The New York (17 page)

The whole time, George pulled his disappearing act. Never made a show.

Spring training was not pleasant the way it usually is. The crowd was big at games, but it was a quiet crowd, full of curious people who had never seen a Cuban play baseball before. The park holds seven, eight thousand and they must have been uncomfortable, sitting on their hands for nine innings at a stretch. The other teams had at least stopped putting this thing on a nuclear threat basis. We were all in Florida just to play ball and get tan and not overexert ourselves. Every team had a hothead or two, and some of the Cuban kids got regular baseball slurs, but the other players saw that this thing was not the missile crisis. They resented the Cubans as scabs, but they had come to play ball.

The quiet crowds, though, that got to me. The people paid their money and bought tickets and went through the metal detectors — the FBI guys insisted on that — but then they just sat on their hands. I hoped it wasn't going to be that way all year,

I told all this to Charlene when I called her at night. She was still in the habit of being out some nights, but I was learning that Charlene was not going to be anybody's little housewife and was coming and going as she pleased. But when we talked, it was real pleasant. I didn't tell her what Castro said to me, but I did tell her he smelled like Old Spice. That made her get the giggles. She has a nice, deep-in-the-throat giggle that has appreciation for your wit written all over it, I counted myself a lucky man in that, at least.

The cops arrested a half-dozen Miami Cuban exiles one night when they staged a demonstration in the lobby of our hotel, but I didn't pay any attention to that and neither did anyone else. The Cubans on the Yankees were getting to be old hat. The only one who was clearly destined to get ink in the future was Raul.

Damn. Arrogant son of a bitch though he was, he could hit a ball. Not just home runs but singles and doubles and triples and liners and towering drives. The man seemed determined never to let an appearance at the plate pass that he didn't whack into the ball. Throw outside the zone and he'd reach across the plate with those long arms and just flick that ball over the second baseman's head into center, bouncing fifty feet in front of the outfielder. Whack, whack, whack. I hate to say it was a pleasure to watch him hit, but it was.

The real thorn in my side was Romero, Castro's spy and the designated chaperone. He counted all the time. He counted the kids on the bus to the park and counted them on the bus on the way back. He counted them in their rooms. He had a room at the end of the hall and his light was always on and his door was always open. Little fucking bean counter. I tried to talk to him one time and it was no go. Then, when the agent for the player's association came by, I tried to explain to the players they had to join the union. They said OK. The rep said OK, Romero didn't get it.

“You call yourself a Communist and you ain't gonna let them join the union? What kind of a Communist are you?” I said in plain English.

Romero just glared at me with lazy, bad eyes.

The players' rep was Bill Ofmeyer from headquarters. He said, “Whaddaya mean, Communists? We aren't Communists.”

“I know you ain't Communists, I was just making a point with Castro's toady here. Hey, Romero, you want Castro to get the dog for sending in scabs to break the union?”

Romero didn't understand this at all so I tried again in more formal Spanish.

— Señor, I was told nothing about this (Romero said).

— Fine, fine, I'll handle it.

I turned to Ofmeyer and said, “Whadda they gotta do?”

“Sign up,” he said.

I personally took the papers around to the boys and made them sign. I said they had to sign to play. Señor Romero watched this and made out that he was reading the form, but he couldn't read English any better than I could read Spanish. He said he would have to call El Supremo. I said he could call his Aunt Tillie, they'd still had to sign with the union. In the end, they did.

I did get together one night with Tommy Tradup and we became semi-hilarious in the bar at my hotel. The team stays at the Palm Aire Hotel, which is nice digs and has a nice little bar. More important, the Cuban kids didn't drink there because it cost too much. Instead, they bought six-packs and drank in their rooms and watched the Spanish station out of Miami.

I was never close to Tommy when we were teammates, but we did hoist a few from time to time because when you're on a long road trip, even teammates can substitute for friends. This night was one of those times, and Tommy didn't tern mean on me until he'd had his sixth stinger.

