The New York

by Bill Branger

  8

  You can imagine how discombobulated Raul was that winter, playing ball and thinking of going to New York City. He got an old guide-book to New York in the central library in Havana and he went over it with a fine-tooth comb. The book was about thirty-five years out of date and didn’t bear a lot of resemblance to New York as she is now — I mean, there was something about the “wonderful, safe, efficient” subway system, which was a hoot by itself — and about the Empire State being the tallest building in the world and about the football Giants playing in the Polo Grounds. Man.

  But it was all that Raul had to go on. You see, he hadn’t ever set foot off Cuba except for those inter-American games in Costa Rica, and he was homesick for it without even leaving it.

  One of the things that was impressed upon him by old Fidel was he could say nothing — nothing —- to anyone about this before it happened and was announced by the Supreme Leader.

  So he couldn’t tell Maria.

  Maria Elena Velasquez was a daughter of the middle class in Cuba, which is supposed to be about having no classes in their society. She had a good education and, despite everything, she had fallen in love with a ball player like Raul. Her father was a doctor and her mother was a university teacher, and though her father liked baseball, he didn’t like it that much.

  Raul, I have to explain, is a sweet and shy boy who is very polite. He’s light in the body and his skin is sort of translucent brown, if you can follow that. He has stunning olive-drab eyes and a power swing that is surprising coming out ofthat light body. He put on a few pounds in New York eating unhealthy food, but he was never going to be a Babe Ruth or Frank Thomas in bulk.

  The polite part of him got him inside the Velasquez household, finally. He was deferential to both the Señor and the Señora, and they could not deny his charm. Or his obvious love for Maria. They just wanted to make sure that the love was held this side of respect until something legal came along. I don’t blame them. I’d feel the same way if I had a daughter. I know it’s a double standard in light of my relationship with Charlene — what would her mama say? — but that’s the way the world works, on double standards. It’s the only thing we can rely on.

  The secret Raul carried around with him that winter affected his play, and he was only hitting .387 by the end of the season. Everyone noticed it, including El Supremo, but he let it pass because the big announcement was due any day now. The winter meetings of the major leagues were being held in Los Angeles and it was there that George Bremenhaven sort of stunned the sporting world. But more about this part later.

  The secret weighed on him the way it had weighed on me. Maybe more. But I was thirty-eight years old and I just dropped the weight on others, including Charlene Cleaver and Deke Williams. Raul was twenty-three and Cuba is scarier than it is in America, especially when your leader tells you to keep something secret and he’s got a prison system to back it up, not to mention firing squads and whatever else they have down there.

  Maria Elena Velasquez was troubled by Raul’s behavior that winter and by him hitting only .387, because she was a big baseball fan. She went to every game she could.

  It was how they met. After a game one night, in a Havana cafe that stayed open late, she and her father had gone to the game together and they were eating one of those midnight suppers when Raul and a couple of his teammates came in to do the same. Her father wanted Raul’s autograph but he asked for it in the usual way of grown men. He pretended it was for his daughter.

  Raul took one look at the daughter at the far table and fell in love. He told me that and I believe him. When you’re an instinctive great hitter like Raul, you learn to trust your instincts. Why shouldn’t people fall in love at first sight anyway?

  So Raul went to the table and personally handed her the autograph, and the father, Señor Doctor Alejandro Velasquez, politely asked him to join them, figuring he wouldn’t.

  He did.

  — Señorita (Raul began) I am so sorry I can only offer you my name on a piece of paper. It is a worthless gift and I am ashamed to …

  — No more lowery words (Maria interrupted). The gift is kind.

  She patted the back of his hand then, something old man Velasquez did not like to see, Maria Elena had great presence in the company of men, even with her father.

  — Then the next time I see you (Raul said), I’ll bring a garden of bougainvillea instead of flowery words.

  — Be careful of the thorns (she said).

