The New York

by Bill Branger

  4

  I felt bad enough after meeting with George that I went straight back to my studio apartment in Fort Lee and packed.

  I packed my clothes and a couple of books that travel with me and threw out the perishables in the icebox.

  There were six cans of MGD left and I left three of them in case I came back late to the apartment and the liquor stores were closed. Threw my shit in the trunk of the Park Avenue. Except for the three cans of beer. They lasted me across New Jersey. When it was late afternoon, I had gotten through the Poconos when I was stopped by a goddamned state cop. Speeding laws are sick in the East. The limit is 55 miles per hour on these big, wide interstate highways all across New York and New Jersey and even Pennsylvania. Nothing gets halfway sensible until you reach Ohio, and it doesn’t get honestly good until Oklahoma and Texas.

  I told the Pennsylvania trooper that my mother died and I was coming home, all the way back to El Paso. A lie like that sounds terrible, but I’ve explained I never had any principle, except for that time in fifth grade when Booker beat it out of me. Besides, my mother did die, a little after I was born, and I never forgave her for doing it.

  The cop probably didn’t believe me, but he let me go with a warning and I watched my step the rest of the way across Interstate 80. Watching your step in the East on the interstates means going just as fast as the trucks will let you. They go 70, you go 70. They slow down, you slow down.

  I pulled off the first exit in Ohio and called Deke Williams in Chicago.

  Deke (Catfish) Williams was a long reliever with the Yankees in the early eighties, when I broke in. I was a starter, but Deke taught me the stuff. If he hadn’t taught me the stuff, I would have been out of the Bigs in a year or two because I didn’t have the speed to start.

  “But you mean, boy, and ain’t half dumb, so listen up,” old Deke had said. Nobody ever called him Catfish even though he listed his name that way and wanted to be called Catfish. He thought it would make him a character. But he was just Deke to everyone, even the clubhouse manager. I tried to call him Catfish to please him, but he saw through that and said I was patronizing him. You couldn’t win with Deke.

  I can say he was a friend. And I needed one.

  “Where you at, boy?” Deke said on the long-distance line from Chicago. He was owner of three “Catfish Williams” rib shacks and, well, catfish houses in the black neighborhoods of Chicago. I did mention he was a colored man?

  “Boy, you got four hundred miles till you at Sweet Home Chicago, you be driving all night ‘fore you get here. Get a Holiday Inn some place with that buzzer in the bed and start out at dawn — you be here ‘bout when I’ll be wakin’ up. You drive all night, you get here when I’m goin’ to sleep.”

  It made sense. I agreed. Ten minutes later, I was all alone in a motel room with a fresh six-pack of Miller Genuine and two Big Macs and one giant order of fries. I turned on the TV, ate my supper, and drank two of the beers. Then I called Charlene in Houston. She wasn’t in and that annoyed me because, like most men, I expect women to sort of hover around the phone, waiting for their man to call them. That’s a male instinct, and I’m modern enough to realize how chauvinist it sounds. But I’m honest enough to admit that I have the failing, along with every other swinging dick ever born.

  I called her after two more beers and she still wasn’t in. I calculated that it was close to midnight in Houston. I calculated I didn’t want to calculate anymore.

  I woke up at dawn, showered, and combed my hair. I checked out and turned down the offer of a free USA Today at the front desk. It was a cool dawn and the fields around the motel were soft with white fog. I drove to the McDonald’s of the night before and got a coffee and an apple bran muffin. Charlene would have been proud of me.

  I spent the next six hours or so going to Chicago. There is not much to say about Ohio and Indiana, at least as they look zooming along Interstate 80-90. It was one in the afternoon Central Time when I got lost on the South Side of Chicago and called Deke for help.

  “Where you at now?” Deke said. There was a yawn in his voice.

  I told him it was a liquor store at 747 East 47th Street.

  “Shit, boy, you in the ghetto.”

  “I thought you lived down here.”

  “I do business down there, I live up here. Just stay inside and try not to look too white, I be right down.”

