Gods of Wood and Stone

by Mark Di Ionno

  During the season, his friends from Compton had the run of the place. There was a drug arrest one night, and a small fire another. Once, Motley’s ex-girlfriend got punched in the mouth by one of his friends and lost three teeth. Each time, the sports TV, TMZ, and ET crews made it impossible to move in the locker room. Scumbag athletes were big news, and entertainment, and good for ratings. . . . That’s what scared him so much now about Syracuse.

  When Grudeck first saw Motley on TV that off-season, the volume was muted, so he thought there was another crime. Motley was talking fast in gold-rimmed shades and giant chains, wearing a synthetic Nike jacket.

  “The kid always bragged about the cash Nike gave him, but bitched because he always had to wear something with the logo on camera—headbands, crew neck undershirts, hats, wristbands,” Grudeck explained. “Said it cut into his style.”

  Parked behind Motley was a glossy black Hummer Alpha and a fully chromed Porsche Carrera GT. Next to him was his agent, Marty Levinson, who had ten or fifteen top players. Levinson wore a black suit, and shirt with a tab collar fixed with a white pearl stud and no tie, what was left of his hair slicked to his head, racing shades plastered to his face, beads of sweat glistening on his forehead in the California sun.

  “I turned up the volume and Levinson was doing an ‘injured party’ act. I remember him saying, ‘My client is being exploited by a system that ignores fair market value’ and ‘The Red Sox should have the decency to pay the man what he’s worth.’ I wanted to puke. Except it got worse when Motley answered questions.

  “He said something like, ‘I thought slavery was dead, but I’m like a high-paid slave, see? I can’t go work where I want. I can’t go work for somebody who wants to pay me better. I got to stay on the plantation until my contract is up, see?’

  “Slavery? What was the guy making? Eight or nine million a year to play baseball? I couldn’t believe the press had nothing better to do than pay attention to this guy. Worse, no one in the media even challenged him. When the sports show cut back to their anchor desk, their ‘baseball experts’ started to argue the merits of his value, but none of them told the truth. None of them talked about honoring a contract, or putting that kind of money in perspective for regular people. If I was a regular working guy, like my father, I’d hate us, too.”

  This went on for weeks, Grudeck told Stacy, and during one press conference Motley said, “I know I’m worth mo’ money. They know I’m worth mo’ money. Just pay me the damn mo’ money.” The press ate it up. The clip ran all day, all channels. The Herald turned it into a back-page headline.

  MOTLEY:

  “JUST PAY ME

  THE DAMN

  MO’ MONEY”

  “So he finally shows up in Fort Myers, ‘under protest.’ The reporters circled him, like dogs sniffing each other’s asses,” Grudeck said. “I let it go, but it was starting to get on my nerves. It was my team, and he was a disruption. But you know the part that bothered me the most?”

  “He was making more than you?” Stacy guessed.

  “No. I didn’t give a shit about that. Never did. No, what pissed me off most was watching all these reporters suck up to him. This bunch of little squirrelly white guys, nodding with these phony smiles plastered on their faces at all of Motley’s jive bullshit.”

  “I don’t think anybody says ‘jive’ anymore, Joe,” Stacy said.

  “You know what I mean . . . but one day he goes too far. He says the Red Sox want everybody to fit the same mold. He says, ‘Boston ain’t ready for a boy from Compton, see . . . they like the Joe Grudeck types, you know, that clean-cut, all-American, white-boy thing.’

  “Now he’d brought me into it, the motherfucker, so when the sportswriters slunk over to my side of the locker room, I told them, ‘Motley should shut up and play. That’s what he gets paid for. Not to talk bullshit.’ I was stupid. I took the bait.”

  The next day’s Herald front page, not the sports page, but the front, read:

  “SHUT UP

  AND PLAY”

  Grudeck lays down law to Motley

  Grudeck leaned back in his chair, then leaned in, close to Stacy’s face.

  “Now this is where it gets stupider. The next day the reporters crowd Motley’s locker and he gets in outrage overdrive. He says something like, ‘If Joe Grudeck has somethin’ to say to me, he should be a man and say it to my motherfuckin’ face. I don’t give a fuck how many motherfuckin’ All-Star teams he made. He needs to show me some motherfuckin’ respect.”