  — I would be happy to be scratched all over by thorns. The beauty of the bougainvillea is worth a little pain. All beauty is.

  Well, it went on and on like this right from the start and I can’t remember all that Raul told me they said because a lot of it sounds too fantastic for translation, and it probably is. It probably isn’t all true, either. When you think you’ve been really eloquent, you probably were just drunk. I’ve found that true in my case anyway.

  They talked and talked over cups of coffee and bottles of beer Like any ball player who works at the game, Raul could drink beer after a game until the cows come home and not be affected by it. Some hydrate with ice water, but I like flavored ice water myself. So does Raul.

  They talked about Raul’s life as a boy on a finca in the countryside. That means farm. He was an unremarkable child, one of six, except for this baseball thing. Fortunately, it could be spotted because Cuba is a country full of baseball scouts, the way everyone in New York is an architecture critic.

  Maria Elena was just beautiful and was just twenty-one. She had a long, thin nose set just right in her face and those full lips and a generous cast to her brown eyes. She wore glasses, too, which showed she was smart. Charlene wears glasses, too, but only to read. She had a sense of humor. She told jokes and listened to them. She was a captivating speaker. She she she. Raul could not praise her enough to me later, to explain all the things he ended up doing.

  The old man, the doctor, was getting pretty tired of this boy by the end of the evening, but he couldn’t seem to cut his way through the youngsters’ mutual admiration society. He said he had an operation in the morning, and that was supposed to be the end of it.

  It had just started.

  It took about six months for Maria Elena’s parents to recognize the facts of life and go into phase two, a strategic retreat that involved leaving behind booby traps for the advancing trooper. Nothing seemed to work.

  Polite Raul showed up for dinner Sunday nights at the Velasquez house. He didn’t really know about knives and forks in their proper order, but he wasn’t a slob, and even Mrs. Velasquez gave him a pass on table etiquette. Another dud booby trap.

  Polite Raul took Miss Maria Elena by the hand and did an elegant promenade on non-baseball evenings in Havana before the lights began shutting down. There is passion in the air in Havana, I have to give it that, and you can feel it even if you are an Anglo.

  But that winter before the announcement of George and Fidel’s revolution was a bad one for the young lovers. It strained them so severely that the Señor Doctor and his wife saw hope that the whole thing would self-destruct and that they wouldn’t have to worry about their dud booby traps.

  And the romance might have ended. But it turned out it lasted long enough — until the winter meetings of major league baseball were held, up in cloudy Los Angeles. I can tell you that after the meetings and after George and after Fidel and after everyone else in the world let the beans out of the bag, it was hopeless from the standpoint of being Maria’s parents. Nothing would stop Raul and Maria then.

  9

  “Before I throw this open to questions, I have an announcement to make,” George Bremenhaven said on that gray L.A. morning.

  I can tell you what the weather was because I was there. George asked me to come. Ordered. All of this at one in the morning, the usual hour for a George Bremenhaven phone call. The man has the social life of wallpaper. I stumbled around my tongue and told him I didn’t want to go to Los Angeles even to see Mi
chelle Pfeiffer and he made it clear I couldn’t refuse. Charlene was right. I was already in his web, which he had just barely started spinning. But I was stuck.

  All right. I went to L.A. for two reasons. One was that George popped for the room and air fare. The other was that I was curious about what was going to happen to Dr. Johnson next. Boswell needs eyewitness facts, not watching everything on C-Span.

  No, the third reason was that I still had it half in mind to bam George for setting me up. Charlene had got under my skin with what she’d said about me, about George making me the scapegoat and the Judas goat, and I thought if I saw George, it might just remind me to pop him in the chops.

  I didn’t, of course. George, if he cared, probably knew that.

  Another thing I have to explain about George is that he’s a Republican and the guys in the White House were Democrats. I figured that out by myself before I ever went to L.A. He was a patsy for them in just the way I was a patsy for George.

