Jerusalem Field
Behind my childhood house in Levittown, New York there is a flat dusty ballpark of a few acres named Jerusalem Field. Not more than two dozen years before it was a part of a potato farm, one of many on this flat 14 by 7 mile treeless prairie. This farm was tended by taciturn German speaking farmers who named their village Jerusalem. The old Lutherans named other towns nearby Jericho and Babylon.
At the end of World War II the farmers eagely sold their insect infested fields to real estate developers Levitt & Sons and hustled off to Florida counting their money as they left. Almost all of the 17,347 60 by 100 foot estates they created were occupied by people who never owned a house before.
Every summer weekend Jerusalem Field was packed with chattering little league baseball kids, their parents and truckloads of accompanying equipment. The games would begin early in the morning with parents and spawn rotating in and out all day/ They would continue right until the sun dropped behind and endless horizon of Levitt ranches. Organized sports was more important to these parents than anything else in their world. They ate breathed and lived spectator sports. Far more than just entertainment it was a way of life around around which their emotional lives revolved. One or two generations removed from their immigrant ancestors they replaced the certainty of old-world tribalism with that of spectator sports. They wore colors, bore symbols and slapped on bumper stickers of their team. Conversations began and ended with in-depth and emotional discussions of the players, strategies and outcomes. Men often wore the shirt number of a player they felt closest to. There were rules in a book with clear winners and losers. In the rigid hierarchy of working class life this was a man’s only channel and the women went gamely along.
My parents chose their house lot because the real estate agent said there was a park right behind it. “It will be like part of your backyard” he said. “For the children” he said. A small yellow sign just over our backyard fence read “No trespassing after dusk.” Park police or “parkies” as we called them would patrol the field at night in an extra-duty pickup truck to enforce the rule. At night us beer drinking Marlboro smoking teens would taunt them until a pair of headlights would come straight at us. We’d hurdle over a chainlink fence into someone’s backyard with the agility of olympiads and disappear into the maze of identical dark streets. I liked the word “dusk” but never heard it used outside of high school english class and that no trespassing sign.
Working class accounting classifies children as an expense rather than a capital investment so at birth you’re pretty much a sinner and already in debt. They can’t legally throw you out of the house until 18 and you could feel the tacit frustration. “Three more years until my youngest is out.” was a typical sigh.
There was no irony in Levittown. If you are going to live your tribal fantasies through your child then you do it, brazenly, with no apologies. Those children owe you their very lives goddammit. So while the kids on the North Shore were prepping for entry exams little Levittowners were learning how to pitch and bat for that three-one-hundredths-of-one-percent chance of getting into the major leagues. Dads would puff their chests with pride to see their family name squeezed onto the back of their boy’s tiny uniform along with a pitch for Dominico’s Pizza.
Once the umpire yelled “play ball” things got serious and the parents’ interest was intense. Sometimes disagreements over an umpire’s call would rise up. Sometimes these disagreements would escalate into grownups on the bleachers shouting and shoving while their uniformed children stood in the field, passively watching, gloved hands straight down their sides. Sometimes the game would even be forfeited when the Nassau County police had to roll onto the field.
Every summer Saturday morning a high pitched fielder’s chant “He’s no batter. He’s no batter.” would drift into our overheated 10 by 10 attic bedroom and pass over my two brothers and I. The kids sang it in a rehearsed monotone to encourage the little pitcher on the mound. Right at the moment the pitch was delivered the kids would sing “Swing batter, swing batter” to encourage the opposing batter to swing at anything and miss. And the umpire would shout “Steee-rike” just like in the majors if the kid did miss. Behind it all was the sound of chattering parents who only stopped talking when their child was up at bat.
Come August the crescendo and decrescendo of thousands of ticking cicadas would compete for attention and then blend with the Little Leaguers for a grand finale until school started. Finally one late summer afternoon there would be one last slog to the gravel parking lot and quiet would descend unto the former potato field for two weeks until midget football began. This intricate ritual became the background noise to my summer childhood.
I didn’t really have a lot of friends at 11 years old but I did love baseball. So next March tryouts were coming and I asked but my mother immediately said no with no further explanation. I did often wonder where the little girls were. They seemed invisible. The rest of the family seems to be here, who’s watching them? Having had just brothers the life of a little girl was so impossibly mysterious to me.
