THE TWO LOCAL breweries, Neuweiler’s and Horlacher’s, where my father worked, were next to Riverfront Park; there Tom Feifel coached the Downtown Youth Center Bears 110-pound football team. Just across the Lehigh River was the Arbogast and Bastian slaughterhouse and meat-packing plant, its symbol two interlocking hearts with an arrow through them, like something a romantic kid would carve on a tree. There were times, especially in late summer, when practice began, that the smell of the hops and sweet barley malt from the breweries combined with the stench of slain pigs and steers to overpower us, and we begged Tom to cancel practice.
“What are you, pussies?” he would jeer at us. “Line up for calisthenics!” Often somebody would throw up, and, led by Tom, we would all join in the ridicule. “Hey, wussy,” Tom would yell at the gagging kid, “if you feel something hairy coming up swallow quick ’cause it’s your asshole!”
“Get mad!” he would shriek, red in the face. “Get mad!” Two of us would hold the blocking dummies, bracing them with all our weight, in order to leave a passage between them wide enough only for one. The two combatants, competing for a spot in the starting lineup faced each other on all fours in the dirt.
“Ready. On the whistle.”
At the whistle’s short blast, we would lunge for the opening, butting our helmeted heads together like goats.
The whistle again, to stop.
“You call that hitting? That was a god-damned love tap! Hit him for Christ’s sake. You go over that man, you hear? I want to see him on his back. I want to see your footprints on his chest. Get mad! You want to play on Sunday? Do you? Then show me, damn it!”
It was all right to cry, as long as you cried with gritted teeth and lips curled back, roaring, snot or even blood running from your nose, as long as your crying was accompanied by rage, as long as you thirsted for victory.
We easily won the championship. The other teams were mostly ragtag groups of kids with someone’s father for coach. We were considered better disciplined, better schooled in the fundamentals, better coached. The other kids were scared of us.
I still have the team picture from the newspaper, yellowed and coming apart where it’s folded. Tom’s not in it.
SCOOTER WAS A halfback, skinny and quick. I liked to pair off with him for drills, since he couldn’t hit very hard. I got to know him because Tom used to pick me up in his station wagon for practice, and Scooter was usually with him, riding shotgun. He was a grade ahead of me at St. Francis.
One fall day he asked me if I wanted to see something neat after school, and we went to a spot called the fort in the field behind the school called the prairie. Weathered boards and a piece of oilcloth covered a shallow bunker dug into a hill, and the approach was guarded by a thorny patch of wild raspberries, white wands of stickers that were hard to wade through. Unless you were wearing crisp new jeans or a long coat, you had to pick your way through, moving one prickly whiplike branch at a time. When we were playing army, the fort was virtually invulnerable to surprise attack.
My hands were cold, so it must have been at least November. I didn’t have gloves on. As I worked my way through the raspberry brambles to the fort, Scooter fired a match rocket at me. We used to buy stove matches, Ohio Blue Tips that you could scratch on anything to light, and by first wetting the tip on your tongue, you could snap it into flame on your thumbnail and in one motion shoot it in an arc that left a smoke trail behind it. By the time I got through the tangled raspberry wands, I’d had to slap one burning match from my shoulder and stamp on another where it had landed in the long dry grass.
“You want to start a fire?” I yelled. “Be careful.”
I knelt next to Scooter with my hands in my pockets. My toes were cold in my torn sneakers.
“Look,” he said, and he held up a mouse by its tail. The little creature pawed the air and twisted this way and that.
“Here. Hold him. Don’t let him get away.”
I pinched its tail and held the mouse up in front of my face, studying its black eyes, pink nose, yellow teeth. It squirmed and twisted, and it was all I could do to keep hold of it.
“Here. Put him in here.”
I tried to lower the mouse into a coffee can he’d lined with dry grass, but it kept arching its back and grabbing onto the edge of the can with its hairless paws. After two or three tries, I closed my other hand around the animal and got it in the can.
The mouse tried to leap out, fell back on the dry grass, and spun around and around on his hind legs scratching at the smooth metal.
Scooter struck the match off his front tooth, and it hissed into flame. What he intended did not occur to me until he dropped it in the can.
The mouse screamed and flailed upward as the flames took it. I remember the smell of burning fur and the splayed pink paws like tiny hands. I remember the moment when it fell backward and blistered in the flames.
