“Look, you need to lose this attitude,” he said. “They’re interested in you, okay? Handle it. It’s no big deal, believe me.”
He paused for a long moment and grimaced. He seemed more amused by me than exasperated.
“Why me?” I said, fishing for reassurance. “They can get any guy they want.”
He softened his tone. “That’s just the point. I know those girls. They’re convinced that every guy on the planet has the hots for them.”
“I’m not following you,” I said.
“They have no idea that you’re afraid to talk to them. They think you’re not interested.”
“Look, he went on,” warming to the task. “Don’t flip out just because they’re rich and popular. Guys like us are trophies to them. They think we’re either rocks or juvenile delinquents.”
I’d thought about this before, but it was reassuring to hear it from someone more practiced and confident than I was. Steve now had my full attention.
“It doesn’t hurt that we’re athletes, either,” he offered. “They’re cheerleaders. What does that tell you?”
Everything he’d said made sense. It was like I was seeing it for the first time, though. I checked the impulse to tell him how grateful I was for his advice. There I was, putting myself in the subordinate role again.
“Look,” he said, “Julie didn’t pick Larry Brown because of his good looks or money. You know what I’m saying?”
It’s funny how just a little bit of reinforcement can shift your point of view. At the afternoon staff meeting I thought I caught all three girls staring at me and giggling again. This time, it gave me a tiny morale boost. And a glimmer of hope.
After the meeting, Steve and I hung around to devise a scheme for Saturday night’s beach party. I’d been worrying all week, thinking about the humiliating dances and mixers I’d gone to. The awkward sparring, the small talk, the popular crowd pairing off with one another, while I’d invariably end up alone or with some other loser.
But Steve’s plan calmed me down. He would run interference for me. The only thing I’d have to do was follow his lead.
“It’ll be a two-minute hit and run,” he said “Then we’ll both be out of there like a cool breeze.”
When I woke up the next morning, I was looking forward to the party with almost as much anticipation as if I was preparing to pitch a ball game.
That night, everyone sat around the fire, roasting marshmallows and singing “Ninety-Nine Bottles of Beer on the Wall” and a bunch of other dumb camp songs. After an hour, I started getting fidgety. Finally Steve gave me the “let’s go” sign, and we started to walk over to the fire pit where the three girls had congregated. I made certain not to look over at them, but every step I took made me feel more self-conscious and uneasy. I was thankful it was so dark.
Without any small talk, Steve introduced me. Then he quickly said something about the two of us having a previous commitment. Right as we were leaving, he turned back and said, “Why don’t we all get together at the picnic next Friday, right after the softball game.”
I thought I saw Linda the jock nod in agreement. To sweeten the offer, Steve promised he’d invite Annie to come along. Before they could respond, he nodded in my direction and we took off.
It was his idea not to hang around at the beach party. It would go better, he said, if the girls saw me first on my own turf, doing what I did best—which was, of course, playing ball.
“Think of it as having home field advantage,” he laughed.
How did Steve become so shrewd, so fearless? You had to have a lot of balls to make this work. If I’d have dreamed it up on my own, I’m sure I’d have already bailed out by now.
On Monday morning, Steve added one more wrinkle to the plan. He wanted my “phantom girlfriend” to show up at the picnic on Friday.
“It’ll make you look even better,” he said.
I tried to talk him out of it. But he’d been right about everything else. No matter how improbable the whole thing seemed, I decided to go along with it.
The phantom, girlfriend idea took root the previous week, when I was whining about my lousy luck with girls. To gain some sympathy, I’d told Steve the story of my recently failed romance with Ellen Wiseman.
Just before Memorial Day weekend, my friend Carole had brokered another blind date for me, this time it was with Ellen, who she described as a cute, brainy sophomore from her Advanced Geometry class.
