A CHRISTIAN SCIENCE HEALING - 1970

When Mary Baker Eddy, the discoverer and founder of Christian Science, created the religion in the late 19th Century hospitals were places you went to die. There was no such thing as penicillin. Doctors could only set bones, give you glasses and pull teeth. So Mary told her flock that they may seek medical care for broken bones, eye-glasses and teeth only. She said that for other diseases the cure was to know that they were unreal-- and that as soon as you recognized this fact that they would disappear.

In 1969, when penicillin had been around for 24 years, and doctors could cure a thousand diseases, I made one last visit to mine. Dr. Lionel J. Pepperman was a big, swarthy, gentle pediatrician, whose offices were attached to his house on Farview Avenue. He had medical instruments made out of chrome and Bakelite. I sat on butcher-paper and broke out in goose bumps when Dr. Pepperman asked me if I had a girlfriend. The back of my neck got this fantastic rush of tingles while I thought of all the things I would tell him about Amanda Clemmons, the girl I was in love with, if only I had the nerve to speak. Which, I never did.

Dr. Pepperman had a beige telephone with push button dialing. His fingers smelled like Dial and Kools. And when he gave shots, like for the mumps you could feel the needle go into your arm, but there was no pain.

Still my time with Dr. Pepperman was coming to an end. My mom was a Christian Scientist, named Mary after Mary Baker Eddy herself. My mom a half-Armenian, half-Russian Jew, born in the northeast corner of Tabriz, Iran – the capital of Azeri Persia was in fact named after the WASP discoverer and founder of a marginal Boston-based metaphysical offshoot of Congregationalism. Now I may be going out on a limb here, but I would even hazard a guess that my mom is the only half-Armenian, half-Russian Jew born in an Azeri area of Persia who is named for the blueblood Bostonian founder of a pseudo-ontological Nuevo-Christian denomination… at least the only one in her neighborhood.

About six months after I last saw my pediatrician, I told my mom that I had a 24-hour bug. She asked if I wanted to go to Dr. Pepperman, or did I want her to call Mr. Hoffnung whom I wouldn't have to see. He would pray for me remotely from his home.

You see, Bud Hoffnung was a Christian Science Practitioner. If Dr. Pepperman was nice, Mr. Hoffnung was someone from fairy tale land. He was Mr. Rogers wrapped in a Burl Ives container, filled with love and smiles. And let me tell you something, whatever I may think of Christian Science today, or what you may think of Christian Science today, Mr. Hoffnung was perhaps one of the nicest, kindest, most genuine human beings you could possibly ever meet in your life.

And, if my mom called Mr. Hoffnung, I didn’t have to go anywhere. I could stay home and watch television while my parents paid him to pray for me. Wonder which one I chose?

So I curled up on the mustard coach in our living room, under my blanket and my bedspread, and I watched Captain Kangaroo, Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood, Courageous Cat and Minute Mouse, Gigantor: The Space Age Robot, Lassie, The Lucy Show, The Adams Family, Bachelor Father, Gilligan’s Island, Felix the Cat, Dodo the Kid from Outer Space, and Lost in Space.

All the while, Mr. Hoffnung prayed for me, utilizing the Divine Healing Power of Christian Science in order to see me as God's Perfect Child. This allowed him to heal me by fighting off the Mental Malpractice that had told me that I was sick. And sure enough, the following morning, twenty-four hours after I came down with a 24-hour bug, I was healed – healed without ever once stepping foot within a doctor's office, healed through the power of Divine Love, healed through the power of Christian Science prayer.

Was this the greatest discovery ever? I could be sick whenever I wanted or needed to be and I never had to be checked on again. All I had to do was say I was sick and bingo… we would call Mr. Hoffnung, he would pray for me, and I could watch TV.

Still, there was a catch, because when you have a Christian Science healing, it was hoped that you might give testimony. Christian Science churches had Wednesday Night services, at which one stands up and tells of their healing. I remember at one of the Wednesday Night testimonials one elderly lady saying that she had had something in her eye and at that moment when the pain was the most excruciating; that Divine Mind put a commercial on her television that told her to pull her upper eyelid over her lower eyelid to get rid of the object. She tried this and the item came out, proving God's love.

Between testimonies, the First Reader gazed out at the congregation with a beautiful smile. The First Reader was an elected member of the congregation who led all church services. In Christian Science our preachers were the Bible and The Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures by Mary Baker Eddy. Thus, we only needed a fellow member of the church, a reader to read these to the congregation.

I sat in the pews knowing I should rise and tell my story of being healed from a 24-hour bug in 24-hours. Mr. James, the First Reader cast his smile over to me. It was dark outside and I could feel the cold that had soaked into the windows. My eyes darted over to the words on the wall, “You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free,” (John 8:32). But I didn’t get up. I didn’t feel like my 24-hour bug was worthy. You see, the thing of it was, that I… I… hadn’t really, well, if you want me to be totally transparent and honest about it, the thing is that I hadn’t really had a 24-hour bug… The truth of the matter was that I had wanted a day off from school… to watch TV. I’d only said that I had a 24-hour bug, as an excuse… to get a day off… from school.

So I glued myself to the green cushion that ran the length of my pew and decided that I would get sick soon, really sick, honestly sick, close to dying sick and so that I could have a real Christian Science healing to make up for my pretend 24-hour bug. Then I would rise before the congregation, and give testimony of the divine healing power of Divine Mind.

In the months that followed, my attendance record at school become the worst, I have been told, in the history of Spring Valley Elementary. A meeting was called between my mom, my teacher, Mrs. Schaeffer, and the principal, Mr. Di Cicco, to discuss my horrific attendance and see why I had become so sickly. During this meeting, which I supposedly had a terrible sore throat and stomach ache that had caused me to miss yet another day, I got bored listing to the adults talk and got up out of my chair to run around the room, kicking the kick ball against the wall as hard as I could.

One day, yet a few weeks later, my dad was waterproofing our basement. He had a plastic drum full of chalky white waterproofing powder, which he mixed in batches in a trough, and then broomed against the cinder blocks. I put my face over the drum and a puff of powder flew into my face.

In an instant, I was blind.

I ran upstairs and put my face under the sink, but I couldn’t open my eyes. I tried to hide what had happened, but I was whimpering in fear and my mom found me in the bathroom sobbing. With some more water and toweling, I managed to regain my sight, but my right eye stung like I had poured salt and lemon juice into it.

The next day, Mrs. Schaeffer, stared at me, with my bright pink eye, running nose, and hacking cough. She took me to the nurse, and the two of them discussed the awful looking condition of my face for awhile. Finally they rendered a decision, and in their supreme medical expertise, they decided that maybe I wasn't a faker at all, because clearly I had pink eye. Calls went out to my mom and my dad, neither of whom answered the phone. The nurse went down to the principal’s office and came back with phone numbers for our neighbors. Eventually she managed to get Mrs. Petrusauka, our next-door neighbor on the phone, and explained to her what pink eye was and how she would need to keep me far away from the Petrusauka’s five-year old daughter, Alice. She was also to make absolutely sure that Alice and I did not share a Kleenex.

I tried to process if this was brilliant or inane advice. I had never shared a Kleenex before, but maybe this was common practice among non Christian Scientists. I wasn’t sure. Soon, Mrs. Petrusauka came and drove me to their house, and I sat and watched Sesame Street with Alice. She reminded both of us not to share a Kleenex.

I prayed. I prayed so hard to know the truth, so that the truth would set me free. I prayed to know that I was the perfect image and likeness of God and that I did not have pink eye. I knew that I did not have pink eye.

Actually, that’s completely accurate. I knew that I did not have pink eye.

I knew that I had waterproofing powder in my eye.

But my teacher and the school nurse were under the influence of Mental Malpractice and thus had given me pink eye, conjunctivitis. They had given me a real disease from which I could be healed and give testimony at the First Church of Christ Scientists in Ridgewood, New Jersey.

A few hours later, my mom picked me up and called Mr. Hoffnung. She read to me from the Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures by Mary Baker Eddy and from the Bible. That night, my dad prayed with me. Now, to give both my parents credit, I don’t think they believed I had pink eye…but by the tenets of the church, denial of the existence of a disease is the first step to healing that disease.

