Then I feel the pliers grip the end of the nail on my right index finger, and cold sweat pours from me, and I feel the tug of the pliers and then the pain begins—and I sing. I sing like the Vienna Boys’ Choir. I empty my head like a box of cornflakes. I tell them everything from our deepest military secrets to my shoe size.
And I anguish. Because, though I realize this is only a daydream, I am afraid that if such a thing ever really happens, I will play my part poorly. I am afraid that I will crack during torture. I am ashamed that I cannot measure up to a captive spy I once read about, whose lips were still sealed after losing all ten fingernails.
Sometimes in my fearful fantasies my captors by-passed torture and simply marched me out to the firing squad. But I never got shot. Even as six rifle sights met at my trembling heart—“Ready! Aim!”—I call out to the commanding officer, “Wait a minute!”
The commanding officer pauses.
“There’s something you don’t know. If you shoot me you’ll never find out.”
The officer calls off the guns. He expects me to divulge vital military secrets, but the information I offer is purely personal. I tell him something about his wife, his family back home, something he could never have known without me. He is overcome with gratitude. He dismisses the firing squad. And I have discovered something: Words can save me.
Despite all the attention I paid to warfare, I was never in a real fight. Around sixth grade this began to bother me. I saw other kids flailing and clubbing, tearing each other’s shirts to shreds, trading bloody noses, and I said to myself, “Hey, why not me?” I began to feel deprived because my right hand had never known the feel of fist on chin. I felt a growing need to hit somebody.
But who? I could think of no one I wanted to hit. And apparently nobody wanted to hit me. Every day I walked to and from school unchallenged. I was a bur in no one’s saddle. A likable bloke.
However, the prospect of going through life punchless was too strong to ignore. I looked around my classroom. Who was as small as I, or better yet, even smaller? Who was unlikely to hit me back? Who needed hitting?
There was only one answer: Joey Stackhouse.
Joey Stackhouse was skinny. Mash down his blond pompadour and he was maybe half an inch shorter than I. He had a narrow, foxy face. But his main feature was teeth. He was a walking warning against not brushing. When he smiled, you found yourself looking at all the colors in your crayon box. Plus his clothes were shabby.
For several days I hung close to Joey, alert for an offending remark or gesture. He remained obstinately harmless, as friendly as ever. It became clear that I myself would have to manufacture the momentum for the punch.
I worked myself into a snit. I convinced myself that anybody with teeth like that was asking for it. One day he walked home with me after school. We were on the 700 block of George Street, close to my house. I picked a fight with him, accused him of something, I don’t remember what. Then I hit him. I balled my fist and swung, and when my knuckles landed—thock—against his chin bone, I was as surprised as when my stone hit Johnny Seeton.
As punches go, it was dainty, more tap than wallop, my intention being to match a punch’s form, not force. I’m sure that, physically, he barely felt it. But a punch has a double impact, as I was about to learn, and only the first lands on the chin. Joey’s eyes widened. He stood there staring at me with such wild astonishment that I knew at once he had not, not in a million years, been asking for it. He started to cry. He blurted out, “Why’d you do that?” and ran back down George Street.
If ever I had notions of becoming a warrior, they died that day as I turned the other way and walked home alone. It has been more than forty years since I hit Joey Stackhouse—the first and last person I ever punched—and it remains the only taste of war I ever needed.
Lash
La Rue
Early on I learned, without anyone actually telling me, that in this world it is not enough just to be. You have to be something.
So around the age of five I decided to be a cowboy.
Cowboys rode three trails into my life: (1) The Garrick Movie Theater downtown, which showed Western double features on Saturday afternoons, (2) comic books, and (3) Frontier Playhouse.
Frontier Playhouse came on TV every weeknight at six, right after Howdy Doody and right in the middle of dinnertime. I was not allowed to eat in the living room, where the TV was, but I was allowed to move my chair to the doorway between the kitchen and dining room. I placed my dinner on the seat, knelt down, and watched the nightly cowboy movie while eating on my knees. It’s a wonder I could see the platter-size screen at the far end of the house.
