Our old house was in the city proper, across the street from the courthouse, the police station, the back of a fancy restaurant. I would sit on our old, splitting wood porch, with weeds growing up through its cracks, and see people crying alone in their cars, divorced couples fighting with papers clenched in fists, police and their handcuffed perpetrators, cooks smoking dope between shifts, crows eating the food waste spilling out of the dumpster. We lived there until I was ten years old.
After we moved, all I saw from the new porch was the yard. Back yard, front yard, side yard; there was even a yard in the middle of the street (a median, I guess) and in the cul-de-sac.
There was, though, a dog who passed by from time to time. A little old, greying black dog, with curly hair that stuck close to his body. Maybe a mini poodle or something else expensive. “Hey little buddy!” I’d call out to him as he passed by. I didn’t know his name.
I ached for a dog. I would anguish through sleepless nights, clutching and petting my pillow, pretending it was filled with the warmth and love and enthusiasm of a canine. My parents' excuse at the old house had been that we didn’t own it, that the landlord didn’t allow dogs, so that was that. Now that we had moved, they invented a new excuse: Mom was allergic.
I eventually tempted this dog into sitting on the porch with me with unhealthy offerings of cold cuts and cheese, hastening its already near death. Its eyes were clouded with cataracts.
A woman was walking down the sidewalk, normally bereft of walkers. “Buddy!” she was calling out. “Buddy!”
She saw me on the porch. “Buddy? There you are!” she said, making her way up the lawn. I looked at the tag on the dog’s collar: BUDDY. Its stubby little tail wagged; it did its best to go down the concrete steps to her.
“You’re always sneaking away! But it looks like someone was watching out for you this time, huh?” she said, smiling up at me. If I had thought these kinds of things at the time, I would have thought she was quite beautiful in a very suburban type of way, but I was only ten and did not think these things yet.
“He likes the cheese,” I explained.
“Well, thank you so much! If you ever find him again, you can pet him and give him all the cheese you want! We live right up there if you ever want to bring him home,” she said, pointing to a large, tan, red-shuttered two-story at the end of the cul-de-sac, like it was Versailles at the end of the Avenue de Paris. There was an enormous black GMC pickup truck smiling in the driveway and a Baltimore Orioles flag hanging from the porch. “I saw you just moved in last week? I have two boys just around your age. You should come over and play sometime!”
“Okay,” I said. Petting this lady’s dog made me smile for the first time in weeks, and then she came and took him away. But maybe offering her sons as new friends in exchange was a fair trade.
“I’ll give your mom a call,” she said. She tucked Buddy under her arm and waved goodbye.
The Hartley boys: it sounded like they were some cheap knockoffs of the Hardy Boys, but the only mystery they ever solved was which of them was the biggest jerk, and it always turned out to be all of them.
There were two of them who were around my age, Cal and Eddie, and a younger, third one named Jimmy, who was their mother’s desperate attempt at adding a girl to their litter, but I guess Mr. Hartley’s masculine genes were just too strong. They were All-American in looks and size, farm-fed and robust, blonde-haired and blue-eyed, like their mother.
Because his father was also named Cal, I could never remember whether Cal’s full name was Cal Ripken Junior Hartley or if he was named after his father, who was named after Cal Ripken Senior, and thus named Cal Ripken Hartley, Jr. Eddie and Jimmy were apparently named after Orioles baseball legends as well.
Point being, these Hartley boys loved their Baltimore Orioles, and they loved their baseball like their fathers before them, and so going over there that summer after I moved meant I was going to be passing time in the most great and American of summertime ways.
I had no idea about baseball, or any sport, really, except for maybe Quidditch. When they handed me an aluminum bat for the first time, I didn’t even know if I swung right-handed or left-handed. I could never remember which way to hold the bat, and so they thought I was a “switch-hitter.” Either way, I was rarely making contact with the ball.
Cal was batting most of the time anyway, and his younger brother pitched to him because I could not throw strikes. I was relegated to playing ‘outfield’ in the backyard, between the swing set and the sandbox where the littlest, Jimmy, would play with construction truck toys.
“Why does your lawn look like crap? Does your dad even water it?” Cal asked me between his brother Ed’s pitches. Ed giggled like a maniac because he thought it his duty to laugh at everything Cal said, especially at verboten words like crap.
I hadn’t even noticed the state of my yellow and crinkling lawn as compared to the green and trim edition we were playing on.
