Rami Manirah grew up in South Central LA where his parents owned and operated a dry cleaning store after moving from England when he was three years old.
“Dad saw a baseball game on TV and said, ‘this is like cricket except their uniforms are dirty and they have teeth on the bottom of their shoes.’ He thought a country this dirty needed someone who could clean things. He was right.”
Manny surfs and speaks in the Southern California accent that they call a non-accent because it doesn’t sound like it is from anywhere else.
“When I was twelve my Dad said to me, ‘Son this is America. Either you invent something or you play baseball. Everyone else is just a salesman. And if you do play baseball, keep it in your pants. Nothing ruins a ball player faster than women.
Also, you are slow and lazy. Baseball is a good choice for you.’”
Rami is built more like a Buddha than an athlete, but he has a knack for turning any type of pitch around in the opposite direction and watching it fly over the outfield fence. A first baseman is born. In the outfield he is a place where easy outs disappear and come back as doubles and triples.
Batting coaches avoid Rami. They don’t want to be credited with ruining his swing, his form, although they watch him carefully to figure out what it is he is doing so they won’t look stupid talking about art when they have spent their life studying science.
Ichabod Grobnick grew up in Pittsburgh Steeler country and thought he would be a quarterback , a Joe Namath, a Joe Montana, a Ben Roethlisberger. He is a lineman that wants to be a quarterback. In baseball they are called catchers.
Call him I-Grob or I-G or don’t call him at all, he’ll call you and he’ll call you whatever name he wants to call you. He doesn’t have metal plates in his head, but from the way he plays it must be one of his career goals. Everyone has a gimmick these days. I think he is more of a Bible belt catcher than a Steeler belt catcher. Thou shalt not steal. Thou shalt not be vain in the playing of God’s game. He’ll be in the bigs soon if he doesn’t kill himself putting on his gear.
Nimrod Songalong is from the Philippines and he is in the process of legally changing his name from the Tagalog original to an American moniker, Flip Songa. There was an Ellis Island tradition of changing peoples names for convenience when immigrants were processed into the country. Tradition is a nice way of saying that lazy, underpaid clerks didn’t bother to respect the people enough when they crossed the border to get their names right. In Flips case a lazy clerk would have been a good thing. Nimrod knows how to cook adobo, a Philippine stew, so a lot of players end up hanging out at his place just to get a taste of a real meal.
CHAPTER 56
So I’m dreaming again, hoping I don’t talk in my sleep and my roommates pick up on what they think is going on in my mind at night. In this dream J.P. and I are sitting at the counter of a neighborhood type diner in some neighborhood in Brooklyn. Casey Stengel sits behind the cash register by the entrance door. Babe Ruth commands the biggest booth in the restaurant in the company of a flotilla of call girls. Joe DiMaggio is in a booth by himself drinking coffee. Willie Mays works the grill, chatting up customers and using his spatula like a sling. Derek Jeter works the counter and Don Zimmer busses the tables.
“Classy joint,” I say.
“Swanky,” says J.P.
“Maybe I can get a job here.”
“You’ve got to be a hall of famer to sling hash here.”
“It’s a goal of mine.”
“Maybe I could be a waitress in a room like this, like in the movies with DeNiro, Pacino or better, Leo the Cap.”
“Leo? You’re on a first name basis with Leo?”
“It’s a goal of mine.”
“It’s good to have goals.”
I look out the front window and there is St. Sligo on the outside looking in and wearing a Cubs uniform. It starts raining. Lightning hits him, but he doesn’t flinch or blink. A tornado flies in the distance. Wrigley Field, spinning, is tossed through the sky by the force of the twister. Auntie Em can’t save it now.
CHAPTER 57
J.P. looks at me as I wake up from the dream.
“Another bad one.”
“It didn’t have a happy ending.”
“What happened?”
“The baseball gods punished St. Sligo.”
“They do every year.”
J.P. is staying with me for the summer instead of going back to L.A.
I tell her the dream.
“Can I work at the café that Leo likes?”
“I’ll make some phone calls.”
CHAPTER 58
Sligo visits for the first game.
“Just came to check on my favorite client”
“Thanks Uncle.”
“No problem. Be careful. If you don’t make the team you’re contractually obligated to work the Coney Island geek shows for one year.”
“You’re trying to be amusing aren’t you?”
“What could be more amusing than Coney Island?”
“Why don’t you have another six or seven beers to go with your hot dogs. It’ll be more fun.”
“I’m trying to look professional.”
We are eating at Nathan’s.
“This is Nathan’s,” says Sligo. “This is the first hot dog stand in America. In fact the early settlers bought Coney Island from the Indians for twenty-four hot dogs.”
“Why twenty-four?”
“I don’t know. They’re Indians, not accountants. They didn’t understand compound interest.”
When Uncle talks it isn’t always easy to determine if he is talking just to talk, talking to make a point or talking just to show that he is being held hostage by his own imagination; taken prisoner, kidnapped and dropped off in some remote and desolate landscape away from real people.
“You don’t want to end up a Coney Island Baby.”
“That doesn’t sound good.”
“The pressure is to get out of the minor leagues or you’re just another Coney Island Baby.”
