Outside Looking In (8 page)

Another Baltimore institution I wrote about as an outsider was Jonah House, the religious commune founded by the ex-priest Philip Berrigan and the ex-nun Elizabeth McAlister, which campaigns against nuclear weapons. Phil had become famous in 1968 when he and his brother Daniel, a Jesuit priest, were two of the “Catonsville Nine,” antiwar activists who broke into a draft headquarters in Catonsville, Maryland, and defaced draft cards with blood before burning the cards. Phil and Liz made more headlines in 1972, when President Nixon's attorney general, John Mitchell, tried to convict them and five others of planning to kidnap Henry Kissinger. I covered this trial of the “Harrisburg Seven” in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, for
Harper's.
It was there I first met Alger Hiss, who came to speak in favor of the Seven. The jury did not believe the charges against Berrigan and the others. They went free. It was Mitchell who later ended up in prison, for his Watergate crimes.

Jonah House survives, though Phil is now dead. I reported on many communes in the 1960s and 1970s, in college towns and in Canada. They were all short-lived. Only Jonah House has gone on and on, still recruiting young people for demonstrations and writing campaigns that argue no one has the right to make and maintain weapons that can destroy much or all of the human race. Jonah House was named for the biblical figure who lived in the belly of the whale, which is how the Berrigans saw Americans living in the national security state that was fostering the deadly nuclear system. Every year, on the liturgical feast of the Holy Innocents—those children slaughtered by Herod when Jesus was born—the Jonah House people would go to the Air and Space Museum in Washington and sing hymns around the model of the Hiroshima bomb. I went with them, and wrote about their eloquent arguments against nuclear fantasies of power.

Phil and Liz rotated the kinds of protests at nuclear sites that led to their being imprisoned. One would stay out of jail while the other went in, so the outsider could bring up their children, who became antiwar activists in their turn. Though Jonah House received some donations from peace activists, it supported itself for years by doing manual tasks, especially house painting. This was not only an economic necessity but a statement of solidarity with the working class. There are many homes in Baltimore that have a careful coat of paint put on by some of the most famous jailbirds in America.

I did not lose touch with the Berrigans when I moved from Baltimore to Evanston, Illinois. There I went to church with new friends, Dick and Nancy Cusack. Dick had been Phil's college roommate at Holy Cross, and they were antiwar activists themselves, as were their actor children. Nancy was arrested while protesting the work of the School of the Americas, which trained enforcement figures for South American dictators. I dined with the Cusacks whenever Daniel came to visit (Phil was too often in prison to come west).

When Daniel had gone underground to avoid arrest, and led the FBI a merry chase, J. Edgar Hoover's agents went to the Cusacks to see if he had been in touch with them. When their young daughter Annie came in from school, the agents asked if they could question her. Nancy said, “Sure.” Annie asked what this was all about. Nancy told her, “These men are looking for Father Dan.” Why? “They think Father Dan has done something wrong.” “That can't be. Father Dan wouldn't do anything wrong.”

When Phil died in 2002, the Cusacks' actor son, John, who could not leave the set of a movie he was making, lent his parents the private plane he uses. I went with them back to the city made holy by Jonah House, where I renewed acquaintance with its members. Phil was buried in a plain wood casket, and Daniel preached an eloquent sermon based on the raising of Lazarus. In the plane on the way back, Dick told me his story of the pope's beanie. He and a Holy Cross classmate, on graduation, went to Rome and attended a Mass at Saint Peter's. The pope at the time was Pius XII, who came into the basilica carried on men's shoulders in the
sedia gestatoria.
It was his practice to throw his white skullcap (the zucchetto) into the crowd as he passed. Dick and his friend scrambled for the prize, and had equal rights to it, so they agreed to rotate possession of it when they went home. But when it was Dick's turn to have it, he loaned it to his mother, who started passing it around to friends to cure their various ailments. He never got it back. (I dedicated my book on the rosary to Dick, though he was not much of a rosary sayer in his last years.)

