Dead Languages Page 7
Denny’s Restaurant and Safeway Market weren’t playing up to par. Father soon emerged as the main attraction. When a batter took a called third strike, Father would parody the victim’s indignation. When a batter drew a walk, Father would run halfway to first base with him to speed things along. He was the only umpire working the game, so on balls hit to the outfield he’d run down the foul line to make sure the ball had been caught, and on balls hit to the infield he’d run to first base to be in position to decide. He signaled safe by spreading his arms and flapping them, as if readying for flight. He signaled out by jerking his thumb, and the entire right side of his body, down: an expression of disgust for all this drossy dirt. Between innings he juggled three baseballs in the air.
At one point he walked back to the screen and, not realizing who it was, told me to take my fingers off the wire because a foul tip might crush them. I said, “You’re doing great, Dad.” Later, while a new pitcher was warming up, he told me to run and get him a lime Sno-Cone. I was still quite mortified by Ls and said: “How about cherry, Dad? Cherry’s better.”
He said, “No, Jeremy, lime.”
I told the lady at the snack bar: lime. It took a while. All the colors of the lady’s face; all the colors of the people in line, the advertisements, the glass window, and the wooden counter; all the colors of the plastic wrappers, red and black licorice, pink, plain, and hot buttered popcorn; all the colors of the machines, the soft drink cups and the money melted into one sticky, greenish liquid in my mind as I struggled to say the word, all one smeared, acid mess, but I brought back a lime Sno-Cone and Father munched it down first chance he got.
He worked all day, four long games, ten in the morning until six at night, and at the last out of the last game the fans applauded. It was only light, polite, scattered applause and maybe they were only clapping for the winning team, but to me it was a thunderous ovation and they were thanking the umpire. I stood up behind the screen and joined them. I cheered for Father.
One of Father’s favorite baseball players was the old Brooklyn Dodger outfielder Pete Reiser, who had a nasty habit of crashing into cement trying to make the putout. Later that summer I was devising a complicated miniature golf course throughout the house to entertain my friend, Charles, who was flying up to spend the weekend. I took a break from landscaping the front nine to find Father dashing back and forth between the two freshly painted white walls of the living room. From one to the other he bounced, sullying the varnish, cursing his head, wailing, mutilating himself like Pete Reiser revved up to cartoon speed, and all I wondered, selfish soul, was whether this prisoner who was my father would get carted away before Charles arrived to attempt birdie putts from the rear hallway into Bruin’s water bowl. One of the few musical refrains I ever heard Father sing, and he sang it all the time, was a little ditty that went: “Don’t mess with Mr. In Between.” That mess looked to be just about complete. Mother drove him to Montbel in time for a late lunch.
8
SO FATHER’S ONLY arena of glory was the ballfield. Where was mine, then? That was what I wanted to know: where was mine? One of the more interesting phenomena of mumbling is that most stammerers can read aloud to themselves for hours without the slightest hint of hesitation, which suggests that the perplexity is neither biological nor chemical but preeminently social: one person’s failure to imagine himself in pleasant relation to another. I would sit on my bed in the early evening with the door closed, the blinds drawn, the lights off, and read aloud what I thought was the most beautiful passage in all literature—the introduction to The Quality of Courage, by Mickey Mantle. I would read it over and over again into the recorder, then play it back, and my voice would return high, soft, shy, girlish, but fluent: absolutely unbroken. Almost lyrical. And yet this was no triumph. It was only further isolation.
Mother especially felt this to be so. She snuck into my sound system and recorded a message that contained a few garbled words but could be transcribed without difficulty.
J, hi, it’s Mom. It seems to me that you’re a singularly walled-off little boy. I’ve had the experience of observing a young person crash through his protective wall and have only the most banal inner core to disclose.
Whom she was censuring here I haven’t a clue. Maybe some disinterested suitor from high school.
Not so in your case, J, I am convinced. Since I was at least twenty before I conceded the need for intimacy, you are ahead in the game.
I hadn’t conceded a thing and the act of communication has never struck me as a game.
