Friends, here's a morsel—the first few grafs—of the work of years, Trips `n' Trials of a Down, Beat Dad. Taste! Taste!
“What’s in a name?” my friend Head would say. “Lots, kemosabe.” It was true in his case: Head. Hammerhead. Hammerhead Hirsch, The Boardwalk Balladeer. Hammerhead Hirsch, The Young Lord of the Ring, from his Golden Gloves days–though Pugilist Poet is the one that stuck. Or Hammerhead Hirsch, Lord of Sunset Av, Venice, as his friends from the bookstore would say late at night when they’d come by Headquarters for a brew and a chew.
“But way back in Brooklyn, it was Hillel the Hebe.” Head’s voice—like honey sprinkled with grit—was one of the keys to his allure. Ditto his patter, a felicitous marriage of So Cal cool and East Coast brio as seductive as notes from the Pied Piper’s flute. Satisfied at a glance that I was enthralled, he continued. “Yeah, that’s what the Italian kids hollered when they chased my sweet ass through Lafayette Park. `Run, Hebe, run,’ and that’s what I did—I ran for my life, ming—and I’ll tell ya, I got pretty fast from a few months of that! So fast that two years later I was playing second and batting leadoff on a mostly Eye-talian team in the Ice Cream League, with some of the same clowns chased me through the park. Yeah the Ice Cream League, it sent more players to the big leagues per capita than anyplace else you can name, I betcha. And not just bit players, youngblood, but stars, too, like Joe Torre and—”—Head lifted his eyes to the heavenly choir—“—Sandy,” for Koufax, his patron saint, and the reason he’d fled New York for L.A. a few days after high school. “But I digress. Yeah, Hillel the Hebe. When my dad heard that, he did what any red–blooded Yiddishe papa would do. He put down the dish towel, stuffed a pair of socks into a couple of oven mitts, hung a gunny sack full of dirt from the one scrawny tree in the courtyard out back, and taught me how to box. You shoulda seen him, man, Mordechai Hirsch, the boxing tailor, whomping the bag with those stuffed oven mitts, shouting `Never again!’ Whomp! ‘Never again!,’ the fringes of his prayer shawl fluttering in the wind as he stuck and moved, stuck and moved, reaching up now and then to steady his beanie lest it fall to the ground. You may not believe this, kiddo, in an age of Jewish white collars, but your peeps had a number of boxing greats once—a slew of crowns in the lighter divisions, and some middle and heavyweight champeens, too. Didja know that?”
I shook my head “no,” as was my wont, for I rarely knew anything Head told me about ten years ago, and felt in his presence like I hadn’t been born, although I was fourteen and book–smart when I first started taking refuge at HQ.
“It’s a fact,” Head continued. “Slapsie Maxie Rosenbloom, Max Baer, Benny Leonard—”
In the interest of proving that I, too, was a sentient being with the power of speech, I blurted: “Did your dad have any nicknames, Head?”
Head grinned crinkly–eyed like I like you, you dope. “He had one nickname: Pa. To everyone else, he was just Mordechai. That was all the nickname for a man like him.”
Whatever that meant. Head’s eyes glowed with merriment at my confusion, and I turned from a gleam too intense to withstand. But Head sure loved his nicknames, loved bestowing them on all the satellites that orbited him: the workers at the bookstore like O’Sad Fred, the sad–sack old–timer who’d been there longer even than Head, and the store’s regular patrons like Too Tall Ted and Hemingway’s Dead and Rebel With A Cause, and the boardwalk crazies like Juicy Jack, Dapper Dan, and The Rag Tag Cowboy, folks who considered the bestowal of a nickname from Hammerhead Hirsch akin to being knighted, who prized these tags and ... [Trips `n' Trials of a Down, Beat Dad—comin' soon! Thanks for reading.]
