Old Neighborhood (15 page)

“There’s a fella walks along Jerome Avenue under the El and sings ‘O Solo Mio’ all day.
That’s
crazy. Stevie, you remember Frankie Frisch with the Giant games?”

“He’s batting two hundred, but he
l-o-v-e-s
to play ball.”

“See? There’s nothing wrong with you, Stevie.”

We reminisced until dark about people from the neighborhood and sports events. We met every day from then on, to play cards and talk about the old days.

I discovered that on weekend mornings a different group of ballplayers showed up on the basketball court in St. James Park. These were “the older guys,” which meant they were all at least twenty years younger than I. They were working men in their mid-twenties with a few college-age people as well. Their style of play was slower and closer to basketball as I had played it, people would sometimes pass off if they did not have a shot. I slipped into a game with them. I was beginning to get my touch back and in one streak my team stayed on the court for five games without losing. When the games ended, a stocky redheaded man in his late twenties named Jack Walsh said:

“You new around here?”

“I used to live around here.”

“Well, maybe we’ll see you tomorrow.”

In schoolyard terms that was an outright invitation.

“Thanks. I’ll see you.”

I heard—or I hoped I heard someone say—“Good ballplayer,” as they were leaving.

My life in the neighborhood became increasingly ritualized. I had my physical conditioning, my reading, my card games and conversations with Sam, my lunches at the candy store. Chris Anton was unraveling. He stood in the doorway watching people going into the coffee shop, the pizza place or the donut store, tallying lost revenue. “Another nail in my coffin,” he would say. Chris had entered the business with his cousin, who then abandoned him to work in a luncheonette in Brooklyn, and Chris was left with long hours and small profits.

“They come in here for newspapers with their Big Mac containers in their hands. It’s insulting.”

Most of his business seemed to be with the sale of newspapers and magazines. The pizza store sold ices and ice cream cones, McDonald’s served shakes, and they all competed for the local food business. I think I was the only person who ever ate in Chris’ store. Everything was made fresh to order, he prepared nothing in advance because the poor man had no expectation that anyone would ever show up. So if I ordered a tuna sandwich, he would open a can of tuna. I ordered a hamburger and he went across the street and bought a hamburger patty from the butcher shop.

He told me about his family life, his daughter lived in Detroit, where she was married to an auto worker, his wife was a dressmaker in their apartment in Washington Heights. “Are you out of work, Steve?” he asked. “In a manner of speaking,” I said to him. He patted me on the arm reassuringly.

Chris longed to visit the place where he had grown up, a village in Crete, and now he was in this place, where he had no heritage, and no sense of what this store he owned should be. He had little stock, he was relying on the sandwich trade to turn matters around for him, and there was a limit to how much I could eat.

“Chris, excuse me for meddling,” I finally said to him. “But this store—it lacks detail.”

“Detail?”

“Things. Items. Nickel-and-dime items, quarter items, dollar items. Things in cases and hanging from cards. Pen-light batteries, rubber bands, ballpoint pens. Things that people don’t know they need until they see them.”

“You think?”

“It’s too spare, Chris. And you should do something to get kids in here.”

“They don’t come. They buy pizza. They buy ices. They don’t come to me.”

“Get more comic books, Chris. And put them in the front. And bubble-gum cards. And loose candy. I’m a big believer in loose candy for a candy store. It goes with the tradition. And it smells good.”

“In the old days this worked?”

“In the old days this worked.”

“Loose candy? Where do I get it?”

“There has to be a distributor.”

I went to the public phone in the back and made a call.

“Mr. Robbins’ office,” my secretary answered.

“Hello, Miss Crawford.”

“Mr. Robbins! Hello!”

“Miss Crawford, I want you to drop everything. Find out where you get the following items from a candy distributor: spearmint leaves, nonpareils, jujubes, licorice pipes, chocolate kisses, candy buttons, bubble-gum cards, banana bats, and wax lips.

“Mr. Robbins?”

“Do you have that?”

“Yes.”

“I’ll call you in an hour.”

I phoned and she gave me the names of two distributors in the city. Between them they had all of the items except the wax lips.

“When can we expect you back, Mr. Robbins?”

