I remember an easier, less complicated time, when life drifted warm and lazy like a high-pressure system was in charge, yielding scant, high clouds and a light breeze.
It was the summer of 1976, my eleven-year-old season in baseball, when my friends and I searched for our freedom, old enough to pedal away from home on bicycles, young enough to be amazed by what we found, as America garishly celebrated its two hundred years of freedom with bicentennial cigarette lighters, neckties, plates and spoons, and even Log Cabin syrup sold in a special-issue Bicentennial Flask. There were five or six of us who ran in a pack in the neighborhood, spanning the couple of miles between Oxford’s town square and the Ole Miss campus.
We were latchkey kids, me, Dan, Robbie, Bart, and the rest—that’s what I’d heard a neighbor say. Mom and Dad and the other parents let us run the town during the summer days, while they were at work, and into the dusk, which stretched past 8 PM in daylight saving time. What trouble could we get into, anyway? Not much, I suppose, since there wasn’t any crime around town that we knew of, and we weren’t making much trouble beyond tossing a frog like a rock, thinking it was invincible. But eleven-year-olds have goals, and mine that summer were one, get a hit, and two, kiss a girl.
When I was flying down University Avenue from Dan’s house on my bike, pedals spinning faster than my legs could keep up with, I felt like the college boys I’d see breezing around town in their Mustangs, the throaty hum announcing their arrival like they were someone special, and in my eyes, they were.
On that bike, free to come and go as I pleased, bicentennial quarters jingling in my pockets until they escaped on bubble gum or a hamburger at the Kreme Cup, I felt like I had a place on this earth where I belonged.
Friends had called me the “Strikeout King” for much of that summer, which had more to do with baseball than with the fact that I’d chickened out on a kiss from Kelly at the movies, panicked because I’d heard she was experienced, whatever that meant. I’d left my sweaty hand glued to hers all the way through the end credits, when we pried apart and went home facing that fact as the butt of a chicken joke Bart repeated when the guys were together.
Baseball, though—I should have been better at baseball, really, I should have been, and I’d get there eventually, but I was behind the other boys because Dad didn’t play pitch and catch with me. We tried a few times, but the ball hit him once in the nose, and that was that. I learned to practice in the backyard by throwing high fly balls to myself in the air and catching them. The coach said I was one of the best at scooping ground balls and fly balls. Batting was a different story, however, since I practiced hitting alone in the backyard by tossing a ball into the air, getting my hands set on the bat before the ball got back to eye level, and taking a rip. I’d gotten good cracking balls over the house, but that didn’t line up at game time. Coach said I’d taught myself a swing hitch, dipping my back shoulder to hit balls dropping from the air instead of seeing them come at me in more of a straight line and swinging through in that direction.
“If you ever get that back elbow up, you’ll be hitting home runs instead of striking out,” Coach said.
I landed a spot starting at first base on our eleven-to-twelve-year-old Civitan team, despite being in the younger age group. I’d proudly don that red-fronted cap and red T-shirt jersey and ride my bike to the ballpark, two and a half miles away but pretty much downhill all the way, catching a ride home from Coach or Dad after the game. Still, I was striking out so much game after game, Coach told me to stop swinging and get a walk instead. I’d cry at home in my room after games, unable to swing, or embarrassed if I did.
But those were about the only tears I shed in that summer of freedom. Most every day offered fresh adventure for myself and my friends. Once we went spelunking in a ditch that ran behind the Methodist church preacher’s house, saw something shiny under a rock, went in for a closer look, and found six Playboy magazines rolled tightly together in a ball for protection from the water. We spent almost as much time wondering how the magazines got there—a preacher’s house!—as we did looking at the pictures. Mesmerized by the shapes and the hair, here and there, we didn’t want to stop looking, and our solution was to go back most every day it wasn’t raining until it didn’t deliver the same shock. When July came and the look-see didn’t deliver the same punch, we moved on.
We’d ride our bikes down to the Kreme Cup, Oxford’s version of Dairy Queen, which had soft-serve ice-cream cones, beef and soy patty burgers that were flat and hot and oniony and only thirty-five cents each, pinball machines that weren’t broken, and teenagers who’d already found trouble we didn’t yet understand but enjoyed imagining and who made a cloud of smoke from their cigarettes as they stood around tables and the machines, keeping it all in a haze, a world of its own. We’d stare at the girls, who smoked and flaunted their figures in halter tops, matching them to the Playboy pictures, and pick up overheard rumors, spreading them among ourselves as gospel, like the one about Trish, a high-school senior who smoked like she owned stock in Winston, how she’d done so much damage to her lungs, she’d been coughing up blood in the bathroom and, gross.
We’d ride our bikes to the university swimming pool, where the kids like us who couldn’t afford the country club went to swim and gaze at girls like Michelle, a year older, though two heads shorter. I’d look for her and, if I scored with a find, follow her around like she had me on a leash. We looked at girls a lot that summer, and talked a lot about girls, whereas the summer before, it was more—Did you see what happened on Fat Albert? Monroe is watching so much TV he can’t sleep and is doing poorly in school.
We wondered what they liked, the girls, like Michelle, and we wondered how they felt and speculated how we were going to kiss one, and who might be first. “Me,” I’d proclaimed, and the gang gathered in, listening closely.
“I’ve a plan.”
