The Curious Case of Sidd Finch

by George Plimpton

  "I waited until he had taken a few steps toward the rocks above the pen, gliding down between the tree trunks -the yaks shuffling nervously below-and then I let fly. Point A to Point B. The snow leopard gave a kind of nonleopard, quite rabbity sort of hop, and looked around as if some internal muscle in the vicinity of his shoulder blades had gone awry. He disappeared up toward the snowfields.

  "The head lama was pleased. He was very pleased that it was the snow leopard and not the yeti.

  "I got to be very good at it," Sidd told us. "The snow leopards appeared above the yak pens less and less. When they got pegged they looked absolutely bruised with indignation. They didn't quite know what had happened. Before they disappeared back among the rocks, they stood and looked around with those sorrowful, hurt looks that house cats get when you embarrass them in some way."

  "What about the stones?" I asked.

  "The dop-dops carry their stones around in a leather pouch. I, too, look for stones that feel absolutely perfect to the touch. I put them aside. I walk to where the snow leopard has been, and I look for the stone so that I can use it again. That is what I find so agreeable about baseballs -they fit so perfectly into the hand; there are seams over which to fit the fingers. The ball becomes one with the hand."

  After a pause Sidd said, "I will admit to an awkward thing. I got to like throwing to a pinpoint target. I began to urge the leopards to come down out of the rhododendron forests to disturb the yaks. When they didn't appear, almost in pique I would fling my stone at a distant stalk, a butterfly fanning its wings on top, and crack the stalk so the butterfly would vault into the air, fluttering. It became a distinct pleasure to make a connection between myself and a distant object over an expanse of space, what in Zen is called the ma. The physical feat became all-important. And, of course, when you get very good at something you wonder how you can apply it to something more gainful and useful than hitting an occasional leopard with rocks. One evening, when I was so still that once again I was imagining the lichen growing behind my knees, baseball came to mind."

  I asked him if he had seen a baseball game.

  Yes, at college he had gone a few times. To Fenway Park. He went alone. He had no friends at Harvard. He did not know whom to ask to go with him. He did not understand many of the technical details of the game and was too shy to ask his neighbor in the stands-almost undoubtedly (it occurred to me) a man staring straight ahead, chewing gum very rapidly and muttering that the Sox would find some way to blow this one.

  Sidd told us what he found especially appealing about pitching. "Do you know what a mandala is? It's a design, usually on silk or cotton-a banner, really, in which the purpose is to focus attention on the center. It's a familiar aid to meditation. A baseball field is something like a mandala-in which the focal point is in the middle of the diamond of the base paths-the pitcher's mound. When I see a pitcher walk across the base paths, on the way there I feel as if he were walking across the silks of a mandala to the center of consciousness."

  It was after midnight. Sidd yawned and said that if he didn't get to bed, he was going to scare the Mets authorities in the enclosure the next day. His control would "wobble." Debbie Sue sighed and said the porpoises in the Bay were going to be disappointed. She tugged at his shirttail. That was one of their nightly rituals-to swim out in the Bay to where the porpoises came by the shore. Sidd hated it because he was such a poor swimmer. Debbie Sue could hardly wait. The midnight swim. The porpoises expected them. He held her head between his palms. "I do not feel like the sea tonight," he said gently. "Namas-te."

  We watched him disappear down the little hallway to their room.

  "What he's really going to do is meditate," Debbie Sue told me. "It makes me jealous. He's going to empty his mind. In a while I'm going in to make it difficult for him. I'm going to crouch next to him. He gets into the lotus position and he cups his left hand over the right. It's always done that way," she said. "The active hand is the right, and when you put the left over it, you are quieting it down, bringing it to rest. It always makes me shiver to see him doing it.

  "Owl," she said suddenly. "Do you know what I did on the beach today? I asked him to throw a baseball as far as he could."

  "Come on!"

  "That's right. Right out to where a freighter was on the horizon." She seemed rather harried when she an nounced this, fidgeting around on the settee, which squeaked in the dark, and more so when I went on to say that I thought she was doing Sidd a terrible disservice by asking him to do such a thing. "You'll destroy him. After all, that's an arm he's got there, not a mechanical catapult."