On first impression, Ellen looked like the epitome of the “sweet old-fashioned girl” that Teresa Brewer was singing about that spring. She had shoulder-length sandy-blonde hair, deep blue eyes, a pale complexion, and an angelic smile. The way she dressed made her look much too staid: flair skirts, loose cardigans, and lacy blouses, which, I later found out, hid a shapely, alluring figure. But when I met her, Ellen could have passed for a choirgirl. Not exactly my ideal. With my track record, though, I couldn’t afford to be choosy.
We seemed like such an improbable match. On our first few dates, she was so demure and reserved. When I finally pressed her, I found out that Ellen was class valedictorian in junior high, she’d been an exchange student in France, and she was already aiming for a scholarship to Vassar or Wellesley.
I was ambivalent about her. She seemed too straight-laced and aloof. Yet she was enthusiastic about me. She went along with all my suggestions. I took her to a jazz club, a foreign film, and a Dodger game. She came to one of my summer league games, and she even seemed amused when I went off on one of my half-cocked rants about Kerchman, or some riff about the Dodgers. It was a heady feeling to be the one who was setting the agenda. It was what Donna must have felt like when she was running the show with me.
But it still troubled me that Ellen was so reticent to talk about anything personal. Every time I’d ask who her friends were, what kind of boys she liked, who she’d gone out with before me—she’d change the subject.
The big surprise was that when it came to making out and petting, Ellen took the lead. It disarmed me, of course, and made me reconsider all my preconceptions. Once we got started, we were grabbing each other every chance we got. I continued to feel ambivalent, though. Ellen was so much the opposite of the popular girls I was enamored of. Yet I loved the idea that she had a crush on me. For the first time, I wasn’t waiting for the other shoe to drop.
It all changed on a balmy evening in June when we went to the beach to watch the fireworks display. Everything about the setting was exotic: the salty ocean aroma, beach fires burning in the distance, muted strains of music from portable radios, waves lapping on the shore, and the sporadic pop-pop-pop of the multi-colored flares that intermittently lit up the beach and the water.
One thing led to another, and we ended up on Ellen’s blanket making out under the boardwalk. We started necking, then quickly moved to petting. The night, the music, the fires, the waves, the fireworks—everything fell away. I’d been dreaming about this ever since that time in junior high when I found out that Manny and Cindy were making it under the 116th Street boardwalk.
Ellen and I kept at it, but at the instant when it seemed there’d be no turning back, she jumped up, shook the sand out of her hair, and sat cross-legged, Indian style on the blanket.
“We have to talk,” she said.
All I could think of was that it’s happening again: the old game of who’s in charge of sex. Turns out that there was a boyfriend—at Andover—a guy she characterized as smart but unimaginative. Too preoccupied with school and college applications, she said. Even in my super-agitated state, I knew what that meant. He wasn’t paying enough attention to her. That’s why she was here with me.
He was from a rich family in Hewlett Bay Park. At sixteen, he was already driving his own T-Bird and traveling abroad with his parents in the summers. His future was mapped out. When he graduated from college, he’d go to med school and later take over his father’s Park Avenue Orthopedic practice. They’d been going steady, it seems, for three years; and o
f course everyone expected them to get married after college.
Had this been a movie, it would have been a funny scene. But I was furious with her. And mad at myself for getting chumped again. My stomach was hollow. I stood up to leave. Ellen pulled me back on the blanket. She was under a lot of pressure, she said. Didn’t know how to break up with this guy. Both sets of parents agreed they were made for each other, and so on.
What it came down to was that she just wasn’t ready to betray the boyfriend. She was asking me in her typically indirect way if I wouldn’t mind being the “other guy” just for a while, until she got her priorities straightened out. I said I’d think about it. I wasn’t happy about any of it, of course. But under the circumstances, I had to admit that it was not an unreasonable request, because the truth was that neither of us had a good enough reason to cut the other one loose. We were both using each other to bolster our confidence.
When I finished the story, Steve said, “You’re not in love with her, right? And you’re not screwing her? Means you’re in the driver’s seat.”
