"Levy-NewHorizons" - читать интересную книгу автора (Levy Robert J)

ROBERT J. LEVY

NEW HORIZONS IN STICKBALL

At the start of the summer of 1965, when I was twelve years old, I believed my
life was permanently circumscribed by the small-minded, imagination-parched
streets I moved through. Then Huge arrived to play in the Burton Street Games,
teaching us possibilities in the sport of stickball no one had suspected. By the
end of that same summer I had participated in the ultimate stickball game, hit
the fly ball to end all fly balls, and discovered that even the suburbs can be
touched, however briefly, by marvels.

It was just Mitch and me the day it all began. The afternoon had been hot and
close, but toward evening the humidity broke and the breeze grew merciful,
particularly at the highest point of Burton Street where we had been playing
fungo with a spaldeen and an old broomhandle doctored with black electrician's
tape. We'd already worked out the cars-equals-hits thing: the green Buick was a
single; further down, a white Cadillac was a double; beyond that we selected a
Mustang to be a triple; at the very end of the street, an old Woody Wagon was a
homer.

At one point Mitch smacked an erring line drive that disappeared into the
backyard thicket of a distant home. We climbed the fence, but couldn't find the
ball, so we called it quits for the day. Later, we sat atop a rusted, wheelless
Chevy in an overgrown lot behind the train tracks of the Long Island Railroad,
reclining against its fractured windshield, trying not to gag as we smoked a
couple of Swisher Sweets Mirth had copped from his dad.

School was out. September was miles away. It ought to have been a perfect spot
at a perfect time, overlooking as it did the crisscross-shadowed Little League
fields and, beyond that, the seemingly endless grid of suburban avenues and
boulevards fanning out like a spiderweb on all sides. However, my folks had
recently split up. My dad removed himself from the familial picture to hole up
with his new girlfriend in Hempstead (good riddance to him, to his violent
tempers, and to being smacked for no reason). My more sat home giving herself
ulcers, pawing through religious pamphlets for life's answers, and plotting
revenge.

Me, I was depressed as hell. I spent my days reading grim French fiction I
didn't really comprehend ("Mother died yesterday. Maybe it was the day before .
. .") and smoking joints on the sly. I hated the neighborhood, the pettiness of
it, the closeted, cloistered, blinkered, racist, philistine, ghettoized
narrowness of Queens and environs. Of course, at the time, I would have simply
said the place sucked big-time. The fact was, I wanted something more than my
friends wanted, something great and grand. But I had no name for what that might
be and no understanding of how to achieve my goal. All I knew was that the
suburbs did not breed the sort of magic I sought.