  "I don't know what got into me," she said. "I actually wanted to see if he could do it."

  Once again the nagging suspicion crossed my mind: she had been commissioned by some agency to cripple him in some way.

  She said, "I stood there looking out at the Gulf, waiting to see how far out the baseball would land. I heard him wind up behind me, and this little gasp, you know, of effort? And I waited. And waited? Nothing happened. The Gulf out there in front of me? Just as flat as a pancake ... and the first thing I thought was that he had thrown it clear out of sight! It was awesome! The ball must have landed in South Carolina, or someplace."

  I grinned in the dark at Debbie Sue's idea of what lay over the horizon of the Gulf of Mexico.

  Then she said, "I turned around and he was still holding the ball. He had this sly smile and I said, `Oh, you've faked it! You're not supposed to cheat. Wait'll I tell Owl.' "

  "What did he say to that?" I asked.

  "He said it was another ball he was holding. He'd thrown the first one. It was probably just coming down now. Splash, and he made one of these great imitations of his, so that I could just see that ball plopping down and turning over out in the Gulf, and bobbing? So I said, `Throw it again-this time so I can see it.' "

  I asked, "Did he do it?"

  "He totally refused. Totally! He just bowed and said that to throw the ball to the horizon once was quite enough."

  "Well, don't do it again, Debbie Sue," I said. "You can damage his rotator cuff." I hadn't the slightest idea what the rotator cuff was, but I know that baseball people dreaded injuring it the way skiers despaired of a leg fracture.

  "I'd rather die," said Debbie Sue.

  I went to sleep that night thinking of the baseball landing far out in the Gulf, startling a fisherman sitting in his boat on the calm sea just beyond sight of the shoreline. He would assume that a mullet had jumped clear of the water, but then he would turn and see the baseball revolving and bobbing, the ripples extending from it to indicate it had just dropped down. From where? Thrown out of an airplane? He would look up in an azure sky and find it clear from horizon to horizon. Would he speculate that it had dropped from out beyond the atmosphere itself? What else was there to think?

  VI

  NE AFTERNOON I went with them to the beaches. I had told them that morning that according to my cardboard schedule it was my afternoon for the marina and to go to the library to look up strange occurrences. But I made an exception. Sidd came back to the bungalow after his noontime practice in the enclosure to go with me.

  We got in the Volkswagen. Debbie Sue had been out shopping somewhere and she planned to meet us at Treasure Island Beach.

  "Debbie Sue is showing me how to throw a Frisbee," Sidd said. "I am dreadful at it. It flutters like a bird. I have hit myself in the foot."

  Sometimes I wondered why someone of his complexity of mind, and given his curious introspective historyyears in the monastery and so forth in the Himalayaswould be devoted to someone who, to put it baldly, was so breezy, coltish, wacky. Learning to throw a Frisbee! Perhaps that was the very reason-that he realized that she was extricating him from a way of life that was stultifying, an extension of the reason he had turned up in Maine and asked to pitch.

  "How was practice today?" I asked.

  "As usual," Sidd said. "Mr. Reynolds has developed a new stance to catch the pitch. He stands with one
leg braced behind him. He leans forward. It looks as though he wants to push down a wall. His eyes continue to indicate worry. I tell him to try not to be concerned."

  We drove through the streets of St. Petersburg. It was a sun-drenched afternoon. We went by a municipal swimming pool, its surface roiled by splashing children; from the cement courts nearby the thump of basketballs carried through the car window on a warm wind off the Gulf. We passed by the grounds of a country club-tennis courts and the green of its golf course stretching off through the palms. We stopped for a light. In front of us a group of bicyclists were poised, high on their seats, long tanned legs out, toes down, to balance as they waited for the light to change.

  Beside me, Sidd suddenly said, "I can do very few things. I can't play tennis. I can't golf. I hardly know anything about swimming. I can't bicycle. I have limited myself."

  "Well, you can throw a baseball," I said. "And you can make extraordinary sounds. And your French horn."

  "That's all very specialized," he said. "My horizons are limited. I can throw a ball but I am very feeble at catching one. Mr. Stottlemyre is in despair. He takes off his baseball cap and hits himself in the middle of the forehead with the palm of his hand. He eats sunflower seeds."

