Report from the Interior (5 page)

A friend of your parents’, Roy B., had played third base for the Newark Bears, the legendary minor league team that had once been part of the New York Yankees system. Nicknamed Whoops—for shouting out that word whenever he made an error in the field—he never made it to the major leagues, but he had played with and against any number of future all-stars, and since everyone liked the fast-talking, effervescent Whoops, a squat fireplug of a man who owned a men’s discount clothing store out on Route 22, he was still in touch with many of his old ballplayer friends. He and his wife, Dolly, had three children, all girls, none of whom had any interest in baseball, and because he knew how much you cared about the game, both as a player and as a fan, he took you under his wing as a kind of surrogate son or nephew, a boy in any case, to share his baseball past with. One weekday night in the spring of 1956, just as you were about to go to bed, the telephone rang and, lo and behold, there was Phil Rizzuto on the other end of the line, the one and only Scooter, the Yankees’ shortstop from 1941 until his retirement earlier that month, asking if you were Paul, Whoops’s young friend. I’ve heard you’re a terrific infielder, he said, speaking in that famously jovial voice of his, and I just wanted to say hello and tell you to keep up the good work. You had been caught off guard, you barely knew what to say, you were too flummoxed and tongue-tied to give more than one-syllable answers to Rizzuto’s questions, but this was your first conversation with a legitimate hero, and even though it lasted no more than a couple of minutes, you nevertheless felt honored by that unexpected call, ennobled by your brush with the great man. Then, a week or two later, a postcard arrived in the mail. On the front, a color photograph of the interior of Whoops’s clothing store: rack after rack of men’s suits under the glare of fluorescent lights, ghost-like suits with no bodies in them, an army of the missing. On the back, a handwritten message: “Dear Paul, Hurry and grow up. The Cards can use a good third baseman. Yours, Stan Musial.” Phil Rizzuto had been one thing, an excellent player whose career was now behind him, but Musial was one of the immortals, a .330 lifetime hitter who ranked as the National League equivalent of Ted Williams, a player still in his prime, Stan the Man, the left-handed slugger with the curved stance and lightning-quick bat, and you imagined him strolling into Whoops’s store one afternoon to say hello to his old friend and the ever-vigilant Whoops asking Musial to write a few words to his little protégé,
a short message for the kid,
and now those words were sitting in your hands, which made you feel as if a god had reached out and touched you on the forehead. There was more, however, at least one more act of kindness from the good-hearted Whoops, a final display of generosity that surpassed all the other gifts he had bestowed on you. How would you like to meet Whitey Ford? he asked you one day. It was still 1956, but mid-October by then, not long after the end of the World Series. Of course you would like to meet Whitey Ford, you answered, you would love to meet Whitey Ford, who was the ace pitcher of the champion Yankees, the pitcher with the highest winning percentage in the history of the game, the short, brilliant lefty who had just completed his finest season. What person in his right mind would not want to meet Whitey Ford? And so it was arranged: Whoops and Whitey would stop by your house one afternoon next week, sometime between three-thirty and four, late enough to be certain you would be back from school. You had no idea what to expect, but you hoped the visit would be a long one, with Whoops and Whitey sitting around the living room with you for several hours talking baseball, during which Whitey would divulge the subtlest, most hidden secrets about the art of pitching, for in looking at you he would see straight into your soul and understand that, young as you might have been, you were someone worthy of being entrusted with that forbidden knowledge. On the appointed day, you rushed home from school, which was just a short distance from your house, and waited, waited for what must have been an hour and a half but felt as if it were a week, fretfully pacing around the rooms on the ground floor, all alone with your thoughts, your mother and father both off at work, your five-year-old sister God knows where, alone in the little clapboard house on Irving Avenue, growing more and more nervous about the supreme encounter, wondering if Whoops and Whitey would actually show up, fearing they had forgotten the rendezvous, or had been delayed by unforeseen circumstances, or had been killed in a car crash, and then, finally, when you were beginning to despair that Whitey Ford would ever set foot in your house, the doorbell rang. You opened the door, and there on the front steps was the five-foot-six-inch Whoops and the five-foot-ten-inch Yankee pitcher. A big smile