The thump, thump, thump of a dream

AS I walk slowly down 64th Avenue, south of what used to be East 14th Street, I pass the garage door that was once a part of Lefty Lyon’s dream.

I stop for a while and concentrate on that portion of memory that has stored the muffled sound of a tennis ball being thrown against the door.

Thump, thump, thump ...

If I concentrate hard enough, I can see Lefty tossing the ball and catching it in his fielder’s glove, over and over again. He’s a small boy of about 12 with freckles across the bridge of his nose and thick red hair that he rarely combs.

He never tires of throwing the ball and catching it, even though the day grows late and the lights of the modest wood frame houses along the block are beginning to turn on and their residents prepare for the evening meal.

Thump, thump, thump ...

Lefty was there in the early morning, just as the sun was beginning to warm East Oakland, until it was impossible to see the ball, even with the street lights turned on. Summer was the best time because the days lasted into the twilight with enough illumination to prolong the game of a ball against the garage door.

Lefty’s dream was important to him. He wanted desperately, more than most kids want anything, to be a major league baseball player; to be Ted Williams, the hottest player of the day, because that’s who he admired the most.

No way.

You could tell even in those preteen years that he was always going to be too small for any kind of athletics and probably not good enough. He couldn’t throw the ball very hard and missed it a lot when it bounced back, but that didn’t faze the kid one bit.

Never mind that a baseball coach from Castlemont High who’d heard about him came to 64th Avenue to check him out, and told him right to his face that he just didn’t have it. I thought Lefty was going to break down and cry, but he didn’t say anything, and when the coach left, he went on tossing the ball.

Thump, thump, thump ...

Lefty had two older sisters who weren’t bad looking but they didn’t seem to pay much attention to Lefty or even to each other. We’d see them on East 14th Street, now International Boulevard, sometimes hanging out at a coffee shop as we walked to the pool hall that was a few blocks away, where Lefty could display his real talent. The sisters never greeted Lefty. Not a word.

He was one of the best pool players that anyone had ever seen, including Raincoat Jones, who had spent a lot of time around pool halls during his wandering years. He was a habitue of this particular place, a large, dark upstairs room, the name of which for the life of me I can’t remember.

Raincoat delighted in watching Lefty, his red hair glowing under the hanging lamps, take sucker after sucker, who never figured this slight kid for a pool shark. Lefty would take them on one by one, cleaning the table, slamming the 8-ball into a corner pocket like a guy furious with its very existence. We figured that throwing that tennis ball day and night gave him extra strength to propel the cue ball like a rocket on green felt. You could almost see smoke trailing from it.

We weren’t even supposed to be in the place, but because of Lefty’s skill, they allowed us behind the green door, which was the color of the entryway. They encouraged us to smoke cigarettes because the owners figured it would make us look older in case the cops came by. I doubt if they’d have cared if they had come by, but you couldn’t convince anyone of that. So we smoked.

I’m not sure why I’m going on about Lefty so much. I guess it’s because I was formulating my own dreams and so were most of the other guys along 64th Avenue.

We never talked about the coach telling Lefty he’d never make it in the big league because we were all of the opinion that at age 12 anything was possible, even though we were poor and our dreams so far away.

Lefty came to represent persistence. No matter what, he’d keep tossing the tennis ball against the garage door, even when it was raining and the wind was so strong that the ball would get blown away from him and he’d have to chase it down the block, and then return to his strange obsession.

Thump, thump, thump, thump ...

We moved away from 64th Avenue when my stepfather got work at the Kaiser Shipyards in Richmond, and I didn’t see Lefty again until years later, after I’d returned from Korea and was working at the Oakland Tribune. He was trying to make documentary films and was looking for contacts, of which I had none.

We had lunch and a couple of drinks at the old Hollow Leg across the street, and then he was gone and I never saw him again. But standing by the old garage door I can visualize him perfectly, and feel a little sorry that his dream never worked out.

Thump, thump, thump, thump ...

Funny about dreams.

Al Martinez’s column appears Mondays and Fridays. He can be reached at al.martinez@latimes.com.