Dead Languages (12 page)

“Won’t you please, Jeremy? It would make your mother so happy.”

I shook my head.

“Please walk with us the rest of the way.”

I stood, picked up my pack, and started to run back onto the trail, but Father caught my foot and gave a little flip, which he really shouldn’t have done because I had an open knife in my hand. The knife, the pack fell out of my grasp. I landed in the dirt, Father pounced on me, and then—in a clearing at the timberline of the most beautiful mountains I know—we commenced to wrestle. It was the worst melodrama, the most absurd tableau: clutching each other’s clothes and rolling around on a bed of pine needles. He kept shouting, “Why won’t you walk with us? Why won’t you talk to us?”

Perfectly legitimate questions, but I didn’t have the answers and, besides, I was more interested in what had happened to the knife. Though it may have been only the sun setting his fingers on fire, I thought I saw the red handle of my pocket knife sticking out of his hand. I didn’t stop to contemplate whether I was encountering pure hallucination or potential homicide; I pushed him off me, grabbed my pack, and didn’t stop running until I was at the bottom of the mountain, a hundred yards from our car, sitting on a rock and skipping stones across a placid lake.

It seemed like it took forever, but they finally came trudging down the trail. Mother shook her hat at me. It was an extremely ugly hat. It had purple polka dots scattered across the brim like a disease. I’ve never seen her quite so angry as she was the moment she saw me sitting on a rock, skipping stones. She said she’d thought I was lost and now here I was, skipping stones. She said I had no right to run ahead of the pack, no right to make her worry like that, no right to ruin everyone’s vacation by playing dumb. I nodded, and in sign language said I was sorry. She thought I’d made an obscene gesture and, explaining that twelve years old wasn’t too old to be spanked, struck me across the back and legs with her steel-tipped walking stick until words came out of my mouth: not very pretty words: rather ugly words, in fact: so ugly as to be dishonest: but words, nonetheless: “I hate you. I hate all of you.”

DID YOU KNOW
that corporal punishment is often used for petty and trivial offenses such as throwing gum or not stripping for gym? Did you know that it is sometimes administered with split baseball bats and with slotted paddles? Did you know that it has been done in front of other children, as well as by students? Did you know that it has been done to disturbed children who need to be helped rather than hurt, that in the name of discipline grown men will hold a resisting child down on the floor and hit him many times?

Did you know that, when Mother got worked up about an issue, she could crank out a purple pamphlet with the best of them? Well, I suppose you did…. It wasn’t so much that I hated the members of my family as that I couldn’t communicate my love. That is always a problem, I’ve found, being unable to communicate one’s love. It gets one into the least attractive type of trouble. And I did love them. I loved them as ferociously as it’s possible to love one’s field artillery when one’s field artillery is committed to the ideal of social justice but prone toward intramural warfare. It seemed to me Mother thought the only reason to exist was to perform an endless number of good works. Where in the world would she get such an idea? No wonder Beth’s doctoral defense was going to be a revisionist view of the Levellers.

The primary beneficiary of Mother’s largesse was the Negro People. There were far fewer honeymoon pictures of Mother and Father kissing each other than of both of them kissing some black-faced, white-robed statues in Palm Springs. And that seemed to set the tone for the remainder of the millennium. Father rooted for the Dodgers because they were originally from Brooklyn, but we as a clan stayed loyal to them because they hired the first black baseball player (Jackie Robinson), retained the first crippled black baseball player (Roy Campanella), and started the highest number of black players with Stepin Fetchit faces (Johnny Roseboro, Jim Gilliam, Tommy Davis,
et al.
). There was something slumming in all this, something that was wrong, and I knew what it was when I was nine years old: we would love someone only when he was helpless. Gretchen thinks most of my problems pretty much stop and start on that sentence. One Easter weekend at Watts Towers Mother looked smogward through some latticed wine bottles with a positively religious sparkle in her dark eyes. When cousin Sarah married a black man from Philadelphia, Sarah’s mother couldn’t come, so Mother substituted and brought the temple down with an a cappella finale of “Bridge Over Troubled Water.” Never in my life have I met anyone who meant so well.