A quite different Baltimore institution was the moviemaker John Waters. He was just beginning his weird career when we moved there—filming on the streets of his hometown with amateur equipment and friends as his only actors. I went to his “world premieres” at midnight in a local theater after the regular runs were over for the day. He brought a red carpet and searchlight to the events. His “stars” entered through thin ranks of fans. The first movie I saw, in 1968, was
Eat Your Makeup.
Despite his “underground” fantasies, and compliant actors who did stunts like eating a dog turd for the camera, he came, later in his career, to make more conventional films—like
Hairspray,
which led to the lavishly remunerative Broadway version of the story.

But there is nothing conventional about the Christmas cards he still sends out every year, cheerfully ghoulish creations. He claims that the first card he created was a conventional Joseph-Mary-Jesus crib scene on which he replaced the baby Jesus's face with that of Charles Manson. I did not see that one, but I did see the card that re-enacted his police mug shot (from a time when he was arrested for restaging the Kennedy assassination on a Baltimore street)—he made it a Christmas card by putting a Santa hat on his photographed image. Another year, his “card” was a clear plastic Christmas-tree ball, with red lettering on the outside that said “Merry Christmas from John Waters”—inside, on its back, little legs in the air, was a dead cockroach. One of my sons has a collection of all the cards John sent us. It is one of his most prized possessions.

Knowing John helped me in 1973. I was part of the crowd at a counterinaugural protest at the beginning of Nixon's second term. The police dispersed us with tear gas and chased us from the midtown area. As we fled, we tried to evade the police by streaming into an underground garage, a poor tactical decision, since they trapped us there and brought up a bus to put us in after arrest. John was there with his camera crew, filming for background scenes in his next movie. There was a TV camera crew there, and perhaps the police thought John and his actress, Cookie Mueller, were with it. (They were better dressed than the rest of us.) At any rate, when the police tried to push me onto the bus and I showed them my
Esquire
press pass, they paid no attention until John came over and said, “That's all right. He's with us.” I went free, vouched for with the police by the auteur of
Pink Flamingos,
the dog shit epic.

We were in Baltimore during the glory days of the Baltimore Colts football team—a team full of stars: John Unitas, Raymond Berry, Lenny Moore, Alan “the Horse” Ameche, L. G. Dupre, Gino Marchetti, John Mackey, Artie Donovan, Eugene “Big Daddy” Lipscomb, Jim Mutscheller, Alex Hawkins, Jimmy Orr, Lenny Lyles. I had not been a Colts fan before we moved to Baltimore in 1961. In fact, I was rooting for the other side when the Colts won their first national championship (1958), in what is widely considered the greatest football game ever played, against the New York Giants. I was dating my future wife at the time, in her hometown of Wallingford, Connecticut, and I watched Giant games with her father, John Cavallo, rooting for Frank Gifford, Sam Huff, and the other New York players.

I could not watch the championship game with John, since it occurred over the Christmas break and I was visiting my parents in Michigan. I heard the first part of the game on my car radio, but when it went into late minutes with the Giants ahead, I ducked into a bar to watch on television. Then, though the whole Giants defense was keying on the wide receiver Raymond Berry, Unitas hit him with three passes in a row, taking the ball into field goal range. That kick tied the game and sent it into overtime. Unitas steered his team to victory in the first overtime ever played in professional football.

In Baltimore, my whole family succumbed to the town's fascination with the Colts. And as the sixties turned to the seventies, and the team cooled off, we were close to two informal shrines to the Colts, since we lived just a couple of blocks away from Unitas's restaurant (The Golden Arm) in one direction, and Artie Donovan's liquor store in the opposite direction. My children knew Donovan's son, and told a story about the swimming pool behind his house. Artie, who called his autobiography
Fatso,
was huge in his playing days and got huger afterward. Once, in the winter, when the pool was empty, he fell in after a few drinks too many and no one could pull him out. Legend later grew that a crane had to be brought over to hoist him up.

