Fries, No Flies

The Hebrew characters spell the word Chai (sometimes pronounced "hai"). It means life or refers to the living God--depending on how it's used or defined. A variant, l'chaim, is the common toast in Hebrew, meaning "to life". My last name, Hyman, is also a variant on the word, meaning that my last name refers to life and the God that lives inside me.

My last name was changed to Hyman when my forebears arrived from Romania at the turn of the 20th Century, having been hunted and killed by mobs and their villages burned to the ground. Grandpa Max came to America when he was still young, quite without the English language and familiarity with life on these shores. Along the way, he changed our name.

Jewish boys and girls attend Hebrew language and culture training for several years leading up to the Bar/Bas Mitzvah, a ritual that signifies adulthood in the tribe. You learn common prayer, special prayers selected by the calendar that match the season in which you turn 13 years old, our cultural history, and the language used to read and recite scripture.

My family initially sent me to a school that was not affiliated with a synagogue, but a bar mitzvah mill that churned out celebrants by the dozens. We met in a converted store filled with school desks and blackboards under the direction of a taskmistress whose name I have blocked from memory to protect myself from recurring trauma. I love a story from Donald Barthelme in which he calls the teacher "Miss Mandible", and it will suffice for this recollection. My Miss Mandible walked behind the desks--not unlike the demon nuns that have been described to me from recovering Catholics--making sure we kept our Sephardic noses to the grindstone.

I had trouble making out the consonants, although the vowels were simple. They appeared beneath each letter, or to the side, and were few in shape and number. But the consonants! Some were uttered from deep in the throat and when you pronouced them correctly, it sounded as if you were trying to clear a bolus of half-chewed beef from your windpipe. Several characters looked exactly the same to me, which is why I sunk into depths of multi-generational despair when I confused them in recitation beneath Miss Mandible's gaze. When I went to the synagogue, I always chanted the notes to the prayers, mumbling the actual language, which seemed impossibly out of reach.

What I truly loved, however, were the short historical films we watched on biblical heroes from the Old Testament. I particularly had a crush on Ruth, the Moabite woman who said, "Entreat me not to leave you, or to turn back from following you; For wherever you go, I will go." In the film she was utterly delicious, impeccably tanned, lean, and graceful in her white robe and sandals. From then on, I was to search the continents and islands of my travels to find a woman who would commit to everlasting fidelity.

Bethlehem, as it was presented in the film, was a small village with neatly arranged little adobe houses tucked among smooth pathways that ran between desert rocks and plants. In the close-ups you could see Ruth's skin--like spun chocolate--and pleasant eyes. This a was a Bethlehem quite without scorpions, flies, and pestilence--whether biblical or otherwise.

One afternoon--for we went to Hebrew school after regular school let out--my friend David and I made a discovery that was to influence our religious training forever. Just up the alley that ran behind the Hebrew school was a cafe that sold french fries by the bag. These were no diminutive fry bags issued by fast-food joints. These were Number 10 shopping bags, brown as Ruth's skin, and stuffed to the top with hot, oily, heavily salted fries. They made for fine eating and quelled the imperious, full-body shame that rose to the heart from scripture dyslexia.

How many times did we sit in the alley, ignoring the fear of flunking out of Hebrew school, wolfing down those delightful, crisp, heavenly fries that surely God had delivered unto us? I cannot say, except that as my bar mitzva date grew near, my father was disturbed by my apparent inability to read or speak the most rudimentary of expressions required for the ritual. A private tutor was arranged, thereby wiping out the savings my parents might have made by sending me to the cut-rate, bar mitzvah factory run by Miss Mandible.

The venerable David Starr made house calls, teaching me how to perform the entire ceremony phonetically. Ever-more chubby, now entered into a lifelong struggle with my overeating, I mastered the Torah melodies, which I sung in my cherubic, bell-clear soprano voice just months from changing forever--and everyone was proud of me.

Years later, I visited Bethlehem on a day trip from Jerusalem. There was no sign of Ruth in the crowds of Sabras who walked among the modern apartments and rumbling buses. Her descendants wore bright miniskirts, Western jeans and baseball caps, and several carried Uzi machine guns. These were tough women, who had no notion of taking an oath to follow me wherever I went.

And the biting flies, dear God, oh the flies!

