Of Snakes Sex Playing in the Rain, Random Thou Page 9

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  As a writer, then, that has been my main subject. I won’t say that I haven’t or won’t write about the cities I know, the cities I have visited. Indeed, I have set scenes already in San Antonio, Dallas, Houston, and New York. But I still feel obliged to tell stories about what made me become a writer in the first place, about a place that is as infinite in its variety as it is static in its sense of time and change.

  So, regardless of whether they drive Porches or pickups, of whether they deal with male menopause or milo harvesting, of whether they prefer Brooks Brothers and L.L. Bean to leather jackets and bullhide boots, of whether they drink Perrier and martinis instead of Lone Star and a “Col’ Co-cola,” all writers must find their ideas in the stuff of what they know, what they have done, else, what they create will be fabricated, false. Whether they publish or not, whether they succeed or not, the motivation that must guide writers must be found in the fabric of their imaginations. It is there they will find the profits of their prose, their personal fulfillment, and it is from there they will tell their best and truest stories, relying less on the truth and more on the genuineness of their memories.

  IF THEY DON’T WIN IT’S A SHAME:

  BASEBALL AS MYTH AND EQUALIZER

  “This is the last pure place where Americans dream.

  The last great arena, the last green arena,

  where everybody can learn the lessons of life.”

  —Marcus Giamatti

  I’ve always loved baseball, even though I haven’t always been aware of it. That is not to say that I’ve always been the fan of any particular team. Loyalties change with geography unless you grow up in a professional club’s immediate area; when I was a kid, Texas had no major league. There was the Texas League, arguably the greatest minor league source of the greatest players in the history of the game, but the “big leagues” played far away. Maybe because of that, I’ve always rooted for the underdogs. In my very distant memories, I can remember listening to the Brooklyn Dodgers on the radio, but only on nights when the Fort Worth Cats were out of town. The station that broadcast the Cats’ home games wasn’t equipped to follow them on the road; when the Cats were away, it carried the Dodgers. I had no idea what part of Texas Brooklyn might be in, but I liked their scrappiness, and I felt betrayed when they abandoned Gotham for the land of sushi and tofu.

  Later in my adolescence, for reasons I cannot explain, I followed the Cubs and suffered through their continuing series of heartbreaking seasons and their dedication to tradition. But the lighting of Wrigley Field darkened my enthusiasm some. I had a similar affinity for the Red Sox, largely because of Ted Williams and Carlton Fisk; but that’s now over, since the “Curse of the Bambino” has been broken. The Sox may have the pennant, but they lost their gritty glamour. The Yankees were also a dominating team of my youth; I suppose Ruth and Gehrig cast too large a shadow for latter-day players to escape: DiMaggio, Berra, Mantle, Maris enlarged the Bronx Bomber legend to a point where no pretender from anywhere else could diminish it. The Georgia Peach, Stan the Man, Dizzie Dean, Hammerin’ Hank, The Texas Express and The Big Unit might be similar heroes of the diamond. But they weren’t wearing pinstripes. They didn’t play in the House that Ruth Built.

  Later, professional baseball came to Texas—sort of; I mean, it was indoors and played on a rug. The Astrodome, of course. Initially, they tried to grow grass under special glass panels in the roof. It worked, but it made the field intolerably hot for the players. They took up the grass and put down plastic—Astroturf was born. Something in baseball, though, began to die.

  I still tried to work up some enthusiasm for the Astros. I followed them to their mid-eighties pennant race, and I wept with them when they lost. I even pulled for them more recently, but, in the long run, nothing helped. Even new digs with real grass and a retractable roof and a freight-train fast-baller couldn’t improve their chances. When I moved nearer the Dallas/Fort Worth Metroplex, I started out every season hanging in there with the Rangers. Their roller-coaster-ride seasons and tendency to trade away great talent that often comes back to beat them beggars enthusiasm. They seem to be dedicated to being the team that “almost was.” Even Nolan Ryan’s arrival couldn’t inspire them to overcome the handicap of having been the Washington Senators—“First in war, first in peace, last in the American League.” That’s a joke only a true baseball fan understands.

