Gods of Wood and Stone

by Mark Di Ionno

  Then the blur of Joey’s childhood ended and, just like that, he was gone almost ten months a year. Baseball took him, and kept him on such a tight schedule—all those games, in all those cities, and thank God, she didn’t have to sit through them all anymore. Still, she missed him. When he played in New York, he could only join them for a late breakfast in the team hotel, before getting the bus to the ballpark. Sometimes they went to Boston, but she stopped after Chuck died. But even before that, for ten months a year, for more than twenty years, she saw him only a handful of days for a handful of hours.

  And then he would come home, and it was like he’d never left. Sleeping, eating, talking sports with his dad, going to the gym, doing God knows what around town until he left again for his golf vacation, then spring training. He left a boy, and as the cycle of seasons quickened with time, retired a middle-aged man. Sylvia watched in quiet despair. His sports dominated her life as a young mother, and they would leave her life as an older mother unfilled. Yes, she hoped for the usual: that Joey would someday find a girl and settle down into a grown-up life. Yes, she dreamed of Joey living nearby—around the corner, the next town over—with his agreeable wife and three, four adorable kids. Sylvia could babysit after school, and take them to the park, or go shopping with the girls while Chuck threw around the ball with the boys. But now Chuck was gone, and she, well, she kept busy.

  Grudeck was a perfect mix of his parents. He got his height and long arms and legs from his father’s Polish side, and the breadth of his shoulders, strength of his back, and sturdiness on his feet from his mother’s Southern Italian side. He had his mother’s prominent “guinea profile” in nose and chin, and her dark hair, still more black than gray. Certainly, his fierceness as a competitor came from his mother, although his easygoing off-field manner was more like his dad.

  But Sylvia Grudeck was not an emotional woman. Even as she aged, she was strong and sturdy, easily able to lug bags of kielbasa and other groceries from Lutz’s five blocks away and unafraid to tackle heavy yard work or shovel out after a blizzard. Joe always detected a hardness about her, an aloof shell, maybe a trait passed down from the poor, barren-earth farmers who were her ancestors.

  Chuck Grudeck had some dark corners, too, well hidden from the “great guy, great coach” face he put on in public. He found no pleasure in his work; eight hours a day, doing the same thing, over and over and over. Nobody better or worse than the next guy. Assembly was assembly; joyless work for an hourly wage. Something you had to do, not wanted to do.

  He derived all of his life’s enjoyment—more than that, all of his identity—from the sports heroics of his son.

  Chuck Grudeck may have made Joe Grudeck what he was, but Joe Grudeck also made Chuck Grudeck who he was: Joe Grudeck’s father.

  In the end, that was all.

  In the years before his father died, Grudeck often wondered, What if I’d sucked? What then? What would have happened to him?

  Joe Grudeck aided his father’s escape from an ordinary life by being an extraordinary son. His talent propelled his dad from run-of-the-mill factory worker to star maker, local legend, pillar of the youth-sports community.

  But it wasn’t enough to fill Chuck Grudeck’s loneliness. The rare times Joe Grudeck moved unnoticed through the house, he detected his parents’ distance from each other. His father, on his nights off, watched a game . . . any game . . . on TV, until dozing off. His mother, in the kitchen with the daily Star-Ledger, read every word, to make the evening disappear. On weekends, as Chuck rushed through the yard work to get Joey to his games, his mother was in the house, dusting and vacuuming with equal haste. Their conversations over dinner centered on Joey’s games and matches, or nothing. The rare times Sylvia didn’t go, she got the blow-by-blow.

  “Tell Ma how you did today, Joey.”

  “I pinned the kid from Irvington in thirty-six seconds?”

  “You shoulda seen it, Syl . . . Joey picks up this big colored kid like he was nothing . . . and bam! Right to his back. Flat. The place exploded.”

  Each night, a different story, but with the same ending. Wrestling season, Joey won. Football and baseball, Joey’s team won because of Joey.

  Both years Joe Grudeck won the state wrestling championships, his father sat matside with the coaches, and rushed out to clumsily hoist his son in the air. When Grudeck’s teams won their state football titles, his dad charged onto the field with the kids as the seconds ticked off.

  It took Joe Grudeck years to understand, but the burden of it all—What if I’d sucked?—kept him coming home to Union. His father needed him. He needed him to be Joe Grudeck, so he could be Joe Grudeck’s dad. Joe Grudeck had to stay close. To not do so would have made his father a nobody.

