Still Pitching (2 page)

I loved the books themselves—their feel, their smells, their textures. While my mother shopped for groceries and clothing on 116th Street, I haunted the Rockaway Beach Public Library, eagerly pulling books down from the shelves and sitting cross-legged on the wooden floor, inhaling the musty aromas and running my fingers over the grainy textures of those volumes. When I'd crack the binding and bend the book open, my heart started racing and my hands trembled with anticipation.

While I was out of first grade
, I also began to write. I'd scribble notes in the margins of books, or I'd write in a hand-sized spiral bound notebook I kept in my pants pocket. Sometimes, I'd pretend I was the author and rewrite the story. Or if I wasn't satisfied with a character's decisions, I'd write what I would have done in the same situation. When I didn't like the way a certain book began or ended, I'd make up my own beginning or ending. If a story seemed too predictable or boring, I'd change it. If I felt an affinity for a certain character, I'd pretend that he or she was my friend and I'd write that character a letter. Once in a while something I wrote would stop me in my tracks. Other times I'd be thinking about one thing and an unbidden thought or idea would appear on the page.

I liked writing for many of the same reasons that I loved to read. Once I got going, I could write for hours without thinking about anything else. I loved the sensation of feeling both transported and in control. I never felt inadequate or self-conscious when I was writing. I could imagine anything I wanted to, make myself into anyone I wanted to be. I also liked the challenge of finding the exact language to express some of the doubts and fears I couldn't reveal to anyone else. And if I couldn't think of the right word, I'd look it up in the dictionary or in my mother's thesaurus.

I was just beginning to enjoy my involuntary furlough from school when my mother announced that it was time for me to go back. For the first few weeks I was self-conscious and tentative—so afraid the kids would start taunting me again. But once I got used to being back in school, I remember feeling disappointed that the reading and writing we did in class did not provoke nearly as many supercharged moments as those I'd experienced alone at home.

In those early years of school
, I didn't get to spend much time with my father. For much of his adult life, Abraham Jacob “Jack” Steinberg was a traveling salesman. He worked for a Manhattan table linen manufacturer when I was a kid. His territory was Ohio, Michigan, Illinois, and Indiana.

My father disliked being away for such long stretches, but he was a lot happier on the road, where he could be his own man, than he was in the home office. Whenever he took me with him to Manhattan, he'd balk at doing the routine paperwork they gave him. And it irritated him when he'd have to take orders from his bosses, some of whom were younger and less experienced than he was. But he put up with it because, like so many Jews of his generation, he believed it was his responsibility to work hard and provide for his family. This was the ethic he lived by until the day he died in 1989.

I admired my father's persistence, but I felt sorry for him because he never got the chance to follow his dreams. As a kid I had no idea what I wanted to be when I grew up, but I knew I craved a more romantic existence than the unremarkable life my father and mother led.

My father knew this about me, and he was always urging me to get my head out of the clouds. At the same time, he never stopped encouraging me to better myself. His standard lecture was about missed opportunities. He made it clear that he wanted me, his firstborn son, to go to college and get an education—as well as to seek out and do whatever it was that would make me happy.

“If you settle for anything less, you'll always regret it,” he said.

While my father offered me this permission, he was never able to give it to himself. I learned how to follow my own dreams, not from his advice, but from my grandfather Hymie's escapades.

In his prime, Hymie Frankel
was a robust, gentle man. Almost six feet tall, he liked to wear grey cardigan sweaters and smoke pungent White Owl stogies. By his late forties his hair was already thinning, and his shoulders were rounded from bending over the prescription counter at the pharmacy. Yet my grandfather had an aura about him, a tangible presence that attracted women and men alike.

As a young boy I was enamored of him. My mother claimed that Hymie fawned all over me, the family's firstborn son. Allegedly, he took me for rides on Sundays in his beat-up old DeSoto, just so he could parade me in front of all the uncles, aunts, and cousins. And, as the story goes, he flashed my baby pictures to the regulars at the pharmacy every chance he could.