Before I could answer, Eddie served up the pitch of a true crony, and Cal duly pinged it with the aluminum bat. It was a deep drive, beyond the mowed lawn and past their property line into the high, uncut grass. I stepped carefully into it as Eddie cheered his brother around the bases.
As I bent to get the ball, some little flash of green caught my eye amongst the other shades of the grass. I picked it up: a fifty-dollar bill!
“Hey guys!” I said, running back. “Check this out! It’s like, 50 bucks!”
“Whoa!” they said, their eyes got big as if they’d never seen cash before.
“You found that in the grass?” Cal asked, adjusting his baseball cap, turning it backward. He alternated his cap backward and forward with a regularity and cadence that I could not figure out the pattern of.
“Yeah, weird. Maybe it’s your mom and dad’s,” I suggested. I had recently taken a quiz in a magazine which determined that I was a Gryffindor, and thus had the propensity to try and do the honest thing. “Let’s bring it inside and show your mom.”
We went inside with the money.
I was always amazed by their house. My new house was nice, but it was what my mom called a “ranch,” which I did not understand because I could not see how it bore resemblance to a cattle farming operation. Theirs was a true, honest-to-God second floorer. The first time I was there, I asked if they lived on both floors. They laughed like crazy; I couldn’t explain to them that at my old house, the second floor was a different apartment.
“Is this yours, Mrs. Hartley?” I asked their mom, holding up the bill. She was on the couch watching Ellen DeGeneres with Buddy because she did not work.
“Oh my goodness! What is that, a fifty-dollar bill?” she said, taking it lightly so as not to snatch it from me. It seemed very weathered, as though it had been outside for a long time.
“I thought it must be yours,” I said.
“Yeah, probably,” said Cal, matter-of-fact, hands on hips, sunglasses on indoors.
“I don’t think we lost any money. Mr. Hartley never said anything about missing some money, and he usually knows exactly how much cash he has. Where did you find it?”
“In the tall grass behind the house. Cal hit a ball back there.”
“Well then, I think you should keep it!”
“What?! But MOM!” Cal wailed. “It should be mine! It was on our land! I’m the one who hit the ball back there. That’s like, almost enough to buy Tony Hawk Pro Skater 2!”
Eddie chipped in: “I WANT TONY HAWK PRO SKATER 2!”
“I’m sure someone in the neighborhood lost it a long time ago, and it just blew into the grass. And you know, the tall grass back there isn’t our land, technically,” his mom said, handing me back the bill. “You can take it, sweetie.”
“Okay! Thank you,” I said, pocketing it. My mom would try and make me return it once I got home, but Mrs. Hartley refused it then, too.
Cal took off his hat (it was facing forward, then) and threw it into the couch.
“Cal,” his mother started slowly. “Did you ask your new friend what we talked about?”
He sighed, and I wondered how someone with such a nice mom could be so horrible. Without looking up from the floor, with minimal enthusiasm, he asked, “Do you want to come to my birthday party?”
I didn’t wonder so much about Cal’s petulant nature once I met his dad.
I had only ever seen Cal’s father once, when he was putting up the Bush/Cheney sign on their immaculate lawn with a bit too much pride. From what I gathered, he was some kind of salesperson for construction stuff, and apparently, this kept him away from home most of the time.
But on his son’s birthday, he made a big deal of being present and accounted for, doing the fun part of parenting while I am sure he neglected less glamorous aspects.
They had set the yard up as a sort of mini-baseball field, with real bases and a little pitcher’s mound and some snow fence because, apparently, Cal’s friends from school were exclusively other ball players. I was expected to play, of course.
Mr. Hartley was the designated pitcher. He was serving up perfect strike after perfect strike, nice and soft and at a manageable height, for these little 9-year-olds to cream the ball deep into the tall grass. They were playing no strikeouts since the harder you swing the more likely you are to miss. The point was to give everyone an equal opportunity to look like a big-shot home run hitter.
It was easy for me to stay invisible when I played the field, but the spotlight that was the batter’s box illuminated me. Mr. Hartley softened his throws even further, practically tossing them to me underhanded.
I don’t remember if I was batting left or right-handed, but whichever way I was standing, I was doing it wrong. No matter what height, what level or speed Mr. Hartley threw the ball at, I could not hit it.
Each whiff caused a blare of guffaws and chuckles from the other boys. “String Bean, String Bean!” some of the boys called out. The nickname Cal gave me.
Mr. Hartley could not hide his frustration.
“Try choking up…okay, swing now…alright, eye on the ball…all the way through now…”
He was a man who did not suffer incompetence.