From TV and movies and comics I knew lots of cowboys: Roy Rogers, Gene Autry, Hopalong Cassidy, Lash La Rue, Red Ryder, Tom Mix, the Lone Ranger, Tex Ritter, Ranger Joe, Tim McCoy, Hoot Gibson. And horses: Trigger, Topper, Silver, Champion, Tony, Buttermilk.
When my friends and I played cowboys, almost everyone wanted to be Roy Rogers. With his fringed shirts and silky neckerchief and white hat and golden horse, how could you not want to be Roy? I was usually the first to call out, “I’ll be Roy Rogers!”
But when I was alone and my secrets came peeping out from their hiding places, I knew there was a cowboy I wanted to be even more than Roy Rogers. I wanted to be Lash La Rue. From hat to boots, Lash La Rue dressed all in black. But that wasn’t what made Lash La Rue special—it was the whip. He carried it coiled at his belt, and with it he did most everything the others did with their six-shooters. Was a bad guy reaching for his gun? Lash was quicker with his whip. A flick of the wrist, the whip uncoils—leather lightning!—darts ten, twenty, thirty feet across the dust to snatch the gun, barely clear of its holster, from the bad guy’s hand. Is the bad guy running away? The whip catches him at the ankles, trips and hogties him, ready for the sheriff. The rawhide tongue could lick the spit from a horse’s lips or kiss it on the ear.
Lash La Rue. I recognized him as “cool” before I ever knew the word.
I loved the West. The songs: “Home on the Range,” “Tumbling Tumbleweeds,” “Red River Valley.” Cattle drives. Sarsaparilla. (The movies made sarsaparilla seem like liquid fire. Imagine my surprise, years later, when I drank my first glass—and discovered it was root beer.) Stagecoach holdups. Box canyons. Harmonicas and campfires and coyotes howling in the night.
I had an armament Roy Rogers himself would have been proud to own: twin golden pistols in twin white leather holsters. My white leather gun belt had a dozen little leather loops to hold a dozen red wooden bullets. Of course, the bullets were just for show. The real ammo was caps, five rolls to a box. They could be bought at one of two grocery stores, Freilich’s next door or Teufel’s across the street.
I drew pictures of good guys and bad guys shooting it out. I considered myself an expert at drawing horses, but my favorite part I always saved for last: the orange, red, and yellow streaks that indicated gunfire crisscrossing the picture.
My early cowboy artwork.
I practiced my draw until it was as fast as Tim McCoy’s. I twirled my golden guns on my fingers. I drank my Ovaltine from a Ranger Joe mug. I played the harmonica. I yodeled.
And then one day in third grade I went all the way. When I woke up, instead of getting dressed as usual, I put on my cowboy outfit: ten-gallon hat, studded shirt, jodhpurs, golden guns, boots and spurs. My mother must have thought, Oh, no! as she heard my spurs clanking toward the breakfast table. I drew plenty of stares on my three-block walk to school.
Such was the class facing our teacher, Miss Davis, that morning: twenty-five pupils and one cowboy. She probably checked her calendar to see if this was Halloween. I remember her looking down at me in the first row, smiling gently, and saying, “Jerry, would you like to do something for us?” Apparently I did, for I stood, faced the class, and serenaded them with “I Got Spurs That Jingle Jangle Jingle.” And I shook my boots.
A couple of summers later I had a chance to really live the cowboy life. I h
ad gotten a pup tent for Christmas. Now I could camp out, pretend I was on a cattle drive, pretend our backyard was a tumbleweed range somewhere in Texas or Wyoming.
I invited my other best friend, Roger Adelman, to join me. We laid out our blankets in the tent. We talked and played card games, and as the sun went down we turned on a battery-powered lantern and played some more. Eventually it was time to go to bed. We crawled under our covers and turned off the lantern.
An hour later I was still awake. I had never known it got so dark on the range. And so quiet. No cows mooing, no coyotes calling, only Roger’s breathing. And the ground—even with a blanket it was so hard. How did cattle stand it? In vain I kept trying to sleep. I felt immense and bristling, the only soul awake on the planet. I longed for a night-light.
