Love and Fury (12 page)

When I was nine, the American Legion baseball team my father coached won a championship, and instead of the traditional championship jackets he offered them a weekend trip to New York. I was the batboy so I got to go, too.

My father's car, his first, was a black Pontiac that sounded like a machine gun if you drove faster than 25 mph. On our way there we had to stop several times to let the radiator cool and get water. One of the players in the car—we were traveling in a caravan with the other coaches and with one or two of the players who had cars—said something about pissing into the radiator and everyone laughed. I laughed along but wondered if that wasn't a good idea since I had to pee and was afraid to ask if we could stop.

“We are under the river!” my father blurted as we entered the Holland Tunnel. Holland was a country, I knew from school, that would be entirely underwater were it not for the windmills and dikes that held back the sea, so the name of the tunnel made a nine-year-old's sense to me.

The parking garage for guests of the Prince George Hotel was a huge machine that seemed to work something like a Ferris wheel. The attendant drove the Pontiac into a steel mesh cage, and another man pressed a button and sent the car up, up into the building until we couldn't see it anymore, and several other cars in their cages came into view. I recall the smell of the garage, the exhaust fumes, the layers of grease and grime in the machinery, but there was nothing ugly about it; it seemed elegant to me and brilliant, my first understanding of the verticality of New York, which became almost unbearably exhilarating looking uptown to Thirty-Fourth Street, where the Empire State Building, which my father claimed was one of the seven wonders of the world, stood in its impossible glory.

Everything was a wonder to me on that trip and there's hardly a point in recounting the wide-eyed provincial kid arriving in the metropolis, but as we headed for Yankee Stadium that afternoon, I saw poverty more abject than any I'd seen in Allentown. Its hopelessness struck me with something like the vertigo I felt looking up at the skyscrapers of Manhattan, as if there were a pit exactly as deep as the Empire State Building. I saw kids my age, clothes shiny with grime, rags really, scrambling over piles of bricks in an alley, people hanging around doorways, leaning against walls, sitting on the front steps of buildings. Black people. I'd never seen so many black people. I was morbidly fascinated and wondered what was wrong with them; didn't they know how to live?

All it took to ratify my parochialism, my naive self-centeredness, my—say it—my racism, was the black man I saw drunk on a subway platform; right under a sign that said No Spitting, he hawked up a green wad and—
och-tooey!
— spurt it on the tracks. Then he glared at me. He was disgusting, dirty, perhaps dangerous. I stepped close to my father. Soon we'd be at the ballpark where Mantle and Maris would team up to clobber the opposition, where my father had promised to “buy me some peanuts and Cracker Jack” like the song he'd taught me when I was three.

“What a beautiful day for baseball!” My father pronounced as we emerged from the subway.

That afternoon, Mantle hit three homers in a double-header, one in the first game and two in the second. I don't recall who the Yankees played.

We drove home at night; it was cooler and the radiator didn't overheat. I sat in the back, hanging out the window, looking behind us at the skyline as it receded. Over and over, the song I heard everywhere during the weekend replayed in my ears, Harry Belafonte's “Banana Boat Song”:
Come Mister Tallyman, tally me banana. Daylight come and me wanna go home.
When I could no longer see the skyline, I pulled my head back inside the car, resolved that I would live there one day.

I looked at the Yankees pennant I was bringing home for Bobby, and imagined telling him about the game. It was always tricky because while he seemed to like hearing about things I'd done, the places I went and what happened there, I often felt bad that he couldn't come along, that he was always stuck at home in his wheelchair. I had to think about how to tell the story so it felt like we were sharing something and not that I was oblivious to his situation. I would give him the pennant and I would keep the small baseball bat that was a ballpoint pen.

