Joe, You Coulda Made Us Proud

by Joe Pepitone

  “Who the fuck wants your autograph?” he said. “Look underneath.”

  I looked at the bottom sheet of paper. It was a subpoena to appear in court about a long-overdue bill. I started checking out every piece of paper before I accepted it from an autograph-seeker. I got so many subpoenas I became paranoid. I’d see a guy with a piece of paper the size of a baseball card and wonder, Do they make subpoenas that small? The other players would look out for me: “Joe, that guy’s a process server.” I’d duck, hustle away. When I’d get a summons to appear in court, I’d give it to my attorney and he’d go. A $600 bill from three years ago was now $875, and my lawyer would have to make a settlement. “All my client can pay you is two hundred thirty. He’s flat broke. You can take that or you can take nothing and get on line to collect. You’ll be number three hundred eight-four on line.” The guy would take the money and run. Not even a thank you.

  It was a bitch trying to play baseball with all the worries about bill collectors. I thought any day one of them would run on the field and serve me in front of twenty thousand people. I’d go up to bat, the pitcher would release the ball, and I’d see a bill flying up to the plate.

  When I wasn’t thinking about debts, I was thinking about Eileen, which was worse, much worse. I would be sitting in the dugout during a game, and all of a sudden I wouldn’t know what was happening on the field. My daughter’s words on the day I left would flash into my mind: “Daddy, don’t leave me.” Tears would come to my eyes and I’d bow my head so no one could see me wipe them away. I didn’t want to let anyone know what I was going through, to show any weakness. But I couldn’t keep those words from shooting into my head—in the clubhouse, in the on-deck circle, at bat, in the field—“Daddy don’t leave me.” I realized that I wouldn’t be seeing Eileen any more—the Yankees didn’t even visit Oakland then—that I had lost her forever, and no matter what escapes I engaged in, I couldn’t permanently escape that fact. Lord, I tried. I couldn’t bear to be alone. I had to be around people all the time, had to have a lot of things happening, anything that might keep me from thinking.

  It didn’t always work, though, no matter how much I went out, how much I partied. I’d be with a chick, really getting it on, balling away, and wham—“Daddy, don’t leave me”. Then I’d instantly slip out, be left with nothing but wrinkled skin and the feeling that my head was about to explode. I look back on it now and I am sure I never would have gotten through this period if I hadn’t been so young, if I hadn’t been able to trick myself into not thinking. If I’d been older, more mature, if I had known anything, I would have been forced to think—and they would have had to haul me away.

  But all of this didn’t do a lot for me as a ballplayer. With the boozing and lack of sleep, I was never in shape. It wasn’t that I drank that much, but most of my time in bed I spent fucking or trying to fuck. Small wonder I loafed on the field. When you’re hitting well, it doesn’t matter what you do at night. You never hear from the guys. I heard from a number of the guys this season: “Joe, you didn’t run out that ground ball. You’re making us all look bad, as if you don’t care.”

  “Fuck you,” I’d say.

  Ralph Houk called me into the front office to see him. He’d observed my half-assed play, and he knew about my debts and that I had split with my family. “Is the divorce bothering you?” he asked.

  “No, shit no,” I told him, refusing to admit there was anything wrong other than the financial problems.

  “Well, what’s on your mind?” he asked. “What’s bugging you?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “The whole team’s going bad. It’s depressing.”

  The whole team was going bad. We were in sixth place all season. Roger Maris, Elston Howard, Tony Kubek, and Mantle were all injured. Mickey drove in forty-six runs in ’65. Bouton won exactly four games. I batted .247, hit eighteen home runs, and drove in all of sixty-two runs, and nobody looked as bad on the field as I did at times. Even Mantle got annoyed one day.

  I think I lost about three inches of hair off the front of my head this season, and after a game it would take me twenty minutes to get the remaining hair to cover the bare spot. I combed and combed to get it just right after one game in which I hadn’t hustled on a play in the outfield. Mantle was sitting next to me rubbing ointment on his aching knees and watching me. When I finally finished and gave my hair a last pat, Mantle stood and mussed it with his ointment-smeared hand. “Damn it,” he said, “that’s what you deserve.” He was right, but if it had been anybody except Mickey, I would’ve smashed him in the face.

