Imperfect: An Improbable Life

by Jim Abbott

  We settled there when I was in fifth grade, between an elegant old couple on one side and a professor and his wife on the other. Gardens colored their backyards. Our house, by our previous standards, was huge, with spacious rooms and fireplaces that heated them. A furnace dominated the basement. Running it was expensive, so Dad bought a wood-burning stove, attached it to the furnace, and fed the stove with the wood from pallets he’d collect from the family meat business. One afternoon he called me over to the stack of pallets in the backyard and said, “Jim, lemme show you how to take these things apart.” Then, with a grin, he cranked up a chainsaw. I swept up the sawdust. In spite of its size and the large property it sat on, the house was affordable because the streets that led to ours had begun to reflect the coming economic recession. Chad and I walked to school—through the backyard, over Gilkey Creek where once a wanderer’s dead body had been discovered and dominated our conversations for weeks, across the park, and up a hill, where we’d turn back toward the house. Mom and Dad would wave from the front door—Everything all right?—and we’d wave back.

  Some of the best friends in my life were made in the Wiffle ball games in that backyard, and in the trees scaled in that park, and at the ends of the bike rides that would deliver me to pickup games that might or might not accept me. After all the moving around, it was good not to be the new kid, the different kid, and better to be the familiar kid. It was good not to answer the questions. And it was especially good to be simply one of the guys, no better or worse. It took a few beatings to get there. The neighborhood mirrored a diverse city, one that was hurting in a lot of ways. So when dusk came and the games thinned out, the white kids and black kids would wave their good-byes and head to their neutral corners until tomorrow, just like the skinny kids and chubby kids and the one-handed kid.

  By the time I tromped across Burroughs Park for my first classes at Flint Central, the city’s unemployment rate paralleled those of crime, inflation, and despair, each racing to determine which would sink Flint first. As GM was planning the celebration of its seventy-fifth anniversary and the United Auto Workers its fiftieth, nearly a quarter of the city’s working-age population was idle. Downtown, Montgomery Ward, J. C. Penney, and Smith-Bridgman closed. When the local food market advertised to fill a couple entry-level positions, applicants stood two-deep around the block. Some brought sleeping bags, coolers, and lawn chairs. Crack cocaine became the new industry, homicide and arson the new hobbies. As the decade wore on, Money magazine surveyed three hundred major U.S. cities for their livability; Flint was three hundredth. Few who lived there were surprised, though they cloaked their reactions in outrage.

  We were okay. Dad was selling beer. Folks always had money for beer. Mom was an attorney. Folks always needed a way out of trouble. We had food to eat, clean clothes to wear, and plenty of pallets to carve up and burn.

  Years before, I’d worn down my parents on the subject of the prosthetic limb, so by my freshman year I couldn’t have said whether it was in a box in the garage or in a hospital storeroom or in a city landfill or on some other kid’s arm. As I’d neared the end of elementary school, the last place I saw it was on the floor of my bedroom closet, there with five sneakers that were too small or tattered, toys I’d outgrown, a pair of snow pants, and a plastic bat split along its seam that one day could be brought back to life with duct tape. “I haven’t worn that in a long time,” I thought, “I don’t think I ever will again.” While I was glad to be rid of it, that arm held more than cables and bands. It symbolized my parents’ efforts to help me. Their intentions were good and pure, and I felt a responsibility to them, though not enough to wear it. I felt bad about that. Sometimes, as heavy as it was on my shoulder, it was heavier on the floor.

  The arm was in the clothes closet because that’s how I thought of it—as a part of my wardrobe, along with the pants and shirts and jackets I wore to school. It went on in the morning and came off the moment I walked through the front door at the end of the school day. The stump socks were folded in the sock drawer of the dresser. The elastic bands that operated the pincers but wore out so fast sat in a tangle on the bookshelf. “Where’s your arm?” Mom would ask before breakfast. “Where’s your arm?” Dad would demand as I gathered my lunchbox and homework. Some days I’d huff away, return to the closet, strip off my shirt, strap on my arm, and stomp off to school. Others, I’d plead for a respite, just one day off, promising to wear it again the next day. Eventually, gloriously, there were no more tomorrows for my right arm, though twenty-five years later a man I didn’t know contacted me, said he was in possession of my arm—guaranteed it—and asked if I would like to buy it back. I was mortified, though less so when he described what he had, and it turned out what he was hoping to sell could not have come from my closet. It was a left arm.

