by Philip Roth
SMITTY: Why doesn’t he go to the F.B.I.?
OAKHART: He claims the F.B.I. is infiltrated from top to bottom with Communists and Communist sympathizers. He says he wouldn’t get out of there alive.
SMITTY: Why not Landis then?
OAKHART: He doesn’t trust him. Smitty, neither do I. Landis would use the scandal to make us look bad and himself like a hero. He’d use this thing to shut the league down once and for all. Exactly, Gamesh says, what the Communists would want him to do in the first place.
SMITTY: Then why doesn’t he go to the top?
OAKHART: According to him, the Soviet agents in the War Department who arranged the leasing of Mundy Park are Roosevelt appointees. They’d bury it, he says—and him too.
SMITTY: And the papers? What about talking to me? I know the son of a bitch.
OAKHART: Because that would be premature. Right now he could finger only Mazuma and Ockatur—but there are others, just as highly placed, whose identities are a mystery even to him. Then there are the party members and fellow travelers among the players—
SMITTY: And where does he find evidence for that, General?
OAKHART: That’s what he’s out to find. As manager of the Mundys he’ll appear to Stalin to be carrying out his mission, but in actuality he’ll be in the best possible position to work in our behalf to uncover and expose the entire conspiracy. Up close, inside, managing the team that’s been their number one target, he’ll be right at the center, able to employ all the skills he’s learned from them, against them. At SHIT he was first in his class, Smitty—so he tells us, anyway.
SMITTY: Also at bullshit, my old friend.
OAKHART: You don’t buy it.
SMITTY: Do you? The guy is crazy. Some lunatic off the street hired by that dried-up old slit. Whatever it is, it ain’t on the level.
OAKHART: You think it’s not even Gamesh?
SMITTY: Suppose that it is. Why would you believe him, of all people? If ever there was a grievance-monger with a score to settle, it’s that maniacal bastard. “Sturgeon with Stalin. Cocktails with Molotov.” It’s all too ridiculous.
OAKHART: Ridiculous, yes—but what if it’s also true? What if baseball is destroyed from within?
SMITTY: When that happens, my dear General, it’ll be a sad day indeed, but it won’t be the atheistical materialistic Communists who will have done it.
OAKHART: Who then?
SMITTY: Who? The atheistical materialistic capitalists, that’s who! A’ course that’s just one man’s opinion, General—fella name a’ Smith.
The following is excerpted from General Oakhart’s testimony before the subcommittee of the House Un-American Activities Committee on October 8, 1944, in Port Ruppert.
THE CHAIRMAN: General, would you tell the Committee why, having solicited the advice and opinion of your friend Mr. Word Smith, the well-known sportswriter, you decided the following morning to disregard it and to recommend the appointment of Gamesh as manager of the Mundys?
GENERAL OAKHART: Well, Mr. Dies, it was because of that startling phrase that Mr. Smith used, “atheistical materialistic capitalists.”
MR. THOMAS: In other words, General, until he used that phrase, it just had not entered your head at any time during the previous years that this man might have Communist leanings or might even be an outright agent of a foreign power dedicated to overthrowing our government by violent means.
GENERAL OAKHART: Frankly, sir, I have to say no, it did not. I am afraid I had been completely taken in by him until that evening. Perhaps I might not even have been alert to the implications of the phrase “atheistical materialistic capitalists” if I had not spent those hours earlier in the day with Mrs. Trust and Mr. Gamesh. You must realize—indeed, I know you do—that I have not been alone in believing the Russians and General Stalin to be, in President Roosevelt’s words, “our brave allies in the fight against Fascism.”
MR. THOMAS: Along that line, General—would it be your opinion, as a former military man, that the war against the Germans and the Japanese has been used by the Communists to mask their subversive activities here in the United States?