  (I picked up that “patsy” from old movies, not that they talk that way anymore in New York City. Even the cab drivers in New York ain’t colorful, unless you consider scary colorful. They’re all foreigners anyway; they only speak in foreign, so maybe if I understood foreign, they’d be colorful. You go down Broadway, you don’t see guys and dolls and people who talk like that. You see colored guys selling junk jewelry on the sidewalk and towel-heads running delis. Where’s the color in that? The whole country is bent on speaking like they speak in Omaha. I read one time that all the 800-numbers are in Omaha because Omaha people are smart and speak clear English, which means no accent when they answer the phone, so there’s nothing to offend anyone from any part of the country. Take Johnny Carson, he’s from Nebraska, but if I were to ask you where he was from, you’d have a hard time remembering because he doesn’t sound like he’s from any place at all. Who would have thought it came down to talking like Omaha?)

  That tangent comes from thinking about George and everything George puts everyone through. It makes you crazy.

  To get back to it: George made me have dinner with him that night in the hotel and the closest I came to punching him was telling him about the letter from Miss Roxanne Devon to Charlene Cleaver and about the IRS man coming around Jack Wade at the dealership.

  “I don’t know anything about that shit,” George said, eating a very unhealthy charbroiled steak. He stabbed a piece of the steak and made it disappear. While he was chewing, I said very calmly:

  “You’re full of shit, George. You’re just the kind of evil son of a bitch who would do something like that. Like this kid I knew, pulled the wings off butterflies. To see what they would do when they couldn’t fly anymore.”

  “You are not a butterfly, Ryan. You’re an employee.”

  “Why’d you want to mess me up with Charlene?”

  “Why would I want to do that? And what about this Roxanne Devon, you fucking her?”

  “There ain’t no Roxanne Devon, which you know anyway. And where would you get a name like that?”

  “I had an aunt named Roxanne once.” He tried to look wistful then, like one of those kids drawn on eating plates that get sold to collectors for anything but eating. “She’s dead. I always liked that name,” George said, chomping another piece of steak.

  “Why Jack Wade?”

  “Who?”

  “George, I know you did it.”

  “Prove it.”

  “It’s a federal offense to pretend to be a federal officer … I think.”

  “Is it really?”

  “George, you have a reputation for cavorting with unsavory people. I mean, besides your fellow owners.”

  “That’s not true,” he said. He was getting whiter in the face and he was chewing harder, which means I was getting to him. I relaxed a little and turned on a smile.

  “So you were afraid I would go back to Houston and stay there and tell you the hell with the contract.”

  “I wasn’t afraid, Ryan. You’re too in love with baseball and money to do something like that. Besides, you’d be lousy selling cars, believe me.”

  “How would you know?”

  “I wouldn’t buy a car from you.”

  “I wouldn’t sell you one.”

  “On principle, right?”

  “Something like that.”

  “Ryan, you don’t have any principles. Look, you’re here, eating my food, drinking my wine. A man of principle wouldn’t do that.”

  “You’re drinking a martini and I’m not eating steak.”

  “Same thing.”

  “George, why’d you invite me here?”

  “Why do you think?”

  “Because you’ve just about sold off the team with no sign of hiring anyone.”

  “More than half. Just got a couple more. My lawyers are looking into the Cookie Coletti contract. I think I can can him without paying for it.”

  “George, you are really a shit.”

  “That’s the second time you’ve said that. Normally, once would be enough, I would have let you walk. But I’m generous tonight. It must be the wine.”

  “George, that’s a martini.”

  “Same thing. How can you be Boswell if you don’t hang around Johnson?”

  “If I knew I was gonna have to spend social time with you, I would have asked for a raise.”

  That rolled right off. Another chomp of steak. The steak actually looked good, not that there was anything wrong with the redfish, but the steak actually looked very, very good. Why the hell hadn’t I ordered a steak? Charlene wasn’t here, she wouldn’t know. Except it might stay on my breath.