Glory Days

It's almost as if the two words "Bitter Rivalry" are linked by some symbiotic notion of tribal fidelity, as if there can be no bitterness without rivalry. In the photo, San Francisco Giants pitcher Juan Marichal is in the business of whacking the unprotected skull of Dodgers' catcher John Roseboro with his ash-wood bat. Famed hurler Sandy Koufax rushes to aid his battery-mate. It is August 22, 1965, just weeks before the Dodgers would go on to beat the Twins to win the World Series. The Giants were in hot pursuit, finishing two games back. It seems that Roseboro aimed throws back to Koufax so that the balls whizzed past Marichal's ear. The two had words, and Marichal went off like the tightly wound Dominican he was. The fight lasted 14 minutes and Roseboro required 14 stitches.

The number 14 in baseball means everything to me. When I was seven years old, my father took me to Ebbetts Field to see the Brooklyn Dodgers. The "Boys of Summer" featured Jackie Robinson, Duke Snider, Roy Campenella, and Pee Wee Reese. The silent heart of the team, to me anyway, was the first baseman Gil Hodges, who wore number 14.

Gil, the son of an Indiana coal miner, had come up as a catcher in 1943, but shipped out to the Pacific, where he earned a Bronze Star for courage in battles on Tinian and Okinawa. When he came home, he was moved to first base, where he was a stalwart up until he was replaced in 1961 by Norm Larker. Consequently, I never much liked Norm Larker, who managed only 22 homers in four years with the Dodgers.

Hodges was strong enough to lug refrigerators without assistance. His physique and numbers were astounding. He was second only to Snider in leading the league in home runs and RBIs during the 50s decade. He won the first three Gold Gloves for fielding after the award was created, was the first player after Lou Gherig to hit four home runs in a game, and in 1950 became the first Dodger to hit 40 home runs in a season. An eight-time allstar who helped lead his team to six pennants, he was dwarfed by the greatness of other players around him (Mantle, Mays, Snider, Aaron) and has not made it to the Hall of Fame despite leading the Miracle Mets of 1969 to their World Series title as manager.

But I had other reasons for loving him. He was soft spoken, and his name was Gil, the same as my father's. Our initials are the same. And we both played first base. He looks as big as Jackie in this photo of the boys standing in front of the batting cage in Ebbetts.

The morning of my first game, dad drove us across Brooklyn in his gray Dodge and we got to Ebbetts Field in time to watch Gil take batting practice. Aside from the brilliant patch of green amidst the city scape around us--as so many writers remark about in their memoirs--I recall the vivid blue of the uniforms which had been black and white in the newspapers. Sure, there was the smell of the grass, but more than that was the overwhelming bank of cigar smoke, the overtones of roasted peanuts, and a sour aroma of beer in the air.

I knew from my reading that the rivalry between Giants and Dodgers fans during the era was, in fact, bitter, but I had yet to really feel it. Bobby Thomson's home run in 1951 apparently fueled the hatred. That was before I was born. When Giants fans bring that homer to my attention today, I am quick to point out that immediately afterwords, the Giants were destroyed by the Yankees in the World Series. I point out that since both the Giants and Dodgers moved west in 1957, only one team has won a World Series--in fact five of them--and that team wears blue.

But back to Brooklyn.... What I recall most about my first trip to Ebbetts Field was that we sat just to the left side of home plate, about 30 rows back, and the cast-iron pillars that supported the upper deck rose right between the seats and blocked our view toward first base. I remember the warmth of the crowd, which seems to blot out most of the other recollections. It remains my first memory of Black people, the fans who came to see Jackie. I remember the incredible kindness and joy in their faces, and how several made a point of speaking with me, including an older gentleman who sported a smoldering cigar and tapped me on the shoulder whenever the crowd roared. I remember wild music, played by spectators who had brought instruments with them. And a circus clown, mournful Emmett Kelly from Barnum and Baily, passed among the rows making us laugh.

We moved to Los Angeles--the same year the Dodgers moved--so I never lost my team. Dad would take us to the Coliseum and later, to Dodger Stadium to see the new boys of summer. I always rode in the back seat with my baseball glove in my lap. The place was packed whenever the Giants came to town. I hated to leave before the last out, but my dad often would get us up and out the ramps to beat the post-game traffic that tied up the freeways for hours. I'd listen to games on my transistor radio at the beach, in the car, while mowing the lawns, and in my darkened bedroom at night where I could see the grass and red-dirt infield in my mind's eye as Vin Scully carved out delicious swirls of language. We'd sneak a transistor radio and earpiece into synagogue, where the High Holiday services often conflicted with the World Series.

