There's not that much of my childhood I remember fondly. Truth be told, there's not that much of it I remember at all. Repressing the painful is a real skill; what the economist Tyler Cowen would call my "production function." But there was this brief moment, when I was ten or so, just as our family moved to an expansive four-bedroom apartment on 72nd Street, that I can't -- or won't -- let go of. There are a few triggers that bring it back to mind, a moment when my brothers and I felt very much at home, happy sort of, and with optimism and hope about the future. These were odd and fleeting feelings for us, well for me anyway, and I think for them too. But they were real, if fleeting, and just maybe, worth remembering.
It was mid-spring, before the air in the city became thick with the summer sun and humidity. This is New York, so there are no azaleas or magnolias or dogwoods blooming in the spring. But somehow, there was a still a smell of freshness among all the concrete. Our parents bought an apartment on a dead-end block on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, just east of York Avenue. The building sat above the FDR Drive, high enough to escape the traffic noise below, and overlooking the East River, Roosevelt Island, and Queens beyond. Who knew there were cul-de-sacs in Manhattan.
The block was a secret little hideaway, right in the middle of the most dense part of the largest city in the country. A street with the elegant and charming "black and whites" on one side, and some less-than-elegant post-war buildings on the other. We were moving to one of the newer buildings, so our view was a constant reminder of the elegance and the charm that was someone else's home.
The "black and whites" were a series of tenements, built in the 19th Century for working class people, but were later upgraded when Sutton Place and other parts of the East Side became fashionable in the 20th Century. There was a grace and style to the buildings, fire escapes notwithstanding. In front were a bunch of sycamores and other city trees. It was a place where some of the lesser Kennedys or Vanderbilts might have lived. For families like ours, in which grace and style were not the natural order, but just something to be jealous of -- and perhaps to strive for now and then -- they were awe inspiring.
For my brothers, Cliff and Charlie, and me, we would soon learn the most impressive thing about the "black and whites"; they came with sports royalty. Like lots of young boys, we were sports crazy, and on the day we moved in, a breezy and sunny one, the doorman in our building had a secret for us.
"Hey kids. Come here." He leaned down and whispered. "You know who lives there?" he said, with some sort of odd pride, I later thought.
Cliff was not shy. "No. Who?"
"George Plimpton." He paused and looked down at three of us, 12, 10, and 8. "Do you know who that is?"
"Paper Lion," I said, with a confidence I didn't know I had.
"Yes!" The doorman snapped up with great surprise. "How did you know that?
"I just read the book." What the doorman didn't know is that I loved to read, but only sports books. And almost always books written by sports heroes. The odd thing about most of these books is that they were usually written "with" someone else, who oddly enough was usually a sports writer. "Why is that?" I wondered back then. The Education of a Tennis Player, by Rod Laver, with Bud Collins. Clyde, by Walt Frazier, with Joe Jares. Life on the Run, by Bill Bradley (no, "with"; hmmm). There were no Hardy Boys or Hemingway for us. We read the classics. Like, I Can't Wait Until Tomorrow...'Cause I Get Better-Looking Every Day, by Joe Namath, with Dick Schaap. But the best of the bunch, at least up to that point, was Plimpton's Paper Lion. What was so fascinating, even to a 10-year-old, was that it wasn't written by a real jock, but by the very intellectual, physically awkward and geeky Plimpton. It chronicles him somehow playing quarterback for the Detroit Lions. And it was genius. Even a kid could see that he captured the game and the layers in a way that Namath couldn't, even with Schaap.
"Does he really live there?"I asked the doorman.
"Yeah. He's been there for decades. He ran the Paris Review from that very building," the doorman, again with undeserved pride.
The three of us looked up at the doorman, silently, unimpressed, and a bit dumbfounded. "What's the Paris Review?" Cliff asked.
But despite never reading any literary magazines, let alone the Paris Review, my admiration for Plimpton was deep. For it wasn't just that he wrote about sports in a way I couldn't quite fully understand. He found a way to play in the major leagues without having any obvious talent. To show just how unlikely it was for Plimpton to become an NFL quarterback, it was Alan Alda who played him in the movie version of Paper Lion. Alan Alda. Not exactly Bart Starr or Fran Tarkenton or Steve McQueen or Robert Redford. Sure, we would learn later that the Paris Review was a very hoity toity publication. But for us, awkward little kids who escaped our rather desperate world of riches and mentally unstable parents through sports, Plimpton's feats on the field seemed far more relevant, and frankly far more attainable than ever joining our heroes as genuine Knicks, Giants, Mets or Yankees. We knew, even then, that sports stardom was not coming for us.
But it wasn't just that we were living on this special block with the famous and the glamorous that made those days joyous. Our own apartment, just across from the "black and whites" was big; maybe twice the size of the two-bedroom that our six-person family had jammed into on First Avenue for a year or so. There was room to breathe for the first time. The new apartment was actually two side-by-side two-bedrooms with the wall between them knocked down. This was all the feeling of luxury. Our parents went all out, we thought. We couldn't exactly figure out why at the time. Now it's obvious that it would have been a really shrewd real estate purchase by them, except for the fact that they would get divorced just a few years later, put the wall back up, and sell the whole thing when the city was on the brink of bankruptcy. Sell low. The apartment, we would later figure out, was our parents' last real attempt to save their marriage -- a marriage our Mom knew from its opening days was doomed; or maybe she just willed its destiny. "Your father wore brown shoes to the wedding. There was no chance." But it would not be their last failed real estate transaction. Nor our Dad's last attempt to try to win our mother's love with a very expensive purchase.
