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Shaved Ice or Icy? Which one of these?

. . . But You Can’t Hide

By John Schulian

I worked as a copy editor at the Salt Lake Tribune while I waited for Uncle Sam to come calling. I think I was the only guy on the desk who wasn’t in AA. That was a great crew. Lots of laughs even if one of them kept trying to talk me into joining the Marines. (Like hell. I’d seen “The Sand of Iwo Jima.” Even John Wayne couldn’t survive in the Marines.) My last night at the paper, these old drunks took me out for a farewell toot-–steak and lobster and booze at one of Salt Lake’s bottle clubs where we found ourselves with a lovely red-haired waitress we promptly named Peaches. Ah, yes, Peaches.

I went into the Army in August 1968, with a master’s degree in journalism in hand and the news of the Tet Offensive echoing in my ears. My dad dropped me off at the Salt Lake induction center on his way to work. I don’t recall what we said to each other-–it certainly wasn’t much-–but he told me years later it was the worst day of his life. I thought about him and my mother a lot in my first days in the Army, and how if I got killed in what I was now certain was an utterly useless war, it might kill them, too.

The funny thing is, I never thought about running to Canada or hunting up a doctor who could concoct an excuse that would keep me out of the Army’s clutches. Hell, I have one friend who told me he got out of the draft when a doctor wrote that my friend’s mother would have a nervous breakdown if anything happened to him. That still bothers me. What made him and his mother so special? My mother would have had a nervous breakdown too. A lot of other mothers did have nervous breakdowns because their sons came home in a box. My two years in the Army were a waste of my time and the taxpayers’ money, but at least I didn’t hide behind mommy to avoid them. I just took my chances and lived to tell the story.

Basic training was at Ford Ord, California, up by Carmel and Monterrey, beautiful country. My company was a curious mixture of returned Mormon missionaries from Utah and surfers and street kids from L.A. Our senior drill instructor had one basic message: “You’re all going to Vietnam and you’re all going to die–unless you listen up!” In the middle of the night, he’d come back to the barracks drunk and wake us up to tell us about his two tours as a door gunner in Vietnam. That was creepy enough by itself. But other nights I could hear advanced infantry training units coming back from maneuvers. These were the guys whose next stop really was Vietnam. They’d be marching through the fog, singing “Wide river, river of Saigon” or–to the tune of the Coasters’ “Charlie Brown”–“In the night time when you’re sleeping, Charlie Cong comes a-creeping, all around-round-round-round.”

Lots of nutty things happened in basic: Guys at the beachfront rifle range deciding they’d rather shoot at luxury boats than Army-approved targets. A drill instructor listening to a drooling loony from airborne and then telling us, “Boys, there’s only two things that come out of the sky and that’s bird shit and fools.” The guy I was supposed to partner with on bivouac trying to kill himself when he learned that his next stop was advanced infantry training, which was likely his ticket to Vietnam. The long faces when we figured out that of our 165 men, 105 received orders that involved what was called “combat arms.” They knew where they were going.

The nuttiest thing of all, though, was that the Army, in its infinite wisdom, decided that I should be a computer programmer. “Get the fuck out of my sight,” my senior DI said when he handed me my orders. He only wanted men who were going to kill Commies for Christ.

My next stop was also my last stop: Fort Sheridan, Illinois. It was Fifth Army headquarters and had a huge data processing center, hence the need for computer programmers. It was also, as fate would have it, on the North Shore of Chicago, between Highland Park and Lake Forest, two very pricey suburbs, not far from Northwestern and, better yet, Wrigley Field. The guys I ran into at Fort Sheridan were mostly smart and funny and a hell of a lot better company than anybody I’d met in grad school. They’d been plucked from jobs at places like IBM, Texas Instruments and NASA, and they really knew what they were doing when it came to computers. I, on the other hand, had never even seen a computer.

Amazingly, nobody made a big deal over it. I ran errands for my civilian boss, an older guy named John Munn–everyone who worked for him was called a Munnster-–and I tried to read every book I hadn’t been able to in college. Six months later, just as I was about to lose my mind, I learned that the post newspaper was looking for an enlisted man to help its civilian editor run it. The editor was Joe Neptune. I’m telling you, that fort was loaded with great names. Joe Neptune, AKA the King of the Sea, signed me up immediately. A couple of other really talented enlisted men showed up not long afterward, and just like that, I was home free. The toughest thing I had to do for the rest of my tour of duty was put the paper to bed by 11 a.m. Thursday so I could jump on a commuter train and then the L and make it to Wrigley Field’s bleachers by the bottom of the first inning. War is hell.

