by Rick Ankiel
Harvey grew stronger. He joined the games, played baseball in high school and soccer in college. He could see an athlete run or tackle or hit a ball over the fence. Everyone could. It wasn’t enough for Harvey. He wanted to understand. What made the great great? What burdened the average?
It wasn’t their strength. Or their speed. Or their coordination. It wasn’t even their effort.
That appeared to leave one thing.
“You want a water or a beer or something?” I asked.
We sat in the living room.
“I’m fine,” Harvey said. “You grew up near here, right?”
“Fort Pierce. Just up the road.”
“Tell me about that,” he said. “What was that like? Tell me about your parents. Your childhood.”
I’d called him, after all, and I thought maybe that’s where we were headed. And so I told him my story. The good parts. The bad parts. The frightening parts. I snuck up on the parts I’d never told anyone and hadn’t thought I ever would. I liked Harvey right away, just as I had a year before, when we’d met. If this were going to fix me, then I’d start talking and stop when I ran out of courage or words, whichever came first.
Soon I wasn’t feeling like a patient, like the off-kilter guy telling a near stranger his life story. Soon—maybe it was the way he listened, the questions he asked, hoping to understand—I wanted him to know what it had been like. How mad I was. How afraid I’d been. How it was I could be surrounded by noise, by people, and still be so alone.
For months, since I’d come home from California to bury another friend, I’d lived by myself in this house I’d always wanted. Yet I couldn’t stop the internal chatter. It said I wasn’t going to be OK. It ordered me into the backyard to face the wall, to throw until it felt right again. The day was coming when I’d have to put on the uniform and stand on the mound, when Tony La Russa and Dave Duncan would fold their arms and learn how the winter had gone, when Mike Matheny would gear up and sit on his haunches and pound his mitt and say, “All right, Ank, let’s go.”
C’mon, Rick, throw the ball.
That was the thing, really. Just pick up the ball and throw it. Except I couldn’t. And I knew I couldn’t. And Harvey knew I couldn’t. And everybody standing there—Tony La Russa and Dave Duncan and Mike Matheny and every damned reporter—knew I couldn’t either. I could hit that nick in the wall a thousand times in a row, long as I was out there alone next to a couple empty bottles of Bud Light. Long as my mom was safe and my dad was doing time and the only light was a pink-orange sun that didn’t care if I hit the wall or the bay.
My whole life I’d carried a shield, forged from the belief of who I thought I should be. What a man should be. That is, impenetrable. It’s what I became as a ballplayer too. I followed the best arm plenty of people had ever seen, and if it wasn’t the best, it was close enough, and that made me invincible. What was I without it? The only place that would have me unconditionally—a ballpark—looked me over and said, “Prove it. Try harder. Want it more. Suffer.”
Thunk.
I wasn’t impenetrable. I was transparent. Anybody with a passing interest, anybody in a Cardinals cap and the mildest curiosity, would see who I was, what I’d become. I couldn’t have that. I’d earned the other life, the one I’d had before, the one with the great arm and the future that had caused grown men to whistle and say almost out loud, “Goddamn, would you look at that.”
And I cried. Sitting in my own living room across from a man I’d met once before, who a couple hours earlier I didn’t know whether to call Doctor or Mr. Dorfman or Harvey or what, the tears soaked my face and then my shirtsleeve trying to mop them up. Of the two of us, only Harvey had known they were coming.
“It’s OK, Rick,” he said. “You were never taught how to deal with this. Starting today, we’re going to rebuild your foundation, if you want. We’ll start pouring the cement today.”
I nodded OK. I just wanted to throw a ball straight. I wanted people to like me, to think I was a decent person, to forgive me for hiding from the person who’d hurt my own mother. For not smashing a Louisville Slugger over my dad’s head and being done with it. I wanted Harvey, this man whose job it was to save Scott’s clients from themselves, to like me, which was strangest of all. I mean, I barely knew the guy. And as I sat on the end of my couch, crowded into the corner against all I’d revealed, it occurred to me I might not throw a ball straight that day. Or maybe the next. It occurred to me that I wasn’t merely a lunchtime session for Harvey. He hadn’t come all that way to shake my hand and tell me I was going to be fine, that he’d fixed plenty like me, that all I had to do was believe.
