“Listen, Manderson,” I began, beginning the try-to-reason-withhim part of my plan, “at least I spelled your name correctly.”
He didn’t seem impressed with that fact.
“Hey, I was just having a little fun,” I went on. “It was a joke. Where’s your sense of humor, man?”
He hit me in the stomach. I didn’t have to pretend to fall down. I really did fall down because he hit me in the stomach. But I did continue to remain fallen down.
“Get up!” he ordered.
I didn’t move. My eyes were closed tightly.
“Are you okay?” he finally asked. I could sense he was beginning to think he had killed me.
Still no response.
“Hey, Monk,” he called to Norman Montgomery. “I think I’ve killed this son of a bitch.”
“Let’s see,” said Monk, kicking me in the ribs. More pain, but still I remained still.
“I believe you have killed the son of a bitch,” said Monk, adding, “Let’s go. We’ll be late for practice.”
“Do you think I’ll get in any trouble if I really did kill him?” Manderson asked the Monk.
“They might make you sit out a couple of games, but that’s about it,” said the Monk.
When I was certain they had gone, I got up off the ground, got into my car, and drove home. I was in a great deal of pain, but I knew I had acted correctly. To have attempted to fight back would have resulted in getting hurt even more. Plus, I sensed I had brought at least a smidgen of guilt into Phil Manderson’s life, and I was pleased with that.
As far as Filbert Fowler and Phyllis Dalyrimple were concerned, they actually did get together before the school year was out. Against his father’s protests, Filbert wound up marrying Phyllis when they were twenty, and both had a long career in porno movies. Filbert produced them, while Phyllis played various starring roles.
Camilla got over being mad at me eventually, and she now gives me credit for launching her own career in journalism. She later made it to New York, changed her name to Liz Smith, and became a premier gossip columnist.
I had no more opportunities to practice my craft the rest of my high school days. Oh, I wrote a sonnet here and there, did a Chemistry essay entitled “Halogens: Friend or Foe?” and wrote a magnificent paper on President Chester A. Arthur, but that was it.
I did, however, have the opportunity to learn something that would benefit me greatly as a professional journalist. I learned to type.
My basketball coach, Mr. Sheets, taught typing. I’ve seen enough newspaper movies by now (Bogart’s Deadline USA and Jack Webb’s 30 to name a couple), to know you had to be able to type if you wanted to write for a newspaper. Writing things out longhand becomes painful after a time (during the last eight or nine pages of my Chester A. Arthur tome, I developed severe hand cramps), and I didn’t have a particularly attractive handwriting style in the first place.
Mr. Sheets would not allow the two-finger hunt-and-peck system, so I learned the technique where you put the fingers of your left hand on asdf and the fingers on your right hand on jkl; and went from there. It was surprisingly easy.
The first thing I could type fast without making an error was: “Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their country.” (I didn’t make a mistake just now, nearly thirty years later, either.)
I also learned to compose on a typewriter. A lot of people learn to type so they can get a job typing what other people have written down longhand. I learned to type so I could sit before my typewriter in Sulphur Dell, where the Nashville Vols played, and compose:
By LEWIS GRIZZARD Atlanta Journal Staff Writer
NASHVILLE, TENN—First baseman Buck Riddle picked the Atlanta Crackers off the canvas here Saturday night with a three-run homer in the top of the 9th inning that hatched a come-from-behind 6–4 Atlanta Cracker victory.
Of course, Mr. Sheets did insist that I copy a few things on the typewriter and not make any mistakes. He’d give tests in that. I did okay, but I’ve never been the neatest of typers. And, just as I figured it would, it worked out that if you write for a newspaper, you can be as messy as you want to be with your typing. When you make a mistake while writing your story, you can simply crossover the mistake with a bunch of x’s.
In those days, when you were on the road, you would send your stories back to the newspaper by Western Union, and Western Union sent back every word in all caps, no matter how you typed it. That meant you could type your entire story in lower case, since it would still be sent back in all caps. That saved a lot of time and energy, too.
By the end of the year, I had composing on a classroom typewriter locked, and my mother found out my Aunt Emily, on my father’s side, had a typewriter that had belonged to her late husband, my Uncle Frank. She called Aunt Emily and asked if I could have it.
Aunt Emily agreed, as long as we would come over to her house to pick it up. I was reluctant to go, because my Aunt Emily was a little strange. She talked quite fast and had once been a fortune-teller—or witch, I forget which—and I was afraid she would put some sort of hex or curse on me.
Also, Aunt Emily’s daughter, Cousin Helen, was much younger than I was, but the last time I had seen her, she had kicked me on the shin.
“Aunt Emily is giving you Uncle Frank’s typewriter, and you should be grateful enough to at least go ride over with me to pick it up,” said my mother.
“But what if Helen kicks me in the shin?” I asked.
“You’re afraid of a nine-year-old girl?” my mother asked back.
I didn’t say anything else and, somewhat ashamed, got into the car. When we arrived at Aunt Emily’s she suggested Helen take me outside to see their new horse. I had no interest whatsoever in seeing a horse, but my mother cut me one of those looks that said, “Get out there with Helen and see that horse. Now.”
We were looking at the horse, Helen and I, when she snuck behind me and poured a bucket of water she’d found in the stall all over my head. It didn’t just stay on my head, of course; it dripped down on the rest of me.
I attempted to catch Helen and feed her to the horse, but she ran inside and said, “Mama, make Lewis stop chasing me!” Great, I thought. Not only is my mother going to get mad at me, but here’s where Aunt Emily gives out the curse.
I did explain why I was chasing Helen, of course, and the fact I was drenched in water from head to foot gave my story a great deal of credibility.
“You shouldn’t pour water on your cousin,” Aunt Emily said to Helen.
“Oh, he’ll dry out,” said my mother, thinking, I’m sure, What am I raising here? A young man who can’t deal with a nine-year-old girl cousin?
Many years later, when I got divorced for the third time, my mother said, “Your troubles with women may have started with your Cousin Helen.”
I wondered to myself if I had been able to get even with Helen, which I never did, would my marital record perhaps be a brighter one?
I did get Uncle Frank’s typewriter that day, however, and practiced writing sports stories. I even practiced what I would write if the time came when I had to compose my first professional column:
Hello, world, for the first time, subjectively,
I thought it was low-key, yet obviously written by a man who had stored up a lot of things he wanted to say.
I don’t remember the first line of the first professional column I ever wrote—which would appear years later on the sports page of the Daily News in Athens, Georgia, but I know it wasn’t what I had practiced on my Uncle Frank’s typewriter