  When his dad died seven years back, McCracken Funeral Home had a line down the block. It was a miserable night in late July, misty and damp when rain wasn’t falling. Grudeck knew he was coming to the end of the line as a player, and his dad getting sick was a double shot of looming mortality. But he never expected him to go that quick. He would have liked to have spent more time . . . but family doesn’t come first in the bigs. The team does.

  Joe Grudeck flew in from Detroit to stand by his mother. He stood stoic and strong, sweating in his black suit, knee and hip aches dulled by Advil, and accepted condolences from hundreds of people he’d known his whole life. The kids he played with, now grown into paunchy men. Their parents, now gray and stooped. The other men who coached in town, some older than his dad, now unsure in their step. The remaining Jenn-Air workers, down to one shift as the company outsourced work to a sheet-metal factory in Vietnam. For four sessions over two days, Joe shook all the sweaty hands, giving as firm as he got, even as his own hand swelled and stiffened. He took the back slaps and hugs, ignoring the burning sensation in his throwing shoulder. He listened to stories and compliments about his father, with such intent sincerity his face muscles ached. And not for one minute was he ever convinced all those people were there for his dad. They were there for him.

  The night after the funeral, Grudeck boarded a plane in Newark and settled into a first-class seat. During the plane’s ascent, Grudeck looked out the small window at the expanse of lights below; the lights of his town and the surrounding towns like his, the lights of thousands of homes like his, filled with people like his parents, all shrinking away beneath him, becoming blurred behind wisps of clouds. Or was it the tears gathering in his eyes?

  One light—his father’s—was extinguished. And then it hit him. Grudeck, too, was marching down his own timeline. He only had a few years left to play, and then he, too, would fade away. He would no longer be a man of the moment, he would be a man of memory. He would be a living relic. Dead as a player. Alive as something else. What would that be?

  He pushed his face closer to the plane window, suddenly overwhelmed by these terribly sad facts: all his fame did not buy his father a single extra minute of time, nor would it eternally preserve his father’s legacy. It was all coming to an end. His dad was dead and Joey was getting too old to play. Too old. Who would care about Chuck Grudeck anymore, when Joe Grudeck was too old to play? Here, above it all, he saw it so clearly. He leaned into the window well so the overattentive first-class stewardesses could not see his face.

  It was the last time he’d cried.

  Not when he retired.

  Not on Farewell Joe Grudeck Night at Fenway.

  Not this morning, when he found out he’d been inducted.

  Chapter Six

  Grudeck turned in his mother’s driveway, got out, and opened the glass storm door with a G design in wrought aluminum. Sylvia Grudeck was in the kitchen, washing her morning coffee-and-toast dishes, when her son filled the doorway.

  “Joey! What a surprise,” she said as he gave her a quick kiss on the cheek. “Is everything all right?”

  How could she not remember this was Hall announcement day? he thought.

  “You should have told me you were coming . . . I have
a church meeting this morning . . . but let me put some coffee on.”

  Grudeck let her.

  She waited for him to ask, just once, if he was interrupting her day, but he didn’t. Not today, not ever. She found this grating, and found herself feeling guilty for being irritated as she filled the glass coffee carafe with cold water.

  “Ma, I have news.”

  “Good news, I hope.”

  “Yep, good news. I got voted in. I’m in.”

  She forgot today was the day. Completely forgot. She let the carafe rest in the sink and turned to hug him, now more flush with conflicted feelings.

  “Oh, my God. Oh, Joey, your father . . . the Hall of Fame? . . . He would have never dreamed. Oh, Joey . . . so proud, he would have been so, so proud.” Tears came to her eyes as she held her son.

  Here it was, the culmination of Chuck’s life and, well, hers, too, but Chuck was gone, and she was not. She searched for the right superlatives.

  “This is just wonderful, terrific, Joey. Ever since you were a little boy . . . The Hall of Fame!”

  “Yep, me, right there with Ted Williams, Babe Ruth, Joe DiMaggio, all of ’em.”

  “I don’t know what to say. Well, let’s see . . .” she stammered, trying to marry his big news to her already planned day, “. . . let’s see . . . I have a church meeting at eleven thirty . . . and we’re packing lunches for the soup kitchen after . . . and, oh, forget it . . . I can skip it. Oh, my God . . . the Hall of Fame! . . . I can just, let me call Father Ed and tell him I’m not coming!”

