I seemed to know all the people in my grandparents’ neighborhood, and they all seemed to know me. The Burkhardts lived on one side, and they were sometimes my baby-sitters when my grandparents were at work, and their house always smelled wonderfully like tomato sauce, which was, my grandfather explained, because Mrs. Burkhardt was an Italian. The Sanderses lived on the other side, and they also were sometimes my baby-sitters, and Mrs. Sanders always wore white clothes, and that was because, as my grandmother explained, Mrs. Sanders was a nurse. This simple order could have become mighty complicated on the day that Mrs. Sanders made spaghetti for dinner, but it was soon overwhelmed by a more fundamental truth. Mrs. Sanders, according to my grandmother, worked at St. Francis Hospital because she was a Catholic, and it turned out that Mrs. Burkhardt was also a Catholic, and Tommy Sidowski, who was a kid about my age who lived behind my grandparents, and whom I knew pretty well, and who was, according to my grandfather, a “Polack”—well, he was a Catholic too. Suddenly, the bewildering fragments of identity had yielded their common denominator, and that is why, at the age of six, I became a Catholic, a development that, unfortunately, went completely over the heads of my grandparents, who could not understand why I kept saying that I was a Catholic when, they insisted, I was hardly even a Methodist. My grandparents and I eventually reached an understanding on the matter, and it was agreed that I could become a Catholic later on if I still wanted to, and that arrangement was basically satisfactory to me, though it did not keep me from dipping into the ashtray for the next few Ash Wednesdays. My grandparents even let me be Italian—though only partly, and on my mother’s side, whatever that meant—but on my subsequent desire to become a Polack they remained uncompromising. Which was fine, because Tommy Sidowski wasn’t even my best friend.
The Sanderses had two boys, Huey and Michael, and Huey was just a year younger than me, and it was Huey who would become my best friend in the world. We started playing together in my grandparents’ backyard when I was barely five, and for as long as I can remember, we were playing baseball and baseball-related games. Most of these games we made up, partly because, with just the two of us, it would have been difficult to field two standard teams, but also because it was our unspoken desire that in the games we played, neither one of us should really win or lose. We played some games that we copied from other kids—Wall-Ball was not one of our originals—but also some games that we made up from scratch over the years, games like Up Against the Wall, Off the Roof, Perfect Game, Double Play, and Rundown.
For each of our games we made up rules. The object of Up Against The Wall was for the fielder—we always imagined we were some Phillie outfielder, usually either Johnny Callison or Tony Gonzalez—to make a great leaping catch by hurling his body against the brick wall of my grandparents’ house; the “batter” would accommodate by throwing the ball just over the fielder’s head. We had a scoring system for the catches: one point for a catch, two points if you juggled the ball and caught it, three points if you caught it above an imaginary line on the wall, and four points if you caught the ball and hit the wall with sufficient force or friction to draw blood. We scored each catch, but did not keep a running tally; the game ended when we had drawn too much blood, or when we broke one of my grandparents’ windows.
Off the Roof was our variation on Wall-Ball. The “batter” threw the ball onto my grandparents’ roof, and the fielder tried to catch it when it rolled off. This was tougher than it sounds, thanks to my grandparents’ rain gutter, which, we discovered one day, caused the ball to hop at impossible heights and angles. You got a hit if the fielder missed the ball, were “out” if the fielder caught it, and lost your turn at bat if you threw the ball over the roof. We scored it like a regular game, but never completed an official one, each effort being called sometime in the middle innings, when my grandfather got tired of getting the ball out of the gutter.
Perfect Game was an effort by a pitcher—usually Huey, as either Jim Bunning or Chris Short—to throw one, that is, to record twenty-seven straight outs. The catcher called the pitches as well as the balls and strikes—and, for that matter, also the play-by-play—which meant that every game ended with the nearly intolerable suspense of a full count on the twenty-seventh batter. Almost every effort was successful, thanks mostly to the propensity of the imaginary batters to chase and foul-off even the wildest pitches. The only exceptions occurred when the pitcher would refuse the benevolent products of the catcher’s imagination; the pitcher would then show remarkable fortitude in overcoming the adversity of one walk or sometimes even two.
Double Play was really not much more than our practice of that baseball play. Whichever one of us was the first baseman would throw a groundball to the other fielder, who could be either a shortstop or a second baseman, depending on his identity on that particular day: when Huey was Bobby Wine he played shortstop, when he was Tony Taylor he played second base; I was always Cookie Rojas, who could play any position. The middle infielder, whoever he was, would tag second base, and relay the ball to the first baseman, who would decide, based on a very complex mathematical calculation involving various laws of physics and also little kid’s moods, whether the throw was in time to complete the double play. The middle infielder did not always agree with the call, and that prompted occasional rhubarbs, as the infielder went nose-to-nose with the first base umpire, who, of course, used to be the first baseman, but who had now assumed a distinctly antagonistic persona. Things would get particularly heated—and complicated—when the first baseman would rematerialize and join the fray, and sometimes the combined force of their arguments would persuade the umpire to change his mind. This rarely happened, however, and the rhubarbs were mostly just an excuse to practice cussing. Double Play usually went the full nine innings, the exceptions occurring only when games were suspended on account of the adults overhearing the rhubarbs.
All but one of our games were designed to be played by just two people; the exception was Rundown. Rundown required two fielders and a baserunner: the fielders, stationed at first and second bases, threw the ball back and forth, and the baserunner would at some point attempt to leave first base and get to second or, once caught in a rundown, at least make it safely back to first. There were no points and no scoring; the runner either made it safely or not.
Huey and I could be the fielders in Rundown, but we needed a baserunner, and neither my grandparents nor Huey’s mom were generally up to the task. Fortunately, however, Huey’s folks had planned ahead, and they provided Huey with a kid brother named Michael, and while Michael was generally no more useful than any other kid brother or sister—his primary function seemed to revolve around whining, which was either the cause or effect of our general indifference to his existence—-still Michael made a perfectly adequate, and eventually an absolutely perfect, steady runner in our game.
What was so perfect about Michael was that he was always “out”: in all the games of Rundown we played, he never once stole second, nor even made it safely back to first. This required, admittedly, some ingenuity on our part: he seemed, sometimes, like he was going to be safe, as when one of us made a wild throw, and he seemed, on other occasions, like he might actually be safe, as when he appeared to be standing on second base before the ball’s arrival, but invariably fortune intervened, and Mike would accidentally trip in the base path over our outstretched arms, or overrun the base, propelled by some mysterious natural force that looked strangely like Huey or me. When these physical phenomena were not denying Michael his due, fate nonetheless conspired against him; either Huey or I had invariably called “time-out” (whether or not Michael actually heard us), and “time-out” meant, by rule of course, that the game had to start over. It is a wonder, given his steady misfortune, that Michael continued to play with us, but he did, and he always seemed to have fun.
For Huey and me there was something a bit too crude and obvious about our schemes against Michael, and I suspect we would have soured on them over time.