Love and Other Ways of Dying (52 page)

It’s a sentiment that the twenty-seven-year-old Posada takes to heart. And it’s not just Posada. Sandy Alomar, Jr., the catcher for the Cleveland Indians, wears number 15 on his uniform in memory of the man he calls his favorite player, a connection he was proud to acknowledge even when the Indians met the Yankees for the American League pennant last year. He says it brings him luck.

I try to imagine guys like Derek Jeter and Jorge Posada five, ten, fifteen years from now. Even as they’ve really just begun to play, they will stare down the ends of their careers, on their way to the Hall of Fame or whatever endorsement deal or restaurant ownership pops up. You play hard, hoard your memories, and then suddenly you can’t see the ball or you get thrown out at second on what used to be a stand-up double, you separate a shoulder that won’t heal or just miss your wife and children, and
then you go home to Kalamazoo or Wichita or Canton, Ohio. And then who are you, anyway? Just another stiff who played ball.

Except you get the second half of your life. You get to try to resurrect yourself as the person you most want to be.

The house that Thurman Munson built first appears in a vision. One day Thurman Munson and his wife are driving around the suburbs of New Jersey when they turn a corner. Thurman Munson hits his brakes and says, Whoa, I have to live in that house! I’m serious, Diana, that’s my dream house! It speaks to some ideal, something orderly, regal, and Germanic in him, a life beyond baseball, an afterlife, and he sheepishly rings the doorbell and does something he never does. I play catcher for the New York Yankees, he says, and I have to live in this house. I mean, not now.… I just want the plans. I promise you I won’t build this house in New Jersey. This will be the only one of its kind in New Jersey. I’d build it in Canton, Ohio. This house. In Canton.

The woman eyes him suspiciously, takes his name and number, says her husband will call him. He figures that’s the end of that. But the husband calls. Invites the Munsons for dinner. By then Thurman Munson has composed himself, and the man eventually gives him the plans. And then it really begins—years of Sisyphean work. First they have to find the perfect piece of land, which takes forever. Then, instead of hiring a contractor, Thurman Munson subs out the job, picks everything right down to the light fixtures himself. He gets stone for the fireplace from New Jersey; stone for the rec room from Alaska; stone for the living room from Arizona. He wants crown moldings in all the rooms. He wants a lot of oak and high-gloss and hand-carved cabinets. In the rec room, a big walk-down bar … then, no, wait a minute,
not a big bar, a small bar, and more room to play with the kids. Pillows on the floor to listen to Neil Diamond on the headphones.

He flies home on off days during the season to check how things are going. But they’re never going well enough. Thurman Munson rages and bellyaches. He throws tantrums. He has walls torn down and rebuilt. He chews out the workers like Billy Martin all over an ump. Like his own father all over him. The guys start to hide when they know he’s coming. Sure, you want your house to look nice, but this guy’s nuts. He’s dangerous. He’s Lear. He’s Kurtz. He’s a dick.

And the stone keeps coming. From Hawaii, Georgia, Colorado …

Then finally it’s done. It’s 1978. Thurman Munson’s father, the truck driver, has abandoned his mother, moved to the desert, is working in a parking lot in Arizona, a dark shadow in a shack somewhere, and Thurman Munson moves his own family into the house that Thurman Munson built.

Something lifts off his shoulders then—after all the tumult, after the two World Series victories, after his body has begun to fail, after the constant rippings in the press. And yet, he’s also become more inward and circumspect. He doesn’t hang out with Goose and Nettles and Catfish for a few pops after games anymore. No, many nights, nights in the middle of a home stand, even, he goes straight to Teterboro Airport, where he keeps his plane, and flies back to Diana and the kids, follows the lights of the highway, the towns of Lancaster and Altoona and Clarion flashing below and the stars flashing above, until Canton appears like a bunch of candles. Sometimes he’s home by midnight.

And here’s the odd thing now: There’s always someone in the house when he comes through the door. There’s Thurman Munson and Thurman Munson’s wife and Thurman Munson’s kids, but there is someone else, too. A part of himself in this
house. A presence, a feeling around the edge of who he is that waits for a moment to penetrate, to prick his consciousness, to change him once, forever.