Mom loved to go to the stadium where they had fabulous hot dogs. Maybe they weren't as good as the Coney Island dogs at Ebbetts, but they were and still are tasty. Mom knew the game, too, and the players. We watched every battle televised from Candlestick when the Dodgers played the Giants--the only games on television aside from a weekly NBC broadcast. Dad would order a pizza and we'd set out the tv trays in the den and camp in front of the set for hours. We were watching the incredible stretch run in '65 that Sunday afternoon when Marichal whacked Roseboro on the head. That moment I finally became a Giants-hater.

When I moved to Northern California to go to college in 1972, the Giant's drew so poorly that I could go to games at Candlestick Park and sit among a crowd of Dodgers fans almost equal in number to the locals. The boys won their share of pennants those days, and it was fun to rub it in. One night sportswriter Gary Rubin finagled a press pass for me at Candlestick and I walked around the batting cage, yakking with Steve Garvey and Ron Cey, snapping a photo of Smokey Alston as he stood with his foot on the top step of the dugout in his last year as skipper.

But by the time the Giants assumed their new home in the city, the crowds were almost entirely made of hardened fans in orange and black with profound hatred of all things blue. I made the mistake of wearing my Dodgers jersey. A surly fan wedged his nacho chip into that so-called cheese sauce and dumped it over me.

Outnumbered, I simply found an usher, reported the incident, and had the fan tossed out of the stadium. Revenge was sweeter than the relish on their substandard hot dogs.

Only once have I rooted against the Dodgers. I am not ashamed of it. It was September 6, 1988 in Cincinnati's Riverfront Stadium. That year that the Dodgers would go all the way, riding to the World Series title on the backs of Kirk Gibson and Orel Hershiser. The game Cincinnati's Tom Browning of the Reds started against Tim Belcher began late following an evening shower. Tom Chiarella and I sat under the overhang in the upper deck and drank beers, waiting out the storm. Chiarella was an avid Mets fan, but more than that, he loved the game. We thought nothing of driving half a day to see the Mets play in Atlanta. For this outing, we had driven in the rain nearly four hours to Cincinnati, hoping they'd play the game.

The Reds would only get three hits off of Belcher, tallying a single run. But that is not the story. Gibson was tossed out after arguing strikes after his third futile at bat. Hell, they were all futile at bats. Not a single Dodger reached first base.

Browning took his perfect game into the eighth. Wonder about the odds of seeing a perfect game? There have only been 16 of them since Cy Young tossed the first one in 1904. So as the ninth inning rolled to the top of the scoreboard, I rose to my feet, dropped my blue hat on the seat behind me, and began cheering for Tom Browning until I was nearly hoarse as he retired the side. I watched as he was carried off the field and waited around for his curtain call.

I still reside in Northern California, where I am frequently confronted by Giants fans. I heard it especially during the recent dark era in which they joined in some inexplicable, hallucinatory hubris in their allegiance to Barry Bonds. In the face (an apt metaphor) of all evidence to the contrary, they loved their bloated, naked emperor with his artificially-swelled punkin' head.

It's difficult to reconcile my new-found devotion to Buddhism with historical sibling rivalry, especially when the bile arcs through my veins each spring. It's not as if I have not been a loudmouth thug myself. Once I got a row of fans tossed from Wrigley Field after yelling unkind epithets against an umpire who had crossed a picket line. An usher once asked me to remove a tee shirt I was wearing that suggested that the New York Mets should receive vigorous stimulation while bending. Simply saying that I have never touched another fan or tossed anything through the air, save for a beachball at Dodger Stadium on a hot summer's day, is gross rationalization. But growth takes time.

Crowds of fans have been trampled in sporting events around the world. I recall film clips from England where rival soccer aficionados tossed darts into a crowd, maiming the eyes of opposing fans. This is surely setting loose the precognitive, ancient furies of Irish and the English, Hatfields and McCoys, Arabs and Jews, Protestants and Catholics, the Red states and Blues. I don't see a fundamental distinction between beating up a fan in a parking lot because of the color of his cap as flying an airplane into a large office building. It's just a difference in amperage.