No, I was a full-time project. Starting right then.
CHAPTER
FIFTEEN
I wanted to feel better about myself. I wanted to feel good about tomorrow. At the same time, I didn’t want to care so much. I didn’t want to carry a few lousy hours at the ballpark around with me all the time. Baseball had always made me feel special, and then, starting one afternoon, I didn’t ever want to think about it. Before, baseball was the light that drew me through the day, that pulled me out of bed in the morning and sang me to sleep. Now it haunted me. Taunted me.
I needed a break, and yet the routine was relentless. Every day was filled with baseball, which meant failure, or the brink of failure, or the recovery from failure. Even on the good days, and there were good days, there was no avoiding tomorrow, which I tried to assume the best of. I suspected the worst.
There were ways I could have coped. I could talk to Harvey. I could practice distraction, optimism, and focus. I could count my breaths and ask my heart to settle. I could go to the ballpark every single day and work, and throw, and believe, until I was physically and emotionally spent. I could smoke dope and drop ecstasy. I could drink beer and pretend I was fine until closing time.
Because I was desperate to win my career back and be a reasonable human being and forget what an effort it was, I chose all of it. I ran every lap. I showed up for every drill. I threw every bullpen. I read every self-help book, including Harvey’s. I’d never read a book before, not front to back, not even in school. Harvey handed me a copy of All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy, his go-to introduction to himself and the world as we would try to bear it together. Years later, I learned this was the book he’d first prescribed for Jim Abbott, another pitcher with challenges, and others he’d helped. By the third page, having read the first two begrudgingly, my mind lit up. It hadn’t occurred to me that there would be books I would enjoy, that I’d learn from, that would offer a moment away from the noise. That experience—not only did I read every word, cover to cover, but I was sad it had to end—led me into bookstores, to James Patterson, to Dan Brown, to Lee Child, and then to the shelves where the books assured me I could be OK. They taught me the breathing exercises. They had names for the stuff that filled my head and quickened my pulse. They talked about the fear. I’d never heard anyone talk about fear. Not anyone I’d ever respected, anyway. A baseball field was no place for fear. Neither was Fort Pierce.
So Harvey would call every day. Or I’d call him. And maybe there was a message in All the Pretty Horses for me—he wouldn’t really say—and maybe the message was that there was no message. Not everything had to mean something. Or maybe what was important was for us to talk about the two boys who’d up and gone to Mexico, which was when all the shooting started, and it’s when our heads are low and pistols are hot that we figure out what’s important. Maybe the horses are pretty, and they are, but that leaves an awful lot that’s not.
By then, I was becoming skilled at looking for ways to escape. Some worked. Ecstasy worked for a while. Connections from home delivered it in bags or bottles, enough for a couple weeks, and an hour before meeting friends for a beer I’d swallow a pill. My heart rate would settle. I could smile and mean it. Laugh without thinking halfway in, “Yeah, but tomorrow you gotta throw.” This, at twenty-one years old, from a place where drugs wer
en’t uncommon, where drugs solved the smaller problems in the moments before the bigger ones arose, was my eject button. Get out just ahead of the nastiness, because the alternative was to stand chest-deep in the thought that I was done. At twenty-one. Having thrown 212 big-league innings. And the only place I had to go was home. That $2.5 million, minus taxes and fees and what I’d been living on, wasn’t going to last forever either. No, I had one way back in, and that was to solve this thing, and that meant throwing strikes, and that meant not thinking about it anymore, and that meant not caring so damn much every second of every day. So, yeah, ecstasy got me through some days when I was drowning in apprehension, and it was never supposed to be the permanent solution, which worked out perfectly when the Cardinals asked me to meet with a doctor one morning.
“Listen,” the guy they told me was a doctor said, “word on the street is that you are doing ecstasy.”
I death-stared him.
