Joe, You Coulda Made Us Proud

by Joe Pepitone

  I remember, when Jimmy had been gone about a month, asking my mother to bring him home. I was six years old, and I said, “I want my brother Jimmy back, Mamma.”

  “Soon,” she said. “He’ll be home soon.”

  And as the years rolled along and the brother I’d been so close to stayed away, stayed on and on and on with my aunt . . . I began to think my whole goddamn family was fucked up.

  V

  “Mom–I wish he’d die!”

  Just before the start of my last season of high-school ball, my father had a heart attack. He was thirty-nine years old, had worked hard all his life, was in fantastic shape, drank very little. Yet one day he was in the peak of health, and the next day he was almost dead. They had to rush him to the hospital to save his life.

  I couldn’t believe how close we’d come to losing him. I was a seventeen-year-old kid, and there were some thirteen scouts for major-league baseball teams following me around. This was the season in which they would come at me with a contract if I hit the ball even as well as I had the year before—and the man I counted on most at this time, needed most despite our problems, was critically ill. He was so sick, this superman, the toughest man in a very tough neighborhood, that I couldn’t even go to visit him.

  Two days later I was in another hospital, on the critical list. There was a lot of trouble at Manual Training High in the spring of 1958, a lot of violence. On this day, when school ended, I went to my locker to get my jacket and go home. A guy I knew named O’Dell was standing by the lockers with a group of people. All of a sudden he came over to me and said, in a put-on gangster voice, “Stick ’em up.” I looked down and there was a gun in his hand, a .38, its muzzle inches from my belly.

  “Hey,” I said, staring into the cylinder and seeing bullets in them, “that thing’s loaded!”

  Bang! it went off, the sound echoing through the corridor. I didn’t even know I was shot, didn’t feel a thing. I just stood there looking down, and I saw the hole in my shirt near the lower edge of my rib cage. I picked up my shirt and there was a hole in my skin, circled by what looked like a bruise, but there was no blood. I reached my hand behind me and felt my back, sliding it over the flesh in search of a hole. Then I felt it, my fingers meeting the slippery wetness all around the aperture. I looked at my hand and it was smeared with blood. I fell to my knees, still not feeling pain, only a queasiness in my stomach, like I was going to throw up.

  Just then a woman teacher ran up behind me and tugged at the back of my collar. “All right, you,” she said sternly, “give me those firecrackers!”

  O’Dell had run off crying, but one of the other guys said, “He’s been shot.”

  “Oh my God,” said the woman, seeing the hole in my shirt. “Lie down—you’d better lie down.”

  I was on my knees, in shock, but I didn’t think lying down in this corridor was going to do a whole lot of good for a gunshot wound.

  Then the teacher said, “No, we’ve got to get you to the nurse. Can you walk?”

  Someone helped me to my feet, and I found I could walk slowly if I bent over slightly. She led me to the elevator of the four-story building and pressed the Down button, leaned on it till the door opened. The elevator operator was a guy who had a well-deserved reputation for playing with a quarter deck. We were on the second floor, and when the elevator door opened, the teacher said, “Hurry up, get us down to the nurse’s office. This boy’s been shot.”

  The elevator man said, “Okay, I just gotta pick up somebody on the fourth floor that rang a while ago.” The door closed in our faces.

  The teacher screamed after him, then turned to me with a worried look. “The stairs are right here,” she said. “Do you think you can walk down?”

  With help, I made it down to the nurse’s office. She took one look at me, helped me lie on the table with the long sheet of white paper covering it, and called for an ambulance. She placed her hand on my forehead and asked, “How do you feel?”

  “I don’t feel any pain,” I told her—and the minute I said it I remembered something I’d heard one of my aunts say when a member of the family was very sick: “If you don’t feel no pain, that’s when it’s bad. I tell you, that’s when it’s very bad.” That was when I got very scared.

  A few minutes later there was a priest at my side with a purple stole draped around his neck. He had come to administer the last rites. “Are you sorry for all your sins of your past life, my son?”