  Well, it isn’t easy not looking white when that’s what you are and everyone around you is noting the fact. The guy who ran the liquor store carried a pistol on his waist and that was as far as it went. Couple of drunks came in and took me for a policeman and asked me to arrest some woman across the street. Two kids wearing White Sox caps at an angle came in and ordered a bottle of Johnny Walker Black and told the guy with the pistol to put it “on account.”

  Then Deke came in.

  Deke taught me the split-fingered fastball and a slider and how to play chin music with a batter crowding my zone. “Don’t be ‘fraid to knock him down — knock him out dead if need be and always stand your ground if he comes for you on the mound,” Deke would say. He was right about everything. Including me being mean enough to be a good relief pitcher.

  Relief pitcher is like a grunt in the marines. You never see him until you need him. Nobody asks a grant how he killed someone on the battlefield, they just want to know he did it. The way no one wants to know how steaks come from steers. Deke taught me all that and it made me a survivor.

  Deke was wearing a camel hair coat and a jewel in the lobe of his left ear. He came into that liquor store and there was instant respect all around.

  “Hey, boy,” Deke said. “What’s a white boy like you doin’ lost down here in the hood?” Playing with me.

  “Catfish,” I said for the first and last time.

  “Hey, Irish Hillbilly. Come on outta here,” Deke said, and he wrapped me up in a camel hair bear hug.

  “That your car? With those Texas plates on it? Shit, you got more luck than brains.”

  “Yeah, George says I’m lucky, too,” I said. We were on the sidewalk. The street is mean and shabby and looks bombed out. Reminds me some of the neighborhood around Yankee Stadium.

  Deke said, “Well, you don’t want to leave that car here, not if you want it back. You follow me.”

  I followed him across his city. Deke was born and raised in the housing projects, and somehow he got on. Played Triple A in Louisiana for two years, which is a story by itself, and then jumped to the Bigs with the White Sox. Got traded to the Yanks in a six-player swap and finished up there, Deke is Cooperstown, record for saves in a season, lifetime 2.59 ERA, a couple of other trophies of note. I’m just grateful he took notice of me when I came up. And took some pity on the strength of my fastball.

  We parked in a lot next to an Italian restaurant somewhere near the Loop. Deke waited for me while I locked the car and joined him at the entrance.

  Good food and good beer, and when I was beginning to feel fell, I told him everything I promised George not to tell anyone. Deke jest listened while he spooned his linguine, and when it was finished, he grunted. At the story and at the empty plate in front of him.

  “You need money that bad?”

  “I never met anyone could turn down $600,000 without at least wincing a little bit.”

  “What you think the other players gonna do when George brings in these wetbacks don’ even speak English to knock down their wages? Huh? And what you think it’s gonna mean to you?”

  “Gonna mean I’ll be eatin’ on the road with the umpires,” I said.

  “Sheet. Umpires won’t even have nothin’ to do with you. Little owner’s pet you turn into being,” Deke said. “How you know no one else woulda picked up your contract?”

  “Sid was shoppin’ me all season, quiet-like, and no one was even sniffing in my direction. I supposed that’s the reason Sid didn’t return my calls.”

  “Then you negotiate your own contract for even less money than you made last year and
for a lot more headaches. Man, these wetbacks ain’t even gonna be your friend, knowin’ you the Anglo reports to the owner.”

  “They ain’t wetbacks, Deke.”

  “I know what they are,” Deke said. He took a piece of Italian bread and tore it in half. He had a large diamond ring on his pinkie finger and gold chains around his neck. He got out of the Bigs in 1984 or ‘85; he was a man destined to do all right.

  “The only friend you got in the world of baseball right now is George Bremenhaven,” Deke Williams said. “That is a sad commentary on you, your character, and your future.”

  “I tried to call Charlene Cleaver last night from the motel room and she was plain out,” I said.

  Deke gave me the cold-eyed look. “You feelin’ sorry for yourself, boy?”