from Whoops, followed by a terse but friendly handshake from the maestro. You invited them in, but Whoops or Whitey (impossible to remember which one) said they were running late and had only dropped by for a quick hello. You did your best to hide your disappointment, understanding that Whitey Ford would not in fact be setting foot in your house and that no secret knowledge would be imparted to you that day. The three of you stood there talking for what amounted to four minutes at most, which should have been enough to satisfy you, and surely would have been enough if you had not begun to suspect that the Whitey Ford standing on the front steps of your house was not the real Whitey Ford. He was the right size, his voice had the proper Queens accent, but something about his face looked different from the pictures you had seen of him, less handsome somehow, the round cheeks less round than they should have been, and even though his hair was blond, as Whitey’s hair was, it was cut in a severe flattop, whereas in all the photos you had seen of Whitey his hair was longer, combed back in a kind of modified pompadour. You wondered if the real Whitey Ford had backed out of the visit and that Whoops, not wanting to let you down, had produced this more or less reasonable facsimile of Whitey as a substitute. To quiet your doubts, you began asking Whitey or not-Whitey questions about his record of the past season. Nineteen and six, he said, which was the correct answer. Two point four seven, which was also the correct answer, but still you couldn’t shake the thought that a not–Whitey Ford might have done some homework before the visit so as not to be tripped up by a wiseass nine-year-old kid, and when he thrust out his right arm to shake your hand good-bye, you weren’t sure if you were shaking Whitey Ford’s hand or the hand of someone else. You still don’t know. For the first time in your life, an experience had led you into a zone of absolute ambiguity. A question had been raised, and it could not be answered.

Boredom must not be overlooked as a source of contemplation and reverie, the hundreds of hours of your early childhood when you found yourself alone, uninspired, at loose ends, too listless or distracted to want to play with your little trucks and cars, to take the trouble to set up your miniature cowboys and Indians, the green and red plastic figures you would spread out on the floor of your room in order to send them into imaginary assaults and ambushes, or to start building something with your Lincoln Logs or your Erector set (which you never liked anyway, no doubt because of your ineptitude with mechanical things), feeling no impulse to draw (at which you were also painfully inept and derived little pleasure from) or search for your crayons to fill in another page of one of your stupid coloring books, and because it was raining outside or too cold to leave the house, you would languish in a mopey, ill-humored torpor, still too young to read, still too young to call up someone on the telephone, pining for a friend or a playmate to keep you company, most often sitting by the window and watching the rain slide down the glass, wishing you owned a horse, preferably a palomino with an ornate Western saddle, or if not a horse then a dog, a highly intelligent dog who could be trained to understand every nuance of human speech and would trot along beside you as you set out on your dangerous missions to save children in distress, and when you weren’t dreaming about how you wished your life could be different, you tended to muse on eternal questions, questions you still ask yourself today and have never been able to answer, such as how did the world come into being and why do we exist, such as where do people go after they die, and even at that exceedingly young age you would speculate that perhaps the entire world was enclosed in a glass jar that sat on a shelf next to dozens of other jar-worlds in the pantry of a giant’s house, or else, even more dizzying and yet logically irrefutable, you would tell yourself that if Adam and Eve were the first people in the world, then everyone was necessarily related to everyone else. Dreaded boredom, long and lonely hours of blankness and silence, entire mornings and afternoons when the world stopped spinning around you, and yet that barren ground proved to be more important than most of the gardens you played in, for that was where you taught yourself how to be alone, and only when a person is alone can his mind run free.

Every now and then, for no apparent reason, you would suddenly lose track of who you were. It was as if the being who inhabited your body had turned into an impostor, or, more precisely, into no one at all, and as you felt your selfhood dribble out of you, you would walk around in a state of stunned dissociation, not sure if it was yesterday or tomorrow, not sure if the world in front of you was real or a figment of someone else’s imagination. This happened often enough during your childhood for you to give these mental fugues a name.