  “No, Ma, don’t do that. I just came to tell you before you heard somewhere else. I got to go see Sal, and then there’s a press conference, and, you know . . . Tell ya what. I’ll drive you over.”

  “And then how will I get back?”

  There was some snap in her voice. “I mean, I planned to drive myself,” she said, righting herself. “Like I always do.”

  They moved to the Formica-topped kitchen table, a yellow-speckled relic from the 1960s, still sturdy as Gibraltar, and sat in the matching plastic-cushioned chairs. They were silent for almost a minute as Sylvia Grudeck dabbed her eyes.

  “Think about how many times we sat here,” he said. “The number of meals . . . I’ve probably eaten a hundred thousand meatballs at this table.”

  His mother snorted a laugh.

  “Yeah, and these old things are coming back in style. Can you believe it?” she said. “I saw them in Huffman Koos last week . . . a set like this was two thousand dollars! I was with Rose Tartaglia and we were laughing! I said, ‘I could have a garage sale, sell my old junky set as an antique and make a few hundred bucks.’ ”

  Sylvia Grudeck didn’t sit long. She jumped up to get the coffee and grabbed a pack of anisette toast from the pantry.

  “Let me make you some eggs,” she said.

  “No, Ma, I’ve got to go.”

  The kitchen wall phone rang.

  “Let me just see who that is . . .”

  “Sure, Ma . . .”

  It was her friend Mrs. Erminio, to say Joey was on TV.

  “Oh, thanks, Bet . . . Joey’s here . . . I will . . . Yes, I will . . .”

  “Betty Erminio says congratulations,” she said when she hung up. “And you’re on the sports station right now. Tony was watching.”

  They went into the living room, and Grudeck found the remote on the reading table, right where his father always kept it. On SportsCenter he saw his young self, a near rookie smiling in the sun, then behind the plate. Then a still shot of his rookie card.

  The announcer, a young black hipster, was saying stuff like . . . Mr. Lunchbucket, yo, now enshrined . . . last of the hard-knuckled catchers, true that . . . Mr. Icon of Beantown . . . gave blood at the office ev-er-y day . . . Mr. Everyday, Joe Grrreww, going in the Shrine.

  He kept the patter up during the highlights, Grudeck throwing out a runner, Grudeck watching his World Series home run, and then the two moments everybody seemed to love the most.

  The first, a still photo of him knocking out Willie McCombs, was one for the ages. Like Ali standing over Liston. Namath aiming his finger to God. Larsen jumping into Yogi’s arms. Joe Grudeck showing the ball, Willie McCombs starched at his feet.

  It happened in his second year, when McCombs was the fastest man in baseball and played with spikes-up aggression. He tried to score from second on a blooper in the gap, and the throw from right field one-hopped to Grudeck, braced at the plate. Grudeck knew what was coming. McCombs’s only chance was to broadside this kid catcher with a shoulder to the ribs, knock him on his ass, and get him to drop the ball. But McCombs lowered his shoulder. Grudeck swung a two-handed tag around hard, aiming for McCombs’s head. Glove, ball, and fist—the front line of Joe Grudeck’s shifting weight—landed square on McCombs’s jaw like a perfectly timed backhanded left hook. A one-punch knockout. He was out, all right, out at the plate and out cold. He fell on his back, arms stiff and quivering at his sides. The Fenway crowd, on its feet and screaming already in anticipation of the play, exploded in a guttural, nuclear howl: 37,000-something people expelling all that was in their lungs at once. Grudeck never heard anything like it. The sound reverberated through his head and chest, deep into his brain and lungs. He suddenly felt light-headed and light-footed. A tingle gripped the back of his neck and his sphincter.

  This is what glory feels like, he thought at that moment, and seeing the picture brought it all back. Every time.

  A guy from the Associated Press got the shot. Joe Grudeck, his mouth open and twisted in emotion, holding the ball like a battle trophy over the prone McCombs. The AP moved the picture internationally. The tabloid Herald and staid Globe both used it big on Page 1, with a rare identical headline: “OUT AT HOME!”

  One play, one moment, the first Joe Grrrewww legend was made.