Come March the next year backhoes appeared followed by scattered workers in reflective gear who dug holes several feet down. The workers pulled yellow caution type around the holes and left. Looking for fresh ways to kill ourselves us kids climbed into the holes for an inspection. A week later flatbed trucks bearing huge round aluminum tubes rumbled over the grass followed by a cement truck. By day’s end four skyscraper high aluminum tubes were erected. A crane showed up a week later and attached banks of lighting fixtures and by that day’s end had left too. Long Island Lighting Company trucks came and ran cable underground to somewhere digging up large rocks which had probably vexed the potato farmers a century ago.
Then one May school night while all three of us were in bed a nuclear level flash of white light parted the curtains plowed into our bedroom and smacked itself up against the far wall scaring the dog to under the bed. They were testing the lights. The money plowed into that old potato field could have been used to attract better teachers, equip a science lab, plant something more than scrub pine in the parks or a thousand other uses that would make life better for everyone. But no, the tykes dressed in their pinstripes were brightly lit up way past their bedtime to play out a grown man’s major league fantasy in the dark.
But this late summer afternoon was different. My dad was working a double shift so not coming home. My brothers were out with friends. I put two TV dinners in the oven, Salisbury steak for my mother and Mexican for me. The Mexican one featured two cheese enchiladas in a cumin heavy brown sauce and two little triangles one filled with refried beans and the other Mexican rice. It was very exotic.
While the dinners were heating in the oven I stepped out into the postage stamp backyard to watch the little leaguers over the fence. That’s when the heavy late August air outside humid and laden with the smell of earth suddenly got cooler, damper and filled with the pungent scent of ozone. The seagulls circling above landed folding their wings over their big white bodies. A couple of them landed right in the middle of center field while a game was still in play.
My mother, a woman who never travelled 20 miles from the Bronx, used to occasionally say seafaring things like “Red sky at night, sailors delight. Red sky in the morn sailors be warned” Presently she said that when the seagulls come inland and land a storm is coming, which I thought was very wise. It was much later in life that I learned she was divorced from a lifelong merchant marine named Irving before she met my father.
Back out on the baseball field a kid hit a grounder that bounced through the shortstops legs into the outfield sightly disturbing one of the big white seagulls who gracefully sidestepped it having other things on his tiny mind.
I looked west and the sure enough the horizon had darkened to a blue-grey band over the endless tract houses. Thunder faintly rolled. The dark wall of thunder clouds slowly rose as far-away lightning flashed between them. My heart quickened. Joy enveloped me. A storm is coming!
To this boy a violent thunder storm offered great hope. A thunder storm has the power to humble even the most dangerous people and one was coming. I cast all my little boy hopes and wishes that things will be different after the storm. That the thunder, lightening, winds and heavy rain will wash it all away so we can all begin anew. I still feel that way.
The oven timer rang and I walked back into the kitchen grabbed a towel and pulled the aluminum wrapped dinners out of the oven putting my mother’s on the stovetop. I brought mine to the darkening back room to look out at the field and get a front row seat for the coming storm..
The band of clouds had risen to meet the sun and darkened to charcoal grey. The sky suddenly turned so dark the street lights came on. I squirmed in my seat with joyful anticipation. The rolling sound sharpened into claps of thunder, the wind picked up and one bolt of lightening hit the flat ground.
The chattering out there stopped. The mood pivoted from routine to anxious. All activity now focused on anxiously collecting and packing gear and dragging it all to the gravel parking lot with spawn in stumbling tow. Then the first fat drops of rain plopped down into the infield creating little bomb craters in the yellow dust as the last of the uniformed boys hustled off carrying a padded third base half as big as him. They were gone.
And truth be told something did change. My mother brought her TV dinner to the back to sit with me and watch the storm. This never happened before, my mother just sitting with me. She sat facing the window and I to her left. The room then got so dark all I could see was her and me.
My mother made no secret that she didn’t want kids or that the ones she had were a big disappointment especially the oldest, me. The times I was alone in the house with her hours would pass without a direct word except for an order to do something. I thought nothing of it and would pass the time reading books and magazines or watching television until someone else came home but here she was sitting next to me in this unnaturally dark room.
The drum beat of rain turned into a torrent. The skys opened and the wind whipped the tree branches upward. The clay infield soaked then puddled and then became a torrent. Things slammed in the yards around us. Both of us sat wordlessly eating while chaos surrounded us. A branch cracked off the willow tree and fell to the ground. I began to regret my wish. Then just as suddenly it passed leaving a dripping landscape with lots of broken branches and the late afternoon sun trying to peek through. All the same as before except wet and minus the little leaguers.
My mother silently got up with her empty tray, threw it out and retired to the another room to read her Newsday. I opened the the TV Guide to see what shows I wanted to watch this week.