Daze,
you said to yourself,
I’m in a daze,
and even though these dream-like interludes were transitory, rarely lasting more than three or four minutes, the strangeness of feeling hollowed out like that would linger for hours afterward. It wasn’t a good feeling, but neither did it scare you or disturb you, and as far as you could tell there was no identifiable cause, not fatigue, for example, or physical exhaustion, and no pattern to the comings and goings of these spells, since they occurred both when you were alone and when you were with other people. An uncanny sense of having fallen asleep with your eyes open, but at the same time knowing you were fully awake, conscious of where you were, and yet not there at all somehow, floating outside yourself, a phantom without weight or substance, an uninhabited shell of flesh and bone, a nonperson. The dazes continued throughout your childhood and well into your adolescence, coming over you once every month or two, sometimes a bit more often, sometimes a bit less, and even now, at your advanced age, the feeling still comes back once every four or five years, lasting for just fifteen or twenty seconds, which means that you have never completely outgrown this tendency to vanish from your own consciousness. Mysterious and unaccountable, but an essential part of who you were then and occasionally still are now. As if you were slipping into another dimension, a new configuration of time and space, looking at your own life with blank, indifferent eyes—or else rehearsing your death, learning what happens to you when you disappear.

Your family must be brought into this as well, your mother, father, and sister, with special attention paid to your parents’ wretched marriage, for even though your purpose is to chart the workings of your young mind, to look at yourself in isolation and explore the internal geography of your boyhood, the fact is that you didn’t live in isolation, you were part of a family, a strange family, and without question that strangeness had much to do with who you were as a child, perhaps everything to do with it. You have no horror stories to tell, no dramatic accounts of beatings or abuse, but instead a constant, underlying feeling of sadness, which you did your best to ignore, since by temperament you were not a sad or overtly miserable child, but once you were old enough to compare your situation to that of the other children you knew, you understood that your family was a broken family, that your parents had no idea what they were doing, that the fortress most couples try to build for their children was no more than a tumbledown shack, and therefore you felt exposed to the elements, unprotected, vulnerable—which meant that in order to survive it was essential that you toughen up and figure out a way to fend for yourself. They had no business being married, you realized, and once your mother began working when you were six, they rarely intersected, rarely seemed to have anything to talk about, coexisting in a chill of mutual indifference. No storms or fights, no shouting matches, no apparent hostility—simply a lack of passion on both sides, cellmates thrown together by chance and serving out their sentences in grim silence. You loved both of them, of course, you fervently wished that things could be better between them, but as the years went on you began to lose hope. They were both out most of the time, both working long into the evenings, and the house seemed permanently empty, with few family dinners, few chances for the four of you to be together, and after you were seven or eight you and your little sister were mostly fed by the housekeeper, a black woman named Catherine who entered the scene when you were five and remained a part of your life for many years, continuing to work for your mother after your parents divorced and your mother remarried, and you were still in touch with her well into her dotage, when the two of you exchanged letters after your father’s death in 1979, but Catherine was hardly a maternal figure, she was an eccentric character from the backwoods of Maryland, several times married and several times divorced, a cackling jokester who drank on the sly and flicked the ashes of her Kool cigarettes into her open palm, more of a pal than a substitute mother, and therefore you and your sister were often alone together, your anxious, fragile sister, who would stand by the window waiting for your mother to return at some appointed hour, and if the car did not pull into the driveway at the precise minute it was expected, your sister would break down in tears, convinced that your mother was dead, and as the minutes rolled on, the tears would devolve into violent weeping and tantrums, and you, just eight and nine and ten years old, would do everything you could to reassure her and comfort her, but seldom to any avail, your poor sister, who finally cracked up in her early twenties and spent years spinning off into madness, held together today by doctors and psychopharmacological drugs, far more a victim of your strange family than you ever were. You know now how deeply unhappy your mother was, and you also know that in his own fumbling way your father loved her, that is, to the extent he was capable of loving anyone, but they made a botch of it, and to be a part of that disaster when you were a boy no doubt drove you inward, turning you into a man who has spent the better part of his life sitting alone in a room.