  “I’m sorry! I’m sorry!” I said, panicking and beginning my confession. “Father, I didn’t go to the store for my mother like I told her I would; Father, I played with myself—” Then I broke it off, wondering out loud, “What if I don’t get it all out, Father?”

  The priest reassured me and finished giving me last rites. Now I was really afraid, and I lay there thinking all kinds of weird things. I remembered having heard my mother and other women in my family say—as all Italians seemed to then—that just before you die you see the face of Christ. I put my hand over my eyes.

  The ambulance took me to Methodist Hospital and they operated to close up everything the bullet had torn inside me. I was in surgery for nine hours. I had been lucky, the doctor told me afterward. The bullet had struck a rib and caromed out my lower back . . . missing three vital organs by inches. I was on the critical list for six days, in the hospital for twelve.

  Perhaps the most amazing thing was that the day I was shot, my father—who was in Jewish Hospital some distance away—suddenly asked his nurse what had happened to me. “Something’s wrong with my son Joe,” he told her. He had an instinct, like a second sense, about me that seemed to tell him every time I had a real problem. The nurse told him he was mistaken, to relax. With his heart condition, he was not supposed to get upset. But he kept insisting that something bad had happened to me, that they were keeping it from him—until finally the nurse gave him a sedative, put him to sleep. Of course, my mother had informed them about me, and that night they removed the television set and radio from his room. In the morning, their absence confirmed his fears. My father started screaming, and his doctor decided he had to tell Willie. My father tried to get out of bed, saying he had to go see me. The doctor gave him a shot to calm him, but it didn’t do much good. The only thing that could be done to take the strain off his damaged heart was to lift him into a wheelchair and take him to see me.

  When they rolled him into the doorway of my room and I saw him sitting there in that chair, looking small, haggard, the tears just spewed out of my eyes. I almost ripped out the tubes snaking from my body as I reached for him. They pushed him next to my bed and he leaned over and hugged me and kissed me and then lay his head on my chest sobbing, our tears intermingling on the front of my hospital gown. We stayed like that, holding onto each other and crying, for about ten minutes.

  My father got out of the hospital a week before I did. He had to stay home and take it easy. His doctors couldn’t say when he could go back to work—they didn’t know whether Willie would ever be able to do heavy construction labor again. Probably not. My father couldn’t stand it—being sick, being confined to the apartment, unable to do anything except shuffle around, lie around all day long. I guess he must have felt as if someone had stolen his manhood . . . had crept in one night and made off with his muscles, snipped off his balls.

  He was awful to be around, constantly grouchy, yelling about something every minute—particularly at my mother. She was an angel through all of this, as she had been through all the shit Willie and I had brought down on her over the years, all the tension and fear and pain. Now she had both of us to care for in beds across a hall from one another, two semi-invalids to wait on, comfort, abide. And my father kept yelling at her.

  I remember the second day I was home from the hospital, when it became too goddamn much for me. My father and I had had an argument, and minutes later he started screaming at my mother, who was in my room. I got angry, absolutely furious, and I said, “Mom—I wish he’d die. I reall
y wish he’d die!”

  “Joe, you don’t know what you’re saying!” she said to me. “Don’t say that about your father!”

  The next night, it was Good Friday morning, I woke up with a start at 3:20 A.M. I heard three loud, grating snores. They had come from my father’s room. I got out of bed and hurried into his room, with my mother coming in right behind me. My father’s head was down on his shoulder, his eyes wide open, unblinking, staring right into my eyes.

  “Willie!” my mother yelled. “Willie!”

  I started crying. My aunts and uncles came in from next door, and one of them held a mirror under my father’s nose. The glass didn’t fog. My face fell into my hands, the sobs ripping at me, and an uncle took me across the hallway to his apartment. About fifteen minutes later the doctor got there, and my uncle came in and told me what I already knew but had refused to admit to myself: “Willie is dead.”