It’s easy to joke about it now, but there was no joking when you saw the guys coming back from the ’Nam. I remember senior NCOs screwing over a black guy with a purple heart and a bad limp. It wasn’t enough that they’d gotten their pound of flesh from the poor bastard; they had to bust him back to private, too. I played basketball with a returnee who won a Silver Star in Vietnam–he’d crawled out in the middle of a firefight to rescue a couple wounded buddies. The one I remember best, though, was a solider who had been badly wounded in combat and whose hair was completely gray at the age of 22. When we were on KP, he fell asleep between breakfast and lunch and a cook tried to be funny by dropping a stack of trays on the table where he had laid his head. It must have taken us 10 minutes to pry his hands off the cook’s throat. I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised by the violence. The potential for it was always there. I knew that for a fact when there was a shakedown inspection in the barracks next to mine and they found .45 automatics and machetes right next to the drugs and hypodermic needles.

I still thank God I never saw combat. Who knows if I would have lived, or if I had, what kind of a mess I would have come back as. On one of my last days in the Army, I was having an obligatory out-processing chat with my company commander, who was looking at my background for the first time. “Why, you have a master’s degree,” he said. “You could have been an officer.”  I didn’t bother telling him what the life expectancy of a second lieutenant was in combat. I just said I’d rather be a civilian. Free at last, free at last, great God almighty, I was free at last.

I left the Army as quietly as I had gone into it. I didn’t get drunk or get laid. I’m not sure anybody even shook my hand. I just caught a plane to Salt Lake for a brief visit before I started a job as a reporter at the Baltimore Evening Sun. In my bedroom, among the letters I’d written home, I found an obituary that my mother had clipped from the Tribune. It was of a guy I’d been in basic training with, a returned Mormon missionary who’d been killed in combat in Vietnam. He was a year younger than me, but we had the same birthday: January 31.

Click here for the full “From Ali to Xena” archives.

I appeared on The Sports-Casters’ podcast last night (Season 1, Episode 24).

Dig it.

Grantland, Bill Simmons’ on-line magazine, is open for business today.

Our pal Chris Jones has a piece on the Blue Jays and the Red Sox in the American League Beast:

Without ithout looking it up, I can tell you the night the Toronto Blue Jays won their first World Series — October 27, 1992 — because that was also the night I lost my virginity. I’m not nearly so sure of the night they won their second World Series. I was in college, watching the game in my dorm’s common room, on a TV that was suspended from the ceiling. When Joe Carter hit that home run off Mitch Williams to beat the Philadelphia Phillies, I jumped up and cracked my head on the TV, opening a dime-size hole in my scalp. It turns out that holes in your head bleed a lot. Somewhere, there is a picture of me still celebrating, late that night, drunk, mostly naked, and covered in dried blood. I’ll be forever glad that we did not yet live in the digital age.

That’s how important baseball was to me back then. I still have the Ken Burns Baseball catalogue on VHS; I once spent an entire summer making a paper model of Fenway Park, complete with a ball-marked Pesky’s Pole. But then a couple of fate-changing events took place. First, there was that whole no-longer-a-virgin thing. Before sex, something like Dave Stieb’s wobbly retirement — ignoring his brief resurrection six years later — would have qualified as a significant life event of my own. Now, it barely registered as a brief. And then baseball went on strike. I was sitting on a couch in a Mexican hotel room when everything stopped — those 14 words are how all stories of loss should begin — and I took it very much to heart. The girl who claimed my virginity later cheated on me, and baseball’s cold shoulder gave me the same feeling: I should have left you before you left me.

Last month, Jones wrote a blog post that relates to this piece. It is worth checking out.

Gainin’ on ya…

It’s so hot…

Fat men can dance. In honor of David Ortiz, who busted a move last night after hitting a home run, here is the great Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle (featuring our man Buster):

More Yankee-Red Sox nonsense, three games at the Stadium starting tonight. Cliff has the preview.

Freddy vs Lester…

Derek Jeter DH
Curtis Granderson CF
Mark Teixeira 1B
Alex Rodriguez 3B
Robinson Cano 2B
Russell Martin C
Nick Swisher RF
Andruw Jones LF
Eduardo Nunez SS

I’ve got nuthin’ to add except the usual:

Let’s Go Yank-ees!

Now a melon is something I want to like more than I actually do. I used to dislike them but I can’t say that is true anymore. And yeah, have had it with cured ham and that’s a winning combination. But I never crave a melon. Watermelon, sure, but a regular old melon? Nah. It’s just…”eh,” for me.

That said, this picture makes me want to like ’em.

[Flix by Bore]

Over at ESPN, there is a terrific profile of Chris Bosh by Elizabeth Merrilll:

He has always moved to a different beat, a cross between easy listening and hard-thumping rap. He plays with a hint of vulnerability and fear. He says things James and Wade wouldn’t say. Like when he was humbled in a second-round loss last month in Boston. Bosh told reporters that nerves played a part in one of his worst games of the season.