“Sounds like a song sung by a guy wearing a straw hat and playing the banjo.”
“Cubbiephrenia is catching.”
“Are you making any money with it?”
“I need some sponsors for the ad revenue. I get a lot of drunken bloggers spewing misspelled obscenities.”
“You don’t mind if I don’t tell anyone I’m involved. It might be a conflict of interest.”
“Don’t even think about it. You’ve got to be about hardball 24/7. Leave the fan business to the fans. Even if this is the minor leagues you’re still a pro.”
CHAPTER 59
At Columbia I walk across the campus to see what I’m missing and feel like my brain needs steroids. Columbia University: where the elite meet to geek and freak. J.P. makes friends easily here in a way that makes me feel like I’m missing something. Even some of the minor leaguers have had four years of college, four years of studying, thinking and bullshitting before having to face the hard head of adult real time politics.
It is good to take a break and the only reason that brings the group together. The jocko slobs in the locker room are interested in my cross town intellectual pursuit, but most of them have never heard of Columbia since none of the Lions sports teams are talked about on ESPN.
J.P.’s roommate is a radical feminist who takes a serious bent to all areas of J.P.’s everydays.
“She’s got my back,” J.P. says.
She also has a poster on the wall that states:
“No phallus will delay us,
No penis can demean us.”
She hangs sex toys on a rack on the wall over her bed that in too many ways reminds me of a gun shot rack in the back of a pick up truck in the South although I can’t explain why I make that connection.
CHAPTER 60
Zack Rodriguez, steps down from the bigs and onto our little playing field two days after we reported, for the purpose of rehab afte
r minor surgery to his right knee. We try not to stare or act foolish like a fan or get in way of his big league walk. He doesn’t see people when he moves, he just goes past looking forward as if seeing in the air some invisible knowledge of baseball that is only in his field of vision. He doesn’t stop and chat about his long term mega million dollar contract or the steroid use that has put a big ‘but’ on his Hall of Fame chances.
“How’s the knee?” Coach asks him.
“My bags are packed.”
“I can see that,” said Coach, “Can I borrow five million dollars?”
“You couldn’t afford the interest.”
“I wasn’t going to pay it back.”
“Good to see you Coach.”
“Good luck Champ.”
Grobnick looks at Z-Rod and says to no one directly, “Steroids, maybe I should take some.”
Half the guys are thinking the same thing. It’s Brahma Bull vs. Bambi and Bambi needs to get big fast.
So I sleep and have a steroid dream:
The Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. I’m the biggest balloon on the street. I’m attacked by King Kong who is being chased by a regiment of soldiers.
I dispatch King Kong with a haymaker punch and float away from the scene with the infantry and helicopters in pursuit.
I float to the top of the Empire State Building and my tethers get tangled up with the antennae at the top of the building. Fighter planes attack. I snap free from my tethers. Tracer bullets rip through the sheath of the balloon.
Spinning and wheezing I buzz off across the Manhattan skyline propelled by the air of my bursting balloon towards Yankee Stadium.
CHAPTER 61
I’m working out without steroids. I’ll work on my timing. There are a lot of guys on steroids who can’t hit the ball out of the infield because they can’t make contact with a pitch. Some guys have muscles so big they have forgotten how to run, but still believe the size of their muscles has replaced the need to use their brains. They think they are going to swing at fat pitches, but they are just going to flail at the bait of sucker pitch after sucker pitch.
I can hit so the coaches aren’t sure if they want me as a pitcher or an everyday player. It is a problem for the coaches and so it is a problem for me since the coaches would rather find a prospect who isn’t a problem.
Chances in hell. I’m a teenager and I’m worrying about chances in hell. Maybe if I start out worrying about chances in hell it will give me the force to blast my way all the way to limbo. It is a Catholic way of thinking. Original sin. We were born with sin on our souls. We are through before we even get started.
“Worse things can happen. You can become meek and try to lead a perfect life,”
says J.P.
“That’s me.”
“Right. Or you will say the hell with it – it doesn’t make any difference what I do because I’m already damned.”
“Fuck it.”
“There is third option.”
“The law of threes.”
“You can find a religion that gives you better odds than slim to none.”
“A bigger better religion with more options for more people. More god all the time.”
“You need a god that doesn’t look at you and say ‘Go to hell’.
“Get thine ass out of here damn it.”
“In baseball you’re guilty as hell and no one wants to hear your prayer.”
“Baseball has superstition. It doesn’t need religion.”
“Pagan.”
I get more questions from home about J.P. than I do about baseball which is their way of saying without saying that they think I have more of a future with her than I do with baseball. She’s taking classes in Advanced World Economics and I’m taking Advanced Kid Games 101. At least I’m making more money than she is for all her thinking.
We never talk about the specifics of us together the way you talk to a coach about the mechanics of your batting swing.
CHAPTER 62
Food. Lance thinks about drugs, we think about dinner. Coach talks to us about food and says that an army marches on its stomach and he doesn't mean we crawl on our
bellies like reptiles. He says a hungry man is an angry man and he isn't much good as a soldier. You play when you're so hungry you can't think and you'll get hit in the head so hard that you won't have to worry about that thinking thing for too long.
