The Brothers K (54 page)

—Henry David Thoreau

T
elephones are, without question, useful devices. But they are also, it seems to me, the verbal equivalent of houses without toilets. Telephones allow minds to communicate with minds (or tongues with ears, at least) in clarity or turmoil, in semisomnolence or drunkenness, in lust, joy, hysteria, stupefaction or any other state that fails to render a human physically incapable of holding up a quarter-pound chunk of perforated plastic—which is most every state there is. That telephones can connect us in seconds to any creature on earth foolhardy enough to lift its own chunk of plastic is wonderful. But it’s also terrible, given what a lot of people think and feel about each other. That’s why, until they’re equipped with some sort of flush or filter or waste-disposal system for the billions of words that ought not to be spoken, I’ll not trust the things.

In 1969—thanks to the old dial-a-prayer projects that resulted in the
manifestations of G. Q. Durham and Doc Franken—Everett had an idolatrous faith in telephones. In 1969 he also still hated Elder Babcock as much as he hated anybody, but his antiwar struggles had dispersed his hate over such a wide area that the Elder seldom entered his mind anymore. When Freddy wrote and told Everett what Mrs. Babcock had done to her ear, though, the Babcocks reentered his mind in a hurry. In fact he walked straight to his phone in a rabid-dog stagger, dialed directory assistance, then the Babcocks’ number, heard the Elder lift his quarter-pound chunk of plastic, and just that fast was engaged in a malediction match with the only man I know of leather-lunged and tenacious enough to rage as long and loudly as Everett himself.

What Everett later recalled was not so much the verbal blows struck as the odd rhythm of the striking. He’d expected the two of them to blaze away simultaneously, like riot cops and students at a militant demonstration, but instead their fury had fallen into a pattern: one of them would suck down a lungful of air, blaze away for as long as it lasted, then pause to catch his breath while the other poured out a lungful of abuse. It was almost mannerly, Everett said, “like an old Napoleonic duel.”

But when he got around to telling me what they’d actually said, I saw nothing duel-like about it. It reminded me more of a fight I’d once seen between two hoods at my high school—two notorious street-fighting toughs who hated each other so much, but were so equally matched, that in the end they hadn’t the wit or energy to avoid a single punch: they just stood there, propped up by sheer kinetic hatred, taking gentlemanly, almost golferlike swings from the heels as they smashed each other’s faces into featureless pulp. Babcock’s initial thesis had been that “Everett Chance” and “Satan’s Minion” were virtually synonymous terms. Everett had countered by shouting that Adventism was just a quirky little nineteenth-century cult started by a barnstorming peabrain and a puritanical plagiarist, and that it had survived into this century only because of the segregated school system and financial empire built by money-sucking leeches like Babcock himself. The Elder then averred that Everett was possessed and unnatural, that he had sex with himself constantly and probably with animals and his brothers as well, and that his pimples, manners, beliefs, depraved writings and speech all proved this. Everett told the Elder that he underestimated himself terribly, and that thanks to his last visit to our house we brothers had repented, baptized each other in the upstairs tub, and enjoyed several hours of Christian group sex afterward. Babcock cried out that on the day Everett and all his brothers tumbled down into the Lake of Unquenchable Fire, he would praise and
thank his Just Lord and Savior and weep copious tears of joy. “Better an eternity in that lake than a night in bed with your sow of a wife,” quoth Everett. “How about your sisters, boy?” Babcock shot back. “Have you laid your lascivious hands on
them
yet?” And so on and so forth. Obviously, the AT&T conversation-flushing phone-toilet was what the situation required.

Everett and I had a telephone falling-out of our own when he bragged to me about getting in the last word. He said he’d shouted at Babcock that the kind of preacher who threatens others with hell is no different than any moron leather-jacketed greaser who shoves his middle finger in people’s faces and tells them “Fuck you!”—and Babcock, instead of answering, had hung up on him.

Then I said to Everett, “I think you’re right. Babcock
is
that kind of preacher. So why are you trying to be the moron greaser?”

And Everett hung up on me!

As I remember, the bases were loaded.