“Your new friend, Raul, he's an uppity spic bastard, isn't he?” Tommy said.

“No more than you, hoss. All you hitters got the disease. All the great ones,” I added, stroking him down the way you do a horse.

“That cunt is gonna find out that we play the game different here,” Tommy said. He sneered. He was a mean drunk. I had forgotten that. I should have been counting his stingers for him.

“Well, I'm sure hell learn. He's just a rook, Tommy.”

“You, you fuckin' traitor, I expect you to say that,”

“Now, hold on, Tommy. You ask me to have a beer with you and then you insult me. You don't wanna do that.” I said this calm, looking down the dark bar at the bartender, wishing I was back in my room. I didn't need this shit.

“You fuckin' rummy pitcher, you suck George's cock and whatcha do now, the same for that cunt?”

See, when a drunk gets mean, he swears and the words seem to lose their impact through the alcoholic haze, so they just pile them on, one after another, much like a baseball brawl. After a while, words fail them and that's when the bottles start flying. I wasn't in a flying mood myself and I started to look at my watch as though time meant something to me.

“I gotta run, Tommy,” I said.

“Fuck that, stay for another drink,” he said.

“Can't. Got to call my girl.”

“Aw, you ain't got a girl, you just sucking cock these days.”

“Tommy, don't be saying things you don't mean.”

“I do mean them,” he said.

“Then don't say them anyway.”

“Oh, yeah, You wanna stop me saying things I don't mean?”

This is the moment when Glint Eastwood gets that squinty tic in his eye or John Wayne hauls back and the fight commences. Except I am not in a movie and I am neither of those guys.

“Grow up,” I said and turned.

He conked me on the back of my head with my own empty beer bottle. The bottle did not break, thank goodness. But it hurt like hell so I turned around, as though he had tapped me on the shoulder.

He still held the bottle by the neck.

“Put the bottle down, Tommy.”

He dropped it on the bar and it broke, This got the bartender's attention and he edged down toward our end. (Where was he a couple of minutes earlier?)

“You got trouble, take it out of here,” he said.

Tommy said, “Go fuck yourself, monkeyface.”

I didn't say a thing. I just turned and started out of the lounge. Tommy held on to the bar for the good reason that he needed to, but I could hear him all the way into the lobby.

“You lie down with Cubans, you wake up with fleas. Remember that, you son of a bitch!”

It made about as much sense as anything did.

We escaped from the Grapefruit League with an 11 and 14 record, which was fairly miserable.

The New York sports media is as vicious as they come and they bared their collective teeth at the sorry lot of es as we descended the American Airlines charter at LaGeardia. The team bus was waiting. I was glad to see it still spelled
Yankees 
the regular way. Microphones cluttered the arrivals area inside the terminal, bet not for es. They were commandeered by our supreme leader, George himself, finally ducking out of hiding.

The Cubans dutifully marched aboard the bus, bet I opted for a cab. I told the guy the address in Fort Lee and he grimaced and cursed and said it would cost me $40 and it was a trip out of his way and all the blah-blah I hear every time I take a cab to Fort Lee.

I wanted to get home in the worst way. I wanted to see if the drive-away car service demon had delivered my car without denting it or stealing the lighter. I wanted to tern on the TV jest to hear some more English. The bilingual thing was giving me a headache every day.

Mostly, I jest wanted to get away from baseball. It was the first time in my life I was beginning to feel like that, and it bothered me. One-hundred-sixty-two games with these kids who now had about twelve words of English between them — and one of those was
cerveza
, which isn't English to begin with. It wasn't that they couldn't learn English. Some were actually smart. It was that they refused to. If Mexicans had been that arrogant, they'd still be living on the wrong side of the Rio Grande to this day and we wouldn't have any cooks in our Italian restaurants.

There was a dent in the right front fender, bet the lighter was still in its slot. The anonymous kid who had driven the car up from Texas had parked it in the pay lot of the apartment building. I'd move the car later. I was beat.

