Mr. Vertigo (31 page)

But no regrets. I had a good dance for my money, and I’m not going to say I didn’t. The club turned into the number-one hot spot in Chicago, and in my own small way I was just as much a celebrity as any of the bigwigs who came in there. I hobnobbed with judges and city councilmen and ball players, and what with all the showgirls and chorines to audition for the flesh parades I presented at eleven and one every night, there was no lack of opportunity to indulge in bedroom sports. Dixie and I were still an item when Mr. Vertigo’s opened, but my carryings-on wore her patience thin, and within six months she’d moved to another address. Then came Sally, then came Jewel, then came a dozen others: leggy brunettes, chain-smoking redheads, big-butted blondes. At one point I was shacked up with two girls at the same time, a pair of out-of-work actresses named Cora and Billie. I liked them both the same, they liked each other as much as they liked me, and by pulling together we managed to produce some interesting variations on the old tune. Every now and then, my habits led to medical inconveniences (a dose of the clap, a case of crabs), but nothing that put me out of commission for very long. It might have been a putrid way to live, but I was happy with the hand I’d been dealt, and my only ambition was to keep things exactly as they were. Then, in September 1939, just three days after the German Army invaded Poland, Dizzy Dean walked into Mr. Vertigo’s and it all started to come undone.

I have to go back to explain it, all the way back to my tykehood in Saint Louis. That’s where I fell in love with baseball, and before I was out of diapers I was a dyed-in-the-wool Cardinals’ fan,
a Redbird rooter for life. I’ve already mentioned how thrilled I was when they took the ‘twenty-six series, but that was only one instance of my devotion, and after Aesop taught me how to read and write, I was able to follow my boys in the paper every morning. From April to October I never missed a box score, and I could recite the batting average of every player on the squad, from hot dogs like Frankie Frisch and Pepper Martin to the lowest journeyman scrub gathering splinters on the bench. This went on during the good years with Master Yehudi, and it continued during the bad years that followed. I lived like a shadow, prowling the country in search of Uncle Slim, but no matter how dark things got for me, I still kept up with my team. They won the pennant in ‘thirty and ‘thirty-one, and those victories did a lot to buck up my spirits, to keep me going through all the trouble and adversity of that time. As long as the Cards were winning, something was right with the world, and it wasn’t possible to fall into total despair.

That’s where Dizzy Dean enters the story. The team dropped to seventh place in ‘thirty-two, but it almost didn’t matter. Dean was the hottest, flashiest, loudest-mouthed rookie ever to hit the majors, and he turned a crummy ball club into a loosey-goosey hillbilly circus. Brag and cavort as he did, that cornpone rube backed up his boasts with some of the sweetest pitching this side of heaven. His rubber arm threw smoke; his control was uncanny; his windup was a wondrous machine of arms and legs and power, a beautiful thing to behold. By the time I got to Chicago and settled in as Bingo’s protégé, Dizzy was an established star, a big-time force on the American scene. People loved him for his brashness and talent, his crazy manglings of the English language, his brawling, boyish antics and fuck-you pizzazz, and I loved him, too, I loved him as much as anyone in the world. With life growing more comfortable for me all the time, I was in
a position to catch the Cards in action whenever they came to town. In ’thirty-three, the year Dean broke the record by striking out seventeen batters in a game, they looked like a first-division outfit again. They’d added some new players to the roster, and with thugs like Joe Medwick, Leo Durocher, and Rip Collins around to quicken the pace, the Gas House Gang was beginning to jell. ’Thirty-four turned out to be their glory year, and I don’t think I’ve ever enjoyed a baseball season as much as that one. Dizzy’s kid brother Paul won nineteen games, Dizzy won thirty, and the team fought from ten games back to overtake the Giants and win the pennant. That was the first year the World Series was broadcast on the radio, and I got to listen to all seven games sitting at home in Chicago. Dizzy beat the Tigers in the first game, and when Frisch sent him in as a pinch runner in the fourth, the lummox promptly got beaned with a wild throw and was knocked unconscious. The next day’s headlines announced: X RAYS OF DEAN’S HEAD REVEAL NOTHING. He came back to pitch the following afternoon but lost, and then, just two days later, he shut out Detroit 11–0 in the final game, laughing at the Tiger hitters each time they swung and missed at his fastballs. The press cooked up all kinds of names for that team: the Galloping Gangsters, River Rowdies from the Mississippi, the Clattering Cardinals. Those Gas Housers loved to rub it in, and when the score of the final game got out of hand in the late innings, the Tiger fans responded by pelting Medwick with a ten-minute barrage of fruits and vegetables in left field. The only way they could finish the series was for Judge Landis, the commissioner of baseball, to step in and pull Medwick off the field for the last three outs.

