The Battle of Coogan’s Bluff
I woke up Monday morning with the worst stomach-ache of my life. I felt cold and clammy, shaky and violently nauseous.
Whitey was sitting on his bed, staring me down.
“I don’t feel good,” I croaked pathetically.
“She ain’t going to buy it,” he said.
“My stomach is messed up,” I continued, adding more rasp to my voice, letting my eyes drowsily roll back. I coughed weakly and sighed.
“She ain’t going to buy it,” he repeated, then jumped off the bed and headed out of the room. I closed my eyes. The waves of nausea washed over me. I pulled my pillow tightly over my head. Any moment now, I was going to be horribly, terribly sick to my stomach. I wasn’t sure whether I could muster the strength to crawl out of bed and make it to the bathroom in time. I heard the door open again.
“Your brother says you’re sick.”
It was my Mom. Great. This was it for me. My make-or-break moment. I had to sell it. I had to sell it big.
“My stomach is really sick, Mom,” I whimpered. I tried to look at her through the mist of my failing eyes.
“You’d better get ready for school,” she said. “I’ll have breakfast ready for you in a minute.”
She closed the door as she left.
I couldn’t believe it. I had grown to trust this woman. I thought she loved me. I was her baby. I thought my well-being meant something to her. It became terribly obvious to me that I had been misled. I got dressed, ate my breakfast in silence, and walked a few steps behind Whitey to school. At school, I watched the clock all morning long.
Finally, as the afternoon rolled around and game time approached, I became more and more depressed. I knew that — not too awful far from where I was — the Giants were in their uniforms and were out on the field warming up, and I was in a lousy classroom, and there wasn’t a damned thing I could do about it. My despair was complete.
And then, at my darkest moment, the most incredible thing happened. The classroom door opened, and a kid walked in with a big, brown portable radio. I stared at it in disbelief. A radio. It could mean only one thing: Miss Bernini was a baseball fan. The kid sat it on the edge of Miss Bernini’s desk and plugged it in for her, and then she extended the antenna and clicked it on. There was a small buzz, and then she twisted the dial and I could hear a man’s voice; and then I made out his accent.
“Are you putting on the Giants game?” I asked.
Miss Bernini smiled, continued tuning the radio, and said — without ever looking up at me — “No, I’m putting on the Dodgers game, John.”
I was taken aback. I had never realized it before, but now it was clear; dreadfully clear. The woman who had been entrusted with my education was a foreigner, an enemy in our fair land. I pieced it all together: all along I had known there was something sinister about her voice. She had done well disguising her accent. Miss Bernini from Brooklyn. Damn her.
Finally, she was satisfied with the quality of the sound from the radio. She left it just loud enough so that we could all hear it. My skin crawled as the foul Southern accent of Red Barber permeated the room. Miss Bernini moved front and center and asked for our attention.
“Okay,” she said, and I shuddered. How had I ever missed that Brooklyn accent before? “This afternoon we’re going to try something a little different. You all have your books?”
Everyone nodded. What the hell was going on here? What the hell was she up to?
“This afternoon is yours, for reading, or independent study. You can do whatever work you’d like, as long as you stay in your seat. There will be no talking and no wandering around.” She wandered back to her desk. This was bizarre. Miss Bernini was a great teacher. She challenged us. She pushed us, sometimes kicking and screaming, into thinking. She had even made us write our autobiographies — our autobiographies — as a class project, and we were just kids that had never done anything or been anywhere.
And now she was offering us “independent study.” Unbelievable. She sat down at her desk and turned up the radio a bit more. Her motive became clear. In her life, teaching was important. Her students were important. But baseball — Dodgers baseball — was more important than both. She regained a measure of respect that had been lost, but I still had one question that burned inside. As the other kids busied themselves with their books and papers, I piped up.
“Miss Bernini?”
She smiled and raised her eyebrows, but didn’t look at me.
“Yes, John?”
“Could we listen to Russ Hodges on the Giants’ station?”
Miss Bernini’s smile grew. She still would not make eye contact with me.
