Moon Song and Baseball

Moon Song

Kevin’s mom and dad were the prototypical Leave It To Beaver types. Mr. Ferring was a natty dressy who kept his office tie on until after dinner and like Ward Cleaver, never lost his temper or raised his hands to the kids. He’d say, “Now Kevin….” followed by an order or comment, and that was it. Mrs. Ferring only had to say, “We’ll talk to father about this later,” and Kevin and Cindy would get respectfully back into the obedience line. It was amazing.

When I stayed over at Kevin’s, Cindy hung out with us. She was a year older than I was but didn’t hold that against me like my sister Karen did. Cindy had two fascinating penny-size freckles on either side of her mouth. Kevin told me they weren’t freckles but scars from a terrible incident when Cindy was younger. I wasn’t able to find out what possessed her to do it; she didn’t like to talk about it. But she stuck her tongue into an electrical socket and the voltage blew holes through her cheeks. Still, she was very pretty and looked real fine.

Mrs. Ferring was carefully coifed. Her blond helmet hair was sprayed into place, her orange lipstick glistened on her freckled lips and her fingernails and toes were painted to match the lipstick of the day. There was a Stepford Wife quality about her. She adored her husband and waited on him hand and foot and kissed him with affection, constantly. They were always cuddling and polite to each other. I wondered if Cindy would grow up to be like her mom. That would be great.

Kevin, my brother Joe and I came up with a song, well, someone else’s song we heard on the radio, but we wrote our own lyrics. We called it: “By the Light of the Moon.”

While I was walkin’ down the street
I met a pretty girl that I’d like to meet.
Hmm by the light of the moon, Oh yea
Hmm by the light of the moon, Oh yea
She was pretty and looked real fine,
…something, something, and she’d be mine.

Chorus, repeat, repeat, and repeat until we stretched it out for a good two minutes. We practiced it over and over until we got it right. We swayed and kicked out a leg move in unison after the “Oh yeas.” Our prepubescent voices were maybe one octave lower than The Chipmunks, but better. Our first performance was in front of Cindy. She thought it was great. So did Mr. and Mrs. Ferring. Our biggest crowd was a group of ladies gathered for a Tupperware party at my house. Mom pulled us in from the backyard to sing our song. We absolutely killed; the chicks dug it! Enamored by our cuteness and the lovely melody, the women clapped with enthusiasm after our bow. We always finished with a bow.

We got caught up in the hysteria and pondered this music thing rather seriously. First, we’d have to think of a cool name. “The Horny Toads,” “Moon Monkeys,” and “The Lizard Lads,” were considered and shelved. In the meantime we better write a couple more hit songs, get an agent, and make a record. Then we could quit school and go on tour. We were on cloud nine for a good week. Our final performance was in front of Mike Harper who brought us back to earth with a resounding thud. He laughed at us, mocked our song, and said, “It was pussy.”

Baseball

Kevin and I were on the same baseball team, the Pirates. I really didn’t like baseball, but it was like church, you were expected to go. I did my penance in left field for the transgressions of the sacred game I was surely guilty of. I was like a fish out of water and flopped around in the outfield when a ball was hit to left. Kids in California could play ball all year round, depending on the league you joined, so I began my short-lived baseball career with a disadvantage. The puny skill-challenged players like myself rode the bench half the time and alternated in the outfield where we could do the least damage to the team. I wasn’t the worse outfielder ever, I don’t think, and could get under a ball with my speed, but it was a 50/50 chance I’d catch it. I had a good arm and I could whip it into the infield to throw out an aggressive runner at second or third even if I fumbled a catch. I was very good at striking out and eliciting moans from our dugout and the stands especially if it was the last out of the inning with a guy at third. But I did my best and managed to draw my share of walks, and by chance, get a hit every once and a while. I loved to run the bases and learned to slide under a throw. On the rare occasion someone hit a single or double after me, I felt the exhilarating experience of crossing home plate. I don’t know if I was a jinx but the Pirates finished in last place.

Our Dad took Joe and I to a Padres game that summer. The San Diego Padres of that era were a minor league AAA farm team of the Cincinnati Reds, playing in the Pacific Coast League. The Padres were the reining champs, having won the PCL pennant the year before. Tony Perez was the third baseman that year. In the 70’s, Perez became an important cog on the awesome “Big Red Machine.” Cincinnati won five straight division titles, three pennants and two World Series.
We had a good time that night. It was great to be out anywhere with my Dad. I can’t say I have as many father/son memories as I wished I had, but while we were in San Diego we shared a few outings that were special to us. That baseball game was one of them. We sat together high up in the bleacher seats, which provided a great view of the well-lit field. I recall wearing my baseball glove, at the ready, for the entire game, wishing for a souvenir homerun ball. I don’t recall the final score or if the Padres were victorious, but I fondly remember the sounds of Balboa Stadium. The stadium was filled with the murmur of a thousand voices. Dad, Joe and I joined in with the collective singing the National Anthem, roared when a run scored and booed when the umps blew a call. We could hear the crack of the bat making contact with the ball and the distinct pop of a fastball hitting the catcher’s mitt. The food vendors climbed between aisles calling out: “Get your hotdogs! Peanuts—Fresh Peanuts…” and “Cotton Candy Here!”