  “This is going to get ugly, isn’t it?” Stacy said, cringing at Grudeck’s attempt at black English like she did at the c-word.

  “Oh, yeah,” Grudeck said. “Ugly ain’t the word. So he’s over there telling the sportswriters . . . ‘I’m no suburbs Little League champ, see. I’m from the fuckin’ streets. Maybe that’s how they do shit where Grudeck from, but where I’m from you stay out of a man’s shit, else he be in yours.’

  “When the sportswriters came back to me, I kept it simple. All I told them was ‘I said what I had to say yesterday. He can talk all the shit he wants. I’m done.’ ”

  He stopped there, and she was relieved. She didn’t want to encourage him to tell more. His anger was off-putting, almost frightening. As for the unveiled racism . . . she was rolling that around in her head, remembering things he said back in high school. But she let it go.

  Grudeck, too, held back. He wanted to go on and tell her about how sick he was of all the tattooed chest-thumpers in sports today, and their big fucking mouths. Especially in football and basketball. With their long hair coming out of football helmets like professional wrestlers, inked up like Hells Angels.

  God, he wished he played back in the day . . .

  But he left it unsaid. He didn’t want to be judged by her. There’s only so much truth a person can take. So he kept on with the story.

  “I was done with the media, not with Motley. I was captain. It was my team. Nothing blows up a locker room faster than race stuff. When you’re on a team, you should be team colors first, everything else second. I know that sounds like bullshit, but it’s true. Now with all Motley’s slavery talk, I could see a couple of black guys leaning his way, and now with his ‘white boy’ remark, he’d made it racial, in a big way. I had to put it down, right then. I had to clean it up, quick.”

  Grudeck’s story was turning and, again, Stacy along with it. Asserting himself, his responsibility—his muscle, really—all that “my team” stuff stirred her in some innate way. Her expression must have changed, because Grudeck looked her in the eyes and threw her a wink. She blushed and quickly looked down at the notepad.

  “I want to tell you something I’ve never told anybody before, not even my dad,” Grudeck said. “I get this feeling . . . it comes when I know I’m going to win. I don’t know how to describe it. It’s like adrenaline, but calm, and my hands feel light, and move like they have a mind of their own. I felt it with every touchdown pass in high school, every time I pinned a kid, every big hit in every big game I was ever in, from Little League to the Red Sox. That’s how I felt that day with Motley.”

  Grudeck told her how he felt attuned to everything when he walked into the Florida sun that day. The bleached white City of Palms stadium shone brighter against the blue sky; the rustle of the outfield palm trees sounded crisper. He went through his morning stretches and warm-ups, making sure not to avoid Motley. He got next to him for calisthenics and when Motley went into the outfield to jog and sprint, Grudeck did, too. When Motley came in for batting practice, Grudeck joined him in the on-deck area. Motley said nothing and avoided eye contact. Grudeck made “goddamn sure” to not do the same. He looked straight at Motley a few times. This was Grudeck at his best. Being boss, and making fucking-A sure everybody knew it. At the end of the day, with the palms casting long shadows and the breeze turning a notch cooler, Grudeck called his team together.

  “The coaches trotted off, and the equipment guys were clearing the field. I
stood on the mound and looked around at my teammates. ‘I only got one thing to say,’ I told them. ‘We’re all in this together, right?’ And I looked straight at Motley. ‘Right?’

  “Everybody started saying, ‘Yeah, Joe,’ ‘Right, Joe,’ and I said, ‘Good. Now, if somebody’s got something to say, get ready to say it now, ’cause I got something to say. And that’s this: everybody here is paid to play, to be part of this team, not part of some asshole media circus. I’m talking to you, Dre, so if you got something to say, or any of you got something to say, say it now.’ Nobody said anything, and I asked, ‘One more time . . . if you got something to say, say it now. Say it fucking now, to the face of your teammates, not to a bunch of jerk-off reporters.’ I was looking straight at Motley. He got the message: it was us against him. And that was that.”

  “That’s it? That wasn’t so ugly,” Stacy said. “What happened next?”