But for that brief moment -- I remember it as just a few days -- it felt very much like home, or at least what we imagined home should feel like. It was a new beginning. One of hope and promise. Of leaving behind anger and dysfunction for something more akin to what we saw of families on television. It felt like we had moved to a new country, when in fact it was just a few blocks away from where we were before.
And what was most intriguing and beguiling of all for me and my brothers was that we could play our version of stickball in front of the large, multi-level garage that sat next to our apartment building. We played with a tennis ball and one of those slightly scaled-down versions of a Louisville Slugger they gave away on Bat Day. Back in those days, believe it or not, Yankee management gave away real wood baseball bats to the first 40,000 fans who came to the Stadium on Bat Day. I know it seems crazy. People back then weren't particularly well-behaved. But somehow arming a stadium full of drunk New Yorkers with dangerous weapons didn't cause mayhem. I find it hard not to imagine the rumble that might happen if the Yankees ran such a promotion today.
The garage sat across the street from the "black and whites" and its face was a wall of cinder blocks, painted a light gray. It was the perfect spot to draw a box on the wall with chalk just the right size for a strike zone for pre-teens. The street beyond the sidewalk was mostly free of parked cars and traffic, making a sizable infield easily laid out and accessible. There was a bump in the street, just off the curb, that made a natural mound. It was glorious on those first few spring days. The only problem was that my older brother Cliff was quite a bit taller than me and Charlie, so drawing the strike zone posed a real problem. Of course we were used to thinking about this kind of thing. Height -- and body image more generally -- were regular conversation topics for Mom. "Why are you so fat?" "You're really thin; are you gay?" "You have a big belly." And a year or two later, when Charlie grew right past me, it was time, my Mom insisted, for me to see a psychiatrist to deal with feelings of inadequacy I must have had. "What's therapy, Mom?" And back then, therapy was definitely not cool. I have only a vague recollection of sitting silently with the psychiatrist for what seemed like an hour, but was probably about 90 seconds before he asked, "do you know why you're here?"
I hesitated a bit. "My Mom thinks I'm sick, I guess."
"Are you?"
"I don't think so." What is a little kid to say?
"Do you want a soda?"
"Yeah."
Despite what our mother would have deemed an existential crisis brought on by our asynchronous growth spurts, my brothers and I worked out the strike zone rather simply. We drew the box on the garage wall so for the two of us younger ones, the strike zone was from our thighs to our shoulders. For Cliff, it was from his shins to his waste. It was my first lesson in rough justice. It worked out. And it would soon become a lesson in trying to chase a high fastball.
For those first few days on our cul-de-sac, it was genuine bliss. Mom and Dad got along, he drinking his Dewar's and water, smoking his pipe, she ordering around a housekeeper organizing this room or that. And my brothers and I played stickball for what seemed like hours on end on our secret street along the East River. It was all spacious, and fun; a new beginning far from the rough and tumble of the rest of the city and all its troubles. And we all looked at each other, content in the illusion that we were enjoying each other's company.
That was, until the last pack of cigarettes was about to run out.
"COLE. BABY," Mom screamed out for me, late in the afternoon of day three in our new place.
Mesmerized by the illusion of family happiness, I came running eagerly from the room I shared with Charlie. "What ma?"
She was in the kitchen searching around for her purse. She had no problem barking out orders at the same time. "I need you go to the store and get me some cigarettes?"
Uh oh. This wasn't good. This didn't feel like the new us. I was about to watch the Mets play the Giants. My ten-year-old mind was racing. And besides, I knew that 10-year-olds weren't supposed to be buying cigarettes. But I also knew my Mom could care less, about any rules in the store or about my plans or discomfort. "Do I have to?"
"Yes. And I need you to go to the drug store and buy me some napkins. You can buy the cigarettes there too." My breathing became shorter and more rapid, not because I had any idea what she meant when she said she wanted "napkins," but because I was sensing that the bliss of the past 70 hours or so was coming to an abrupt end.
"Ok. Come here," she said, as she grabbed her purse. Then she grabbed me, bent down, and looked me straight in the eye. "Listen. I want two cartons of soft pack Parliaments. You got that?" I nodded. "Not menthol. And I want two packages of Stayfree napkins. Ok?" I silently nodded again, completely unsure of what she had just said. She grabbed a ten dollar bill from her wallet. "Here's ten dollars." She put it, crumpled, in my little hand. "Bring me back the change," she said emphatically, staring me down. "Got it?"
I stood there, repeating to myself, without moving my lips, "soft pack Parliaments, soft pack parliaments, soft pack Parliaments." Then I looked up in fear. I had no idea where the store was. "Where's the store?" I mumbled.
"Fork. On Second Avenue and 72nd Street." At least that's what I heard.
I shoved the money in my pocket. Then nervously repeated what I took in back to her. "The fork store on Second Avenue and 72nd Street. Two soft pack Parliaments and two packages of napkins."
"Two cartons of soft pack Parliaments. Not menthol." She shook her head in disgust. I imagined her saying to herself, "what an idiot."
I nodded again, my head going up and down even though I wasn't fully sure that I got it. But I headed for the door and the elevator anyway. And to the fork store.
Kommentare