  The second, a video, was an ugly, nasty spectacle, always shown in Grudeck highlight clips and a greatest hit in “The Best in Basebrawls” video collections.

  On the night he choked out a young slugger named Felix Ruiz, Grudeck was in mid-career and the best-hitting catcher in the AL. It was the final game of a weekend trip to Yankee Stadium in late August, with the teams battling for first. The Yanks won the first two, racking up double-digit runs in each game to the delight of their front-running fans. Growing up in Jersey, Grudeck loved the Yankees, but playing there in a Red Sox uniform poisoned his boyhood memories.

  Now it was late Sunday afternoon, the sun sinking on another Red Sox season. Grudeck tried to keep his teammates up, constantly chattering. It was humiliating. Joe Cheerleader, forced to resort to high school rah-rah stuff to fire up a team of fucking quitters. The anger began to spew out of his gut, a toxic, molten flow that dried his throat and burned in his ears. In the top of the eighth, a rookie reliever named Gannon—Gannon the Cannon—pitched Ruiz high and tight. Ruiz faced the kid and grabbed his crotch. The fans went wild, especially all the New York Puerto Ricans who came to see Ruiz play. Grudeck became incensed.

  “Hey, it’s a day game, there’s a lot of families here,” Grudeck bitched through his mask. “How ’bout some respect?”

  “Fa yu, man,” Ruiz said, and spat across the plate.

  “Fa me?” Grudeck came back, mimicking his accent. “Those are American dollars they’re payin’ you, Pedro. Try learning English.”

  Ruiz ignored him and let another stream of tobacco juice go, this time angled more closely toward Grudeck.

  “Watch yourself, Pedro,” Grudeck said.

  Then Grudeck called for another pitch inside. Gannon shook him off. Grudeck called it again.

  The kid shook him off again and stepped off the rubber. Grudeck yelled “time” and bounded toward the mound. The kid looked alarmed as Grudeck bore down on him.

  “Hit him,” he hissed at Gannon. The kid blinked.

  “Hit him,” Grudeck said again.

  “I don’t know, Joe . . .”

  “I’m not asking. I’m telling you, hit this son of a bitch,
right now,” Grudeck said. “Right now, you decide if you want respect in this league. If you do, drill this bastard. Right in the hip. Or the back. Hit him in the head, I don’t give a fuck. But hit him now. I’ll take care of the rest.”

  The kid did as told. A fastball to the hip. Ruiz jumped back, but not quickly enough. Ruiz dropped his bat and started toward the mound, pounding his chest, cursing in Spanish. He didn’t get far. Grudeck threw off his mask and helmet, ditched his glove, and was right on him. He spun him by the shoulder, so they were face to face, and Grudeck heard the howl in his ears. Was it the crowd or the rush of anger disguised as adrenaline?

  “Wha . . . wha da fa?” said Ruiz, hands out.

  Grudeck shoved him—just hard enough to let Ruiz come back with a straight overhand right. Grudeck stepped inside it and put Ruiz in a neck-twisting headlock, then flung him over his hip to the ground. Grudeck landed with his big lats against Ruiz’s chest and felt the guy’s ribs collapse. He was hoping a few had broken. He squeezed Ruiz’s neck, trying to break that, too. Then he took his top hand and ripped the thick braided gold chain off Ruiz’s neck and tried to shove it in his mouth.

  “Now what . . . Now what do you have to say, you spic fuck,” Grudeck spat down. “Open up. C’mon, big mouth. I’ll shove this spic chain down your spic throat.”

  By now the benches were emptied and Grudeck saw legs multiplying around him and hands pulling his uniform.

  Ruiz struggled but Grudeck had him plenty tight with just one arm. With his fist closed around the chain, Grudeck punched Ruiz hard in the face . . . one, two, three times . . . driving his flat nose even flatter into his dumb skull. Then there was a scrum of bodies, a forest of pin-striped and gray legs, arms flailing and grabbing. Joe Grudeck went back to a two-handed headlock and squeezed until . . . he wanted to hear a snap. He wouldn’t let go, even as the blood pumped out of Ruiz’s split nostrils, even as his mocha skin turned a sick shade of purple. Men pulled at Joe Grudeck’s arms, someone punched him in the ear, and someone kneed him in the back, but he wasn’t letting go. Joe Grudeck wasn’t letting go until . . . he wanted to see Ruiz’s head explode like a blood-filled balloon.