The Journey Home

by Jorge Posada

  We had those scrapbooks at home filled with stories about my dad’s sporting efforts. When I was young, I’d flip through them, mostly to look at the pictures, but when I hit my midteens and started to work with his softball team, I began to look at those stories a little more closely. I never doubted that my dad knew what he was talking about when it came to baseball, but I saw that his knowledge came from his own experiences, not just from reading a book or picking it up in some other way. That was huge for me, I can see now, though at the time I still had a few remaining questions about why he was having me do some of the things he was.

  I also finally asked my dad to share with me some of the experiences that weren’t in those scrapbooks—how he got to Puerto Rico was something that I didn’t fully understand before then.

  Though he loved the country and life had been good for them there, my grandfather sensed that Castro was going to change things for the worse. He decided to take his family to Puerto Rico in 1962. At that point, my father was 23 years old. That meant that he fell within the age range of males (15–27) that Castro had targeted with a law forbidding them from leaving the country. With his visa torn up, my father had no choice but to remain. He worked at the Ministerio del Comercio Exterior de Cuba (MINCEX) in the shipyards monitoring exports of products like cigars. He lived in the house that his parents owned, but still had to sell off nearly all the furniture, including a piano, and other household items in order to survive. His being held in Cuba also meant that he couldn’t honor the contract he’d signed with the A’s.

  He was allowed to play for sports teams that his government ministry sponsored. The pages of the “after” scrapbook detailed his contributions to his basketball team as a point guard. He was named to various all-star squads and played for them in different tournaments. Eventually he traveled to places like the Soviet Union, Bulgaria, Hungary, and other communist countries. His government job gave him the flexibility to do that, since Castro believed that sports could promote his political agenda. My father didn’t like Castro and what he was doing to the country and wanted to leave. Just as on those basketball trips where they were guarded heavily to prevent anyone from defecting, he was being watched at home.

  He never knew how, but someone must have informed a government official about his opinion of Castro. In 1965, he was arrested, stripped of his government job, and imprisoned for ten days. When he was released, he was sent to sugarcane fields to cut the crop. The work was backbreaking. He did have some incentive, though. Depending upon how many rows of cane he completed, he could earn time off to visit other family members still in Cuba.

  He knew that he couldn’t stay under those conditions, so he devised a plan. Each time he earned that pass to visit family in Havana, he took steps to put that plan into action. On one of the trips after he’d earned a pass, he went down to the docks where he once worked. He found a Greek captain who he had been friendly with and told the man that he planned to get out by boat and hoped he could get help. The captain was sympathetic and he agreed, with a couple of conditions. It was up to my dad to figure out the rest of his escape. After six months of working in the fields and making all the other arrangements, my dad decided that the time was right. The Greek captain’s ship was scheduled to be in Havana Harbor in a few days. My dad snuck away from the cane field and then rode a horse many miles to get to where his uncle had hidden a coffin. From there, he rode many hours in a closed coffin—with a hole drilled into it so that he could breathe. Eventually, they reached Havana. On January 2, 1967, my father dressed in a suit and tie, carried his old work credentials, and entered the docks where he boarded the ship. He stowed away inside a wooden crate filled with boxes of cigars, and only when he knew that they were at least 18 miles outside of Cuba did he bang on the crate and get released.

  A few days later, they were in Greece. Because the Greek captain was concerned about getting in trouble with Cuban authorities, he had to report my father the day they set out. The Cuban authorities knew where the ship was destined and Greek policmen were waiting for him at the docks. My father’s athletic skills paid off. He scrambled down the cargo netting and outran the police. Eventually, he found sanctuary in a Greek Orthodox church that was known for aiding refugees. They sent him to Madrid where he found work, played baseball, and seemed content to live out his life. But the pull of family was too great in the end, and by July 1968, he was in Puerto Rico. Six months later he met my mother, and then I came along in 1970.

