A lot of help she was. My birthday wasn’t until October.
I knew what sort of glove I wanted. I had seen it at the hardware store in Newnan. It was a fielder’s glove with a deep pocket, and it was autographed by Pee Wee Reese of the Dodgers. It cost thirteen dollars. I often went to sleep dreaming of that glove.
A couple of days after my tearful scene with my mother, she told me that H.B. wanted to see me in their bedroom. I presumed the worst. He had something for me to do that would involve wheelbarrows and digging around in the dirt.
I walked into the bedroom as he was putting on his tie. “Look in the sack on the bed,” he said to me.
I picked up the sack and looked inside. It was a new baseball glove, but it wasn’t the glove I had wanted, the glove I had dreamed about. I had never even heard of the bush-leaguer who had lent his name to it.
“That what you wanted?” H.B. said.
“I wanted a Pee Wee Reese glove,” I answered.
“Who is Pee Wee Reese?” he asked.
That settled it. The man was totally without portfolio when it came to baseball. I threw the glove down and ran to my room crying.
I’m not certain when I realized that I had done something wrong. Perhaps it was in the night sometime, when I recalled the look on my stepfather’s face as he watched me peer into the sack.
He had made the move. He had known that his lack of baseball expertise had disappointed and frustrated me, so he had tried to surprise me with the new glove. He had reached out to me, but I had been ungrateful.
I never got over that awful thing I did to my stepfather — it grieves me even now — but I did attempt to make amends. I told him I was sorry. I even tried the glove. It wasn’t that bad a glove. The first game we played, H.B. came. I pitched and we won. After the game, he said, “You have a nice fastball.”
It is amazing what bonds baseball can develop between men ... and between boys and men.
* * *
It has been nearly thirty years, but I remember the Moreland Baptist lineup as vividly as ever: Danny Thompson played first; Bobby Entrekin was at second; Wayne Moore, the coach’s son, was at shortstop; Danny Boswell played third; Dudley Stamps caught; Charlie Moore was in the outfield with Mike Murphy and Eddie Estes. I pitched.
Pete Moore, “Mr. Pete” to us, was the coach. He was a short, heavy-set man of great baseball wisdom and patience. Perhaps his greatest move was to devise a plan to save our supply of new baseballs.
The problem was this: We played our home games on the Moreland School playground field. There was a wire backstop behind home plate, but it wasn’t much of one. Foul balls went over and through the backstop and usually landed inside a birddog pen directly behind the field.
Given the opportunity, birddogs will chew a baseball right down to the cork in a matter of seconds.
After the birddogs had chewed up enough foul balls to threaten possible cancellation of the rest of the season, Mr. Pete decided to station team reserves in the pen to retrieve the baseballs before the dogs could get to them. We called that position, naturally enough, “birddog.”
That’s how Eddie Estes, who later became one of the all-time great Moreland Baptist outfielders, learned to play the game. Eddie was two years younger than the rest of us. He was also a thin child but quick as a cat. And Eddie was persistent. He came to every practice and to every game, even though he never could break into a lineup made up of older boys. That was before Mr. Pete put Eddie at “birddog.”
Every game, when the rest of us would head out onto the field to take our positions, Eddie would go the other way and crawl inside the birddog pen behind the backstop. The training he got fighting birddogs for foul balls eventually made him into a defensive whiz.
He made the starting lineup the next season in centerfield. We were playing rival Grantville, as I recall, and I was pitching. The game reached the late innings tied.
Grantville had runners on with its slugger, one of the Massengale boys, at bat. What little curve ball I had, I hung to the Massengale boy.
The ball shot toward centerfield. Eddie turned his back toward the infield and ran. There was no fence, only a gully and a dirt road that was the centerfield boundary. A few steps before he reached the gully and the road, little Eddie jumped into the air and flung his glove skyward. When he came down, he tumbled into the gully out of sight.
He quickly emerged from the muddy pit, scratched and bleeding, but the ball was in his glove. The umpire called Massengale out. We won the game.
