CATCHERS IN THE RYE
They tell us oldtimers to do memory exercises to keep our minds sharp and push against incipient dementia. I’m finding crossword puzzles helpful for verbal recall and the freshening of cultural coordinates of the past (tho the new generation of puzzle constructors seems increasingly wedded to modern slang I don’t recognize). I have other ways, too, of freshening the memory springs. A lot of it has to do with revisiting scenes from childhood.
Elsewhere among these blog-pages I shared my imaginary beagles but did not mention the fact that their existence drew from an earlier source. Long before I dreamt up the low-maintenance dogs, Hans and Yuhans, I did what many kids do: I invented human friends. Mine were pretty vivid – enough so that my sisters and mother took notice and sometimes, to my mortification, told other people that little Donny at any given moment was off in some cinematic wonderspace that occurred only inside his head. I think this embarrassing thing might not have happened but for the fact that I told Mama and both sibs the names of my original cast of invented buddies: Jonker, Blossom, and Gary. The names stuck in their minds. Once I got past my initial anger at having my intimate trio outed, I was sometimes willing to talk about them. But not a lot. This was a delicate thing.
Jonker was a tobacco man. He chewed and sometimes smoked, but only cigars, and those had to be short and fat. He bit the ends off and added those nibs to his chaw which he kept in a pouch fastened to his belt. He liked to spit. Jonker was on the heavy side, with the body type known back in the day as husky. He wore husky jeans and big shirts, usually flannel plaids. Jonker was not my age, or even close to my age; he was a grown man – still young but already hardened a bit by life. He was serious, not a guy to trifle with. You might have said at the time, he was a man’s man – lived in a world devoid of females. And deeply blue-collar. Jonker was comfortable with any beer that came in a long-neck. If I had to liken him to a familiar screen figure, it might have been Charles Bronson, but a Bronson fattened a bit by Broderick Crawford. I realize that Charles Bronson would be an anachronism here, as his career arose decades into the future (tho Crawford was certainly around; Highway Patrol, anyone?), but that’s the thing about imaginary people of this kind. They live more in eternity than time; they swim in a different plasma, like figures in a dream – and their qualities are just as protean. Jonker was rock-solid, dependable, a man of his word. If he were in the army, he’d be in a tank corps.
Blossom grew from some sweet soil, perhaps the poetry of it. His name suggested a certain delicacy, and it was true. Where Jonker was down to earth, a sober realist, good with hands, and fists when they were needed, Blossom dreamed. There was an ethereal quality about him which made him the hardest of the three to describe. He was sometimes even hard to conjure – diaphanous in body, and of a mind fleeting. I think he was androgynous. Blossom was more voice than flesh. Hard to visualize – still so even today – but I could hear him. He sounded like a breeze, or distant music, or a human poem.
Gary was the regular guy, maybe late teen-aged. Handsome, athletic, lithe, quick on his feet. I saw him in situations where a straight, fast thinker was needed. Gary was a rising-to-the-occasion sort of guy, and attractive because of it. A role model for me, and of the three of them the one closest to myself. Girls his age liked him, but he had no steady. If Gary played, he played the field, but that was not where his main interests lay. They lay in sports. Baseball, probably second base. Football quarterback, the hero’s position. He didn’t play hockey because I hated hockey even tho our town, Johnstown, had a semi-pro team, the Jets, and one of my sisters dated one of the players for a time. His name was Shroup; he painted Shroup on the handle of his wooden sticks, and he gave me one to ingratiate himself to my sister. There, right there, is another memory spur.
We rented a brick duplex at 529 Oak Street, just a block from Messenger. Our phone number was 7-4117. This was long enough ago that phone numbers had five digits. It was a party line, because you had to pay extra for a private line. When you wanted to make a call, you didn’t just start spinning the rotary dial; you picked up the receiver and quietly listened for the dial tone. If there wasn’t one, it meant someone was on the line. We were one of four parties; it was rude to listen in on someone’s call, so we obeyed the etiquette. We hung up quietly and waited. Dad said always give ‘em five minutes before you pick up the receiver again.