“No, John,” she said, “we’re going to listen to Red Barber.”
Great. The worst combination of heaven and hell. Baseball, but from the slanted, jingoist point of view of the Brooklyns. I tried to come up with a plausible argument (“You’ll get better reception on WMCA,” was all I could think of), but I realized that in the little cat and mouse game going on between us, the cat had control of the radio. I decided to make the best of it.
Ralph Branca opened for the Dodgers and shut us down in the first, eliciting a pleased smile from Miss Bernini. Jim Hearn, pitching for us, reciprocated in kind and I smiled, too, adding one very loud clap just to make sure the villainous Miss Bernini was paying attention. If there was war on the greensward of Ebbets Field, I would be proud to fight the battle of Our Lady Queen of Peace Elementary.
We had two men out in the second when Andy Pafko launched one of Hearn’s pitches into the stands in left field, giving the Dodgers a 1-0 lead and provoking Miss Bernini to call out, “That’s the way to do it, Andy!” It was said just loud enough to make sure everyone heard it, but not too loudly to cast aspersions on her professionalism. I acted like it wasn’t a big deal, but Judy Keppel looked up from her book and asked, “What happened, Miss Bernini?”
“Andy Pafko just hit a home run to put the Dodgers in the lead,” Miss Bernini explained, as if Judy Keppel had any clue as to what any of this meant.
“Oh, good,” Judy responded in her moronic little monotone. “What’s the score?”
“One-nothing, Dodgers, in the second,” Miss Bernini answered, her lips curling into that cat-smile I had come to despise so much.
“Good,” Judy intoned. “I like the Dodgers.”
“So do I,” Bonnie Carter chimed in.
I turned in my seat to face them.
“What do you know about baseball?” I spat in their general direction. “You don’t know anything about baseball. How could you possibly like the Dodgers? You don’t know the first thing about the Dodgers.” It was yet another in a million occasions during my life in which I should have just shut up and not said a single word. But I couldn’t. I just couldn’t.
“I do, too,” Bonnie sneered at me. “I know they’re going to beat the stupid Giants.”
She said Giants in this long, stretched-out, distorted way that turned it into two words, “Jye” and “Yunts,” that took almost five seconds to pronounce, accompanied by a look that I was sure would end with a slight dribble of bile from the corners of her contorted mouth.
I bit my tongue and turned away from her, shaking my head and looking up to the Heavens for almighty God’s help. It was too late.
“Behave yourself, John,” Miss Bernini said. She didn’t have to say it angrily or loudly. I knew she was in the position of authority here, and that — with Judy and Bonnie on her side, as well — I was outnumbered; worst of all, I was outnumbered by girls. Plus, their team was ahead. The situation stunk. I took a deep breath. What the hell do women know about sports, anyway?
In the bottom of the third, with two out, Carl Furillo scorched one down the third-base line. Bobby Thomson went horizontal and snared it, robbing Furillo of extra bases for the third out. In the top of the fourth, Don Mueller flied out, Monte Irvin was hit on the arm by one of Branca’s errant deliveries, and Whitey Lockman flied out to make it two down with a runner on first. Thomson came to bat, got two quick strikes, and then pounded a fat Branca fastball over the fence in left-center field to put the Giants up, 2-1.Miss Bernini groaned.
“What happened, Miss Bernini?” Judy asked.
“Bobby Thomson hit a two-run homer,” I announced quickly, figuring I’d be the mouthpiece for any positive Giant news that would occur. “The Giants are ahead, 2-1. Why don’t you pay attention if the Dodgers mean that much to you?”
“Excuse me,” Judy replied, doing a stretch job on the words to make them last almost as long as Bonnie’s “Jye-Yunts.”
“That’s enough of that,” Miss Bernini called out. I believe she meant it for both of us.