“When you talk to LeBron or Dwyane, you feel like you’re talking to a basketball player,” Miami Herald columnist Greg Cote said. “When you talk to Chris Bosh, you get the feeling you’re talking to a pretty interesting guy who just happens to play basketball. He admits things you don’t often hear major athletes admit. He’ll tell you that sometimes he feels anxiety in late games.

“He almost reminds me, in a way, of Ricky Williams with the Dolphins. He just has that sensitive side to him that’s interesting to explore.”

I’m not rooting for the Heat but I like Bosh. Again, great job by Merrill.

And that’s word to:

George Kimball has a fine profile of Pete Hamill and Hamill’s new novel, “Tabloid City” in the Irish Times. This part spoke to me:

Introducing Hamill at a symposium celebrating the publication of Tabloid City a few weeks ago, fellow writer Adam Gopnik alluded to Tabloid City’s “recurrent theme of loneliness”, but he was quickly corrected by Hamill. While most of the novel’s characters do fly solo, some do so by choice.

“I would draw the distinction between loneliness and solitude,” says Hamill. “Many of us, particularly writers and artists, cherish our solitude.” He and Fukiko maintain separate working quarters in their Tribeca loft.

“Many people adjust to being alone by embracing solitude, rather than surrendering to loneliness, and there’s something almost ennobling about that. With a good book in the house, you’re never alone. But since being alone – at least in my opinion – can be most difficult at night, some people fill their nights with work.”

I used to be uncomfortable being alone. Maybe it is because I’m a twin, I don’t know. But I associated being alone with being lonely. Now, I see that solitude is not necessarily depressing or isolating at all. And that is a great relief.

[Photo Credit:  David Senechal Polydactyle]

One, two, you don’t stop…

Jack Mann was a great newspaper man: editor, reporter, and columnist.

Over at the National Sports Journalism Center, Dave Kindred has a wonderful piece on Mann:

Mann made his reputation through the tumult of the 1960s. First as Newsday’s sports editor, then writing for Sports Illustrated, he encouraged and reveled in reporting that disturbed the peace. “Chipmunks,” he wrote, appropriating the term of disdain coined by co-opted hacks, “are the New Breed … their outstanding characteristics being irreverence and curiosity.”

He made words dance. He once assigned reporters to interview track fans who carried their own stopwatches so he could write the headline: “These Are the Souls Who Time Men’s Tries.” By the end, his resume came with stops in New York, Long Island, Miami, Washington, Baltimore, and Annapolis, perhaps because in his fierce integrity he suffered fools not at all. “Most chicken newspapers,” he once wrote, “which is most newspapers….”

When he was at Newsday (1960-62) Mann sent a style sheet to his staff. It was known as “the yellow pages” because he typed his memos on legal pad paper. I recently came across a copy and so in the interest of honoring history and the elements of style, I now share it with you:

[Photo Credit: Shaefer]

And I ain’t getting my haircut, neither.

No, not that Dante…The Yanks picked Dante Bichette Jr. in the amateur draft yesterday. And I’ve no idea if he’s a scrub or not, no matter how much I disliked watching his old man’s theatrics back when. Here’s the early returns from Rivera Ave and The Yankee Analysts.

Now this lady knows how to roll with style. The red flag is the icing on the gravy.

Over at BP, Kevin Goldstein offers up a mock draft.

And over at The Yankee Analysts, our pal William J takes a look at recent players who have been drafted more than once.

[Photo Credit: t.t@o]

You Can Run…

By John Schulian

I went to graduate school in journalism at Northwestern, and the best thing about it was that it kept me out of the Army’s clutches for one more year. Other than that, I didn’t care much for the experience. I’d spent the summer before I went there playing ball and blacktopping roads, so I had a pretty good tan. No sooner had I started hunting for an apartment than some guy asked where I’d “summered.” “On the end of an idiot stick,” I told him. When the guy didn’t realize I was talking about a shovel, I knew I was in the wrong place. Nothing against Northwestern–it’s a great school and having a master’s from there definitely helped me get a job in Baltimore when I finished my two-year hitch in the Army. But Northwestern is also a haven for children of privilege, and I’m allergic to them. Always have been, always will be.

It was like I was watching a movie as one big car after another delivered a succession of beautiful coeds to campus, mothers and fathers bidding adieu to their little darlings. It didn’t take me long to realize that I had nothing in common with about 90 percent of my fellow grad students. Some were horse’s asses like a guy from Brown who wore a suit but no socks with his penny loafers. Some were budding drones who knew lots about government but couldn’t write a letter home. Some were lost causes like the guy who decided he’d rather join the Air Force. And then there was the professor who yelled at me for showing up early for a meeting. He was the biggest horse’s ass of all. But if he or anyone else on the faculty had taught anything I was interested in, I would have made myself pay attention. Unfortunately, the faculty in 1967-68 was fixated on covering courts and government and water and sewers, and I wanted to write about flesh-and-blood people, the more colorful the better. I got my best lesson in that when Jimmy Breslin blew into town to cover a Mafia trial for the Sun-Times. He wrote a piece about getting a tip on a racehorse from one of the defendants, Paul (The Waiter) Ricca, and the judge declared a mistrial. Now that was what I had in mind when I went to Northwestern.

