The Moth (31 page)

A few days later, sure enough, a letter arrived in the mail on official Yankee letterhead. It invited me to come up to the stadium for an interview with Nick Priore, who was the clubhouse manager.

So I put my jacket and tie on. I didn’t even tell any of my friends about this, because it was way, way too weird to explain. I took the 4 train up to the stadium. This was October, and the Yankees weren’t playing in the World Series back in ’91, so it was very quiet. I walked into the Yankee lobby, and there was a security guard there.

I introduced myself, and I said, “I’m here for the batboy interview.”

He picks up the telephone, and he’s like, “Nick, some kid’s here to see you,” and he says to me, “Have a seat.”

So I sit down in the pinstripe lobby, and I’m passing about ten minutes waiting for this guy, Nick, to come up for the first job interview of my life. I’m trying to think of the questions that he might ask me. I’m ready to tell him what my favorite subject is in school, why I think the Yankees need a big bat behind Mattingly to win the pennant next year, and what Mickey Mantle’s batting average was in 1956.

I’m passing the time, when these double doors burst open, and this guy walks in—obviously Nick, but he doesn’t introduce himself. He could be anywhere from forty to eighty years of age. He has this greased-back hair and a stogie between the two teeth left in his mouth and a chaw of tobacco. He’s wearing a wife-beater T-shirt, blue Yankees shorts, and white athletic socks pulled up to his knees. He has these black sneakers that are obviously shoe polished.

He looks at me and says, “Are your parents gonna mind you taking the train home late at night?”

So I say, “I take the train to school every day. I think it’ll be fine.”

And he says, “Well, come back Opening Day.”

I go home. I think I have the job. I’m not really sure. Six months later, Opening Day in 1992, I put on my jacket and tie, and I show up at the stadium at 9
A.M.
I go back downstairs, through these tunnels, and come to this big steel door—the Yankee Clubhouse.

I walk inside, and it’s complete pandemonium.

All these ballplayers that I’d only seen before on TV or across rows and rows of stadium seats are here in the flesh, right in front of me. I had a poster of Don Mattingly above my bed for my whole life, and he’s standing on the right. Jimmy Key, the ace of the pitching staff, is over there.

Opening Day at Yankee Stadium is not just a sports event. It’s a news event, and it’s the beginning of spring in New York City. Mayor Dinkins was in the clubhouse with his entourage, and like, it’s
Mayor Dinkins
and
Don Mattingly
, you know? I’m walking around, and I’m kinda lost, and I figure I better go find Nick.

So I walk up to Nick, and I say, “Nick, I’m Matt. We met a couple months ago. This is my first day of work. What do you want me to do?”

And he says, “Stay the f—outta my way.”

I kind of shrink back and throw my backpack over on the side, and I’m wandering around in a daze, when I feel a tap on my shoulder. I turn around, and it’s Don Mattingly.

He sticks his hand out, and he says, “How’s it going? I’m Don Mattingly. Are you gonna be working with us this year?”

I’d never really thought about the experience in those terms. He could’ve said so many other things that wouldn’t have been as cool.

He could’ve said, “Who are you? Are you the new batboy? Are you gonna be working
for
us this year?”

But he said, “I’m Don Mattingly. Are you gonna be working
with
us this year?”

So I said, “I know who you are, Mr. Mattingly. I’m Matt. I’m the new batboy.”

He’s like, “Great to meet you, Matt. I have a very big job to ask of you. I’ve just unpacked all my bats from spring training, and I don’t know if it was the altitude of the flight up from Florida or the humidity down there or what, but the game starts in about two hours, and I need you to find me a bat stretcher.”

I say, “Okay.”

I go and find Nick, but Nick is busy. Probably half a dozen ballplayers are bothering him for batting gloves or AA batteries or this or that.

I walk up to him, and I’m like, “Nick, I need a bat stretcher for Don Mattingly.”

Nick lets loose with a stream of expletives that fell on—I swear—completely virgin ears. I’d never heard that type of language in the movies before or anywhere, let alone directed at me.

So I rock back on my heels and go and find Nick’s assistant, Rob.

And I say, “I need a bat stretcher for Don Mattingly, and Nick told me to go f—myself, and I don’t know what to do.”

