Breakaway Days

By Marvin Leibstone

Breakaway Days is an attempt at America-picaresque, a young American’s road, city and foreign territory, story remembered several decades later, violence-light given that nearly all of the novel’s recalled time-frame is the 1950’s for a young adult’s hasty introduction to adventuring, to many of life’s wins and unavoidable losses. So, starting as a nineteen year-old stuck in the particulars of a sport (Baseball),of his being a dreamer without a conclusive dream, plus his having concerns about “the Draft,” and of what a meaningful life should consist of, Breakaway Days protagonist encounters the unexpected and finds numerous illusions kept and many illusions shredded. . . Readers may be reminded of Twain’s Huck Finn were Huck nearing his 20’s, of Hemingway’s Nick Adams tales, and the writings of Jack London, being surprised, however, by the outcomes.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Feb 23, 2021
• ISBN: 9781664160248

Marvin Leibstone

Marvin Leibstone is the author of two previously published books, Sports & The Heroic (Random House-Xlibris), which connects spiritual content to the committed and better athletes much-practiced and tempered skills; and, Guardian, Down (Tattered Cover Press), of two short novels and three short stories re. war and politics, based on the authors experiences as an army officer (his war: Vietnam) and as a journalist covering national security issues from Washington, D.C. and abroad. The author has been Publisher and Editor of World Affairs Notebook (worldaffairsnotbook.blogspot.com) since 2014.

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Copyright © 2021 by Marvin Leibstone.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

Rev. date: 02/23/2021

Xlibris

844-714-8691

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Contents

Author’s Note

Acknowledgement

Part 1 The Road

Part 2 Urban Rhapsody

Part 3 Cuba

Part 4 New Era

Epilogue

AUTHOR’S NOTE

T HOUGH THE FOLLOWING pages can, in part and style, appear to be what’s referred to as memoir, and though the author has experienced incidents quite similar to those described within, all characters portrayed in Breakaway Days are fully imagined. Therefore, Breakaway Days is a novel, and any resemblance among its characters to persons living or deceased will always be coincidental, except for the brief appearance of American author, Ernest Hemingway, found in the novel’s Part Three, CUBA.

For my grandchildren (Order of birth:)

Will, Chris and Cate-Elise Decker,

and Michael Benjamin Morrissey

and Matthew Aidan Morrissey.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

B REAKAWAY DAYS WOULD never have completed without the encouragement and editorial support provided willingly and lovingly from my wife, Gail Leibstone, for which I’ll remain grateful forever, as I am for our more than our 30 years together and for all that’s ahead for us.

If the fate of man is to live with death from adolescence to premature senescence, then the only life-giving answer is to accept the terms of death, to live with death as immediate danger, to set out on that uncharted journey into the imperatives of the self.

Norman Mailer

Writer

… for a transitory moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face … with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

last page, The Great Gatsby

PART ONE

The Road

Stay suspicious, friend,

of the taking to seeings

because little is ever

what is first noted

Carry the thought

that what seems of gold

may be straw

Do not, then, break

the bond with what’s so,

your ally in the game

Otherwise, you’ll have to marry

the cold and unsteady

days of shame.

From a book of poems

by Marvin Leibstone, title:

"Whisperings from back of

Plato’s Cave."

ONE

I T WAS A Tuesday morning, late October, 1955, when at age nineteen, I, David—Davey—Cole, left Washington, D.C., to travel across America, forty-seven dollars and twenty-three cents in a back pocket of my khaki trousers. I wore a white cotton shirt under a blue wool sweater and brown suede jacket, my feet sore in old Keds from my fielding and running bases during games played at a local field, hailed as last neighborhood and post-World Series baseball before the first arrival of snow.

In my soft and worn backpack, I had two undershorts, two T-shirts, plus a baseball and a fielder’s glove, though I might only get to have ball-to-glove repeats inside a car, truck or at a motel room.

Why that journey? Now, and sixty-one years later, the answer that I went with seems peppered with arrogance, written the night before to a northwest Washington, D.C. girlfriend and daughter of a federal judge, whom I’d learned after my traveling she’d preferred being with someone other than me, relieving me of having to strategize the separation, which only a God could perform correctly.

For several decades, the letter sat crumpled in a partly ripped pocket of the suede jacket that finally won a trip to Goodwill, replaced by an old man’s team jacket, its large white script "Ponce de Leon-baseball," which I’d wear alternately with an old army field jacket while mowing our Colorado home’s front lawn and when shoveling snow December through April. I’d forgotten to remove the letter, the next wearer of the jacket perhaps reading … never to be trapped inside a day repeated hundreds of times as if redundancy was humankind’s most noble achievement, its emulation a duty, an insult, I suppose, to those who day after day collect money at toll booths from drivers of cars along the nation’s highways and at tunnel and bridge entrances, not because they want to but must to survive.