  The back-and-forths with my parents petered out when I was maybe ten, when they’d recognized I was better off finding my way with what I had and, anyway, they had tired of the sulking arguments about it. I couldn’t hold a bat with that thing, couldn’t swing a hockey stick, and couldn’t even run without it clattering against itself and whatever else was nearby. The technology that was supposed to be extending my physical boundaries was keeping me off the playground at recess and slowing me to a walk. The best it did for me was to grant the motivation to be rid of it, which meant working the right arm I had until it became more reliable. My true arm was thin and slightly short and lacked the mobility of my left arm, but it had some life in it. Not having fingers was problematic, but my wrist worked okay. With my right arm, I could push things around, wedge things between my forearm and body, trap things, hold things steady, carry things with some nimbleness, and that all seemed to be a reasonable place to start. I was forever staining the right side of my shirts, where I cradled oranges in order to peel them and bike parts in order to fix them and baseballs in order to pitch them. I dropped a lot of stuff. I was frustrated when the easiest tasks required two hands, and so were nearly impossible for me. But it was better than the alternative, better than being Captain Hook. I’d left that behind; where, I didn’t know and didn’t care.

  Where it was not—cinched neither to my body nor my consciousness—was good enough. Into a new world of the usual high school frailties and rather pointed tensions, enough of them drawn along racial lines, I arrived at Central a little gangly, a little intimidated, a lot self-conscious and with my right hand stuffed deep into my right pocket. This was a tough school, a burdened school, and a basketball school. It also was the neighborhood school, which meant a few warm faces and a somewhat soothing intimacy. I’d played pickup ball on the gym floor for years, so I’d crawled the grounds and hallways before. That’s not to say it wasn’t at times a dangerous place. Just like Flint itself, there were shadowy corners at Central where being young, alone, and unimposing drew unwanted interest. The rumor on campus—supported anecdotally by various bloody noses and black eyes—held that a black gang was recruiting new members. Gang leaders required their candidates to batter a predetermined number of white faces, which might have grown their membership but did little for the rest of the school’s morale. This seemed a long way from the color blindness of Burroughs Park. I’d avoided those rites until a couple months into my freshman year when one morning I was climbing the stairs past the auto shop, heading for first period. The stairs amounted to a back entrance into school, the quickest route to my locker from Burroughs Park. Halfway up the first flight, I heard from around the corner what must have been a half-dozen boys coming from the other direction. They were talking loud, laughing, and at a quarter to eight in the morning quite obviously not coming to school but leaving. My stomach churned.

  I paused, considered retreat, was caught in between, realized it was too late to run, and finally surrendered to the mobile gauntlet, thinking, “Aw, this isn’t going to be good.”

  I reached the landing as they did and stood to the side as they passed. Single file, they looked me over coldly, one after the other,
four of them, then five, and when I came to believe I’d been thankfully unworthy of their scorn, the last of them balled his fist and hit me square in the jaw, sending me staggering into the wall. They whooped and hollered, a celebration for the pledge who’d come a white kid closer to full membership. My mouth hurt, my books were scattered on the landing, and I felt like a dope for wandering into the ambush, but mostly I was relieved they kept going. It wasn’t until I reached my locker that I began to shake. I brushed a few tears from my cheeks with the sleeve of my jacket. I’d assumed my turn was coming at some point, and I hoped that would be the worst of it. My buddy Mark Conover once made the mistake of allowing a stray basketball to roll into another game in gym class. The kid tripped by the ball waited for him in the locker room and beat him pretty good for it. Mark’s attacker was expelled, but that hardly calmed a population of white kids who felt terrorized.