“Yeah uh, why don’t you just, uh, take first base. Just get on first,” he finally said. I put the bat down and walked to first.
Everyone laughed and clapped sarcastically.
To my credit, I don’t recall being tearful or otherwise emotionally scarred from that incident. Hitting balls with a metal bat was already a skill which I did not rate highly, and thus my inability to do so did not cause me any irritation.
My inability to make any other neighborhood friends concerned me much more.
After the game was over, Cal opened a bunch of presents, among them Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 2 for the Playstation.
The summer passed, I went to school and still did not make friends. It was a different culture; you had to have at least ten different outfits to rotate through wearing and I only had six, I was growing too fast for my parents to keep up. I read at lunch, I read at recess. The Hartley boys were, thankfully, in different classes. Our suburban school was huge; I never saw them.
At our old house, I had plenty of friends, if not many especially close ones. When my dad told our family that he had been promoted and that we were going to move, I resolved to call upon my friends for help. We would organize, I imagined. We would protest. An army of kids, the friends of my friends, all of us would make signs and take to the streets, surround my father’s place of employment, and make our stance against the promotion of fathers and the moving of their families known. ‘SAY NO TO PROMOTIONS’ is what my sign would say. The bosses in charge would relent; they would realize it was wrong to give someone a promotion if it meant uprooting their entire family. We would stay put.
Of course, this didn’t exactly pan out. My parents promised they would help me maintain my friendships, but it was a 45-minute drive back to the old neighborhood, not exactly out of the area but a bit of a stretch for daily playdates.
They suggested I write letters to my old friends, which I did regularly at first. The problem was that most little boys of that time had an aversion to reading and writing.
“I finally beat Pokémon Red on Gameboy!” I wrote to one of my friends, detailing my strategies and Pokémon lineup.
“So what?” he wrote back, addressing each of my paragraphs with a single sentence as if they were a homework assignment. “I beat Pokémon Red like 8 times.”
He didn’t write back after that.
My parents severely limited my Gameboy time, which pushed me toward filling up my considerable solo time with that tried and tested loneliness resolver: a good book.
I waited for an owl with my invitation to Hogwarts to arrive; none ever did.
Instead, the route of my escape was revealed the following summer through a fight heard through my parents’ bedroom door. Words like “have to move” and “can’t afford the mortgage” and “capital gains tax” were said.
They called a family meeting that was very much the antithesis of the one they called a year before and let me know that my dad had gotten ‘laid off’, which I gathered was the opposite of a promotion. They said we might have to move, that they weren’t sure what was going to happen, but that they loved me no matter what. I nodded without much to say, my mind whirring with possibilities.
Afterwards, I sought out my dad while he played guitar in his office. He was always in his best mood when he played guitar.
“Dad, why did you get laid off?” I asked, without much context as to why that may be a harsh question for my dad to answer.
He looked out the window to our lawn, which even after an entire summer of us living there remained just as dead and weed-filled as it did the summer before.
“I’m not sure, to be honest, bud. I guess they thought they needed me, but…then they didn’t,” he said.
I sensed I had embarrassed him, so my voice got quiet: “Will we ever get a dog now?”
He shifted the guitar in his lap and put his hand on my head. “We’ve been over this before, buddy. I don’t think so. Mom is pretty allergic.”
“Then I think it’s great that you got laid off. We should move,” I asserted.
He laughed and strummed a chord. “You’re probably right.”
It was decided we would sell the house and move in with my grandfather back near the old neighborhood, for the time anyway. Our yard was filled with boxes in half-packed stacks, naked furniture splayed out as if it were a yard sale. I heard the bat-on-ball metal ping of the Hartley boys playing in their yard, so I went over there to escape. At least I wouldn’t have to lift boxes.
Despite me being the “String Bean,” they were always willing to let me join in. It was nice for them, I think, to have me as the third man out there, for them to watch me flounder around in the shadow of their athletic might.
“What’s up, SB?” Cal said, at bat as always. I took up my usual position, gloveless. “I see you’re moving?”
“Yep,” I said. No warm goodbye from Cal, no wondering where I was going or why we were leaving.
Eddie wound up to pitch but stopped short of throwing. “Buddy, MOVE!” he yelled.
Their little black dog, Buddy, had blindly wandered in front of Cal, who then kicked the old dog aside so that Eddie could pitch to him.
I don’t know what I thought at that moment, but whatever it was must have been the ten-year-old equivalent of: Fuck this kid.