We talk about where we're going to eat more than we talk about ball. We talk about food all day and end up at IHOP where you can eat and not talk. Rami says he is afraid that he will eat his way out of baseball. "I know I'm fat man. I went the beach the other day and the sea lions threw harpoons at me.”
He smokes weed and eats when he isn't playing baseball. He probably doesn't know how much he eats, he just puts food in his mouth on an automatic reflex.
"My favorite food group is beer. That is one food that you get the immediate results. It tastes good and you get that energy boost that gives you a charge."
J.P. sneaks me into the cafeteria when she can for a binge - no - purge face stuffing food fest that ends when I get tired of chewing. She isn't used to New York yet. She's stressed and she doesn't eat when she stressed.
I think it is because there is something about Manhattan that makes you think that you're not working hard enough. She can talk to anyone, but she is okay when she is sitting by herself just thinking and not going crazy on her own time. She's quiet when I eat, like she is trying to take her mind off of food.
CHAPTER 62
When Cressi isn’t talking about baseball he reads the newspaper and rants.
“Too many MBAs. You've got too many degrees cooking at the wrong temperature. You got to make something to make money. Why are they getting bonus points for putting up zeros? What you call a player who just shows up and collects a fat paycheck for doing nothing? A major leaguer.”
CHAPTER 63
So at this point in the story game you're wondering how to fill in your scorecard. Maybe you're thinking it will be predictable the way a baseball game is predictable in that it has nine innings, the batters get three strikes and there is always another game tomorrow.
You could be thinking how Uncle Sligo will screw this up for me since he is just the man for that job. He has been helpful in keeping my story going. Will I give it all up for my high school sweetheart and lead the life that I was brought up to live?
CHAPTER 64
Lon and Ron Show
LON: Its a beautiful day for a ballgame today Ron.
RON: That's right Lon. If I wasn't a professional broadcaster I would break into a song.
LON: Like a gay musical number? Which team are you playing for Ron?
RON: There's no singing in the press box. I report I don't play.
LON: How about a musical about real guys?
RON: No dolls?
LON: Dolls are alright, but the songs gotta be the kind of song a guy would sing. 'Gotta pee, gotta pee, let the urine be free'.
RON: You know what kind of guys would sing that?
LON: What kind of guys Ron?
RON: Guys without girlfriends.
LON: You know that one 'doe a deer'?
RON: You’re just trying to get me to say 'yes dear'.
LON: So the next line is fa, a long long way to run.
RON: Where are you going with this?
LON: Fa. If the Von Trapp family lived in the Swiss Alps why do they say fa instead of far? Are they really from Brooklyn?
RON: You got a problem wit dat?
LON: That's a big la dee da to you Ron.
CHAPTER 65
“The coach says I'm not mean enough to win. What do I have to do, kill someone to show how tough I am?"
"Why don't you kill the Coach?" says J.P.
"That would solve a lot of problems."
"That would be bad enough to impress the macho boys."
"Maybe I should kill them a
ll."
What is a bad man? According to any woman, men are bad by nature and are only acceptable with a tolerable amount of badness. Bad can be good in sports. Is it essential? According to the book of St. Sligo:
"They said Ernie Banks was too nice to be a champion and that nice guys never win.
I've known some assholes that couldn't win a prize with a box of crackerjacks. What about the other Cubs. They weren't all Mr. Congeniality and they couldn't win a thing."
CHAPTER 66
Opening day. I don't care if it is the minor leagues it is opening freaking day and I am in uniform on the playing field with a bat in my hand and a pitcher who's already counting to get me out with a get stupid pitch that I'm going to rock his idiot head off with a four seamed line drive.
CHAPTER 67
Don't think too much, but don't play stupid. I've been thinking about it, but not in a stupid way, not that anyone would purposely think stupid; they would try to think a smart thought, but a dumb thought would come out and they wouldn't recognize the difference.
What Cressi was saying or trying to say, so I think, is that when you're playing the game you should have thought of everything before hand because when the ball is flying you won't have time to think, you'll only have time to make or not make a play. And if you don't make the play they'll want to know, 'What the hell were you thinking?'.
And you say, " I don't want to think about it."
"Oh yeah? Well you should have thought of that before."
Cressi is going to think I'm being a wise ass.
He watches me during drills.
“You can play ball. You're that kid from California. LA?” Cressi says.
“San Pedro.”
“Where’s that?”
“ Near Catalina.”
“Catalina? I almost went there once but I didn't have my passport.”
You don't need passport, it’s part of California.”
“That was a joke. I used to have a place there when I played for the Dodgers.”
“You should have had a MVP for a couple of those years.”
“I like you Catalina. You know how to talk to a manager. I heard you were something of a wise ass.”
“No sir. That is some bad information.”
“Good. You know what happens to wise asses in this game?”
“No sir.”
“They get traded to Cleveland.”
“That's got to hurt.”
“That is nothing compared to the stinging end of your wit.”
“You're joking again.”
“Yes I am. Good come back Shecky.”
“Sometimes I sting myself.”
“Yeah, well make sure the door is locked and the radio is turned up.”