My parents didn’t believe I had pink eye, because that’s what they had to believe in order to be good Christian Scientists, not just because they knew I had waterproofing powder in my eye. I prayed all night that, “There is no spot where God is not.” I knew I was the perfect likeness of being of God and that was all that was real about me, not the pink eye.

The next day, I awoke with two white eyes. My coughing was gone. My nose had stopped running. My mom sent me to school, where everyone was astounded to see me in such good shape. Amanda Clemmons studied my eye. It gave me that cold tingling on the back of my neck. The teacher told her to back away so that she didn’t catch my disease. Mrs. Schaeffer was a bitch. I told everyone that I had been healed by Christian Science, which got me beat up at recess.

The next Wednesday service, I went to church with great anticipation. As members of the congregation stood up to give testimony, I felt more and more nervous. At each gap between testimonies, I blanched when Mr. James, the First Reader looked my way with his benign smile. I bunched up the velvet cushion in my fists…and I held myself down to the pew, waiting for the services to end. When they finally did, we all stood up to sing “Onward Christian Soldiers, marching as to war, with the cross of Jesus going on before…” I blasted my voice as loud as I could, giving testimony and thanks to God with the accompaniment of the entire church.

Then I went home and spent the next ten years convinced that I had had a divine healing. If you had met me between 1971 and 1981 and asked me why I believed in Christian Science, I would have told you that I had been healed from pink eye. It’s amazing how much truth we can build upon our own lie.

Mr. Hoffnung and I went on to become very good friends. His office was also in his house, which was surprisingly much nicer than Dr. Pepperman’s house except the black telephones had rotary dials. When I revealed to Mr. Hoffnung that my imaginary friend was the voice in my mind, the voice of God, he said that’s probably right. The voice in my head is God, and then he smiled to reassure me. Mr. Hoffnung was like one of my grandfather’s brothers, nice for no other reason than to be nice. Dr. Pepperman had an underlying purpose to his being nice… he was trying to get me to calm down while he stuck the Bakelite tip of some instrument into my ear or shined some piercing light into my eye. Still, I never once got the cold tingles he always gave me when I saw Mr. Hoffnung. Mr. Hoffnung never once asked me a question about a girl I like. Mr. Hoffnung never once got me to think about Amanda Clemmons…and I liked thinking of Amanda Clemmons.

But here’s the real rub…even though I eventually left the church, when I finally reminded myself of the waterproofing powder, nothing in this story contradicts Christian Science. How’s that possible? What I remembered was that I didn’t really have pink eye, that the pink didn’t exist. Christian Science teaches that we are healed when we realize that we don’t really have a disease, that the disease doesn’t exist. Thus, by my saying that I never had pink eye, I actually prove that I had a Christian Science healing.

Ah forget it…I didn’t have pink eye…that’s the truth, and the truth has set me free.

NATALIE SAN SIMEON AND THE 1971 FORD TORINO BROUGHAM - 1980

The first time I saw Natalie San-Simeon was at 2:51 in the afternoon of October 13, 1976 standing near the Kresge’s, at the midway between Bam’s and Gimbel’s at the Garden State Plaza. She had deep brown eyes with a slightly Asian look about them. Her cheeks dimpled when she smiled. She was a Wella Girl. Her hair had Wella Balsam Shampoo full body. She wore a V-necked velour sweater over a synthetic satin shirt, Levis Boot Cut jeans and ski down vest. She was five solid feet of stunning.

We were at the mall to hear President Gerald Ford speak. I was holding a Kodak Tele-Instamatic 110 camera high over my head, snapping pictures of the President, while sporting a stained Sears t-shirt, threadbare work boots, and a Kodak Tele-Instamatic vinyl belt case that labeled me a, “Card Carrying Member of the Audio-Visual Squad.” Sensing it would be smartest to hide, I was hypnotized by Natalie. I stood there, in my worn-out yellow Sears windbreaker, next to my mom, and I stared at this Italian-American princess, this unspoiled paradigm of “spectacularness.”

The next day at school, I passed Natalie San-Simeon in the hall and discovered that the world’s most perfect woman went to Paramus Senior High. I quickly developed a case of unrequited love that lasted for six years.

Natalie didn’t have a boyfriend in Tenth Grade. I never asked her out. Natalie didn’t have a boyfriend in Eleventh Grade. I never asked her out. In Twelfth Grade she began hanging out with a friend of mine. Soon, they were walking down the hall together with his arm resting on her shoulders, like an ape limb hung over a Bottecelli. They went to prom together on a night that I stayed home to watch MORK AND MINDY. Natalie’s boyfriend and I both wound up at GW.

During freshman year, whenever Natalie came down to visit I knocked on my friend’s dorm room door every… fifteen minutes or so until he answered. And there would be Natalie San-Simeon, the cutest girl ever to walk the planet Earth, sitting with her knees under her like a cat, smiling at me and talking to me about D.C., New Wave, and Paramus gossip She was a cross between Stewardess Barbie and Mary Ann on GILLIGAN’S ISLAND.

Sophomore year, Natalie enrolled at the Ameican University up by the National Cathedral. My friend came to me upset. His parents had spent two hours on the phone with him telling him he had to stop dating Natalie. It was getting serious and she wasn’t Jewish. My friend was devastated. I thought because he was going to disobey his parents, but, I realized he was devastated because he was going to dump Natalie. He was going to dump Natalie San-Simeon. How crazy was that? I was so stunned; I actually tried to talk him out of it.

A few months later, on Halloween night, my now single friend told me he was going to hide. Natalie was on campus looking for him. I gave him my sympathy as he trudged away. Then, I tore up to my room and took a scalding high-speed shower, liberally spilling Clairol Herbal Essence on my scalp. I put on my roommate’s Yves Saint Laurent cologne. I put on my Fiorucci jeans, my Capezio shoes and matching purple Polo knit and Oxford shirts, with the knit’s collar up. I even had a knit purple belt to match. I ran to The Exchange, the GW bar, and searched for Natalie, but she wasn’t there. Finally I slogged back to my dorm with my head hung low, and I walked right into Natalie. She was with a group of Long Island looking Amrican University students. She talked to me until her friends dragged her away. But, before she left, she told me that she lived in Anderson Hall…on the fifth floor.

I ran up the steps, three risers at a time, to get to my room and write down “Anderson Hall, fifth floor.” I told my roommate, Johnny Napali, about Natalie. My passion scared him a little and he pulled out his guitar and held it on his lap to steady himself. He told me that he was going to make sure that I got a date with Natalie. It was why God had sent him to George Washington University.

The next day, he dragged me into my room and slammed the door, with an admonishment that I was not allowed out until I called her. I tried to open the door, but Johnny found allies who would help him shove me back. Kids from my dorm took turns standing guard. Either I called Natalie or I lived out my life in Thurston Hall, Room 608. The trouble was that even though I was 19, I had never, ever, ever asked a girl out before in my entire life. I needed to learn how fast.

I picked up the phone and dialed the fifth floor of Anderson Hall at American University seven times, clicking the line dead before it rang each time. On the eighth call, a girl answered before the phone rang. My stomach tapped against my throat. I asked for Natalie San-Simeon. The girl asked who was calling. I said, “Chuck Freericks.” Fuck, that’s a stupid name! But, I couldn’t think of a better one.

Minutes of silence passed. Then there was flurry of phone movement… fvwishwkumpawmmm…and I heard Natalie San-Simeon saying, “Hello?” Even writing these words down now, 24-years later, my palms are sweaty, my heart is pounding against my ribs, my stomach is tapping on my throat and all the rest of my innards are melting. Do you understand? I was on the phone with Natalie San-Simeon. Holy fucking shit.

Natalie and I spoke for about an hour. I said what a funny coincidence it was that I ran into her in my lobby and wasn’t that fun? I talked about Springsteen and Rockpile, because someone had told me she liked them. And as the conversation finally came to clubs, she mentioned Scandals, and I realized that this was the opportunity, so I asked her if she’d like to go to Scandals sometime. When she said yes, I said it would be good to have dinner first. She said yes. Now, up to this point, I had mentioned going with me. I’d just asked her in general terms if she wanted to go to Scandals and dinner and not wanting to spoil things by having her reject me for a Friday or Saturday elite level date when she realized that I was coming with her, I suggested Tuesday. She said yes.

