and make it speak for itself. I would hear them use a certain expression, then six months later hear the boys I walked home with use the same phrase as tentative white slang. The boys I walked home with hated my nigger friends, they hated me, and I never knew why. Father said they hated me because I was a Jew. Mother said it was because I let them know I thought I was better than they were. Was that woman never wrong?

As I walked home with these boys, one of them would slip my wallet out of my pocket and at the end of the block he’d say, “Oh, hey, Jerry, isn’t that your wallet back there?” I’d have to go back and pick it up while they’d keep walking. Or they’d discuss in depth Jack’s thirteenth birthday party, which all of them had quite obviously attended and thoroughly enjoyed, but to which I hadn’t been invited. Occasionally we’d play tag on the way home and I, of course, was always nominated to be It first. They’d try to lure me into running in front of cars, but I knew their tricks and was much faster than any of them, although whomever I tagged would turn around and chase only after me, so I’d have to run all the way home, patting my pocket to make sure they hadn’t taken my wallet again.

Other times they’d play what was known as the silence game, talking among themselves, refusing to address one word to me or answer a single question during the entire walk to or from school. On Halloween, they made a habit of hurling eggs and flaming pumpkins at our front door. I wanted to believe Mother and Father when they assured me our house was so heavily pelted because it was across the street from the high school, but I knew the Halloween ghouls were my little friends who didn’t like the fact that I both played basketball and quoted Steinbeck. Once, I received an anonymous letter which, mock-homosexual, complimented me on how smooth and brown and strong my legs were; wouldn’t I like to meet in the boys’ bathroom on Saturday?

They liked to do that sort of thing. They liked to turn the communication process into low farce. One of their principal entertainments was to gather at someone’s house and make witty telephone calls to unsuspecting parties. One Friday night they asked me to join them. I didn’t want to. I wanted to stay home and play Scrabble with Beth. I made various excuses, apologies, requests for a rain check, but they insisted, and I feared reprisal if I didn’t participate in their pranks, so I went.

They were all sitting in flame red chairs in the garage of a boy named Bill. They all had names such as Jack or Bill, Jim, Art, Steve, Mark, Ron, Lee, Hank. Sometimes I think they selected me as their scapegoat because my first name had more than one syllable. The chairs were arranged in a neat circle, and the telephone sat in the center of the circle like some immense insect they were trying to tame. They were all drinking cans of Coors and smoking Camels. I visualized Beth and Mother sitting in the den, eating popcorn, drinking pink lemonade, creating word combinations, and I yearned to be with them, but Jack handed me a beer, Art placed a cigarette in my mouth, Jim pulled up a chair for me, and I had to stay. I didn’t like the taste of beer and I was incapable of either lighting a match or inhaling smoke, so I put down the aluminum can and the cigarette and ate M&M’s, which were consumed in great quantity by the gang so that Bill’s parents—who couldn’t have cared less or known more—would smell sweet chocolate rather than bitter malt or black tobacco.

These abstentions, of course, did little to endear me to the denizens of Bill’s garage, but I sat back in my flame red chair and watched them dial. They’d request that a large pizza be delivered to the house across the street, then half an hour later rush to the garage window and laugh at the next-door neighbor’s rebuff of the poor pizza man. They’d ask beautiful little girls: if your Uncle Jack was on the roof, would you help your Uncle Jack off? They’d tell lonely old women: I’m from the Electric Light Company—would you please look outside and tell me if your street lamp is on? It is? Well, would you please turn it off? You’re wasting electricity.

This was a droll enough way to spend a Friday evening and I was starting to enjoy a little the blind dialing, the passing of the phone, the random cruelty of the calls, but then it was my turn. The telephone was placed in my lap and I said, “No, I just came to watch. I told Bill that when he called. I’m not calling.”

I stood up to depart, but they blocked the door.

“Oh, yes you are,” Jack said.

“Come on, Jerry, be a sport,” Art said.

“Yeah, Jer, don’t puss-out on us,” Jim said.

“You can’t watch and then not call,” Hank said.

Perhaps Hank was right. It was unfair to watch the wickedness without doing the deed—in that way, not unlike a night I spent recently on Santa Monica Boulevard watching naked girls dance on dimly lit stages, but running in terror when approached by a coolly attractive and surprisingly inexpensive prostitute—so I returned to my chair, held the phone in my hands, and asked, “Who do I call? What do I say?”

“You call who you want,” Steve said. “And you say what you want, but it’s got to be nasty.”

I tried to think of something nasty. At the time, there was a television program in San Francisco called “Dialing for Dollars,” whose master of ceremonies interrupted a very old movie every five minutes to call one of our lucky viewers out there and ask (for progressively larger amounts of money until some spinster finally knew the answer): who won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress in
1956
? Who is the only person to have been nominated five times for Best Actor and never won? Where was Gig Young born, and who was his leading lady in
Last Train to New Orleans
? What movie are we showing tonight? Is anyone, is there a single blessed soul, out there watching and, if so, why? To call someone, tell him it was Pat McCormick from “Dialing for Dollars,” ask a perfectly simple question, and—no matter what our lucky viewer said—say I was sorry but that was not the answer we were looking for: wouldn’t this be nasty enough? I thought it would, dialing.

“Yullo,” an old man answered after a number of rings and burped. Immediately, I saw him: recumbent, in gray socks and white whiskers, on a prickly couch; overhead, dirty red drapes; at his feet, trustworthy schnauzer and trusted Scotch.

I was thirteen years old, my voice was very high and hesitant—obviously not that of the exceedingly smooth Pat McCormick—but all the boys were looking at me and listening. I said, “Good evening, sir, this is P-P-Pat McCormick on ‘Dialing for Dollars,’ Channel
2
Weekend Movie. We’ve just stopped at the climactic scene of
Snowbirds in the Sahara
to call and ask you a question worth twelve h-h-hundred dollars. That’s right, twelve h-h-hundred d-d-dollars. We’re looking for the name of a movie that’s currently very popular and stars K-K-Katherine Ross, Paul Newman, and Robert Redford. It’s called
Butch Cassidy and the Blank Blank.
We’re looking for the blank blank, sir. Can you hazard a guess? It’s worth twelve h-h-hundred d-d-dollars. The clock is ticking….”

I couldn’t tell whether the boys were laughing at the brilliance of my hoax or the obvious schism between who I claimed to be and who I was.

The old man said: “I don’t know the name of any goddamn
Birch Calliope and the Blank Blank,
but I damn well know you ain’t Pat McCormick. I know the sound of that man’s voice and you ain’t it. You’re a kid who’s got a speech problem, isn’t that right, kid? Well, whadja callin’ here for?”

“N-n-not even a w-w-wild guess, sir? Ten seconds and counting….”

“Whadja doin’, kid? Your speech counselor toldja to make telephone calls, impersonatin’ public personalities or somethin’? Whadja doin’? You ain’t ‘Dialin’ for Dollars’ any more than I’m the ‘Flyin’ Nun.’ But I can tell ya somethin’, kid, you’ve got a mouthful of marbles. I never heard a kid talk so bad as that before. Callin’ here like that, you otter be ashamed.”