At the end of every season, our Gayle Wilson baseball league raised money to keep it going for another season. Think Girl Scout Cookies, but boys, and no cookies. We were told to get out and solicit as much money as we could, asking for donations and turning it in for our team. The boy on each team who raised the most money got to pick a queen and escort her onto the field for ceremonies. From there, the boy in each age group who raised the most money got to kiss his queen.
As I said, I had a plan.
First, though, I needed to get a hit, eradicating my Strikeout King title. But how? I was running out of time with only two games remaining in the regular season. I rode my bike down to the Ole Miss tennis courts, only a half mile away, and foraged in the woods that surround the courts for abandoned balls, hit and left by players who wield a racket how I wield a bat, with a dip back, swinging upward. I found a handful, rolled them in my shirt, and took them home. I fired a tennis ball at the side of the garage, and it bounced back toward me, first into the ground, and from the ground up to knee level, so it came back with the angle and velocity of a bad pitch, but still a pitch, and—swat.
Miss.
I remembered what Coach said: “Get your back elbow up.”
Sometimes, he’d said, the slightest adjustment makes all the difference.
I lifted it up, like a flared chicken wing.
Pitch, swat, miss. Pitch, swat, miss.
Dad heard the ruckus, balls slamming into the garage.
“That’s not good for the wood,” he said.
I stopped, waiting until he and Mom left for work the next morning.
For days, I practiced. Pitch, swat, miss. Pitch, swat, WHAM.
Between batting practices, I started raising money for the King and Queen day, the closing ceremonies for the regular season at the park. I asked Dad for a donation, and he gave me five dollars. I found an empty jelly jar, dropped the bill inside, and saw possibility inside the jar’s emptiness. I started walking the neighborhood, house to house, asking for donations, explaining how the funds allowed us boys a place for baseball in the summer and how that was important because it brought us all together, out of mischief, and the league wouldn’t make it without their generous support.
Soon, my jar overflowed with bicentennial quarters and dollars and more five-dollar bills. I struck out all three at bats the next game but turned in my jar, and the coach smiled like I’d ripped a double.
“That’s great, Magee,” he said. “You’ll be escorting our queen, it looks like. Go ahead and ask a girl if she can do it.”
I called Michelle.
“Hold on please,” she said, putting the phone down. She was gone for a while, five minutes, maybe ten, and it felt like an hour. Talking to her dad, I suspected.
The phone rustled, and she was back.
“Okay,” Michelle said.
The ballpark was packed for the finale—our Civitan team played the American Legion in the last regular-season contest preceding the closing ceremonies. The stands were filled with parents and grandparents and friends and teachers I’d never seen at the park before. It was my second at bat. I’d walked the first time up, not swinging, like Coach suggested, but only because the pitcher couldn’t throw a ball that didn’t land in the dirt. He was still in the game my second time up, probably because they were saving the ace for all-stars.
I walked up to the plate, taking a few practice swats in movement, and saw Mom and Dad in the stands, and heard Coach yelling, “Don’t swing, Magee. Make him throw you strikes.”
I didn’t know what the score was. Didn’t matter. The pressure was on if I was to shake the nickname, if I was to shake my shame. Despite the crowd, despite the fact that I’d arrived at the last game with a buckshot batting average, it was the most confident I’d felt in the batter’s box. For the last week and a half, I’d done the work, ball after ball thrown into the garage with swing after swing. I knew there were dents across Dad’s precious boards, but I didn’t care.
I stood in the left-handed side of the batter’s box. The pitcher wound up—firing toward the plate. It came in low, just like they bounced from the garage, and—
WHAM.
The ball ripped over the first baseman’s head, over the right fielder’s head, took one hop, and bounced off the outfield fence, careening into the open field as I dropped the bat and ran for freedom, rounding first base, then second, heading to third as the outfielder picked up the ball, and then home before its arrival, an inside-the-park home run, my only hit of the season.
“Magee,” Coach shouted as I walked back to the dugout, “keep hitting like that and you’ll be an all-star next season, son.”
I stood on the pitcher’s mound after the game, Michelle at my side. They announced us to the field the way I’d seen the homecoming court announced at Ole Miss in the fall. “Here’s David Magee of the Civitan,” the announcer said, “escorting Michelle Robinson, daughter of Dr. and Mrs. Robinson.” We’d walked to the center of the field, standing by the pitcher’s mound, holding hands, smiling.
I counted down to the moment I’d looked forward to most of the summer the way I’d seen the prelude to blastoff of NASA rocketships headed to the moon on TV. Ten, the youngest-age-group winner was called. Nine, the young man leaned in, planting a soft kiss on the cheek of his taller, skinnier, blonde queen, eight, blushing like the red snow cone smeared on her face. Seven, six, five . . . finally, the announcement for my age group. Four: “And now, the king of eleven and twelve,” the announcer said, three, “raising forty-seven dollars,” two, “the most among all the leagues,” one, “is David Magee, who may now kiss the queen.”
Blastoff.
Everything stopped but my heartbeat, and for the first time in my life, I wasn’t the Strikeout King, or a bastard child, or a lost latchkey kid. I don’t remember asking Michelle if it was okay, the kiss, though I suspected it was understood among the girls. But she gave a soft squeeze of my hand, as if to say, Congratulations, it’s okay. My cheeks reddened, and I turned my head toward her and looked into her eyes. She looked confidently back, a year older, prepared, perhaps, for what was to come. I pursed my lips, and she tightly squeezed my hand with her tiny one, and I planted my lips gently on top of hers, resting there for one full smack as the crowd cheered.