Wherever I Wind Up: My Quest for Truth, Authenticity and the Perfect Knuckleball

by Wayne Coffey

  I fell down in the garage, I say.

  On the ride back home, I say nothing and try to forget, but there is no forgetting. I try to distract myself by counting the yellow dashes along the center of the road. It doesn’t work. I feel filthy and bad, like the scum of the earth, only worse. I have been stained and it can never be cleaned up. There is no helping me or my shame. It feels as though it is choking me to death. Mile after mile, the car keeps moving, but there is no escaping the beat-up garage on the knoll. It is so much worse than the babysitter. I don’t know why and it doesn’t matter why. There is no hope for me and no help for me. I have no options. No place to go. The car rolls on to Nashville, to my house. I think of my room and my photo of Larry Bird. I want to get in my bed and pull the covers up over my head and not wake up for a long time.

  Please, God, let me be safe.

  MONDAY, FEBRUARY 21, 2011

  Port St. Lucie, Florida

  First impressions are important, and in his first full meeting with us as the Mets manager, Terry Collins makes a really good one. We are in a conference room in Digital Domain Park. Everybody is there—Sandy Alderson, the new general manager, his assistants, the players, the coaches, the trainers, the clubhouse manager, and even our two cooks. We go around the room and introduce ourselves. Sandy speaks first. “The expectations for this club outside of this room are very low,” he says. “I know you guys expect more of yourself, and I expect more of you too.”Sandy is not a rah-rah guy, and his approach is low-key but very compelling. “The goal of any professional sports franchise is to win, and that’s why we’re here.”

  When he’s done, he turns the floor over to Terry, who says, “Sandy stole my speech.” Everybody laughs.

  Terry has no notes. He speaks from the heart. I’ve heard a lot of these first-day speeches, and believe me, it’s more common than not for them to seem formulaic, straight off boilerplate. This is not like that at all. Terry is intense, fiery, and enthusiastic. I never get the feeling he is saying things for effect. It seems so authentic, the way he makes contact with everybody in the room and jacks up the decibel level. Even when he dabbles in clichés—“We’re going to do things the right way”—you can’t help but feel his passion and energy. Terry is a small man and doesn’t have an imposing presence when you first see him, but he is powerful nonetheless. The essence of his talk is simple: “Everybody says we’re going to stink. I hear it over and over. I think they’ve got it all wrong. You want to come along as we prove them all wrong?”

  Terry talks for twenty minutes or so, and by the time he is done, all I can think of is: This is a guy I’m really going to enjoy playing for.

  CHAPTER THREE

  FAITH ON WALNUT

  Some kids are fighters. Other kids are scrappers. I am a scrapper. I spend two extremely scrappy years—fifth and sixth grades—at St. Edward School, and the trend continues into the seventh grade at Wright Middle School, where the kids are bigger and stronger than me, but not too many have less regard for their bodies. I don’t worry about pain or getting hit or getting knocked down. I just get back up and come back at you like a boomerang. My goal when I fight is simple: I want to give more than I receive. This doesn’t make me proud. It’s just what it takes to survive, and in seventh grade survival is what I’m all about.

  Fights aren’t an everyday occurrence in my neighborhood, but I seem to have more than my share of them. I fight to defend myself, to right a wrong, or to settle a dispute. I’m not picky. I figure out early that in a school where smoke billows out of the bathroom and pregnant girls walk the hallways, you don’t want people thinking you are wimpy.

  So I learn to act tough when I need to, and sometimes when I don’t need to—which gets me into trouble. In the lunchroom one day, I get up from my seat. You have assigned seats at Wright at lunchtime, and strict rules about leaving them, the school’s effort to prevent the cafeteria from turning into WrestleMania. But I need to get a homework assignment from a classmate, so I get up and walk across the lunchroom.

  A monitor corrals me and says, Get back to your seat.

  He’s kind of nasty about it. I don’t appreciate his tone. I cuss under my breath. Not loud, not a bad cussword, but an audible obscenity, no doubt.