One time, in the seventies, I went into Artie's liquor store to interview him about the Colts team. I was wearing a slipover shirt that looked vaguely like part of a sailor suit—I had grabbed it in Rome after the airline lost my luggage. Since my wife was not with me at the time, my taste had not been impeccable. Artie, who never disguised his feelings, gave me a queer look and said, “What are you—an Englishman?” He loved to talk about his teammates, including the “weirdo” Berry and the superhuman Unitas. He said that Unitas was so accurate with a football that once, when a defensive player sacked him and rubbed his head in the dirt, he told the apologetic lineman who had let the charger in to let him through again on the next play. As the opposing lineman thundered at him, Unitas jammed the football around his face mask and broke his nose. It was counted an incomplete pass.

There were many myths about the combination of Unitas throwing and Berry receiving. Berry was so surehanded that in his entire career he had only one fumble. At The Golden Arm, I asked Unitas if he had some special affinity with Berry as a receiver. He said, “Hell no. Raymond bugged me. He wanted to tell me all these fancy steps he would take, the new patterns he was inventing. I told him I did not want to hear that stuff. Just get clear, I told him, and I'll find you.” I went to see Berry in Massachusetts, where he had gone after retiring as a player. He was working for the New England Patriots, first as a receivers coach and then as head coach (in his second season at the top spot, he took the team to the Super Bowl).

I repeated to Berry the common myth that he and Unitas shared a single brain, or some invisible connection. His wife, Sally, laughed out loud at the thought. Though the two men had practiced together in the off hours at first, they soon got on each other's nerves. Berry was especially concerned at the stories Unitas would tell about him—stories that entered accounts still being published. Unitas thought he was paying tribute to Berry as a man with little natural talent who overcame all obstacles by hard work and study. In my conversation with him at The Golden Arm, Unitas told me that Berry had one leg shorter than the other. He was also a slow runner, had bad eyes, a bad back, and only nine usable fingers.

Berry especially resented the way Unitas kept telling the story of his short leg after Berry had corrected him. Unitas had once seen the team doctor treating Berry for a pinched nerve in his back. The doctor kept lowering the legs alternately, to see what effect the pinched nerve had on his freedom of motion—which was why Unitas said he had a bad back. Actually, this was a temporary injury that had nothing to do with the permanent state of either Berry's back or his legs. “I used to get letters from parents saying they had a child with one leg shorter than the other, and they knew I was playing football in that condition. I had to convince them that the story was false.”

What about the unusable finger? “I use it all the time.” His little finger was dislocated and ended up skewed. But he kneaded putty to bring back its strength and flexibility. And his bad eyes? Berry was one of the first athletes to use contact lenses, and he did not have just one set of them. He had a case with a range of options. He had tinted ones when he was running away from the sun—in effect, built-in sunglasses. He had different tints for playing at night under lights. He had experimented for all different conditions. As a result, he had better eyesight than anyone on the field—he could hardly have caught hundreds of passes and dropped only one if that had not been the case. Unitas saw him shifting his contacts about in their special case and thought he must be practically blind.

As for not having natural talent, Berry said that he had very large hands for catching and very large feet (size 14) for cutting, twisting, and reversing. It is true that he studied every aspect of the game with an intensity that a natural athlete like Unitas considered obsessive. But that paid off for him. Berry would go out and pace the field before games, identifying areas of loose turf, slippery wetness, or (in winter) icy or frozen patches. As he had contact lenses for different conditions, he had a range of cleats he could use for the different turfs he had to run on. He could change them in the game as rain or freezing temperatures altered the situation.

Despite their temperamental differences, Berry could not have held Unitas in higher esteem as a player. I told him that many people thought the game had gone beyond the days when Unitas called signals without feedback from specialized experts on their headphones. Berry, who had observed the changes in the game as he coached the New England Patriots, said that he had never seen a better reader of the situation on the field than Unitas. Whatever new things had come in, he told me, all Unitas needed was minimal protection from his linemen and he would find a way to win, against any challenge. “He was just a winner.”