But you will learn, as I did, that being available for intimacy means taking risks. Also, there are many facades that present themselves as intimacy, only that isn’t what they really are. But being really close to another person—open and trusting and caring—is an indispensable part of life. Don’t deny yourself that dimension in human relationships. As time moves along it turns out that closeness to others adds up to one’s number one treasure.
Mother didn’t seem to hear how hilarious it was to be lecturing about the crushing need for human warmth on a reel-to-reel Sony.
Until I was twelve I was, in a certain limited way and only in full profile, pretty. I did a little modeling for a toy company that advertised in the Jewish Welfare Fund Community Bulletin, which Father edited. Rather than pay me, which the toy magnate said would be vulgar, he’d let me choose a toy from the display shelves. By far my most cherished possession was a space mask that was a white helmet holding outsize green goggles and a red speaker that fit over the mouth. When you talked, your words had the quality of transmitted authority. Charles recently sent me a postcard with photographs of snakes on the front, and on the back the happy information that “four principal kinds of snakes need to be avoided: rattlesnake, cottonmouth, copperhead, and coral snake. A few rear-fanged snakes are poisonous, too, but less so than these. Of the harmless kinds many are of great benefit to mankind. Studying the complicated interdependence of animals and plants (ecology), we learn that the plant or animal that needs nothing does not exist.” The last ten words were underlined by Charles, who is now a Marxist transcendental meditator. As time moves along it turns out that closeness to others adds up to one’s number one buried treasure. All phonemes denote nothing but mere otherness.
In person, Mother suggested I might shed some of my neurasthenic self-consciousness if I pursued a selfless discipline such as politics. Integration of the schools was quite the rage at the time and Mother was researching a three-part series for The Nation on bussing in the Bay Area. This was my last year at Currier, which was opposed, on principle, to impurity. It was one of the only and certainly one of the oldest private grammar schools in the city. Although the board of directors was perfectly willing to accept, as they were known then, Negroes, it flatly refused to start offering full scholarships to promising six-year-olds just because they came from the wrong part of town. This effectively reduced the nonwhite population at Currier to none.
Mother not only promised to smear Currier in the first part of her article but also threatened to send me to a public school if I didn’t campaign, on a strict desegregation platform, for student body president. I didn’t want to run for student body president, I didn’t care if Currier didn’t enjoy Negroes, but I liked the school’s playing fields, its insular walls, and I wanted to stay for my final year, so I consented to become a candidate.
I think Mother was the first person ever to take a school election seriously. At Currier, elective office was pretty much the exclusive province of thoughtful, unattractive girls who wanted to earn a Block C and had nothing better to do with their afternoons than bang gavels on Formica tables or read aloud the extremely tedious minutes from last month’s extremely tedious meeting. This election was no exception. There were three presidential candidates, and Currier’s stand on desegregation hadn’t touched two of them. California didn’t have a state flower. One of the pet projects at Currier was to get everyone to write letters to our congressman, urging him
to lobby for the Shasta daisy as the state flower. Quite what stake Currier had in the Shasta daisy I never discovered, but Tracy Gordon campaigned on the solemn promise that by the end of her term the Shasta daisy would be flying on the flagpole or at least potted spectacularly on the governor’s front lawn. Patricia Hewitt was a little more circumspect. She was very fat and ran—but ran is the wrong word—on one issue: mandatory physical education was an infringement of her rights, one of which was to be obese. Alphabetically speaking, Zorn was last on the list.