Mr. Pete embraced little Eddie when he returned to the bench. Mays robbing Wertz in the ’54 Series hadn’t been as dramatic.
“Eddie,” said Mr. Pete, “that was one of the best catches I have ever seen.”
“I was afraid not to catch it, Mr. Pete,” Eddie responded.
Mr. Pete asked him why.
“I was afraid that if I didn’t, you’d put me back at ‘birddog.’”
* * *
There are instances now, of course, of girls actually playing Little League baseball. If she can go to her right and hit line drives, then I suppose it would be terribly unfair to keep her off the team. But I’m still old-fashioned enough that I’d be shocked if I heard a nine-year-old girl, who had just struck out to start the game, come back to the dugout and tell her teammates, “The sonofabitch ain’t got a thing.”
What concerns me even more is, I’m not certain how many boys are playing baseball today. It seems to me that too many of them are playing soccer.
I dislike soccer immensely. It’s a dull sport and it is not American. They play it mostly in those weird countries where the government changes hands every two or three days, supporting my suspicion that soccer is also a game that encourages political upheaval and anarchy.
All a person needs to play soccer is wind enough to run up and down a field for several hours and agility enough to bounce a ball off his head. Anybody can learn to run up and down a field for several hours, and I’ve watched seals in the circus bounce balls off their heads. On the other hand, I’ve never seen a soccer player who could dive underwater and come back with a dead fish in his mouth.
Kids are playing soccer all over America today, but are there any great soccer clichés? Of course not. People are too busy running up and down the field to think of any. As I explained before, in baseball there’s all sorts of time to sit around in the dugout and think of clever things to say, like when an opposing player makes a stupid error and you say, “Nice move, Ex-Lax.”
In baseball, you not only have to be able to run, but you also have to learn to bat and to catch and to throw and to slide and to spit. All baseball players spit. I doubt they ever spit in soccer, except when they fall down and get a mouthful of grass.
Once I was in London and, because there was nothing better to do, I switched on the BBC and watched the English soccer (they call it football, which is ridiculous) championship game. (After you’ve walked through Harrod’s and been over to Buckingham Palace, London can be even more boring than soccer.)
One side would kick the ball down to the end of the field, and then the other team would kick it back. I’ve seen more excitement at county fair pick-up-the-duck games. The crowd, a hundred thousand or so, sang during the entire game. They apparently were just as bored as I was.
The players kicked the ball around for a couple of hours, and finally it hit a guy who wasn’t looking in the back of the head and went into the goal. After much running and kicking, the guys in green finally had themselves a soccer championship by the score of 1-0.
I’m afraid that when today’s young soccer players become adults, they’re going to be terribly boring people and perhaps even a little fuzzy from having soccer balls bounce off their heads for so many years.
What really worries me, however, is the great number of today’s youth who don’t play baseball or soccer. They’re in shopping malls playing those damned video games. They’re all going to grow up, I fear, to have big buglike eyes from staring into t
oo many video screens. Just listening to the infernal beeping noises those games make is enough to drive kids goofy. And trying to shoot down all those asteroids in a matter of seconds also will make a child extremely nervous and frustrated, and they may all wind up with the same bad case of the shakes overworked air controllers get.
We played indoor games when I was a kid, too, but we played educational games like rotation pool and nine-ball, which teach a youngster such important lessons as how to put reverse English on the cue ball while squinting through the smoke coming out of the cigarette he’s holding in his mouth at the time.
There weren’t any women allowed in pool halls, either, which offered further opportunity for male development. Girls today walk into video game arcades big as you please, and there’s even a female version of “Pac-Man” — “Ms. Pac-Man,” if you will.
I haven’t checked to see, but if there’s still a Boy’s Life magazine, it probably carries advertisements for feminine hygiene spray these days.
* * *
One of the few remaining all-male holdouts is college fraternities. So far, women have been content to remain in their sororities. Belonging to a fraternity offers all sorts of opportunities for companionship with other men without women around. You can drink beer together and play cards together and think up nasty Homecoming floats together, and the older brothers will be available to keep you abreast of the proper way to conduct yourself as a young gentleman on campus.
