Whale Music Read Online Free PDF Page B

could only erode his skills. Daniel abandoned baseball altogether.
    So I decided to become a good baseball player. Danny decided to become a hoodlum. I never achieved my goal. In my entire little-league career I had only one at-bat, the coach putting me in out of desperation, and although I did manage to get on base (hit by pitch), I was lifted in favour of a pinch-runner. Danny, on the other hand, became a very good little hoodlum.
    Danny discovered the great love of his life, speed. Not the pharmaceutical variety (although he was to develop a powerful fondness for that), but velocity and fleetness. Our home town of Palomountain nestled in some pretty ambitious foothills, the streets went up and down like a roller-coaster, and Danny tookto finding anything with wheels and hurtling down the declines. When his rusty bicycle proved unworthy of the exercise he stole better ones, when he got bored with that he helped himself to go-carts and soap-box jalopies, and when that was no longer boiling his blood he got extremely ambitious and stole a car. That was when he was thirteen years old, and, although he tried to look older by donning sunglasses and smoking cigarettes, the local police soon became aware that a small child was bombing around town in a great big black Studebaker, and they shut him down.
    Danny had to go to reform school for a year.
    That was kind of a watershed year for the Howell family.
    Let’s review the pristine American upbringing, let’s look at this childhood painted by Normie Rockwell. Here we see the Howells at dinner: the father, the mother, Danny and Desmond. What are they eating? No one knows. It was cooked by the mother, and she has the best insight, but she identifies all of her dishes with a kind of crippled continental French that the boys have long since given up trying to decipher. The father doesn’t care what it is. The father eats with fork and spoon. Apparently he never mastered the knife, the knife is beyond him, the whole concept of knife goes over the father’s flat, brush-cutted head.
    Daniel picks at the meal. Desmond devours with gusto.
    “This is good,” Danny offers. “It tastes like in a restaurant.”
    Mother looks up dreamily. She names the dish. We are baffled.
    “It is good,” I say. “I’m having seconds.”
    “Hey, Dezzy-do,” says the father. “You’re turning into a real porker.”
    “He’s big-boned,” says my mother quietly.
    “ ’Sides,” offers Dan, turning towards the father, “he’s not as fat as you.”
    “Put a lock on it.”
    “Henry,” says my mother, and that single word snaps thefather’s head up. “What’s happening with Jimmy Cohn?”
    Cohn being one of many weasel-like men that my father had music-related business with.
    “That guy,” snarls the father. “He wouldn’t know a smash hit number one socko boff if it came up and kissed his ass.”
    “Please.
Les enfants.”
    “I’m just saying.”
    “I think you should talk to this Maurice Mantle,” says my mother.
    “Maurice Mantle is chicken-shit. I want someone with know-how and savvy, baby, because when I hit, I’m hitting
big.”
    “Perhaps,” suggests my mother, who has yet to see any evidence of the father hitting in any manner at all, “you should talk to Maurice.”
    “Maurice
,” mocks the father. “I don’t need him. When I hit, baby …”
    “I’m hitting big,” says Danny. Danny scrunches up his face. “So we hoid.”
    The father bristles, but finally allows a chuckle for his cocky son. My mother laughs gently, rubs his hair. I laugh, too, overjoyed.
    It was hard when Danny went away to reform school.
    Mother cried so much that I thought she might dry up and blow away like dust. The father sat in his study, the door closed, everything silent within. The one thing I remember him saying was—and wait, let’s set the scene, because it’s important to realize that the father had no logical reason to make this pronouncement, it wasn’t a response to