  Now he doesn’t appreciate my tone.

  Come with me, young man. You are going to regret your garbage mouth.

  He’s right—I am going to regret it—because this is Tennessee in the mid-1980s and corporal punishment still rules the day. The monitor escorts me down to see Mr. Tinnon, the assistant principal in charge of paddling. He conveniently keeps the paddle by his desk.

  Bend over, Mr. Tinnon says.

  He wallops me hard on the butt three times, then informs me that I have been suspended for three days.

  Three days? For one little whispered cussword?

  I don’t think the punishment fits the crime—I know kids who had full-scale brawls in the hallway who didn’t get suspended for three days—but my viewpoint does not get a forum.

  Three days, he says.

  I serve my sentence, but whether I learn any enduring lesson from it is far less clear. I have my first fight in seventh grade two weeks later. It’s against a big, fat kid whose name I never learned. I have no idea how or why we wind up in the Wright parking lot behind the school, but somehow he crosses me, or I cross him, and there we are, a couple of dopes with our dukes up, ready to rumble. I follow my usual strategy, which is to barge right in and see what the guy’s got, and watch carefully to see if he closes his eyes when he throws a punch. Most kids do. And when they do, I know I have an opening to hit them. This kid hits me with a few minor punches when I charge in on him, and he closes his eyes with every punch. I take a step back and when he begins to throw another one, I rip an uppercut into his jawbone. Blood spurts out of a gash in his face and he goes down on the pavement. He isn’t moving.

  I take a look at him, lying there in a bloody heap, and at my blood-splattered right knuckle, and then pick up my stuff and head for home as casually as if we’d met for afternoon tea. I return to the usual empty house, have a bowl of Froot Loops, and climb the poplar tree in the front yard. I think about the kid again, wonder if he is still laid out in the parking lot. I can’t believe how little I care.

  I never mention the fight to anybody.

  The next time I fight, I use the same full-bore approach. We are playing a tackle football game a couple of streets over from my house, and this older kid, strong and sinewy, takes me down hard.

  Too hard.

  What do you think you’re doing? I say, scrambling to my feet.

  What’s your problem, punk? Can’t take a hit?

  We square off and I wade in on him and he drives a fist into my temple and knocks me almost to the ground, doubled over, and finishes the job with a kick to the gut with what feels like a steel-toed boot. I am done. TKO in the first round. The other kids disperse. This time I am the one left on the ground. Some boomerang.

  A stray dog comes over and sniffs me. I slowly get to my feet, mad at myself that I couldn’t take the kid’s punch, furious at him that he used a kick to end it.

  I never mention this fight to anybody, either.

  R. A. DICKEY

  IN THE SPAN of four years, I go from Glencliff Elementary to St. Edward School to Wright Middle School. Whatever my address, I keep finding my way into tangles and still don’t care about pain. I don’t care about lots of things. At St. Edward’s, my uniform consists of dark green chino slacks and a collared shirt. I wake up late one day and have to dress in a hurry. I really have to go to the bathroom, which is downstairs, and I really don’t feel like going downstairs. It will take too much time, so I just go ahead and pee right in my pants, which are now just a little darker. I finish getting dressed and walk to school. A block into the walk, my legs start getting chafed by the wet pants.

  What am I doing? Why didn’t I just change my pants? I think, Do I really care so little about myself? When I finally get to scho
ol I head for the bathroom and stuff a wad of paper towels inside my pants to blot up some of the wetness. It doesn’t help much.

  I spend the whole day in urine-soaked pants.

  It’s not that big a deal, I tell myself. They’ll get cleaned up the next time my mother goes to the Laundromat.

  WHEN I TURN THIRTEEN, I am on the move again, in more ways than one. I have been admitted to a prestigious all-boys school, Montgomery Bell Academy, or MBA, as everybody around Nashville calls it. My uncle Ricky went to MBA and it changed his life. My parents don’t have all that much communication with each other, but they both want my life to change, too, so, one year removed from wetting myself and being a low-level troublemaker, I find myself taking a long and intensive MBA entrance exam. I don’t make the cut. A year later I take the test again and this time I do make the cut. When MBA generously offers me a full package of financial aid and my parents agree with the school’s plan for me to repeat seventh grade, the deal is sealed.

