The Curious Case of Sidd Finch

by George Plimpton

"Not a word."

  She told me what had happened. That morning, just before Sidd left for Huggins, almost on impulse, she had said she was leaving him and going home. It wasn't going to work out.

  "I told Sidd a taxi was coming for me."

  "What did he do?" I asked.

  "Sidd? Oh, Owl, his lip trembled. He said, `Even a good thing isn't as good as nothing.' I thought about that, and I said, `Sidd, what in God's name does that mean, tell me?' He said to me, `No more, no less than the others,' and I ran out the door."

  "Where'd you go?"

  "I went to my family's. I cried all the way there-all the way down the causeway. Just as I walked in the door I realized I'd made a mistake, a bad one. So I said, `Hi, Dad'-he was standing there with his arms outstretched -and I turned around and got into the same taxi I had come in. I called out to my dad. He was standing there staring at me with this funny look as I ran down the path -that I'd call later and explain."

  "I think that's advisable," I said. "He must be quite confused-your dad."

  "Poor Dad never had a chance to say a word? I'll call him as soon as I find Sidd."

  "Do you know where he is?"

  "No," she said. "I drove to Huggins. They told me about the catastrophe. He's disappeared."

  After a pause I asked, "Do you have any ideas ... where he's gone?"

  "No," she said. "I was hoping you'd know. I was hoping he'd come back to the bungalow and leave a message."

  "He came back to get his things. But there's nothing left."

  "No note?"

  "I'm sorry. But that last thing he told you-that nothing is better than a good thing-doesn't that mean that he's going off looking for The Void again? A monastery perhaps?"

  "Oh God," Debbie Sue said. "What's Dad going to say when I phone him from Tibet?"

  I said I hoped that she would keep in touch. I tried to be jocular. If she ever wanted a partner to go out and visit her porpoises, I was available ... preferably when there was a moon.

  The Mets were on the phone for a few days wondering if I had heard from Sidd. I said I had no news. I told them I suspected he had gone to some kind of retreat. I called the Chung Te Buddhist Association in New York and got a list of places he might have gone-the Shasta Abbey in Northern California, the Golden Mountain Dhyana Monastery in San Francisco, and the Tail of the Tiger Center near Barnet, Vermont. I called two or three and asked if a man with a French horn had passed by. Whoever was at the other end put down the phone. I waited a long time for the person to come back and say that no, no such man had passed through the gates. I wrote him a letter c/o Chung Te Buddhist Assoc. of New York saying that I hoped he would stay in touch, that I valued his friendship. It was quite a long letter.

  As I mailed it I realized it was the first lengthy communication I had written in a decade, short of a laundry note or two, to be read by another's eyes.

  Alas, it never was. After a few weeks the letter came back from the Chung Te Buddhist Association stamped Addressee Unknown.

  XI

  MISSED THEM. For the first time the bungalow seemed not a sanctuary, shadowy, like a warm burrow-as Debbie Sue once referred to it-but gloomy and quiet. I went outside and sheared away some of the shrubbery to let the sun come in. I put up the volume on the phone and sometimes I found myself hurrying down the little hallway to answer it-hoping to find either of their distinctive voices at the other end ... almost hearing in my head as I reached for the receiver Debbie Sue's "Owl, it's the owl-lover," or the modulum of Sidd's soft "namas-te."

  Never. Wrong number. I had a listing very close to that of the local Baptist church. The few friends I made in Pass-a-Grille telephoned on occasion-one of them a girl to whom I confided too much and who thought the concussion and communality of a local disco would solve my problems. She wore a black, tight skirt with portholes up the thighs. I watched her through the cigarette smoke. Sometimes a young man materialized in front of her, drawn to her, and she would acknowledge his presence by adapting the strange, stiff movements of the dance to his, a pair of puppets. I watched her, thinking of Debbie Sue and how she ignored the people around her on a dance floor. My date invariably said, "Whew!" when she sat down at our table, so small that our knees knocked.

  I told Amory Blake about her. He nodded and was, as usual, "pleased." He said I was "coming along very nicely."