GENERAL OAKHART: Absolutely. There is no better example of that particular kind of Communist treachery than the cynical way in which patriotic feelings were manipulated by the Communist agents in the War Department in order to secure the lease to Mundy Park and drive the Ruppert Mundys from their home. I’d like to take this opportunity, if I may, Mr. Thomas, to inform the Committee that I was one of those who from the very outset opposed leasing Mundy Park to the War Department. At that time, of course, I had no idea that Communists had so thoroughly infiltrated the executive branch of the United States government, and that it was they who were plotting the destruction of my league. On the other hand, that destruction was imminent if the Mundys should be dispossessed from Mundy Park—well, that seemed to me a foregone conclusion.
THE CHAIRMAN: General, following your March 16 phone conversation with Mr. Smith, in which he used the phrase “atheistical materialistic capitalists,” did you have any specific recollections of other catchphrases or slogans he had used in the past, either in conversation or in his writings, that had a subversive or propagandistic flavor?
GENERAL OAKHART: Well, of course, his speech and his writings were peppered with phrases that caught you up short by their sardonic or barbed quality, but generally speaking, I shared the view of most everyone, that this show of irreverence was more or less in the nature of a joke, much like all that alliteration he’s so famous for.
MR. MUNDT: A joke at the expense of his country.
GENERAL OAKHART: It seemed benign enough, Mr. Mundt, at the time. As everybody knew, he had been a pinochle-playing crony to several American presidents.
MR. THOMAS: Did you know, General, that he has also been a ghostwriter for the present incumbent of the White House?
GENERAL OAKHART: No, sir. I have only learned that through these hearings. But let me tell you, Mr. Thomas, that when he used that phrase, “atheistical materialistic capitalists,” I could not have been any more shocked had I known that the man who spoke such a phrase happened also to be a speechwriter for the President of the United States.
MR. THOMAS: Well, I’m glad to hear that. Because it would have shocked me profoundly to learn that the hero of the Argonne Forest and the President of a major American baseball league could permit such a traitorous, slanderous, propagandistic remark to leave no impression on him whatsoever.
GENERAL OAKHART: Well, you needn’t be shocked, sir, because it didn’t. It is not for me, Mr. Thomas, to describe the action I took within the next twenty-four hours as “daring” or “courageous” or “far-sighted,” but given the tone of your last remark, I feel I must remind the Committee that Angela Trust and myself, alone in the entire world of baseball, have been fighting tooth and nail against the hammer and sickle—and to this day, to this day, have earned little more than the scorn of our colleagues and the disbelief of the nation. Admittedly, it was not until that fateful night in March that I came to recognize the enemy for who and what he was, but since that time, as I am sure you know, I have been in the forefront of the battle against the Red menace, and no less than the members of this Committee, have done everything within my power to fight to preserve the Constitution of the United States and the great game of baseball against Communist subversion and treachery.
(Loud applause. The Chairman raps his gavel.)
THE CHAIRMAN: I appreciate that the spectators may from time to time wish to express their admiration for a witness, but I must ask you to restrain your enthusiasm in the hearing room. I’m sure that General Oakhart, who just prior to this morning’s hearings announced his intention to run for the presidency of the United States in the coming election, would just as soon you express yourselves through the ballot box anyway.
(Laughter.)
GENERAL OAKHART: And, Mr. Dies, I am equally sure that if in August either of our great political parties had nominated fo
r the presidency a candidate who had seen at first hand how the Communists work, a man who knew from hard and tragic experience what an unscrupulous, ruthless, and murderous gang they are, if the American people had been given the opportunity by either the Democrat or the Republican parties to vote for a man who was equipped to fight and to defeat the Communist enemy in our midst, then they might not be roused to display such enthusiasm for my words. But the fact of the matter is, sir, that the people will be silent no longer. Their eyes have been opened—they know the struggle that America will face in the postwar years with those who now pose as her friends. And so do I. And if Mr. Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Democrat Party do not know—and Mr. Roosevelt does not!—and if Mr. Thomas E. Dewey and the Republican Party do not know—and Mr. Dewey does not!—then the American people will look elsewhere for leadership. They will look to one who is not afraid to speak the unspeakable and to do the undoable, to one who is not afraid to call an enemy an enemy, at whatever cost and peril to himself! To one whose party is his country and whose platform is the law of the land!
(Loud applause.)
