Making Friends
It was when I was in 6th Grade that the loneliness of my childhood existence really began to get to me. By then, I was no longer hanging around with any of the kids my age in my neighborhood — they and their families all seemed so “normal” compared to me and mine. I felt a combination of shame and superiority over them.
The Kribels, who I had gotten really close to — Pete was my age, Jake a few years older, but our bond had been baseball — taught me most of what I knew about baseball statistics, and introduced me to a game I would love for many years, Strat-O-Matic Baseball. There was a whole world in those statistics, that I could simply lose myself in, and did, at times. I loved it.
I had worked in their mom’s bakery, getting paid 50c an hour for 3 hours a night, 3 nights a week, until Jake had to fire me. I was 11 years old and got fired from my first job! (I also delivered newspapers in the morning, the Pittsburgh Post Gazette). I got fired for getting sick after eating too many broken chocolate bunnies. We had to take them out of their molds and line them up on the display trays for the front. If a bunny broke, you either ate it or threw it away. I couldn’t see letting perfectly good chocolate go to waste, so I kept eating the broken bunnies, until I got sick, and then fired. After Jake fired me, I was too ashamed to go around either Pete or Jake for a long time. It was humiliating! For most of 1965, I spent most of my free time at Forbes Field. By ’66, the loneliness of my world was really getting to me.
That’s about when I started hanging around with Chucky Duffy (“Duff”). He was part of the St. Pius X school yard sports crowd. He was shorter than me, but much, much tougher, and an athlete. He was especially punishing on the football field, for a little guy. Duff was tough as nails. I would help him deliver the afternoon Pittsburgh Press to his route of customers in Dormont, the next town over. Duff would be my longest lasting friend of my childhood, but, like most of the other friends I made, it didn’t end well with him. But that would be five years later.
Duff and I wound up doing everything together. He, like me, was the youngest boy in his family. He had two olders brothers, while I had four, plus an older sister and a younger sister. His family was a lot more straight-forward than ours, but there was enough dysfunction there that I felt very comfortable in his house. I suspect his Dad might have been an alcoholic.
We lived, ate and breathed sports. We played year-round up at St. Pius. Most of the time, it was either basketball on the outdoor court, or football. In the winter when it snowed, we shoveled off the basketball court and played. We also went fishing a lot in the spring, summer and fall. We went out to pay lakes, in Canonsburg and other little towns outside the city. We’d get someone to drive us out early in the morning, then stay there all day, fishing, until someone came to pick us up. With Duff, I was very much a follower. I was his understudy. I was determined to learn how to live from him. It was never fair, on my part, to put him in that position, but that’s how I was. I had such little self-confidence, I thought I had to learn from other kids how to be.
I wasn’t very good in any of the sports, but I had a powerful desire to learn. I was just very uncoordinated, had poor vision, I always seemed to have a broken pair of glasses hanging in weird angles off my face, always the big, thick black frames that were the cheapest. When it was just me and Duff, he was a friend, even though there was a good bit of bullying that went on, even then — but in the group of guys we hung around with up at the school yard, Duff made sure I was always the brunt of the jokes; the bullying by the whole group was always led by him.
I was the group’s scapegoat. I never fought back when that went on. I had a thing about that. I’d had non-violence instilled in me by my older sister, Juli, and I took great pride in not resorting to violent behavior, no matter how much was done to me. I turned the other cheek. I had a lot of lumps and bruises on both sides, and all over my body, to prove it. Those guys never let up.
I eventually got pretty damned good on the football field, because there was nothing that could happen out there that was any worse than the shit that happened off the field. Out there, in the heat of the battle, I could give it back. It was sports, so it was allowable violence. I eventually developed a rep as a tough son of a bitch on the field. They tended to run the ball in the other direction, away from me. I was tall and skinny as a rail, but could take whatever got thrown at me and, with a smile, give it right back.
At home, I had an older brother who did the bullying. I had it coming and going. Dad bullied me, too, more mentally than physically, but it was bullying behavior, nonetheless. I just took it. I’d hang my head and think, “Yeah, he’s right. I really am no damn good. I really do think too much. I really don’t think enough. I really am a promising young man — always making promises.” Another older brother had been my shining light, the one who always seemed to have positive things to say, who had taken me under his wing to show me what he knew about sports, who’d play catch with me out back in the alley behind the house. He was the one who introduced me to Forbes Field, and the Pirates. But, he was off to college by the time I was in the 6th grade, so he was no longer around.
I missed my days wandering the ballpark on my own, but I didn’t miss the loneliness. I might have been the scapegoat of that jock crowd, but at least I had a crowd, something I belonged to — they put up with me. They let me hang around with them. I thought that was something. It was — it might have appeared to be pathetic to the casual observer, but I truly prided myself on having overcome my loneliness, and stuck with that group, and with Chucky, no matter what they did to me.
The Duffy’s had a terrible fire at their house, it burned it out real bad, and they had to move, temporarily, down the street from us. His mom was really worried about Chucky, and asked me to watch out for him. He was really angry, inconsolable. She asked me to watch out for him! Who the hell was watching out for me? I did absorb a lot of his anger during that period. I had the lumps and bruises to prove it, all over my body.
She’d never had to ask. I was always a good friend to him. I still didn’t understand that friendship went two ways. How would I understand that, when the kid I chose to be my best friend was a One-Way street, all the way to the dead-end? But, I was always proud to call him my friend. He was the closest thing I had to a best friend, and that was something — wasn’t it?
