I was ten, never before touched by greatness, and...
I was ten, never before touched by greatness, and would have been as beneath the Swede's attention as anyone else along the sidelines had it not been for Jerry LevovJerry had recently taken me on board as a friend; though I was hard put to believe it, the Swede must have noticed me around their houseAnd so late on a fall afternoon in 1943, when he got slammed to the ground by the whole of the JV team after catching a short Leventhal bullet and the coach abruptly blew the whistle signaling that was it for the day, the Swede, tentatively flexing an elbow while half running and half limping off the field, spotted me among the other kids, and called over, "Basketball was never like this, Skip
The god (himself all of sixteen) had carried me up into athletes' heavenThe adored had acknowledged the adoringOf course, with athletes as with movie idols, each worshiper imagines that he or she has a secret, personal link, but this was one forged openly by the most unostentatious of stars and before a hushed congregation of competitive kids--an amazing experience, and I was thrilledI blushed, I was thrilled, I probably thought of nothing else for the rest of the weekThe mock jock self-pity, the manly generosity, the princely graciousness, the athlete's self-pleasure so abundant that a portion can be freely given to the crowd--this munificence not only overwhelmed me and wafted through me because it had come wrapped in my nickname but became fixed in my mind as an embodiment of something grander even than his talent for sports: the talent for "being himself," the capacity to be this strange engulfing force chanel white watch and yet to have a voice and a smile unsullied by even a flicker of superiority--the natural modesty of someone for whom there were no obstacles, who appeared never to have to struggle to clear a space for himselfI don't imagine I'm the only grown man who was a Jewish kid aspiring to be an all-American kid during the patriotic war years--when our entire neighborhood's wartime hope seemed to converge in the marvelous body of the Swede--who's carried with him through life recollections of this gifted boy's unsurpassable style
The Jewishness that he wore so lightly as one of the tall, blond athletic winners must have spoken to us too--in our idolizing the Swede and his unconscious oneness with America, I suppose there was a tinge of shame and self-rejectionConflicting Jewish desires awakened by the sight of him were simultaneously becalmed by him; the contradiction in Jews who want to fit in and want to stand out, who insist they are different and insist they are no different, resolved itself in the triumphant spectacle of this Swede who was actually only another of our neighborhood Seymours whose forebears had been Solomons and Sauls and who would themselves beget Stephens who would in turn beget ShawnsWhere was the Jew in him? You couldn't find it and yet you knew it was thereWhere was the irrationality in him? Where was the crybaby in him? Where were the wayward temptations? No guileAll that he had eliminated to achieve his perfectionNo striving, no ambivalence, no doubleness--just the style, the natural physical refinement of a starwhat did he do for subjectivity? What was the Swede's subjectivity? tas hermes There had to be a substratum, but its composition was unimaginable
That was the second reason I answered his letter--the substratumWhat sort of mental existence had been his? What, if anything, had ever threatened to destabilize the Swede's trajectory? No one gets through unmarked by brooding, grief, confusion, and lossEven those who had it all as kids sooner or later get the average share of misery, if not sometimes moreThere had to have been consciousness and there had to have been blightYet I could not picture the form taken by either, could not desimplify him even now: in the residuum of adolescent imagination I was still convinced that for the Swede it had to have been pain-free all the way
But what had he been alluding to in that careful, courteous letter when, speaking of the late father, a man not as thick-skinned as people thought, he wrote, "Not everyone knew how much he suffered because of the shocks that befell his loved ones"? No, the Swede had suffered a shockAnd it was suffering the shock that he wanted to talk aboutIt wasn't the father's life, it was his own that he wanted revealed
We met at an Italian restaurant in the West Forties where the Swede had for years been taking his family whenever they came over to New York for a Broadway show or to watch the Knicks at the Garden, and I understood right off that I wasn't going to get anywhere near the substratumEverybody at Vincent's knew him by name--Vincent himself, Vincent's wife, Louie the maitre d', Carlo the bartender, Billy our waiter, everybody knew MrLevov and everybody asked after the missus and the boysIt turned out that white chanel watch ceramic when his parents were alive he used to bring them to celebrate an anniversary or a birthday at Vincent'sNo, I thought, he's invited me here to reveal only that he is as admired on West 49th Street as he was on Chancellor Avenue
Vincent's is one of those oldish Italian restaurants tucked into the midtown West Side streets between Madison Square Garden and the Plaza, small restaurants three tables wide and four chandeliers deep, with decor and menus that have changed hardly at all since before arugula was discoveredThere was a ballgame on the TV set by the small bar, and a customer every once in a while would get up, go look for a minute, ask the bartender the score, ask how Mattingly was doing, and head back to his mealThe chairs were upholstered in electric-turquoise plastic, the floor was tiled in speckled salmon, one wall was mirrored, the chandeliers were fake brass, and for decoration there was a five-foot-tall bright red pepper grinder standing in one corner like a Giacometti (a gift, said the Swede, to Vincent from his hometown in Italy); counterbalancing it in the opposite corner, on a stand like statuary, stood a stout Jeroboam of BaroloA table piled with jars of Vincent's Marinara Sauce was just across from the bowl of free after-dinner mints beside MrsVincent's register; on the dessert cart was the napoleon, the tiramisu, the layer cake, the apple tart, and the sugared strawberries; and behind our table, on the wall, were the autographed photographs ("Best regards to Vincent and Anne") of Sammy Davis, Jr Joe Namath, Liza Minelli, Kaye Ballard, Gene Kelly, Jack Carter, Phil Rizzuto, and fendi big Johnny and Joanna CarsonThere should have been one of the Swede, of course, and there would have been if we were still fighting the Germans and the Japanese and across the street were Weequahic High
Our waiter, Billy, a small, heavyset bald man with a boxer's flattened nose, didn't have to ask what the Swede wanted to eatFor over thirty years the Swede had been ordering from Billy the house specialty, ziti a la Vincent, preceded by clams posillipo"Best baked ziti in New York," the Swede told me, but I ordered my own old-fashioned favorite, the chicken cacciatore, "off the bone" at Billy's suggestionWhile writing up our order, Billy told the Swede that Tony Bennett had been in the evening beforeFor a man with Billy's compact build, a man you might have imagined lugging around a weightier burden all his life than a plate of ziti, Billy's voice--high-pitched and intense, taut from some distress too long endured--was unexpected and a real treat"See where your friend is sitting? See his chair, MrLevov? Tony Bennett sat in that chair To me he said, "You know what Tony Bennett says when people come up to his table and introduce themselves to him? He says, 'Nice to see you' And you're in his seat
That ended the entertainmentIt was work from there on out
He had brought photographs of his three boys to show me, and from the appetizer through to dessert virtually all conversation was about eighteen-year-old Chris, sixteen-year-old Steve, and fourteen-year-old KentWhich boy was better at lacrosse than at baseball but was being pressured by a coachwhich was as good at soccer as at football but couldn't vintage gucci bags dec