  Clearly, I didn’t understand back then what pain and sacrifice really were, especially not in comparison to what my father endured. Only now, as a father myself, do I fully understand what my father was trying to do for me, why his stubborn insistence that I do things his way was really the right way and would benefit me. He left his home country with literally nothing but the clothes on his back and within months of arriving in Puerto Rico was working hard to make a comfortable life for himself and his family. In a way, I feel silly for sharing stories of what I saw then as sacrifices I had to make. I didn’t know the complete history for many years, but heard my father and his Cuban friends talking about riding on an elephant’s foot, holding on to its legs, and other crazy things they did in Cuba and how much they missed the good old days. They seldom spoke of the hardships. And it seemed like when he played sports my dad was able to recapture some of the spirit of what life had been like before Castro took over.

  Catching Esteban Ramallo wasn’t easy—and he did inflict a bit of pain on me—but it was fun because it wasn’t easy. Just as over time my ability to hit left-handed went from feeling unnatural to natural, I was learning that mastering something difficult is rewarding. I don’t know if it was because of a strange set of circumstances or what, but it felt like for a long time I wasn’t a switch-hitter at all: for years at a time, I only seemed to face right-handed pitchers, so batting lefty became my default. In fact, I got so comfortable on the left side of the plate that when I finally faced my first lefty around the time I was 15, I honestly didn’t know what to do. My dad kind of shook his head in disbelief and told me to bat right-handed. I’d been taking batting practice right-handed all along, but just a few cuts each time.

  Digging into that right-hand box felt a bit odd at first, but that feeling disappeared pretty quickly. I couldn’t have said this at the time, but learning to be adaptable—for example, going from facing my peers in baseball to playing with adults in fast-pitch softball—was important to my development and maturity as a ballplayer. Ultimately this ability to switch—whether from one side of the plate to another, from an aluminum bat to a wooden one, or from my expectations for myself to someone else’s—would prove to be an incredible asset, and one that only my father could teach me.

  I might have been surrounded by expectations, but that didn’t mean that I was becoming a perfect little angel—far from it. I tried as hard as I could to meet my father’s standards, sometimes too hard, and when I couldn’t be as adult as he wanted me to be—like when I went for my BB gun instead of simply asking for my ball back—I snapped and acted very immaturely.

  I didn’t always respect the rules and restrictions that were placed on me, and often I rebelled against the pressure put on me without totally understanding why. In fact, I nearly threw away all my dad’s hard work, as well as my own, because I couldn’t resist the temptation of speed.

  Manuel had a Yamaha scooter, and I wanted one too. As much as I liked cycling, being able to ride around and not have to pedal was amazing. Manuel would take me on the back of his—even though my mother told me not to—and I loved the sensation of being able to zip along. Eventually, Manuel gave in and let me take it out on my own, but just in front of the house.

  Of course, I wasn’t satisfied with just doing that, so I then began to beg him to let me take it out in the neighborhood. “Just around the block, man. Just around the block.” I wore him down, and he said, “Okay. But be careful.” I hate those words.

  I was careful, but I was and wasn
’t lucky.

  I came to a tight curve, got the scooter leaning into it nicely, and the next thing I knew I was tumbling on the ground, feeling the skin on my hands and knees being shredded off. I came to a stop on my stomach and could feel the grit and stones of the gravel that had caused my slide. The scooter was on its side next to the curb, its engine still running and its rear tire spinning. In an adrenaline rush, I got up and ran to the scooter and switched off the engine. I got it back upright. I hopped back on, fired up the motor, and rode back toward the house. Only then did I feel any pain. The gouges in my knees and hands stung, though they were superficial, but as I twisted the throttle I felt a sharp pain in my wrist. I looked down at it and could see that the swelling had already begun.

  I came to a stop and Manuel came running.

  “I heard the motor revving all the way over here. What were you—” He stopped himself and his eyes grew wide. He then squeezed them shut. “Why did I—”

  “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I don’t know what happened.”

  By this time, the pain was getting really bad. I felt light-headed and a bit nauseated. I levered the kickstand down and staggered onto the sidewalk, where I sat with my head between my knees.

