Howard Jacobson - The Mighty Walzer

Sheeny Waxman, notwithstanding Aishky Mistofsky’s post hoc recollection that he’d been of our company on the night my talent was divulged, was an unknown quantity to me. He was very short, with a pronounced tic, and enjoyed a reputation as a head jockey — that was all I knew about him. A very short twitching head jockey with a terrific forehand. When I asked what a head jockey was they all laughed at me. ‘Something like a linguist,’ Theo confided, whereupon they all laughed again. As for Sheeny Waxman’s forehand, only Louis Marks, on our team, had a forehand that could equal it. And Louis Marks was injured. Hence me.

I was going round to the Akiva almost every night now. If my father was home he would drive me. Otherwise I caught a local train from Bowker Vale to Woodlands Road, one or other of my aunties accompanying me to the station, just in case the prefab boys thought of launching an assault.

How anyone could have supposed that the prefab boys would have been deterred by a Shrinking Violet I can’t imagine, but the ploy worked. The one time I was stoned was the one time I’d persuaded my mother I was now big enough to walk to the station on my own.

Usually Aishky Mistofsky drove me back. I’d promised my mother that if I didn’t have a lift I would ring home and wait for someone to collect me. The trains stopped early and she didn’t want me wandering in the dead of night. Not through that part of Manchester with all its shaygets perils. I didn’t of course tell her that Aishky Mistofsky was indeed the blind one and that I was never in more danger than when he drove me home.

I had quickly grown fond of Aishky, in the gooey way a little kid grows fond of a big kid. I liked his gingery beaky face, which he brought very close to mine on account of his short-sightedness, and which he pressed right up against the windscreen of his Austin A40, for the same reason. I liked the way he laughed, throwing his head back and showing the red hairs at his throat — an action that didn’t so much register the funniness or smartness of something someone had said, as the uncomplicated pleasure he took in someone being there to say something to him at all. And I liked the way he played ping-pong, earnestly, with a resolute arm, as though he owed something to the ball. He never defended, not even when that was the one sure way of beating his opponent. He liked to hit, rhythmically, conventionally, the bat starting low down, arcing predictably, and finishing high up, and if that didn’t happen to be what it took to win that night, so he lost.

In this he was the very opposite of his best friend, Twink Starr, whose great strength was his ability to find the edge of the table, but who would grit his teeth, chew his tongue, alter the whole nature of his game — pushing, chopping, half-volleying, sweating buckets, coughing up phlegm — if that was the only way to win the match. But I’m running ahead of myself. Before there were any matches — at least as far as I was concerned — I had to be kitted out. ‘For starters,’ Twink reminded me, ‘you can’t go on borrowing my bat — you’ll need your own.’

‘What do you mean for starters?’ Aishky queried. ‘What else does he need?’

This was the other big difference between them. Aishky Mistofsky played in the clothes he came home from work in. He took off his jacket, rolled up his sleeves and changed his shoes, that was all. He didn’t even loosen his tie. Whereas Twink Starr turned up already panting and dancing, like a prize fighter, in a hooded tracksuit, with a towel round his neck. Under the tracksuit, which he peeled off in stages, he wore a crested Fred Perry shirt, pleated shorts and long white socks with a blue stripe in them. In his bag he carried an asthma spray, two sets of sweatbands, a change of shirt and a small lawn-cotton hand towel with his own monograph sewn into it — JS . When the going got tough he would tuck this into his shorts like a waiter’s tea cloth, so that he could dry the handle of his bat between points. Years later, professional tennis players competing for more prize money in a single fortnight than Twink Starr and Aishky Mistofsky could hope to earn between them in a lifetime would, as a matter of course, tuck lawn-cotton hand towels into their shorts. But before Twink Starr no racket-player had ever thought of doing such a thing.

‘You want him to play in long hasen, like you?’

‘What’s wrong with long hasen?’