  In my childhood I was a much more loyal fan of the game. I played it, of course, in backyards and vacant lots, used a ratty old glove, a splintery bat, and a lopsided ball. It was a summertime staple. I could quote batting averages, RBIs and ERAs with all my friends. I knew the names and numbers of all the players, yearned to see them in their faraway parks, strained to hear the static-filled radio play-by-play, and ultimately squinted at their grainy black-and-white images on television and in Life magazine. I collected their cards, fondled them lovingly, traded them, and finally wore them out so much that they would be worthless and illegible today even if my mother hadn’t thrown them out. Like most kids my age, I loved baseball. It was an obsession.

  And naturally, I couldn’t wait until I was old enough to be on a regular team. There was no tee-ball then, no coach-pitch or machine-pitch. Kids started organized ball when they turned eleven or twelve. They were expected already to know the fundamentals of the game, and most did. Because the town was small, there were a limited number of teams, which meant a limited number of games and an even more limited opportunity to play in one of them. The park was a hard-packed dirt field surrounded by a splintering grandstand built decades before when there was a city team. It always seemed to be on the verge of collapse, and during one heavy windstorm, it did. Coaches, typically, were mostly dads and big brothers, mostly interested in seeing their sons and nephews play, mostly ignorant of how to manage kids. The leagues had no minimum participation rules then, so most of the players who weren’t related to a coach or one of his buddies were usually stuck “squatting in Splinter City, warming the pine.” I was among them.

  In fairness, though, I never could play the game well. I could hit the ball a ton, and often where I wanted to, but since I was fat and clumsy (“Husky,” my mother said; my uniform had to be special ordered.), I was too slow to run the bases well. I could catch okay, so when I did get in a game, I was always stuck out in right field, kicking the tops off of weeds and counting odd-shaped rocks, daydreaming, until somebody accidentally hit one my way. At that point, I would wake up (too late) and chase it until it rolled dead while the batter scampered home. During my brief stint in organized youth ball, I mostly played “left bench.”

  Certainly, we had no junior high team, and—football being “king”—my high school eliminated baseball from the varsity schedule long before I was born. After the grandstand blew away, they graded the old field and made it a parking lot for the football stadium. But we still played every chance we got. And in the games we organized ourselves in vacant lots and back yards, everyone got in and played all the positions. Left on their own, kids seemed to have an innate sense of fairness and a democratic distribution of fun. (One old coach I know opined that probably the best thing that could happen to youth league baseball would be the mandatory posting of signs on all ballpark gates: “No parents allowed.”) We all—boys, girls, all ages, even the kid crippled by polio—played.

  I remember one neighborhood game in particular: Tommy Hatcher’s backyard. A gravel street and a bar ditch ran through the outfield, and a home run was anything over the Brownlow’s fence, since the gate was always locked. Home plate was under a chinaberry tree, and first base backed up to a barn, so you couldn’t overrun it. We started early on a Saturday morning and played till full dark. There were no coaches, just kids managing by fiat and keeping meticulous account of batting orders. Dads, though, officiated. My father umpired for a while, so did Tommy’s, and other dads from the neighborhood drifted over and took turns calling balls and strikes, safes and outs. There were no rhubarbs, although a lo
t of calls were loudly disputed. Mothers brought out Kool-Aid and homemade cookies. The teams changed as kids came and went to do chores, eat dinner, go get haircuts or a new pair of Buster Browns; but on each side, a nucleus stayed the same. We played fifty-two innings. I don’t remember the score. It wasn’t important, wasn’t the point. The point was the game, itself. It was like school, like church, like visiting the old folks on Sunday afternoons. Baseball was something we just did.