So Rob goes, “Chill out. I saw Danny Tartabull using one in his locker.” Danny Tartabull is the new power-hitting right fielder.

I go to Tartabull’s locker, and he’s getting dressed in his uniform. I stand off on the side, and he says, “How’s it going?”

And I’m like, “Fine. I’m Matt. I’m the new batboy. I need a
bat stretcher for Don Mattingly, and I heard you were just using one.”

Tartabull says, “Well, I was using one, but I left it in the manager’s office. You should probably go check in there.”

I say, “Thanks,” and I go into the manager’s office. I walk in, and Buck Showalter, the manager, is having a press conference with probably eight or ten reporters. I stand off on the side, and the conversation comes to a standstill basically because there’s a sixteen-year-old kid there in his Easter blazer and jacket, standing in the manager’s office at Yankee Stadium two hours before first pitch on Opening Day, looking very lost and anxious.

Showalter turns to me, and he’s like, “Can I help you?”

And I say, “I’m Matt. I’m the new batboy. I’m really sorry to interrupt, but I need a bat stretcher for Don Mattingly, and Danny Tartabull says that he left it in here.”

So Showalter looks down beneath his desk. Then he’s like, “Well do you need a right-handed one or a left-handed one?”

This is the first question I heard that day that I could answer with complete confidence, because you couldn’t have grown up in New York at that time without knowing that Mattingly was the best left-handed hitter in baseball.

I say, “I need a left-handed bat stretcher.”

Showalter says, “Well, I think we maybe have a right-handed one around here, but probably not a left-handed one. You should try down at the Red Sox clubhouse. See if they have one.”

So I said, “Okay, thanks. I’m sorry to interrupt.” By this point, I’m sprinting down the hallways in the tunnels beneath the stands. I run into the Red Sox clubhouse and find their equipment manager and give him the whole story [
talking very quickly
]: “I’m Matt. I’m the new batboy for the Yankees, and
Danny Tartabull left his right-handed bat stretcher in Buck Showalter’s office, but I need a left-handed one, and the game’s about to start.”

He’s like, “Calm down. We don’t have one, but we
need
one. Here’s twenty bucks. Go up to the sporting goods store on 161st Street and River Avenue and buy two—a left-handed one for Mattingly and a right-handed one for us—and then bring me back the change.” He gives me the $20. I put it in my pocket. I run upstairs.

By now, it’s an hour before first pitch on Opening Day. Fifty thousand fans are coming down from the subway in the opposite direction that I’m walking. I’m the only person in the world who knows that if I don’t come through on this mission, Mattingly’s gonna go up there against Roger Clemens and the Red Sox on Opening Day at Yankee Stadium with a toothpick in his hand, basically.

So I’m fighting against the crowd and feeling so much weight on my shoulders. I’m making my way through, and I’m about to cross the threshold of Stan’s Sporting Goods, when it dawns on me… I’ve played a lot of baseball in my life, and I’ve been a big fan for a while, and I don’t even know what a bat stretcher looks like.

At that moment it dawns on me for the first time:
Is this a joke? Could this possibly be a joke?

But I had so much fear, because if I go back, and I tell Don Mattingly, “I’m too smart to fall for your BS bat stretcher story,” and I’m wrong, I’m gonna be back in the bleachers before my first game and lose my dream job.

So I take three laps around the stadium, convincing myself,
It’s gotta be a joke. It’s gotta be. It’s gotta be a joke.
Then I walk back in. I go down the stairs. I walk into the clubhouse. Mattingly
winks at me from across the clubhouse, a couple of the other ballplayers laugh.

Mattingly goes three for four that day. Yankees win. It was my first day in pinstripes.

I didn’t learn until later on that I was the first kid in anyone’s memory to have gotten the job without having a connection, without somebody knowing somebody or their dad knowing somebody. And you know, as naïvely intense as I was in chasing that bat stretcher, I was perhaps as intensely naïve to think I could get a job working with the Yankees. But the lesson to me is that with a great deal of persistence and a little bit of common sense, even if the thing you’re chasing may not exist, you can sometimes will it into being.