There was a plastic garbage bag fell of mail accumulated over the winter. I took it along with my bags into the elevator.

It was good to be home, even if home was just a studio in a high-rise on the Hudson River looking over at Manhattan.

The beer I left in the icebox was still there and I had one and just sat in my armchair with my feet up on the windowsill and looked at the city. It was late on an April afternoon and the light was fine, angling low behind me and making the city shine,

I started thinking about something and stopped when I realized I was thinking in Spanish. I never realized before what a straggle two languages were when you were working with people in another language. Made me wonder how those immigrants managed to hold up while straggling to make a living.

The phone rang.

I answered on the third ring.

“You son of a bitch, what are you trying to pull on me now? I was at the airport.”

“I saw you, George. I thought you had matters well in hand.”

“You son of a bitch, I was going to introduce you “

“I figured that. That's why I'm here now.”

“I give you an extra twenty-five thousand on your contract and you pull this shit on me, ducking your responsibilities.”

“I've got no responsibility to talk to the media and act like your Charlie McCarthy”

“What the fuck is wrong with this team? You guys stunk up the Grapefruit League this spring.”

“It's only spring training, George. They're just learning to work together”

“The fucking opening day is three days away, what kind of shit are you pulling? I could lose a fortune on this thing.”

“You could hardly lose a fortune since you traded away your fifty-million-dollar personnel roster.”

“Except for you, you broken-down son of a bitch. I kept you.”

“Yeah, Now I wish you hadn't.”

“You gonna quit on me? You and that cocksucker agent Sid cooking up-”

“George, I can see you now, those arteries pounding and your eyes bulging out of your head. I won't tell you to calm down because I'd just as soon you had a stroke, then maybe you'd stop calling me all the time to hear yourself think out loud.”

“I own you, Ryan, I own you!”

“People don't own people except in certain parts of the Middle East and Africa. So you've got a contract, is all you've got.”

“And the contract says you got to help me with these Cubanos. They got their rooms at the East Side Hotel and they start complaining right away about the sheets and the beds and the bugs.”

“Get an exterminator.”

“I spoiled them. I spoiled them in Florida, put them up at that hotel. This is New York, this isn't Florida. People live like this here, don't they get it?”

“When I first came up, I was in that East Side hotel you own, George. I'd rather live in a Chinese prison than live there.”

“Oh, Mr. Bigshot now with his $650,000 contract —”

“George, you want to settle this now? You call up Sid and make him a reasonable buyout offer and I'll walk tomorrow. I'm tired of your shit and I'm tired of getting a headache every day listening to those kids and I'm tired of interpreting for Sparky when Sam goes and hides in the clubhouse. Even Sam gets tired of them.”

Silence.

Now George became conversational in tone: “What's wrong, Ryan? With the team?”

“Time will tell.” It is my all-time favorite sports cliché.

“What's that mean?”

“It means you got to give them time and treat them right.”

“All right. I'll send over an exterminator.”

“That's a start.”

“What if this thing doesn't jell? In a month or so.”

“Then we'll finish lower than you expected.”

“I expect to win the pennant, nothing less. New York expects nothing less.”

“It's good to have great expectations.”

“You see any bright spot in any of this? Sparky looks like he's on dope, I can't get a straight answer from him. I should fire his ass and get someone else.”

“It isn't Sparky. Sparky is fifty-six years old. He's used to talking to ball players, not talking through his clubhouse manager. They're a decent bunch of players —”

“You were supposed to weed out the bad ones.”

“Some are better than others. What did you expect, twenty-four supermen?”

“Yes. I expected twenty-four supermen and one washed-up reliever,”

“Well, you got part of your expectations.”

“You mean you.”

“I mean the kid — Raul. He's genuine, George, hell learn Ms way the first go-round of games, but it'll be the hitter learning, not the pitchers learning how to pitch to him. Because you can't. You can walk him, to get around him, but if you put it anywhere near the plate at any speed with any curve, he'll hit you. He's a natural born hitter and he's only twenty-three. You stole him.”