“So how come it doesn’t feel that way to me?”
“She owes you big time. And don’t kid yourself, she knows it. Ask her to the picnic and tell her why.”
Just like that? What was I getting myself into? The whole thing was turning into an elaborate production. I told Steve I was too embarrassed to ask Ellen to do it.
“I bet you an egg cream she won’t say no,” he said.
Never second-guess an aficionado. Steve knew how all of this worked. Just as he’d predicted, Ellen was all too willing to participate.
The whole routine was more complicated than I’d ever imagined. All I could do was shake my head in wonder. The gamesmanship here wasn’t a lot different from the kinds of tradeoffs I used to make with all three of my coaches.
What transpired on Friday was surreal. For the entire day—the game, the picnic, and the evening—I was in “the zone.” The ball game itself was like a dream fantasy. Steve and I, and Ronnie and Rob were the co-captains for our respective teams. That was incentive enough to want to win the game. We each picked five other staff members and two of the oldest campers. Partly on intuition and partly by design, I picked Linda Price to be our tenth player. I knew she was competitive, and I could tell from watching her swim and pitch to her group that she was a good athlete. I also knew that choosing Linda wasn’t going to hurt me any—with either her or her two girlfriends.
I was so keyed up that I couldn’t even sit on the bench between innings. I coached third base and never once looked up at the kids, staff members, or the parents in the bleachers. I stayed alert to every nuance and detail on the field, all the while imagining that Joanne and Julie were watching every move I made.
On the field and at bat I played fully on instinct. I anticipated every ball hit to me at short, I got three hits, and I hit the game winning home run, a long fly ball that carried over the fence and landed in the swimming pool. Even the last play of the game couldn’t have been better scripted. Linda made a running catch of a fly ball with the tying run on third base. That hunch, too, had paid off.
When the kids and staff came streaming out of the bleachers, Julie and Joanne gave Linda a hug. Then all three of them hugged Steve and me. My stomach was flip-flopping. Steve had known all along exactly what he was doing.
Just before the picnic started, Julie asked if Steve and I would pose for a picture. I was glistening with sweat and still in a state of mild euphoria.
“Take off your shirts, you guys,” she said. “I’ve wanted to take this picture all summer.”
“I bet you have,” Steve whispered to me under his breath. He squeezed my arm as if to say, “She’s the one. Go for it.”
Julie circled her lips with her tongue and pointed her Brownie box camera at us. Next, she posed us individually—Steve first, then me. As we changed positions he whispered, “She’s using me to get to you.”
I tried to act composed, even nonchalant. But I was so flushed, I could hardly stand still for the picture. So this is what it feels like to be pursued.
Later on, Ellen showed up at the picnic wearing a pair of skintight white shorts and a form fitting red halter top. All afternoon Ronnie and Rob followed her everywhere she went. I was laughing to myself, knowing they’d be all over me with questions on Monday morning. Even Steve, who’d brought Annie with him, hung around the food table flirting with Ellen. She thrived on the attention. And why not? It was her reward for going along with our scheme—the quid pro quo Steve had had in mind all along.
Before the picnic was about to break up, I grabbed Ellen’s hand, marched up to the three girls, and proudly introduced her. I watched them coldly eye her up and down. Ellen didn’t even flinch. She was playing her role to the hilt. The day had already gone way beyond my expectations, but there was more to come. As we were all packing up, Steve volunteered to drive us to Cairo’s. This was going to be a real treat. Cairo’s had even more of a mystique than the State Diner. I’d heard so much about it that it had assumed almost mythical stature in my imagination. Cairo’s was located in the roughest part of Inwood. The owners, Teddy and Frank, were rumored to have Mafia ties. On weekends, Five Towns studs and Far Rockaway jocks took their girlfriends there “to be seen.”