  “Nothing, really. It all kind of died down. He left camp, the team didn’t budge and eventually traded him to Anaheim. And that was that.”

  Whatever it was Grudeck saw in Stacy’s eyes moments earlier—admiration? love?—made him decide not to tell the rest of the story. He knew she wouldn’t appreciate how he mopped up the unfinished business. Some things she just wouldn’t understand. Like Syracuse. He could never explain that away, not even to himself.

  She stopped writing and was studying his face, and a guilty look said he was holding back.

  * * *

  AFTER PRACTICE, Grudeck stayed in the shower, long after his teammates left, waiting for Motley, who he knew was dawdling to avoid him.

  He waited, soaping and rinsing, for twenty minutes, letting the water splash off his massive shoulders and run down his body, pooling at his feet. The hot water turned his skin soft.

  Motley finally came in, went to shower at the opposite end of the room, and turned his back on Grudeck.

  After a minute, Grudeck broke the silence.

  “So, now that it’s just me and you, you got something to say?” Grudeck yelled over the clatter.

  “Don’t fuck with me, Grudeck.”

  “That’s it? ‘Don’t fuck with me’? All the bullshit you gave the press about being from the streets . . . where was it? . . . South Central L.A.?”

  “Compton, man.”

  “Whatever . . . So now, after all that ghetto bullshit, all you got to say is ‘Don’t fuck with me, Grudeck’? I was expecting a little more. A little more . . . I don’t know what . . . manhood.”

  “Look, Grudeck, I don’t want no trouble with you, see,” Motley said over his shoulder. “I don’t give a fuck about you like you don’t give a fuck about me. Let’s leave it at that.”

  “That’s where you’re wrong, Motley. You may not give a fuck about me, but I have to give a fuck about you, because you’re on my team. See?”

  “Why you fuckin’ with me, Grudeck?”

  “Because you’re fucking with my team. My team.”

  “Whatever, Grudeck . . . what-the-fuck-ever,” Motley said.

  Grudeck then started going around the room, turning every shower on full blast.

  “Problem is, Motley, it’s not that easy,” Grudeck said, raising his voice over the steamy din. “You just can’t say ‘whatever’ and be done with it, because it’s not in your control anymore. You lost that when you called me out. What did you think? I was going to be intimidated? Shit, man, I’ve been beating black asses like yours since I was in seventh grade.”

  Motley ignored him, until he felt Grudeck’s breath on his neck.

  “It’s in my control now,” Grudeck said. “It’s my team, and you called me out. So I got no choice.”

  Motley spun around with a wild hook, but Grudeck was already inside it, and his big right hand got Motley by the throat. His left forearm hit Motley across the chest and drove him hard against the tile wall, and, just as quick, Grudeck kicked out his legs from underneath him. Motley landed hard on the tile floor, back first, with nothing to break his fall. Grudeck heard a squeak from his chest, and slammed a knee into his solar plexus to hear it again. He buried that knee in Motley’s gut, pinning him to the floor, and still had his throat. Motley frantically tried to pry Grudeck’s hand off with both of his. This left Grudeck’s other hand free, and he balled up his fist and cocked it right over Motley’s face. Motley looked up at it, eyes bulging. At first, Grudeck wasn’t going to hit him. But the terror in Motley’s eyes was too good to pass up. Grudeck brought the fist straight down, alongside Motley’s nose and under his eye. Bat-on-ball sound. So satisfying. Motley lurched and stopped struggling.

  Grudeck let go of Motley’s throat and got to his feet. Motley stayed down, coughing and rubbing his neck.

  “Shut the water off when you leave,” Grudeck said over his shoulder.

  Motley bolted camp that night, and they never spoke again. He asked for a trade, and the Red Sox sent him home to play in California.

  But soon after, Grudeck realized he’d been manipulated by the press and felt like fresh meat for the jackals that circled and yapped and whipped things into a frenzy. He felt like a kid in a schoolyard fight, egged on by cowards who only liked to watch fights, not be in them. He felt stupid. What if he’d hurt that kid? Or killed him, slamming him on a tile floor like that? Punching his head against it. People died from less. Or if Motley had come after him with a gun. They all carry guns, these sports thugs today. Then what? And for what? One night against the Angels, he thought of finding him after the game to apologize, then thought, Fuck Motley. Fucks like him ruined sports.