  For a long time, at least the first couple years, that was life at Central. If you fit the victim profile, you kept your head down, minimized eye contact, and hoped it wasn’t your day. The tough school in the tough town took its victims, and these were desperate kids who preyed on insecure ones. Fortunately, it was also a sports school in a sports town, which meant there were places where there were rules and pockets of etiquette and at least one way to rise above the random cold-cockings.

  So started high school and the adolescent lessons. There were plenty of punches to be taken, ducked, and thrown. The next connected closer to the gut.

  I regarded myself as a reasonably proficient basketball player, a certainty that blossomed on the asphalt courts around town and open-gym nights on the floor. Shortly after the flyers were posted announcing freshman basketball tryouts, I showed up on the first of two days in my shorts, T-shirt, and high-tops. Half the boys of the freshman class, it seemed, turned out. This was Flint; everyone could play basketball. Those who couldn’t thought they could. Basketball was part of the culture of the city, like cars and unemployment.

  The coach had a strategy that lacked nuance, but suited the crowd. He rolled out a few basketballs, blew his whistle and, from a distance with his arms crossed, sorted through the mayhem. On the hardwood of the Lavoie Field House, sides were chosen, games reared up, and the good players began separating themselves from the not-quite-good-enough players, and when the cuts came I was going to miss those not-so-good guys. I mixed in, made a very clever no-look touch pass with the coach—I was sure—staring straight at me, got a few rebounds, and a day later came to open-gym night for a pickup game when a few of us noticed the tryout results had been posted on the bulletin board. The names of the boys who’d made the team—fifteen of them—were listed in alphabetical order. It didn’t take long, then, to realize Abbott was not going to be there. None of my friends’ names were there, either.

  Two months into high school, I’d been ambushed in a stairwell and lost the chance to play basketball.

  Central basketball, as it turned out, was loaded. We—and by “we” I mean the guys who made the team—won three consecutive state championships beginning in 1981, drawing crowds from all over Michigan. As each banner was hung over the gym it became clearer to me why my name wasn’t on that bulletin board. Flint was a hoops city, and Central was in those years its heartbeat. Stan Gooch, the varsity coach then, won 406 games at Central. The real glory years were in the early eighties, when he won with city legends Eric Turner, Mark Harris, Marty Embry, Darryl Johnson, and Terence Greene. The Central basketball dynasty ended in 1984, when Flint Northwestern showed up with Glen Rice, Andre Rison, and Jeff Grayer.

  Long before then, I’d turned to baseball.

  The game had come to me, and I to it, at Pierce Elementary School, a low-slung building less than a mile from Burroughs Park. I entered in fifth grade, so another new classroom, thirty new classmates, and thirty more explanations for what happened to my hand. We’d covered that ground—“I was born this way.” “No, it doesn’t hurt.” “I don’t know why it looks like that.” “No, nothing ‘happened.’ ”—when in late winter the teacher passed around a signup sheet for Little League baseball, finally. My new friends, most of whom lived in the neighborhood and ran Burroughs Park with me, had played organized baseball together the year before. They talked about the hits they had and the teams they beat and who could pitch and who couldn’t, and I was envious. I’d played T-ball and enough backyard Wiffle ball and, after being turned away a hundred times, I’d earned my way into some of the neighborhood games. Dad, of course, had played a large role in that, staring down at his sniveling firstborn in the kitchen and ordering him back to the park. If the older kids were going to ignore me and my hopeful gaze and my stunted arm, Dad wasn’t going to hear it. This was the man, after all, who’d once convinced me I would do hard time for grand theft bubblegum.