“You understand,” he continued, “you need to protect your reputation. And we do too. And the organization’s reputation. Are you OK? Do you need help? We have people who can help you.”
I stood up and walked out, went home and dumped whatever pills were left, and called Harvey.
“Whatever it is you’re searching for isn’t real,” he said.
It felt plenty real. It was so real I needed it to stop. Because I had to throw tomorrow. It seemed I always had to throw tomorrow. While I still believed I would beat the monster, that the books and the breathing and Harvey and my own will to be the toughest guy in the room would win, I also understood—for the first time, with Harvey’s help—that this was not going to be won in a single pitch. That this was going to get ugly. Hell, I thought, I’ve seen ugly. Let’s go. I maybe shouldn’t have been quite so eager.
The spring of 2001 was the worst of it. My days began in the dark, because I started long before anyone else at the spring-training complex in Jupiter. The events of the previous October had turned me into a national curiosity, which brought reporters and camera crews and questions and distraction. So I threw when no one was around, just as the sun was coming up. Dave Duncan, some unlucky bullpen catcher, and I would get to the clubhouse early, and we’d pile into a golf cart and putter out to a back field, where I’d stretch and warm up and then see what my arm had in store for me. It’s not as though I hoped to keep it a secret. There was no secret to be kept. The hovering reporters, even the familiar ones who’d covered the Cardinals for years, heightened the stress in a fluid process. It was plenty hard when no one was watching. It was enough that I had to watch.
I tried to recall who I’d been only a year before, then a few spring innings from becoming a regular in the Cardinals’ rotation, the start of a career—and a life—I had expected to be brilliant. Spring training had been fun. From teammates I figured to have for years, I’d made good friends. Darryl Kile had become someone I could talk to about pitching in the big leagues. Jim Edmonds was a veteran I admired for how easy he made the game look, a direct result of how hard he worked. He too had become a friend.
I liked being a Cardinal. I liked being a big leaguer. I felt important, as if I’d discovered exactly what I was born for, exactly what I’d fought so desperately to become.
What had been so easy—show up, stretch a little, yuk it up with the boys, throw a thirty-pitch bullpen, field some comebackers, run a few laps, shower, go home—was instead a daily test of my emotional stability. Hours before, long before dawn, I’d have jumped awake amid tangled, damp sheets. Harvey had told me not to fight it. So at 2 or 3 or whenever my nightmare had reported for duty, I’d hoisted myself from bed and turned on a movie, or ridden my bike through the neighborhood, or gotten in some push-ups and sit-ups, or turned to a bookmarked page and started reading about why my heart was running so fast. I’d fallen asleep thinking I’d have to throw tomorrow and startled myself awake thinking I’d have to throw today, and if I’d found a little something the day before that seemed familiar, I’d go stand in front of that cinder-block wall to see if I could summon it again. If so, and the arm stroke felt reasonable and the ball felt cooperative, I wouldn’t stop throwing. Thunk. Thunk. Thunk. The soundtrack to my neighbor’s breakfast, poor guy. But there was no letting it go, the compulsion to chase the reassurance of a single pitch that went where it was supposed to go, the drug that was OK, that was good. That was more like it. If not, if the ball came off my fingers sideways and that needed to be corrected, I wouldn’t stop throwing.
All that by the time I had to get into my car and drive to work and go through it all again, only in Cardinals colors and in front of who knew how many people.
The strategy was to pretend I wasn’t a mess. First, throw until I could barely raise my arm, then smile and not let anybody in, other than Harvey. So from the time I slammed the car door behind me in the parking lot to the time I opened it again, no one would see me suffer. I would not mope in front of my locker. I would not throw my glove in disgust. I would not acknowledge frustration. Nor would I acknowledge the reporters who’d come to see me crack, who, having seen no signs of cracking (other than the pitches themselves), would then ask—roundabout—if I was about to crack. The trick was to keep moving.