Until it does: One summer evening on a day with no game when Thurman Munson has had three home-cooked meals and the family has finished dinner and the kids are playing. Diana is in the kitchen tidying, washing dishes. Thurman Munson is wearing a blue-and-white-checked shirt and gray slacks. He rolls up his sleeves, lights a cigar, goes out back, and lounges in a lawn chair, feet up on the brick wall. He’s never one to relax, always has a yellow legal pad nearby, running numbers for some real estate deal. But it’s that quiet time of evening, a few birds softly chirping in the maples, blue shadows falling over the backyard, the sweet scent of tobacco. Thurman Munson just gazes intently at the sparklers of lights in the trees, a wraith of smoke around him.

Diana glances out the kitchen window and sees his big, blue-and-white-checked back, sees Thurman Munson shaking his head. A little while later she looks out the window and again he’s shaking his head. And then again, until she can’t stand it any longer, and she barges out there and says, What are you looking at? Why are you shaking your head? Thurman Munson doesn’t seem to know what to say, but when he looks at her, his eyes are all lit up and he’s crying. It’s one of the only times she’s ever seen him cry.

I just never thought any of this would be possible, he says. And that’s it. For one brief moment, the man he is and the man he wants to be meet on that back lawn, become one thing, and then it overwhelms him.

After the crash, the psychiatrist told Diana to get rid of her husband’s clothes quickly or it would just get harder and harder. So that’s what she did, she got rid of Thurman Munson’s clothes, the hunting vest and bell-bottom pants, the bad hats and suits and
coats. It took an afternoon, going through his entire wardrobe. Sometimes it made her laugh—to imagine him again. Sometimes it was harder than that. And she got rid of almost everything.

But that blue-and-white-checked shirt—she kept that.

I go to Catfish Hunter’s farm in Hertford, North Carolina, not far from the Outer Banks, on a swampy summer night. He owns more than a thousand acres, grows cotton, peanuts, corn, and beans, and after retiring at the age of thirty-three, this is where he came. Always knew he was going to come back here after baseball, just thought his daddy would be here, too. But he died a week before Thurman Munson. The darkest days of Catfish’s life. Out in the fields, living with the ghost of his father, sometimes something would pop into his mind and he would remember Thurman.

He could make a $500 suit look like $150, says Catfish now, then he smiles. In the past year, the fifty-three-year-old former pitcher has been diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or Lou Gehrig’s disease. Started as a tingle in his right hand when he was signing autographs down at Woodard’s Pharmacy for the Lions Club in the spring, then he had to use two hands to turn the ignition on his pickup when he went dove hunting, by Halloween knew something was seriously wrong, and now his arms hang limply at his sides. Seems farcical and cruel. The same arm that won 224 games, that helped win five World Series rings, that put him in the Hall of Fame, lies dead next to him. Wife and kids and brothers and buddies help feed him, take him to the pee pot. And then no telling what the disease will do next.

If Thurman had played five more years, he’d own half the Yankees, says Catfish. Everybody liked the guy. The whites, the blacks, the Hispanics. We sit on a swing by the side of the house,
the fields stretching behind us, family and friends out on the front lawn watching Taylor, the four-year-old grandchild, bash plastic baseballs with a plastic bat. A fly buzzes Catfish, but he can’t lift his arms to wave it away. Even if he could, I’m not sure he would now. Remembering Thurman Munson keeps bringing Catfish back to his father, the proximity of their deaths, a double blow with which he still hasn’t really come to terms. And his own condition—a thing suddenly hurtling him nearer to the end.

Every time I came home from playing ball, says Catfish, the first thing I always did was go over and see my dad. He lived seeing distance from here. My wife said, You think more of your daddy than you do of me. And every day that we went hunting, my wife would fix us bologna-and-cheese or ham-and-cheese sandwiches and every day I ate two and he ate one. When Thurman died, his uniform was still hanging in his locker. I just thought he was going to come back. Every time I walked in the clubhouse, I thought he was coming back.

His eyes well with tears, he seems to look out over the road, reaching for his daddy again or Thurman Munson, then shakes his head once. Remembers a story: Pitching to Dave Kingman in the All-Star Game, the same Dave Kingman who hit a Catfish change-up in a spring-training game for a home run the length of two fields, and here he is again, and here is Thurman Munson calling for a change-up again. Catfish shakes it off and Thurman Munson trundles to the mound, says, Gotta be shitting me, won’t throw the change-up. Millions of people watching tonight that’d love to see him hit that long ball. Oh, let him hit it as long as he can! Munson goes back, shows the change-up, Catfish throws a fastball and pops him up. When he goes to the dugout, Thurman Munson shakes his head. Gotta be shitting me, he says, won’t throw the change-up, then walks away.