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  Somewhere between that great series of Southwest Conference Football Championships racked up by UT and the Dallas Cowboys’ series of Super Bowl triumphs, I sort of lost interest in baseball. Even then, though, I was never comfortable when some beer-soaked, triple-chinned gridiron fan asserted that the NFL had replaced the American and National Leagues as the purveyors of the National Pastime. Tom Landry’s Cowboys might call themselves “America’s Team,” but I knew in my heart that they would never replace the fun-to-hate Yankees, no matter what one thought of George Steinbrenner.

  Football fans were, I suspected, ignoring an observable fact: A sweaty light-dozen muscular hulks in plastic armor running around once a week on a polyethylene carpet under a climate controlled ceiling could never replace the sweet symmetry and gentle grace of a baseball team. No football field and its crowded, raucous din could substitute for the aroma of grass on a diamond on a summer evening and the soughing ripple of conversations in the outfield bleachers. No football squad, hunkered down and muscled up on a striped grid could rival the sight of a bunch of lithe and limber guys standing with casual ease around a perfectly manicured diamond, scratching their crotches, spitting tobacco juice, and trying not to daydream until a hard liner shoots toward them and they sprint swiftly to snatch it from the air and smoothly fire it back to a teammate for an easy out. No football play with its body blocks and shoe-string tackles could ever match the charm and grace of nine men moving perfectly together like parts of a well-oiled machine. No marching band could match the steady rhythm of an organ building tempo for a key pitch. Football—and its attendant indoor imitator, basketball—could never be pastimes. They were for fanatics. Baseball was for fans.

  The arguments, however, became more pointed.

  “Baseball,” a friend of mine asserted back in the mid-seventies, “is ten minutes of excitement crammed into three hours.”

  “You just don’t understand it,” I argued. I became the kid I once was, picking up a timeworn gauntlet. “Look: there’s a pitcher and a batter. That’s the focus. The pressure is always there, first pitch to last out. The fielders, the catcher, the umpires—everyone else becomes integral to that center stage of dramatic action. From the wind-up to the swing, everything hinges on those two guys: who they are, their records, their tendencies, what they might or might not do. Every play is different, every situation unique. Prediction is only speculation. On every pitch, everything changes priority—the count, the score, the inning, who’s on base, who’s on deck, who’s in the bullpen—and it keeps right on changing, for twenty-seven outs, unless the score is tied. Then it changes again. It changes until somebody wins. It is exciting, damnit!”

  He laughed. “I’d rather watch golf.”

  I couldn’t see how anyone could fail to understand the sublime intensity of a ball hurtling toward a strike zone at nearly 100 miles per hour while a man with a round piece of wood in his hand attempted to “hit it where they ain’t.” It was raw ability versus raw strategy, timing vying with confidence, concentration pitted against focus. It was the only game in which the defense controlled the ball, for God’s sake. Baseball, I continued to argue, required intelligence to play. Instinct is secondary, talent is secondary. Even athletic ability is secondary. As one first baseman put it not long ago when he was accosted by a female reporter because of his unathletic, unhealthy habits, “Lady, I’m no athlete. I’m a baseball player.” Baseball is a game that’s played in the mind as it’s worked out on the diamond. What counts is the player’s mental alacrity, his ability to think at least three moves ahead, to know what to do in the event that any of a hundred of a thousand possibilities unfold with the rapidity of the swing of a bat.

  I also pointed out that the most often asked question by fans at a football or basketball game is, “What happened?” But I forgot about instant replay on modern scoreboards. “There’s nothing in baseball to match a two-minute drill,” my friend contended in rebuttal. “Or a draw play that works, or a Razzle-Dazzle, or a Hail Mary, or a broken play that brings fans to their feet, or an end-run that breaks out behind a wall of blockers.” His basketball fan buddies made similar arguments for a fast break or inside hookshot or three-point field goal from mid-court. We didn’t even get into hockey.

