Ham on Rye: A Novel

  “Stop feeling sorry for yourself,” said my father. “Be a man!”

  “Smile, Henry!”

  “What’s going to become of you? How the hell you going to make it? You don’t have any get up and go!”

  “Why don’t you go see Abe? Talk to him, learn to be like him,” said my mother…

  I knocked on the door of the Mortensons’ apartment. The door opened. It was Abe’s mother.

  “You can’t see Abe. He’s busy studying.”

  “I know, Mrs. Mortenson. I just want to see him a minute.”

  “All right. His room is right down there.”

  I walked on down. He had his own desk. He was sitting with a book open on top of two other books. I knew the book by the color of the cover: Civics. Civics, for Christ sake, on a Sunday.

  Abe looked up and saw me. He spit on his hands and then turned back to the book. “Hi,” he said, looking down at the page.

  “I bet you’ve read that same page ten times over, sucker.”

  “I’ve got to memorize everything.”

  “It’s just crap.”

  “I’ve got to pass my tests.”

  “You ever thought of fucking a girl?”

  “What?” he spit on his hands.

  “You ever looked up a girl’s dress and wanted to see more? Ever thought about her snatch?”

  “That’s not important.”

  “It’s important to her.”

  “I’ve got to study.”

  “We’re having a pick-up game of baseball. Some of the guys from school.”

  “On Sunday?”

  “What’s wrong with Sunday? People do a lot of things on Sunday.”

  “But baseball?”

  “The pros play on Sunday.”

  “But they get paid.”

  “Are you getting paid for reading that same page over and over? Come on, get some air in your lungs, it might clear your head.”

  “All right. But just for a little while.”

  He got up and I followed him up the hall and into the front room. We walked toward the door.

  “Abe, where are you going?”

  “I’ll just be gone a little while.”

  “All right. But hurry back. You’ve got to study.”

  “I know…”

  “All right, Henry, you make sure he gets back.”

  “I’ll take care of him, Mrs. Mortenson.”

  There was Baldy and Jimmy Hatcher and some other guys from school and a few guys from the neighborhood. We only had seven guys on each side which left a couple of defensive holes, but I liked that. I played center field. I had gotten good, I was catching up. I covered most of the outfield. I was fast. I liked to play in close to grab the short ones. But what I liked best was running back to grab those high hard ones hit over my head. That’s what Jigger Statz did with the Los Angeles Angels. He only hit about .280 but the hits he took away from the other team made him as valuable as a .500 hitter.

  Every Sunday a dozen or more girls from the neighborhood would come and watch us. I ignored them. They really screamed when something exciting happened. We played hardball and we each had our own glove, even Mortenson. He had the best one. It had hardly been used.

  I trotted out to center and the game began. We had Abe at second base. I slammed my fist into my mitt and hollered in at Mortenson, “Hey, Abe, you ever jacked-off into a raw egg? You don’t have to die to go to heaven!”

  I heard the girls laughing.

  The first guy struck out. He wasn’t much. I struck out a lot too but I was the hardest hitter of them all. I could really put the wood to it: out of the lot and into the street. I always crouched low over the plate. I looked like a wound-up spring standing there.

  Each moment of the game was exciting to me. All the games I had missed mowing that lawn, all those early school days of being chosen next-to-last were over. I had blossomed. I had something and I knew I had it and it felt good.

  “Hey, Abe!” I yelled in. “With all that spit you don’t need a raw egg!”

  The next guy connected hard with one but it was high, very high and I ran back to make an over-the-shoulder catch. I sprinted back, feeling great, knowing that I would create the miracle once again.

  Shit. The ball sailed into a tall tree at the back of the lot. Then I saw the ball bouncing down through the branches. I stationed myself and waited. No good, it was going left. I ran left. Then it bounced back to the right. I ran right. It hit a branch, lingered there, then slithered through some leaves and dropped into my glove.

  The girls screamed.