  Then I went crazy, completely lost control of myself in my guilt over what I’d said the day before. I wanted to hurt myself, to pay myself back for those words about my father. I dove at a second-floor window, trying to throw myself out into the street below. I cracked two panes and bounced off the framing, and my uncle and aunt dragged me sobbing into bed. My aunt sat with me, tried to comfort me, but she only made it worse . . . much worse.

  “Your mother told me you said you wished your father would die, but that doesn’t mean anything,” said my aunt. “God took your father and gave you back your life, because you were supposed to die when you were shot, Joey. It’s God’s will.”

  That statement destroyed me. I couldn’t get it out of my mind, and the guilt feelings tracked me in my subconscious for years, until a psychiatrist helped me. All that time I actually thought I’d willed my father dead, that I had killed him.

  After that I went into a heavy depression and cried myself to sleep every night. My mother, who had gone back to work, would sit on my bed for hours every night and rub my back until I went to sleep. I was a big boy, almost six feet tall, seventeen years old, and I managed to go to school and to play ball again, finish the high-school season. In fact I hit damn well: ten home runs in fourteen games. Yet every night I cried, every night I had trouble sleeping. My mother got me the most powerful sleeping pills and they didn’t work.

  Then one day in typing class, toward the end of the semester, I suddenly began getting these hot and cold flashes. They sent me home and my mother took me to the doctor, who said it wasn’t dangerous but that my heart was skipping beats. I stopped going to school, just stayed home, never left the apartment. I became a real hypochondriac, certain that every twitch was going to kill me. My nerves went and my eyes blurred; for a week I saw everything through double vision. I lost almost fifteen pounds, went down to 125 on a six-foot frame. I looked like death.

  Finally, after I hadn’t left the apartment for over a month, my mother went to my friends and told them they had to get me out of there. She told them to drag me out if they had to, but that I had to get out. The guys came up, four of them, and literally picked me up and carried me out to a car, threw me in it, and took off to Coney Island. When we got there, everyone but me jumped out. “C’mon, Joe,” they said, “let’s get something to eat.” I didn’t answer, just sat there in my depression. Then the smells of all that great-tasting Coney Island food wafted into the car, filled my nostrils. I must’ve eaten ten hamburgers and fifteen franks that day. I was ambulatory again.

  I started playing ball with Nathan’s again and regaining the weight I’d lost. But there were no longer thirteen scouts following me. That bullet wound caused ten of them to drop off. Only the Philadelphia Phillies, Los Angeles Dodgers, and New York Yankees were still interested in me. When the bidding got up to $25,000, the Phillies withdrew. And although I’d grown up only a little over a mile from Ebbets Field and had gone to a lot of Dodger games before they moved to the West Coast, I’d always been a Yankee fan. My father had been a Yankee fan and my uncle Louie who’d started me playing ball was a Yankee fan. If I hadn’t picked them, Louie would have given me a shot in the head. The Yankees put me through a thorough physical examination, I was judged fit, and on August 13, 1958, I signed with them for a $25,000 bonus.

  I’m sure that in the years since then the Yankees have wished they’d examined my head, been able to see the terrifying guilt, the compulsive rebellion against authority, the need to be loved that led me down so many bizarre and painful tracks.

  My father’s death was a traumatic experience, but secretly after it I think I felt, good, good, I’m free now. Free. When he died I was crying on the outside, but inside I think I was happy, actually happy not having to worry about him rapping me or yelling at me any more. It was a relief to get that pressure off my head. Now I was on my own, and I could do whatever I wanted to because my mother couldn’t stop me, and it felt wonderful. Yet mixed in with this elation was the guilt from the belief that I’d not only willed my father’s death but that I was happy about it. God, it was so sick, so hateful to me.

  And then I went through a year of tremendous highs and abysmal lows that wrenched my mind, shattered my sleep, and came very close to producing a nervous breakdown. I still have nightmares about that depression. To this day I don’t know how I got through it. I guess I was finally able to shove it aside, never totally dispelling it, but never permitting it to overwhelm me thereafter. Or so I thought.

