But there is something related to that experience that isn’t so gratifying. It’s the reminder of what happened next on that first day of the 1962 baseball season, as I sat beside my stepfather in his brand new Volkswagen Beetle.
“There’s something I need to talk to you about,” said Harvey. “I promised your mom I’d do it today.”
Harvey put out his Tiparillo. Years later, whenever I saw an ad for the little cigars or heard the company cigarette girl’s catchphrase, “Cigars? Cigarettes? Tiparillos?” I would think back on this conversation with a welter of feelings.
“Your mother wants a divorce.”
“Oh.” It took me a few seconds to pull myself out from under this ton of bricks. “How come?”
“She doesn’t love me anymore.”
“What did you do?”
“Maybe I’m not so easy to live with, Scoots. I drink. I smoke. I swear. I buy Nazi cars. Maybe I’m not so good for you and your sister to be around. Your dad moved out, and what does your mom do? She takes in the first fleabitten old mongrel that shows up on her porch. Like that Mrs. Payson who owns the Mets — she doesn’t go for a young husband like your father, she gets one with maybe a little too much mileage.”
“Gil Hodges just hit a home run.”
“And Don Zimmer’s playing third with a metal plate in his head. I’m not saying I’m worthless, kid. Hell, I’m designing conducting coils for the strongest magnet mankind’s ever put together. I’m just saying your mom and I — we had some laughs, and now it’s time for me to chug off in my little insect car and quit corrupting the kids, you know?”
“You aren’t corrupting me. I’m eleven. I can take care of myself.”
Harvey didn’t say much after that. He turned up the volume and together we listened as the Cardinals piled up the runs. The final score that day would be 11–4. It was to be the first of nine straight losses for the Mets. They wouldn’t catch a break until they faced off against the Pirates twelve days later, on April 23.
During a commercial for Rheingold Beer sung by Vic Damone, I turned down the volume and asked my stepfather when he was moving out.
“Couple of days.”
“Will Connie and I get to see you again?”
“I won’t be a stranger. In fact, your mom says once I get my own place, you can come over and listen to the games whenever you like. And your sister can come too. I have a feeling I’m going to start missing her linguine real fast.”
I rested my head against the glass of the passenger window. Even with the pervasive smell of the cigar smoke and the beer, I could detect the distinct rubber and vinyl scent of a virgin car. I liked the smell. New cars reminded me that change isn’t always bad. I tried to see my stepfather Harvey’s departure this way. Harvey knew how much I had grown to love him and look up to him, even though he was a good fifteen years or so older than my mother and obstinately set in his ways (as he would be the first to admit). He had taught me everything I knew about baseball and cars and technology and science, and had been, in truth, over these last two years, much more of a father to me than my own.
I think Harvey knew this and I think it made having to tell me about the decision he and my mom had reached a hard thing to do. Harvey had been married only once before, many years ago for a few months after he got out of the Navy. He never talked about his first wife and I didn’t ask. He never had kids. Connie and I were the closest he was ever going to come to having kids.
Harvey turned up the radio. But a moment later there was a knock at my window. It was my older sister Connie. I rolled down the window. “Is the game over?” she asked.
“Bottom of the sixth,” said Harvey.
“I’m making linguine.”
“Did your mom talk to you?”
Connie nodded. I could tell from the puffiness of her eyes that she’d been crying.
“You two want to come in and listen to the game while we eat? Mom says it’ll be okay.”
I gave my stepfather the same hopeful look as my sister. “I got my new transistor radio,” I said, holding it up, as if he hadn’t been with me four days earlier when I picked it out.
“Sure,” he said. He turned off the radio and picked up his nearly empty third bottle of beer. Connie looked at the bottle and then looked at me. “Have you been drinking too?” she asked.
I nodded. “But don’t tell Mom.”
“I won’t tell Mom if Harvey gives me a pull.”
Harvey held the bottle up for Connie to reach in and take through the window. “You see why your mother’s kicking me out, don’t you?”
We had Connie’s linguine, which was seasoned with an ungodly amount of oregano (just the way we all liked it). My mother and stepfather were civil, almost friendly to one another at the table, and when the game was over and the injury of defeat was patched up with positive thoughts from the broadcasting trio on the future of the franchise, Harvey took me aside. Quoting the famous Yankee and future Mets player and manager Yogi Berra, he said, “When you come to a fork in the road, take it.”
Then he handed me a fork he’d lifted from the table, and turning his face so I wouldn’t see it, went out onto the back porch to smoke another Tiparillo. I didn’t follow him. He had a lot of thinking to do about his next inning.
1963 ESTIVATING IN NEW JERSEY
Adrian Martini took out his handkerchief and wiped the beading sweat from his forehead. It was late September but it felt like late July.
“Are you allowed to call it Indian summer when summer never really left?” asked Benny Baum, the other salesman working the floor that afternoon at Landis Avenue Appliances. Benny took a swig of his Coca-Cola, the third bottle he’d plucked from the frosty commercial cooler that afternoon. The cooler was put there by the store’s owner for the refreshment of his customers, especially those who had stepped into the un-airconditioned south Jersey appliance store and then seemed immediately desirous of stepping right back out again. The reason was this: in spite of meteorological evidence that argued against it, the owner had a seasonal habit of turning off his store’s central air conditioning unit the day after Labor Day. Nobody — not Adrian or Benny or Sophia, who worked in Accounts (and had come to work this day wearing more bath powder than Blanche DuBois) — could talk him out of it.
“Was that a real question or are you being rhetorical?” replied Adrian, sticking his now soggy handkerchief back into his trousers pocket.
“Doesn’t matter. Just making conversation,” said Benny through a half-yawn.
Adrian was only barely listening to his sales colleague. He was watching the two kids presently situating themselves on the linoleum floor in front of the store’s new Magnavox 330-square-inch console. Anticipating their arrival, Adrian had turned on the set and made sure it was tuned to Channel 6. Adrian did this every afternoon he was in the store, and every afternoon he was in the store the girl and boy could be counted on with almost clocklike punctuality to show up between 3:50 and 4:00. This meant that every weekday afternoon of every week, Landis Avenue Appliances got a ten-minute helping of American Bandstand rock and roll, leading into the main attraction: Popeye Theatre, hosted by Sally Starr. Thursday was Adrian’s day off. But he knew that the girl and boy came to watch Popeye and the Three Stooges and cowgirl Sally Starr on Thursday, too (along with the Dick Clark appetizer), because Benny told him so.
The girl, who looked to be about nine, and the boy, who looked to be about seven, had started making their afternoon visits about two months ago. Adrian and Benny figured that the kids didn’t have a TV at home. Mr. Poitras, the store’s owner, didn’t mind. In fact, he liked to think of the kids as props in a sort of real-life diorama about home and hearth and family togetherness — the hearth, the pot-bellied stove, if you will, of twentieth-century America being a sparkling new 330-square-inch Magnavox American Traditional, Normandy Provincial, or Danish Modern console television. (And nobody beats our competitive prices!)