  MBA was founded in 1867 and ever since has been educating Nashville’s elite, a demographic group I know nothing about. Many MBA students have parents who set them up with six-figure trust funds. I have parents who smuggle flatware from Western Sizzlin. It’s not a great socioeconomic fit. I may not be the only kid from the other side of the proverbial tracks, but we’re not exactly taking over the school, either.

  By the time I hit my new, hoity-toity hallways, most everybody I know is calling me R.A. It stands for Robert Allen. I was Robert for most of my life, but people in the family call Granddaddy R.G., for Robert Green, and now they’ve taken to calling me by my initials too. The only person who continues to call me Robert is my mother, though it’s remarkable she’s not calling me much worse.

  I am giving my mother a hard time—about everything. I’m an adolescent brat running amok. Cleaning up my room, hanging up my coat, taking out the trash—I battle her over the most mundane of household tasks, and work hard every day to find new ways to be defiant and beat her down with my unruliness. As my time at MBA approaches, I go for the jugular.

  I’m going to go live with Dad, I tell her. I don’t ask her permission. I tell her this is how it’s going to be.

  My mother is sitting in her blue La-Z-Boy recliner. She couldn’t have been more stunned if I’d told her I was quitting sports to take up the cello.

  What’s wrong with living here with me, where you’ve always lived?

  Nothing, I just want to live with Dad.

  I have custody of you, Robert. You can’t just decide you are living with your father.

  I’m going to live with him. That’s what I want. I want to do the things I used to do with him. He only lives ten minutes away, so it’s not like it’s that big a deal.

  She tells me that it’s not my choice, but I don’t hear her; I’ve already turned and left the room. I don’t know why my mother doesn’t just bring down the hammer and tell me that it’s not my decision and I’m not going anywhere. My mother is a functioning alcoholic, but her drinking is getting worse and she’s down a lot and probably ashamed that her life hasn’t turned out differently. She probably doesn’t feel entitled to stand up for herself.

  I see an opening and seize it.

  A couple of weeks later, moving day arrives. I pack up a duffel bag and head downstairs. My mother is again in the blue recliner. I hear my father’s car pull up. I don’t hug my mother or kiss her or thank her for everything she has done over the first twelve years of my life. I behave, quite honestly, like a completely self-involved teenage punk. I just walk out the door and get into my father’s car. The last sound I hear when I walk out of 247 Timmons is my mother sobbing. They are the big, heaving, gasping-for-air kind of sobs. I can still hear her out in the driveway.

  I’m a child of divorce who is learning on the fly how not to feel pain—or anything else. It’s been that way since the babysitter and the kid behind the garage.

  I can’t believe how little my mother’s sobs bother me.

  All I am fixated on is getting close with my dad again. That’s the whole point of my power play. It’s not about getting away from my mother’s drinking or about the towels she wants me to pick up. It’s not about having more independence. It’s driven entirely by this yearning to be back at the Green Hills Family YMCA and chase foul balls at Sounds games again and drive a golf cart next to my father, hoping to play thirty-six holes.

  That’s what I want to do with my dad. That’s what I want more than anything in my life. I want to hear him call me Little Horsey and have everything be the way it was before he left, before the divorce and all the instability.

  It’ll be great, Dad, don’t you think? That’s what I want to say to my father, but I never do.

  THERE ISN’T ANY part of MBA that I’m not intimidated by in the beginning. I don’t know the buildings, the teachers, or where the bathrooms are. Everywhere I look I see kids wearing their collared Ralph Lauren Polo shirts, with the familiar logo of a man on a horse with a polo mallet. We can’t afford them, so I dress in the knock-off Knights of the Round Table shirts, with a less familiar logo of a man on a horse with a flag. It doesn’t bother me, and nobody mocks me for my clothes, but I am in a whole different orbit, and it’s strange. I’ve never heard of a school having a motto (“Gentleman, Scholar, Athlete”), and I’ve never heard of having to adhereto an academic honor code, either. Every time I submit an assignment or paper, or take a test, I write these words and sign my name beneath them: On my honor as a gentleman, I have neither given nor received aid on this work.