  I fired the ball into our pitcher on one bounce then trotted back into shallow center. The next guy struck out. Our pitcher, Harvey Nixon, had a good fireball.

  We changed sides and I was first up. I had never seen the guy on the mound. He wasn’t from Chelsey. I wondered where he was from. He was big all over, big head, big mouth, big ears, big body. His hair fell down over his eyes and he looked like a fool. His hair was brown and his eyes were green and those green eyes stared at me through that hair as if he hated me. It looked like his left arm was longer than his right. His left arm was his pitching arm. I’d never faced a lefty, not in hardball. But they could all be had. Turn them upside down and they were all alike.

  “Kitten” Floss, they called him. Some kitten. 190 pounds.

  “Come on, Butch, hit one out!” one of the girls pleaded.

  They called me “Butch” because I played a good game and ignored them.

  The Kitten looked at me from between his big ears. I spit on the plate, dug in and waved my bat.

  The Kitten nodded like he was getting a signal from the catcher. He was just showboating. Then he looked around the infield. More showboating. It was for the benefit of the girls. He couldn’t keep his pecker-mind off of snatch-thoughts.

  He took his wind-up. I watched that ball in his left hand. My eyes never left that ball. I had learned the secret. You concentrated on the ball and followed it all the way in until it reached the plate and then you murdered it with the wood.

  I watched the ball leave his fingers through a blaze of sun. It was a murderous humming blur, but it could be had. It was below my knees and far out of the strike zone. His catcher had to dive to get it.

  “Ball one,” mumbled the old neighborhood fart who umpired our games. He was a night watchman in a department store and he liked to talk to the girls. “I got two daughters at home just like you girls. Real cute. They wear tight dresses too.” He liked to crouch over the plate and show them his big buttocks. That’s all he had, that and one gold tooth.

  The catcher threw the ball back to Kitten Floss.

  “Hey, Pussy!” I yelled out to him.

  “You talkin’ to me?”

  “I’m talking to you, short-arm. You gotta come closer than that or I’ll have to call a cab.”

  “The next one is all yours,” he told me.

  “Good,” I said. I dug in.

  He went through his routine again, nodding like he was getting a sign, checking the infield. Those green eyes stared at me through that dirty brown hair. I watched him wind-up. I saw the ball leave his fingers, a dark fleck against the sky in the sun and then suddenly it was zooming toward my skull. I dropped in my tracks, feeling it brush the hair of my head.

  “Strike one,” mumbled the old fart.

  “What?” I yelled. The catcher was still holding the ball. He was as surprised at the call as I was. I took the ball from him and showed it to the umpire.

  “What’s this?” I asked him.

  “It’s a baseball.”

  “Fine. Remember what it looks like.”

  I took the ball and walked out to the mound. The green eyes didn’t flinch under the dirty hair. But the mouth opened up just a bit, like a frog sucking air.

  I walked up to Kitten.

  “I don’t swing with my head. The next time you do that I am going to jam this thing right up through your shorts and past where you forget to wipe.”

&
nbsp; I handed him the ball and walked back to the plate. I dug in and waved my bat.

  “One and one,” said the old fart.

  Floss kicked dirt around on the mound. He stared off into left field. There was nothing out there except a starving dog scratching his ear. Floss looked in for a sign. He was thinking of the girls, trying to look good. The old fart crouched low, spreading his dumb buttocks, also trying to look good. I was probably one of the few with his mind on the business at hand.

  The time came, Kitten Floss went into his wind-up. That left hand windmill could panic you if you let it. You had to be patient and wait for the ball. Finally they had to let it go. Then it was yours to destroy and the harder they threw it in the harder you could hit it out of there.

  I saw the ball leave his fingers as one of the girls screamed. Floss hadn’t lost his zip. The ball looked like a bee-bee, only it got larger and it was headed right for my skull again. All I knew was that I was trying to find the dirt as fast as I could. I got a mouthful.