I pledged Sigma Pi fraternity my freshman year at the University of Georgia. They were a great bunch of guys, the frat house was a beautiful old Southern mansion, and it was the only fraternity that offered me a bid.
Fraternity rush in my day was helpful to a young man, because it gave him the opportunity to test his fragile male ego, and it supported his theory that the more macho he acted, the better chance he had of making other young men like him.
Basically, rush worked like this: You walked into a large house filled with strangers. You had worn your best suit — your only suit, in my case — and you had doused yourself heavily with Old Spice, which your father wore. You went around shaking hands with members of the fraternity you happened to be visiting.
If your father had been a member of the fraternity and also was wealthy, you didn’t have a lot to worry about. You probably could have managed a bid wearing pajamas and flip-flops. If you had no such legacy, then it was important that you did everything possible to make a good impression on the brothers.
“The most important thing,” I had been told, “is to make certain you squeeze hard when you shake hands.”
Nothing, of course, gives a man away like a soft handshake. Girls and wimps and nerds have handshakes that feel like you’ve just grasped a recently-departed grouper. Real men, the kind of men you would want in your fraternity, squeeze your hand firmly. Strength of grip was second only to size of genitalia in determining manhood. All this likely dates back to the days of the cave men, when they ran around naked and choked each other.
Each time I was extended a hand during rush, I made certain that I offered a firm shake in return. By the time I walked into my third fraternity house, my hand felt like a beer truck had run over it. I continued to squeeze firmly anyway, doing my best to ignore the pain and taking a certain amount of comfort in the fact that it was the handshake, not the aforementioned first measure of manhood, that was being checked.
There was something else I had been warned about when I went through rush. If you are included in a group that is taken on a tour of the plumbing system of the fraternity house, that particular fraternity probably doesn’t want you even to be seen on its property, much less want you to be a member.
The first house I visited was SAE. From various sources, I had learned that SAE was a very prestigious fraternity and that girls from the spiffier sororities loved to date SAE’s. The SAE house was nice. I especially enjoyed seeing how the water pipes in the basement were insulated so they wouldn’t freeze during the wintertime.
Next, I went to Sigma Nu. They didn’t show me the pipes, but they did herd me over into a corner with two exchange students and a kid with a case of terminal acne.
I didn’t do any better at Phi Delta Theta, either. One of the brothers took me and two other rushees — one of whom wore thick glasses and stuttered and the other who was wearing white socks — back to the kitchen and left us with the cooks, who were peeling potatoes.
I thought I might do much better at Kappa Sig. My first cousin happened to be chapter president. When I finally was able to corner him, however, he not only disavowed our kinship, he also swore — in a very loud voice so his brothers could hear him — that he had never seen nor heard of me before. My keen deductive senses alerted me to the fact that I might as well write off any future as a Kappa Sig.
At the Kappa Alpha house, they sang “Dixie” and told stories about Robert E. Lee. The brothers there treated me like a direct descendant of William T. Sherman. I got the pipe treatment again at Sigma Chi, and at ATO they asked me to wait out on the porch until the bus came back to pick up the rushees.
I was close to giving up on any chance at becoming a fraternity man when I walked up the stone pathway to the Sigma Pi house, an impressive antebellum structure with large white columns and rocking chairs on the front porch. To my utter surprise, the brothers never mentioned one word about the Sigma Pi plumbing system and they seemed generally interested in me and what I had to say.
They showed me the party room and the jukebox, and they took me downstairs to something called the “Boom-Boom Room,” which featured a sawdust floor, booths in which to sit, and all varieties of neon beer signs. This, I determined, was where the brothers of Sigma Pi brought their dates.
“This is probably where you bring your dates,” I said knowingly to the brother giving me the tour. I might have been fresh out of high school, but I wasn’t a complete dummy.
“Good thinking,” said my guide. “Now, let’s go over here to the toilet and see if you can figure out what we do there.”