But my most vivid memories of him don't involve Sunday car rides. By the time I was nine Hymie and his buddies were smuggling me into the harness racing tracks at Roosevelt and Yonkers. The first time he took me to the races he said, “Don't tell your mother or Grandma Tessie. If you do, Mikey, we'll never hear the end of it.”

That was the start of our conspiracy.

Whenever he planned to take me to the harness races, he'd tell my mother we were going to the movies. She knew Hymie wasn't playing it straight with her, but what could she do? He'd been taking
her
to the track since she was a young girl. Besides she also knew that the serious betting action was at “the flats,” Belmont Park and Aqueduct (“The Big A”).

“Swear to me Hymie that you'll never take him there,” I once heard her urge him. And, despite my pleading, he honored that request. He didn't take me to Belmont until I graduated from high school.

The family mythology only
added to Hymie's aura. According to my mother, in the Roaring Twenties my grandfather owned two Manhattan pharmacies near the Ziegfield Theater. And she liked to boast that Al Jolson, Jimmy Durante, Georgie Jessel, and Burns and Allen hung out at Hymie's stores before and after their shows. She also claimed that he loaned Jessel some big money when the future star was just getting started.

“He might as well be giving it all away,” she frequently said. And in some ways she was right. Whenever Hymie was flush he gave his money to show biz and racing buddies, and to the down-and-outers and hangers-on who regularly tapped him for cash. But once when I pressed her on the issue, she admitted that most of the luxuries she enjoyed came from money he'd won at the track.

Hymie was so fond of my mother, his eldest daughter, that for her eighteenth birthday he bought her a canary yellow Ford roadster and then enrolled her in an exclusive women's teaching college. And her younger sister, my aunt Ruthie, claims that she would have enjoyed the same privileges had it not been for the stock market crash of ‘29. My mother's version, though, was that Hymie lost the pharmacies not on account of the crash, but because he ran up so many debts with the bookies.

Whatever the case, Hymie characteristically took the loss in stride. He moved the family to Rockaway Beach, a resort community on the south shore of Queens, where he bought a small pharmacy in partnership with his three nephews, Mickey, Sam, and Abe Neiman. Together they began to rebuild what he had lost.

By the time I was born, in the early 1940s, Hymie was earning what my mother called “a decent living;” and he and my grandmother Tessie were living in my mother's and father's house on Beach 132nd.

My father was on the road so frequently that for a time Hymie became a permissive surrogate father to me. On racing nights Hymie would have me meet him at five o'clock at Neiman's Pharmacy. The ritual went like this: first he'd slip me a twenty and we'd go up the street to Sam Cahmi's deli, where he'd sit me down at the counter and order me a lemon coke and a hot pastrami sand-wich, then he and Sam would duck into the back room to wait for Willie and Ralph—from the butcher shop—to arrive with the racing programs.

Those two guys were right out of a Damon Runyon novel. During the day, Willie and Ralph cut meat and wore bloodstained aprons and baggy brown wool pants. But at night, when we went to the track, they were decked out in three-cornered hats, shiny black suits with diamond stickpins and vests, and pointy shoes with white spats.

I used to love to hang around and listen to them handicap.

“Doc Robbins says to put the long green on Adios Harry in the third,” Willie would boast. And Ralph would counter with something like, “I have also got an inside tip. From Shermie. He says number three's got the post. And mark this down, Will, the horse is runnin' on greenies.”

When the four of them disappeared into the back room, I wasn't supposed to know what they were up to. But it didn't take a lot of smarts to figure it out. Guys with wallets bulging like egg rolls paraded in and out of that room as if it had a revolving door.

Once at the track, Ralph, Willie, Sam, and my grandfather would go back to the stables to get inside tips from the trainers and stable boys. They always had the lowdown on which horses were running on Bute, who was lame, and who was the heavy favorite. They also studied the drivers' records, each horses' winning times, the track conditions, the horses' blood lines, even the wind velocity and direction. They bickered over which horses were the “mudders” and which ones were “rabbits.” They always knew who you could count on to “crap out in the stretch.”