I hung up the phone and opened the door, to find that the hall was empty. I guess everyone got bored with the long call. I ran up and down the dorm, singing, on the top of my lungs, the barely known hit by The Tremblers, “I’ll be taken her out tonight, out tonight, out tonight…When I said I want to meet her they said boy you’re just a dreamer…just a make believer…but I’ll be taking her out tonight.” It was then that I realized that my car was in New Jersey.

I had a 1978 Buick Regal Limited with crushed velour pillow seating, opera lamps, a five liter V-8 and a padded landau roof. But, I didn’t have a mechanic in D.C., so I’d driven the car to New Jersey for an oil change. I’d borrowed my brother’s avocado green 1971 Ford Torino Brougham to get back to D.C. Problem was that it was Sunday night. I had class Monday morning. I had class Tuesday morning. I had a date Tuesday night. My car was 240 miles away and I was not going to take Natalie San-Simeon out in an avocado green 1971 Ford Torino Brougham.

Luckily, Johnny Napoli did a lot of cocaine or the events that follow probably never would have happened. He told me that I had two choices, fucked, or really fucked. Really fucked was calling Natalie back and changing the date to another day. Fucked was we drive five hours to New Jersey, swap cars, and drive five hours back to D.C., only missing our 9:00 classes in the process, getting back in time for our elevens.

It was One A.M. when Johnny Napoli and I got into my brother’s 1971 Ford Torino Brougham, and hit Pennsylvania Avenue, driving by the White House, before turning onto New York Avenue for the ride up the BW Parkway. I had enough adrenalin pumping through me to keep me up for the next couple hours easily. We sailed through Baltimore just before two. We stopped at the big rest area south of the Delaware Memorial Bridge, and Johnny took over driving because, to quote him, I looked like I was about to keel. It was close to 3:30 by then. We passed the Cherry Hill water tower about thirty minutes later. Within an hour I asked Johnny to pull over and let me drive again, because he was alternating which eye he kept open while driving. An hour and a half later, I pulled the car into my driveway in Paramus, New Jersey, at Six A.M. exactly. My father had already left for work.

My mom made us breakfast, and gave Johnny some coffee. She said how pleasant it was that we’d come to visit. At 6:30, half-an-hour after we arrived, we left again. I don’t remember the drive back to D.C. at all. I know it was in the Regal, which drove like a marshmallow on satin sheets. I know that we didn’t crash and die, but I do honestly believe that there were moments when we were both asleep, even though one of us was always driving. We got back around 11:30 and I dropped Johnny in front of his 11:00 class, before I drove back to the dorm and fell asleep.

Tuesday night, I found a message in Johnny’s handwriting, taped to the black rotary wall phone. It said that Natalie called and was sick and couldn’t keep our date. On Wednesday the same rotary wall phone rang. It was Natalie calling to reschedule. I suggested next Tuesday. She said yes. Next Tuesday, the phone rang. It was Natalie. She didn’t feel well again, but this time she rescheduled for Wednesday.

On Wednesday, I skipped a midterm to drive out to the Chevy Chase Syms, where an educated consumer was their best customer. I bought a European cut fine tweed jacket, Jordache jeans, a pink Izod-Lacoste oxford and a fake gold chain. I drove the Regal to AU and walked into the Anderson Hall lobby. I called the fifth floor and Natalie said she’d be down in a minute. An hour later, the elevator opened, and there she was, in a suede jacket that was – well… let me just say that I wanted to be that suede jacket. That was all I needed in the whole wide world.

There were three other girls with her…all staring at me…like I was the cool guy in a movie picking up the cool girl for a date, and they were the giggling friends wishing they could be my date instead. They were all pretty, but none of them was good enough.

Outside, I opened the car door for Natalie and sat her in my Regal. She reached over and unlocked my door for me. She then pulled the handle and tried to push the door open. Tears of joy sprang from my eyes. She petted the crushed velour on her seat and told me that I had a really nice car. She asked for a hairbrush, and I pulled my brand new, never used, Goody out of the glove compartment. She said I had the perfect kind of hairbrush. I drove very slowly and carefully. I looked at her hands and I thought, those are Natalie San-Simeon’s hands. Those little hairs on her arm are Natalie San-Simeon’s little arm hairs. Wow!

As we waited in the bar for a table at the restaurant, I went to the men’s room, looked at my reflection in the mirror and said, out loud, “I’m Chuck Freericks and I’m on a date with Natalie San-Simeon.”

At our table, Natalie glowed, as the candles flickered on her face and in her eyes. I tried not to stare at her while we talked. I tried to act indifferent to the fact that we were on a date, the way a real guy would act. I had onion soup and fettuccine alfredo. Well, I ordered onion soup and fettuccine alfredo. I didn’t actually eat anything. Neither did she. It went well.

Next I drove her to Scandals, but even though I had figured out a way to ask her on a date, I still did not know how to ask her to dance, so we spent the next two hours watching other people dance. Moreover, because it was a Wednesday, there were no college students there, just grownups, in their twenties. Finally, she told me she needed to go home. I got lost trying to get back to AU, but it was cool, because it kept her in my car longer. I turned up the radio, and I swear to God, I’m not making this up, Supertramp was singing “Take The Long Way Home…Take The Long Way Home…So You Think You’re a Romeo, Playing a Part In A Picture Show…Take The Long Way Home.” Natalie looked at me and we shared a moment of non-verbal communication, smiling at each other the way couples in love share spontaneous insights with just a look and a smile.

When I found her dorm and pulled to a stop, she said to me, “I had a really good time. You can call me again.” It was one of those moments, you know, one of those moments when all the other shit just doesn’t exist, when you think, “it’s all going to be all right, I am going to have a grand and wonderful life.” It was one of those fuck yeah moments. And as she walked up the steps to her dorm, I took out the hairbrush to hold for the ride home. It was 12:07 at night, seven minutes into November 21, 1980, when I started back towards D.C.

In the weeks that followed, I took Natalie out a few more times, but never got up the nerve to kiss her. On our last date, she brought friends along. Then, the Buick Regal began leaking oil and antifreeze and I had to sell it. Johnny Napoli moved back to Connecticut, never to be heard from again. And me? I let go of the crush…one…two years after our first date. As to Natalie, she married one of those Long Island looking guys she’d come down to GW with.

But, you know what, that’s not important. What’s important is that no matter what, I will always know that my life was charmed, on the night of November 20, 1980 when I took Natalie San-Simeon to dinner at an Italian Restaurant in Bethesda, Maryland and I took her to watch old people dancing at Scandals in Washington, D.C. How many people get to say that their first date ever was with a girl that they had already been in love with for four years?

A CAR TO NAP IN -1967 to 1979

What does a $40 car look like? Ours was held together with baling wire, Bondo and duct tape. It had 226,328 miles on it. The front seat consisted of springs and gaping holes. The after-factory air conditioner hung from the dashboard by a single bolt. It was a 1968 Plymouth Valiant 100 that had been my mom’s car for five years. It had been my dad’s car for six years. It had been my car for less than a year.

In August of 1979 my dad sold it for $40 to a friend of our handyman. The handyman’s friend touched each knob and dial on the dash repeatedly saying, “This is great,” over and over again. He turned to the handyman and said, “I can’t believe I’m going to have my own car,” and then he misted up, not ever noticing the two dozen coffee cup rings my dad had left on the top of the dashboard.

He lied down on the back seat and looked up at the torn roof liner. “I could nap back here,” he announced.

He pulled two crumpled twenties out of two separate pockets and shoved them into my dad’s hands. When my dad gave him the keys, he hoisted them up and down in his palm to feel their small heft. Then he yelped a rebel yell, started the car, and drove it out of our lives forever. We heard the motor roar when the handyman’s friend made his turn onto Spring Valley.

Twelve years earlier, I was about to turn six and my brother was turning four, when my mom began a search for a car that her children could nap comfortably in while she drove. She had a 1960 Valiant 200 that smelled like dust, maple syrup and celery. You couldn’t see the floorboard though my mom’s paper collection of flyers, handouts and catalogs.

The 1960 Valiant was a space-aged compact with a push-button transmission, a raised wheel on the trunk, tailfins and a silver embossed dash. My mom was a 32-year-old budding children’s book author who got upset with salesmen, bank tellers, checkout clerks and the like when the real world butted up against her fantasy of what the world was.