I still love those sounds.

On the way out, gorged with hotdogs and sodas, we drove by a new stadium under construction in down town San Diego. It would be the future home of the San Diego Chargers in two years and the home of the National League San Diego Padres in 1969, when the city was awarded a major league baseball franchise.

Now that I was playing ball, I began to pay attention to big league baseball on TV. We watched the Los Angeles Dodgers, the best team in Baseball. The Dodgers also had one of the best pitchers of all time, Sandy Koufax. Against Chicago that year, he pitched a perfect game. Twenty-seven batters faced the great left-hander that day, not one of them reached first base. It was the third of four consecutive years that Koufax would throw a no-hitter. Koufax won his second Cy Young award and led them to the World Series in 1965 with 26 wins.

There was a big hullabaloo when Koufax refused to pitch the first game of the series because it fell on the Jewish Holiday, Yom Kippur. A first game loss by Don Drysdale and a Koufax letdown in the second game left the Dodgers down 2-0 to the Minnesota Twins. But the Dodgers came back and took the next three games including a Game 5 shutout courtesy of Koufax, in which he also knocked in the winning run. Minnesota tied the series in Game 6 and the championship went to a deciding seventh game. Unbelievably, Sandy Koufax pitched another shutout, a three-hitter, and the Dodgers clinched the World Series title. Koufax was unanimously voted the MVP of the Series.

The Summit

Kevin Ferring had surfer-blond hair and was speckled with freckles on every surface he had ever exposed to the sun. Kevin was also ten and my best buddy. He joined Joe, Mike and I on our lizard hunts and was a pretty good skateboarder to boot. Harper always had an excuse to blow off climbing to the top of “S” Mountain, claiming he had done it once, and that was enough. Kevin was more than up to it and said he hadn’t yet and always wanted to. That week we planned the expedition out in every detail. Kevin would bring first aid supplies consisting of band-aids and a bottle of Mercurochrome in case of a rockslide or getting scuffed up running from coyotes, they lived up there. Joe brought an official Scout snakebite kit and a flashlight to signal a search plane at night should we get lost. I packed my knap sack with provisions of sodas, a can opener and an assortment of baloney sandwiches.

When the day came, we started out at the crack of dawn because the summer heat could be a problem by late afternoon. The plan was to get to the top by mid-morning and back by early afternoon. We made our way up the zigzagging east side trail, pacing ourselves as we went. It was a pretty tough trek but my skinny legs were Schwinn-toughened so it wasn’t something I couldn’t handle. There were plenty of distractions along the way, so it wasn’t a strait up climb. Animal carcasses, unexplored caves and lizards pulled us off the trail here and there.

The sodas were gone by the time we were halfway up the mountain, so was the sugar rush when we reached the summit. I was disappointed when we got there because I expected the top of the mountain to have one central peak where you could plant a flag or a plaque, like Pike’s Peak. It was actually more of a long spine of rolling hills and chaparral. (Chaparral is a fancy word for a dense thicket of shrubbery and small trees, primarily evergreen Oaks common in Southern California.) After a good walk, the trail widened to the size of a road as other trails fed into it. We found a good view on the far side and sat under the shade of an evergreen Oak tree. We ate our sandwiches as we stared in awe at the ultramarine blue expanse of the Pacific. What a spectacular sight it was!

“Over that way is Hawaii,” Kevin pointed out.
“Yeah, Don Ho lives there, right?” I said knowingly.
“Who gives a shit about Don Ho?” Kevin asked.
“You do. Everyone knows you dig Ukulele music.”
“Yeah, right…”
“You know, Joe and I saw Ho driving by us in Arkansas.”
“Who gives a flying-shit?” Kevin said.

“S” Mountain was the first mountainous summit I conquered. Not many people I knew could say they climbed a mountain, so I felt proud we accomplished something so noteworthy. We didn’t have a flag or plaque to leave for posterity to celebrate our amazing feat so we left our mark in another way. We climbed to the top of the biggest rock and pissed off of it. Something was strange; Joe’s piss shot out in a double stream.

“What, do you have two holes at the end of el pippi?”
“Yep, guess so.” Joe said. “It’s always done that.”
“That’s weird.”
“You better tell mom.”
“No.”

But he eventually he did. It was impossible for Joe to stand and go because he left a big mess from the errant flow. If he was at a school urinal it wasn’t a problem, but at home he had to sit on the toilet seat and pee like a girl. His pippi problem was a direct result of the slipshod circumcision by the butcher of Belgrade. Scar tissue formed within his urethra, blocking his passage. A Urological specialist re-cored his urethra and poor Joe had to endure a painful ordeal while it healed. I heard him screaming when he went to the bathroom.

When we discharged the last of our fluids we stood and watched as it quickly evaporated on the hot rock. Kevin busted the Mercurochrome bottle on the rock, leaving a deep orange bloody splash that stained the stone, maybe forever. It wasn’t an obvious graffiti like “Kilroy Was Here,” or the bright white spray painted “S” below us, but we left our mark on the mountain, just the same.