Hymie was their leader—always the taciturn, dignified patriarch. When he walked through the admissions gate at Roosevelt, Hymie headed straight for Doc Robbins's office under the grandstand. Doc was an old racing crony, a fellow pharmacist who'd retired in his mid fifties to pursue his real passion. He owned the track's program concessions, and when Hymie and the guys showed up, Doc gave them box seats right at the finish line. More than once I heard my grandfather telling Willie, Ralph, and Sam that he wished he could do exactly what Doc Robbins had done. It was something I never forgot.

Hymie also kept company with the top drivers, and he traded tips with the Mafia types—the big-time shooters in sharkskin suits, black silk shirts, and white ties. Everyone looked up to my grandfather—the bookies, the touts, the trainers. They took his marker, came to him for advice, asked him for handouts. And he acknowledged them all. He'd give money to Jimmy Sparrow, the retarded kid, and to old Shep, the shell-shocked local “village idiot.” He even bankrolled Hilda Bells, who was a bag lady long before bag ladies became part of the landscape.

But he didn't just hand them the money. In his way, he made them earn it. I remember once when old Hilda hit him up for a loan. Hymie pulled out his wallet, but before he handed over the cash he flipped open the plastic sleeves that contained his family photos.

“Look at my grandson,” he said. “Isn't he a beautiful kid?” The gesture embarrassed me, but I enjoyed watching old Hilda grimace and nod her head in mock agreement.

Grandparents and grandchildren
are natural allies. Both have a common adversary: the parents. Hymie wasn't responsible for bringing me up, so he could afford to indulge us both. And what young kid wouldn't enjoy that kind of permission?

The first time I went with him to Roosevelt Raceway, we sat in the grandstand high above the oval dirt track that circled the green infield. I took in the scene through Hymie's old Zeiss binoculars. To my right, just beyond the lip of the grandstand roof, were the finish line and the tote board that flashed the odds every few minutes. Below, between the railing and box seats, were swarms of people: parents and kids sitting on blankets, eating out of wicker picnic baskets; dapper men and flouncy women who looked like they just stepped out of “Guys and Dolls”; faux aristocrats with porkpie hats and chauffeur's caps who sat on folding chairs studying the racing form; and the touts and hangers-on who scurried around like worker ants. It was the most enchanting spectacle I'd ever seen. I felt as if I'd been transported to another dimension

Even though my grandfather was a gambler, the money that traded hands seemed less important than being part of the spectacle and milieu. Ten minutes before the first race, my grandfather sat me down and said, “Mikey, I want you to understand that there's more to this than the money.” Then he walked me through the racing form, explaining the Byzantine symbols: the post position numbers, the horses' best and worst times, their previous finishes, their breed, the trainers' record, the jockeys' track record, the racing conditions, and the stakes. Then there were the times when Hymie took me back to the stables and introduced me to the trainers and jockeys. He had them explain to me how the horses were bred, trained, and developed into trotters and pacers. It was the first time I had truly felt like an insider.

During the racing season
Hymie couldn't stay away from the track. Whenever he could get cousin Sam or Mickey to cover at the pharmacy Hymie would fill prescriptions from six A.M. till noon, and then he'd head for Belmont or The Big A. After a dinner break, he'd drive twenty-five miles to Roosevelt Raceway in Westbury in time for the nightly double. When the ninth race ended, he and his cronies went over to the Sunrise Highway Diner for a cup of coffee and the ritual post mortem. He'd get home after midnight and slip into bed, always remembering—win or lose—to leave a rose and a fifty dollar bill on the dining room table for Tessie and his two daughters. It was Hymie's way of buying them off.

By eight the next morning he was back at the deli making book on the day's races, before heading up the street to the pharmacy where he'd fill prescriptions and indulge his other passion: shmoozing the regular customers.

Though cousin Sam and Mickey were never easy with Hymie's gambling, they had to keep quiet about it. Whatever reservations they harbored, they knew he was never negligent or irresponsible. He'd get up at three in the morning to deliver medicine to a sick friend or customer; he'd fill the paregoric scripts that no one else wanted to make; he'd work the counter, sell cosmetics to the women, order the supplies, keep the books, pay the bills, listen to salesmen's stories, and place the weekly ads in the
Rockaway Beach Wave
.