  “SEERIKE TWO!” I heard the old fart yell. He couldn’t even pronounce the word. Get a man who works for nothing and you get a man who just likes to hang around.

  I got up and brushed the dirt off. It was even down in my shorts. My mother was going to ask me, “Henry, how did you ever get your shorts so dirty? Now don’t make that face. Smile, and be happy!”

  I walked to the mound. I stood right there. Nobody said anything. I just looked at Kitten. I had the bat in my hand. I took the bat by the end and pressed it against his nose. He slapped it away. I turned and walked back toward the plate. Halfway there I stopped. I turned and stared at him again. Then I walked to the plate.

  I dug in and waved my bat. This one was going to be mine. The Kitten peered in for the non-existent sign. He looked a long time, then shook his head, no. He kept staring through that dirty hair with those green eyes.

  I waved my bat more powerfully.

  “Hit it out, Butch!” screamed one of the girls.

  “Butch! Butch! Butch!” screamed another girl.

  Then the Kitten turned his back on us and just stared out into center field.

  “Time,” I said and stepped out of the box. There was a very cute girl in an orange dress. Her hair was blond and it hung straight down, like a yellow waterfall, beautiful, and I caught her eye for a moment and she said, “Butch, please do it.”

  “Shut up,” I said and stepped back into the box.

  The pitch came. I saw it all the way. It was my pitch. Unfortunately, I was looking for the duster. I wanted the duster so I could go out to the mound and kill or be killed. The ball sailed right over the center of the plate. By the time I adjusted the best I could do was swing weakly over the top of it as it went by.

  The bastard had suckered me all the way.

  He got me on three straight strikes next time. I swear he must have been at least 23 years old. Probably a semi-pro.

  One of our guys finally did get a single off him.

  But I was good in the field. I made some catches. I moved out there. I knew that the more I saw of the Kitten’s fireball the more I was apt to solve it. He wasn’t trying to knock out my brains anymore. He didn’t have to. He was just smoking them down the middle. I hoped it was only a matter of time before I golfed one out of there.

  But things got worse and worse. I didn’t like it. The girls didn’t either. Not only was green eyes great on the mound, he was great at the plate. The first two times up he hit a homer and a double. The third time up he swung under a pitch and looped a high blooper between Abe at second base and me in center field. I came charging in, the girls screaming, but Abe kept looking up and back over his shoulder, his mouth drooping down, looking up, looking like a fool really, that wet mouth open. I came charging in screaming, “It’s mine!” It was really his but somehow I couldn’t bear to let him make the catch. The guy was nothing but an idiot book-reader and I didn’t really like him so I came charging in very hard as the ball dropped. We crashed into one another, the ball popped out of his glove and into the air as he fell to the ground, and I caught the ball off his glove.

  I stood there over him as he lay on the ground.

  “Get up, you dumb bastard,” I told him.

  Abe stayed on the ground. He was crying. He was holding his left arm.

  “I think my arm is broken,” he said.

  “Get up, chickenshit.”

  Abe finally got up and walked off the field, crying and holding his arm.

  I looked around. “All right,” I said, “let’s play ball!”

  But everybody was walking away, even the girls. The game was evidently over. I hung around a while and then I started walking home…

  Just before dinner the phone rang. My mother answered it. Her voice became very excited. She hung up and I heard her talking to my father.

  Then she came into my bedroom.

  “Please come to the front room,” she said.

  I walked in and sat on the couch. They each had a chair. It was always that way. Chairs meant you belonged. The couch was for visitors.

  “Mrs. Mortenson just phoned. They’ve taken x-rays. You broke her son’s arm.”

  “It was an accident,” I said.

  “She says she is going to sue us. She’ll get a Jewish lawyer. They’ll take everything we have.”

  “We don’t have very much.”

  My mother was one of those silent criers. As she cried the tears came faster and faster. Her cheeks were starting to glisten in the evening twilight.