Cal hit the next pitch, not so far as the tall grass at the property line, as if kicking his dog had sapped some of his strength.
It went over my head, but I knew I could get to it. I ran, plucked it from the lush, green grass, and began sprinting back.
“Cutoff! Cutoff!” Eddie yelled, waving his arms. No cutoff man for me. I was getting this fucker out myself.
The way we played was to have home plate be what is known as a “pitch-back” or maybe a “rebounder.” It was basically a taut, bouncy net stretched over an angled metal frame, designed to be thrown at such that it would bounce the ball back to you. They had one with a square taped on it to indicate a strike zone. The rule was that if you threw it into the strike zone before the runner tagged the metal frame, they were out.
Cal was rounding the training cone that constituted third and toward the pitch-back as I passed Eddie with the ball in my hand, raised and ready to fire. My skinny little arm unleashed the throw of my lifetime, hard and accurate, dead center in the middle of the strike zone on the pitch-back, just before Cal reached home.
He was out!
I forgot to stop my forward momentum as I threw, and because the throw was so perfect, and because I was so close to the pitch-back, I watched as the baseball filled my vision and rebounded straight into my eye socket.
I gasped and cried immediately.
Eddie collapsed on the ground, laughing.
“STRING BEAN GOT YOU OUT! STRING BEAN! HAHA!” he screamed to his brother.
Cal was usually one to make excuses and bargain with us whenever he was called out, usually based upon some obscure rule he claimed to have implemented earlier, that we had agreed to in some distant conversation of which he had no proof. This time he distracted himself from his failing by taunting me.
“YOU WRECKED YOURSELF!” he yelled. “YOU WRECKED YOURSELF!”
“WHAT IS GOING ON!?” yelled Mrs. Hartley as she came down from the porch.
I couldn’t speak; I was blubbering, holding my eye, afraid it would fall out.
“String Bean threw the ball to get Cal out, and it came back and hit him in the eye!” Eddie explained for me between gasps of laughter.
“Get up!” their mom growled at them. “Or you’re cleaning out the grass stains yourself!” She helped me up. “Oh, David, are you okay, sweetie? Can you move your hand so I can see?”
I moved my hand and could tell by her reaction it was not good. “Looks a little swollen. Might have a black eye. Come on, let’s put some ice on it,” she said, taking me by the hand and pulling me up to the house.
Mrs. Hartley was a good lady. That was the last time I ever saw her; I often wonder what happened to her and if she ever got around to leaving Mr. Hartley.
We got to my grandfather’s that night, and indeed, I had a black eye. I went into the living room to watch TV with him but should have known that he’d have the Yankees game on, an almost nightly summer ritual in which I had no interest, not even after a couple of summers of playing the game myself in the Hartley’s backyard. Luckily, I had brought a book along.
“Hey, buddy. What happened to your eye, you get into a fight?” he asked me as I plopped down on the couch and dust rose all around me.
I did not feel like explaining to my grandfather what had happened, so I told him yes, yes I did.
His reaction was not what I’d have expected from any other authority figure, especially my parents, who would have had instant anxiety attacks and been filled with a million questions and concerns. What my grandfather said was:
“You know what you say when you got a big black eye like that after you get in a fight, and someone asks you about it?”
What?
“You should see the other guy!” he told me, laughing.
I thought about what using this phrase meant. It meant that, although I had an injury, they who had caused me injury had in turn received an even worse injury by my hand, the other guy in question thus implied to be the loser in the altercation, a fact the questioner would have no choice but to believe given the absence of said other guy and allowing the injured (me) to save (wounded) face.
The other guy was me.
For once, I put my book down and we watched as, in the bottom of the ninth, Derek Jeter hit a home run to win the game for the Yankees. They were playing the Baltimore Orioles.
I thought of the Hartley family and of Cal Ripken (Junior?) Hartley (Jr.?), and once again thought something like: Fuck that kid.
thanks for reading this story someone who threw a baseball into their own face. even if you didn’t like it, maybe click the little heart button so that people who might will find it.
BOOK CLUB QUESTIONS:
Did you ever move as a kid? How did it affect you?
How do socioeconomic boundaries make it difficult for kids to make friends?
thanks for reading PNP, try not to give yourself a black eye next time.
Nice, elegiac atmosphere. I think we all have a Mr Hartley in our lives, fuck those guys, but thank god for the Mrs Hartleys. They sustain us through those impossible years and impossible human kids. Soft and tender story. Thank you.
Enjoyed this story. Reminds me of a flipped “Sandlot.”