Free Still Pitching by Michael Steinberg

villages just across the Queens county line.
    I was thinking about those guys while I was reading The Amboy Dukes in the summer. Back in grade school, Manny and Stuie played punch ball with some of us. Both lived a few blocks away from me, so occasionally I’d walk to school with them.
    On the school bus, they had an air of defiance that bought them a kind of unspoken respect. The greasers, I noticed, never taunted them like they did everyone else. And the girls who hung around with the clique would steal furtive glances at them when their boyfriends weren’t looking.
    The most hapless group was the losers and outcasts. They had no choice but to sit near the back between Manny’s boys and the greasers. Poor Eli Rubinstein and Bernard Schoenberg still had Vitalis-trained hair and wore blue or brown gabardine pants and Buster Brown shoes. The girls, Stephanie Sterner and Francine Leibler, were both overweight and had oily skin and acne. They wore grey felt poodle skirts to school. At dances and make-out parties they’d always wind up doing the Lindy Hop with each other.
    The greasers and their “gun molls” taunted the two guys unmercifully, sometimes calling them “kikes” and “dirty Jews.” I felt sorry for them, and yet, like everyone else, I kept my distance.
    Where did I belong in this deviant hierarchy? As ambivalent as I felt about the clique, I still held out hope that those guys would someday warm up to me. I sat right behind them on the bus, listened in on their conversations, and tried to put in my two cents worth every so often. But not one of them went out of his way to include me in the group’s activities—either the Friday night make-out parties or the after school pick-up basketball games in Frank Pearlman’s driveway. The snubs were painful, of course. Yet the more indifferent they were toward me, the more I courted their approval. Whenever I asked myself why I was so desperate for their attention, all I had to do is look at the circle of popular girls and guys who were also vying for their attention.
    I’d been at P.S. 44 for less than two weeks, and already I was an invisible nobody. Writing the sports column and playing on the sixth grade softball team were the only things that had brought me any recognition. But even those possibilities were closed. The junior high newspaper had been disbanded a year ago. Lack of interest, I was told. I thought about trying to enlist some help to revive the school paper. I even posted a notice on the announcements bulletin board. No one responded.
    To my chagrin, the school also didn’t have the budget to support any competitive sports—football, basketball, or baseball. That left only softball in the spring. And according to those in the know, the school team was a virtual nonentity.
    Back in sixth grade I could share my misery with Peter or Mike. But since junior high began we’d all been drifting apart. We had different homerooms, class schedules, and teachers.
    Complaining to my parents wasn’t even an option. Because of unexpected setbacks, they’d been struggling to make ends meet. Three years before, during the summer when my grandmother died, my father and Hymie had a falling out. My grandfather then sold his share of the pharmacy to his nephews Abe, Sam, and Mickey Neiman, and moved in with my aunt Ruthie and her family. My parents assumed responsibility for the mortgage. Which meant that my mother had to work a half day at the pharmacy, while my father took a second job as a clothing salesman in a department store.
    I could feel the tension between them whenever I was home. My mother blamed my father for driving Hymie out. She also resented having to work. My father tried to explain that it was only a temporary setback. I felt embarrassed and sorry for them. But what could I do? I was too preoccupied with my own troubles. I’m sure I made matters worse by moping around the house all