In the sixth, it was time for some more one-on-one between Thomson and Furillo. This time around, Furillo hit a weak chopper down the line. Bobby charged it, grabbed it, and fired on to first to nail Furillo just before he reached the bag at first. The Giants clung to their scrawny little 2-1 lead into the eighth inning behind Hearn’s masterful pitching, then picked up an important insurance run on a solo homer by Irvin in the bottom of the frame. In the top of the ninth, Pee Wee Reese walked with one out, but the Dodgers couldn’t do anything with it and went down peacefully, giving the Giants a one-game lead in the best-of-three series, and wasting the home-field advantage in the process.
Miss Bernini snapped the radio off. By now, me and her were the only ones left in the room. The others had all gone home at the regular time. She stood up and began straightening some papers on her desk.
“You’d better get going home now, John,” she said, avoiding eye contact with me. (What was it with her?) “Get going before your Mom starts wondering where you are.”
I gathered up my stuff and headed out the door. I wanted to walk out with a snarling “How do you like your lousy Dodgers now, huh?” but I didn’t. Whitey and some of his friends were standing around talking by the schoolyard gate and I went over to them. They had heard the score but not the details, so I filled them in.
“How’d you find out all that?” Larry Elkins asked.
“My teacher brought in a radio,” I said, leaving out — for now — that I had to sit through the insufferable meanderings of Red Barber for the duration of the game.
“You should be a sports announcer,” Larry said to me, based on my two-minute, off-the-cuff synopsis of the day’s action. I shrugged modestly. I had never realized what a shrewd judge of human character my brother’s friend Larry was.
On Tuesday, it was different.
I had something to live for, and a way to hear the game. I practically jumped out of bed at 7:30, got washed up and ate my breakfast and gathered my school stuff and headed off with a profound and almost sickening bounce in my step. Miss Bernini would have the game on this afternoon, the Giants (as willed by almighty God) would smite the wretched Dodger horde, thereby advancing to the World Series (against the Yankees, whom I could almost tolerate), everything would be perfect in the Universe, and I could exact a small measure of pride from the fact that, in my little corner of the Universe, I had done all that I could to help the team I loved win.
That, and I could lord it over the ill-bred Brooklynian Miss Bernini. The thought of this alone got me to school nearly five minutes earlier than usual.
The morning meant nothing to me. The morning was a blur of spelling, math, current events, recess; I kept one eye on the clock at all times until game time rolled around once more. Miss Bernini, once again reprising her legendary role as “The Cat,” kept the radio off until Sheldon Jones had completely warmed up and was ready to throw the first pitch. She clicked the radio on, screwed around with the dial, and then I heard the voice of Russ Hodges. My eyebrows raised so high they pulled my mouth open.
“In deference to Mr. Kelly,” Miss Bernini said (and she never looked me in the face), “we take you now to the Polo Grounds and the play-by-play call of Russ Hodges.” She smiled a snotty smile (never looking me in the face) and sat down. I was stunned; stunned, I tell you. My adversary had pulled one of the all-timers on me, but why?
I’ll never know why. I’ll never know why Miss Bernini threw me this big, fat pitch down the middle of the plate, giving me what I wanted, and I’ll never know why Leo Durocher put Sheldon Jones on the mound for the second game of the playoffs against the Brooklyn Dodgers. I never met Sheldon Jones. I don’t know anything about the man. Sheldon Jones may be the sweetest guy who ever walked the face of the Earth, a prince among men, devoted to his wife and children, kind to animals. It matters not. Sheldon Jones – nicknamed “Available,” because he always seemed to be just that – had no reason to be on the mound at the Polo Grounds that day. No reason. No reason at all.
But there he was. In my heart, I wished him my best. In my mind, I had this bad feeling. It just didn’t feel right. Not today.
I sat back in my chair and watched the radio at the front of the class. Jones got the first man he faced, then Pee Wee Reese lined a single. Duke Snider struck out, and Jackie Robinson came up. He belted Sheldon’s first delivery into the left-field seats. Great. The Dodgers were off to a 2-0 lead. Miss Bernini smiled. I hated her.