  “Semi,” I admitted.

  “You pulled that swamp over on yourself. No one made you do it,” Deke said… “It didn’t look that bad at the time.”

  “How’s it look now?”

  “I could make a … well, public statement.”

  “From what you told me, the government be all over your sorry pink ass if you do that. Why you think George wants you to keep this under your hat? This is about the government, boy, and you don’t fuck with the government. Ole George, man, he sleeps with Abe Lincoln. You know what the government do when they decide they wan’ you? Check your IRS, check how often you fucked your mama, man, there ain’t nothin’ they can’t do to you. You fucked, boy,”

  “I drove nine hundred miles to have you tell me that?”

  “I woulda done it over the phone if you’d let me. No, wait. I ain’t gonna talk to you over no phone no more till you out of this. Government, the first thing they do is tap your phone, sort of as natural as pissing first thing in the morning.”

  “What should I do?”

  Deke thought about it. The Italian waiter asked him if he wanted anything else and he said something about Amaretto. I said I wanted another bottle of beer. I was full of food and still on edge, the way I get before a big night game. They ought to only play baseball in the daytime, the way the Cubs used to do. You eat too much before night games and it upsets you.

  Deke said, “You go down to Texas, see your honeylamb, and don’t get her involved in this thing. Just stay low for the winter, let George do what George is gonna do. Maybe the shit’ll hit the fan for George and his friends in the government. Them Cubans down in Miami might burn the town down, they find out the government was making a deal with Fie-Del Castro.”

  I hadn’t thought of that. There were Cubans in Miami, lots of them, and they made people like Pat Buchanan look soft on communism. If it came out that the government was doing a back-door deal to import Communist baseball players, not just to any team but to the God Bless America New York Yankees, well….

  “You’re making me feel better, Deke.”

  “You can feel slightly better but not good enough to rooster strut,” Deke said. “You just find yourself a hole in Houston — and I’m sure there are plenty — and you hide in it.”

  Deke paid with a platinum American Express card and we sashayed into the parking lot like two millionaires after a long lunch. I was even feeling sleepy, but that didn’t last long. Deke gave the parking attendant ten bucks to keep a careful eye on my Buick with the Texas plates. And he took me on the town.

  I’ve never had a bad time in Chicago except the night the White Sox took off on me and I gave up a grand slam and another homer before Sparky put me out of my misery. And that wasn’t the whole night, just the working part of it.

  Well, to make it short, I didn’t have a bad time in Chicago again. It lasted until five in the morning at a blues joint on the South Side where Deke and several ladies at a round table tried to pretend I wasn’t white. But I was and I fell asleep on them, and the next thing I know, I was in Deke’s condo on the Gold Coast, sleeping it off in the spare bedroom. Deke was right about sleeping until early afternoon. It’s the only sensible thing to do if you’re going to stay up all night.

  Deke made coffee and grits and runny eggs around two P.M. and told me what to do again, and I took a cab to my car in the parking lot. The car was still there and I gave the attendant another ten on top of Deke’s ten, and I was out of Chicago just before the afternoon rush hour.

  Went by the St. Louis Arch around sundown and kept traveling until the tiredness hit me again around Columbia, Missouri.

  Charlene Cleaver answered her phone on the second ring. I was naked and warm from a shower and lying in a bed with a coin-operated vibrator that made the mattress wiggle.

  “I tried to get you a couple of times last night,” I said in a casual way.

  “I was out,” she said, just as casual.

  “I figured either that or you can turn off the ringer on your phone.”

  “Why would I want to do that?”

  “Well, that was just a joke,” I said.

  “You still in New Jersey?”

  “Actually, Missouri. Be in Texas tomorrow.”

  “Really?”

  That “really” was kind of cool, I thought. It had the tone that receptionists use when they are not paid a lot of money but have to deal with people while wearing high heels and makeup because the bosses want it that way. Sort of hostile and yet polite.

  “You mad at something, Charlene?”