Ultimately, I wound up spending almost all of spring quarter in the bleachers at Wrigley Field. I think it’s safe to say I had the best tan in grad school. I got my master’s, too. And 30 days after I returned home, the draft board reclassified me 1A. And 30 days after that, I reported to the Army induction center. My heart may have been God’s, but for the next two years, my ass belonged to Uncle Sam.

Hell, yes, I was afraid of going overseas, because overseas in those days usually meant Vietnam, and even though the women and the country were beautiful, it was no vacation for American troops. Most of them were REMFs (Rear Echelon Motherfuckers), but there were enough bombs going off in Saigon to kill you just as dead as you could get killed humping through the jungle.

I’m getting ahead of myself, though. Let’s go back to the beginning of this particular chapter of my life. I wasn’t the least bit political when I was an undergrad from 1963 to 1967. Nor do I remember seeing that many kids at Utah sporting peace signs or even long hair. I know I didn’t have long hair; I leaned toward the short look favored by Peter Gunn, the TV detective. What can I tell you, I was just a kid in Bass Weejuns, khakis or Levi’s, and a button-down collar shirt. If there had been an anti-war rally to go to in Salt Lake, I would have looked completely out of place. Not that I had my head in the sand about Vietnam. I read Jonathan Schell’s “The Village of Ben Suc,” which gave me a good idea of how screwed up things were in Vietnam. But the Salt Lake papers were running wire service stories from the war, and they leaned on body counts and bombing runs, not trenchant analysis. Time magazine, which I read regularly, was foursquare behind the war, to the point that its New York editors were replacing the truth its correspondents found in Vietnam with lies and propaganda. David Halberstam of the New York Times was one of the few brave reporters on the scene who refused to buy the military’s bullshit, but I didn’t read the Times then. And the news about anti-war demonstrations elsewhere in the country seemed so far away. Sometimes everything seems far away when you’re in Utah.

David Halberstam, far left

I don’t know many guys from Salt Lake who wound up serving in Vietnam. One who did was a wonderfully funny guy I played football with; his reserve company got called to active duty, and the next thing he knew, he was building an airstrip and praying that a sniper didn’t draw a bead on him. He made it back in one piece, by the way. There was another kid-–he was two years behind me in high school-–who I heard got shot up pretty badly over there. Among guys my age, there was a stampede to get in the reserves -–Army, Marines, anything to avoid the draft. They were even going up to Idaho if they heard of openings there. If I’d stayed in Salt Lake, I probably would have joined them. But I was off at Northwestern and didn’t really start thinking about what I was going to do until winter quarter. I remember exploring officers candidate school in the Navy, but when they told me I’d have to sign up for four or five years, I said forget about it. I’d take my chances with the draft.

Click here for the full “From Ali to Xena” archives.

George Kimball

Also reviewed in the Times yesterday was “At the Fights: American Writers on Boxing.” I’ve been touting the book all spring. It was edited by two veteran writers I’m fortunate to call friends: George Kimball and John Schulian. I was thrilled that it received nothing short of a rave from Gordon Marino:

More than any other sport, even baseball or golf, boxing calls forth the muse in writers. It’s no surprise. Where there is risk there is drama, and boxers put more at risk than other athletes. In a single evening, they roll the dice with their health, marketability and sense of identity. When you have a bad night in the ring, you can’t make it up in a double header on Sunday, or on another football field in a week’s time. And after the very last bell, there is seldom a diploma to fall back on, and there sure won’t be any pension checks coming in the mail.

It’s a very hard game — maybe even crazy — but as the affection-filled writers who have attached themselves to these warriors know, the masters of the ring possess a unique nobility. That nobility is perfectly framed in this remarkable volume from the Library of America. The essays here capture every angle of this world, both solemn and comic.

…I would bemoan only one omission, namely, the wise, lustrous pages of F. X. Toole’s introduction to his short-story collection, “Rope Burns.” Though “At the Fights” weighs in at 500-plus pages, it doesn’t contain a single flabby contribution. Over and over again, writers and readers have sought to get behind the eyes of a fighter, to fathom the fighter’s heart. This is as close as you can get without catching a hook to the head.

It’s my favorite book that’s come out this year. Perfect for Father’s Day or any other day you want to be graced by a collection of great writing.

[Cartoon by George Price]