Durocher got wise after two innings and yanked Jones with one down in the third, replacing him with George Spencer. Spencer nailed down the final two outs, and then the Giants fought back in the bottom half of the inning. The Giants loaded the bases against Clem Labine with two out, bringing Bobby Thomson to the plate. Labine was falling apart. Miss Bernini looked worried. My heart was pumping. Labine wound up and threw the curve. The curve, the curve, the curve. Thomson swung and missed. Labine had escaped. Miss Bernini made a fist and pumped her arm once and blew out her breath and smiled. I shrugged. It was no big deal. It was early. We’d be back. Damn right, we’d be back.
Even after Brooklyn scored another run in the fifth, then three more in the sixth, I still felt we had a chance. The bell rang and class let out. I sat with Miss Bernini and two other kids to listen to the game until it was over. Ed showed up and sat down next to me and I told him what was going on, quietly, so Miss Bernini wouldn’t get any additional pleasure from my retelling of the whole bloody tale.
The weather outside was rotten and drizzly, and the game got held up because of the rain.
“You want to head home?” Ed asked me. I nodded and, quietly, got up to leave.
“Good evening, fellas,” Miss Bernini called to us. God, I could hear the Brooklyn in her voice, like she let it come out deliberately, just for my benefit. “Be careful in the rain.”
Yeah, right. Like she cared. When I was far enough away, I’m sure she got up on her desk and did a little victory dance, grinning like an idiot. Ed and I made it home, ran upstairs, turned on our lucky radio and waited for play to continue.
When it did, the Dodgers amassed four more runs, and we were 10-0 losers. It was our first loss in eight games, and I felt in the pit of my stomach that Miss Bernini’s little ploy of putting on the Giants broadcast is what did it. I knew it. She knew it, too. An intelligent, modern woman resorting to superstition. I know she figured that if the Dodgers lost when the radio was set to the Dodgers’ radio station, then the superstition would hold and the Giants would lose if she tuned in to their radio station. It was devious. It was disgusting. I knew I had to get the radio back to WMGM and Red Barber on Wednesday, or else it would be all over.
So I just sat there, my pressure gauge peaking at maximum, my flow restricter strained to near-bursting. I hoped for the opportunity when Miss Bernini started tuning in the radio and the rest of the class was a little distracted, and then I would saunter up and very casually request permission to go take a pee.
Miss Bernini must have had a sixth sense about my condition, because she went into a stall. She kept, for some reason, teaching us stuff — handing out homework, asking questions, making me suffer. God, I hated her, and God, how I had to pee. I couldn’t move or make a sound, I had to pee so bad.
I know she knew that the game was starting in mere seconds, and I know she knew (but I don’t know how she knew) how bad I had to pee. My time was up, and I couldn’t stand it any longer. It was either make a move and ask to leave, or pee my pants. The last was not an attractive alternative, not at all, but the choice would soon no longer be in my hands. My shyness in this matter would soon become a spectacular embarrassment. I had to act.
Miss Bernini had wandered to the back of the room and my moment was upon me. I garnered all my strength and pushed myself upright, using my desk for leverage. I straightened up and took a few steps toward Miss Bernini; frail, tentative steps. I drew within ten feet of her, the pain growing exponentially, and she turned on her heels and marched briskly back to the front of the room.
Oh, yeah. Now all I had to do was follow her up there. And then what? We get to the front of the class, and she speeds off to the back again? I couldn’t take the chance.
“Miss Bernini?” I called to her weakly.
She glanced back over her shoulder. She was not an awful-looking woman. She had nice brown eyes and dark hair and she had a real good smile. I wanted her dead. I had to go pee worse than I ever had before.
“Yes, John?”
“Can I be excused?”
I made a strange kind of sweeping, pointing, shrugging gesture, a sort of international hand signal for Boy, Do I Gotta Go Pee, and she smiled.
“Okay. Hurry up.”
Thank God.
I walked as quickly and as normally as I could down the hall. The Boys Room at the end our wing beckoned to me. I entered. Larry Elkins was standing inside, by the sink, looking casual but also looking kind of relieved that I wasn’t a teacher or yard-duty monitor.
“Hey, John. What’s up?” he asked.
I hated company when I needed to go pee.