I couldn’t speak. I couldn’t even look at Scooter. All I could do was stand and then, with my hands deep in my jacket pockets, wade through the crisscrossed thorns that tore at my thighs through my pants.
Scooter shouted after me, “You did it too! We did it together! Both of us! You did it too!”
MY FATHER IS the coach, and I am the batboy, of the Herbert Paul Lentz Post #29 American Legion baseball team. I’m in my uniform, a smaller version of his, although I’m bothered that I don’t have pants like his, with the black-and-gold braid down the side, only baggy gray ones. We’re early, there to line the base paths, batter’s box, coach’s boxes, and on-deck circles. None of the teenage players have arrived yet.
“Go limp. Like a puppet. You’ll never get hurt that way. Hit, crumple, and roll. Okay, ready? Stand up. And hook up.”
These are jumpmasters’ commands, and I mime obedience, standing and reaching up to lock my clip on the static line that will pull the chute from my pack when I have plummeted some distance from the plane. When I jump I yell, “Geronimo!” My sneakers hit the grass and I let my knees buckle, dip my shoulder, land on thigh, hip, shoulder, and roll over and over in the lush summer grass. When I look up, my father smiles and flashes me the thumbs-up sign.
I remember he tried to teach this skill to Bob too, when his falls were getting more dangerous; he would hit the ground with his knees first, then whiplash forward without the strength in his arms to break his fall. Often his face was black and blue and scabby. Dad and I both tried to get him to tuck his shoulder and roll when his legs buckled, but Bob never mastered it. I remember being proud of being able to jump from higher and higher places without getting hurt.
The growing distance between Bob and me was partly my need to believe that he could learn, if only he would try a little harder, how not to get hurt. I wanted him to practice with me. “Let’s go outside and play paratrooper,” I’d say, but he never felt like it. I knew he was sick, but I needed to hold him responsible for at least some part of it. If my brother’s disease could slam him into the ground at any moment, bloodying his nose and blacking his eyes, there was no hope. If he were completely helpless, I would have to feel it: not only the sidewalk smashing him in the face, but also his outrage and humiliation, and, worst of all, my grief. No. Not my brother. He’s too smart. He could get the hang of it if he would try.
I loved riding next to Dad in the car, his dusty spikes on the floor in front of me while he drove in his stirruped stocking feet. “Nobody in the valley knows baseball better than your dad,” the father of one of his players said. “They say that he’s a bird dog for the Reds; is that true?” I didn’t know; besides, I didn’t know for sure if a bird dog was a good thing or not.
“Oh, hell,” Dad said when I asked him, “anybody can be a bird dog. All you have to do is know a few scouts. A bird dog’s a guy who watches a lot of kids play ball and when he sees somebody who might be major-league material he calls up one of the scouts. If the scout likes the kid and signs him to play, the bird dog gets a few bucks. You just have to know who the scouts are. There might be a guy around to look at a couple of the kids this week or next. I know him, but these guys don’t want the whole world to know who they are, so I don’t say nothing. People can figure it out for themselves. It don’t make no difference anyway.”
I watched for scouts, convinced I’d know one if I spotted him. I took a handful of safety pins from my mother’s sewing box, turned my baggy gray pants inside out, and used the pins to take in the inside seam of both legs. A scout would never consider a guy with baseball pants so loose they flapped in the wind. The trouble was that the pins would sometimes come undone, and once, playing paratrooper off the topmost bleacher seat, I jammed a pin deep in the flesh of the inside of my thigh. When I pulled it out, I could feel blood running down my leg. I crawled on my elbows to the cover of a nearby shrub, pretending I’d been shot. There was blood on my pants, and later, when one of the players asked me what had happened, I said I’d gotten spiked stealing second base.
In my fantasy, the scout, who looked like anybody else, walked up to my father after a game and, taking a Yankees cap from his pocket, slapped it on his thigh, tugged it on, spit, and said, “The batboy. We could use that kid. He’s major-league material.”
I WAS IN the back seat of Coach Tom’s car, in the parking lot of an ice-cream, pizza, and sandwich shop on Seventh Street, just beyond the bridge where, ten years old that year, I caught my first two fish. The first was a fat spring sucker I netted as it shimmied up the icy, ankle-deep white rapids just west of Seventh Street to spawn in calmer water. My feet numb, I waded ashore with my prize, a pulsing muscle squirming in my hands, my blood pounding. I remember the shame when the thrashing changed to a shudder, and my wonder when, after I thought it was dead, it slapped the bank once more with its tail.
