Not that any of our guys cared about the game. When I got up there, they were gathered around The Doo, who was sitting on the bench and telling them he was fine, goddammit, just a little dizzy. But he didn’t look fine, and our old excuse for a doc looked pretty grave. He wanted Danny down at Newark General for X-rays.
‘Fuck that,’ Doo says, ‘I just need a couple of minutes. I’m all right, I tell you. Jesus, Bones, cut me a break.’
‘Blakely,’ I said. ‘Go on down to the locker room. Mr DiPunno wants to see you.’
‘Coach DiPunno wants to see me? In the locker room? Why?’
‘Something about the Rookie of the Month award,’ I said. It just popped into my head from nowhere. There was no such thing back then, but the kid didn’t know that.
The kid looks at Danny Doo, and The Doo flaps his hand at him. ‘Go on, get out of here, kid. You played a good game. Not your fault. You’re still lucky, and fuck anyone who says different.’ Then he says, ‘All of you get out of here. Gimme some breathing room.’
‘Hold off on that,’ I says. ‘Joe wants to see him alone. Give him a little one-to-one congratulations, I guess. Kid, don’t wait around. Just—’ Just scat was how I meant to finish, but I didn’t have to. Blakely or Katsanis, he was already gone.
You know what happened after that.
If the kid had gone straight down the hall to the umpire’s room, he would have gotten collared, because the locker room was on the way. Instead, he cut through our box room, where luggage was stored and where we also had a couple of massage tables and a whirlpool bath. We’ll never know for sure why he did that, but I think the kid knew something was wrong. Hell, he must have known the roof was going to fall in on him eventually; if he was crazy, it was like a fox. In any case, he came out on the far side of the locker room, walked down to the ump’s room, and knocked on the door. By then the rig he probably learned how to make in The Ottershaw Christian Home was back on his second finger. One of the older boys probably showed him how, that’s what I think. Kid, if you want to stop getting beaten up all the time, make yourself one of these.
He never put it back in his locker after all, just tucked it into his pocket. And he didn’t bother with the Band-Aid after the game, which tells me he knew he didn’t have anything to hide anymore.
He raps on the umpire’s door and says, ‘Urgent telegram for Mr Hi Wenders.’ Crazy like a fox, see? I don’t know what would have happened if one of the other umps on the crew had opened up, but it was Wenders himself, and I’m betting his life was over even before he realized it wasn’t a Western Union delivery boy standing there.
It was a razor blade, see? Or a piece of one. When it wasn’t needed, it stayed inside a little tin band like a kid’s pretend finger-ring. Only when he balled his right fist and pushed on the band with the ball of his thumb, that little sliver of blade slid out. Wenders opened the door and Katsanis swept it across his neck and cut his throat with it. When I saw the puddle of blood after he was taken away in handcuffs – oh my God, such a pool of it there was – all I could think of was those forty thousand people screaming KILL THE UMP the same way they’d been screaming Bloh-KADE. No one really means it, but the kid didn’t know that, either. Especially not after The Doo poured a lot of poison in his ears about how Wenders was out to get both of them.
When the cops ran out of the locker room, Billy Blockade was just standing there with blood all down the front of his white home uniform and Wenders laying at his feet. Nor did he try to fight or slash when the bluesuits grabbed him. No, he just stood there whispering to himself. ‘I got him, Doo. Billy got him. He won’t make no more bad calls now.’
That’s where the story ends, Mr King – the part of it I know, at least. As far as the Titans go, you could look it up, as ol’ Casey used to say: all those games canceled out, and all the double-headers we played to make them up. How we ended up with old Hubie Rattner squatting behind the plate after all, and how he batted .185 – well below what they now call the Mendoza Line. How Danny Dusen was diagnosed with something called ‘an intercranial bleed’ and had to sit out the rest of the season. How he tried to come back in 1958 – that was sad. Five outings. In three of them he couldn’t get the ball over the plate. In the other two … do you remember the last Red Sox–Yankees playoff game in 2004? How Kevin Brown started for the Yankees, and the Sox scored six goddam runs off him in the first two innings? That’s how Danny Doo pitched in ’58 when he actually managed to get the ball over the dish. He had nothing. And still, after all that, we managed to finish ahead of the Senators and the Athletics. Only Jersey Joe DiPunno had a heart attack during the World Series that year. Might have been the same day the Russians put the Sputnik up. They took him out of County Stadium on a stretcher. He lived another five years, but he was a shadow of his former self and of course he never managed again.
He said the kid sucked luck, and he was more right than he knew. Mr King, that kid was a black hole for luck.
For himself, as well. I’m sure you know how his story ended – how he was taken to Essex County Jail and held there for extradition. How he swallowed a bar of soap and choked to death on it. I can’t think of a worse way to go. That was a nightmare season, no doubt, and still, telling you about it brought back some good memories. Mostly, I think, of how Old Swampy would flush orange when all those fans raised their signs: ROAD CLOSED BY ORDER OF BLOCKADE BILLY. Yep, I bet the fellow who thought those up made a goddam mint. But you know, the people who bought them got fair value. When they stood up with them held over their heads, they were part of something bigger than themselves. That can be a bad thing – just think of all the people who turned out to see Hitler at his rallies – but this was a good thing. Baseball is a good thing. Always was, always will be.
Bloh-KADE, bloh-KADE, bloh-KADE.
Still gives me a chill to think of it. Still echoes in my head. That kid was the real thing, crazy or not, luck-sucker or not.
Mr King, I think I’m all talked out. Do you have enough? Good. I’m glad. You come back anytime you want, but not on Wednesday afternoon; that’s when they have their goddam Virtual Bowling, and you can’t hear yourself think. Come on Saturday, why don’t you? There’s a bunch of us always watches the Game of the Week. We’re allowed a couple of beers, and we root like mad bastards. It ain’t like the old days, but it ain’t bad.
For Flip Thompson,
friend and high school catcher
Some stand-in for me in one of the early novels – I think it was Ben Mears in ’Salem’s Lot – says it’s a bad idea to talk about a story you’re planning to write. ‘It’s like pissing it out on the ground,’ is how he puts it. Sometimes, though, especially if I’m feeling enthusiastic, I find it hard to take my own advice. That was the case with ‘Mister Yummy.’
When I sketched out the rough idea of it to a friend, he listened carefully and then shook his head. ‘I don’t think you’ve got anything new to say about AIDS, Steve.’ He paused and added, ‘Especially as a straight man.’
No. And no. And especially: no.
I hate the assumption that you can’t write about something because you haven’t experienced it, and not just because it assumes a limit on the human imagination, which is basically limitless. It also suggests that some leaps of identification are impossible. I refuse to accept that, because it leads to the conclusion that real change is beyond us, and so is empathy. The idea is false on the evidence. Like shit, change happens. If the British and Irish can make peace, you gotta believe there’s a chance that someday the Jews and Palestinians will work things out. Change only occurs as a result of hard work, I think we’d all agree on that, but hard work isn’t enough. It also requires a strenuous leap of the imagination: what is it really like to be in the other guy or gal’s shoes?