The Crowd Sounds Happy

by Nicholas Dawidoff

  I put the record on the turntable and the voice came squalling out “Why, why, why, why,” coarse, jittery, and echoey with strain as though Costello’d got himself locked inside the laundry room and was deeply pissed off about it. What exactly did he have on his mind? Well, he was frustrated (“I can’t do it anymore and I’m not satisfied”). And he was trying to get past it (“I used to be disgusted; now I try to be amused”). And he wasn’t having much luck with the result that he may have been boiling over (“I don’t know how much more of this I can take”). The man was a complete malcontent, swarming with bitterness, emasculated by faithless women, longing for revenge against all the fools, deceived, lost, hurt, the angriest guy in the world shouting “I’m not angry anymore.” All this, and the added pressure of trying to stay safe by keeping everything under wraps (“If they knew how I felt they’d bury me alive”). I found this hostility vastly reassuring.

  I had the impression that I was touching a strange region out there, with a county road lined by telegraph poles disappearing into a horizon somewhere far away where the people more like me were living. I played My Aim Is True over and over, singing along with Elvis—“I could tell you that I like your sensitivity when you know it’s the way that you walk”—sometimes guessing at the slurred lyrics. Even when I did get them right for sure, they tended to have such a pithily opaque finish that I had no idea what they meant. (“Red dogs under illegal legs”?) But I understood everything. Here stood one bold man unafraid of showing his hand to the cruel world. He was combusting with fierce desires and sneaky feelings, and, guilt-stricken as he might have been about some of it, he felt worse that his undesirable self just wasn’t going to get satisfied tonight, this month, or probably ever. Listening to the record, I was not specifically conscious of why I might be drawn to Costello. But the general fact of it was this: I, a person so frequently unaware of my own state of mind, so doggedly disconnected from my true experience of life that I didn’t even know that I was especially angry, was not angry anymore. I was ecstatic.

  If rock ’n’ roll really could, as the rock stars promised, offer a young guy deliverance, set him free, the Red Sox seemed to have the opposite effect on me. When the Red Sox wasted a scoring opportunity with a base-running mistake by Rick Miller or a clumsy swing by Butch Hobson at what the broadcasters told me was “a hanging curve that Butch really wishes he had back,” it would take me a while to get past the unnecessary failure. Sometimes I thought on and off about it for hours. I could become enmeshed in this kind of lamenting even when the Red Sox were leading the game, because I couldn’t forget that they ought to be ahead by more. These regrets were most tenacious when the Red Sox broke down and lost a game they’d been about to win. Only then could I ever admit that I’d expected a win, and the way I knew was because of the reluctance involved in divesting myself of what I’d prematurely begun to savor. One method for coming to terms involved a little internal sermonizing—thinking to myself how “unforgivably careless” it was of them to squander something so difficult to achieve. Yet even after I believed myself to be reconciled to the game that was frittered away, I would display signs that were to the contrary. For days, chirring through my mind was what the team record “should be” along with what it actually was.

  Where the Red Sox walked, I foresaw only danger. When the Red Sox got many runs ahead of an opponent, I would wish for them to cease, not plate any more, for there seemed to be a moral risk to scoring too much, whereby if you were gluttonous this one day, it would cost you in the future. It was a logic of sin and economy, for it also stood to reason that there were only so many runs available in a season, and I hoped to make the supply last as long as possible. I was the sort of worried fan who went out of the room only when my team was batting, when nothing terrible could happen. If the Red Sox lost to a weak team, and even when they won imperfectly, I fretted, certain it promised ill for later in the season when the schedule would grow more challenging. Baseball being, after all, a game of simple justice where teams must earn their ups—merit the privilege of hitting—I wanted the Red Sox not only to win, but to deserve to win. When they lost, part of what consoled me was the righteous sense that on this day they were unworthy. Curiously, I did not hold other teams to this fierce, punitive standard. If Red Sox opponents made even egregious mistakes, I had no problem regarding them yet as fully puissant. Indeed, when I would think through the names of all the Red Sox American League rivals, I detected latent menace in each club, endowed all of them, from Toronto to Milwaukee to Texas to California, with lethal guerrilla powers. I nurtured a proactive fatalism even though year after year the Red Sox had a winning record. And yet, inconsistently, I also always had aspirations. Ready as I always was to be disappointed by the Red Sox, when they went ahead and did disappoint, I was dimayed in a way that suggested I had not been ready at all.