Sometimes, you did something stupid but not realize it until after the fact. Part Two

Now that we were skilled trappers and could collect any number of species in a given week, the question was what to do with them. It came to me while on a school field trip to the San Diego Zoo. It was my first visit to a zoo. It was amazing to see the array of magnificent animals I knew so well from watching another of my favorite shows, “Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom.” Marlin Perkins and his trusty assistant, Jim Fowler, traveled the world and each week featured a new adventure, or to be more exact, a forced encounter with exotic animals. They were out in the muck or the brush wrestling alligators, running from elephants or wriggling out of a potential death-grip of a python or anaconda that got the better of them.

In the zoo’s reptile house, the snakes and lizards peered from within glass displays that replicated their natural environments. And then I remembered—the old TV in the garage, it was just the thing we needed. We gutted the inside of the TV and tacked on screens in the front and back. After cutting half the top off and replacing it with a weighted board, we placed it out on the back patio. We filled the bottom with dirt, pebbles and stones. In the corner we planted a clump of grass next to a Beaver-tail cactus and set in a bowl of water in front of it. With a few specimens we’d have the second best reptile exhibition in San Diego.

We captured a couple Sagebrush Lizards, a Skink, a Pocket Mouse and a good-sized scorpion. We figured they’d love their new abode. It was an impressive San Diego eco-system complete with a pond. That first day or so life in the “Desert Kingdom,” as we called it, was hunky-dory. The mouse hid under the grass, the scorpion claimed the dark under the stones and the lizards preferred clinging to the screens. The Skink sat on top of the stones panting or slept behind the cactus. We caught some crickets and dug up a few worms and threw them in at night.

It was an ecological disaster.

The exhibition started to stink. The over-watered the cactus was wilting in the corner. The scorpion killed the little mouse; the skink, we surmised, ate one of the smaller lizards and most of the crickets and worms drowned in the water. The scorpion was immediately evicted and the skink let go soon after, when the other lizard disappeared. A couple crickets were the only surviving occupants. Joe decided, because we had plenty of room in the desert kingdom, he would get us a new tenant on his own.

Across the street were plenty of ground squirrels. Some of them friendly, especially if you threw them some nibble food. Joe coaxed one over with some Cheerios, and threw his tee shirt over it. In the ensuing Jim Fowler-esq struggle to overcome it, the little beast bit his hand. Joe was used to pain, and a little bite was nothing to him. Victorious, he carried the bundled squirrel back, and let it loose it inside the box. The squirrel went totally berserk and tore the place apart trying to jump out. It left fist-sized dents in the screens, upturned the water bowl and knocked over the cactus. It eventually calmed down after we stepped fearfully away.

“It’ll be all right, I think…”

“Yeah. I’ll get some more Cherrios,” Joe said as he casually inspected his bloodied finger.

“What happened?” I asked.

“Nothing.”

It was anything-but nothing.

When my parents found out Joe had been bitten by a squirrel, they went berserk. It didn’t help matters when the squirrel went nuts again when they went out to take a look at it. Seeing the big fuss Joe changed his story to: “It’s just a scratch...”

I heard something like, “Jesus, it could have babies!” Actually, it was, “It could have rabies!”

“Rabies—what’s that?”

They dragged Joe inside immediately to wash his finger off with every disinfectant we had in the house. Numerous frantic phone calls were made as my parents paced back and forth in the kitchen. In a matter of minutes the Board of Health, the SPCA and the Animal Control Bureau were on their way to our house. Joe sat disgruntled out on the patio in one of the comfy Price Is Right chairs with the floral motive. Two cars and a big truck pulled into the driveway and the people were escorted through the house to the patio. The gathering took turns solemnly inspecting Joe’s finger and the crazed squirrel. Each official personally interrogated Joe, or tried to, as he glared back at them with mulish reticence. I watched from inside, waiting for one of them to start beating him with a blackjack or make him drink some truth serum. Joe confessed, kind of, non-verbally, that it might be a bite, with a nod of his head. He was informed it didn’t matter; a bite or scratch was enough to be contaminated. It was incredibly fortunate we had the squirrel. The Animal Control Bureau people carted up the furry perpetrator and took it away to be tested for the rabies virus.

IF the thing had rabies, Joe faced a series of inoculations, maybe up to eight shots in his stomach. Joe had to sweat it out, (no he didn’t want to do that) because it would be mistaken for a fever, one of the terrible telltale symptoms. Within a week, signs of nervous system damage could appear. There’d be no frothing at the mouth, like raccoons and dogs exhibited, but disorientation, hallucinations and seizures could occur. Eventually paralysis would set in. Joe might drop-dead any minute with a heart attack or go into a coma that could last for months…kept alive with the help of life-support measures.

Joe thought it was funny. As soon as my parents turned their heads or left the room he’d feign a seizure or grab his heart and keel over. Half way through the next week the report came back on the squirrel. It was perfectly healthy. The Desert Kingdom was thrown out in the trash, but I saved the cactus. The only specimens I was allowed to bring home after that were cactus. A Golden Snake, a Cotton-top and a Hedgehog, joined the Beaver-tail as part of my desert garden in the backyard.