  I don’t know how long I sat there, thinking all the time how stupid I was and how unlucky I was. Manuel’s mom came and knelt next to me. A moment later my mom, her expression a mix of anguish and anger, joined her.

  I kept mumbling how sorry I was, told her over and over that it wasn’t that bad. She told me to keep quiet, that she was going to make sure I was okay. They loaded me into Manuel’s family car, and we headed off to the emergency room. I was feeling a bit woozy, and every time we went over a bump I winced in pain. I tried not to think about the most painful thing of all—how my dad was going to react when he found out. I knew that my wrist was bad, and there was no way I was going to be able to hide from him the fact that I had gotten hurt. I could tell him that I fell off my bike, but that would require my mom playing along. I knew that she was hurt that I hadn’t listened to her when she’d told me to stay off the scooter. The bike excuse would have been believable—a few years earlier, I had fallen off my bike and injured the other wrist. I’d felt like I deserved that injury because I’d gone to the mall to get a Wiffle ball for our games, even though my mom had said that I wasn’t to ride all the way over there; I did anyway, and along the way I’d fallen.

  Now, as I was escorted into the emergency room and plopped into a chair, I kept thinking about how odd it seemed that every time my mom told me not to do something and I did it anyway, I somehow ended up getting hurt. My wrist hurt like hell. I was afraid of what my dad was going to do to me, and anxious about what the doctor was going to discover, but I shed no tears. Maybe that was a good sign?

  As it turned out, I was very fortunate that I only sprained my wrist. I wore a hard cast for a month, and then a removable one until it completely healed. All of my scrapes, what we called “road rash,” got cleaned up. The worst part was the doctor using a pair of long tweezers to pick bits of stone out from underneath flaps of skin. Only now do I realize what could have happened, how wrong things could have gone.

  I was hurting quite a bit from my injury, but the psychological torture of knowing that my dad was going to come home and I was going to have to confess to him what I’d done was even more painful. I lay in bed, my wrist propped up on a pillow, my fingers feeling fatter and fatter as I watched the shadows crawl across the ceiling and down the far wall. By the time they touched the floor, I heard my father’s car squeak to a stop in the driveway. I figured it was best to just face the music, and I hoped that it would be my music that he’d take away from me this time—though I was certain it was going to be a lot worse than that.

  I went to the kitchen and stood at the table, my wrist resting on the back of the chair in full view of my dad as soon as he entered the house. He came in, stopped in his tracks, brought the flats of his palms to his eyes, and rubbed his face, seemingly smearing it with a deep red paint.

  “¡Idiota!” he snarled. “¿En qué estabas pensando?”

  The words “I wasn’t thinking” nearly escaped my mouth, but I swallowed them and just looked at the floor, noticing for the first time that the skin underneath the nail on my big toe had turned purple.

  My dad went on yelling, telling me what I’d already been thinking myself but had dismissed as unnecessary worry: “You’ll never make it to the big leagues. The wrist is a complicated joint. You damage it, you can’t throw, you can’t hit. What good are you then?”

  He didn’t even ask me how it had happened, and I was glad about that. But when he said, “Someone needs to keep a better eye on you, you can’t be trusted,” he looked at my mother and then at me. I started to tear up, sad that I might have caused my mother even more grief than I already had.

  “It was my fault—” I began.

  He swiftly cut me off. “¡Por supuesto!” He had his hands on his hips and leaned forward, bug-eyed, like a cartoon lion about to raise his head to devour me. “Who else is there to blame?”

  The question hung there in silence, along with the smell of rice burning. My mother took in a sharp breath and scrambled to the stove.

  I didn’t need to hear anymore, but my father added, “Get out of here. I can’t look at you right now.”

  I retreated to my room. About a half hour later, Michelle came in, tiptoeing and carrying a bowl of rice and beans. She set it on my nightstand and darted out again. My stomach growled, but I didn’t eat a bite. I knew I deserved this punishment and wasn’t going to do anything to lessen it.