  "It's never to late to learn any of these things," I said.

  "Debbie Sue is throwing the baseball to me out in your backyard," Sidd said. "She is going to teach me how to ride a bicycle. I am pleased. The monastery prepares you for the spiritual, but not for a practical life.

  "Debbie Sue is a very good golfer. She took me to play yesterday. She's quite a different person when it comes to golf-very serious, quite grim really. Simply no nonsense. We went to Big Tony's golfing range. I am not innocent about golf. I know something of the terminology-sandblasters, wedge, hole in one, Arnie's Army, and all that, and at Stowe, in front of the north portico, there is a golf course. But I have never tried the game-never picked up a club. She put the ball on the tee for me. She said, `If you can throw a baseball into the sun, you ought to be able to hit it there with a five iron.' I had no idea it was so difficult. I dug a huge chunk out of the earth. Big Tony came out of his office. I hit a seven iron that I had rented from him into the ground and snapped the shaft. Big Tony said, `Hey!' I gave up. I sat with him and we watched Debbie Sue finish off the pail of balls. Debbie Sue is beautiful to see hitting a golf ball. She has a long, fluid swing. The club hangs down her back as she watches the flight of the ball. Big Tony said she could win on `the tour' if her head was screwed on right-a `beach bum' he called her. I tried to pay for the broken club."

  I realized that part of my affection for Sidd was that he was a bit like myself-a cripple. Except for his astonishing skill at throwing a baseball with uncanny accuracy, and so forth, he was, in fact, "out of it" as we used to say. He could not drive. He couldn't cook. He had very little savoir faire. He didn't understand menus. Modern contrivances were beyond him; rather than manipulating them, they seemed to manipulate him. He had trouble replacing telephones in their cradles. In the morning I'd hear him murmuring to the faucets as he turned them on for his shower. I understood why he wished to be apart from the Mets locker room. They would have kidded him unmercifully. He could barely swim. Traffic confused him. Even walking to dinner in Pass-a-Grille, where the traffic is relatively contained, if I'd look elsewhere just for a second there'd be a scream of brakes and Sidd would run up to me, ashen-faced, as contrite as a guilty dog, from some near calamity on the street.

  Debbie Sue loved all this. It made her feel-as she told me once-like a den mother: a warm, protective feeling.

  She was waiting for us at Treasure Island Beach. She rose from the sand and ran for us. The Frisbee flicked out from the vicinity of her waistline and came on a swift line toward us. I heard Sidd gasp as he threw up his arms, not to catch the Frisbee but to protect himself, covering his face as if what was coming for him were the outstretched talons of a falcon. The Frisbee sailed by and off to one side and hissed into the sand behind us.

  "Owls on the beach," she said, looking at me. "Neat."

  We had a long conversation in the sun. Sidd had gone for a walk, perhaps to meditate in the dunes.

  "Sometimes he's up there for an hour. When he comes back we lie on the sand and feel the sun cook. He can get very distant. Sometimes he likes to talk about baseball. Yesterday he asked me why baseball was called the National Pastime. I had trouble with that one, so I told him what I liked about it."

  Apparently these were such items as the little whisk brooms the umpires use to clean off home plate and the fact that they turn their rear ends to the field when they do so, presumably not to offend the sensibilities of those sitting behind the foul screens. She liked the big dusting mittens the ushers use to sweep off the seats when they snap them down, and she wanted a pair of them to wear around Pass-a-Grille. She liked looking into the cool of the dugout and wondering what they were talking about in there. "It's so much better than a bench, which you have in football, and all you see from the stands is a row of backs with numbers on them. In baseball it's a little house you can step into, just like a badger's."

  She told me she liked the outfielders. They slowly stalked about out there ... and suddenly they were active, scampering until they were under the ball, and once there they were so cool, as if it were the easiest and most boring thing in the world they were about to do. She liked the way Darryl Strawberry's body, with its tiny behind, sat way up there on those long legs. She told me she had once dated a shortstop at Duke, but she didn't tell me much about him or her times there.

  "Shouldn't you be up there at school?" I asked. "It's not vacation time, is it?"