The other was my first trout, caught exactly the right way too, on a tiny size 20 hook slipped under the metallic green collar of a Japanese beetle from a shrub beside the water. I saw the whole thing. The beetle floated over him, glinting like a jewel, its shadow moving along the gravel bottom, and the trout turned, moved downstream, turned again, and waited for it like a confident outfielder under a pop-up. Up, a sip, a flick of the tail, the lazy return to his station. My ears were hot and pounding. My hands shook. I took in the slack and pulled. I had him!
I felt the same pounding that day in the parking lot after baseball practice. The same shaking hands. Tom has pulled into the shade of the mint-green cinder-block building, neon beer signs in the windows, the dink-dink-whack of pinball machines. One by one I am holding color slides up to the light, slides of grown-ups doing amazing things, astonishing things. I am trembling, and my fingers fail. I drop a slide.
Tom cuffs me on the side of my head above my hot red ear. “All right, that’s it, no more for you. I told you to be careful.”
My blood’s at flood tide. Induced, premature, with a hunger urgent as an infant’s, my sexuality is born, a beggar. “No, please. I’m sorry. I’ll be careful. Honest.”
“Let’s get some ice cream, shithead.”
“But wait. I want…”
But the slides are back in the yellow cardboard sleeve and he is locking it away in the glove box. Later I will learn from him how people relieve this painful wanting, but for now I can only cry, hiding my face in my arms, leaning on the front seat. My new baseball glove is on the floor between my feet.
“You fuckin’ crybaby. Stay here.” The door slams but I don’t look up. Soon he’s back.
“Here. Eat it, damn it, before it melts.”
TOM’S HOUSE, WHERE he lived with his mother, was near the bottom of the steep Sixth Street hill, just across from the entrance to the park. The street was closed off in winter. Kids with sleds flashed down the hill. Others, on broken cardboard cartons from the nearby bakery, spun round and round, laughing but envious of those who ran and flopped and shot past in a straight fast run downhill. The row of houses on the west side of the street descended, of necessity, more gradually than the hill itself, so that the farther down the hill you went, the more steps there were up to the front doors of the houses. It was two whole flights of concrete steps to Tom’s front door.
TOM SLAPPED MY ass as he got up and pulled up his pants. “Go take a shit,” he said, nodding toward the bathroom.
The bathroom was powder blue with gold flecks in it. Furry, fluffy rugs and toilet-seat cover and a doll with crotcheted skirt demurely camouflaging the spare roll on top of the tank.
I sat and tried to reason. Something was wrong with me. This was supposed to be fun. “Come on, let’s have some fun,” Tom would say on the way to his house. He kept his slides and 8mm movies in the bedroom there, and while he threaded the film or loaded the slide projector, he would let me look at cartoon books of Donald and Daisy Duck, Popeye and Olive Oyl, Mickey and Minnie Mouse doing the same things the people in the slides and movies were doing.
Then the projector would start clicking and a white square of light would appear and turn into colors that Tom would focus to writhing, sweat-glistened bodies. There was no sound but the whirring of the projector and Tom’s occasional grunting. Reaching around from behind me, he would take my penis between his thumb and forefinger, saying, “You like this, don’t you? You like this, don’t you?”
Sometimes I did feel giddy and out of control, but right then I felt vaguely sick to my stomach, not as if I’d eaten something rancid, but fluttery and strange. Either the force of his penetration was reverberating in my system, or I was learning, as I sat there trying to make sense of what was happening, how to keep myself from crying, from even knowing I felt hurt. Probably both. I shit, and turned around to look, having never seen sperm. I’d been told by my father that it was a seed. I knew from the slides that it was a kind of jelly, and I thought that a seed must be suspended in it like the seeds in a grape. So I looked for a seed. I didn’t see any.
By the time I came out of the bathroom, I thought I had figured out what was wrong. Tom was in the living room, drinking beer and watching a ball game. I put a smile on my face and a bounce in my walk and said, as casually as I could, “Next time we should try it the other way around, and I’ll do that to you.”
He laughed, then put his hand on my chest and pushed so that I staggered backward across the room and into the sofa. “Sit down and shut up,” he said.