  “Not angry at nothing. Figured you’d be sitting up in New York the rest of the winter,” she said. She was explaining and complaining at the same time.

  “Charlene. I just wanted to sign the contract.”

  “Says in the Post that your owner is dismantling the team. How come he isn’t dismantling you, Ryan?”

  “I dunno,” I said.

  “Says in the Post that some season ticket holders are withdrawing from buying seats next season because George Bremenhaven is getting rid of the best players.”

  “Well, he’s doing that, all right.”

  There was another of those long-distance silences. Even though I know the phones are all wired with fiber optics and really don’t hum on the lines anymore, I can still hear that old-fashioned long-distance hum when no one is speaking.

  “But he’s going to sign you.”

  “He signed me.”

  “You talk to Sid?”

  There she went again with that Sid shit. “I can’t get hold of him.”

  “So it’s another year you’re on the road.”

  “One more year.”

  “So you’re coming down to Texas for the winter.”

  “That’s the idea. Winter in New Jersey doesn’t thrill me.”

  “Well, I guess we’ll all see you when you get here “

  “What’s making you mad, Charlene?”

  “Dogs get mad, people get angry”

  “All right, angry then.”

  “Nothing,” Charlene said.

  “Charlene,” I explained, “I had to get the ink on that contract before George changed his mind.”

  “Ryan Patrick, I think your friend George is going insane,” Charlene said.

  “He’s been there for years. I told you that before. But money is money. And he ain’t my friend, I only work there.”

  “And you got your money and now you’ll have to sleep with it,” she said.

  When she’s upset, her metaphors get sloppy. I said, “I talk to you four days ago and you had to cancel a dinner reservation at Tony’s. You honestly blame me for sticking around New York for a couple of days to get assured of a job for next year?”

  “Jack Wade offered you a job.”

  That was it. Or part of it. I just forgot about Jack Wade in all this. And Jack and Charlene went to college together, I think. Jack was married, but that rarely matters with car dealers. On the other hand, maybe it was something else besides Jack Wade.

  “You didn’t want me to sign again?”

  “What does it ever matter what I want, Ryan?”

  “We’d have that much more to open that restaurant,” I said.
<
br />   “Don’t patronize me, Ryan,” she said.

  There is nothing more miserable than being in the middle of Missouri at night talking by phone to your woman who is seven hundred miles away and she’s pissed at you. So I told her that.

  “There you go, Ryan. Feeling sorry for yourself. Look around you, Ryan. The world is full of people who could use a little pity. You’re a major league baseball player making more money for each game you’re in than most people make in a year of working. You can feel sorry for them.”

  “Like Jack Wade,” I said.

  “Like him.”

  “Jack Wade can take care of hisself. Hey, Charlene, I did what you said, I put more money into Latin America “

  “That’s nice,” she said. “You still got that Canadian steel?”

  “I guess so, it hasn’t come up in my thinking so I must still have it,”

  “I’d dump it if I had it,” she said.

  That’s what I mean, she’s always thinking on three tracks at once.

  “Well, then I’ll get rid of it”

  “You do what you want, Ryan Patrick. You always have. No one can tell you nothing.” Back to Track Number One, train now leaving.

  “Not even poor li’l old Charlene Cleaver.”

  “Charlene don’t ever need a man’s pity,” Charlene said, and that was it. She didn’t slam the phone down, but she might as well have, it was that final. I knew if I called back now, I wouldn’t get through. I think I saw where the conversation had been heading — right into a train wreck — but sometimes you hurry it along to get to the punch line anyway.

  And when I finally fell asleep that night in Missouri, I dreamed of Charlene and Deke in the same dream with George. Sam was in the dream, too. They were all telling me what a sorry-ass dope I was and how every bad thing that was going to happen was my own fault. And some of the dream was in Spanish, which made me wake up sweating.

  I didn’t know — did not have a clue then — that Chariene was mad at me for reasons completely different from anything I imagined. It was just as well I didn’t know, because I would have ended up driving all eight just to be with her.