chapter two

The Pick-Up Game

“Hey, Teddeee.” Every morning that summer started the same.“Hey, Teddeee.” It was Sammy Bellissimo and Harry Kirkland outside my window at about nine o’clock.

My mother was one of the sweetest women on Earth. But for some reason all the kids were afraid to knock at our door. Instead they stood outside my bedroom window and kind of chanted my name over and over until I came outside.

My mother tapped at my bedroom door and stuck her head in the room.“Teddy, Nelson, your friends are waiting for you.” Nelson was my brother, about a year and a half younger than me. We shared a bedroom. We also had two sisters, who shared another bedroom. It was 1964, the height of the baby boom. Our fathers had all fought in the Second World War then came home and found decent-paying jobs in the steel industry in Western Pennsylvania. Almost every family in town had three or four or five kids in it.

I hopped out of bed and opened the window. It was a perfect mid-June morning in my home town of Rockland. My backyard stretched out long and green in every direction until it melted into the neighbors’ yards and then into their neighbors’ yards and so on across the neighborhood, with only a dirt alleyway here and there to break up the sea of green. There were giant oaks and fruit trees and maple trees spread across the ball-field-sized yards.“I’ll be out in ten minutes,” I yelled down to my buddies. I could see they both had their bikes, with their baseball gloves hanging on the handle bars.

“Nelson, wake up,” I said, shaking my brother’s shoulder.“Looks like we’re getting up a game.”

“I’m not playing,” my brother moaned as he pulled his sheets up over his head.“You go.”

Nelson always disagreed with whatever I suggested,“Suit yourself,” I shrugged, but five minutes later we were both in the kitchen wolfing down a bowl of Frosted Flakes. Harry and Sammy were already playing catch in my backyard.

“We’re getting up a game, Mom,” I told my mother as she tossed the bowls into the soapy gray water in the sink. She knew that was my way of asking if we could play in our yard.

“Why can’t you play in Janie Kirkland’s yard?” my mom complained.“Why does my yard always have to have those ugly bare spots all over it?” I had this conversation with my mother about fifty times each summer. I waited for the rest.“Besides, you’ll break a window.” She walked out of the kitchen and into the living room, where she was ironing clothes in front of the TV.

I knew my mom was right; we hosted more than our share of the neighborhood ball games. That was mostly because the other fathers in town worked shifts at the local steel mill. There was almost always somebody trying to get some sleep in the middle of the morning or afternoon. To wake up a sleeping father was unthinkable. Here was a man who left high school to defend his country, who came back to build the nation, who worked all night to feed his ever-growing family, who wanted nothing more than a hot meal and eight hours of sleep. It washugedeal to interrupt his sleep with noise from a pick-up game.

“Who the hell do these kids think they are?” one of the mill workers’ wives would shout out over our heads at some invisible adult audience.“My husband worked eleven to seven last night. Why are they screaming and yelling while he’s trying to get some sleep?”

We tried to stay away from sleeping fathers, but when we did happen to wake one up it was a bad situation. We knew all our neighbors personally. So our parents would get angry phone calls and we would all get punished. Everyone’s parents doled out their own kind of punishment based on their nationality and whatever they le