“No wax lips,” I said, preoccupied. “It was a wonderful item. You could stick it over your lips and then eat it when it stopped being funny to you.”

The next time I played ball with the older guys, Sam appeared at the fence to watch. When we were between games, he called out:

“It’s big time today. You got yourself an All-City from Clinton.”

“Really?” Jack Walsh said to me.

“Just honorable mention,” I said.

“Still—”

“He scored thirty-four points once in a big game against Taft.”

Bless Sam for remembering. It was 36 points, but I did not correct him. When we started to play again the change was subtle, but noticeable. I was getting the ball more often for shots. And I finally made the drifting-off-the-court push shot down the right side.

When we finished playing, Jack Walsh invited me to join them for a beer. We went to Shannon’s Bar on Jerome Avenue, a long bar with pinball machines and a dart board to the side, and a color television set on a ledge over the bar. We talked basketball, I told them that when I first started to play nobody took jump shots, which a couple of them found hard to believe, and I recalled Red Holzman as a player, taking long, arching two-handed set shots. “Did you see the Original Celtics?” one of the younger ballplayers asked, missing my time by twenty-five years.

Sam tendered the invitation awkwardly, I sensed he was concerned that he would be rejected, or that I might have considered it inappropriate. He asked if I would join him and his wife for dinner at their home, and I said I would be pleased to come. On a Saturday night, I brought flowers for them, and entered Sam and Hinda Goodstein’s apartment. Hinda was a lively little woman in her late sixties. The apartment, located near the reservoir, had summer slipcovers on the furniture and the aroma of mothballs in the air. They were like gnomes, they fluttered around, nervous about my being there. I was touched by how important a social occasion this was for them. Hinda had been a bookkeeper for an insurance office in the Bronx before she retired, and she had a memory for sports marginalia that equaled her husband’s. She was the only sixty-nine-year-old woman I ever met who fondly remembered Native Dancer.

After a roast beef dinner, which we ate in the dining area, we sat in the living room for tea and cookies, the most expensive sold in the local bakery, purchased especially for their guest. I learned that they lived on Social Security and interest on the savings which they had accumulated. They went to neighborhood movies together, watched sports programs on television, played cards with friends. I admired what they had, a life together. They had had good racing luck. I wondered if I would ever reach old age with Beverly.

The time was after ten and I could see they were getting tired, but they did not want to end the evening. Sam brought out the family album, which contained pictures of their daughter Claire, who was a few years younger than I, scenes of Claire and her husband in New Rochelle with the grandchildren, and pictures of a younger Sam and Hinda in the neighborhood.

“What do you think of this?” Sam asked.

He showed me a picture taken in front of the candy store of Sam and a boy of seventeen.

“I’m in your book?”

“Sure. You were part of the candy store. Don’t you remember?”

“Yes, Sam. I remember. I didn’t know anyone else did.”

I was becoming vain abut my decreasing weight, so I avoided beer and whiskey at Shannon’s Bar, ordering Tabs and eating sandwiches at the bar for dinner to build up my bar bill. The bartender, a burly man named O’Brien, was nonjudgmental, and I could sit at my leisure watching night ball games on television, chatting with some of the ballplayers whom I now knew. Jack Walsh was an insurance salesman, Jimmy Gomelli, at six feet three, the best ballplayer, was an auto mechanic, Jose Rudio and Mike Mazowski, two burly young men, worked for the Sanitation Department, Bobby Kelleher was a senior at St. John’s University, Pete Hughes was a fireman. “What do you do, Steve?” Jack had asked me and I said, “Not much of anything right now.” As an insurance man, he preferred more information. “What
was
your field?” he said, and I told him, “Advertising.” That seemed to settle my account. I was scoring in the games and I had seen Bob Cousy play, which seemed to be more significant.

“Welcome to ‘Wide World of Sports,’” Jack said to me as we were leaving the basketball court on a Saturday morning. “How would you like to be our right fielder today?”

“Your right fielder?”

“We’ve got a bar league. For softball.”

“I don’t know about that. I haven’t played softball for years.”