I wanted to cry but I didn’t dare. I bent over with my arms folded across my belly, pretending to watch the ball game. Mostly I felt ashamed for being so stupid. Why was I unable to understand what was going on? The more I learned, the more confused and ashamed I became. I knew lots of things the other kids didn’t. I knew that Minnie Mouse liked to have Mickey lick her pussy, loudly: Slurp, slurp!, the caption read. I knew that Popeye’s prick was as big as his arm, that Olive Oyl could nevertheless take all of it inside her, smiling, and that Bluto’s, by contrast, was laughably small, which was why he was such a bully. I knew that even more astonishing than the union of man and woman was the so-called gang-bang. I knew that Coach Tom’s penis was uncircumcised, although I didn’t know how to name that difference then. I knew that sex was sinister, clandestine, hot, and universal. I may have even known that my childhood was over.
ONE DAY, COMING home from Tom’s house, I was walking in the front door when I heard a crash. My father was yelling, “Damn it Jesus fuckin’ Christ!” and Bob was screaming. I ran into the room and found Dad on the floor, swearing, pounding his fist on the carpet, teeth gritted, unable to move. Bob had fallen in the corner, partway up the wall, his neck bent at a grotesque angle. I froze looking down at my father. “Help your brother, you asshole!”
Mom came running down the stairs. “What happened?”
“Call the doctor!” I shouted. Mike was shrieking in the next room. The doorbell rang—our next-door neighbor. My father said, “You don’t let anybody in here, damn it. You’ll be sorry.” I didn’t. I said that some shelves had fallen. “Thanks, but everything’s all right.” The doctor came: Bob was unhurt, a nosebleed and a bump on the head; my father had ruptured a disc in his back.
MY FATHER HAD always been given to sudden rages, even when we were little. Some days he came home from work already angry about something, and we were careful not to provoke him. Some days that was impossible, and he would pull his belt from his trousers, double it, and come after us. “I’ll teach you!” he’d shout.
Now I had become the target for his rage. He would chase me, and I would try to keep some piece of furniture between us: the kitchen table, or the sofa, or Bob in his wheelchair. Sometimes he would corner me and, as he kicked at me, huddled on the floor, he’d shout, “Get up! Get up off the god-damned floor!”
It must have seemed to him that life was sneering at his every plan. It wasn’t me he wanted to “get up off the god-damned floor.” He must have been living in hell.
How many times did I walk out, careful not to slam the door and further enrage him? Out into the yard with its robins and squirrels, slugs and salamanders, the little bugs that rolled up into tiny armadillos, the praying mantises my mother called clothespin bugs. How many hypnotic hours did I throw a ball, hard, at the strike zone chalked on the shed? Beyond the yard was the neighborhood; beyond the neighborhood, the town. I was learning how to leave.
Sometimes, trapped in a corner, I couldn’t get away from him, and afterward, bringing my elbows down from beside my head and uncurling my hunkered body, I only knew I had been gone, not where. That was something else I was learning, another kind of leaving: when there was nowhere to go, that’s where I went.
A CANVAS DUFFLE held the bats. The balls were in a bowling bag. We sat on the bench taking off our street shoes and putting on our molded rubber spikes. Curt, Pete, Angelo, Patrick, Scooter. We played catch and pepper, took infield and outfield practice, batting practice if it was a home game. When the game began, I took my position on the bench, second from the bats, next to Tom, who kept rolling a baseball in his hands, running his long yellow fingernails along the seams, hardly watching the game for minutes at a time, looking up and yelling something, angrily, once in a while, but mainly staring down at the ball in his hands, turning it this way and that, over and over. My father stood just behind the bench, his arms folded across his chest, or behind the backstop, bent at the waist, arms up, hanging on the chain link screen. “Let’s hear some chatter out there!” he’d say. The guys on the field would answer.
“Hon you baby. Fire it in there. Hon you babe.”
“No batter. No batter.”
I understood I would not get into the game. There were a couple of other boys on the bench with me, but they weren’t ballplayers, not real ones. They didn’t care about the game the way I did. They didn’t even know how to put on a uniform. My father had shown me the secret. After you had your white sanitary hose and baseball socks on, you turned your pants inside out, placed the elastic where you wanted it on your legs, rolled the now double socks down over the elastic band, stood, and pulled up your pants. That’s the way real ballplayers wore their uniforms, not with the elastic showing or their socks falling down.