There's yet an odd peace in drifting to naive days where I sit in Ebbetts Field, craning my neck for a glimpse of Gil Hodges, that hulking Rock of Gibraltar, who brings Blacks and Whites, Christians and Jews, and all the odd fellows of the borough together where, for a moment, we are the embodiment of the refrain from the mystic Rumi, in which the poet says,

"Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing
and rightdoing there is a field.
I'll meet you there.
When the soul lies down in that grass
the world is too full to talk about."

Going Under

The Granada Hills High School "Highlanders" chose the McLean tartan. Only a few members of the marching band were allowed to wear kilts, sporrans, and flashes. I took great pride in it, although I was a Russian Jew and the closest I had come to the highlands was the corner of Chatsworth Street and Zelzah Avenue, where palm trees and burger joints dotted the landscape.

I wore the kilt around town just to call attention to myself. I wore it to the store, the dentist, on cruise nights on the Sunset Strip, and to the pancake house. If I could, I would have worn it to synagogue.

I was certain it underscored my manhood. Matt Garbutt had a Falcon station wagon and after football games, I'd ride in the back deck, my naked legs hanging out the open window toward following cars. There were jokes about what we wore underneath, but none of us would tell.

In the fall of my senior year I wore the kilt to Dr. Abraham's office. The doc was a fully paid member of one of the twelve tribes of Israel and, like myself, had no prior experience in man skirts. At the end of the appointment it was decided that I had a lazy eye that would require surgery. The procedure was scheduled and off I went to parade my uniform about Ventura Boulevard.

The operation required a mild sedative. In those days, strabismus surgery had to be performed without anesthesia so the patient, gazing consciously at spots on the ceiling, could let the physician know if the adjustment to the muscle was on target. Only then would the anesthesiologist deliver the knock-out drug.

To begin, the anesthesiologist injected my eye socket with a numbing solution, making six or eight insertions around the orbit. They burned like iodine. When the doctor had successfully moved my eye out from its setting to reach the muscles beneath it, the pain was absolutely intolerable. It felt like he was pushing a screwdriver into my eye. Worse, I could see everything through my good eye, reflected in the mirror the surgeon wore on his forehead.

"Just a little longer, " he said. I was wriggling in my restraints and the nurse put her hand on my shoulder. The dots on the ceiling seemed close and in focus through my tears. "A little more," he said, "you're doing great."

The pain shot back into my skull and down my neck, and I cried out. At that second, Dr. Abraham lifted up his mirror and peered at me.

"What do you wear under that thing, anyway?" he asked.

For a moment we were laughing. And just after that, the full anesthesia hit like a sledge and I passed into the heather.

Brighton Beach

This is the earliest photo I have of myself. I'm in the carriage. Whenever I look at this picture, I admire the tips on my dad's flashy shoes (click on the picture, you'll see the details). I was born in December.

Dad has a compelling grin, but if you linger on the image, you'll see a very complicated man standing in the winter chill. Analytical and methodical, he quit his plans to become a chemist and went to community college to train as an accountant. His way of bonding with me during my adolescence was to lug me along to help him inventory--by hand--the thousands of ballpoint pens at the Lindy company.

Like all of my memories, the Brooklyn-Brighton Beach years are more a series of repeated narratives assembled by my mind to serve some emotional pattern. They're well-grooved tales that are as unrelated to The Moment as any story colored by perceptions, motives, and constant repetition. It's a catalog of show tunes--Gabby's Greatest Hits--with lyrics and a choreography of events, unalterable over time.

Several years ago, I returned to Brighton to find the Little Odessa of thousands of landed Russians. These were not the same Ukrainian Jews of the 1950s, who like my relatives sat in the cafes talking about Robeson and Roosevelt and Jackie Robinson. The lanes where dad might have wheeled my carriage, passing below the El train to shop for for warm knishes and potato kugel, were now choked with roiling crowds of immigrants bickering over the price of mp3 players--blonde-haired, ruddy-complected, Russian-mafia youth. Thugs.

Shop signs, which had been in that oddly mystical Hebrew lettering of my youth, were now printed in Cyrillic, a language I had associated with cosmonauts and evil people in black fedoras wielding hydrogen bombs. Unlike my static memories of the cold winter morning where my dad wheeled me out for fresh air, the neighborhood had changed its tune, as well as its book of lyrics. Nonetheless, the vision I retain of modern Brighton, too, is an assemblage of images that suits my sense of loss. The nugget of hope, of course, is that I know these things.