They chanted together: ‘I don’t shut up, I grow up. And when I look at you I throw up.’
‘Then your mother goes around the corner and licks it up,’ I said, and hauled ass out of
there, giving them the finger over my shoulder as I went. I never had any friends later on
like the ones I had when I was twelve. Jesus, did you?
12
Different strokes for different folks, they say now, and that’s cool. So if I say summer to you, you get one set of private, personal images that are all the way different from mine.
That’s cool. But for me, summer is always going to mean running down the road to the
Florida Market with change jingling in my pockets, the temperature in the gay nineties,
my feet dressed in Keds. The word conjures an image of the GS&WM railroad tracks
running into a perspective-point in the distance, burnished so white under the sun that
when you closed your eyes you could still see them there in the dark, only blue instead of
white.
But there was more to that summer than our trip across the river to look for Ray
Brower, although that looms the largest. Sounds of The Fleetwoods singing ‘Come Softly
Darling’ and Robin Luke singing ‘Susie Darlin’ and Little Anthony popping the vocal on ‘I
Ran All the Way Home’. Were they all hits in that summer of 1960? Yes and no. Mostly
yes. In the long purple evenings when rock and roll from WLAM blurred into night
baseball from WCCU, time shifted. I think it was all 1960 and that the summer went on
for a space of years, held magically intact in a web of sounds: the sweet hum of crickets,
the machine-gun roar of playing-cards riffling against the spokes of some kid’s bicycle as
he pedalled home for a late supper of cold cuts and iced tea, the flat Texas voice of Buddy
Knox singing ‘Come along and be my party doll, and I’ll make love to you, to you,’ and
the baseball announcer’s voice mingling with the song and with the smell of freshly cut
grass: ‘Count’s three and two now. Whitey Ford leans over … shakes off the sign … now
he’s got it … Ford pauses … pitches … and there it goes! Williams got all of that one! Kiss it goodbye! RED SOX LEAD, THREE TO ONE!’ Was Ted Williams still playing for the
Red Sox in 1960? Absolutely not. But he was. I remember that he was very clearly.
Baseball had become important to me in the last couple of years, ever since I’d had to face
the knowledge that baseball players were as much flesh and blood as I was. The
knowledge came when Roy Campanella’s car overturned and the papers screamed mortal
news from the front pages: his career was done, he was going to sit in a wheelchair for the
rest of his life. How that came back to me, with that same sickening mortal thud, when I
sat down to this typewriter one morning two years ago, turned on the radio, and heard that
Thurman Munson had died while trying to land his airplane.
There were movies to go see at the Gem, which has long since been torn down; science
fiction movies like Gog with Richard Egan and westerns with Audie Murphy (Teddy saw
every movie Audie Murphy made at least three times; he believed Murphy was almost a
god) and war movies with John Wayne. There were games and endless bolted meals,
lawns to mow, places to run to, walls to pitch pennies against, people to clap you on the
back. And now I sit here trying to look through an IBM keyboard and see that time, trying to recall the best and worst of that green and brown summer, and I can almost feel the
skinny, scabbed boy still buried in this advancing body and hear those sounds. But the
apotheosis of the memory and the time is Gordon Lachance running down the road to the
Florida Market with change in his pockets and sweat running down his back.
I asked for three pounds of hamburger and got some hamburger rolls, four bottles of
Coke and a two-cent churchkey to open them with. The owner, a man named George
Dusset, got the meat and then leaned by his cash register, one hammy hand planted on the
counter by the big bottle of hardcooked eggs, a toothpick in his mouth, his huge beer
belly rounding his white T-shirt like a sail filled with a good wind. He stood right there as
I shopped, making sure I didn’t try to hawk anything. He didn’t say a word until he was
weighing up the hamburger.
‘I know you. You’re Denny Lachance’s brother. Ain’t you?’ The toothpick journeyed
from one corner of his mouth to the other, as if on ball bearings. He reached behind the
cash register, picked up a bottle of S’OK cream soda, and chugged it.
‘Yes, sir. But Denny, he -‘
‘Yeah, I know. That’s a sad thing, kid. The Bible says: “In the midst of life, we are in
death.” Did you know that… Yuh. I lost a brother in Korea. You look just like Denny,
people ever tell you that? Yuh. Spitting image.’
‘Yes, sir, sometimes,’ I said glumly.
‘I remember the year he was All Conference. Halfback, he played. Yuh. Could he run?
Father God and Sonny Jesus! You’re probably too young to remember.’ He was looking
over my head, out through the screen door and into the blasting heat, as if he were having
a beautiful vision of my brother.
‘I remember. Uh, Mr Dusset?’
‘What, kid?’ His eyes were still misty with memory; the toothpick trembled a little
between his lips.
‘Your thumb is on that scales.’
‘What?’ He looked down, astounded, to where the ball of his thumb was pressed firmly
on the white enamel. If I hadn’t moved away from him a little bit when he started talking
about Dennis, the ground meat would have hidden it. ‘Why, so it is. Yuh. I guess I just got
thinkin’ about your brother, God love him.’ George Dusset signed a cross on himself.
When he took his thumb off the scales, the needle sprang back six ounces. He patted a
little more meat on top and then did the package up with white butcher’s paper.
‘Okay,’ he said past the toothpick. ‘Let’s see what we got here. Three pounds of
hamburg, that’s a dollar forty-four. Hamburg rolls, that’s twenty-seven. Four tonics, forty
cents. One churchkey, two pence. Come to …’ He added it up on the bag he was going to
put the stuff in. ‘Two-twenty-nine.’
‘Thirteen,’ I said.
He looked up at me very slowly, frowning. ‘Huh?’
‘Two-thirteen. You added it wrong.’
‘Kid, are you-‘
‘You added it wrong,’ I said. ‘First you put your thumb on the scales and then you
overcharged on the groceries, Mr Dusset I was gonna throw some Hostess Twinkies on
top of that order but now I guess I won’t.’ I spanged two dollars and thirteen cents down
on the Schlitz placemat in front of him.
He looked at the money, then at me. The frown was now tremendous, the lines on his
face as deep as fissures. ‘What are you, kid?’ He said in a low voice that was ominously
confidential. ‘Are you some kind of smartass?’
‘No, sir,’ I said. ‘But you ain’t gonna jap me and get away with it What would your mother say if she knew you was japping little kids?’
He thrust our stuff into the paper bag with quick stiff movements, making the Coke
bottles clink together. He thrust the bag at me roughly, not caring if I dropped it and broke
the tonics or not. His swarthy face was flushed and dull, the frown now frozen in place.
‘Okay, kid. Here you go. Now what you do is you get the Christ out of my store. I see you
in here again and I going to throw you out, me. Yuh. Smartass little sonofawhore.’
‘I won’t come in again,’ I said, walking over to the screen door and pushing it open. The
hot afternoon buzzed somnolently along its appointed course outside, sounding green and
brown and full of silent light. ‘Neither will none of my friends. I guess I got fifty or so.’
‘Your brother wasn’t no smartass!’ George Dusset yelled.
‘Fuck you! ’yelled, and ran like hell down the road.
I heard the screen door bang open like a gunshot and his bull roar came after me: ‘If
you ever come in here again I’ll fat your lip for you, you little punkr
1 ran until I was over the first hill, scared and laughing to myself, my heart beating out a triphammer pulse in my chest. Then I slowed to a fast walk, looking back over my
shoulder every now and then to make sure he wasn’t going to take after me in his car, or