She dragged us from car dealer to car dealer, forcing us to lie down in the back of each car she tested, to see if we were comfortable napping. It was sort of like trying on new pants to see if they fit, but doing it with the backseats of Detroit’s finest. Oddly enough, as I remember it, all of these car dealers were selling the same cars. You see, she had a Valiant and liked that, so we visited different Plymouth dealers throughout the county, rather than actually looking at other brands.

She was very brand loyal. Our washing machine always had a box of Tide, a box of Cold Power and a bottle of Downy atop it. In the bathroom, we had a bar of Ivory Snow and a tube of Colgate with MFP. Our kitchen always had Brillo Pads, never SOS, Ajax, never Comet, and Palmolive Dishwasher Detergent, never Cascade. My mom had a Valiant and even though it was dying, it was a brand she knew… so we only looked at Plymouths, and most of them were Valiants.

Finally, she dragged us to a dealer who decided what my mom needed was a Barracuda. He walked us over to a gold fastback. It was the most beautiful car I had ever seen, a real Hot Wheel. Under the huge glass fastback there was a carpeted flat area that looked an awful lot like a bed to the salesman and my mom.

This was what my mom had been looking for all along, a car with a place for my brother and me to nap while she drove. She had us climb into the back and lie down. She tested the area between the rear wall of the car and my shoe like she tested new shoes for me, pushing a thumb against the front toe. I fit perfectly in the Barracuda.

My mom told the salesman she wanted to take the Barracuda for a test drive. He said, “Great, put your kids in their seats and we’ll go. My mom said, “I need to make sure they’re comfortable lying in the back while I drive.” The salesman said this was a bad idea. My mom insisted it was a good idea. Finally, he told her he didn’t want to come along if my brother and I weren’t in our seats. My mom took the car for a test drive without him.

As we pulled off the lot, I felt good, lying in the sun that was penetrating through the huge rear window. The sky was blue and the car smelled new. There were little lights at the end of each fender that flashed with the blinkers to let you know that they were working. I was in Heaven, until we hit first bump. My mom called back to see if we felt it. Then she had to stop quickly in order not to run a red light. My brother and I flew forward. Our heads smacked into the back of the back seat. Our bodies accordioned. We both began to cry. My mom took the Barracuda back to the Plymouth dealer and told him it wasn’t a very good car.

Frustrated, she dragged us back home, ready to give up, and told my dad this. He took us to another Plymouth dealer, Castle Motors, but they were closed when we got there. My mom looked in the fence at the 1968 cars all lined up. She squealed in delight, “Charley, that’s it, that’s it. That’s the car I want.” She pointed at a blue 1968 Plymouth Valiant 100. “Isn’t it cute?” After test driving a dozen cars and measuring the back seats of a dozen more using my brother and me as her yardsticks, she picked the Valiant out instantaneously through a chain-link fence. We went back the next day and bought it for $2,683.15.

Over the days, months and years that followed, my brother and I spent hours and hours napping and sleeping in the backseat, watching as the light and shadows from streetlamps swept across the rear window like a black and white kaleidoscope. Brand loyalty turned out to be a good thing, as history actually proved the Slant Six Valiant to be one of the most reliable cars to come out of the late 1960s. And as the years passed, eventually I went from napping in the Valiant to driving it.

Near the end of the twelve years that we owned it, I nursed it over to Parwood Sunoco one day, keeping the windows cracked open because the muffler was leaking carbon monoxide into the cabin. When Mark, the mechanic, opened the hood he looked at me and said, “You know what this car needs?”

“What,” I asked?

“A replacement car….”

My clearest memory of it the Valiant though isn’t about how old and enfeebled it became. In fact, my clearest memory is about napping… being six-years-old at my grandmother’s apartment. I was in my pajamas and my dad carried me down the long staircase and out into the crystal cold night. He put me on the hard vinyl of the Valiant’s back seat. He put my brother on a pillow on the floor. We drove home in that steady staccato of the streetlamps kaleidoscope washing across us and then fading into shadows.

As unbelievably dangerous as it probably was to let us nap in that car, when I did, I knew I was in the safest place in the world. And because of that, I understand why the handyman’s friend was so delighted to buy the car. I truly understand.

NOBODY GETS BACK IN - 1981

For over a year, Ted Koppel had called out the days that the hostages had been held in Iran.

It was day 436 – And I wasn’t dating Natalie San Simeon, but I didn’t know that yet. Because she was my first girlfriend, and I needed to clear as much time to be with her as possible, I plagiarized my term papers and didn’t study for my finals so I could have time to randomly appear where she was – like at her campus – in her dorm elevator – 9.75 miles from my campus.

In fact, a couple weeks before, when George Washington University’s term was over and everyone else had gone, I’d spent a week in my empty dorm, so that I could coincidentally happen to be leaving the same day that Natalie’s term was over at Maryland, and be able to drive her home for Winter Break – “How cool, we’re both done the same day!” Everyone thought I was dating Natalie too. In fact the only person who knew I wasn’t dating Natalie was Natalie herself.

Day 437 – I got a letter from the Dean of Academic Probation that I’d been expelled – something about a 1.2 grade point average. I made an appointment to see him.

I didn’t want to leave George Washington. For the first time in my life I had a girlfriend. Besides, I’d recently been voted the most popular kid at school… at my dorm… on the 6th Floor of my dorm. And the politics of being in DC were intoxicating. I had met the Vice President of the United States, Walter Mondale. And I’d seen President Jimmy Carter not light the Christmas tree.

I’d worked at Kennedy Headquarters, where I’d used a Xerox Magnafax Telecopier that transmitted words on paper. I sent Ted Kennedy’s speech to him on the road using the phone. In as little as four hours, I’d been able to send ten whole pages to Oklahoma.

Day 438 – There was no way I was going back to New Jersey. I drove the 9.75 miles to College Park and filled out an application for the University of Maryland Continuing Education program. The admissions advisor said, “As long as you haven’t been expelled from George Washington your application looks fine.”

Day 439 – I had my appointment with the Dean of Academic Probation. I arrived early and sat in reception practicing looking like I was trying not to cry. Finally he saw me.

“How do I get back in,” I asked.

“Nobody gets back in,” he told me. I looked like I was trying not to cry.

“Fine,” he grumbled, “write a statement of appeal explaining what happened last semester get some letters of recommendation from professors, and TAs. But, not from students, and don’t work too hard on it; nobody gets back in.”

I worked fifteen hours on my statement. I began with the death of a relative at the beginning of the semester, not mentioning I’d only met the man once. I then tore into the epic of living with my insane, and since dropped-out roommate, Tony Abruzzi. I indicated there was voodoo and Satanism involved, although I failed to site any examples, not knowing what real examples would be. By the time I was done, the document was twenty pages long, but it wasn’t enough to save me.

Day 440 – With no sleep, I trudged to the offices of every professor I had ever had who had given me at least a C. I came back to with two letters of recommendation. I got two more from my RAs. Four letters wasn’t going to cut it, but I wasn’t going home. I was staying to meet more Presidents, spend more time with my girlfriend and continue to be the most popular kid on campus… in my dorm… on the 6th Floor. Suddenly it occurred to me, I was the most popular kid on the 6th floor of my dorm. Maybe two letters from students wouldn’t mean anything, but what about 15? What about 20? Fuck the Dean of Academic Probation. Let’s see him swim through 25 letters.

I went from door to door, leaving notes on all the dry-erase message boards and telling my story to all who answered. I poured my soul out to Jappy girls, to preppy boys, to closet lesbians, to stoners, to preppy girls, to Jappy boys, to out-in-the-open-but-I-didn’t-get-it-yet gays, to library moles, to fraternity drunks, to smokers, to tokers, to jokers, to weird kids no else one talked to. My plight became the cause-celeb of the dorm. Everyone wrote me letters. Letters upon letters upon letters piled up on my desk, each one of them extolling the virtues and the promise that was Chuck Freericks. There were typed letters. There were letters on flowery girl stationery. There were letters ripped from spiral notebooks. There was a letter on a brown paper bag. Close friends wrote two page long documents. Kids from the 5th and 7th Floors joined in and wrote letters. That night, after dinner gaggles of students sat all over the hallways, writing letters as the 4th and 8th Floors joined the Chuck Freericks cause.

Day 441 – I had 112 letters. I placed my 20-page statement on top of them and carried the pile to the office of the Dean of Academic Probation. When I handed the pile to his secretary she said, “You don’t expect him to read all of this do you?” I starred at her, looking like I was trying not to cry.