When I couldn’t stand it any longer, I shook Roger awake. Five minutes later he was trudging homeward while I climbed into my bed, in my bedroom. Alas, I was not at home on the range after all. I was strictly a living-room cowboy.
Ashes
in the Grass
Two years after wearing my cowboy getup to school, I donned an outfit of a different sort. It was a Saturday morning in September, and I was getting ready for my first organized athletic event: a grade-school football league game. First I pulled shoulder pads over my undershirt; then I put on my number 15 blue and white football shirt; then my football pants with knee pads; then my sneakers; then my football helmet. Looking in the mirror, I could hardly find myself in all that armor.
I was a nervous fifth grader. Most of the players would be sixth graders, so I did not protest when my mother offered to go with me. We walked down George to the dead end and along the dirt path to the park. The field was swarming with kids from the six public grade schools in town, and none of them looked like me. No helmets, no shoulder pads—just T-shirts and jeans (which we called dungarees). The only thing we had in common was sneakers.
What had I expected? I had known this was two-hand touch football.
I was mortified. I dared not approach my team, Hartranft Elementary. My mother and I stood at a distance, watching the game in awkward silence. I prayed no one would recognize me.
Officially, then, my athletic career began a week later, when I arrived dressed like everybody else, and without a mother in tow.
My cowboy boots, spurs still attached, grew dusty on the floor of my bedroom closet. The twin white holsters and golden guns hung over one of the maple posts at the foot of my bed. As the years went by, the red toy bullets disappeared one by one, until only empty ammo loops were left.
I had given up cowboys for quarterbacks, horses for stitched horsehide. No longer were my seasons summer, fall, winter, and spring but baseball, football, and basketball. I was a sports nut.
Sports had taken their hold on me, even at age 6. I’m getting the autograph of Gil Dodds, a mile-run champion (and minister).
Perhaps it was inevitable. Not long after I belted my last ball over the landlady’s fence on Marshall Street, my father had begun taking me to Norristown High School games, basketball at first, then football and track and field. He was a ticket collector for football games, scorekeeper for basketball, and would hold those jobs for over fifty years. The world of sports had simply been waiting for me to grow into it.
We took our sports seriously, my friends and I, getting up games to fill every spare moment. Lunchtime at school, for example. We had an hour and a half, as I recall, since Hartranft had no cafeteria and all students went home to eat. I ran the three blocks to my house, wolfed down my lunch, and ran back, leaving me with an hour and fifteen minutes to play basketball on the playground. It’s a wonder the teacher didn’t pass out deodorant when afternoon lessons began.
We played wherever we could: alleys, streets, playgrounds, the park, even living rooms. But there was one special place. My old friend Roger Adelman, in a letter to me, describes it perfectly:
“This field was unique. We played baseball there, but it really wasn’t set up for baseball. There wasn’t a right field, since what would have been right field was occupied by the stand of spear weeds which, for some mystic reason, no one would (or could) cut down (although it was burned down several times by Bill Zollers, the neighborhood firebug). So all players had to bat right-handed—or promise not to pull the ball to right field. The outfield—left and center—was full of weeds and rough spots but was playable. The infield was in good shape because Johnny Rizzuto and I mowed the grass regularly. We also marked the foul lines with white ashes from the coal-burning furnaces in our houses.
“Left field was a special place. The boundary of deep left field was the dump. If you hit one into the dump in the air, you got a home run. If the ball took one bounce into the dump, you got a double. If it rolled in, you got a single. Only qualified players were assigned to left field: fast enough to stop those bouncers and rollers from going into the dump, brave enough to run right up to the edge of the dump and snag a liner headed into it (I have a memory of Pickles Noblett taking a header into the dump after a valiant try to stop a home run), and daring enough to go down into the dump to dig out a ball that ended up there. The dump had its own mystique—not to mention rats—and I am sure that, to this day, there are still a few hardballs there.”