  There was a moment in ’65 when I came close to punching manager Johnny Keane. The guy who’d beaten us in the ’64 Series with the Cardinals had become Yogi Berra’s replacement, and Keane and I didn’t hit it off from the beginning. Keane reportedly got upset in spring training when he heard I was after his daughter. I didn’t understand why he was upset. Shit, I was after everyone’s daughter. He must have fined me nine or ten times during the season. Once, though, he was absolutely wrong and I got furious. Hell, there were certainly enough legitimate reasons to fine me. On this day there were several bad accidents on the Belt Parkway. I was coming from a visit to my mother, and I sat in traffic, not moving an inch, for ninety minutes. I got to the park only thirty minutes before game time, and explained to Keane what had happened.

  “At least you could think of an original excuse,” he said. “That’ll cost you two-hundred and fifty dollars.”

  “That’s not an excuse—it’s the damn truth!” I yelled angrily. “The fine stands,” he said. “Now get your uniform on in a hurry and get on the field.”

  “How the hell much money do you think I’m making?” I asked him. “Every time I turn around you’re fining me. Two-fifty, huh? Why don’t you make it a thousand? And take it out of next year’s pay. You already got this year’s!”

  “Get on the field,” he said. He stormed out of the clubhouse, slamming the door behind him.

  Which was a lucky thing for both of us, because I’d had enough. My uniform shirt was half buttoned and I ripped it off my back and threw a wooden stool across the dressing room. The game was starting by the time I got to the dugout.

  As if I didn’t have enough shit coming down on me, Mike Jackson and I had some bad vibes and I had to find another place to live. One day I went to the cleaner to pick up my clothes. Most of the stuff I owned was there. But the clerk came out with a helluva lot more clothes than I owned. I looked through them and saw that about half the stuff belonged to Mike. He’d put all his cleaning on my bill. I really got pissed off. He was heavily in debt, but he wasn’t in my league. I went back to the apartment, threw him against the wall, smacked him a couple of times, and cursed him out.

  A few days later I arranged to move into Roger Maris’s apartment in Kew Gardens, Queens. Relief pitcher Hal Reniff, who had been sharing the place with Roger, had recently married a girl in the building. Then I went to a furniture buyer and sold all the furnishings in my apartment. Barbara had left a lot of our stuff in the house, and everything in the apartment Mike and I shared belonged to me. He really wasn’t a bad guy, but I was still so angry with him I didn’t tell him I’d sold the furniture. Two days later four men walked into the apartment when Mike was sleeping and cleared out everything in the place until they got to the bed. Then they woke him up.

  “Would you mind getting up, mister? That bed belongs to us.”

  I picked up my money, then went by the apartment to tell Mike I was moving, though I suspected he had a clue. He was sitting on the carpet in the living room, smoking a cigarette and flicking the ashes into an empty soup can.

  “Couldn’t you at least let me know in advance what you’re doing, man?”

  “Sure,” I said. “But you’re an asshole. Sleep on the floor.”

  It wasn’t a nice thing to do, and Mike and I weren’t friends again until about a year later. But that’s where my head was then. On a countdown to derangement.

 
; By the end of the regular-season schedule, I was literally disassembling before my very eyes. We had four games left to play in Boston, and I couldn’t face them. I could barely face myself in the mirror, and I didn’t know what I was going to do. But I felt it was something self-destructive, something crazed. It wouldn’t do any good to go out; I couldn’t see any even momentary escape in partying. The party was over. I needed help.

  I called my two best friends from the neighborhood, Lemon and Fat John. And I called my Uncle Louie. People I could trust, could count on, was safe with. I told them all the same thing.

  “I’m in my apartment in Queens. I’m coming apart. Please . . . please come over here right away, or you’re not gonna see me again. I need . . . I need someone with me. Right away.”

  They all came, my friends, within the hour, and I sucked it in, got myself semi-together. The club went to Boston without me that day, and Houk called.

  “Ralph, I’m sorry,” I said, “I just couldn’t make another trip with that man [Johnny Keane]. I’m coming apart. I’m going out of my fucking mind.”

  “All right, Joe, take it easy,” he said, seeming to understand. “I’ll call you right back.”