In trouble caused, in attention received, in anger aroused, I was the only one in the campaign who counted. Misses Gordon and Hewitt found the actual act of electioneering beneath their contempt and refused to come down into the courtyard to solicit votes. The election was on Friday; speeches were on Thursday; we were encouraged to canvass on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday; I campaigned so hard I forgot I didn’t care. I distributed buttons that said on one side LET ’EM IN and on the other GIVE ’EM GOLD. I unfurled long banners that announced in orange HELP THEM HELP THEMSELVES: EDUCATE THE UNDERPRIVILEGED, which was meant as a reference to the poor tykes in the Mission District but which may have been misinterpreted as a confession of my own inadequacies. During recess I walked the halls with a cardboard sign—I’M A FREEDOM FIGHTER, ARE YOU?—hanging from my neck, and bought third-graders, who seemed old enough to enjoy the gesture but not old enough to judge it, cartons of milk and sugar cookies. Most of my posters were removed. Most of my buttons were edited to read LET ’EM SIN and GIVE ’EM MOLD, placed on my seat, with the pin up. I responded to the antagonism, though. I appreciated the hatred. No one had ever liked me at that school, I’d never fit in, and it was nice to see the antipathy out in the open. At night, Mother called every Currier parent in the phone book and excoriated racism.
All of this was only prologue to the speech. It was that I worried about, that which was giving me bad dreams. Mother suggested I write a speech that omitted all the sounds which were then so ominous to me (B, D, P, R, and L) and when I said that was impossible—“bussing,” for instance, “desegregation,” “president,” “race,” “love”—Mother said, “Love?” then said she could do it, she’d write it for me. No, I told her, I was writing my own speech and leaving in all the letters of the alphabet. I had no particular desire to stutter excessively before six hundred people, but I also had certain things I wanted to say and thought paraphrastic constructions would only occlude communication.
At breakfast on Thursday, Mother sang:
Today, oh, today’s the day
They’re giving the presidency away.
I don’t know what she thought she was doing. Maybe she thought her little carol was making light of the whole election or filling me with confidence. She kept repeating the rhyme, I wanted her to stop, and all I could say in response was: “No, Mom. The speeches are today. The election is tomorrow. The teachers like to have a day to warn the students against voting purely on the b-b-basis of who told the funniest jokes.”
My idea of breakfast was to hide behind a semicircle of cereal boxes, wrapping myself in a cocoon of sugar shock and upbeat promotional promises. Mother reached over a particularly tall box of Alpha-Bits to hand me a vitamin and sing:
Today, oh, today’s the day
They’re giving the presidency away.
She finally arrested her aria to ask if I’d give my speech while she finished her coffee and Beth also wanted to hear it, but I insisted the substance of my address remain secret until the general assembly. Mother was curiously acquiescent, so I marched off to school with my bag lunch and books in my satchel and, in my hands, in one of Mother’s glossy white folders, the text of my talk.
The upper playground at Currier was a steep cement hill and, when third-period classes were dismissed, the entire slope was filled with unfriendly faces. At the bottom of the bank was a row of chairs in which the candidates sat, and a microphone mounted on a podium at which they suffered. The presidency was not the only thing being given away that day. There were all the candidates for all the class offices; for boys’ athletic manager, who distributed the kickballs at recess; for girls’ athletic manager, who didn’t; for vice president, who had nothing whatsoever to do with the president; for secretary, who had to have nice handwriting; for secretary-at-arms, who had to have a nice left hook. All these aspirants came to the podium and spoke, and all their speeches were soporific. The speeches for president were last. Miss Hewitt delivered a lecture in favor of fatness. Miss Gordon tossed a bouquet of Shasta daisies to the audience. Mr. Kirby called me to the mike.
I don’t especially revere the poetry of Robert Frost, but I’ve always loved the way he stood in the snow in 1961 and tried to read a poem that the wind kept shaking out of his hands. He was so old, the glare was so strong, the poem was so corny. He kept trying to read “For John F. Kennedy His Inauguration” until he realized he didn’t need that piece of paper. He knew another poem. He let the page fly away and mumbled from memory. There was no snow the day I gave my speech, no wind, no senility, but there were boos when Zorn was introduced, suggestions that Zorn be sent to Zambia, shouts (which could hardly be contradicted) that Jeremy was a Jew. Although I didn’t toss away my address and speak from memory, I persevered. Amid catcalls and paper airplanes, I began.
Principal Kirby, Vice Principal Brinkley, Assistant Principal Wilkerson, Dean McCafferty, teachers, students, classmates, friends: good morning.
So far, so good. This was the standard opening. The audience liked nothing so much as the standard opening and the initial hostility dissipated into a more passive skepticism.