  I remember the day I got through the depression, and that day I swore—swore—that I would never again allow myself to get that depressed. I was never again going to allow myself to feel that bad, feel that kind of excruciating pain, no matter what happened. I was going to be happy, have fun from then on. Fuck misery. Live it up, Joe Pepitone. The past is past and the world is yours.

  VI

  When fucking couldn’t compare with playing baseball.

  When I signed with the Yankees I was told I wouldn’t play until after the 1958 season at the Florida instructional school. I was disappointed. But about ten days later I got a call from the front office saying the Yankee Class D farm team in Auburn, New York, needed an outfielder for the last few weeks of the season. Would I like to be that outfielder? It was like asking a dog with weak kidneys if he’d like a tree.

  I went right out and bought myself a new Thunderbird, in my mother’s name, of course, because I wouldn’t be eighteen until October and didn’t have a driver’s license. I talked her into it, and she went along with me after all I’d been through. She was probably tired of rubbing my back to help me get to sleep. I also bought several 250-dollar silk suits, sleek, very tightly cut like the younger, sharper racket guys wore then. I never gave a thought to the fact that I’d spent some five-thousand dollars in one day. Hell, as far as I could tell, I was rich.

  I rubbed neat’s-foot oil on my gloves, packed my bags, and the next day was off to join the Auburn club of the New York-Pennsylvania League. Joe Pepitone, age seventeen, from the Park Slope section of Brooklyn, property of the New York Yankees, perennial World Champions, sitting tall behind the wheel of a sparkling new T-Bird . . . was on his way.

  I joined the club on the road, in Corning, New York. I went into the clubhouse at the end of the game, and Tommy Gott, the manager, said, “You’re rooming with the shortstop, Phil Linz.” He pointed at a guy a year or two older than me with an open, smiling face. He was wearing thick glasses that made him look like a scholar, and he seemed quiet, very serious. He was obviously the ideal person for me to hang out with breaking into professional baseball. Phil Linz turned out to be one of the flakiest, wildest people I ever met, my kind of guy.

  That very first night we roomed together, we were lying around on our beds in the hotel talking, when I heard someone in the corridor yell, “The shit’s on!”

  “The shit?” I said to Phil. “What shit?”

  “We’re having a water fight,” he said, jumping up and going to his bureau. “Want to join me?” He pulled out about a dozen large balloons and ran into the bathroom. “Come
on!”

  We filled them with water and stepped out into the corridor. We heard someone coming toward us from around the corner. I got excited and dropped my balloon, which broke on the floor. “Shit, Joe, they’re coming—grab something!” Phil whispered.

  There was a fire extinguisher hanging on the wall near the corner. I grabbed it and pressed myself against the wall as the approaching footsteps grew louder. When they were almost to the corner, I jumped out, tipped the extinguisher over, and started firing. Yellow foam shot out all over the suit of the guy approaching. The problem was that the guy inside that suit was Tommy Gott, my manager.

  “Hey, Phil—uh—” The corridor behind me was empty, the door to our room closed. It was just me and my manager, whom I hadn’t even played a game for, but whom I’d thoughtfully bathed with chemical foam. He was not pleased. Not only was his suit ruined, but also the wallpaper and rug around him. The hotel was not real happy, either—throwing the entire team out within the hour. The damages and fine I had to pay came to 250 dollars—two and a half weeks’ salary. Linz thought it was very funny.

  Tommy Gott didn’t hold it against me on the ball field. He put me right in the starting lineup, and I hit the shit out of the ball—14 runs batted in in 16 games, and a .321 average. Professional baseball was not only fun, it was a cinch.

  All I cared about then was playing the game and having a little fun. I did both. The day we got back home to Auburn I went to the ball park early, as I always did then. I pulled up in my big T-Bird, parked, and started walking to the players’ entrance. A girl about my age was standing there.

  “You’re new, aren’t you?” she said.

  “Yeah. Joe Pepitone, from Brooklyn, future New York Yankee.”

  She smiled, a bright laughing smile. “Can I have your autograph?”