For authors Henry David Thoreau, Mark Twain, and Mr. Twain’s Huck Finn, sameness without meaning was the enemy. Writer Jack London left for the Klondike, Ernest Hemingway went off to Italy, to France and Spain, later Cuba, and baseball greats Joe DiMaggio and Ted Williams served overseas in the U.S. Army, Williams a combat pilot during World War Two and during the Korean War, all escaping from what I thought to be bland, loose scaffolding for the legacy-driven life that they preferred if not always easy at the having.

Not being older with obligations from toe to top of the head, it seemed natural to me to have those heroes from sports and literature, a process that I believed made for good sustenance, for survival of more than simply surviving. Baseball addressed this, which the sport’s coaches wrote in the skies of my mind for me. I gave it my best at high school and college, the game underscoring that while returning to home plate addresses team necessity, there’s striving for personal excellence in the game, pride in one’s skills occurring in proper balance with that of other players, a description that in my early years I was in thrall of–Big time! A coach, who also taught world literature, asked of our team’s starters, Should Homer’s hero, Odysseus, look back in old age on his life, will he be grateful that it took ten years of adventuring and not three to return to home plate, a.k.a., Greek island, Ithaca? At that time, I liked believing that the old hero would choose the ten over the three.

Those sports and book heroes had extracted meaning from the unexpected, from their venturing forth. Each of them refused to be glued to living one day 364 times afterward–year-after-year.

How worthy an enterprise would that road experiment of mine be? Well, the best and the rational in science and religion advise us that at birth we inherit a great swath of space and time inside which we can travel from the unknowable to the knowable, barring ill health and accidents. Baby steps, then we walk. We could risk the wide bend–I was for that.

And, with horizons far off it would be weeks before I’d have even the vaguest understanding of a journey’s bright and also dark moments and conflicting attributes.

AS WAS my want at the time, I paid little attention to whether I’d be missed or not, or if anyone would be saddened by my departure, or if I’d be in any kind of danger: I told no-one of my exit from America’s national capital region, not even my parents, who lived their quiet life of repetition at Queens, New York, and hadn’t learned that I chose not to finish another semester at Washington, D.C.-located American University. It wasn’t that I’d hardened, as if my soul was injected with Novocain twice daily; rather, it was cowardice: I feared telling loved ones of my plan, feared that their disappointment would cause me to give up the plan.

And, to heck with academia. I wanted to shout, Shame! AU had fraternities that said persons of Jewish background and African-Americans could only be Associate members, and the school insisted that no matter what your religious background was you had to attend church run by Methodists every Wednesday morning, why that day no-one at the school had a sure answer for.

SO, I put a thumb into the air and caught a ride taking me over the Fourteenth Street Bridge, gazing back at the Washington monument, the well-manicured greenery surrounding it, then the Potomac River that flowed creamy and choppy under the bridge.

By nightfall, I was at Danville, Virginia, a rather small town then, my clothes wrinkled and carrying the sour odor of my sweat. A journey had kicked in, but not of the wild intensity and bulk of adventure experienced by the protagonists of novels such as Melville’s Moby Dick or Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines, instead a narrative of a milder and quieter sort and yet deep schooling, I a young man running from that possibility of a life of, Thoreau’s words, … quiet desperation, I, a not too young ‘un (Twain’s Huck:) lightin’ out for the territory.

TWO

I ASKED THE TRUCK driver to drop me off at the southern edge of a paved straightaway before he had to turn left and east on an unpaved road. I was set on traveling south to reach Tampa, Florida, where an aunt and uncle lived, hoping they’d put me up for a week or two before my heading west. I had California in mind, mostly because it was the far end of the country from where I began. I’d spend time at Florida’s Clearwater Beach, swimming in the ocean, enjoying a day of deep-sea fishing with Uncle Ted, hitting and catching a baseball with his son, Warren.

Now the temperature in Virginia had fallen dramatically, and I was cold. It was between three and four in the morning as I walked along Danville, Virginia’s empty and dark streets, uphill until reaching an open café at a crossroads.

I could still smell the farmed tobacco leaves that I’d passed, a kind of sweetness to them. The leaves were stacked inside wood warehouses that had huge doors open at either end. I liked the smell of the recently harvested tobacco.

I entered the poorly lit café and noted a scrawny, pale and round-shouldered cook behind a counter, and that I was the café’s other person there.

I sat at a wide and clean table, so hungry I thought of slurping ketchup and mustard from their containers onto the free saltine crackers upside on tables.

I watched the cook position several eggs in a bowl by a large grill, wipe clean a long counter and set empty coffee cups, napkins and spoons in front of cushioned stools, never looking at me, yet I sensed he knew just where I was as I moved here, then there.

Though I’d begun looking away and out the wide window at the treeless streets and low brick buildings, my hunger probably signaled from facial expressions that I couldn’t control.

The cook brought me a plate of scrambled eggs and toast, and a cup of coffee. I have since learned that hiding hunger is a most difficult task for anyone to pull off. Naturally, I thanked the cook and he nodded and smiled, as if I’d done something for him.