She began working full-time as the public information officer for the first integrated junior high school district in California and proceeded to make the Levellers look like a gang of Georgia Democrats. Mother sat on the side at the Tuesday night school board sessions, attacking her antique typewriter as if she were H. L. Mencken in
Inherit the Wind.
Whenever she grouped school children for posed pictures she insisted there be black faces in the crowd, but she was such a poor photographer that the black kids always came out as smudgy studies in ebony. She wrote the bimonthly newsletter that was distributed to the teachers,
my
teachers, and nearly every issue offered a signed editorial polemically in support of desegregation of the schools.

“We were all babies,” she wrote, explaining the origins of human sympathy. “We all have parents who love us. We all live in some kind of house. We all have families. We all have friends. We all need food. We all have feelings.” She got giddy about people she’d never met in a way she never could about people with whom she lived in some kind of house. Mother needed a scrim between herself and love, in the same way Father has relied upon the periodic cancellation of his memory; Beth, the space of time; and me—at twenty-one I already seem to suspect I’ll never marry.

One day Mother came home and stood on our tiny plot of front lawn, pounding a for sale sign into the grass, shouting at us to come outside.

We followed orders.

“What’s for sale?” Beth said, wise guy, as she was deep in some homework assignment. “The lawn?”

“The whole blessed house,” Mother said. She pirouetted ecstatically in the windy twilight.

“The whole house?” I said.

“We’re moving,” she explained, waving her hammer at me.

“Back to L.A.?” Father hoped. It was the only true paradise he ever experienced, way in the past.

“No, into the Fillmore district.”

“She’s lost it,” Beth whispered to me. “She’s finally joined Daddums in the burn ward.”

“Honey?” Father said. “The Fillmore?”

“At today’s Human Relations meeting, Ike said, ‘Revolution comes the day white families give up their houses in Pacific Heights to move into the ghetto.’” It was
1968
. Mother took what Ike said as a personal challenge. Ike pronounced the word, “ghetto,” with exaggerated emphasis on the first syllable to make it sound like he still lived somewhere near there.

“Honey?” Father tried again. “Don’t you think Ike meant it just sort of rhetorically?”

Mother refused to entertain the notion that words were ever meant as anything less than a direct call to arms and, while we paraded up and down the sidewalk with flashlights, accosting inquisitive pedestrians, Mother got on the horn with a hundred realtors, trying to get one, just one, to have enough imagination to foresee what a publicity coup it would be for them to work out a swap with a black family from the Fillmore. It’s a pity Father hadn’t earned his real estate license yet. Maybe he could have figured out a way to get us waking up every morning in the projects.

That wouldn’t have been his style, though. He was more circumspect about his role in the revolution. That fall, Father was fired from his post at the Jewish Welfare Fund—he wasn’t getting enough one-liners about last night’s charity dance into Herb Caen’s gossip column—and accepted a much lower-paying job as director of the poverty program in the Mission. He sat in a one-room office without central heating and called grocery stores, wanting to know why they didn’t honor food stamps; called restaurants, asking if, as the sign in the window proclaimed, they were indeed equal opportunity employers. Sometimes, on weekends, he flew to Sacramento or Washington to request more money for his program. In the Mission district, they worshipped him. They called him the Great White Hope. Watts rioted, Detroit burned. Father said, “Please, I’m just doing my job.” They invited him to barbecues, weddings, softball games. At the softball games he outplayed everybody. The salary was seventy-five hundred dollars a year, but he was happy. The ghetto was his.

Father called a landlord to ask whether the apartment listed was still available and received assurances there was a vacancy, but when he returned that evening with a skinny black man who’d just arrived from West Texas the landlord said the room had been rented. The poverty program filed a complaint with the city housing department; when weeks passed and Nicky was still without a place to live, Mother told Father to move Nicky’s luggage into the guest room.

Nicky didn’t have any luggage but he stayed until spring. He showed me how to shake hands, how to play pool, play cards, how to dance, how to dress. He bought me liquor and dirty magazines. He played basketball, baseball, football, tennis, and track with me and let me win. He didn’t leave until he met and married a pretty white girl, but what I remember is this: the morning after he moved in I walked into the bathroom while he was showering, smelled his body as burnt butter, hot heated jelly, damp sweet sweat, and vomited into the sink.