Matthew McGough
is the author of
Bat Boy: Coming of Age with the New York Yankees
(Doubleday, 2005). From 2006 to 2010, he was a writer for NBC’s
Law & Order
. His next book, about the Stephanie Lazarus cold case and the Los Angeles Police Department, is forthcoming from Times Books. His author website is www.matthewmcgough.com.

JEFFERY RUDELL

I
n all honesty I admit I sometimes lie. Occasionally I will include a tiny lie in a story I’m telling if I think it will make the story better. I don’t do it to protect the innocent, because I don’t know any stories where the people in them are innocent. I don’t do it to be shocking either, though I admit to once telling a story where I exaggerated the length of my penis. In my own defense I exaggerated down and not up, and I did it for the laugh.

The story I’m telling you tonight does not have a lie in it, or many laughs for that matter. When I’m done telling you this story, you may think it’s nothing but a lie, but I’d ask you to trust me on this.

At the age of nineteen I fell prey to a powerful and deeply corrupting influence. It dogged me for six years, costing me many a friend and in the process bringing my family to ruin. It crippled me to such an extent that I have spent the intervening years recovering from it.

The influence I speak of is Hope.

You should know from the get-go, there was nothing in my childhood to suggest I might find myself on such a wayward
path. My parents loved me terribly. They taught me right from wrong. They taught me to be courageous in the face of bullies. They taught me patience and forgiveness. They taught me that love would see me through any misfortune.

My trouble began on Independence Day. Not
the
Independence Day but
my
Independence Day. My Independence Day occurred on Memorial Day 1982. That was the day I told my family I was gay. The act itself—“Mom, Dad, I’m gay”—was relatively unexceptional. In fact, it should have been more exceptional, and I’ve always wished that it had been. However, subsequent events overshadowed it, and it pales by comparison.

The subsequent events took place in my absence, after the fact, as I was in my car driving back to college to take my final freshman exams. I remember being on the highway and thinking how I had expected my parents to sort of freak out and how, much to my surprise, they had not freaked out. They’d been calm and cool—oddly calm and cool. Still, I was happy as I drove back to college. Meanwhile, subsequent events were busy unfolding back home.

My mother was going through the house where I grew up and was gathering things I had made for her: a jewelry box when I was in 4-H, a painting when I was sixteen, a box containing all the letters I’d written from camp and from college. She was removing photographs from the walls and placing them in piles. She was directing my father, who never dared
not
follow her direction, to take my bed and lamp, my desk and chair, the Smith Corona—my Smith Corona even!—and put them all in the front yard, next to the rock garden, not too close to the maple tree. My clothes, my books, my bookcases, my report cards, my Farrah Fawcett posters, my shoes, three years’
worth of
Interview
magazines—the good ones with the Andy Warhol covers—everything.

Then, with my brother and my sister and my grandparents watching, my mother removed a cigarette from a tiny crocheted case she always kept them in, lit the cigarette, and then put the match to the pile of items, there in the front yard, that contained the sole and complete record of my existence in my family.

It burned for seven and a half hours, thanks in part to the addition of some lighter fluid to help get the larger pieces of furniture going. All of it, all of what was me and mine prior to that memorable Memorial Day, up in flames. According to my sister, who years later related these details to me, it was a mighty impressive blaze. In their eagerness to feed the fire, and due to an unexpected wind off the fields around the house, the sugar maple that was older than my great-grandfather caught a spark in its branches and was sacrificed.

They cut off all communication with me. They emptied and closed our joint bank account: poof, there goes college. They barred the door. They stopped talking, stopped answering my letters, stopped taking my calls. They stopped everything with me. They just stopped.

I was completely disbelieving. This didn’t make sense. My friends all had stories about telling their parents they were gay, and they all ended the same way; sooner or later everything worked out fine. My friend Michael’s parents had reacted harshly at first, but within a year they were inviting his new boyfriend to come home with him for the holidays. Everyone counseled me to have a little patience and have a little hope.

And this is how it starts, slowly, just a little hope, just enough to get you through. But hope is cumulative. A little bit here and a little bit there, builds up in the system until it becomes
something toxic: denial. I grant you their reaction had been, yes, extreme, but not the
worst
that could happen. The thing for me to do, I thought, was to be a good son, to make them proud, to somehow earn back their love.