  I felt I was improving. I actually wrote down a strange occurrence for him. He took the three-by-five card on which I'd written it down in curiously tiny letteringquite novel-and read it aloud to me. It was interesting to hear my words. They concerned a Los Angeles man who had attached a number of big helium-filled weather balloons to the kind of summer-lawn deck chair that reclines and has holes in each armrest for a glass of gin and tonic. His intent was to go up above Long Beach for a short flight. He planned to control his altitude by popping the balloons with an air pistol. Just off the ground, he dropped the pistol by mistake, and, wearing Bermuda shorts, he rose in his deck chair out of the backyard to a terrifying ten thousand feet or so, indeed spotted by commercial pilots bringing their planes into the Los Angeles airport. Incredibly, he came down safely ... about twenty miles or so from his starting point. Quite a saga! I thought it would fit very nicely into Blake's files. But after he had inspected my three-by-five card, and turned it over to see if anything was written on the back side, he made a slight moue of disappointment. Perhaps my co-researchers-the chauffeur or the advertising executive-had already discovered the item. No matter.

  Smitty called a few times. He was getting ready to take the Enterprise north-a leisurely trip up the East Coast to New Jersey. He told me that when he flew over the Florida inlets he could see a fan of sharks at the entrance, holding in the water just offshore, swimmers not a dozen feet from them. "They're harmless-thresher sharks most of them-but if those people down there only knew what was right next door to them!"

  He asked me if I'd like to take part of the trip with him. It was about as nice a way to go as there was-in a big gasbag harbinger of the spring meandering north up the coast.

  I demurred. I told him I was planning to come up later in the summer-perhaps July to spend a month with the family in Marblehead. I'd try to look in on him on the way.

  "Hey, you remember that crazy morning in the blimp?" he asked. "Dropping those baseballs?"

  "Hard to forget."

  "A practical joke, I hear," Smitty said. "I'll tell you something. Those guys on the Mets sure went to a lot of trouble to pull that one off. That's the wildest I ever heard of...

  The afternoon he left he flew the blimp over Pass-aGrille. I heard the clatter of the engines. Its shadow passed over my bungalow. I wondered if Smitty had done this on purpose-a gesture. I went out into the street and waved up at the gray bulk, as big as an apartment house, going overhead.

  Life went pretty much back to normal. I referred to my cardboard master chart every morning. Opening day for the Mets came and went. Gooden pitched at Shea. The Mets beat the St. Louis Cardinals 6-5 in the tenth on a Gary Carter solo-shot home run. I read about it in the papers.

  I wondered about Sidd and Debbie Sue. I supposed that he had gone back to his studies somewhere, perhaps even to the Himalayas. I had no idea where Debbie Sue had disappeared. Perhaps she had caught up to him. Perhaps she had gone back to Duke to finish out her spring term. Sometimes I went down to the beaches and looked beyond the incoming lines of surf to see if she was out there on her board ... convinced that I could recognize her slim body and the arch of it against the wind. I would wave her in with a towel. In the darkness of the bungalow I imagined this, and the glint of the sea water on her skin. I thought of writing down Debbie Sue on my master chart so I would be formally scheduled to go down to the beaches to look. But it was melancholy to leave the beaches without a glimpse of her, so I kept pretty much to my regular appointments. I was surprised, and a bit hurt, that they did not telephone. Of course perhaps the thing was ringing in the shadows when I was out.

  As for the pub
lic, the idea got around fairly quickly that the whole Sidd Finch thing was a hoax-a grandiose practical joke. After all, the article in Sports Illustrated had appeared in their April i issue-April Fool's Day. That should have been a tip-off enough. Someone pointed out in the local newspaper that one of the meanings of the word finch in the Oxford English Dictionary is "a fib, a lie." And what about all those crazy excesses-the fact that he could throw a ball 168 miles per hour! And what about all those weird mannerisms-playing the French horn, for Chrissakes, and pitching with one foot bare and the other foot anchored by a woodsman's boot for balance! A Buddhist monk? Come on! How did Sports Illustrated and the Mets-who apparently went along with this lunacy-have the gall to try to put this sort of thing over on the public !

  The following issue of Sports Illustrated ran a short piece on Sidd Finch's disappearance that suggested, rather unconvincingly, that he had given up baseball for the French horn. The story was buried in the magazine ... as if the editors were trying to forget the whole business. The letters column was lively. One subscriber, incensed that what he considered his "sports bible" had bamboozled him, canceled his subscription not only to Sports Illustrated but to all his other Time-Life publications: People, Fortune, Discovery, Time, Money, Life, and so forth, just clearing the decks of them. He added a postscript: "How you like them berries?"