The restaurant itself was an unimposing storefront, the ground floor of an old restored clapboard house. You could smell the aroma of wood fired pizza as soon as you got out of the car. When we walked through the foyer, it was like entering an exclusive inner sanctum. The dining room was just past the bar, to the left. It was brightly lit and alive with the hum and buzz of animated dinner talk. The small, square tables, most of them two and four tops, were draped with standard red and white checked tablecloths. Each one had a wicker Chianti decanter that served as a candleholder. Dozens of framed black-and-white photos hung on the polished, knotty pine walls—pictures of former Lawrence and Far Rockaway High athletic heroes, and autographed photos of celebrities who’d visited the restaurant.
When we arrived, Julie, Joanne, and Linda were comfortably ensconced in their natural habitat—holding court at a center table, smoking, laughing loudly, and drinking beer. They were decked out in white linen pants and gauzy see-through tops. All three were surrounded by a knot of preppy looking cabana boys who had on white ducks and Topsiders with no socks. They each had a V-neck sweater draped around their El Patio T-shirts. All of them—the guys and the girls—looked like they’d just gotten off their parents’ yachts.
As we passed their table, Steve and Annie stopped to talk. I made sure to catch all three girls’ eyes before giving them a perfunctory wave. Later, when Ellen got up to go to the bathroom, I caught the El Patio guys eyeballing her. She did look sexy. For a second, I felt a twinge of desire. Maybe I was making a big mistake.
All evening the three girls kept turning around and shooting glances in our direction. I even heard one of the El Patio guys imploring Julie to invite us over to the table. For that one evening, everything was working right.
All weekend I was worrying about what to do next. Which one should I ask out? How should I go about it? If I asked one, how would the other two feel? Then, I stopped myself. How presumptuous it was to think that all three were interested in me.
Steve had no such hesitations. “Go out with all of them and then decide.”
Of course he’d say that.
“I’d never have the balls to ask all of them out,” I told him. But I was being partly disingenuous. The seed had already been planted.
On Wednesday, just before free swim, Steve whispered, “Before you do anything, check out the girls’ locker room.”
I couldn’t concentrate for the rest of the afternoon. I waited until all the cars and buses had begun to fill up before I let myself into the locker room. It was dingy and dank, and it reeked of wet towels and stale perfume. I pulled the string above the bare light bulb. Taped just above one of the lockers was the photograph that Julie had taken of me last Saturday.
I stood there, transfixed. Was it really me? The guy in that picture had a jet-black flattop, a trim waist, tapered hips, and tightly muscled thighs. It was me, all right. But it wasn’t the image I saw every day when I looked in my bedroom mirror.
It was one of those fleeting, serendipitous moments where you see yourself exactly as you’ve always wanted others to see you. It was such a shock because I’d lived for so long with the opposite image of myself, the one that had been imprinted on my psyche since I was a kid. Looking at that photograph was like seeing a hologram, a mirage that could vanish or shift at any moment.
I remember the precise moment that Julie took the photo. She was kneeling on one knee, looking up. That’s why the broad-chested guy in the picture looked so tall and lean. I noticed for the first time that he had a confident, almost cocky look on his face.
I knew right then that I’d better take advantage of the moment. How likely was it that I’d ever see myself in this light again?
14
The staff swim party on Thursday night was a continuation of the week’s unreal events. Within the course of a half hour, all three girls had asked me to dance. It was such a dramatic reversal from the humiliating scenario at the sixth grade dance. Clearly, the girls were waiting for me to make a move.
I was standing at the lip of the pool trying to puzzle out what to do when Julie came up to me and said, ‘“Time’s up.”
I flinched, but I knew exactly what she meant.
She extended her right hand and asked me to pick one of three balled-up pieces of paper that were resting in her open palm.
“What kind of game is this?” I said, stalling for time.
“Open it up,” she said.
I fumbled with the paper. My hands were shaking, my heart was racing.
“What’s it say?”
“Linda.”
“Next one,” Julie said.
“Joanne.”
The last of course had Julie’s name on it.
Still Pitching Page 19