Six months later, I was sitting in a box with Bingo and the boys when Dean opened the new season against the Cubs in
Chicago. In the first inning, with two down and a man on base, the Cubs’ cleanup hitter Freddie Lindstrom sent a wicked line drive up the middle that caught Dizzy in the leg and knocked him down. My heart skipped a beat or two when I saw the stretcher gang run out and carry him off the field, but no permanent damage was done, and five days later he was back on the mound in Pittsburgh, where he hurled a five-hit shutout for his first win of the season. He went on to have another bang-up year, but the Cubs were the team of destiny in 1935, and by knocking off a string of twenty-one straight wins at the end of the season, they pushed past the Cards and stole the flag. I can’t say I minded too much. The town went gaga for the Cubbies, and what was good for Chicago was good for business, and what was good for business was good for me. I cut my teeth on the gambling rackets in that series, and once the dust had settled, I’d maneuvered myself into such a strong position that Bingo rewarded me with a den of my own.

On the other hand, that was the year when Dizzy’s ups and downs began to affect me in a far too personal way. I wouldn’t call it an obsession at that point, but after watching him go down in the first inning of the opener at Wrigley—so soon after the skull-clunking in the ’thirty-four series—I began to sense that a cloud was gathering around him. It didn’t help matters when his brother’s arm went dead in ’thirty-six, but even worse was what happened in a game against the Giants that summer when Burgess Whitehead scorched a liner that hit him just above the right ear. The ball was hit so hard that it caromed into left field on a fly. Dean went down again, and though he regained consciousness in the locker room seven or eight minutes later, the initial diagnosis was a fractured skull. It turned out to be a bad concussion, which left him woozy for a couple of weeks, but an inch
or so the other way and the big guy would have been pushing up daisies instead of going on to win twenty-four games for the season.

The following spring, my man continued to curse and scuffle and raise hell, but that was only because he didn’t know any better. He triggered brawls with his brushback pitches, was called for balks two games in a row and decided to stage a sit-down strike on the mound, and when he stood up at a banquet and called the new league president a crook, the resulting fracas led to some fine cowboy theater, especially after Diz refused to put his signature on a self-incriminating formal retraction. “I ain’t signin’ nothin”’ was what he said, and without that signature Ford Frick had no choice but to back down and rescind Dean’s suspension. I was proud of him for behaving like such a two-fisted asshole, but the truth was that the suspension would have kept him out of the All-Star Game, and if he hadn’t pitched in that meaningless exhibition, he might have been able to hold off the hour of doom a little longer.

They played in Washington, D.C., that year, and Dizzy started for the National League. He breezed through the first two innings in workmanlike fashion, and then, after two were gone in the third, he gave up a single to DiMaggio and a long home run to Gehrig. Earl Averill was next, and when the Cleveland outfielder lined Dean’s first pitch back to the mound, the curtain suddenly dropped on the greatest right-hander of the century. It didn’t look like much to worry about at the time. The ball hit him on the left foot, bounced over to Billy Herman at second, and Herman threw to first for the out. When Dizzy went limping off the field, no one thought twice about it, not even Dizzy himself.

That was the famous broken toe. If he hadn’t rushed back into action before he was ready, it probably would have mended in due time. But the Cardinals were slipping out of the pennant
race and needed him on the mound, and the dumb-cluck yokel fool assured them he was okay. He was hobbling around on a crutch, the toe was so swollen he couldn’t get his shoe on, and yet he donned his uniform and went out and pitched. Like all giants among men, Dizzy Dean thought he was immortal, and even though the toe was too tender for him to pivot on his left foot, he gutted it out for the whole nine innings. The pain caused him to alter his natural delivery, and the result was that he put too much pressure on his arm. He developed a sore wing after that first game, and then, to compound the mischief, he went on throwing for another month. After six or seven times around, it got so bad that he had to be yanked just three pitches into one of his starts. Diz was lobbing canteloupes by then, and there was nothing for it but to hang up his spikes and sit out the rest of the season.