It was a warm and hospitable welcome that Gil Gamesh received when General Oakhart announced to the members of the press assembled in his Tri-City office on St. Patrick’s Day 1944 that the former Greenback pitching ace standing beside him, whom he himself had banished a decade earlier, was now to be reinstated in the league, as manager of the Ruppert Mundys. With one notable exception, the writers broke into spontaneous applause as the ghostly Gamesh (bewigged, as he would be henceforth, in a raven-black hairpiece, and wearing his old Number 19) stepped to the microphone, removed his spectacles (the General’s idea—adds seriousness) to wipe at an eye with the back of his big left paw, and then proceeded to express his gratitude, first to General Oakhart, for granting him amnesty and a chance to begin life anew; then to Mrs. Trust, for going to bat for him with the General; and then to the American people, who by giving him a second chance, attested to nothing less than their faith in mankind itself … Then he told them what he had seen and what he had learned in his ten years of exile. It was not the story he had told to the General and Mrs. Trust, but one devised for public consumption by the three of them. It had mostly to do with “our greatest natural resource, the kids of America, this country’s future and its hope.” In his guilt and his shame, said Gamesh, he had wandered the length and breadth of the land under a number of aliases—Bill Smith, Bob White, Jim Adams—working for weeks and months at a time as dishwasher, handyman, grocery clerk, and farmhand; he had lived beneath forty-watt bulbs in rooming houses in each of the forty-eight states, lonely as a man could be, without a friend in the world, except, except for “the kids.” At the end of the work day, having downed his bowl of chili at the counter of the local greasy spoon, he would step out into the street and listen. For what? For the sound of the ball striking the bat, or landing with a whack in the pocket of a catcher’s mitt. On many a night he had walked a mile just to watch a bunch of kids batting a taped-up ball around. Was he even alive in those years, other than during those twilight hours on the sandlots of America? Did his heart stir otherwise? No, no—the remaining twenty-three hours of the day and night he was a corpse embalmed in shame. “Hey, mister,” they’d call over to him as he stood on the sidelines smoking his two-cent after-dinner cigar, “wanna ump?” “Hey, mister, fungo some out to us, hey?” “Hey, mister, ain’t that right? Ain’t Gil Gamesh the greatest that ever lived?” “Walter Johnson!” “Gil Gamesh!” “Rube Waddell!” “Gil Gamesh!” “Grover Alexander!” “No, Gamesh! Gamesh! Gamesh!” Dangerous as it was for this man who wished to be forgotten by America to come anywhere near a pitcher’s mound, it was simply beyond him sometimes not to give a youngster in need a little advice. “Here, boy, do it this way,” and taking the ball from the little pitcher’s hand, he’d show him how to set the curveball spinning. Oh, there were idyllic summer nights in small Middle Western towns when he just couldn’t resist, when he would rear back with that taped-up lopsided ball and hurl a perfect strike into the mitt of the twelve-year-old catcher—in the process (Gil added, with a tender laugh) knocking him onto his twelve-year-old fanny. Oh, the mouths of those youngsters sure hung open then! “Hey, who are you anyway, mister?” “Nobody,” Gil answers, “Bob White, Bill Smith, Jim Adams…” “Hey, know who he looks a little like, guys? Hey, guys, know who he is?” But by then Gil would be shambling off to the sidelines, headed for his rooming house, there to pack up and move on out to some place new, a strange town where he could live another day, another week, another month, as an anonymous drifter … Then, said Gil, the war came. He went around after Pearl Harbor trying to enlist, but always they would ask to see his birth certificate and always he would refuse to show it; oh, he had one all right, only it did not say Bob or Bill or Jim—it said, for all the world to see, this here is Gil Gamesh, the man who hated his fellow man. Then one day down in Winesburg, Ohio, unable to bear any longer his life as a lonely grotesque, he turned that self-incriminating document over to the recruiting sergeant. “Yep, he’s me,” he finally admitted—and the fellow turned red, white, and blue and immediately ran back to show the thing to his commanding officer. For over an hour Gil sat in that office, praying that his exile had ended—instead, the sergeant came back with a captain and a major at his side and handed Gil a little card stamped U, meaning that as far as the U.S. government was concerned he was and forever would be an “Undesirable.” The major warned him that if he did not present the card to his draft board whenever they might call him up for induction, he would be liable for arrest and imprisonment. Then the officers withdrew, and while the Undesirable stood there wondering where he might steal a belt to hang himself with, the sergeant, in a whisper, asked if he might have his autograph.