—Garry Maddox, ex-Phillies outfielder,
       trying to recollect his first grand slam homer

P
apa Toe Chance—stuck though he was in a rickety marriage and the statistical prison of mid-inning relief—managed by the end of two and two-thirds seasons to make himself indispensable to the Tugs, to win four ballgames, and to save God-knows-how-many. No statistician kept track of saves till the Rolaids antacid company came up with a “relief” award as a publicity gimmick in 1969 (I’m not making this up). Papa guesses he saved around ten. John Hultz thought it was more like forty. But Papa thinks Johnny was confusing what he calls “turnarounds”—games that were won because the Tugs relaxed and played better ball after Papa’s appearance—with legitimate saves. Be that as it may, over the course of the same two and two-thirds seasons he also lost four games (nice balance), hit five home runs (we were definitely counting those) and two triples (which he beat out on nine toes). And he maintained a 3.10 ERA in one of the worst pitcher’s ballparks on the face of the earth.

But as Everett said, numbers, for all their vaunted accuracy, are amazingly inaccurate little doodads. They look nice in the books, but the flesh-and-blood actions they stand for are almost impossible to remember.
That’s why, silly as they can be, I prefer to remember the old words, the phrases, the names. I like to recall how, for a few years back at the dawn of the Hippie Era, the name Papa Toe could be heard in jock taverns all over the Portland-Vancouver area, and in dugouts all up and down the West Coast. I like remembering how his best pitch had been dubbed the Kamikaze in a backyard hedge hideout, but the nickname had caught on and traveled all up and down the same coast. And I like to recall how, at the height of this manageable little notoriety, Papa laughed as he and I were driving home to Camas late one summer night, and said, “You know what’s so funny about this Papa Toe stuff, Kade? Nothing’s changed! My shed’s a little bigger now, and I’m free of the mill. But I’m still just tryin’ to keep my head on straight. I’m still just throwin’ those what-did-we-call-’ems? Psalmballs? Prayerballs? Harelipped prayers?”

B
y September 1967, the Pirate management got curious about all the glowing tales their ex-Tugs kept telling about this Papa Toe character, so they decided to fly him up to Pittsburgh for a few innings of what was, unquestionably, “stupid relief.” The adventure allowed Papa to prove almost nothing to them but his physical existence—yet they flew him up
again
in 1969. In ’67 the Pirates finished in sixth place; in ’69 they finished third. Both years they made no bones about having zero interest in Papa’s potential as a pitcher, only the mildest interest in his potential as a pitching coach or scout, but a fair amount of interest in trotting him around in front of journalists and publicists as some sort distinguished-looking mill-gimped “human-interest story.”

Embarrassing as this was, it enabled Papa to throw nine bona fide innings of Big-Time Baseball (three during the first visit, six during the second) that he would never have been able to throw otherwise. True, he gave up twelve hits and six runs. But he got a fluke end-of-the-bat single off Bob Gibson. And hit Hank Aaron in the thigh with a stage-frightened Kamikaze. And got young Davey Johnson to ground into a double play. And he didn’t lose. Or win. Which I think fit his entire knight-errant’s legend just about perfectly. He had a slight case of jet lag the first time he pitched, but he didn’t really think that was why he got shelled. “After all these years,” he confessed in a postcard afterward, “I think I’ve finally just become a Triple A kind of guy.”

In comparison to what I’ve suffered from myself the humiliation and suffering inflicted on me by others vanishes into insignificance
.

—Heimito von Doderer

I
t started out as a typical march for Everett: the same old eight or ten thousand concerned campus clucks and city liberals; the same two or three hundred hard-core rads; the same Seattle city police escort service; even the same pathetic narc in the middle of the action, decked out like a Hollywood Haight Streeter, wheezing “Bodacious shit!” over and over as he passed out free reefers so they could break your head and bust you for possession later on if need be. Their destination was typical too, though Everett had a larger than usual role in creating it: they were heading to Pier 2, right in downtown Seattle, for a “nonviolent confrontation” (“i.e. impotent show of disgruntlement,” said Everett) with a brand-new nuclear submarine which some highly paid panel of Pentagon damage-control experts had dubbed the
Liberty
. According to a less than substantive article Everett had written for the underground
Callipygian Quarterly
, this sub had cost “exactly what J. Edgar Hoover said CBS would have to pay him to suck Abbie Hoffman’s dick on prime-time TV.” But nobody seemed to mind the price tag. The sub sat at the pier for weeks, bland and matter-of-fact as a double-parked taxi, and attracting about as much attention. But then Everett happened to read a Seattle
Times
interview in which the sub’s somewhat confused commander gloated that his vessel packed “the range and nuclear firepower to take out every major city on the west coast of North America.” That was all it took: the next day Everett’s “Give Chance a Peace” column dubbed the commander “Admiral Wrongway Peachfuzz,” thirty thousand students had a good chuckle, the alternative press and peace organizations jumped on it, and the march was planned. Yelling “Go home!” to an inanimate albatross that was already almost home (it had been manufactured in nearby Bremerton) didn’t sound very interesting at all. But marching off to tell Admiral Wrongway Peachfuzz to get his fucking continents straight sounded like good fun.