“Come on, Clinton. We can’t play without a right fielder,” and he put his arm around me and led toward Jerome Avenue. We stopped at Shannon’s and Jack said to O’Brien, “Give the man a shirt,” and the bartender located a jersey with “Shannon’s Bar” across the front and the number 16 on the back.

“Jack, even when I played, this was not my best sport.”

“Just don’t throw the bat, and you’ll be fine.”

We walked toward Harris Field a few blocks away. Our team consisted of the people I knew from the basketball court and some familiar faces from the bar. At the ball field we linked up with a team from Leary’s Tavern, some wives and girlfriends came to watch, a few children were there, beer and soda were set out in plastic ice containers. I did some stretching exercises, trotted around, borrowed a glove and glided to the outfield, Joe D. In the warm-up, a fly ball came to me, I had it all the way. “I got it!” I called and settled under it. The ball went over my head like a passing bird. I had no sense of the ball coming off the bat. Fly balls that seemed to be coming right to me carried beyond me. I was lunging all over the place. I must have looked like a Marcel Marceau parody of a ballplayer. Everyone was given a few practice swings, I failed to make contact several times, my best try was a foul ball off third base. Eventually I caught a couple of routine fly balls in practice, diving. Fortunately the ball game was incidental to the good-natured bench jockeying that went on between the two teams. I played a line drive into a triple, fielded a base hit and threw to the wrong base, and caught two pop flies, very unsteadily.

Leary’s was ahead 10–7 in the eighth inning. I was the only man on our team not to reach base—0 for 4 on two taps to the pitcher, a popout to the catcher and a strikeout. In the bottom of the eighth with a man on third and one out, I managed to hit a slow grounder to the shortstop, was thrown out easily, but the run scored. My teammates cheered me with satiric “Way to hit, Steves” and Jack said to me, “An official RBI, slugger.” We headed toward the bar afterward, talking about the game—Leary’s had won 11–8. When we reached the bar I began to take my shirt off to return it.

“What’s this?” Jack said. “You’re on the team.”

“You’re kidding.”

“You got an RBI and you didn’t throw the bat.”

“That’s some record.”

“Last week our right fielder drank too much beer and fell asleep out there.”

“How many more games do you have?”

“Two.”

“I’ll try to practice.”

“Don’t do that,” he said. “You’ll screw up the system.”

I drove back to Long Island wearing my Shannon’s Bar shirt. I loved it. I wore it all the time.

In the last two games for Shannon’s I actually got two base hits and made four putouts. Before we started the last game, Jimmy’s wife, Cathy, a charming girl in her twenties, made us line up for a team photo. We posed early-baseball style with mock athletic gestures.

“Welcome to the major leagues, Steve,” she said.

In the ball game, after I made a catch to end an inning, Jack came over to me.

“The season’s ending too early for you, man. You’re beginning to thrive.”

“Like Yogi Berra when he played right field.”

“You’re doing fine.”

“Well, I love my shirt. Where does this shirt go in the off season?”

“It’s yours. Keep it.”

In the top of the seventh, with Shannon’s Bar leading the Emerald Saloon by the score of 5–4, the opposition’s big hitter was struck out by Jack Walsh with two men on and one out to a chorus of “Yahoos” from our side. I shouted “Yahoo” also, loudly to the sky—not for the strikeout, but for my shirt, for standing in right field on a Saturday afternoon, for the simple fact of being alive and being there. “Yahoo!” I was still yelling after all the others had stopped.

B
Y THE END OF
August I was working full time in the candy store. My egg creams were made with the proper proportions of syrup, milk and seltzer, and my malteds were outstanding. Eat your heart out, McDonald’s. The idea of a malted was to use cold, almost frozen, milk and enough malt so that it practically closes up your throat. McDonald’s only made shakes, which are not malteds, as anyone who has tasted both can testify.

I realized that my advertising career was over. Tolchin could do as he pleased with the agency. Partners left agencies all the time, they retired, they died, they formed other agencies. The company would go on without me. There were young bloods in the firm, people wanting to be me—well, they could be me.

I would not be walking away from the agency with much money—we never ran that much ahead, but my family would be all right. I had put trust funds away for the girls’ educations, we had the house, and its value had increased, and of course there was another business in the family. We were not bankrupt.