Day 444 – President Ronald Reagan was inaugurated. I didn’t care much for Reagan, but, I wanted to experience DC one last time, so I went down to Pennsylvania Avenue and when the Caddy limousines with police lights passed, I cheered for Reagan and Bush just so I could be part of the crowd.

After the parade, I went back to my dorm, and found a huge swarm of kids from my dorm standing outside. Across the street from us was The F Street Club, “The” Republican Club in the Capital City. We all whooped it up as President Ronald Reagan climbed out of his limo with Nancy and walked up the stairs to the club. Then, George and Barbara Bush got out of their Caddy and headed up. Alexander Haig, Ed Meese, Michael Deaver and James Baker followed. I cheered for each and every one of them, good Democrat that I was.

After it was all done, I went to move my car to the parking lot on 22nd Street. As I pulled up to E Street, home of the State Department, the late John Lennon was singing, “It’s Just Like Starting Over.” The song was interrupted and the Z-107 deejay said we were going to the Associated Press for a special report.

“Frankfurt, Germany, The hostages are free, the hostages are free, the hostages are on a plane to Frankfurt.” And then I cheered a cheer that had nothing to do with festivity or pomp. I cheered for lost causes and how the hostages were finally free even after we all thought they’d never come home. They were getting a second chance.

“Secretary of State, Edmund Muskie,” the radio went on as I turned right, “has just flown into National Airport and is on his way to The State Department. Muskie successfully negotiated the release of the hostages this morning.”

As the radio said this, I pulled up to the light at 20th Street. A limousine pulled next to me. I assumed it was another Republican wonk going to the F Street Club, but when I looked in the rear seat, I saw, sitting alone, Secretary of State Edmund Muskie. He looked at me. I smiled and gave him a thumbs up. Muskie grinned back at me, gave me a thumbs up too and a hearty nod. Then his car pulled off and Muskie went back to his office for the last time. Alexander Haig was now the new Secretary of State.

Later, that night on TV, I watched tape of Jimmy Carter waving anemically from the podium while Reagan was sworn in. Carter looked like he was trying not to cry. Edmund Muskie had freed the hostages. Jimmy Carter had tried to clean up Washington. Unlike me, they’d come here to actually do something, these two great men, and now they were being expelled from DC. They had no appeal. The Dean of Academic Probation had said it all, “Nobody gets back in.”

Day 445 – The phone rang. It was the Dean of Academic Probation.

“You’re back in,” he said. “In twenty years of doing this, no one has ever shown your fortitude. I’ve never seen a student with such a capacity to produce results. Go enroll in your classes. Have a good semester. Put the same effort into your classes as you did into your appeal and you’ll do great.”

Now I can’t say I ever put as much effort into anything in school again as I did my appeal, but I did keep my grade point average above 3.0 for the next two years. And, even I eventually figured out that Natalie wasn’t my girlfriend. The fact that she brought friends on our dates clued me in. As happy as I was that I got back in – I have to admit the lesson I took away from it was that being a little weasel gets forgiven (and even can get you to be the most popular kid on the 6th Floor of your dorm). While being great men of vision gets you ridiculed and run out of Washington DC on a rail – but I guess we’ve always known that, anyway.

THE OFFICIAL 21 CHAMPIONSHIP OF COOPER PLACE - 1974

My brother and I were always in competition. When my dad came home from food shopping, my brother and I divided the Burry’s Scooter Pies and the Burry’s Fudge Town Cookies in half to ensure that neither of us got more than the other. But if my dad ate a cookie, destroying the evenness of our cookie count, it caused tears and accusations to fill our small house tearing apart the fabric of our family, and sending my brother and me into a small battle that would last until the next week’s food shopping.

My brother and I competed over vacuuming. My mom paid a dollar a room, and we would fight over the Hoover upright to earn it. I’d take the prize living room and hallway, leaving him the dining room and my parents’ bedroom—both filled with complicated furniture to vacuum around. We competed over the spot on the rug in front of our black & white 19-inch Magnavox Portable TV and what we watched on it. We competed over our best friend Frankie Petrusauka.

Frankie lived behind us. He was a year younger than me and a year older than my brother. Blonde and freckled, he was worldly. His parents had large tin cans of Charles Chips pretzels delivered to their house. His father had a Volkswagen Beetle. His mother had a Dodge Polaris station wagon. They went to McDonald’s. They had a dog. They had a vacation home in Lake Como in the Poconos. When the Good Humor Truck came, Frankie had money in his pocket to buy a Canonball with a gumball on the bottom. They were real people.

Frankie and my brother bought skateboards together one day in May, and I was felled by a wave of jealousy that crippled me. They went to Sam Goody’s together and bought 8-tracks of Jethro Tull and the Grateful Dead. My brother ran around our house holding his fist in the air chanting, “Dead, Dead, Dead.” The straw that broke the camel’s back came when Frankie took my brother to Lake Como for a weekend. They returned telling stories of having seen a drunk (something I had never seen, although in hindsight I now must admit I’d seen it twice every time I visited my grandparents).

I thought I had lost the war for Frankie’s friendship to my brother when another shift in our fortunes occurred. Frankie’s dad put up a basketball backboard at the curb of their front lawn, turning the cul-de-sac at the bottom of Cooper Place into a basketball court. The three of us began playing Twenty-One (one on one basketball, a point a basket, first one to twenty-one wins, but you must win by two points). The winner then played the next player, while the loser sat out. This meant that Frankie Petrusauka played every game. He could kill you with his standard cut into his signature lay-up. My brother got bored and left Frankie and me to play by ourselves.

It was then; in some misguided belief that keeping track of the standings would result in me coming back that I told Frankie that I was going to start recording who won each game. I announced that all our games up until that point had been practice.

And so we began the first game of The Official Twenty-One Championship of Cooper Place. Frankie beat me 21 to 3. While that may sound lopsided, one of my points was an astounding Hail Mary from the Grundin’s driveway that even Mr. Grundin stopped to admire. As the tournament had no official end, I felt confident that I could come back from my one to nothing deficit with ease.

After our second game, the record was two to nothing. By day six of the championship we were at Frankie twelve, Chuck nothing. It was around this time that my desire to be Frankie’s best friend was passed by my desire to take him down. Even within the losses there were real ups and downs. I lost one 21 zip, but two days later Frankie had had to score 31 pointes to beat me 31 to 29. My first win and the beginning of my comeback were clearly within sight.

Two weeks later we were at Frankie 68, Chuck nothing. It was unbelievable. No matter how well I played, no matter how big a lead I got, Frankie would come back and win. There was no defense against his standard cut to his signature lay-up. In one game I put in twelve lay-ups in a row while Frankie finished his Good Humor Canonball. Frankie beat me 24 to 22. I now had one goal in life… and that was to beat Frankie Petrusauka in basketball. I was like a gambler at a Blackjack table, losing hand over hand, convinced that the start of my streak of wins was just one more game away.

At the end of the first month it was Frankie 137, Chuck nothing. At least half of those games had been close and maybe a fifth of them had gone into extra points because we had been tied at twenty to twenty. We played in the sun. We played on days so hot that my bicycle kickstand melted the road, leaving a gash. We played in the rain. We played after the rain, when Cooper Place smelled of warm raindrops sizzling on hot asphalt. We played on days so long that our mothers called us in for bedtime.

By month two, it was Frankie 387, Chuck nothing. Luckily my family went to visit family in Delaware. It gave me time to regroup. While I was away at my cousins, I slept late each morning, trying to regain my strength. When I did get up, I ran in the field behind their house, building up my endurance. I drank all the orange juice in my cup. I ate all the meat I was served. I even tried a tomato when one was accidentally put in my salad. I’d heard that they build strength.

I returned with a new determination and a new outlook. I was not going to give up. I was not going to let Frankie always have that last shot. I was going to win. Even Frankie could see the new gleam in my eye. He was scared. He knew this was a new Chuck.

But, there was still nothing I could do to stop Frankie’s standard cut to his signature lay-up. We reached Frankie 500, Chuck nothing a few weeks later on a night that we both wanted to get in early to see Happy Days.

We climbed to Frankie 600, Chuck nothing on a morning after a storm that left tree branches, limbs and even trunks lying all over everyone’s yards and cars.