  I had to admit that a routine double-play, a hit-and-run, sacrifice fly, or intentional walk didn’t quite measure up, ordinarily, to those flurries of action. Even a close play at the plate, a diving catch at the warning track, or a suicide squeeze couldn’t really offer such excitement. Figuring the match-ups of lefty versus righty, pitching changes, and pinch-hitting all took time and slowed the pace. I confessed to myself that the specter of twenty-two men slamming their well-padded bodies against each other in fury every twenty-five seconds has more innate appeal than nine guys in knee-britches kicking the tops off of weeds, scratching and spitting, and waiting for something to happen. In theory, baseball is a noncontact sport that depends on developing strategy more than reactive response. So maybe it wasn’t America’s game, after all. Americans have never been all that much interested in strategy or response.

  “Kicking butts and taking names,” my friends insisted. “That’s the American way.”

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  I knew they were wrong, but I had no more arguments to muster. I hadn’t kept up with the game for years. I didn’t know any of the current players besides those whose names were in the news, more often than not because of some crime or scandal or outrageous money deal. So I tried watching a few innings on television, the estimable Game of the Week program. It was a revelation. I was shocked to realize that in the decades gone by, somehow, the players had all become mere boys, ten-to-fifteen years younger than I. Some of them didn’t look as if they shaved more than once a week. What, I wondered, happened to those old guys who used to be so formidable? Where were the baggy, woolen uniforms, the jowly pitchers, the stocky catchers? They all shaved every day, it seemed, and some were clearly having their hair styled. Who designed those odd little O.D.-style caps they were wearing? What was up with the plastic batting helmets? When did they stop chewing tobacco, smoking in the dugout? Where did those garishly colored uniforms come from? Why did their pant legs go down over their ankles, hiding their stockings and stirrups? Where was the umpire’s heavy balloon-style chest-protector? What was all this noise about designated hitters and free agency, and when did they start sliding into the bases head first? (My Little League coach would have benched me for that, had he not had me permanently on the bench, anyway.)

  The game had changed. I couldn’t understand it. I decided that maybe my friends were right. Maybe baseball had died and nobody but football fans knew it.

  Even though I hadn’t kept up, I had never completely lost interest in the game. I played a little softball in graduate school—casual competitions tied to Sunday afternoon barbeques and beer-drinking. But that wasn’t baseball. Then, when we moved near Houston I decided to renew my interest in the professional game by attending a few in the Astrodome. But, somehow, that wasn’t baseball, either. Baseball was never meant to be played indoors. I’m not terribly sure it was meant to be played at night. Wind, sun, humidity, soggy fields are as much a part of the game as bats and balls. In the Dome, everything was controlled; there were no natural variables. The lights were subdued and carefully aimed so they wouldn’t blind a fielder; and when the bat met the ball, it didn’t Crack! with that wonderful snapping surety that signals a hit. It only mushed. The noise from the huge scoreboard was distracting, and people were wandering around all
over the place when they weren’t doing “the wave.” Almost no one was watching the game.

  There were cheerleaders there, too. Cheerleaders for baseball?! Vendors in the stands; yes, some batboys; maybe a mascot; but cheerleaders? Cheerleaders belonged on a gridiron. You don’t cheer baseball. You root! You shout, curse, groan, whine, taunt, applaud and boo and yell for another beer or a hotdog. You just don’t cheer. (“Get a hit, Get a hit, Biiiig hit!”? C’mon.) The field had been used the previous evening by the Houston Oilers in a preseason contest, and the yard lines were still dimly in place, ruining the diamond’s purity. The groundsmen seemed to spread the dirt around the bags with a desultory attitude, as if fearful of getting it on the carpet. The stands were empty by the bottom of the sixth, even though it was a close game. Houston traffic can be murder; it and everything else was killing baseball!

  My attempt to update myself in averages and statistics failed, also. There were more teams now, three full divisions. My few friends who remained avid fans were so full of data that my mind swam trying to keep up with it all. Players seemed to change teams more often than they changed sanitaries. They didn’t even try to stay in the same league. The money was huge, and there was more talk of owners and managers than of players. Corked bats and juiced balls were in the news; so were gambling and steroids.