  On days when, for some reason, I missed listening to the Red Sox game and didn’t know whether they’d won or lost, as soon as I returned home I hurried to my Chronomatic 9. The most expedient way then to get a score was by turning on WCBS 88 and waiting for the twice-hourly sports report at 11 and 41 minutes past. When the news anchor said “time for sports” and threw it to the sports update man, who began to run through the results, I was clenched in suspense, gauging his inflections for clues, trying to know before I knew, looking over at the spines on my bookshelf across the room to see if the first letter that caught my eye was an L or a W, buzzing with negative clairvoyance, expecting a loss and yet hoping anyway for a win. If the Red Sox opponent’s name was said first, I flinched as though my bare foot had landed on a protruding floor nail, though I knew that sometimes the sentence would unfurl in a happy way, with “Oakland lost to Boston 6–3,” rather than the dreaded “Chicago 7, Boston 1.” Even when I already knew that the Red Sox had won, if I happened to turn on WCBS and hear the results being announced, I’d still get a little tense until the winning score was repeated and I was reassured that nothing had somehow changed with the information venue. When the Red Sox lost a few games in a row, it crossed my mind that they would never win again. When they did win again, I would wonder: why was it so hard all the other times? I was always sadder after a loss than I was happy following a win.

  The morning after listening to a Red Sox game on the radio, during a free period at school I would go to the library, sit down with the newspaper in one of the soft chairs over by the rear window, and read the Red Sox box score, the tabulated numerical summary of the previous day’s game. There was something soothing about revisiting the game in agate now that the results were not in doubt. The streamlined box scores of the 1970s were nothing like the plump rectangles of today with the generously compiled up-to-date batting averages, earned run averages, and other premium statistics. As I read, I would often think how simple and clear a box score was, such a cunningly concentrated representation of truthful events. Every day came another tidy installment of new numbers to puzzle over, and, by reading them faithfully, I could try to decode what the game had meant.

  Along the way there were the pleasures of watching individual Red Sox players accumulate spectacular statistics. When Dennis Eckersley won another game or struck out a farrago of Baltimore Orioles without walking more than a batter, that he was setting himself apart in this way, making himself remarkable, gave me a surge of satisfaction. The satisfaction came in noticing right along, appreciating the achievement as it became itself. And likewise, if Jim Rice was on a hot streak, each day when I looked at the jagged transcription of letters and digits that made up the box scores, my eye first found Rice’s line, and should it be filled with threes and fours and fives, images would bloom in my head of long-traveling home runs, of the opposing pitchers executing fouettés to see what Rice had done to them this time, of all the base runners he was driving in getting a little fatigued by so much cardiovascular activity. There was also the whimsical uplift when they did something out of character: a home run for diminutive Jerry Remy, a triple for G
ary Allenson, who ran—and looked—like his nickname, Hardrock.

  The list of Boston names made me happy—most of them. As I read Renko and Rainey I would think that the men operating the Red Sox must be as aware as I was how the fatal paucity of pitching always doomed the team, and I would wonder why these administrators didn’t try harder to address the annual flaw. Even so, I knew that each year there was the possibility of a miracle, though a narrow possibility. This is how much I was with the Red Sox: I expected them to fail in the end, and yet every day I gave them my attention.

  Baseball is a game of failure and it’s those who can endure failure who succeed at it. By then I knew that the constancy of my commitment to the Red Sox would weather whatever loss and disappointment I might experience with them. The real pleasure of following the Red Sox came from the sense of how each game fit in the season-long unfolding of events. It was a private investigation I was conducting, in which my constant ambition was to see the past in terms of the future—all the games and all the numbers gradually justifying a narrative that by late September would solve the deeper mystery of the troubled nature of my team. That the Red Sox might be attractive to me because they were disappointing was something I did not linger on. There was, however, a sense of accomplishment in having chosen a team that made itself challenging to support and a satisfaction in knowing that I could stand it.