  The articles about Sidd tailed off in other papers and magazines and then disappeared.

  One, however, I read with considerable interest. It ap peared in the Sunday edition of the St. Petersburg Times -the June 15 issue-written by Mike Marshall, the Cy Young Award winner in 1974 (the first relief pitcher to win the honor) and the present-day coach at St. Leo's College, not far from Tampa. He holds a doctorate in physiological psychology from Michigan State University. I had always admired him for promoting the concept that whatever a person's physique, the muscles could be trained and developed ... to the degree that hope existed for the fat kid who thought he was forever doomed to be picked last and sent out to stand forlornly in the deepest oakshadowed recesses of right field.

  His article-which was very technical-hypothesized about what had to be going on within the frame of Finch's body to be able to throw a ball 168 miles per hour. He started off with an arresting lead line: "We're talking death here."

  Never having seen Finch, Marshall had to do a lot of guesswork. He felt there had to be a freakish difference in how Sidd's muscles were shaped-that rather than fanshaped muscles, he had an abnormal abundance of bipinnate and multipinnate muscles, which can transfer contractions with much more velocity and efficiency. Marshall hypothesized that the force generated by this oddity could be as much as three to four times normal.

  He was particularly speculative about the pronator teres muscle, "a very important muscle in baseball throwing which rises from the medial epicondyle and attaches to the medial surface of the radial bone. The greater the distance from the fulcrum of the elbow joint to the attachment of the pronator teres, the greater the leverage, and thereby the force the pronator teres generates. Mr. Finch's"-Marshall referred to Sidd throughout as "Mr. Finch"-"pronator teres attachment must exceed the norm of professional baseball players considerably, in deed by almost fifty percent-a mechanical advantage giving Mr. Finch an overdrive gear in his throwing motion."

  He paid special attention to the latissimus dorsi muscle, "the horizontal extension muscle of the shoulder joint that decelerates the throwing arm after it releases the baseball. It is the multipinnate muscle type that permits Mr. Finch to do this over a very short distance and time period." I took this to mean that if it weren't for that particular musculature, Sidd's arm, moving forward at that wondrous speed, would tend to tear away from his body before he could stop it.

  Here's what Marshall had to write about the pitching motion itself:

  "Even with all these anatomical advantages Mr. Finch would not necessarily throw faster than other pitchers. However, I am sure that high-speed triangulated cinematography with telemetry electromyography analysis would disclose that Mr. Finch's mechanics for accelerating his throwing arm maximally are flawless. Because of the extension of his arm due to the multipinnate nature of his pectoralis major muscle we estimate that Mr. Finch can begin to apply force during the propulsion phase of a pitch when the baseball is 28.63 inches behind the earthe previous best posterior force application being ig.18 inches. However, the most remarkable parameters must occur at the end of the delivery-during the anterior force application. The throwing-arm elbow stops forward of the pitcher's ear much as the handle of a bullwhip snaps to a stop and the tip of the whip accelerates to the speed of sound." I remembered what Mel Stottlemyre had said about the curious flicking sound of Sidd's motion. "Because Mr. Finch has a multipinnate latissimus dorsi and bipinnate supraspinatus and teres minor muscles, he can snap his throwing arm to a stop a dramatic 13.14 inches in front of his ear-twice any recording known, thus being able to accelerate the baseball over an incredible 41.77 inches, propelling it on an almost perfect linear forward path instead of the elliptical path other pitchers follow!

  "We are able to determine the initial velocity of the released ball. Mr. Finch releases the ball at 255.25 ft. per sec., or 174 mph. The friction of the air molecules would decelerate the baseball 17.6 ft. per sec. or to the reported 168 mph Mr. Finch can throw. Mr. Finch releases the ball 66 inches in front of the pitching rubber. At an average velocity of 246.45 ft. per sec. or 168 mph, Mr. Finch's fastball crosses the rear tip of the plate .218 after he releases the baseball."