I envied my playmates their nicknames. Besides Pickles Noblett, there were Boogie Batson, Yock Doyle, Booper O’Hara, and Buffalo Morris. My own nickname was Spit—their choice, not mine.
For my money, the best player of all was Jerry Fox. He was several years older than I, and a dead-end legend. He was not very fast, but he did not have to be, for he was magically elusive. This talent came most prominently into play in street football. Sometimes he would just stand there, the ball cradled in his arm, one foot on the bumper of a parked car, daring us to tag him. We reached for his arm—it was gone; for his stomach—gone. Each body part was under separate control, free to move in all directions. It was like trying to tag an eel. If Jerry Fox were a letter of the alphabet, he would have been an S. He was untouchable. His nickname said it all: “The Pro.”
Summers gave us time to gorge on sports. On a typical summer day I dropped my baseball glove into the chrome-plated basket of my bicycle and pedaled out the dirt path to the Little League field at the park. Other guys came from other directions. The rest of the day went like this: Play baseball until lunch, pedal home to eat, pedal back to the park (this time with basketball in bike basket), play basketball at park court until dinner, pedal home to eat, return for more basketball until dark.
Next day: Do it again.
I’m in the back row (with a cap), a finalist in a foul-shooting contest in the park (age 12, 1953). On my right is Dennis Magee, whose last name I gave to a character called Maniac.
Never
the
Monkey
In a green metal box in a bedroom closet, tucked into a fuzzy gray cotton pouch, lies the most cherished memento of my grade-school days. It is a gold-plated medal no bigger than a postage stamp. Inscribed on the back are the words “50-YARD DASH—CHAMPION.”
The medal came from the only official race I ever participated in. There were many unofficial ones …
“Race you to the store!”
“Last one in’s a monkey!”
“Ready … Set … Go!”
Like kids the world over, we raced to determine the fastest. In the early 1950s on the 800 block of George Street in the West End of Norristown, Pennsylvania, that was me. I was usually the winner, and never the monkey.
I reached my peak at the age of twelve. That summer I led the Norristown Little League in stolen bases. In an all-star playoff game I did something practically unheard of: I was safe at first base on a ground ball to the pitcher.
Some days I pulled my sneaker laces extra tight and went down to the railroad tracks. The cinders there had the feel of a running track. I measured off fifty or a hundred yards and sprinted the distance, timing myself with my father’s stopwatch. Sometimes, heading back to the starting
line, I tried to see how fast I could run on the railroad ties. Sometimes I ran on the rail.
It was during that year that I won my medal. I represented Hartranft in the fifty-yard dash at the annual track-and-field meet for the Norristown grade schools. The meet was held at Roosevelt Field, where the high school track and football teams played.
Favored to win the race was Laverne Dixon of Gotwals Elementary. “Froggy,” as he was known to everyone but his teachers, had won the fifty-yard dash the year before as a mere fifth grader. Surely he would win again. My goal was to place second.
When the starter barked, “Ready!” I got into position: one knee and ten fingertips on the cinder track. I knew what to do from the many meets I had attended with my father. I glanced to my left and right and saw nothing but shins—everyone else was standing. I could not have known it then, but the race was already mine.
I was off with the gun. My memory of those fifty yards has nothing to do with sprinting but rather with two sensations. The first was surprise that I could not see any other runners. This led to a startling conclusion: I must be ahead! Which led to the second sensation: an anxious expectation, a waiting to be overtaken.
I never was. I won.
Froggy Dixon didn’t even come in second. That went to Billy Steinberg, a stranger then, who would become my best friend in junior high school. He would also grow to be faster than I, as would many of my schoolmates. But that was yet to come. For the moment, as I slowed down and trotted into a sun the color and dazzle of the medal I was about to receive, I knew only the wonder of seven astounding seconds when no one was ahead of me.
The fifty-yard-dash champion for Hartranft Elementary (age 12, 1953).
Shortstop
From ages eleven to sixteen, if someone asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, I gave one of two answers: “A baseball player” or “A shortstop.”