As happens so often when you play, either as an amateur or a professional, either as an "I-wanna" or an "I-can," I got plunked in the noggin during a late inning of the first game of a twilight twin-bill.
When I started playing ball for serious in say 1973, when I first started showing up as "good" and as "someone to watch," batting helmets were about as primitive as an old DuMont television set. The kind of sets that took a good ten-minutes to warm up and had you getting in a Muhammad Ali sparring session with the vertical hold. You did more punching against the set's wooden cabinet than most fighters do during a three-round prelim.
The helmets I wore in my playing days were not heavy, lusty affairs like players today wear. I liken them to the chocolate sauce soda jerks would dip a cone in. The helmets were basically a thin shell congealed over your cerebellum--more to give you the idea that you had some protection than actually providing real protection. Even after Tony Conigliaro was almost killed by a fastball to his eye-socket, the strength of helmets was more cosmetic than functional. If a drunken sparrow flew into your head, you might be lost for three games or a week.
All that being said, a fastball aimed at my temple led me to a reunion with my unconscious in the Mexican dirt. I lay sprawled on the ground, kicking my legs with pain. When I woke up and saw a horde of grim faces around me, I noticed also the slow floating particulate of dust wafting down to earth from the heavens. It looked peaceful almost. I felt almost like the horse in Frost's great poem, "Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening."
Two teammates flanked me and we flight-of-the-bumblebee'd the 20 or 30 shuffles back to the clubhouse. I tottered like a 40-year-old drunk ending year twenty-seven of a twenty-five-year-bender.
I sat on the bench in front of my locker. Someone handed me a small dixie cup of ice-water, someone else poured the same over my head. Thin mud washed through my scalp like a summer rain on a dirt road.
Jesus Verduzco, our backup short-stop and third-year medical student at Tecnológico de Monterrey, whom we all called pre-maturely "el doctor," came over with a few clean towels and a galvanized bucket filled with ice. With skilled hands he constructed a compress--a sandwich of ice and terry--and guided me to lay down on the varnish.
"Are you dizzy," Verduzco asked me in passable English. "Do you have an ache in the head?"
"I am seeing three of you," I answered staring up at him like a knocked-down boxer the referee. "Are there three of you?"
"It is just me," Verduzco said. "Alone."
He grabbed each of my hands and tugged. He was checking to see if I offered back strength and resistance. He felt at the knot on my head, had me pivot onto my side and applied another cold compress to the cranial insult.
By this time game one was over. It would be a half hour before game two and the team came in for a smoke and beer or a sandwich. Hector came right to me.
"You are ok, Jorge," he asked/told me. "He is ok, Jesus," he asked/told Verduzco.
"I am ok," I answered/lied. Not wanting my pain to get in the way of my toughing out of the pain. "I already am feeling twenty-percent less bleary than just a minute ago."
Verduzco again pressed around with his thumb. He origami'd another compress and applied it. "It feels pain," he asked in his passable English. "It feels less pain," I answered in my unpassable Spanish.
"We lost game one" Hector said to me. "Do you think you can play in game two. I am not so desperate as to call on Perez-Abreu."
I am one of those benighted souls who plays through pain. Before too long it's expected of you. The pain still hurts. But no one knows that. They just count on you. That's the real cost of pain, living with it in silence.
Fernando Perez-Abreu, a back-up utility man was in his fourth season in the Mexican Baseball League. He was good with leather but had yet to hit anywhere near his weight.
"I am seeing three of you, Little Cheese," I answered. When I joined the Seraperos de Saltillo, I had el-Norte'd Hector's full-name, Hector Quetzacoatl Padilla into the more or less palatable Hector Quesadillo. This in my addle I had truncated into mere "Little Cheese."
"I have many times been kicked in the head by the horse," Hector said. He had pulled up two small folding chairs, with a thin ass-cushion on the seat. One chair was for him and one was for Verduzco. Hector had one loving hand holding my compress in place. The other held my left hand in his. He held it like I was seven and scared of a lightning storm.
"There are many times we are kicked in the head by the horse," Hector continued. "This is the natural confluence of head and the fates. This is like rocks and waves. It is like tax and collector. It is like axe and the neck of the turkey."
"It is like Prometheus and eagle."
Hector laughed with me on that one and squeezed tighter my hand.
The in-between mayhem of 25 men between games was in the triple decibels. The raucous bounced off the metallic of the lockers, the linoleum of the floor and the tile of the showers. But my head shut it down. I could hear only Hector and feel only the love that traveled like an electrical pulse from his hand to mine and through my 178-pounds.
"There are many times we see triple, hear triple, get kicked in the ass triple." He was reverie-ing now, like a Shakespearean tearing through twenty-stanzas of the Bard. "We have triple the pain. Triple the hurt. Triple the musts. Triple the not-understanding. We have three of pain. But we must not not show up. We must be triple times triple stronger than the seeing-three of the pain."
"I am seeing still three of you," I said, opening slowly and closing my eyes. When it hurts to blink, that is when you know you know pain.
"You will play tonight," Hector squeezed. "Tomorrow the pain will be less but because of your strength your self with be more."
"And when I am in the field and I see three not one grounder hop my way, or when I am up at the plate and see three not one curveball break high and into my power, when I see triple, Little Cheese, what then?"
Hector laughed.
He removed once again the compress from my temple. He handed the wet towel to Verduzco and he quickly re-filled the towel with melting ice. Hector, with love, lay the compress on my wound. He did not believe in anything larger than himself, but with his eyes he mouthed a short imprecation--hoping the gods would respond. Take from Jorge the pain, he said.
He caressed the compress so as not to caress me.
"When you see three grounders bounding your way, or three curveballs fat like a holiday supper," he said, "When you see three, do what always I did."
Silence so as not to interrupt timing as universal as the cosmic Borscht Belt.
"Do what always I did," he said, "Grab the middle one."
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