  I WAS MAYBE ten. Chad and I had accompanied Mom to the grocery store and on the way through the checkout line a pack of gum practically jumped into my pocket. On the way home, I’d dragged Chad into the crime, and we chomped away merrily in the backseat. Mom was on to me. Dad got home, drama ensued, and he and I left the house with him announcing, “Say good-bye to your mom and your brother.” Chad, I think, eyed the big bedroom. We drove to Flint jail, the kindly officer played along, and it wasn’t until the cell door was open and I was standing on the precipice of solitary confinement that Dad figured he’d taken the lesson far enough. Mom was kinder, but just as firm. Since the drive back to Flint from Grand Rapids and Mary Free Bed years before, the course was set: Jimmy was going to find his way, one way or the other. This was a boy, and that’s what he’d be raised as. The world was unforgiving, and Jimmy might as well learn that now.

  They weren’t exactly right. At least I don’t suspect so. There was a lot of forgiveness out there. For every five sneering kids on every sandlot field who couldn’t imagine how I could possibly help their team, there was a man willing to teach me to tie my shoes. There was a coach who would be sure I got my at-bat and two innings in the field. There was Dad, who in his hard lessons ached to toughen me for whatever lay ahead, and Mom, whose soft heart could hardly bear to watch any of it, but did, and with uncommon compassion. Coaches, all those coaches, seemed to line up to help. Even as a child, I could barely summon the courage to complain, other than about the hook. That, I hated. When the frustration bubbled up, and one too many kids gawked at me for a little too long, and I didn’t think I’d ever be free from what others must be thinking, I’d wonder how this thing had found me. Everybody else had been granted two hands and a life without complications. I was different, unfairly burdened, and always would be. How could I play ball like this? Meet a girl like this? Have a regular life? Immediately, I’d regret the thoughts, like I’d abandoned the fight for myself and my parents and all the people who were trying to believe in me. I’d burn it off by shooting hoops in the driveway, or lying on my back on the lawn and throwing a baseball into the air, counting its revolutions before it fell back into my hand.

  Because, in the end, there was always baseball.

  Mark Conover’s father, Neil, coached that fifth-grade team. We played at Kearsley Park, a fifteen-minute bike ride from home, past the high school and the hospital and the community college, most of it following Gilkey Creek. For the first time, I had a team, and a game that wouldn’t send me away, and a real uniform. In my mirror, a mesh shirt, matching cap, and jeans counted as much as a uniform as Al Kaline’s whites and Olde English D. “Grant Hamady Realty,” written across my chest, might as well have said “Tigers.” I had a position: the left-handed third baseman. Mark’s dad even put me in to pitch once in a while, innings that often would course through a walk or two, some reasonable velocity and, I’m guessing, a few parents concerned for the safety of their little batters.

  But I belonged.

  Kearsley Park was in a floodplain. The baseball field was mostly dirt, except for the times it was all mud. On game days, we’d hang our gloves from our handlebars, wedge our bats under our arms, an
d ride as fast and straight as we could without sending a bat bouncing wildly across the pavement. We had only a few that weren’t already broken, after all. When it rained, we’d gather rakes and shovels from our garages, add those to our uneven loads, meet at the field, and push the puddles into foul territory. We couldn’t bear the thought of not playing. We lived for it. That team made the city championship game, which we showed up for in sweatpants that actually matched our T-shirts. It was a magnificent moment fouled only by the fact that we didn’t win.

  By the time I left those alternately dusty and boggy fields and reached high school, my arm had hundreds of innings on it. Some were in the park league, the summer league, and the Connie Mack league, where I was gradually finding the strike zone. But most of those innings were thrown in my backyard, or up the road in Harold and Howard Croft’s backyard, or in a corner of Burroughs Park, or against the side of the house. Again, my control was coming. By the end of the day, Chad generally was carrying fewer welts to the dinner table.

  I played on the freshman team at Central, mostly as a pitcher and left fielder, occasionally as a first baseman. The season wasn’t long, and when it was over I thought I’d hung in there pretty well, except baseball was becoming my sport even at a time before specialization, and I’d batted .000. It seemed low. In fact, teammates who weren’t really ballplayers—as I was beginning to consider myself—got hits. But not me. I wish I could say it was bad luck.