  But the biggest difference is the splendor of the place itself: the columned brick buildings and towering trees and wide porches, and old stone walls that seem to go on forever, low gray guardians of Southern gentility. In the main courtyard are two Civil War cannons. Not facsimile cannons: real Civil War cannons. They have authentic history at MBA, and I’ve parachuted right into the rock-ribbed thick of it, leaving grit for grandeur, beaten-up linoleum for buffed marble. I feel like a Wookiee at a White House dinner, without question, and yet there’s something that warms me about MBA, no matter how much social climbing I do to get there. I like the order, the discipline, the nurturing. I feel cared for there. I complain about the rules, but privately I relish them. People pay attention to me and listen to me and are trying to help me. That doesn’t happen in all that many places. Not in the same way. I know my mother loves me, but she has problems now. My stepmother, Susan, is awfully nice to me and drives me all over Nashville, to this practice and that game, but she is not my mother and I don’t let her forget that. I feel adrift, torn between two parental poles and not getting what I need from either. I feel alone at home. I don’t feel quite so alone at MBA.

  As the first days of the seventh grade turn into weeks, I get to know an eighth grader named Bo Bartholomew. I am not one who makes friends easily. I am much more comfortable sitting in the back, observing, calculating and measuring my options, a kid who has a hard time with trust. A kid who has secrets. What terrifies me more than anything is that those secrets could somehow be uncovered.

  But something about Bo feels different, safer. He is a big blond-haired guy who plays on the school football team with me and wrestles in the winter, and one look at his muscular torso makes me hope that MBA kids don’t fight the way we did on the other side of town. Smart and strong and handsome, Bo has a perfect smile above a perfect chin, and looks as if he stepped right out of a J. Crew catalog. You look at a guy like Bo Bartholomew and you think you might as well give up because you’ll never be as gifted or as good-looking.

  Bo turns out to be much different than other kids I’ve been around. He is kind, generous, and concerned with the welfare of others. He treats me as a complete equal. He invites me over to his sprawling colonial on a dead-end street in Belle Meade, the swankiest part of Nashville, and the first person I meet is his mother, Vicki Bartholomew. She was Miss Tennessee in 1966, the runner-up to Miss America, and she looks it even now, twenty-two years later,
a pretty, slender woman with blond hair and a welcoming spirit. She offers us a snack and we head upstairs to play Duck Hunt on Bo’s Nintendo. I have never seen a Nintendo. I could get used to it. We play Duck Hunt for an hour and then decide to go out to throw the football, and as we turn the corner into the den to head outside, I am startled.

  I am captivated.

  It is my first memory of ever being captivated.

  On the couch, curled up with her homework, is Bo’s younger sister, Anne. She has thick, blond hair, with curls and waves, something approaching a lion’s mane. She has a green sweater on over a white collared shirt. She has green eyes and she is beautiful.

  Bo introduces me.

  Nice to meet you, says Anne, a seventh grader at the Ensworth School.

  You too.

  The words have barely left my mouth when I start beating myself up.

  That is the best you can do? You too?

  Bo and I go toss the football, but all I can think about is Anne and how ridiculous I must’ve come across with my caveman vocabulary.

  Hanging out in school the next day, I want to talk to Bo about his sister and Bo wants to talk to me about a meeting. It’s on Thursday night, a group called the Fellowship of Christian Athletes. He invites me to join him.

  I’m a three-sport athlete—football, basketball, and baseball—and anything to do with sports I’ll try at least once.

  What is it? I ask.

  It’s just what the name says. It’s a fellowship of guys who are honest with each other and care about each other, and get together to share about their faith in God.

  But I don’t know much about God. The only times I’ve been to church, really, have been with my grandmother, and that hasn’t been very often.