  She wiped her eyes. They were a dull light brown.

  “Why did you break that boy’s arm?”

  “It was a pop-up. We both went for it.”

  “What is this ‘pop-up’?”

  “Whoever gets it, gets it.”

  “So you got the ‘pop-up’?”

  “Yes.”

  “But how can this ‘pop-up’ help us? The Jewish lawyer will still have the broken arm on his side.”

  I got up and walked back to my bedroom to wait for dinner. My father hadn’t said anything. He was confused. He was worried about losing what little he had but at the same time he was very proud of a son who could break somebody’s arm.

  43

  Jimmy Hatcher worked part time in a grocery store. While none of us could get jobs he could always get one. He had his little movie star face and his mother had a great body. With his face and her body he didn’t have trouble finding employment.

  “Why don’t you come up to the apartment after dinner tonight?” he asked me one day.

  “What for?”

  “I steal all the beer I want. I take it out the back. We can drink the beer.”

  “Where you got it?”

  “In the refrigerator.”

  “Show me.”

  We were about a block a way from his place. We walked over. In the hallway Jimmy said, “Wait a minute, I’ve got to check the mail.” He took out his key and opened the lock box. It was empty. He locked it again.

  “My key opens this woman’s box. Watch.”

  Jimmy opened the box and pulled out a letter and opened it. He read the letter to me. “Dear Betty: I know that this check is late and that you’ve been waiting for it. I lost my job. I have found another one, but it put me behind. Here’s the check, finally. I hope that everything is all right with you. Love, Don.”

  jimmy took the check and looked at it. He tore it up and he tore the letter up and he put the pieces in his coat pocket. Then he locked the mailbox.

  “Come on.”

  We went into his apartment and into the kitchen and he opened the refrigerator. It was packed with cans of beer.

  “Does your mother know?”

  “Sure. She drinks it.”

  He closed the refrigerator.

  “Jim, did your father really blow his brains out because of your mother?”

  “Yeah. He was on the telephone. He told her he had a gun. He said, ‘If you don’t come back to me I’m going to kill myself. Will you
come back to me?’ And my mother said, ‘No.’ There was a shot and that was that.”

  “What did your mother do?”

  “She hung up.”

  “All right, I’ll see you tonight.”

  I told my parents that I was going over to Jimmy’s to do some homework with him. My kind of homework, I thought to myself.

  “Jimmy’s a nice boy,” my mother said.

  My father didn’t say anything.

  Jimmy got the beer out and we began. I really liked it. Jimmy’s mother worked at a bar until 2 a.m. We had the place to ourselves.

  “Your mother really has a body, Jim. How come some women have great bodies and most of the others look like they’re deformed? Why can’t all women have great bodies?”

  “God, I don’t know. Maybe if women were all the same we’d get bored with them.”

  “Drink some more. You drink too slow.”

  “O.K.”

  “Maybe after a few beers I’ll beat the shit out of you.”

  “We’re friends, Hank.”

  “I don’t have any friends. Drink up!”

  “All right. What’s the hurry?”

  “You’ve got to slam them down to get the effect.”

  We opened some more cans of beer.

  “If I was a woman I’d go around with my skirt hiked up giving all the men hard-ons,” Jimmy said.

  “You make me sick.”

  “My mother knew a guy who drank her piss.”

  “What?”

  “Yeah. They’d drink all night and then he’d lay down in the bathtub and she’d piss in his mouth. Then he’d give her twenty-five dollars.”

  “She told you that?”

  “Since my father died she confides in me. It’s like I’ve taken his place.”

  “You mean…?”

  “Oh, no. She just confides.”

  “Like the guy in the tub?”

  “Yeah, like him.”

  “Tell me some more stuff.”

  “No.”

  “Come on, drink up. Does anybody eat your mother’s shit?”

  “Don’t talk that way.”

  I finished the can of beer in my hand and threw it across the room.