“Now I know what they mean when they say it's a nice place to visit but I wouldn't want to live there,” my father said. His window was down and the little vent, the wing window, was open in such a way that he could flick the ash off his cigar by poking it out there. I thought that was pretty cool. “I mean, all those people on top of one another! How the hell do you figure out who to hate?” The player in the front passenger seat laughed, along with the two guys in back with me. “No. I'm serious!” my father went on. “How does a person know where he stands? I mean, people should get along, don't get me wrong. I just mean that when push comes to shove you have to know who you're for and who you're against, don't you?”

I've puzzled over that for a long time. The idea that
when
push comes to shove—not
if
push comes to shove—one must decide who one is for and against seems to have been the experience of many German Americans during the first half of the twentieth century. According to historian Daniel Okrent, in his
Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition
,

Iowa declared speaking German in public or on the telephone unlawful. German books were burned in Wisconsin, playing Beethoven in public was banned in Boston, and throughout the country foodstuffs and street names of German origin were denatured by benign Anglo-Saxonisms. Nearly ninety years before french fries became freedom fries during the Iraq War, sauerkraut became liberty cabbage and, in an odd homage to the president, Cincinnati's Berlin Street became Woodrow Street. “Cotton Tom” Heflin of Alabama, who could always be counted on to transcend the limits of ordinary, everyday bias, said, “We must execute the Huns within our gates. The firing squad is the only solution for these perverts and renegades.”

Okrent goes on to quote from David M. Kennedy's account of the lynching of a German man in St. Louis and the court that found his murderers innocent.

Perhaps because my grandfather fought for the United States in the First World War, there was little question in the Hoffman house that his sons would fight in the Second. Don, Edgar, Francis, and Richard all served at the same time. This assumption was not unanimous among German Americans in Pennsylvania. Other families, other communities remained, in both wars, understandably divided, if not in their loyalties, then at least in their affections. It was important therefore to know, and prove, “who you're for and who you're against.”

“My attitudes are my attitudes. They don't hurt nobody,” my father insisted. Implicit in that statement was my father's understanding that he was inconsequential, powerless, and therefore free to hold whatever ideas he found comfortable, no matter their provenance, validity, or potential impact. His racism didn't matter so long as he treated individual people of color with respect. His misogyny didn't matter so long as he was not abusive to women. He hated the French whom he'd experienced during the war (“No self-respect,” he judged of them), but had he met someone from France, I'm sure he would have been welcoming.

My father was born and died at Sacred Heart Hospital. He was baptized, confirmed, and married at Sacred Heart Church. He went to Sacred Heart School. In those days the parish was comprised of Irish, Italian, and German families with their attendant social clubs: the Hibernian club, St. Anthony's Association, Liederkranz. They were the Micks, the Dagos, and the Krauts, all innocent enough to my innocent ears: Micks were called that because their last names began with Mc. Dagos I couldn't figure, so I settled for inversion: since my father called spaghetti sauce “Dago sauce,” I figured that Italians were Dagos because they ate a lot of spaghetti, which I knew to be true, so that must be it. And Krauts likewise. We were German, after all, and we ate a lot of sauerkraut, happily. No harm, no foul, as we said on the playground.

I do not mean to suggest that it was an innocent time. It was more likely an ignorant time, but when you're eight or nine years old, one often passes for the other. Things make sense in their own cockeyed way, shaped by the need to find the world benevolent or at least not poisonous. Later, as teens, maybe kick-started by hormones and disappointments, the whole view shifts, and every evidence of adult ignorance is taken for malice, every limitation of the adult world and the grown-ups in it seems willful, plotted, designed to deny us the fulfillment of our aspirations. An adult now, in need of more than a little understanding myself, I'm no longer so quick to condemn.

About the time he took a job laying railroad track for Bethlehem Steel, my father switched from cigars to cigarettes, which I suppose were easier to smoke on a short break from work. Outside in the cold you could put down your sledge, look down the track you'd laid, peel off your work gloves, shake out a Lucky, offer the pack around to the other guys, then spin the toothed wheel of your lighter, take that first drag, and exhale with something like a sigh.

My father was a smoke ring virtuoso. In the evening, at home, he entertained us with smoke rings through smoke rings, shapes we convinced ourselves, my brother Bobby and I, were animals, cars, trees, things made of breath that quickly broke apart and were gone.

