The Help
I thought I knew what it was like to be patronized as “the help” at the Elks Club in Urbana, Illinois, in the 1970s, a man in his twenties working as a bartender, the members, local merchants and small businessmen, lording it over us, staking a claim to their self-esteem by demanding this or that – “my” drink, which I was supposed to know without asking. (“Bobby’s wife Clela takes a seven-and-seven,” Gene, the older guy, told me in his southern Illinois twang, insider information that could mean a tip.)
But when I saw Blake Ashdown toss a quarter at Willie, the Black waiter, during a quiet moment, the coin ringing across the floor, stopping against a chair leg at a corner table, declare loudly, “Go get it, Willie! I know what you’re standing around for!”
and Willie, awakened from his reverie by Ashdown’s action, stooping to retrieve the coin, miming gratitude while Ashdown and his buddy guffawed,
I realized how my whiteness shielded me from this casual humiliation. Already accepted to a graduate school program in Boston for the following fall, I’d be gone in a few months.
I was grateful. I was ashamed.
The Doctor Is In
Emulating her hero, Doc Ellis, who famously tossed a no-hitter for the Pirates against the Padres at the old San Diego Stadium while high on LSD, June 12, 1970, my college friend Jen dropped a hit of windowpane before the girls’ softball game against our archrivals, the Hurricanes from Craycombe University.
The Potawatomi Rapids Muskrats hadn’t won a championship since the college joined the Division 3 Midwest Athletic Girls Association. (“We were MAGA before MAGA!”) Why start now?
Jen was nowhere near as flamboyant as Doc, whom Commissioner Bowie Kuhn once had to tell not to wear hair curlers when he went out on the field. Doc started the 1971 All-Star Game against Vida Blue, two African-American pitchers: an MLB first.
Key to the 1971 Pirates’ world championship and the ’76 Yankees’ pennant (they lost the series in four to the Reds), Doc also once made it his mission, two years earlier, to bean every batter for the Big Red Machine, yanked after throwing to just five batters, nailing the first three, throwing over the heads of Tony Perez and Johnny Bench.
Jen? Not nearly as talented as Doc, either. Walked the first five batters before Coach Merritt replaced her with Penny Ryan. “Your game’s off, Jen,” he advised her. “You don’t look well. Maybe you should go see the nurse? I think she’s at the infirmary now.”
Charles Rammelkamp is Prose Editor for BrickHouse Books in Baltimore. His poetry collection, A Magician Among the Spirits, poems about Harry Houdini, is a 2022 Blue Light Press Poetry winner. Another poetry collection entitled Transcendence has also recently been published by BlazeVOX Books and a collection of flash fiction, Presto, has just been published by Bamboo Dart Press. A collection of poems and flash called See What I Mean? will be published later this year by Kelsay Books.