So off they’d gone, uptown to down, and all too soon the march had become the usual tedious battle between two radically opposed musical sensibilities—Crooners versus Chanters: “If I Had a Hammer” or “Amazing
Grace” whenever things bogged down in an intersection; “Hey! Hey! LBJ!” or “One Two Three Four!” whenever their twenty thousand feet started laying down a groove. Everett didn’t mind the chanting much, but about the third time the sweet sound tried to save a wretch like him he decided to obliterate his awareness by resorting to one of his tried-and-truest peace-march diversions: by speeding up to the front of the parade column, then slowing down and weaving from one side of the street to the other, it was possible within the space of a few miles and minutes to scrutinize the bottoms of literally
thousands
of women. A couple of thousand ifs, ands and butts into this exercise and he’d reached a nirvana of lust that had him bellowing “Amazing Grace” like it was his all-time favorite song. But was it excessive discharge or merely excessive ogling that Ezra Pound said would lead to imbecility? Everett used to remember, but by the time they’d reached the pier his maneuvers had him weaving like a drunk. Fearing he might muff his speech, he started struggling, like some hopeless old smoker with emphysema, to break his habit. But just as the crowd spread out round the boardwalk and pier to surround the infamous submarine, just as the portable p.a. was fired up and the first speaker began to let Admiral Peachfuzz have it, Everett nearly collided with a female lower story in frayed jeans that fit like pantyhose, raised his eyes to a second story swathed in a lavender BONG THE PENTACONG! T-shirt (one of his own slogans!), reached an incredibly profuse head of shimmering reddish-brown hair, and involuntarily told himself:
If the face and front match the rest, I’m gonna propose on the spot!

Easing up beside her, he consciously reminded himself to swallow his drool, cranked up the aphrodisiacal eye magic, cleared his throat, waited for her eyes and lips to bequeath him his first inspired line. And she turned to him.

And loudly snorted.

Shit O. Deer. It was the Natasha wench. The one who’d told him off at Gurtzner’s lecture. And her face, even smirking,
surpassed
the rest of her.

“How’s the Seattle One-Seventh?” she asked.

“Huh?” quoth the urbane Everett, thinking,
How does she know I was Adventist?

“The Chicago Seven. The Seattle One-Seventh. A joke for a joker. Get it?”

“Oh. Huh. Fine.” Where was his brain? And his magic tongue? What had she done with them? How had she done it?

“It was a mean greeting, though,” she said, smiling wryly but radiantly.
“If I’m going to improve your manners, I’d better start with my own. So let me take it back. ‘How are you, Everett,’ I should have said. And let me also admit that I usually read your column, and even enjoy it—when you pick the right targets.”

She paused. And he could not think of a single word to say. “Hey, come on!” she said. “You look like you don’t believe me.”

He didn’t, but not at all in the sense she meant.

“Want some two-cent reviews to prove it?”

He was in luck! She’d asked a question he could answer by nodding!

“The Wrongway Peachfuzz thing: brilliant. The piece on politicians and women, 71 World Liters Equals 5 U.S. Gals’: weird and a little chauvinistic, but I have to admit I laughed. The behind-the-scenes portrait of the Cajun band, ‘Awesome Possum’:
very
funny. The Jimmy Stewart meets Jimmy Joyce meets Jimi Hendrix filibuster-on-a-page, ‘Smoking Pots in Washingpan’: even weirder. Pot and the pen don’t mix, pal. At least not for you. Let’s see … The character assassination of Charismatics: a complete non sequitur for a columnist like you. Who the hell raised you? Cotton Mather? And the piece on stuffy old tenured faculty, with the—what were those bourbons called? ‘Old Stepdad’? ‘Empty Times’? That one
really
pissed me off. Because it was great. It was right up there with Peachfuzz and Possum. And then you trashed it with the veiled attack on Dr. Gurtzner. Pathetic, Everett! Really petty. No more of those, okay? You should have listened to me the first time.”