But by the time I left for college, for New York City, my father had taken up a pipe. By then he was working in the office of the Recreation Department, overseeing the many sports leagues sponsored by the city, scheduling ball fields, courts, umpires, and referees. A pipe seemed right for a man who sat behind a desk, the sleeves of his white shirt rolled, the square Windsor knot of his tie loosened and the top button of his collar undone. I'd taken to smoking a pipe myself now that I was a college man, reading demanding books and writing carefully incomprehensible poems. I think we both had tweed jackets with leather patches on the elbows.

It took me my freshman year to figure out I wasn't getting much social traction from my man-of-letters get-up. My classmates and friends seemed at home in bell-bottom jeans and serapes, tie-dyed T-shirts, cowboy boots, leather jackets with rawhide fringe. By the fall of 1968, my sophomore year, I had the rudiments of a new self in place: a beard that grew mostly on my neck, hair down to my shoulders, a pair of secondhand boots from Goodwill, and the green canvas military bag designed to carry rounds of ammunition. I had not been home that whole summer. I told my parents I'd found a job in New York, which was true, though not the reason I stayed away.

I am being kind to my younger self when I say that I was in the throes of a confusing transformation and could not withstand just then the reminders my family would be of the adolescent I was: the high school quarterback, the altar boy, the healthy son they didn't have to worry about. I was worried about myself: I was no longer who I'd been and not yet who I was becoming.

I felt that I couldn't climb from the cauldron where I was being transmuted into some new person I hardly knew. It would be like showing up with one hand a claw, the other a fin; one foot webbed and the other a cloven hoof. My plan was to “get my shit together” as we said back then, and present them with the man I had become. They would have to accept or reject that person, and I knew I wasn't him yet. I remember my mother's sigh on the phone—I can still hear it, along with her generous refusal to protest—when I told her I would not be coming home for the summer.

For whatever reason, whether I could not bear to go home and be “Dickie,” whether I wanted to remain in the hashish-and-patchouli-scented new erotic freedom of the counterculture in Greenwich Village, or whether I preferred waiting tables to the pickax and shovel of the road crew job of the previous summer, I had abandoned her. I had abandoned all of them.

I was not returning to my role as emotional support for my mother; I would not be sitting at the kitchen table with her, drinking our cans of beer and filling a large cut-glass ashtray with the butts of our hope: new research into muscular dystrophy, the promise of chiropractic for slowing muscular degeneration, an article she'd read about “atomic” medicine, and swapping the off-color jokes, my mother's secret pleasure, that would lighten the mood for a moment.

I would not be helping my father lift my brothers Bob and Mike from wheelchair to commode and back again, would not be part of the care schedule that required him to come home from work several times a day.

I would give up at last trying to sustain a meaningful friendship with Bobby, declining in his wheelchair, the unselfconscious and once ferocious love we had for each other as boys eroded by his illness, by my relative health, my urgent youth.

My half-crazy youngest brother, Mikey, soothing himself with his continual drumming on the tray of his wheelchair, chanting nonsense syllables nonstop, rocking and banging his head, could become a comfortable memory I responded to with pity and affection.

And my brother Joe, five years my junior, could take up whatever slack I was leaving and I could assent with relief to his role in the family narrative as one who, like me, would be fine.
That boy is all right.

And I would not have to return to a city where I breathed the shame and humiliation of boyhood rape. So long as I remained in New York, site of nearly infinite possibility for remaking myself, I could insist that what happened to me as a boy was of no consequence.

When I first arrived in New York, I lived in a boardinghouse in the Bronx. My roommate was a folksinger who played the banjo. Pete Seeger was his idol. Along with my tweed sport coat and khakis, I wore my hair in a flattop that I made stand up with a stick of wax in a retractable plastic container. Two of the other guys in the house had heard of a club downtown, at St. Mark's Place, called the Electric Circus. Did I want to come?