  In two minutes he did. “Joe, listen to me,” he said. “You’ve got to do me a favor. You owe me a favor, right?”

  “Right.”

  “Just to protect the club, let me put you in the hospital for the last four days of the season.”

  “No, Ralph, I’m not going in any fucking hospital.” I didn’t want people picking at my head. I just wanted to get through these last nights of the season, to get away from the hopeless goddamn season I’d gone through, and I figured I could work out the personal shit myself. People who don’t know anything always think that.

  But Ralph kept talking to me, talking to me, telling me he’d appreciate the favor, telling me I could rest up, that I would feel better, that I had to be near exhaustion after the hours I’d been keeping for so many months. He finally talked me into going to Lenox Hill Hospital, and I went that night. I’m sure now, in retrospect, that his “protect the club” line was a ruse to get me to some shrinks, to try and help me. I had so much ability, and the Yankees needed me straightened out, if that was possible to achieve. I guess Houk wanted to know if it was, too.

  It was great in the hospital. Four days of total rest, and the psychiatrists came right away, a man and a woman. My mind was engaged with fooling them for the entire stay. They questioned me every day, and I really didn’t tell them anything—about Willie, about Eileen, about any of the guilt that was smothering me. I didn’t even tell them about all the debts. I put the whole thing on Johnny Keane and baseball, that it was fucking me up, that I couldn’t stand the regimentation, the authority telling me how to dress, how long to wear my hair, telling me everything I had to do like I was a child. I’m not a child, I told them. I’m twenty-five years old and I’m a good professional baseball player if people would just leave me alone and let me play baseball and not lay a lot of bullshit on me that has nothing to do with baseball. I yelled, ranted, raved, got a lot of shit off my chest.

  But none of the real shit. I didn’t talk about any of the heavy stuff that was happening inside me. I’m not sure I understood even half of it then, but I knew damn well I didn’t want anyone to know about what I had done to my father and my own first-born child, my little daughter. I wanted them to think that, except for a few superficial things, this guy is okay. Both of the psychiatrists kept walking out shaking their heads, as if to say, this guy is crazy, but not really. Just momentarily disturbed.

  It was a hell of an act. It always was. People always thought of me as the happiest, wackiest guy in the world. Shit, I’d worked hard enough to conjure that image and sustain it. I didn’t want to show the pain underneath, that I had any weakness, anything that was beyond my control, that was eating at my head. Who wanted to be around a man who was living in agony? Who, I wondered subconsciously, could possibly love such a man?

  XIII

  “Get your clothes on and get out of here.”

  There was one bit of light in that horror-show season of ’65. I met a tough, sharp, beautiful girl, the girl I would marry early in 1966. She was an actress named Diane Sandre, who had appeared on Broadway with Alan Arkin in Enter Laughing. She was working as a cocktail waitress at the Pussy Cat, and one day I gave Mike Jackson two tickets to a game and he showed up at the stadium with her. I saw them sit down just before the game started, and she knocked me over. I’ve got to meet her, I said to myself.

  It so happened that the first time up that day I hit a home run. The seats I’d gotten for Mike were right behind and on the first-base end of the Yankee dugout. After rounding the bases, instead of running into the home-plate end of the dugout—the normal point of entry—I trotted up to where Diane was sitting and gave her a shit-eating smile, like, Not bad, huh? When I ducked into the dugout, Mike later told me, Diane said to him, “Did you see that clown?”

  I didn’t know this, of course. When I hit another home run in the fifth inning, I again entered the far end of the dugout, only this time I gave Diane a big wink and ticked the bill of my cap to her. “What a silly sonofabitch!” she said to Mike. “Your friend has to be the world’s biggest jerk. Let’s get out of here.”

  “Wait till the end of the game,” Mike said. “He got me the tickets.”

  “Screw him,” she said.

  I ran out on the field after the inning and looked over to give the chick a nod—and I saw the seats were empty, that she and Mike were gone. What the hell happened? I wondered. Maybe they’re gonna meet me after the game.