  Well, there it was-a fifth of a second ... the time span of a wink! As I sat with the newspaper in my hand I blinked a few times, pretending the ball was in the air over that time span, and trying to imagine what it would be like to stand in against such a zoom of speed. No wonder Marshall had commented, "We're talking death here."

  In conclusion Marshall described two medical tests that he thought might turn up interesting facts about Mr. Finch. He felt that if Sidd's muscles were biopsied they would show over "eighty percent fast-twitch phospho- genic muscle fibers ... which, since these fibers contract faster than either slow-twitch exaline or fast-twitch glycolytic, Mr. Finch would generate a remarkably high muscle contraction velocity."

  He also wrote that since Mr. Finch was studying to be a monk, and in the Buddhist tradition as well, that it was unlikely he was using any drugs. He suspected, though, that a blood test after a pitching performance would show a very high level of adrenaline, which is produced by the adrenal glands in response to stress. Having noted the references to lung-gom in one or two of the releases about Sidd, Marshall wrote, "Apparently Mr. Finch controls his adrenaline production voluntarily." Marshall added a rather chilling fact to the latter assessment ... which was that "continued elevated adrenaline levels increase the basal metabolic rate and over the long term ages the body rapidly."

  I put down the paper. In my mind I could see Sidd leaving the mound after a particularly difficult inning under a blazing sun at Shea, stooping slightly as he crossed the foul line, a hitch developing in his stride as he moved for the dugout. How ironic that the adrenaline rush that gave the machinery of the body that extra boost (however Sidd produced it-mantras, mind over matter, lunggom, whatever) was aging him ... like the man who leaves Shangri-La in Lost Horizon and turns into a skeletal ancient within minutes! Could it be that Sidd would have withered away during the season and ended up on a couple of canes? It made me feel better that he had left the game.

  One evening the chimes of the front door rang faintly and out on the back porch I heard the front door, which I never lock anyway, swing ajar; the sound of sandals slapped against the tiles of the hallway. Debbie Sue appeared in the door. I stood up and embraced her, feeling the bones of her rib cage and the soft tumult of her hair against my cheek.

  "I knew you'd be here," she said. "Safe in your burrow."

  "I'm surprised."

  "I tried to telephone a few times and then I remembered you never pick the thing up. We mis
s you."

  "You've been with Sidd?"

  She cocked her head and smiled.

  "I left him just the day before yesterday. He's at a monastery in Colorado. Dad's been sick, so I came back East to see him."

  "It's nice to see you."

  We embraced again.

  "I'm glad you found Sidd," I said.

  "I think he is too."

  "Are things all right between you and your father?" I remembered their last meeting-Debbie Sue turning from his outstretched arms and running back for the taxi that had just deposited her.

  "He's okay now," she said. "I told him I'm going back to Duke in the fall. I still haven't told him about Sidd. I try. I look in his face and I say, `Dad ...?' but then I stop. I just can't get those words Buddhist monk out."

  "You're staying in a monastery?"

  "In the Red Roof Inn just down the way. I can see the monastery roofs from my window."

  It turned out that tracking Sidd down had been quite simple. She had gone to the airport in Tampa and asked at the ticket counter if a funny-looking guy in blue jeans and woodsman's boots, carrying a long stick, possibly a begging bowl (though he might have packed that), and a French horn case had bought an airplane ticket ... a guy with a faintly crooked smile, an English accent, a habit of sliding into different languages, and perhaps-Debbie Sue hoped this-the somewhat lost expression of someone whose heart is broken. The third ticket agent she had spoken to had indeed sold a ticket to such a person. His final destination was Boulder, Colorado. The Denver plane had left about a half hour earlier.

  Once she herself got to Boulder, Debbie Sue had gone through pretty much the same procedure-walking around town to find out where a young Buddhist aspirant monk might go. She was directed to a monastery, or, more technically, an ashram about ten miles outside of town.

  Once settled in the Red Roof Inn, Debbie Sue told me she walked out to a fortresslike structure in the hills. The grounds seemed deserted. The monks were undoubtedly inside somewhere, meditating, chanting, or whatever. After waiting for an hour, half hidden in a plot of scrub pines, Debbie Sue said she lost patience and walked through a swinging wire gate up to the monastery itself, picking the biggest building in the complex, a kind of chapel-like structure, to look for Sidd.