Not That You Asked (9780307822215) (39 page)

The big trouble with most grills you can buy in a hardware store is that they aren't adjustable. You simply must be able to move what you're cooking closer or farther away from the fire at different times. I keep four bricks handy and I'm always setting them up in different combinations to rest my grill on so that I can move the food away from the fire when it's flaming or closer to it if it dies. When I'm ahead of the cook in the kitchen doing the vegetables, I want to put the meat on hold for a few minutes.

Like most Americans, we're eating less meat. It isn't something we decided to do. It isn't diet or religion. Huge pieces of meat just don't appeal to us as much as they used to. Last night I cut two small zucchinis in half lengthwise and poured a combination of olive oil and safflower oil over them. I sliced big new potatoes half an inch thick and took the heavy stems off a big head of broccoli. I boiled the slices of potato for about five minutes and blanched the broccoli. I put some of the oil over the potatoes and the broccoli and put everything on the grill, the broccoli last and very briefly.

I thought to myself, “Craig and Pierre are probably grilling caviar on an electrically operated spit. I wish they were here to try this vegetarian dinner grilled over real wood.”

I'd be a lot better going to school now than I was when I went to school. I wouldn't mind starting all over in about the seventh or eighth grade. That's when I began to lose it a little.

Miss Shute would stand in front of the class when she was teaching arithmetic and say something like this: “Seven. Multiply by three. Subtract nine. Divide by two. Multiply by eight. Add two. Andrew?” she'd say, looking quizzically at me for an answer.

Charles Gibson and several of the brighter boys had their hands up waving at Miss Shute to call on them because they had the answer.

“Fifty,” they'd shout when she pointed at them.

The best I ever could do was guess. I don't think I ever got the right answer to one of Miss Shute's exercises.

Miss Boyd taught us English. “He cooked the steak a deep dark brown,” she'd say. “What part of speech is the word ‘deep'?” she'd ask, then pause. “Andrew?”

They were always calling on me, and I was always letting them down. I didn't know then what part of speech “deep” was in that sentence and, to tell you the truth, I'm not even sure now.

That's why I'd like to start over. I'd like to take advantage of an education. I'd work a lot harder.

I took Latin, algebra, biology and French in high school, and then in college I took good courses in American and English literature. I took lots of history and philosophy but, for the most part, I was more interested in passing than learning.

Kids going to school are lucky. When you see what a mess we make of our civilization, it's amazing we have local governments that govern us, water and sewer systems that work and pipes and wires that supply us with electricity and telephone communications.

As civilized as all these things are, nothing we have done with our world is any better than our determination to educate our young.

Phrases like “Experience is the best teacher” and “There are a lot of things you can't learn from books” are fine to pull out once in a while. These sayings are partly true but they're most popular with people who feel inferior because they didn't get a good education.
They're trying to convince themselves and their friends they didn't miss anything. They missed something and they know it.

Setting out to learn something in a program designed by professionals to teach the most about a subject in the shortest time is a wonderfully civilized thing to do and by far the most efficient way to learn. Putting aside a major portion of your life—often more than twenty years—to cram in facts that might otherwise never come to your attention is infinitely more efficient than experience. Learning from experience is slow and painful. Anyone can gain scientific knowledge about temperature by spilling boiling water on himself, but it's the hard way. Experience is a good teacher but it's no substitute for a real, live one.

The facts and background of subjects like literature, history, science and arts never come to the attention of people whose only teacher is experience because these people choose to quit school and go to work. Millions of people in the world less lucky than most of us never even have the opportunity to quit school. They go from their mothers' arms to work.

The institution of school in our society is almost too good to believe. In school you aren't expected to be doing anything else. You don't normally have a job or, ideally, even any major worries about money. You have special hours to learn in and a special place to go. Almost none of us recognize how good life is in school until we're out of it.

With all the kids going to school, we should all take some satisfaction in having done this one thing right.

One of the saddest days of my life was the day I realized I'd played my last football game. As a young boy I played in pickup games in vacant lots on Saturdays in the fall. I was already certain that I loved the game better than any other.

All through high school and into college I played my favorite game and then, one day, it was over. It was my last game and I knew it.

There are school administrators who emphasize to students the good sense of playing what they call “carryover” sports in high school and college. These are the games like golf and tennis that you continue to play as you age. I understand the argument in their favor but as bad
as I felt the day of that last football game, I wouldn't trade my football days if I could have started playing golf in grade school and grown up to be Arnold Palmer.

It's a problem, though. The problem is that too many games we play in our youth turn us into fans instead of participants when we're older. There's no question that Americans are watching too much and doing too little when it comes to sports.

If I ever run for office—and you're safe because I never will—I'd run on a ticket that endorses spending federal, state and local-government money for an adult sports facility in every village, town and city in the country. They would be on equal footing with our schools, our museums and our libraries.

There ought to be a big field house in every community where adults could play the year round. There's no reason for gymnasiums to be limited to the use of school kids. I don't know many adults who wouldn't get a lot more exercise and enjoy themselves playing games that demanded some physical exertion if there were facilities for it in their communities.

Would it really be too expensive for this rich country to have buildings with racquetball and tennis courts, swimming pools, gymnasiums, weight and exercise rooms and good locker-room facilities? I always look toward our $300 billion defense budget. Just give us one of those billions and we can build a thousand adult sports complexes and spend $1 million each on every one of them.