Frankie 700, Chuck nothing came the day before my family left for vacation in the Poconos. We were not going to Lake Como though, but to Milford, Pennsylvania, where we were staying in a cabin named Bambi. Needless to say, my brother and I both agreed we would never let Frankie know the name of our cabin. I took a book with me on how to become a basketball great. All week long I read about lay-ups and field goals and free throws and dribbling and how to make myself the best basketball player I could be. By the end of the week, I knew more about basketball than Marv Albert and Walt Frasier combined.

When I came back, I brought my new education to the macadam of Cooper Place. As I began to dribble the way I had learned to dribble, Frankie ducked in, stole the ball, and made a shot from the manhole in the middle of the street. The tournament had resumed.

It took three more days to reach Frankie 800, Chuck nothing. The games had become even more competitive. I never lost by more than seven, and was taking as much as a quarter of the games into extra points. When Frankie won his 827th game, it was as much due to his fouling me on my last shot and not admitting it as it was due to his outplaying me.

Frankie won the 828th game handily, but he had to fight me off all the way up to 35 to 33 to win game number 829. For some reason, this made Frankie angry. He didn’t seem to want to play anymore. He started hanging out with my brother again, skateboarding and skulking into the basement to listen to Tull: “To be thick as a brick…” A few days later I finally got him out on Cooper Place again. I made two shots from the center of the cul-de-sac. My lay-ups were flawless. I blocked half of Frankie’s shots. It was only by a miracle that he won 21 to 19. I suggested we play another. He didn’t want to. I told him he was poultry. He told me to give him the ball.

The game was brutal. It was the most intense and fast paced game of Twenty-One ever played on the streets of Paramus, New Jersey. It was 5 to 0, Frankie, when I began a streak of swishes combined with blocks that soon had us at Chuck 6, Frankie 5. The lead went back and forth twenty times, as I made astounding shot after astounding shot, only to have Frankie start pumping in some nothing but nets of his own. We reached twenty to twenty. When I took another long jump shot from the manhole cover, I heard Frankie swear. Then, as if summoning God to his side, he crossed himself and dropped a frozen rope through the rim. I said a silent prayer and scored a wicked shot. It was 22 to 21, my lead. Frankie dribbled the ball slowly towards me, and got ready to make his standard cut for his signature lay-up, when I reached in and knocked the ball away. Frankie continued on his cut, as if he had the ball. I grabbed, it, and dribbled to the basket with him. We both jumped together. The ball rattled around the top of the rim, and then dropped through.

I won, 23 to 21. The standings were now Frankie 830, Chuck one. I screamed and I yelled and I jumped up and down like I had won the NBA Finals. Frankie picked up his ball and walked into his house without saying a word to me.

We never played basketball again. He officially became my brother’s best friend. It was then that I began the Badminton Tournament of Hickory Place with my next-door neighbor on the other side, Becky Rosenberg, but that as they say, is another story.

CRYING TO VIDA BLUE - 1971

I was among the best!

One of the greatest in the annuls of baseball history!

Few have tried, and even less have succeeded in reaching the levels of self-delusion that I achieved with ease on any day at any time and at any place.

Fourth grade for example, when I became convinced that I was going to be a Hall-of-Fame pitcher on the New York Mets. The fact that I had never played baseball did not discourage me. The fact that I did not own a baseball glove or baseball bat did not dissuade me. The fact that I was the last one picked for kickball, even after Lacy Leftkowitz, who picked her nose while waiting to be picked, did not dishearten me. After all, I’d read every book in the Paramus Public Library about baseball, and I had a near perfect set of 1971 Tops Baseball Cards, including the checklist cards, so I knew I was ready.

I determined the best way to pursue my baseball dream was to create my own Chuck Freericks baseball cards, so after dinner one night, I dressed the closest I could come to a baseball uniform – Dacron bell bottoms, a striped terry cloth shirt-sleeve, and black buckle Thom McAns. I posed by the hedge in the backyard, which was the closest I could find to an outfield wall. I wore my father’s antique left handed mitt and my dad recorded me on Kodak Tri-X Pan.

A week later I get my baseball cards, but they were black and white and big and floppy, not like real baseball cards at all. Still, I wrapped them with a stick of bubble gum to give them the right smell.

Now, here’s the funny thing about ridiculous fantasies… those of us that have them will somehow manage to get ourselves into grand situations that others can only scratch their heads about, How the hell did that Goober manage that? And thus, a few days later I received an ad in the mail from Pro-Way Baseball Camp for Boys.

My mom took me to see the camp, where I met the great former Brooklyn Dodgers catcher Roy Campanella. While others pursued their baseball dreams by playing Little League or in stickball games, I, at all of nine years and three months old, pursued mine by networking.

I stood at the side of Roy’s wheelchair, scared to touch it, and desperately tried to think of what I could tell him from all the books that I had read and all of the baseball cards that I had perused that would immediately convince him that I was a baseball star to be. I mean, this was it… right? This was my chance. I had the ear of Roy Campanella. I stood there and stared at him. He smiled, the way kindly men will often smile at stupid children. Finally he asked me what position I played.

“Pitcher,” I sort of whispered, but not much sound came out. Campy nodded and turned away. Man, oh, man, this was it and I was blowing it. I had to say something brilliant, something to let him know what a great ballplayer I was… “Who was your favorite catcher when you were a kid?” I finally mustered out. “Bill Dickey,” he said… and our conversation was done.

I got my mom to sign me up for a session just so I could try to talk to Campy again. My parents deposited me at my grandmother’s apartment and left on vacation. That night, I was so excited that I couldn’t sleep. I lay in my mom’s twin bed beside my grandmother, Mama’s twin bed and listened to her sleep. Mama snored like a horse with strep. She had two glasses on her nightstand, both filled with water, one with her teeth. As an aside, Mama used to say water needed to breathe the air before you drank it. For years I would pour a glass of water and let it sit for hours before drinking it. It did taste better, but I’m not sure why.

Anyway, back to that night. Mama’s dressing table was smothered with photographs, mostly black and white. Her casement windows overlooked the parking lot, and when cars came in, tires munched the gravel. Their headlights reflected four squares against the dressing table mirror and glided silently up over the pile of Reader’s Digests, the table fan, and across the ceiling. The room smelled of old newspaper and mothballs. I lied there, imagining that when they made the movie about my life as the world’s greatest baseball player, they would show this scene of me lying in bed the night before, watching the headlights glide across Mama’s ceiling and having a drink of dusty water.

The next day, Mama was sick. Still she somehow managed to put a winter coat over her nightgown and walked me to Tenafly Road in the 95 degree heat. She held my hand in a death grip as she quizzed the camp bus driver if he was really from Pro-Way and hadn’t stolen a school bus and twenty-five kids in order to kidnap me. Mama escorted me down the bus aisle, keeping her death grip on me until she found a seat for me, which she wiped clean with a crushed Kleenex.

An hour later, I was at camp listening to Roy Campanella speak. Campy told us that baseball was designed to break our hearts. His heart was still broken from the Shot Heard ‘Round the World, Bobby Thompson’s homerun in the 1951 playoffs. Campy also said that after that game Ralph Branca, the pitcher who gave up the homerun, sat by himself, weeping in the Dodger’s locker room. No one went to talk to him. No one would sit with him. If we went on with baseball, each one of us would one day have that moment when baseball broke our hearts and we wept like a baby.

After Campy’s talk we lined up to play catch, but I couldn’t actually get the ball to the guy I was paired with. I couldn’t actually get it anywhere close to him. I was sort of pushing it through the air to the floor in front of me. Campy took me aside from the rest of the boys, and spent the afternoon teaching me how to throw.

“No, no…you’re pushing the ball …see what I’m doing…reach back and then high and then snap your wrist….No, no, no…you’re not watching me, are you? Do you really want to do this? Then why aren’t you trying? That’s not trying is it? Like this, okay, like this.” During the whole time, I was trying to please Campy, but I kept sort of missing what he was saying because I was too busy trying to figure out what I could tell him that would let him know that I was a superstar baseball player. Finally camp was done and he told me to go get on my bus.

As the days went by, I learned more and more about baseball. Like, did you know that there are special baseball shoes? Did you know I was the only kid at camp who didn’t have them? Did you know that baseball gloves need to be broken in before you use them? I did not, and had a glove that was as stiff as wood. Did you know that baseball players wear protective cups? I was not aware of this, and it was a bad thing when other kids played “Cup Check.”

