RUDIMENTS, pt. 216
Making Cars
All of my life it's all been
contradictions.The crazy mix
of stuff that stays around now
for years of memory, but when
it occurred or was happening,
to me was everyday confusion.
There was a fierce and intimidating
pitcher for the St. Louis Cardinals
by the name of Bob Gibson -
I don't remember exactly,
sometime through the mid-60's
I guess. The contradiction is that
you'd not think 'baseball' would
have held my attention, but he
did. I never knew, but just by
representing something to me.
He was different, a pure and a
fierce intimidation. The guy was
like a locomotive on the mound -
an entire dance almost of twisty
thrust and glare, staring down
batters, making faces, throwing
at them, breaking bones - yes,
shoulders and arms and ribs. He
was brutal, and massive, and won
like a million games and situations
year after year, right into the 70's.
He handled a baseball like I wished
to handle words - verbs and adverbs
as curves, nouns and adjectives as
face-high fastballs. Watch out!
-
The 60's were so much bullshit turmoil
anyway, and I was all caught up in it.
Gibson was a fierce, black guy -
amazing, that, in itself. And it only
added to his appeal. He had a take
no prisoners attitude, for sport. The
money of baseball wasn't major back
then, as it is today with all the 25
million and multi-year deals. Gibson
probably scratched out 125 a year,
maybe 150. He never really squawked,
just took the money and played the
killer. The stupid media loved him,
perversely, for all his bad habits.
The entire civil rights things too began
riding on the shoulders of guys (black
guys) like him and Curt Flood. Bob
Gibson was the killer on the mound.
Curt Flood was the killer in the
boardroom. He too was a player,
and a good one - the lily-white jerk
world of baseball hadn't really ever
dealt with guy like these before. The
black players they brought up were
mostly the silent go-along types -
Willie Mays, Hank Aaron, or the
sob-story Ray Campanella types.
Not a peep out of them. The media
played all this passive composure
up; they caricatured the black guys
thereby. Today, it's sort of the same
with the Asian and Japanese guys
who get brought over now to play.
At least they can't speak the language
and have to use interpreters, but
still they say nothing out of the
common mainstream. Curt Flood
took the entire thing to the next
step. He challenged what was
called the 'Reserve Clause' -
which meant that the ball-clubs
completely owned the players and
could do with them what they
wished, send them to any other
team at will, set the terms and
dollar values. The players were
chess-pieces. Slaves. Curt Flood,
embodying the civil rights movement
of blacks, in baseball, said No More!
He sought (along with Marvin Miller,
his attorney) an end to the reserve
clause restriction, so that any player
could negotiate on his own, set
his own terms, set his own dollar
value for contracts, and the rest.
It became a long, drawn-out battle,
and involved a baseball strike too.
But the players eventually won.
Curt Flood found his way to
ignominy, very quickly. Bob
Gibson just kept throwing heat,
taking guys down.
-
I kind of had one eye out for this
all the time I was involved in other
things. Back then, there was always
a newspaper, or a Daily News or
something, around from which you
could glean the basic facts - unlike
now, print then was really the only
street media. Shoe-shine stands,
barber chairs, train stations and
bus stops, always had some half-assed
newspaper or reading matter around.
Nothing electronic. I scavenged - I
was like one of those street or
bus-station kid-bums you see in old
60's movies, scrounging in bus-stop
stands, phone booths and all that, for
newspapers, loose change, anything.
Reading though, paging quickly, like
some crazy freak. It was a heady time.
On every corner, Vietnam stuff,
anti-war kids, fighters, yellers, the
parks and dark corners were nothing
but trouble and danger. If you went
into Bryant Park, behind the NY
Public Library, you were dealing
in death. It's today's 'darling park'
of the world, but back then it
was death, drugs, needles,
and angry black dudes,
everywhere.
-
For me, it was all substantial matter
wherever I went. But I always tried
staying quiet. Another contradiction
had to do with what I was reading.
And oddly enough it was pure fictional
realism - I was neck deep in Theodore
Drieser and Sinclair Lewis. In all
other respects, their writing would
have seemed completely foreign to
me - no leaps of creative imagination
or any of that. Yet, I was completely
taken with Sister Carrie, AND with
Babbit. I took Lewis' Babbit apart
with a fine-tooth comb. It was mosty
all cataloging. It was descriptive,
plain, boring writing, but put into
the play of a realistically determined
viewing of 1920's American life :
real estate, developments, motor cars,
streets and lanes, all that weird societal
dreaming and the onrush of war and
the changing facsimile of life as
presented. The entire rah-rah
charade of American life was
being presented. Babbit was a
characteristic fool, but very well
presented. Dreiser held more of
power and force, maybe the Bob
Gibson of the writing world then,
while Sinclair Lewis sometimes
veered a little too close to Yogi
Berra. It was all almost funny,
yet for me it was grand. I, as I
said, took apart Babbit. It could
be dismantled easily, for examination,
like a cadaver for an autopsy. Every
little, plain paragraph, with little
discursive content at all, confined
itself to itself : the description of the
bathroom sink at his home in Floral
Heights, in his 'fictional' Zenith.'
Then the shaving. The accumulated
old razor blades, hidden atop the
medicine cabinet by the 10's. The
section about the towels, then the
wife, then the three kids, breakfast,
the neighbors. All laid out - as if
Lewis had (probably) sent his
time writing all these snippets
and then sequentially grafted
them all together to make the
little shade-pictures he wanted.
The entire book goes on like that.
Since no one was ever bothering
me and I'd become nearly an
18-hour a day nightowl, I dug
like Darwin, seeking evolution.
"The Babbitts of the country were
struggling to defend what was
later called 'family values,' about
which the Babbitts of America
considered themselves experts.
At least about other people's
families. Babbitt also approved
of Prohibition, but only for
poor people."
-
I could go on here for pages about
all that, but I won't. Either of those
two books, or both, are still easily
available and ready for your reads.
To me, as I finished with all that,
it was like then graduating from
some grand and wildly-wise
school of learning. By the late
1960's we had entire towns and
townships of Zenith-like places; the
raw and the weird suburbs of both
good and bad intentions, leaking
then, as they mostly were, their
latest generation of children -
who couldn't wait to dress down,
slum themselves out, and escape.
To those that didn't a foolish
vacation in Vietnam always
offered itself. The flip side of
all this 'ruggedness' was that
Vietnam acted as the smoothing
paper, the rasp, by which many
of the bumps and the unpleasantries
of the growing scene could be
worked out. It was the further
dawning and progress of the
'deep'state of control which has
us, so now, so deeply, in its tired
and wasteful grasp.
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