Harvey’s usual response to an obstacle was “So what are you going to do about it?” He didn’t say that often to me. I’d been doing something about it since I could remember, and he understood that. When home and family were toxic, I pitched my way out. When they handed me the baseball for a playoff game at twenty-one, I took the baseball. When that baseball went squirrelly, I picked up another and threw that one. He knew, without asking, that I had no interest in picking over the dramas along the way, in learning why I’d been left for baseball dead. He simply set about becoming someone I could trust, and cry to, and brag to, and laugh with. If he were going to save my baseball career, I’d let him. If he were going to make me a better person, I’d let him do that too. I’d even help him.
He was honest. He asked that I look inward, away from baseball and mechanics and what I owed—or didn’t owe—the Cardinals and my teammates. He asked what I owed to myself.
“What are you doing?” he’d say. “What do you want to change? What are you doing to change it?”
I’d start to answer, and Harvey would say, “Tell me tomorrow. Think about it, then tell me.”
He talked a little like a ballplayer, which reflected his upbringing but also the years he’d spent in ballparks, in clubhouses, in bars, wherever a ballplayer might be. He swore in a gravelly voice and never seemed surprised by an answer to one of his questions, no matter where the words came from. When I’d fall into a revelation, where my head was or why I’d done what I’d done, Harvey would say, “Exactly, kid. Exactly.” Like I was solving myself and becoming more prepared for whatever came next. Day by day, conversation by conversation, I began to see myself through Harvey’s eyes, the way a man sees himself through his father’s eyes.
As part of the fresh start, I wrote my father a letter. Seeing as I wasn’t much for writing letters, Harvey helped. When Harvey had asked, “What do you want to change?” and told me to think about it a while, I’d returned with a list that was, basically, “I want to throw strikes. I want to be happy.” When he had responded, “What are you doing about it?” I’d told him I was simplifying my life. I was eliminating anything that carried anxiety, best I could, so the focus would be baseball, getting my life and career back.
And he said, “What about your father?”
The phone calls from prison had become relentless. The effort I was giving to stay positive—“I’ll be calm. I’ll throw strikes. I’ll get this right. Breathe.”—was, on a scratchy telephone connection, washed away with “Why can’t you throw strikes? I can fix this. Are you hurt? What is wrong? Your mechanics are all fucked up. Those coaches are messing you all up.” Some of the calls were angry. Some were belligerent. Others were worse. It was better to ignore the calls, which I did plenty, but eventually I picked up and almost a
lways regretted it.
“I can’t listen to this,” I’d say. “I gotta go.”
“Ricky, dammit…”
But I’d hang up.
Harvey and I had spent many hours on that topic. I’d seen and heard too much for the relationship to be anything but unhealthy. He wasn’t going to change anyway. He was all I had, though, and even at twenty-one I felt a little boy’s commitment—responsibility, even—to being his son. Maybe I wanted to make him proud, still. Maybe I wanted to show him I could do it on my own while he sat in a cell and counted the days. I wouldn’t need him.
What about my father?
“My father,” I said to Harvey, “that doesn’t help any of this.”
He said, “You need to break off the relationship.”
“I can do that?”
Harvey chuckled.
I sat at a desk, wrote, “Dad,” indented the first paragraph, and proceeded to tell him I couldn’t—wouldn’t—talk to him anymore. That I had too much on my mind already. That I didn’t need the stress, the criticism, the reminder that I was less than I’d wanted to be. That I couldn’t—wouldn’t—send him $500 every time he needed it to keep him in prison amenities. That this was my life, not his, and what I achieved would be mine, and what I screwed up would also be mine, and that none of it was his to share, or claim, or fix. Unmentioned was that I’d found someone better than him. A man whose sole interest in me was me. I signed the letter at the bottom of the page, folded it into an envelope, and mailed it. A week later, the phone rang. I let it go to voice mail. He was mad. He was hurt.
I changed my number.
It didn’t solve the problem of spraying pitches all over the bullpen. It didn’t keep me off the vodka. I still needed Xanax to fall asleep, or Tylenol PM, or both. I still awoke in terror. I still sat in my car some mornings that spring and debated turning the key, and still was happy some afternoons getting the hell out of that uniform.