  My dad didn’t look at me or talk to me for a few days after that, but when I was finally able to get the cast off my wrist permanently, he examined it when he came home that night.

  “Take it easy. Just a few swings off the tee for a few days. Twenty-five to thirty. If it hurts too much, stop.”

  I had to fight a smile. My batting tee had gone from being another of my misadventures to a regular part of my routine. I’d “salvaged” the tee from a hose at the back of our washing machine and a broomstick I cut to length. When my mom learned that the washer had a sudden leak, she shouted so loud I could hear her all the way at the far end of the yard, where I was busy digging a posthole so that the broomstick would stand upright. Understandably, she was not pleased, but the hose fit neatly over the piece of wood and held the ball securely. Of course, when my mom went to find the broom to sweep up the water, the count was 0-2.

  There were times when anyone who didn’t know us well would have thought that my name was J-O-R-G-E-U-G-H! for the note of exasperation that my parents had to add to the end of it. My mom covered for me on that one, not mentioning anything about the rubber pipe and broomstick I’d borrowed. She got the pipe replaced, the laundry got clean, and all was well until my dad came home to find me bashing balls off the tee into our chain-link fence. At first he stood there appraising my swing. Then his brow wrinkled and his eyes grew wide. He didn’t want to look at me again that evening. Maybe because this was a baseball-positive failure to do the right thing, he only seemed mad for a few hours afterward. But every time he saw me using the tee he would shake his head slowly and say, “Swing is okay. Tee is bad.”

  That whole incident went down better than my attempt to build a backstop out of a few concrete blocks we had lying around. My mom didn’t like me throwing a ball against the house, so I figured I’d do the right thing and take those blocks, less than a half-dozen of them, and stack them in the yard. They worked well in keeping the ball from getting away, providing good targets for my throws, and making no noise that would bother my mother. Of course, there was a downside—they really scuffed up the cover of the balls. That didn’t matter to me, because my dad’s closet had a laundry basket full of baseballs. It was like one of those Star Trek machines they could walk up to, tell it what they wanted, and there it was. I wanted baseballs, and when I went to my dad’s closet, there they were. I wasn’t payin
g close attention, though, and one of the balls I took out of the closet—well, it wasn’t in the laundry basket but on a small shelf, and it happened to be a ball signed by Roberto Clemente. My dad didn’t care so much that I’d decreased the value of the ball if he wanted to sell it; his concern was that it was disrespectful of me to take something he prized, and stupid of me to not even notice the signature on it.

  I got a taste of my own medicine one afternoon in 1984. I rode my bike on a regular loop through our surrounding area. Since I no longer had to get up early to get to school, and inspired by my dad’s example, I got out of bed to ride 20 miles. On days when practices or games didn’t prevent it, I’d do the same after school. That—and my dream of cycling heroics—ended when a gang of kids attacked me. I was in a poor part of our neighborhood and I saw a group of guys walking along. They carried chains and sticks, but I didn’t really think they would use them. They were shouting and laughing, and then one of them lashed out with his chain, hitting my front tire and knocking me to the ground. A moment later, I felt one of those sticks hitting me. I had on a helmet, one of the old-fashioned bike helmets that looked like partially inflated inner tubes, and along with the dull ache of the stick hitting me I felt a sharp pain. A moment later, I felt blood running down my head, into my eyes.

  We were in a well-traveled area, and the thing that hurt me most was seeing people in their cars staring at me but no one helping me. The guys took my bike, and I had to figure out how to get home. My grandparents lived nearby, so I stopped there. I thought my grandmother was going to faint when she saw her bloody grandson at her front door. I got cleaned up and my dad and mom came to get me. For the next few weeks, my dad came home from work and drove through the area, hoping to spot my bike so that he could take on whoever had attacked me. He never saw it, but I appreciated his efforts. For many years after that I didn’t ride a bike at all, only resuming the activity when I was an adult. I hated the idea that something I valued also made me a target.