“Hey, Larry. Got to go to the bathroom before I blow up.”
Larry nodded. It was an understandable situation: pee or explode. He kind of stood around while I went to that wonderful white porcelain receptacle on the wall and unzipped. I hate company while I pee. I’m naturally bashful, and I don’t need witty repartee while I’m relieving myself.
“Giants are playing today?”
I didn’t know if this was a question or a statement, whether he was attempting to express to me that he was aware that the Giants were playing today, or that he was so flat frigging stupid that he had no clue that the most important baseball game that would take place in our lifetime was almost ready to start. (Meanwhile, I started peeing a glorious pee that made my eyes glaze over rapturously. My breathing began to return to normal.)
“Yeah. They should be starting right about now,” I was able to say.
“They playing at the Polo Grounds?”
My initial analysis was correct: Larry was a frigging numbskull.
“Yeah,” I replied.
“The Giants’ll beat the hell out of them, huh? Don’t you think?”
“I hope so. It’s now or never.” That’s my favorite cliché. It’s now or never. Larry was nodding and looking at himself in the mirror. I was peeing a pee that probably would last the rest of the day. I was peeing like there was no tomorrow. I was taking it one pee at a time. I was peeing a hundred-and-ten percent. I couldn’t think of any other trite, hackneyed expressions. I was a busy guy.
But not Larry. Larry was just standing around. Did his teacher know he was haunting the Boys Room when he should be sitting in class, trying to learn something? The tears were rolling from my eyes, I felt so good. I could hear Larry fidgeting back at the sink, and then he called my name.
“Hey, John,” he said, “want a smoke?”
I looked around at him. He held up the pack of Chesterfield’s for me to see as he popped one between his lips. I froze. My God. I’d seen cigarettes before. My Dad smoked them, so did my Mom, so did virtually everybody on the planet. But what, for Christ’s sake, was Larry Elkins doing with them?
I shook my head “no.” Larry shrugged and lit up. I finished peeing, finally, after nearly five minutes. I zipped up and headed for the sink. Larry puffed away.
“You want to take a drag?” he asked, extending the cigarette toward me. I started to shake my head when the door flew open. Mr. Hamilton, with his shiny, bald head, white shirt and black bow tie, leaped inside.
“Put that out right now,” he hissed at Larry, whose jaw dropped to the floor. “I could smell the smoke all the way down the hall.”
Larry’s knees wobbled. His eyes began tearing up. He snuffed the cigarette out in the sink, then stood there with the mashed butt in his hand, not sure of where to dispose of it. Mr. Hamilton knew what to do with it: he snatched it from Larry’s hand. It was evidence now.
“What’s your name, young man?” he demanded.
Larry said “Larry Elkins” in a voice that was not his own. “Larry Elkins” came from his lips in a soft, sad, trembling, half-whisper.
“Whose room are you supposed to be in?”
Larry’s mouth gaped open. He considered for a moment not answering, and then — I’m sure — considered lying, and then said in the same half-whisper, “Miss Gaspar’s.”
And then Mr. Hamilton looked at me.
“And who are you?”
“John Kelly. I wasn’t smoking.”
“You don’t say,” Mr. Hamilton said. “Then what exactly is this?”
I looked at Larry. He was so scared that he couldn’t close his mouth. He stared at the remains of his cigarette in Mr. Hamilton’s bony hand. Larry Elkins was a tough kid — not quite a bully, but tough — and he was really scared. I waited for him to come to my defense.
“You’re both going to the principal’s office, and we’ll straighten it out there,” Mr. Hamilton decided. He grabbed Larry by the arm and motioned to me for come along.
“He didn’t do it,” Larry whispered.
“What?”
“He wasn’t smoking.”
I looked up at Mr. Hamilton. I’m sure it pleased him that he had two culprits to drag down to the principal’s office; two culprits to let twist in the wind, two culprits to question thoroughly (“You know smoking will stunt your growth, don’t you?” “Who gave you these cigarettes?”), two culprits to return to humiliated parents who wouldn’t ask any such questions. My Dad owned a belt that I knew would do the talking for him if he found out I was involved in this.