  She shook her head. Apparently the social pressures were too much for her. She couldn't abide dormitory life or the regimen of class schedules. She couldn't "adjust." I had the feeling the students had made fun of her-her vitality, her mannerisms-crushed her in some way. She was terribly lonely-really the same sort of problems Sidd had at Stowe, which was surprising, of course, because she was-at least in my eyes-so unbearably beautiful. Sometimes that was the case, wasn't it-that beauty warded people off: it was too complex a quality to deal with. No matter. She left there after a while. Rather wistfully she once sang the Duke song for me:

  The idea of going on the golf tour did not appeal to her. She hated travel, the competition, the thought of crowds. "I think a nice crowd is three," she said, "you, me, and Sidd." She leaned across the sand and laid her head on my shoulder. "I've never been so happy."

  She turned on her side in the sand. "He's been teaching me things. I am trying to teach him golf and how to ride a bicycle and how to catch a baseball, and he's trying to turn me into a monk.... Putting me on The Path? He gives me these little exercises to try. Here's one: `With mouth slightly open, put the mind in the middle of the tongue.' "

  She did it for me-eyes closed as she concentrated. "There! How was that? Did I look vacant? Here's another. `Look at the bowl without seeing what is in it or on the sides.' Sidd tells me if I do this for a while, I will become aware. He tries to get me to imagine myself as an empty room with walls of skin-empty. Oh, Owl, I'm very bad at it. I told him it was impossible. I had too many grouper sandwiches and I had a stomachache.

  "He tells me that if I close my eyes and concentrate I can see my inner being in detail. I try. `Spots,' I want to tell him. `I see spots when I turn on the beach and he faceup, like this.' " The sun glistened on her eyelashes. "So I he to him. `Sidd, I think I see the universe.' Sometimes I rest my head on his bare stomach and I turn my ear to his navel to listen to the tumo-heat. I can hear his stomach gurgling sometimes, but that's all."

  "You're having a wonderful time with him."

  "He's going to see through me," she said mournfully. "He's going to get bored. He's going to get bored teaching me."

  "I think he enjoys telling people things," I said. "Especially you. He's been taught for so many years ... all those self-disciplines. It must be a relief to find some one-"
<
br />   "He teaches me numbers in Tibetan. I learn them. He likes it when we drive into McDonald's and I call out the window of the car into the little speaker, `Okay, we'll have knee Big Macs,' which is two in Tibet, `and hold the pickle, and soom orders of French fries!' which is three. . . ." Her lip began to tremble. "We'll have chile salad for my friend.

  "I can count to eight-chile, knee, soom, she, nah, deb, bi, su ... Owl! Isn't that incredible? Six, seven, and eight spell out my name!

  "I love him," she said, looking so forlorn that I thought she was going to break down completely. "I just don't have any luck with love. Do you know who I loved first? Jack Foote! I was sixteen and he was thirteen. He was the most angelic person ... I mean he looked angelic. He sang in the choir of St. John's Episcopal church in Naples. I went every Sunday. My parents had no idea why I'd gone so religious. I sat in the first row and stared at him in his red choir robes. At night I dreamed of being with him in the choir stalls ... rushing by the minister in the pulpit, and getting to him in there among those wooden benches, all those red robes fluttering ...?"

  "Did Jack Foote know about this?"

  "Oh, I think so. He would catch me staring at him. I never could pick his voice out from the others. I think he was worried. My God, he must have felt those waves of feeling I had for him. Poor Jack Foote. He went off to Culver Military Academy eventually. I used to dream of him in his black jack boots and how I would rush out onto the parade ground and tackle him in the ranks on some wintry day, the hardness of the ground, and all those greatcoats...."

  I told her she was getting carried away.

  "Of course, Owl." She arched her back off the sand of the beach and yawned. "But it is funny, isn't it, that I should fall in love with a choirboy and then a monk. At this rate I'll end up with a bishop! I'll take over a cathedral. You know what? Sidd tells me about the eyes in the temples in Bhutan that are the size and shapes of dolphins. They don't follow you, like the eyes in portraits. They're looking at something else ... off to one side ... He told me there's a fresco of these eyes in the London house. His father brought it back-"