He had set the meal down without facing me, and said, No cost at all to you, fella, and I reached for a fork (Fella was in at the time if you weren’t from New York, not Man, not Dude yet. The cook then said, Long as you clean out the toilets back of you.

And I did that, grateful that a plunger was available and the stink wasn’t too bad. I grew up in a small New York apartment and my Dad and I took turns with a plunger whenever our toilet got stuffed. Then, as I finished the second helping of eggs and toast, a boy possibly thirteen or fourteen years old entered the café.

He was around five-six, and thin. Wide-eyed, with short brown hair, he seemed startled seeing me, as if he were meant to be the only young person allowed to be at the café before dawn.

He held a small stack of newspapers and placed them on the counter, and said hello to the cook while moving toward me slowly.

He told me his name, which I wish I could remember.

I sipped the rest of my coffee after swallowing the last of the eggs and toast.

Then I offered my name and the boy said that it was the same name that a friend’s cat had. No problem, I thought, I had nothing against cats.

The cup that I used was beige and small, the same color and size of a cup that I drank from at a restaurant close to Manhattan’s Times Square. Odd but nice is that which we often do remember, not someone’s name but instead the color of a cup and where held, the sight of that is reassuring, comforting.

The boy said, So, what are you doin’ here?

Finishing a meal, I answered.

Well, I’d know you if you lived around here. I know everybody who lives around here, and they know me. You’re traveling to be someplace distant, I’d bet.

Yep, I said.’

Where?

Tampa, Florida. Gonna visit an uncle and aunt. It’s where the New York Yankees train in the spring.

That’s a long ways. But you don’t look like you’re driving there, and it ain’t Spring.

I’m hitchhiking, I said.

The cook brought more bread to the table, leaving us as quickly as he had moved from me before.

Nearest major baseball to us Virginians is the Baltimore Orioles, but that’s up north, so me and my daddy we like the Atlanta Braves.

His ‘Daddy?’" Up north, only girls called their fathers ‘Daddy.’ Boys and men up north said, ‘Dad, or Pop, maybe Pops, maybe ‘Papa.’ Why is that? I wondered if worded endearments were a sensible way to understand differences among people separated by land or by sea. Has geography been that potent? Maybe it’s everything, and you have to return home after seeing much of the world to know that it’s very powerful, like for Homer’s hero, Odysseus.

After we ate the rest of the bread in silence, the boy said, Let’s go. I’ll show you some stuff, a part of this here town.

He left the stack of newspapers with the cook and didn’t say much as we walked slowly through bleak sections of Danville, Virginia, under overhead lighting that was so low I could hardly make out that the colors of some of the two- and three-floor buildings were mostly of light brown and gray brick.

When we reached the two warehouses and their powerful tobacco smell, the boy said, My Daddy, he used to work here. Tobacco’s the town’s livelihood, he says we at Danville, Virginia, can live well and then poor from it. He don’t talk about it much anymore, though. He can’t walk now, he sits in a wheel chair when he’s not sleeping on a couch, could be on the floor if he’s been drinking too much.

I followed him into one of the tobacco warehouses, where a scrawny African-American watchman seated in a rocking chair nodded hello and said that we ought not be around too long.

We strolled between tall stacks of the fresh and sweet-smelling tobacco, unaware then that, while strikingly of rust-like colors that are easily appreciated, the leaves were killing my father and millions of other persons sort of on an installment plan, bringing on unbearable pain, killing numerous dreams.

The boy seemed fascinated by the tobacco, studying piles of leaves as though they were paintings hanging in a museum. I like the colors of the tobacco, he said. Makes me think about the colors of racehorses I seen pictures of, the horses red and brown and gold-like, and there’re some dogs that roam around here that got the tobacco colors, I think… Wish I could go to Tampa, Florida, like you, he added.

I had a thought that the boy could grow to be a poet or an accomplished artist, possibly a painter of forests, of sunlight striking trees and grassy knolls, his memories of tobacco fields transferred to canvas in a New York City loft; or, he’d never leave Danville, Virginia, spending his days stacking farmed tobacco, sick and dying from that.

HE LED me across a stream and through a thicket of low, dry brush and of trees with gnarly branches, to an old and gray two-floor possibly worm- or termite-visited wood structure that was his home, longer than wide, and it tilted slightly from soil erosion and from age.

A large front window was fitted tight with cardboard, and a confederate flag hung from a loop of cord attached to a broken weather vane, flat upon the roof as there was no wind now. Why the flag at an American home, when it was a traitor’s flag? Didn’t the Confederacy attack America?

His mother was awake and did not seem surprised that her son brought home a stranger. She seemed aware of a soothed edge in him, a loneliness that was gone temporarily from his having returned home with a degree of companionship–it didn’t seem to matter to her who or what the stranger was.

She was a tall and very thin woman with dry gray hair pinned back, light eyes in deep sockets, her skin ashen. You could tell this was a person dealing with more bad luck than reaches most people.

She wore a long gray robe that smelled from baby powder and from medicines, and she led me toward the attic that I had to climb up a ladder to get to while pushing spider webs aside and noticing