With Father working to improve the ghetto and Mother working to get children sent out of the ghetto, they couldn’t very well, in all good conscience, keep me going to a lily-white private school. Besides, neither of them was making anywhere near as much money as before and they couldn’t afford such exclusive education for me any longer, especially since Beth still had another year to go at Jack London Preparatory Academy. Also, Mother thought it would be good for me to mingle with unpampered people; I might get off my high horse and loosen up a little. Instead of going, as most Currier graduates did, to Borough Hills Middle School, which was neither in a borough nor on a hill but in the middle in the sense that it was an intermediate step between private grammar school and prep school, I went to Bayshore Junior High in the heart of the city.

BAYSHORE
was different from Currier. No grass fields, no left field walls, no right field fences, no tower with hour bells. But no speech therapist, either, no farcical student elections, no red-robed Christmas chorus catering to tourists and appearing on the eleven o’clock news, no all-night Open Houses. Just gunmetal gray lockers, gunmetal gray corridors, gunmetal gray classrooms, and little black boys carrying gray metal guns. They left me alone; they knew who my parents were. My reputation as a runner had also preceded me, and they weren’t going to harm someone who, come track season, promised to be so valuable.

After school I’d walk into the Mission, leave my books in Father’s office, then go to the court in the ghetto, which, after the murder in Memphis later that year, was renamed King Memorial Recreation Center. A hoop, a swing, a clay tortoise. At first I just watched. Black basketball is to white basketball as hockey is to, say, hopscotch: they’re not the same sport. I’d played white basketball in well-lit gymnasia, on glassy surfaces, against glass backboards, dribbled a leather basketball, passed it politely to my teammates, allowed my opponent to score a reasonable number of points, acknowledged the fact when I committed a foul. I’d played that game. Even when I played with Nicky, we’d play with people from the Heights and, if he had any jazzier gestures, he never revealed them. Maybe he just wasn’t a very talented athlete. The Mission version—wearing purple socks and black boots with a steel comb in your hair, never passing the ball to your teammates or shooting from beyond five feet, refusing to confess your most flagrant infractions, and kicking your heels and leaping off cement into rarefied ether—I’d never encountered before and was awed.

From the library I checked out
Rattling the Rim,
which concerned the heroes of street basketball in New York City. I’d memorize the myths, then appear at the Mission playground and, during water breaks, in halting tones, tell sad stories about Bedford-Stuyvesant drug addicts who could jump through the moon. The San Francisco stars didn’t want to hear about the New York stars. They didn’t care if Earl Manigault could touch the top of the backboard with his elbows, if Connie Hawkins could spin the ball on his nose while coming down off cocaine. They didn’t care. They weren’t interested. They wanted to be left alone and not be compared to anyone else and dunk until dark.

I shut up and just watched, but I kept reading about basketball until I found an even better book,
A Sense of Where You Are,
which was about Bill Bradley, who attended Princeton, won a Rhodes Scholarship, then played competent if unspectacular professional basketball for several years. During halftime of the Harvard game, while Coach Van Breda Kolff was explaining how to handle the Crimson’s full-court press, the future Rhodes Scholar was off in a corner with a towel draped around his neck and his Converse high-tops unlaced, reading Donne’s
Holy Sonnets.
At halftime of the Harvard game, in Cambridge, trailing by six, he was slouched against an open locker, scanning “Batter my heart, three person’d God; for, you/As yet but knocke, breathe, shine, and seeke to mend;/That I may rise, and stand, o’erthrow mee, and bend/Your force, to breake, blowe, burn, and make me new.” He put the book away, laced up his shoes, and scored thirty-six points in the second half, including a left-handed hook from behind the basket to win the game in double overtime.

A sense of where you are.
I wanted an unalterable compass of my position, not this other, disgusting feeling, this childish apprehension that wherever I was I was hopelessly lost, wherever I stood was quicksand. I stopped going into the Mission district, had Father nail a hoop to the garage door, and started practicing—with Nicky when he was around, by myself when he wasn’t.