The duplex had a slate roof and a full basement where my mother did our washing. She used a Westinghouse tub washer with a wringer. In winter she hung the clothes in the cellar to dry; in summer, the tiny back yard. Shortly before we rented the place ($75 a month, I remember) our landlord, Mr. Baer, had swapped out the old coal furnace for a new natural gas model. It was hot water heat with heavy radiators in upstairs rooms. The old coal bin lay at the street-end of the basement where it could be fed from a trailer or truck backed up to the curb. The bin was a tiny room walled off from the rest of the cellar to keep things clean – or as clean as they could be kept when heating with coal. I remember the low slatwood door into the bin. I was terrified of the coal room and had nightmares about the door.
Our oven and range were electric and came with the house, but the fridge did not. My parents had to go out and buy one before we moved in. They bought a Philco, a short bulbous thing with rounded edges. That appliance went with us from move to move. Four moves and forty years later, my parents still had it, humming quietly as their back-up in the finished basement of the house they built in Orangeville, Utah, when my dad retired. The TV was an RCA, a little console encased in, I think, walnut. Black and white; only rich people could afford the new color televisions.
My three guys were with me through the years we lived at 529 Oak. I count six years there, total, taking me halfway through fifth grade when we moved to a new suburb in the hills above town. Richland Township, our house there the first house my parents purchased, $13,500, at 121 Metzler Street. A little three-bedroom brick crackerbox. The Nesmith boys, Barry and Gary lived across from us. I had a terrible crush on their mother. Jeff and Caryn Allison, both redheads, lived next door, 123 Metzler. Their dad and mom were named Ron and Toppy. I never knew another Toppy, but Rons were dime a dozen. That’s the beauty of memory – how a strange word or name can form an anchor, tying onto the quotidian with a certain flair.
Somewhere along the way, a fourth character joined my cast. I don’t remember what prompted his appearance. Then again, I can’t say where Jonker, Blossom, and Gary came from either. This guy’s name was Randolph. Southern roots but no accent, a bit dapper, left-handed of course in a nod to the term southpaw, quiet but well-spoken. I would have had a near-full infield then, except for the fact that Blossom never played ball. Gary held down second base; Randolph was a crackerjack shortstop; Jonker of course the catcher. Some strange ghosts on first and third. As these guys surrounded me, I was on the mound much of the time, like my hero from the Pittsburgh Pirates, Vernon Law.
There were real friends in the midst of all this – flesh-n-blood boys I played with a lot. The Magro brothers down on Oak Street, Ricky and Davey. Timmy Thomas, Damian Hockyko, Paul Russo and Tommy Kennedy. Then up in Richland, the Nesmith boys, and Lanny McCarty, an adopted only-son, and my best friend, Jimmy Apple, six doors down. They knew nothing of my imaginary quartet, but I have to say, my neighborhood friends were no more real to me than the ones I held inside. And how strange to those flesh-n-blood kids that I would sometimes disappear for hours and stay happier than happy in my private projection booth. It was a very intimate space.
All of this, kept in memory alongside a thousand other details, constructed my sense of self, the familiar, the reassuring feeling of what was normal, and still is. Some say every human being is a committee. I knew the members of mine so well; knew their best characteristics, knew their manner of speech, their skills and weaknesses. They were also my skills and weaknesses. Eventually, the four disappeared – Jonker the first to go, killed in action, I think, on a battlefield somewhere. The others just seemed to evaporate over time, one by one. I spoke to them less, conjured them less frequently until at some point – maybe approaching high school – not at all. Gary seemed to be the last to go.
But in school classes sometimes one or another would reappear, usually in my reading. A figure in The Odyssey my senior year; a character in The Caine Mutiny. Or the heroic Pimpernel. Jonker was a catcher but never the catcher in the rye. That might have been me, standing next to Holden Caulfield, protecting the children from falling, even as my team of brothers disappeared.