Late one September in 1975 as I was wrapping up my
one-season professional career playing third base for the Seraperos de Santillo
in the Mexican Baseball League, I almost got my head knocked off.
I was tired of playing ball for the first time in my life. I
was tired of the routine. I was tired of the dust. Tired of the dripping
showers and the rusty shower-heads in a dozen “visitors’” locker-rooms
scattered around that sad country. Even tired of the guys, guys I loved.
I was tired, I guess, of being a kid and playing a kids game
with a bunch of over-age kids. They were men, but they’d rather put Ben-Gay in
a guys jock-strap to burn his balls than read a newspaper or, god-forbid, a
book. Though I was just 17 at the time, I knew it was time to put away childish
things.
My friends back in the States were starting college and
going to tweedy football games at small elite colleges and bonking their tweedy
eyeballs out. While I was traveling through Mexico on rickety buses, picking
ground balls out of the infield dirt and swinging and missing. What’s more, my
right hand had swollen up to twice its usual size with two broken fingers that
I was playing through. I had stopped a line-drive with my non-glove paw,
knocking it down mittless and chucking the guy out by a yard.
I thought about what my life would be if I hadn’t sojourned
south. If instead I was taking Chaucer and macro-economics and doing all those
other things that everyone else was doing not because they wanted to, but
because, and I suppose this is tragic, they never thought about doing anything
else other than what everyone else was doing.
My friend Chris, my first friend when I transferred to a new
high-school, would eventually drop out of the college he had been programmed to
go to, and give up the life that had been prescribed for him and become a
long-haul trucker. He called me in Saltillo one evening, high on amphetamines,
speeding his freight, an 18-wheeler stuffed to the gunwales with watermelons
from Sacramento to New York. But he, too, eventually returned to the fold and
to college, earning, some years later a PhD. In neurophysics or something else
I surely don’t understand.
Maybe, I thought, I was always just better at leaving places
than staying places. Whenever things got too much for me, which they did often,
I would leave. Even in Saltillo—where for the first time I had people around me
who showed me love, Hector and Teresa, and at this point in the season, a girl
called Karmen, I would leave town for hours at a time and walk in the desert
until I was lost or it was dark and then find my way back groping among the
cactus and the javelinas.
This afternoon in particular, Francisco Moscow, a journeyman
lefthander called on me at my room in Hector’s house. Moscow was a marginal
player and like many marginal players was always looking for a new pitch, a new
delivery angle, anything that would give him a slice more of a chance to hold
on, and maybe become something more than marginal.
A lot of people do this. You see guys who swing and miss curveballs by a good
eight inches tinkering with how they hold their bat, how they stand at the
plate, even the size and weight of their lumber. No one, through the years, has
the courtesy or the honesty to yell at them that schoolyard taunt that soured
so many marginals from the game—‘Aunt Jemima makes a better batter.’
No, they’ll tinker till they die. Thinking if only they had
done this or that, they’d have accomplished this and that and made it big. I
suppose that’s most of life. Years of ‘if-onlys’ punctuated by one big and
final ‘never did.’
I headed out to the stadium with Moscow, picking up Uribe, a
guy who was always messing with his batting stroke along the way. We decided I
would mess around at catcher, Moscow would chuck to me—tinkering tinkering
tinkering—and Uribe would work on his hitting.
Why they picked me to catch, well, I dunno. I was never pals with those guys. I
guess they just picked me out as a tinkerer too. Only not on my game, maybe,
but my life.
I remember seeing, as I jogged out to the backstop, a
catcher’s mask, Buentello’s I think. But for whatever level of stupidity I was
ensconced in at the moment, I didn’t grab it and put it on. I caught Moscow
that afternoon without a shred of equipment on, save a catcher’s mitt that was
left in the bullpen and my old Riddell spikes that I had toted down from the
States.
Things went ok for about 20 pitches, Moscow grooving them to
Uribe so Uribe could get his bat going. Then I started working with Moscow.
Even though I was young, I was our manager, Hector Quesadilla’s favorite, his
prize pupil, his eyes and ears on the field. The other players, even the older
ones, listened to me. I suggested to Moscow that he work his curve straight
over the top, rather than dropping his arm and throwing three-quarters.
I inched up from where I was crouching to handle his
pitches. And Moscow tried his new delivery. Uribe swung late at the pitch and I
had leaned forward out over the plate and then, whack, Uribe’s bat at
full-swing met me square on the flat of my forehead.
I fell backward behind the plate and grabbed at the wound,
afraid to remove my clutch for the blood. I don't remember if I blacked-out or
not, but the next thing I remember is Uribe and Moscow crouching down beside me
speaking Spanish and me unable to understand a word of it. Finally, I removed
my hands from the point of impact, slowly, tentatively. Like I said, afraid of
the blood. But there was none.
The strangest thing was, I could no longer hear anything. I
just had Leadbelly’s “Bring Me Little Water, Silvie,” going through what was
left of my head.
Bring me little water, Silvie
Bring me little
water now.
Bring me little water, Silvie
Every little once in a while.
Don’t you hear me callin’
Don’t you hear me
now
Don’t you hear me
callin’
Every little once
in a while.
Don’t you see me
comin’
Don’t you see me
now
Don’t you see me
comin’
Every little once
in a while.
As I sang to myself, Moscow lifted me up to my feet. And then
he and Uribe got my arms over their shoulders and walked me slowly off the
field, my feet dragging in the dust like an old wounded soldier. They lay me on
a wooden bench in the still-empty locker-room and grabbed some ice-packs from
the old Frigidaire that was in the corner of Hector’s small office..
Hector came in—Uribe had called him from the payphone in the clubhouse—and he
got me standing and walking again. When he spoke to me, I still couldn’t understand Spanish.
Something in my head had gone haywire and he began speaking to me in his rough
approximation of English.
“My son, we ambulance to the hospital.”
“No,” I said, standing on my own, with only one hand
gripping a supporting girder. “No, I’m just a little rattle-brained.”
“Rat-brained,” Hector said. “You are a little rat-brained.”
“That’s right, I’ve played baseball too long without a
helmet. And it’s made me rat-brained.”
The ambulance came and with it, a doctor. He did the
requisite doctor things. Like you’d test a drunk-driver. Shining a light into
my eyes, feeling the grapefruit-sized lump on my noggin, having me touch the tip of my nose
with the tip of my finger. Everything seemed fine. I was even able to take in
Spanish again and speak it.
As you’d suspect, I sat that night, didn’t play. And Hector gave
hit me, Uribe, and Moscow each with a 250-peso fine, about $20. But he never
collected the money from any of us.
Least of all me.
He had to take it easy on me.
After all, I was rat-brained.