Did you know that baseball players eat meat at lunch, to get their energy up? Mama packed me Welch’s grape jelly sandwiches on Arnold White Bread. She included an aqua blue chemical Ice-Pak the size of my head, which mashed the jelly into the bread so that it looked like I was eating a purple penicillin farm. She’d also give me a can of ShopRite ginger ale.

After lunch, sailing on a sugar missile of insulin, I’d head out to the ninety degree heat and 100% humidity to play baseball. But that part of camp wasn’t that interesting. What I needed was to make more contacts… and one day, when I got in trouble for not changing in front of the other boys in the locker room, I was told to sit in the gym Campy, Johnny Bench and Ted Kluzewski of the Cincinnati Reds walked in. This was my chance. Once Johnny Bench and Ted Kluzewski met me, and heard what I knew about baseball, I would be on my way. I tried to think of what would be the best thing to tell them… maybe that the Reds used to play at Crosley Field. That seemed like a good opener. But I couldn’t get the words out, so I just sat there and stared at them. They never noticed me.

Then it hit me… I would tell them how good I was, it was that simple… Oh damn, all of a sudden, every boy in camp suddenly poured into the gym and filled the bleachers. We all formed a line to get Ted and Johnny’s autographs. When I got up to Johnny, I took a deep breath to get ready to explain to him that I was a future star, but when I breathed out, no words came. He looked at me staring at him, grabbed my baseball glove and signed it.

“It’s a little stiff,” he said to me, as he handed my glove to Ted Kluzewski, who signed it too. They ruined my mitt. I never said a word. I just took it back and walked on.

Afterwards, all the boys went out for a catch, but the kid I was paired with kept hitting me in the back with the baseball. (He threw so hard I had no choice but to spin away from each throw, causing him to hit my back.)

That night I tried to wash off Johnny Bench and Ted Kluszewksi’s signatures from my mitt, but all I did was make them fade.

Even more days passed, and I started to realize that I was lost at camp. There were just too many boys there for me to be noticed. What was worse, was that there really was no way to get to talk to Campy, as he was only actually there an hour or so a week. The next time we saw him, he told us Vida Blue was going to visit, on the very last day of camp

Vida Blue was the 18-year-old ace of the Oakland Athletics. He had been on the cover of Time Magazine. He was considered the greatest prospect in a generation. This was it. This was my last chance for greatness. I had to tell Vida Blue about myself. I had to tell him everything I knew about baseball and how good I would be if someone would just give me a chance to play.

I thought about what brilliant information I would impart to Mr. Blue as I came up to bat in a scrimmage game. The pitcher looked in to the catcher, wound up, and threw a ball that appeared to be coming straight at me at the speed of a rocket propelled grenade. I ran away to the left side of the backstop, while I heard the umpire yell, “Strike One.” I got back into the box. The pitcher set, and threw, another bullet, this one aimed at my temple. I ran away, to the left side of the backstop, while I heard the umpire yell, “Strike Two.” I returned to the batter’s box. The pitcher lobbed in a slow curve. I ran away, to the left side of the backstop. “Strike Three.”

On the last day of camp, I ripped a piece of paper from my lunch bag for Vida Blue to autograph. We all gathered in the gym to meet him. Vida stood off to the side, this young boy, only nine years older than me. Unlike Campy, Kluzewski, and Johnny Bench, Vida was more of a boy than a man. He was the same age as some of my baby sitters. He seemed baffled by the kids wanting to meet him. I practiced what I was going to tell him in my head as we began to form a line. I wanted him to know that I was going to use the same pose he did on his baseball card on my first baseball card. I pondered the best opening… Mr. Blue… Vida… Vid… Vi?

I looked up and all the younger boys were gone, already in line. When I tried to move to them, a councilor told me not to cut, and put me in the back, with the 12-year-olds.

“What are you doing here, faggot?” one of the boys asked. I didn’t have an answer, so I didn’t respond.

“This is the kid that Campy was trying to teach how to throw,” another one pointed out. “He’s the reason Campy didn’t come see our game.”

Two of the 12-year-old boys grabbed me by the arms, while a third whispered in my ear, “Cup Check.” I saw his knee flying at me, but I could not move. And then I was on the ground.

“I don’t think he’s wearing one,” one of the other’s pointed out.

I don’t believe that I had ever cried so hard and yet I did not make a noise. I sobbed silently, unable to hold back the tears, the pain, or the embarrassment. When I looked up, I was next in line, and Vida Blue was looking at me.

And then something miraculous happened. Vida Blue dropped to his knee and asked me if I was the kid that Campy and Johnny Bench had been talking about. “I hear you’re going to be a star.” I nodded yes.

“Do you want to come to Yankee Stadium with me?” he asked. “You can help me warm up and I can teach you my curve.” I nodded quickly. “You remind me of me. I think you’re gonna be a Hell of a ballplayer,” he said. “And I want to be your mentor.”

Okay, none of the stuff after the Cup Check actually happened. The reality was that that when I looked up, Vida was looking at me sobbing and he asked, “Are you okay?” When I nodded yes, he took my baseball glove and signed it before I could tell him I had paper in my pocket. Then he signed the mitt of the kid who had just launched my private parts into my stomach.

An hour or so later, camp was over and I was back on the bus to Mama’s house. I noticed that the Johnny Bench and Ted Kluszewksi autographs on my mitt were sort of faint, so I traced them with a green pen to make them darker. I then traced Vida Blue’s autograph so it would be in the same color.

Now you may think that sometime during those weeks I realized that I was never going to see my face on a Topps Baseball Card, but that realization took another five years… ten years. What I did learn was that baseball will break your heart and make you cry.

And I’ve cried many times since, from watching Freddie Patek choke up on national television when the Royals lost to the Yankees in the 1978 playoffs, to seeing the movie Field of Dreams a few weeks after my dad passed away, to meeting Roy Campanella’s son when I was an adult and telling him this story, and having him grin and say, “I’m gonna tell my dad. He has to have really liked you to have taken you aside and taught you how to throw. It’s going to make him really happy to hear that you still remember it.” And I cried again when Campy died only a few months later.

Tom Hanks once uttered the famous line, “There’s no crying in baseball.” Tom Hanks was wrong. And I speak with authority. You wanna know how well I know the game? Roy Campanella taught me how to throw a baseball. Vida Blue has seen me cry.

Okay… now that that’s settled – everyone… Cup Check!

A POKE IN THE EYE - 1991

My relationship with CBS was not unlike the one with my college girlfriend. One moment I was the greatest thing that they had ever found. The next moment I just wasn’t really working out. Then in a third moment, I would get a call asking if I wanted to try again. Like an idiot, I said yes, only to be fired once more.

No matter how many times I went through this, when I got another call, the joy of knowing that I was wanted would fill my veins like a shot of morphine, forcing one word to sputter from my lips again and again, “yes,” “yes,” “yes,” “yes.”

This personally debasing affiliation with the Tiffany Network lasted for five years; beginning at a Shell Station in Orange, California, where I met an older woman of twenty-nine, who said that she could get me temp work at CBS and that I had a nice ass. It ended with a Brooks-Brother-clad, Kool-Aid drinking, Mercedes Benz 450SL driving, CBS Executive Vice President telling me, and I quote, “You are one of the smartest and hardest working people on this floor, but that’s not what I need right now.”

To the credit of the woman who complimented my posterior, she had thought that I was gay and would take it as a girl to girl compliment. And to the credit of the EVP that fired me, he talked my next employer into hiring me at a substantial raise. But still, to this day, when I drive down Beverly Boulevard and see the 1950s edifice of Television City, I feel as if I’m driving by an ex-girlfriend’s house, stalking her while she sleeps.

Most of the times I found myself out of work during my on-again, off-again CBS affair were really just the endings of temp assignments, although some of those temp assignments had been open ended, so finding myself back at home eating bologna sandwiches over the sink was still hard to take. But my first real firing, from a permanent position at the Columbia Broadcasting System, didn’t come until I’d been with the company for two years, going through at last a half dozen firings during that time.