I've never spent much time in a women's locker room but there's something very open, friendly and honest about a men's locker room. I like the smell, the steamy atmosphere, the camaraderie and the disheveled look of it. They're islands of civilization in a mean world. (I have heard … and this is only hearsay, mind you … that in a women's locker room the showers are usually divided into individual stalls so that women have privacy bathing. If this is true, it wouldn't have the same spirit as a men's locker room. If elected to office, I will vote to take down the walls in the women's shower rooms all across the country. Women, like men, have got to face the fact that we're all a little funny-looking naked.)

Athletic clubs in most big cities have good facilities but until recently they've been exclusively men's clubs and they're prohibitively expensive. Membership in the New York Athletic Club costs thousands of dollars and it doesn't let everyone in who has the money, either. Even at the famous West Side YMCA in New York, membership in the Business Men's Club is $810 the first year.

As a result of all the high-priced athletic clubs in town and the
exclusive golf and tennis clubs in the country, not many people can afford to do much about sports, once they're adults, except sit and watch the games on television.

I hereby propose an adult sports facility for every community in the United States.

The medium-size fellow wearing the blue baseball cap looked OK to me as I got off the bus in front of the stadium for the Giants-Dallas game. I was carrying a small canvas bag with my radio, binoculars, two tuna-fish sandwiches, four cookies, a thermos of coffee with cream and no sugar, and a raincoat. In my pocket was an extra ticket to the game.

My idea of a week's vacation is going to a Giants game alone on a Sunday afternoon. I couldn't have been happier. If I could whistle, I'd have been whistling.

There were a dozen young hustlers all around yelling for tickets.

“Who's got one? I need a ticket here.”

Most of them were scalpers who would resell any ticket they got at a profit. The guy in the blue cap didn't look like a scalper, and I felt selfish going into the stadium with two tickets so I went up to him. “You looking for a ticket?” I asked.

“Yeah. Sure would like to see the game. I went to school with Lawrence Taylor.”

It amused me to see the look on his face when I handed him the ticket and walked away. “Mr. Nice Guy,” I thought to myself about myself.

Even though I go to the games alone, my friend Gene sits immediately in front of me, and I'm surrounded by dozens of other friends whose names I don't know because we have met only two hundred times, at eight Giants home games a year for the past twenty-five years. I don't know their politics, their religion or what they do for a living. They may steal for all I know but eight times a year for three hours they're my closest friends.

“What did you do with your other ticket?” Gene asked.

“I gave it to a guy out front,” I said. “He was OK.”

“He'll sell it,” Gene said.

“No,” I said. “He was OK. If the guy who comes isn't wearing a blue cap, you're right.”

As I was bending over to dig my sandwiches out of the canvas bag, a voice said, “Pardon me. I have that seat.”

The black guy standing next to me with the ticket stub was six feet four inches and must have weighed 240 pounds. He should have been down on the field.

Gene turned, gave me a look and said, “Where's the blue cap? You're some judge of character, Rooney.”

“Where'd you get the ticket?” I asked the man.

“Outside,” the big guy said. “Paid fifty dollars for it.”

Mad is too mild a word for how I felt over having been taken.

I settled down to enjoy the game and the big guy turned out to be an OK fan, but I was still mad. At halftime, the big guy went out back. He returned with a Coke and said he'd just seen the fellow who sold him the ticket.

I jumped out of my seat and ran up the stairs and through the tunnel to the refreshment area.

The guy with the blue cap was just coming out of the men's room. I grabbed him by the arm.

“Give me the fifty dollars,” I screamed.

“Let me explain,” he said as his face went white.

“Look,” I said, “I don't know who's gonna win this fight but we're gonna have one.”

At that moment, my friend Gene appeared at my left shoulder.

“Is this the guy?” Gene asked menacingly.

Gene looks and talks like a retired New York City cop.

“I don't have the fifty dollars,” the wimp said. “I'm with some other guys. We needed three tickets.”

“I'm gonna get the fifty dollars,” I said.

“Look,” he said, showing me his empty wallet.

I reached quickly for his wallet and took out an American Express card.

“When you get the fifty dollars, I'll give it back,” I said, and we left him.

Midway through the third quarter, the wimp in the blue cap appeared, holding a lump of bills.

“Here,” he said, handing me the bills, “but I want to explain.”

“Get lost,” I said, taking the money and returning his American Express card. I passed the $50 on to the big guy and went back to the game.

On the bus home Gene said, “Did the big guy ever pay you seventeen dollars for the ticket?”

“Listen,” I said, “when the Giants beat Dallas, it's worth thirty-four dollars to me.”

Anyone who's never been broke cannot possibly appreciate having money as much as someone who has been broke. I never thought I'd live to think so but I know now that it was a good thing for me to have lived through a serious, jobless depression of my own years ago. I never get over appreciating being OK now.

I got thinking about being broke this morning because I just read that YMCAs across the country are closing their residential rooms. Twenty years ago Ys across the country had sixty-six thousand rooms they rented to young men looking for temporary places to stay. Last year they were down to thirty thousand rooms and more are closing.

During a period of almost a year when I was desperately broke, I often came to New York City looking for work or for someone who'd buy an article I'd written. My budget allowed little for a hotel room and I often stayed at the YMCA on Thirty-fourth Street for 50 cents a night.

Of all the things I've ever bought with money, nothing compares with what I got for that 50 cents. The rooms were tiny. I suppose their dimensions were something like twelve feet long and eight feet wide. The bed took up most of the room. Beyond the bed there was a small dresser on one side of a little window and one chair on the other. When you checked in, there was one clean towel, a washcloth and a small bar of soap waiting for you on the bed. The bathroom was down the hall.