I always watched the game intently, even though I was certain I wouldn’t play. I wanted to have plenty to say to my father on the way home. “How long are you gonna sit there getting splinters in your ass?” he always asked, but he needed someone to talk with about the game, and if I paid perfect attention to the way it had unfolded, I could learn from him what the turning points had been and what might have made a difference. By the time we arrived home, we had shared the game, and it didn’t seem to matter as much that I hadn’t played.
I always tried, during warm-ups, to get my uniform a little dirty. Sometimes Tom let me pitch batting practice, and afterward, on the bench, I would keep my jacket on to look like a pitcher on his day off. I’d sift the dry summer’s dust, silken as talc, through my fingers, or make a little pile of it and leave my handprint there.
One afternoon, soon after we arrived at the park from his house, while I was changing my shoes, Tom tossed me a new ball right out of the box. “Loosen up,” he said, and turned away. Sick in my stomach, in shock, in some kind of trance, I stared at the ball. I knew he meant that I was to pitch, but I asked him anyway, “What do you mean?”
“You want a written invitation?”
I hardly remember any of it. My father stood behind the screen, behind the batter, the catcher, and the umpire. I was terribly tired, and the ball felt like a heavy stone. I don’t remember how many innings I pitched. At one point, as I sat on the bench between innings, I wanted to walk to left field and fall asleep under a big tree out there by Jordan Creek. I wanted to go home and draw pictures in my room. I could hear shrieks and the lifeguard’s whistles from the nearby swimming pool, and I wanted to run there and jump from the diving board, knees hugged up against my chest, holding my nose, and sink through the quiet, eyes closed, to the bottom.
One play of that game I will never forget. I walked to the plate without looking behind me at my father, dug in, and hit the first pitch over the second baseman’s head. I stood on first base, my blood pounding in my ears. I still didn’t look at my father; he was there, a figure behind the backstop, but I didn’t look at him. I was going to make him very proud, first; then I would look at him. The pitcher went into his stretch, and I watched his hips, as my father had taught me: “You can always tell if he’s going to try to pick you off or throw to the plate. Just watch his hips, not his shoulders, his hips.” When the pitcher moved toward the plate, I took off for second base, eyes trained on the bag, and timed my slide perfectly, raising a cloud of silky dust that blew like smoke from an explosion into center field. The second baseman didn’t have the ball. “Safe!” I yelled.
“Go back! Go back!” I heard from somewhere. Laughter. Anger. “Go back!” Our catcher, Pete Bachman, was caught between second and third; their third baseman was coming toward him with the ball. For another moment I didn’t know what was going on, and then I realized that I had tried to steal second with Pete already there, and had trapped him in this predicament. The third baseman tagged him out, and Pete glared at me, kicked at the dirt, and walked to the bench.
There were two more outs that inning but I don’t remember either of them. I stood paralyzed on second base, my face and ears hot. The second baseman and shortstop kept making the safe sign at me while wiggling their knees Charleston-style. The hoots and jeers from the opposing bench were so bad the umpire walked over to put a stop to them. My father was not behind the backstop. I looked until I found him standing behind our bench with his arms crossed, staring at the ground. My stomach felt sick again. My ass hurt now; my anus burned. The one shame left I could prevent was crying, and it took all my power and all my will to do it.
As I walked from the field toward the bench at the end of the inning, I passed Joe Murray, our regular pitcher, heading for the mound. No one spoke to me, and I was too numb to care.
While the game went on loudly, I sat on the bench and arranged the powdery dust with my feet. I bent down and left the print of my hand there, the dust so fine I could see every line of my palm and the whorl of each fingerprint. I knew my father was standing behind me, but I couldn’t turn around. I believed that if he knew, he would beat me, and I believed I deserved to be beaten. But Tom had also told me I’d be thrown out of the house, out of my family. He said he knew a kid that this had happened to, and no one had ever heard of him again. “Don’t think you’re gonna come and live with me, neither,” he’d said, as if I would ever have thought of it. It followed that if my father remained my father only because he didn’t know the truth, then he wasn’t truly my father anymore.
I sat there, hidden in a depth of silence I’d never known until then. I knew I wasn’t really safe there, but I was willing to do what was needed, to think or not think any thought, in order to feel, at least for the time being, beyond further hurt, while staring at the image of my hand in the dust.