I had been given yet another open-ended temp assignment, this one to the desk of the Director of Dramatic Specials, who needed a permanent assistant. The HR woman who liked my ass felt that all I had to do was do a good job and I would be offered the position. On day one, I catalogued the Director of Dramatic Specials’ videos, arranging them alphabetically, with Dymo Label Maker labels on each one. When the Director of Dramatic Specials saw what I had done, she was in awe, and called other executive into her office to see how all the tapes were perfectly arranged, and labeled, with different color tape for different television seasons. For the next three months I was Mister Efficiency, jumping on every issue, and arranging everything neatly. The Director of Dramatic Specials soon asked me to be her permanent assistant.

I was finally a real CBS employee, and to prove it, on my first official day, I sat through an orientation of video tapes introducing me to CBS, and briefing me on what health insurance to sign up for, how much to put in my 401k, how to open a credit union account, and who to make my beneficiary on my life insurance.

I took my picture for my ID badge and went back to my desk feeling giddy with accomplishment. I may not have had a girlfriend, but I had a job that I could get a girlfriend with. Not only that, but my ex girlfriend’s parents were in town and were going to take me out to dinner that night. I was planning on how I was going to wow them so that they called their daughter to say, “You idiot, that boy is a rising star at CBS… take him back or we will disown you,” when Gerta, a Czech Germany administrative Assistant with a pure Sudetenland accent and an Elke Summer bob came to my desk and said in her very Czech/German/Sudetenland kind of sexy way, “Matthew wants to see you.” Gerta’s Arian eyes were teary, belying her smile. Her boss, Matthew Addelman, was the Senior Vice President of Daytime and, as Gerta and I both knew, would have absolutely no reason to talk to me, the brand new administrative assistant in Dramatic Specials unless it was something bad.

I went over to Matthew’s office and took a seat. He introduced himself and said that this was really kind of uncomfortable (like it was my fault) but although we’d never met, he’d been asked to let me go. I wondered if he realized that I didn’t want to go.

I took a deep breath and tried to listen more carefully. After all, I was being laid off on the very day I had taken my orientation. Why had I been hired only to be fired? I couldn’t have done anything wrong yet. I hadn’t even been at my desk yet that day. Matthew told me I’d get severance, based on my length of service, which was four hours. When my final check came, there were two extra weeks pay in it. On a percentage basis, it was probably the best severance ever in the history of CBS.

Three years passed, when I got a call from a friend that there was a job I’d be right for at CBS. I figured it would be okay to try there again as the entire Dramatic Specials department was no more, and Matthew Addelman and his assistant Gerta had both been let go in the interim. I was interviewed by three execs, finally ending up in the office of CBS President, Ed Wright, who was known for nixing candidates because they were not a star. Apparently I was, as I was offered the job a few days after that.

I was Manager of CBS Entertainment Productions. I had my own office, and that office was on the Third Floor, the executive floor, of Television City. Sure, I didn’t have a window and the area outside my door was used to store thirty years worth of TV Guide… but I was doing better than a million other people who wanted my job. I was watching TV and reading scripts for a living. Every day was a lazy rainy Sunday in March.

I had five bosses, which was pretty daunting at first, but actually gave me an advantage. Each one of them assumed that I was being kept busy by the others. Don’t get me wrong, I worked hard, but I also realized it wasn’t about the work, it was about appearances.

The rules were simple. Always have something that I “just read” to talk about. Always have a list of writers that I carried with me in case someone asked about writers. Always have a pile of scripts in my hands when heading home. Do these things, and my actual work, and I’d be okay.

Then, one day a new head of in-house was hired by the company. The brother of an infamously malevolent producer, he introduced himself saying, “I’m Kevin, the nice brother.”

Now if someone tells you something good about themselves, you can bet that they are lying. Nice people don’t say nice things about themselves. Oh, they may talk themselves up, like any of us do… but that’s not what I’m referring to. I’m speaking specifically of people who feel the need to randomly blurt out self-compliments. These are liars and should be avoided.

I should have started looking for a new job right when Kevin said he was the nice brother, but I didn’t. It’s hard to say why… I think being at CBS was still, even with all the firings, a magical place to me. I walked past the PRICE IS RIGHT sets outside the Studio 33 and could spin the wheel whenever I felt like it. I smelled a metalic odor of burning antique electricity everywhere I went. I felt the ghosts of William Paley and Desi Arnez stroll past me in the halls - cigarettes dangling from their manicured fingers, spats gleaming at their feet, the sweet scent of gin and Vermouth wafting along in their path.

And most of all, when I came in to work every morning, and looked up at the CBS Eye, I could imagine my enemies and my exes seeing me walking to work through that special executive only door at the bottom of parking lot. I knew for a fact that were all jealous of my success, and that was a good thing.

Then the new head of in-house hired, as his assistant, Gerta, the Czech/German who had called me in to my CBS beheading three years before. Upon seeing me, Gerta shouted out with glee, “We’re both back.”

Things were going great, or so I thought. Kevin was grooming me. He'd tell me to use the stairs instead of the elevator so I could be fit like him; to have lunch with my colleagues and get the inside dirt on their departments; and to learn to read upside down, so I could read what was on other people's desks while chatting with them. Meanwhile, a co-worker overheard him describe me as a "college professor picking crumbs out of my beard."

After a few months Gerta, who never once came over to my desk, came over to my desk. She said, in her very Czech/German/Sudetenland kind of sexy way, “Kevin wants to see you.” Gerta’s Arian eyes were teary, belying her smile. It was an odd moment… a sort of slow motion tragedy, in which both of us were only players… players very aware that we had done this scene before. In that instant, Gerta knew that I was being fired and I knew that I was being fired, and yet, I still jokingly said to her, “This isn’t for me to get fired again, is it?” She smiled, and tilted her head like a dog who had just heard a sound it didn’t understand.

Next thing I knew, I was sitting in the head of in-house’s office. He told me that he thought the time had come for me to start looking for another job. I just sat there, unsure what to say. He said that I could be fired or resign, it was up to me, depending on if I need the unemployment or not. I still just sat there. He got exacerbated… unsure how to deal with me or how to keep me from crying.

Then he said to me, “You didn’t really want to be a television executive anyway, did you?”

You ever have someone ask you a question in such a way that they are pushing you to give them the answer that they want -- and then you give it to them to be nice, even though it’s not true?

“No, I guess I didn’t want to be a television executive,” I lied, trying to make this man who was firing me like me. He nodded, knowingly. “What do you want to do?” he asked. I told him I wanted to write.

“Go drive a truck,” he said… "get some real life dirty experiences that you can write about." Well… if I wasn’t crying before, I have to admit the “go drive a truck” line sort of pushed me over the edge. When I looked up, there were tears in his eyes too.

“Look," he said, touching my knee to let me know he cared, "I wanted to play basketball once. I was on the best college team in all of America, keeping their bench warm and cheering all the star players when they came in off the court. I’ve got three NCAA rings, but not because I deserved to be there, only because I was good enough to be the worst guy on the best team in America." A shiver ran through him as he held back a sob.

"I'm the worst guy on the best team," I sort of sputtered. His face clouded with mawkish malaise and he nodded yes.

The fuck – he was firing me and he was crying! “I’m sorry about this, "he said, "but I need someone who wants to stab me in the back … a guy who I can play tennis with in the morning, but have to lock my office to keep from going through my files in the afternoon.”

“Huh?” I finally managed.

“Look,” he blurted out, “you are one of the smartest and hardest working people on this floor, but that’s not what I need right now.”

I took a deep breath.

“You’re like I was… good enough to get on the best team in the world… but not really good enough to be a part of it. You’re sitting on the bench, while the rest of us are being stars. Anyplace else in the world, you'd be a starter... a star, but here, you're nothing. I’m doing you a favor letting you go. I know what it’s like… I was you. I was the dullest star in the Milky Way, knowing that I could have been the brightest star in any other galaxy. I’ve been there.”

He turned away so I wouldn’t see a tear that had fallen to his cheek. I waited a moment more, expecting him to deliver the Coup de Grace… you know, something like “It’s not you, it’s me…” or “CBS still loves you, we’re just not in love with you anymore…” but the final line never came.

I got up and left, knowing that I’d chosen to be fired. I’d done this by pursuing a career in which the only guarantee you have is that you will be fired from every job you ever get. And although I was done with CBS, I had many more firings to go. All of us in development do. In fact, I have something in common with every person who ever fired me from CBS. Every single one of them was fired by CBS too.