And it is a good morning, isn’t it? The sun’s shining, the sky’s blue, the fog’s far away. We’re happy. We—all of us gathered here today—are happy. We come from good homes, we have good parents, we wear good clothes, we read good books, we eat good food. We’re good. We’re happy. But on the other side of this city, ladies and gentlemen, in the Mission, in Hunters Point, in the Fillmore, the sun isn’t shining and the fog is thick. The boys and girls in those areas don’t wear good clothes. They don’t read good books. They don’t eat good food. They’re not happy. I urge us to do all we possibly can to make these poor people happy.
There are only a few times in my life I’ve been so excited that I lost my awareness of language, but this was one of them. It wasn’t just adrenaline or the articulation that is anger. It was some beautiful form of fear, an ethereal realm of complete panic in which the mind shut off, the mouth popped open, and words came of their own accord. I heard someone shout, “Yeah, they eat shit, but they drive Cadillacs,” and someone else project the same syllogism into what I took to be a rhetorical question—“If they’re so poor, why do they dress so fancy?”—but I couldn’t have stopped talking if I’d wanted to. Good words emerged from my mouth and were amplified for miles. A microphone is said to be very sexual. Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t. Who cares? All I know is I squeezed that thick, throbbing object in my fist and did what all of Mrs. Fletcher’s pamphlets on public speaking had so strongly encouraged me to do because it’s such incontrovertible evidence of the orator’s mastery over his situation. I walked away from the podium. Away. I picked the microphone off the podium, walked toward the audience, stood at the base of that huge hill, and finished my speech.
I urge us to accept little Negro boys and girls from the Mission, from Hunters Point, from the Fillmore, and I urge us to give them scholarships if they can’t afford to come to Currier, which they can’t. I think they can learn from us, but I think we can learn even more from them.
I hope you’ll let me tell a little story that points a moral in this direction. Most of you know I’m a very fast runner. This past summer, I ran every Saturday in the invitational track meet at CCSF. All my opponents were Negroes and, although I ran in the twelve-and-under, some of them weren’t twelve and some of them weren’t under. Some of them were more like sixteen. Every Saturday I ran only one race, the seventy-five-yard dash, and every Satur
day I won. I won by six, eight, ten yards. I forget my times.
At first there was what in the track-and-field world is called “bad blood” between me and my competition. They didn’t like the fact that I won so consistently and easily. They didn’t like the fact that I wasn’t a Negro. They told me to go back to Snob Hill, they claimed I was wearing illegal spikes, they told me my nose was an unfair advantage in the wind. But on the last Saturday of summer they finally admitted that they weren’t going to beat me and, after the race, they gathered around and asked me my name and bought me soft drinks and pinched my thighs in play. One boy showed me how to shake hands. Another boy asked me over to his house. I say: Let’s gather around them and ask them their names and pinch their thighs in play. Let’s show them how to shake hands. Let’s ask them over to our house. Accept Negroes at Currier. Support them with scholarships. Let ’em in, give ’em gold! Jeremy Zorn for President.
I thought I hit just the right grace note at the finish and began to bow when Mr. Kirby rushed up and grabbed me by the arm. At first I thought he was trying to congratulate me, then I thought he was trying to arrest me, then I realized what was going on. Third period immediately preceded lunch time, and when dozens of upperclassmen brought their bag lunches to the assembly no one had suspected any foul play, but now a good percentage of the male population of the fourth, fifth, and sixth grades were throwing a good percentage of their bag lunches at me. I think even some of the third-graders were throwing the sugar cookies that, in all good faith, I’d bought for them. The girls weren’t throwing things. They were calling me names I really don’t need to repeat. The microphone, which I’d left on the ground, screeched. Some students whistled, others popped bags, a lot of people were booing. But it was the older boys, my peers, who pelted me with apples, eggs, peanut butter sandwiches, bags of Fritos, animal crackers, carrots, cartons of milk. After a bullfight in Barcelona, this would have been an expression of admiration, even love, but, epilogue to a speech at Currier, it was something less than laudatory.