Months of wandering followed, months too desperate to describe—Black Hawk, Nebraska; Zenith, Minnesota; up in Michigan; Jefferson, Mississippi; Lycurgus, New York; Walden, Massachusetts … One night he found himself in Tri-City—it had taken a decade to wend his way back to the scene of the crime. There he waited outside Tycoon Park for a glimpse of the great lady of baseball, Angela Whittling Trust. It was she whom he begged to intercede in his behalf. “For I knew then,” said Gil, “that if I could not regain my esteem and my honor in the world whose rules I had broken and whose traditions I had spat upon, I would be condemned to wander forever, a stranger and an outcast, in this, my own, my native land. Of course I knew my pitching days were over, but what with the war raging and so many major leaguers gone, I thought perhaps I might be taken on as a bullpen catcher, as someone to throw batting practice, as a batboy perhaps … Gentlemen, I did not dream, I did not dare to dream—” et cetera and so forth, until he came around again to the kids of America, who were his inspiration, strength, salvation, and hope. To them he owed his redemption—to them he now committed heart and soul.
ONE MAN’S OPINION
by Smitty
Talking to Myself
“And not a word about Mike the Mouth. Has anyone happened to notice!”
Look, that was a decade ago. Isn’t it a sign of human goodness and mercy to be able to forget about what happened to the other guy ten years back? Besides, Mike the Mouth is dead by now anyway. Or else out there still in the boondocks, demanding some nutcake’s version of Justice. Be reasonable, Smitty. So Gamesh robbed him of his voice—the old geezer happened to rob Gil of something too, remember? A perfect perfect game. Look, Smitty, don’t you believe in people changing for the better? Don’t you believe in human progress? Why don’t you see the good in people sometimes, instead of always seeing the bad?
“I’m not talking about good men or bad men,” said Smitty, signaling for another round for the two of them. “I’m talking about madmen.”
Oh sure, everybody in this world is cracked, except you know who.
“Not everybody,” said Smitty. “Just the crackpots who run it. Crackpots, crooks, cretins, creeps, and criminals.”
You left out cranks�
��how come? Cranks who write columns and cry crocodile tears. Maybe you scribblers worry too much.
“If we don’t, who will?”
What the h. do you think you are, anyway? The unacknowledged legislator of mankind?
“Well, that was one man’s opinion.”
Whose, Smith? Yours?
“No. Fella name a’ Percy Shelley.”
Never heard of him.
“Well, he said it.”
Well, don’t believe everything you hear.
“I don’t. But what about what I don’t hear?”
What’s that?
“A word, a single word.” said Smitty, “about Mike the Mouth,” and called sharply this time to the waiter for drinks for himself and his friend.
Said Frank Mazuma: “Gamesh? Great gimmick. Why don’t I think of things like that? Who’d they get to coach at first, Babyface Nelson?”
FIRST DAY BACK IN THE BIG TIME
Gentlemen, the name is Gil Gamesh. I am the manager who is replacing the gentle Jolly Cholly Tuminikar, who himself replaced the saintly Ulysses S. Fairsmith. My lecture for today is the first in our spring training series on the subject of Hatred and Loathing. Today’s talk is entitled “Ha Ha.”
Let me begin by telling you that I think you gentlemen are vermin, cowards, weaklings, milksops, toadies, fools, and jellyfish. You are the scum of baseball and the slaves of your league. And why? Because you finished last by fifty games? Hardly. You are scum because you do not hate your oppressors. You are slaves and fools and jellyfish because you do not loathe your enemies.
And why don’t you? They certainly loathe you. They mock you, they ridicule you, they taunt you; your suffering moves them not to tears, but to laughter. You are a joke, gentlemen, in case you haven’t heard. They laugh at you. To your face, behind your back, they laugh and they laugh and they laugh.