Even so, there wasn’t a fan in the country who thought he was finished. The common wisdom was that a winter of idle repose would fix what ailed him and come April he’d be his old unbeatable self again. But he struggled through spring training, and then, in one of the great bombshells in sports history, Saint Louis dealt him to the Cubs for 185,000 in cash and two or three warm bodies. I knew there was no love lost between Dean and Branch Rickey, the Cards’ general manager, but I also knew that Rickey wouldn’t have unloaded him if he thought there was some spit left in the appleknocker’s arm. I couldn’t have been happier that Dizzy was coming to Chicago, but at the same time I knew his coming meant that he was at the end of the road. My worst fears had been borne out, and at the ripe old age of twenty-seven or twenty-eight, the world’s top pitcher was a has-been.

Still, he provided some good moments that first year with the Cubs. Mr. Vertigo’s was only four months old when the season started, but I managed to sneak off to the park three or four
times to watch the Dizmeister crank out a few more innings from his battered arm. There was an early game against the Cards that I remember well, a classic grudge match pitting old teammates against each other, and he won that showdown on guile and junk, keeping the hitters off-stride with an assortment of dipsy-doodle floaters and change-ups. Then, late in the season, with the Cubs pushing hard for another pennant, Chicago manager Gabby Hartnett stunned everyone by giving Dizzy the nod for a do-or-die start against the Pirates. The game was a genuine knuckle-biter, joy and despair riding on every pitch, and Dean, with less than nothing to offer, eked out a win for his new hometown. He almost repeated the miracle in the second game of the World Series, but the Yanks finally got to him in the eighth, and when the assault continued in the ninth and Hartnett took him out for a reliever, Dizzy left the mound to some of the wildest, most thunderous applause I’ve ever heard. The whole joint was on its feet, clapping and cheering and whistling for the big lug, and it went on for so long and was so loud, some of us were blinking away tears by the time it was over.

That should have been the end of him. The gallant warrior takes his last bow and shuffles off into the sunset. I would have accepted that and given him his due, but Dean was too thick to get it, and the farewell clamor fell on deaf ears. That’s what galled me: the son-of-a-bitch didn’t know when to stop. Casting all dignity aside, he came back and played for the Cubs again, and if the ’thirty-eight season had been pathetic—with a few bright spots sprinkled in—’thirty-nine was pure, unadulterated darkness. His arm hurt so much he could barely throw. Game after game he warmed the bench, and the brief moments he spent on the mound were an embarrassment. He was lousy, lousier than a hobo’s mutt, not even the palest facsimile of what he’d once been. I suffered for him, I grieved for him, but at the same time
I thought he was the dumbest yahoo clod on the face of the earth.

That was pretty much how things stood when he walked into Mr. Vertigo’s in September. The season was winding down, and with the Cubs well out of the pennant race, it didn’t cause much of a stir when Dean showed up one crowded Friday night with his missus and a gang of two or three other couples. It certainly wasn’t the moment for a heart-to-heart talk about his future, but I made a point of going over to his table and welcoming him to the club. “Pleased you could make it, Diz,” I said, offering him my hand. “I’m a Saint Louis boy myself, and I’ve been following you since the day you broke in. I’ve always been your number-one backer.”

“The pleasure’s all mine, pal,” he said, engulfing my little hand in his enormous mitt and giving a cordial shake. He started to flash one of those quick, brush-off smiles when his expression suddenly grew puzzled. He frowned for a second, searching his memory for some lost thing, and when it didn’t come to him, he looked deep into my eyes as if he thought he could find it there. “I know you, don’t I?” he said. “I mean, this ain’t the first time we’ve met. I just can’t place where it was. Way back when somewhere, ain’t I right?”

“I don’t think so, Diz. Maybe you caught a glimpse of me one day in the stands, but we’ve never talked before.”

“Shit. I could swear you ain’t no stranger to me. Damnedest feeling in the world it is. Oh well,” he shrugged, beaming me one of his big yap grins, “it don’t matter none, I guess. You sure got a swell joint here, mac.”