God, if You're Not Up There . . . (6 page)

In junior year, we got a new coach. At practice one day, while I was calling plays in the huddle—“Hut One! Hut Two!”—he said, “You gotta say it faster.”

I said, “Like H-T, instead of H-U-T?”

I might as well have dropped to my knees, pointed to his crotch, and pointed to my mouth. “I wouldn’t know about that.”

W
ith so much sin in my life, I was a haunted vessel, a satellite of the Dark One. I first got drunk on a Saturday night at the end of the summer before school started. I figured I was already ruined, since I’d been having sex. How much worse could it get?

My friend Ernie from the football team—a real tough kid—called me up one afternoon. “Come over to my house. We’ll get drunk, man. My parents are out of town.”

So we took two eight-ounce highball glasses, filled them roughly three-quarters of the way up with Seagram’s Seven, and added a little 7UP. And we drank them down. We had no idea we were handling nitroglycerin. The next thing I (vaguely) recall, we were slow-dancing with each other.

I was supposed to stay over at his house, but I ended up walking the five miles back to my house, vomiting the whole way. My parents came home from a party not long after me, and they came into my bedroom. My mother was trying to have a conversation with me, but I was unable to have that conversation. My father suddenly said, “Ohhhhhhh. Margaret, c’mon, let’s go to bed. Leave sombitch alone.”

The next morning, I was in church with my mother, desperately hung over and full of evil. I’d already had sex, and now I had gotten drunk, and I had slow-danced with my teammate. I was waiting for the gates of hell to open right there in the church, the winds to pick up, and the preacher to point his finger at me: “YOU!”

When nothing happened, I was even more confused. I knew guys were smoking pot and drinking and having sex, and none of us were going to hell. It threw me forever after. I was always nagged by the terrible reality that God had not shown Himself when I had sex, that God had not shown up when I drank two beers. The week after I drank all the Seven and 7s with Ernie and ended up slow-dancing with him, I hit a magnificent double in Eau Gallie.
Is God here? Does he care? Is he paying attention?

Then I thought, Maybe there is no God, and the whole structure started falling down for me.

A
nd then my mom caught me masturbating. As was her custom, she didn’t knock on the door, she just barged in. Since no one had explained to me what was happening to my body, and why my hands wanted to wander there, I was fumbling my way through that process as well. I was mortified.

My mother’s reaction was silent rage. In the days that followed, I’d walk up to her and try to have a conversation, and she’d behave like I wasn’t in the room at all. Finally, I grabbed her by the arm and said, “Why won’t you talk to me?”

“Why don’t you go into your room and pee on yourself?” she spat back.

I thought, Wow, this sex thing is really gonna work out good, huh?

Not long after this, my mother came up to me one day and, for no reason I could fathom, started hitting me, really trying to knock me off my feet. I was fourteen years old, and I was a good athlete, strong. I was probably four or five inches taller than her. I put my arms out in front of me and let her swing away at me in her blind fury. She kept swinging and slapping, and then, too tired to raise her arms anymore, she stopped and looked at the ground. That was the end of it.

I had reached puberty and was changing into a full-blown fur-bearing sexual creature, and it had made me an object of scorn. I had every reason to believe that I was a malignant and terrible person for allowing this to happen to my own body, as if I were somehow responsible for it all.

CHAPTER THREE

There’s Something Wrong Here

W
hen I was still in grade school, my grandfather decided to pull his money out of the Western Auto business. My father couldn’t keep it going on his own, and the store went bankrupt. Ironically, my sister and parents and I had to move in with my paternal grandparents on the western side of Florida in Tampa while my father found work as a traveling sporting goods salesman. After a year or two, he was able to move us back to our house in Melbourne—they’d rented it out while we were gone—so from then on my father was on the road a lot.

But he took a great interest in my young baseball career. He came to as many of my Little League games as he could. The second year I played, I graduated to Babe Ruth League, and my team had the great misfortune of being sponsored by Howard’s Meats. (Go ahead, laugh. Nobody can laugh about that name more than a bunch of thirteen-year-old boys did.) My dad became assistant coach.

My father and I became obsessed with the 297 sign in the outfield at Wells Park. One day during the winter when nobody was there, he took me out to the field and stood at the plate, explaining why a hanging curveball was important if I wanted to get beyond that sign.

“If the pitcher puts his finger on the wrong seam, throws a two-seam curveball instead of a four-seam curveball, and that ball hangs in the air just for a second before it breaks down to the plate,” and he pointed to the 297 sign and, with missionary zeal, said, “Buddy, that sumbitch [pause for effect] is
gone
.”

It was one of the most exciting afternoons of my life. None of the boys could hit a ball over that fucking fence, but he was telling me I could. After years of being terrified of him, it was nice to have him on my side about something.

“Some time in your life, someone’s gonna hang you one right up there, and, buddy, it’s gone.” It was like Billy Graham saying, “Mine eyes have seen the coming of the Lord!”

Throughout his life, my dad had this charming habit of standing up whenever something in a game excited him, even if he was just watching the Florida Gators on his TV at home. So I knew I was doing well when he stood up during one of my games.

But my father being my father, there was a downside to his being so involved in my baseball world. During one game, there was an argument with the umpire, and my father must have had some Hitler flashback, because he went to the opposing coach, in front of the entire community, put his finger in his chest, and threatened to kick the guy’s ass.

When I was in high school, the opposing coach became the varsity baseball coach. From then on, if I didn’t get a hit my first time up, the coach would bench me. I didn’t handle the rejection very well, and I started to bat terribly.