  * * *

  GRUDECK THREW HIS HEAD BACK and closed his eyes, blocking out the harsh glare of the kitchen track lights.

  “What?” Stacy asked, putting down the pen.

  “I’m just trying to think of the point . . . for the speech?” he said. “That’s the problem. I want to talk about this whole thing with the media, but then again, it’s the sportswriters who voted me in. Sal warned me, I could come across as an ingrate.”

  “Like a Motley,” Stacy said.

  “Exactly,” Grudeck said, coming to.

  “Maybe you can do it in a questioning way, not a harsh way. Something like, why, and how, did we become so obsessed with something just meant to be a diversion? Maybe, instead of sounding critical, you just pose innocent questions. Maybe you make yourself sound like a man looking for answers, rather than a man who has them.”

  That night, Grudeck stretched out on his bed, thinking how long it had been since he felt the lightness in his hands. When he walked Stacy to her car, he was hoping to get it, but his hands felt heavy and ached.

  All this talk tonight, all the downsides of the game nobody saw, nobody but the people deep inside it. Amphetamines, steroids, and painkillers, the ballplayer’s equivalent of pot, coke, and booze. Racial tension. Deep ethnic division. Hotel hookers and groupies, some who went willingly and some who got too drunk or high to resist. He learned in Syracuse how easy it was. He did it himself. But he was just a kid then. He looked at himself in the mirror that day and said, never again. Not like that. But it went on all around him. He heard the locker room stories. Girls pissed on and pissed in. Forced to take it in the ass. Gang bangs. The gold-chain guys loved that shit. Grudeck figured it was because half of them were closet fags, bisexuals, at least. No one wanted to believe it, but it was true. With all their macho bullshit. They’d stick it in anything that had a pulse. Look them in the eye hard enough and you could see it. Grudeck figured the guys who did gang bangs secretly got off on watching the other guy. That was the only explanation.

  Plenty of times Grudeck saw girls staggering out of hotel rooms, disoriented and disheveled, mascara smeared, face blotched, eyes and lips blood-red.

  And when one went to the cops, the world lined up against them. Grudeck saw how the public was so quick to give these scumbags the benefit of the doubt. Standing Os at games. And what did the guys in the media talk about? How it would impact the team. The girl? Nobody gave a fuck. Th
at was sports today. A guy accused of rape gets cheered for hitting a home run. A guy not accused of rape gets booed for striking out. A guy accused of rape won the NBA MVP, another won the Heisman Trophy. What a world. What a fucked-up world.

  How do you tell the world all this? How do you tell the dirtiest secrets, and not your own?

  His brain flooded with disturbing images. The two girls in the door-light limping out of his room in Syracuse. What did Grudeck say? “Thanks for coming”? That was it. He was lying in bed, hands folded behind his head, sucked and fucked in his private porno, satisfied. “Thanks for coming.”

  Girls in the dark corners of clubs, in their tight black dresses, being spun around and groped by players. Party time. Their drunk laughter. A girl, Christ, she couldn’t have been more than seventeen, on her knees in a private room, choking on someone’s dick and then vomiting, while the players howled. Grudeck broke that one up, then went upstairs disgusted. He was old then, it was toward the end, and he knew if things were different he could have had a daughter that age. The locker room scenes, guys stretching and chubbing themselves before turning naked toward the pretty female sports reporters; on the street it was indecent exposure, in the locker room, it was tough shit. Should he tell Stacy all this? He was a pig, too, let’s face it. Syracuse, and lots of girls, then paid-for “massages” when the groupies wore him out.

  He lay in bed thinking about all the stuff that bothered him. The new spring training facilities looked like concentration camps, lined with fences to separate the fans from the players; he walked past thousands of people with their hands sticking through the chain link with balls and programs to sign, like Mexican street beggars, starved for a fleeting moment of attention while he ignored their calls, eyes straight to attention, acting indifferent and above them, but still wondering why they cared so much.