  “But you didn’t ask for a raise. The reason you didn’t was that your agent Sid was trying to shop you last season and you got no takers. And you still want to be in the Show.”

  “Well, that’s water slopped out of the trough. What are you going to do, George? You make that announcement that I think you’re going to make and you’re going to be dog meat.”

  “Really? Among whom?” He said it just like that, with arrogance and coolness in his voice.

  “Everyone. The fans, press — I told you that before.”

  “Listen, Ryan. I’m going to reveal something to you that no owner has ever told one of his employees.”

  He paused for dramatic effect.

  “I don’t give a shit. Because I know fans and I know press. Who are the beloved owners? Bill Veeck? Right. Never won shit, so he turned on the charm.”

  “He won in Cleveland. And the ‘59 White Sox.”

  “Same thing.” That didn’t make sense, but George wasn’t paying attention now. He was fixing his little Gila monster eyes on me and not letting go.

  “I know fans, Ryan. You finish third, you’re a bum. You appear in the field and they boo you even if you were announcing a fund to save a kid with cancer. It goes with owning. But win and they might not love you, but they respect you. They back off. They say, ‘Well, that old George Bremenhaven is a son of a bitch, but he gets things done.’ Fans pile up all their resentments in life on the owner of the team they follow. That’s a fact. Win, and your shit doesn’t stink. Lose nobly and they’ll bury you in a concrete bridge in New Jersey.

  “Now, media. Press — the sporting press — is just the same, only more vicious. You get a winner, especially in New York, they’d let you walk down Fifth Avenue in a dress and find a way to explain it was the latest in macho fashion. Lose and they can’t wait to get you, even get you indicted, encourage lone gunmen to stalk you, burn your house, shoot your dog. Press are vicious and they’re so used to it, they don’t know they are. They think they’re the good guys, the arrogant cocksuckers. Even if you win, like I said, you can’t really take all the credit for it, even if you deserve it.

  “It’s a no-win situation, Ryan, which any owner knows from the start. So we don’t play that game. You don’t like the way I run a team, buy me out. You listen to the shit on WFAN in New York? Whiny little losers call in whose high point in life is to go to the
Stadium and boo the millionaire players and then get on talk radio to pretend they’d be better owners. I don’t listen to whiners, Ryan, or take advice from cheerleaders, so that’s why I don’t give a shit what the press or the fans think about me.”

  It was quite a tirade, but he delivered it in a low voice so it didn’t get circulated around the room. I wished I had ordered steak, I was feeling that miserable. Like an ex-smoker facing a crisis without a weed nearby.

  All I could say was, “Well, George, I got no part of it. Just send me my check on time.”

  “You got no part of it? Man, you’re in it up to your asshole,” George said with a non-amusing chuckle. Charlene had said something similar.

  “I don’t see how. I don’t own the team. I don’t tell you what to do.”

  “But you’re my number one boy, Ryan, on and off the field.”

  “I think I’ll just throw up quietly, here, in place,” I said.

  “Come on, get some balls,” George said. “It won’t be that bad, I promise you.”

  Like all promises, especially from owners, this one was flawed in ways I didn’t even guess at that night.

  The next morning, George did his announcement in the Century Room in the hotel. There was a good crowd from the press, because he had put out sweet rolls and a wet bar. Also because the sporting press wanted to see what it was that George could explain he was doing all fall, getting rid of players.

  I sort of slunk in, toward the back. Besides the press, there were scouts from the other owners with their own tape recorders. No one from the League was there that I could see, but that didn’t mean anything because I don’t rub shoulders with the bureaucracy.

  Not usually. Except that time I took Catfish’s advice about playing chin music on this first baseman from Kansas City and ended up beaning him instead. Well, the son of a bitch was practically hanging over the plate — what could I have done and kept my self-respect? But I got a hearing and a fine anyway and five games suspension. On the other hand, I didn’t have a lot of hitters crowding me the rest of the year.