Yes, Thurman Munson might put you on like that, but Catfish
says he only saw him truly angry once. Saw the napalm Thurman Munson, the one who sought to undo the other Thurman Munsons. Some corporate sponsor gives Munson and Catfish a white Cadillac to drive around for the summer, and the two cruise everywhere in it. One night after a game, they walk out and see the front windshield is smashed, all these glass spider-webs running helter-skelter. Catfish isn’t happy, but Thurman Munson starts cussing and ranting and raving. He says, I’m gonna kill whatever sons of bitches did this! He goes berserk. Stalks toward the Caddy, opens the trunk, and suddenly pulls out a .44 Magnum revolver.

Catfish is standing in front of the Caddy, and when he sees Thurman Munson with that .44, his eyes nearly pop out of his head. He goes, Holy shit, Thurman, you got a gun!

I’m going to kill them, says Thurman Munson.

Kill who? says Catfish.

Kill whoever it is I see on the other side of that fence.

Don’t load that gun, says Catfish.

Yes, I am, says Thurman Munson. And he does—then raises it, points it at shadows moving behind the fence, and fires. Crack!

Shit! yells Catfish.

Thurman Munson fires at the shadows again, and again—Crack! Crack! Without thinking, Catfish rushes him, gets his own powerful paws on the Magnum, and wrestles it away. Please, God, don’t let someone be hit, prays Catfish out loud, because now my fingerprints are all over that damn thing.

I didn’t hit anybody, says Thurman Munson. But I’m gonna run them over.

And that’s what he tries to do. He gets in the car and barrels through the parking lot, people leaping out of the way.

Goddamn, you’re crazy, says Catfish. Even today, Catfish can’t figure it out. Could have ended up killing someone, thrown in prison. The man he says he loves actually shot at those shadows.

It’s getting on toward evening now. When it’s time for dinner, Catfish’s wife comes and fetches us. Without my knowing it, I have been invited to stay. Because of Thurman Munson. And so I stand with Catfish Hunter and his family before a table full of food—lobster, a pan of warm corn bread, mashed potatoes, and slaw—on a June night in North Carolina, cicadas droning, heat releasing from the earth. Twenty of us gathered in a circle—fathers and sons, mothers and daughters—and everyone joins hands. Even Catfish, though he can’t raise his at all. His wife takes his right hand and, following her lead, I take his left. A heavy, bearlike thing, warm and leathery and still calloused from farming. I bow my head with all of them. And we pray.

I give you a boy and a man, a son and a father—and then the father’s father. Together for the first time, at Thurman Munson’s funeral. The son wears a miniature version of the Yankee uniform that his father wore. The father lies in a coffin. And his father, the truck driver, has magically appeared from Arizona, sporting a straw sombrero. For a thin, hard man, he has a large nose.

It’s the biggest funeral Canton has seen since the death of President McKinley, thousands gathering at the orange-brick civic center, hundreds more lining the route as the hearse drives to the cemetery. Thurman Munson’s old golf buddy, a pro, waits on a knoll at the local course and doffs his cap when Thurman Munson passes. All the Yankees are there. Bobby Murcer and Lou Piniella deliver the eulogy. And that night Murcer, who’s not penciled into the starting lineup, asks to play, knocks in five runs, including a two-run single to win the game, and limps from the field held up by Lou Piniella, then gives his bat to Diana Munson. A bat kept today somewhere in the house that Thurman Munson built.

When the hearse arrives, Thurman Munson is wheeled into
a mausoleum, followed by his family: Diana; the kids; Diana’s mother, Pauline; and Diana’s father, Tote, who over the years had become Thurman Munson’s best friend. The old man, the truck driver, stands apart. When he’s asked by a stranger how long it’s been since he last saw his son, he says, Quite a while, quite a while. Thurman never found himself, he says.

Then he does something disturbing. The truck driver holds an impromptu press conference, not more than fifty feet from Thurman Munson’s coffin, telling a group of reporters that his boy was never a great ballplayer, that it was really him, Darrell Munson, who was the talent, just didn’t get the break. Later, he approaches the coffin and, according to Diana, addresses his son one last time, says something like: You always thought you were too big for this world. Well, look who’s still standing, you son of a bitch.