  They didn’t. I went to the Pussy Cat that night, was introduced to Diane, and came right on with some bullshit like, “How would you like to go out with a star later?” It was not effective with Diane. I went in there every night we were home after that and tried to get a date with her. Two months later I was still trying. So late one Friday night, with the place jammed body on body, I was in there and she was waiting for an order at the service bar. I elbowed my way over, dropped down on my knees in front of her, and yelled at the top of my lungs: “What the fuck do I have to do to get a date with you? How long do I have to stay on my knees to get you to go out with me?”

  “Shh, you crazy bastard,” she said in a half-whispered plea. “Get up off your knees.”

  I didn’t move.

  “I’ll meet you when I get off—just get up off your kneees!”

  I embarrassed her into going out with me. We stopped for one drink, then went right to her apartment and I smoked a joint. (I’d smoked marijuana occasionally ever since I was seventeen.) Diane was just an all-time super chick. Very deep, very sharp—much sharper, more mature than I was. I dug the shit out of her.

  I got her into bed and got right to it. As I finished, Diane looked up into my eyes and said, “Get your clothes on and get out of here. You are terrible.”

  That destroyed my ego, and I got mad as hell, throwing on my clothes as fast as I could and cursing her. As I walked out the door I heard her say, “What a mistake.”

  I had to go right back out on the street and find another girl to fuck—prove to myself I’m good. Actually, that wasn’t the first bedroom complaint I’d heard. I was generally a maniac in bed: open your legs, let me put it in, bang, bang, ooooh, off. That’s the way I was. I’d ball a girl and I wouldn’t want to be with her again. Thanks for the memory. I wanted a different girl every night, one after another, after another, after another. And every conceivable type: blacks, whites, Puerto Ricans, Chinese, Indians, Serbo-Croations . . . you name it, I’d surely love to try it.

  I can’t relate to this behavior today, don’t know what drove me to act this way, except that it did something for my ego. I kept at it after that night with Diane, didn’t go back to the Pussy Cat because she had cut me too deeply. But I couldn’t get her out of my mind, and a few weeks later I ran into her one night in another bar. She was pleasant, a damn nice, intriguing gir
l. We sat around talking, and the next thing I knew three hours had gone by. I had never been able to sit around with anyone just rapping for hours, and I was particularly hyper at this time, I had to keep bouncing around, doing something. But I actually enjoyed talking to Diane, relaxed with her. She was so intelligent, so hip, made so much sense to me. She was different from any girl I’d ever met. I made an effort to get to know her, to listen to her, which was a unique experience for me. Soon after the season ended, we started dating.

  Diane introduced me to her friends, who were entirely different from the racket guys I’d been hanging around with. Like Diane, her friends were all hip, relaxed, nice. They’d sit around and just rap all evening. This was at a time when a large percentage of people in this country were rising up against the Vietnam War, when the kids were burning their draft cards, marching in protest: “Ho, Ho, we won’t go!” I wasn’t into politics. These people made a lot of sense, and I’d sit around and listen and nod because they did make sense. After a while, though, I wanted Diane and me to get going so that we could get laid. But she was digging the conversation, contributing to it. And I’d start recalling the Korean War, when I was a young kid, and all the guys in my neighborhood were saying, “Man, that’s what I want to do. My uncle, he’s a Marine, and that’s what I want to be, go over there and kill gooks.” I wouldn’t say anything, because everyone had the same point of view, until they’d ask me, “What about you, Joe, wouldn’t you like to get over to Korea and kill some of those gooks?” I’d have to say, “No, man, that’s not me. That’s bullshit. Those gooks aren’t fucking with me. I don’t want to be a hero. I don’t want to get dead.” “Man, they’d say, you’re chicken. You don’t want to fight for your country.” “Right,” I’d say. “I don’t want to fight anyone. You guys know me. I just want to go my own way.”

  I would offer up those conversations in the rap sessions with Diane and her friends, because that’s the way I really felt. I wasn’t hip, I wasn’t political, but from way back I was very much into doing my own thing. And I always thought that fighting was ridiculous, that only crazy people went out looking to fight. Now people were going off to fight and die just because some politician told them to, and it was pure bullshit. This was something I felt and dug talking about. If a kid refused to go to war, didn’t want to fight—fuck it, don’t fight. At that time, a kid who refused to go to war knew he’d have to hide for the rest of his life, which was something I couldn’t do, which took a lot of guts. But if that was what he had to do, right on.