I figured I was dead after that. But, to my complete surprise, I was invited back to Sigma Pi the very next night, and when the bids went out, they offered me one. I was elated but also quite concerned. If nobody else wanted me, why would Sigma Pi, and did I really want to be a member of a fraternity that would accept the likes of me? My ego was in shambles, again.
I asked a friend, who had just accepted a bid from Phi Delt, what I should do.
“Take it,” he said, “before they change their minds.”
I pledged Sigma Pi and was later initiated and eventually became totally content with my membership. At my fraternity, we had a rigid code regarding responsible, manly behavior. I’ll just hit a few high spots.
—AT A PARTY: Never throw up on your date. If you feel like you must throw up, go outside and do it in the parking lot. We’ll make the pledges clean it up the next morning.
Never attempt to climb onto the bandstand and sing with the band until everybody is bad drunk and won’t notice you making a total fool of yourself.
If you think you have the opportunity to engage in amorous activity with your date, do not take her to any of the upstairs bedrooms. We do not want coeds to see the scummy conditions in which we live.
If you have to go to the bathroom, do not go on the shrubbery outside the fraternity house. Shrubbery is too expensive to replace. Go on the tires of somebody you don’t like.
—AT FRATERNITY HOUSE DINNERS: If you do not like a certain dish, such as asparagus stalks, do not hurl it at members sitting at another table. Also, do not spit English peas at tablemates and do not drink directly from the syrup container.
—WHEN PARENTS VISIT: Hide all booze, 8mm skinflicks, condoms, love dolls, firearms and explosives, poker chips, dead animals, roach collections for Saturday night roach races, and any stolen goods.
If you have any books, spread them around your room, and if somebody’s parents ask your major and you can’t remember, say you’re undec
ided between pre-med and animal husbandry.
—PROPER ATTIRE: Never wear socks with your Weejuns.
—IN CLASS: If it is absolutely necessary that you go, sit in the back of the classroom and do not ask any questions, so when you don’t come back for another two weeks, perhaps the professor won’t notice that you’re missing.
If you thought you had a copy of the exam the night before, but then the professor hands you a test that has questions you’ve never even heard of, pretend to have some sort of fit and maybe they’ll take you to the infirmary.
—WHEN ARRESTED: Never indicate you were part of a conspiracy involving other members of the fraternity. We are a loyal brotherhood and will make the pledges fork over enough money for your bail.
My fraternity brothers were a rather diverse lot. I had one brother who rose to the presidency of the Interfraternity Council, a rare and prestigous honor. I had another who pilfered wallets. We called him “Robin Hood.”
I had fraternity brothers who majored in pre-Law and pre-Med. I had others who majored in Bubber’s Bait Shop and threw up on the sawdust floor in the Boom-Boom Room. I had a fraternity brother known as “Odd-Job” because of his physical likeness to the Oriental goon who was an aide to Dr. No in the James Bond movie of the same name. I was frightened of Odd-Job, especially after I saw what he did to another fraternity brother’s stereo.
It was an otherwise quiet evening on the second floor of the house where Odd-Job, for the first time in his collegiate career, actually had decided to study. This was difficult for him, however, because his roommate, who was known as “Seaweed” because his father had been a famous Marine war hero, was playing Sam the Sham and the Pharoahs’s “Wooley Bully” over and over again on his stereo. Several times, Odd-Job had informed Seaweed that if he didn’t quit playing the record he would tear Seaweed into small pieces and let God sort them out.
Seaweed was a stubborn person, however. Also, a stupid one. When Odd-Job had finally had enough of Seaweed and “Wooley Bully,” he walked over to the stereo, took the record off, and began biting it into tiny pieces, spitting out the pieces directly at the startled Seaweed. Odd-Job then picked up the stereo, ripped the plug out of the wall, and threw it out the second story window, rendering it a crumpled mass of electronic innards. He had Seaweed, himself, halfway out the window when cooler heads informed Odd-Job that if he murdered Seaweed, Dean Tate probably would put us on social probation and we couldn’t have a party for the entire fall quarter.
Elvis Is Dead and I Don't Feel So Good Myself Page 17