  Later, I would regard these Red Sox immersions as a discovery of meaning, my first realization that the best relationships in life are those into which I could put more and more of myself. By virtue of my commitment to the Red Sox, I could see my understanding of baseball deepening. I was gaining expertise, which made the game more enjoyable. I also felt closer to the team, a familiarity that was something like intimacy insofar as one aspect of intimacy is making yourself vulnerable, revealing your vulnerabilities. When the Red Sox played badly, I became angry with them, might even act badly myself, shouting at the radio, glowering at the newspaper, brooding. I held them to high account, and if I learned that their play had been not only undignified, but inept, even farcical, or that a player had misbehaved—abandoned his civility—I felt outrage, the familiar implication. But even for those upsetting moments I was grateful. Being able to express disappointment is such a vital element of love.

  Even after twenty years in the classroom, in September my mother still had an annual teaching nightmare. Sally and I knew them all. In one, she saw herself standing before her new classes completely unprepared. Another year, she dreamed of being forced against her will to be in the school basement as her students sat upstairs in her third floor classroom waiting for her. A voice in a third dream told her she was too structured and must refurnish her classroom with modular sofas that would spread the students out across the room, some with their backs to her. Then one year she dreamed she was made to teach advanced mathematics, which she knew next to nothing about. After she’d successfully bluffed her way through the first class and her students were filing out of the room, she thought, I don’t have to suffer like this, and woke up. The morning following her dreams she would be shaking her head in relief, laughing, enthusing “reality can never be that bad,” telling us how the dream had “scared the daylights out of me” and how “it went through me like wine through water,” shrugging off the intruders, reassuring herself, gathering her resolve for the long year ahead.

  We never saw her on Mondays. During the school day, her students handed in the papers they’d written over the weekend, and then in the afternoon she returned to her classroom and read them, covering the margins with red corrections and comments and arrows and exclamation marks, keeping her third floor light on deep into the night, even if snow was piling up outdoors, as she made her way through every submission so the students would get these stories and essays back on Tuesday while they were still fresh in their minds. I never glimpsed any of her work on these papers, never saw the papers at all, because they never came home. “I tell my students that their writing is a private thing, and I mean it,” she said. “They have to trust me that those papers will never be seen outside of that classroom unless they decide to show them to somebody.” It’s easier for a parent to gain the confidence of other people’s teenagers, but not much easier. My mother was the toughest person I knew and also the most frangible. She was stern, touchy, and tenderhearted, a person who could seem aloof and strict until her heart went into her mouth at something and she had to wipe her eyes. At school my mother was all business, nobody’s pal. She expected the best from her students because she wanted the best for them. She did not banter in the hallways like some teachers, cool teachers, the teachers to whom yearbooks were dedicated. Yet when it was time to ask for college recommendations, more students requested letters from her than from anybody else. The students were aware that she understood them with the same penetrating grasp that she displayed when she told them about characters in literature. As she would have said, “All of them mean the world to me.” Years later, I would learn that she was also frequently the teacher in whom students would confide behind a closed door when they were really in trouble, needed somebody who could be trusted to listen and then offer advice without judging them.

  For as long as we can remember, my sister and I have been running into ex–Mrs. Dawidoff charges who want to tell us that she was the teacher who changed their lives. Her work didn’t pay her well compared with what the parents of most of her students earned, and that modest remuneration confused me. It seemed so arbitrary what the world valued, whom it rewarded with large sums of money. And yet I believed that it was not arbitrary, that there must be a moral explanation for why some people had grown up to be wealthy and comfortable and why my gifted, driven, exacting mother was poor.

  My mother didn’t think the world owed her any favors. Truly on her own, without any meaningful community of support that I could see, she carried on, meeting every obligation like a Russian. That she could discover clothes she liked on the racks at Goodwill was a victory of thrift. When it was pointed out to her that as a divorcée holding a job she was a true Liberated Woman, she had impatient words for the Movement: “Those Women’s Libbers with all their talk about careers are doing a beautiful job of undervaluing what it means to be a good mother.” Her conversations with me contained references to those who were far worse off than I, children in India, children in Dickens, children during the Great Depression, children named Joad. I aspired to her example, but in some helix of emotion, I could also not stop myself from feeling disappointed in the world, being at once hurt by the woes of my adolescence and yet aware of how petty they seemed to be.