‘You don’t win in them, Aishky, that’s what’s wrong with them. And you have to keep them up with braces.’

‘Barna won in long hasen.’

‘That was the past, Aishky. Don’t talk to me about the past. This kid’s got a future — he has to have shorts.’

‘The next thing you’ll be saying, he has to have a Fred Perry shirt.’

‘Well he can’t play in his school blazer, can he, you potz.’

They took me to Alec Watson and Mitchell’s in Market Street and continued to fight out their differences in front of the asssistants. ‘Here,’ Aishky called from the cricket counter, ‘what about a jockstrap and a box to go in it?’ And then from the football counter, ‘And maybe some shin pads …’

‘You’re a meshuggener,’ Twink shouted back across the shop. He was helping me choose a cover for my bat. Zip or stud, that was the issue. ‘Do you hear what I’m saying? You’re a meshuggener. You haven’t won a match in a month. But you know what to wear, suddenly. You don’t even look after your bat properly. You carry it around in a plastic bag with your sandwiches. I’m the one who has to pick the crumbs out of your pimples for you. You don’t even know they’re there. You don’t even notice them. But you’re an example to the kid!’

Aishky was in his element, shouting and being shouted at in a public place. His beaky face shone with bashfulness and audacity mixed. ‘What about these?’ he called out. He was now in the boxing section. ‘You wouldn’t want him to spiel without these, would you?’ He was holding up a box of gum-shields.

‘Do me a favour,’ Twink said. It wasn’t a retort. More a philosophical expostulation, to no one in particular.

I too was in my element. It was flattering to be argued over like this by two grown men, sort of. And I loved being in their element. It made me feel I was coming to the end of being a kid. A whole new world was opening to me, one in which you embarrassed the shop assistants. It beat having aunties all ends up.

Which reminded me: I was only a short walk across Corporation Street from the soft-porno shop opposite the Cathedral; if there was some way I could give Aishky and Twink the slip for ten minutes, leave them to argue over my ping-pong wardrobe without me, I could be back before the contemptuous behind-the-counter judge, stammering out a request for the latest Span.

I hadn’t finished with all that, now that I was coming to the end of being a kid and had a team to play for?

Do me a favour.

All matches shall start not later than 7.30 p.m.; the penalty for late starts shall be 2/6 for every fifteen minutes or part thereof.

29(a) Match Procedure, The Manchester and District

Table Tennis League

The sets of any player not present by 9.00 p.m. shall go by default to the opposing team, and the defaulting team be fined 1/- per player then absent.

29(d) Match Procedure, The Manchester and District

Table Tennis League

MY FIRST LEAGUE match was against the Allied Jam and Marmalade Sports and Social Club (the A. J. M.), just this side of Dukinfield. It was November. The blue-black month, smoky with fireworks and fog. To give ourselves plenty of time to get there, Aishky Mistofsky had suggested that he pick me up from home at six o’clock. I was worried about this arrangement. I knew that my mother and my aunties would come to the window to wave me off and I didn’t want them to see Aishky with his blind face pressed to the windscreen. Not knowing how to raise this with him directly, I’d mentioned it to Twink who came up with the idea that he’d change seats with Aishky as soon as they arrived at our place, drive around the corner himself (which he reckoned he could just about manage, although he hadn’t learnt to drive yet), and then change back again once we were out of view. The explanation he’d give Aishky was that he was soft on my aunty Fay, whom he’d seen shopping with me in Lewis’s, and wanted to impress her with the sight of him sitting up like a mensch in his own Austin A40. Aishky would not be able to refuse him this. Impressing a woman with the aim of getting her to show you her bristles — even when the bristles in question happened to belong to someone you knew’s aunty — was a sacred undertaking: if you called yourself a friend you ministered to it. Besides, a bristle out for one was a bristle out for all. In a verbal culture, what goes around comes around. If you don’t cop the feel yourself, you at least get to hear about it.