Part of the problem was playing football. I played football until my junior year, when I threw my arm out due to improper weightlifting technique. I also got knocked out three times. In boxing they say a boxer has a glass jaw, which means if you pop him on the chin, he’ll go down. I have a glass head. If you hit me on the top of the head, you knock me out. By the time I was done, I had done permanent damage to my throwing arm as well as my back and knees.

Another part of the problem was my drinking. My buddies and I drank together a fair amount, but I had also started drinking alone. I didn’t know I was suffering from depression, or where it came from, I just knew I had this great need to escape myself. I started saving my lunch money and going to this store where this zombie who appeared to have been recently unearthed, and who always seemed to have a dab of mayonnaise in the corner of his mouth, would sell us booze. I would sit in my closet in the dark with a bottle of vodka, and if I drank enough, I could imagine that I wasn’t part of my world. By the time I got to be fourteen or fifteen, I drank almost every day.

I was still trying to play baseball. I fully intended to make the major leagues. Even though I was drinking too much to really perform the way I could have, I was still good, if unreliably so. When I was sixteen, I finally conquered the 297 sign. In fact, there was a slab of concrete about eighteen feet long beyond the sign, and I was able to hit a ball well onto that concrete.

Then they built this gorgeous new field out in the forest where we played American Legion ball. Nearly three-quarters of all college players played Legion ball in high school, and more than half of all major leaguers did as well, including Yogi Berra, Ted Williams, and current New York Yankees first baseman Mark Teixeira. More than fifty Legion players ended up in the Baseball Hall of Fame. So, you know, no pressure.

Anyway, the fence in left, for reasons that no one could quite understand, was 340. One day, I hit a ball over that fence. My father was at that game, and he paced it off to 420.

M
y father hit me for the first and only time that year. When I got depressed, which happened more and more often then, he would say, “You got yourself sulled up,” which is “sullen” in normal people parlance. I guess I’d finally gotten sulled up once too often, and it pissed him off. Before I knew what was happening, he popped me a shot to the face.

Not long after that, I came home drunk one night, and my father started yelling at me in front of my friends. I was pretty big then, but still, they don’t call it “liquid courage” for nothing. I got up in his face.

“My whole life you’ve been telling me you’re gonna knock me halfway through that wall. Do it. Let’s go.”

After threatening me all those years, now he simply looked at me and walked away.

M
y batting had become so bad that I struck out the first twelve times I was up during my senior year. My father stopped coming to the games because I was striking out every single time I got up. But on my thirteenth at bat, against Cocoa Beach, I hit a fabulous home run at Wells Park. It was a fantastic relief, but it wasn’t to last.

I
tried out for the baseball team with my friends at Brevard Community College. I hit really well during fall practice, and I made the starting lineup for the spring. This was no small feat. A bunch of the guys on the team would be recruited by the majors: Greg Fairbanks was drafted by the Texas Rangers; Jeff Simons and Marshall Harper by the Chicago White Sox; and Mark Van Bever by the Phillies.

And Bruce Bochy, our catcher, was drafted in the first round in 1975 by the Houston Astros. After playing for the Astros, the San Diego Padres, and the New York Mets, he became a manager, spending twelve years with the Padres, earning them a National League pennant. In 2010 he took the San Francisco Giants all the way to the World Series—and won. (In high school and junior college, a bunch of us would go dancing at local nightclubs. We all imitated his dance, which we called “The Boche.” To all you Giants players, ask the Skip how it goes, it’s a real panty dropper.)

Meanwhile, I went to a couple of different radio stations in Melbourne with little sports shows that I’d record for free. I interviewed players in the area, including members of my own team. The broadcasts ran in the middle of the night, but the interviews were pretty good—I knew what it was to be a jock, I had access, and I was free, so they let me go on the air.

The first day of the season was at Twins Field in Melbourne, where the Minnesota Twins farm club trained. It was one of those crazy days that any hitter knows about, when you know you’re going to make something happen that day. You can feel it. My father came and threw a few balls to me before the game, and I was popping them out of the park. I even hit a line drive that glanced off his head.

I got up in the first inning and walked. The guy didn’t throw me anything close to the plate.

And then it started raining.

The next day I woke up with a fever. I stayed sick for three weeks. I thought God was finally punishing me for having had sex with Miriam Bonaparte.

In my place, the coach put in my friend Wayne Tyson. Wayne and I were batting practice buddies, but he hadn’t made the original starting lineup. Now he was spectacular. He hit from the left side, spraying the ball all over the place. He had super speed to first base. He kept my spot for the rest of the season. It made things awkward between us, and we didn’t hang out much anymore.

I still played from time to time that year. In a game against Seminole Community College, I saw my first slider. Greg Fairbanks had a ninety-something-mile-an-hour fastball, and I could hit that, but I couldn’t hit a slider. I couldn’t hit a curveball that looked like a fastball. Either you are as fast as a cat chasing a feather, or you’re not. George Brett was. Bochy was. Marshall Harper was.

That’s when I realized I wasn’t going to play major league baseball.

I tried to play the following year, but with that slider in my mind, my heart wasn’t in it. I made the team, but I didn’t hit well, so I failed to make the starting lineup. If I wasn’t going to make the major leagues, then there wasn’t anything in it for me.

About midway through the season in my sophomore year, I quit.

S
oon after, while at a school party, I cut myself for the first time with a serrated steak knife I’d found in the kitchen of the house where we were. I made the cut on the side of my wrist. It wasn’t just my failed baseball career, but this overwhelming sense that something major was wrong with me that prompted me to do it. It was my way of telling the world.

Three of my good friends carried me upstairs to the bathroom and cleaned me up. No one ever spoke of it again.

The next time I cut myself, I was alone at home, and I targeted my knee. It bled so badly it wouldn’t stop. My father came home unexpectedly to find the kitchen floor red with my blood.

He looked at me and said, “You’re sick.”