Mr. Hamilton asked me whose class I belonged in. I said Miss Bernini’s. He told me to get back there immediately. I said yes, sir, and went on my way, and never looked back. Poor Larry. He was all the proof I needed that crime didn’t pay.
I walked back into Miss Bernini’s class and found my seat. I could hear the radio chattering away on Miss Bernini’s desk. It was Russ Hodges from the Polo Grounds, not Red Barber. I cursed to myself and accepted it. I wished that I wasn’t so superstitious, but there was nothing I could do now.
“Is there any score?” I asked Bobby Fumetti, next to me. The Dodgers were leading, 1-0, he said. I cursed again. Damned radio. What inning? Bottom of the first, he said. I sat back in my chair. What a great way to get started.
Don Newcombe was pitching for Brooklyn, and the Giants couldn’t do a thing against him. I had this horrible feeling of resignation inside, realizing how far the Giants had come, only to fall short. If only we’d won one more game earlier in the season, back in April or May. Maybe if Willie had been called up even a few weeks — or days — earlier, maybe we wouldn’t be in this situation of having to beat Brooklyn in October. The only good thing happening in the game was that Brooklyn wasn’t doing any better after getting their first run off of Sal Maglie than we were against Newcombe.
The gray afternoon went as quietly as the Giants. Through six innings, Newcombe had blanked us with barely a threat. Bobby Thomson doubled in the fifth, causing Miss Bernini to squirm a little, but he was left there, stranded. The bell rang and class let out, and I hustled out to find Whitey. We ran like the wind past all the other kids, making our usual ten-minute journey in about three minutes. We crashed in through the front door (“Hey!” my Mom called to us, “that’s no way to behave in the house!”) and up the stairs into our room, slamming the door behind us. We fell all over each other to get to the radio; Whitey got there first and clicked it on.“Come on!” Whitey yelled at it as it warmed up and began to hum.
“Come on!” I whined.
Suddenly, Russ Hodges’ voice welled up and we relaxed, grabbing our caps and putting them on. Mom came upstairs and opened the door to scowl at us.
“What was all that about?” she demanded.
“We didn’t want to miss any of the Giants game,” Whitey explained.
“Well, hurry up,” she said. “You’ve both got chores and homework to do.”
Hurry up, she said. Oh yeah, Mom, we’ll just get the game over with right now. Just give us a minute. She walked away, leaving the door open. Whitey jumped up and ran over to shut it, quietly.
“Ten minutes,” Mom yelled.
Whitey flopped back down on the bed. I stared at the radio. The Dodgers went down in the top of the seventh. Monte Irvin came up for the Giants in the bottom of the inning and cracked a double to left. Now, Whitey sat up with me.
“Please,” I begged the radio, “do something.”
Whitey Lockman came up. A base hit would tie the game at one run each. Instead, Lockman dropped down a bunt. Rube Walker, the Brooklyn catcher, picked up the ball in a flash and fired it to third. Irvin slid in. My brother groaned and fell back on his mattress. Russ Hodges yelled “He’s safe!” My brother sat up and stared at the radio as if he couldn’t believe his ears. The crowd in the background cheered. I looked toward heaven. This was too much. Ninety more feet and we were tied.
Bobby Thomson came up.
“Oh God,” Whitey moaned. “Oh God, how about a home run. Oh God, please.”
It was a lot to ask. All Thomson had to do was punch one up onto that short left-field porch and we’d have a two-run lead. I closed my eyes and prayed.
Newcombe delivered. Bobby swung and sent a long drive, way back, to the deepest part of the ballpark, center field. Whitey and I jumped up to watch. Duke Snider gave chase and the ball settled into his glove. On third, Irvin tagged up and sped home with the tying run. The crowd went nuts as Russ Hodges verified it for us: “The Giants have tied the game at one-to-one!”
Whitey and I danced around the room, hooting and hollering, until our Mom yelled up for us to stop. We calmed back down and took our spots on our beds. One more run and we’d have done it. One more run — that was all we needed.