  With a friend and his father from New Haven, I attended a summer evening game between the Yankees and Red Sox in New York, my first time at Yankee Stadium. The enormous ballpark was gray and unruly as a storm at sea, filled with squalling waves of people. At first it all seemed exciting, the big game between the two famed adversaries, but after Jim Rice stroked a home run for Boston and I cheered, somebody behind me smeared my head and back with hot dog mustard. I looked behind; there were only adults, their faces blank with contempt. As the game continued, it was as though they were all salivating for victory while the spit turned. There were many fights between fans broken up by policemen who bundled huge angry men from the premises. At one point, everybody around me craned his neck to watch as a spectator was saved from falling out of the upper deck. A friend who went to a Red Sox game against the Yankees in New York at the time reported that he saw a group of Yankee fans tear off a Boston fan’s trousers: “They depanted him!”

  These brief, random events confirmed an impression: the Yankees and their fans were bullies, brutes, something dangerous, humiliating, and out of control, and I conceived for them a raw and primitive hatred. And what made it all much worse was that the Yankees were now always better than the Red Sox.

  The relentless year-in, year-out futility of it all was enormously frustrating, and there were times I’d think I couldn’t get away from the malign w
eight of the Yankees. When once more the Yankees overtook the Red Sox for another lost game in another lost season, although I’d expected it, I couldn’t believe it, and a powerless fury would rip through my body: devoured again.

  Since the Red Sox couldn’t beat the Yankees, it was enormously important to me that the Red Sox and I be more virtuous than the Yankees and their fans. To this end I worked out elaborate, Manichaean, Yankee-invalidating proofs in which the Red Sox personified goodness and the Yankees and their boorish, free-spending owner George Steinbrenner were the inimical force. The Yankees might win every year, but only because they needed to win too much. They were unfair, the instruments of a supernatural doom that destined them to prevail no matter what the Red Sox did. The Yankee and Red Sox players were men unknown to me, hailing from towns all over America, only wearing shirts that said Boston and New York, and yet by now my feelings about them were becoming stronger than my feelings for many real people in my life. Sometimes I became so emotional on the subject I could scarcely recognize myself; they were making me a different person. Or was it some other effect they were having?

  There is a strange resourcefulness to childhood, an ability to find solutions to the overwhelming problems in your life, problems that often you can’t begin to understand. While it was destructive to spend so much time reviling the Yankees for taking away my hopes and making me helpless, it was also useful to despise them. It never occurred to me that when I thought so hard trying to explain what made the Yankees evil, I was working on this as a way of avoiding other dreads, the dread of going to New York, the dread of what New York could mean about me. There was something festering down there, a family malediction in my father whom I’d once loved but who now terrified me and made me ashamed—and then ashamed for being ashamed because it wasn’t his fault. Once he glanced down at my wrists, unusually thin and elongated, and showed me his, said I had “the Dawidoff-man wrists.” That I was of him and might become him was too much to bear. I was holding it together by not thinking about that. Except every month, just when it would seem to me that I had my own life up in New Haven, I’d go boomeranging back into New York and remember where I came from. Then I’d return home and New Haven with the wind in my face wouldn’t look very good either. The Gerschenkrons were dying. My uncle was lost. My cousins were sad. Everything I came from was rotting. Better to ward off the uncertainty by trying to be so good and so normal nobody could mistake me for something else. But damping down all the emotions was exhausting. That the brutish and ill-intentioned Yankees were annually refuting my need to see the world as a place where goodness would be rewarded terrified and infuriated me. It was comforting to be so angry at them. Now it seems impossible to me that, through all those years, it never crossed my mind that my feelings for the Yankees might be affected by my feelings about anything else in New York, but it didn’t. I just hated them. With my Yankee rages, I could reveal the inner self I never showed.