Million Dollar Arm

by J. B. Bernstein

Again, I nodded yes.

  “It’s good,” he said, continuing to saw away with his knife and fork without guilt.

  Rinku and Dinesh might have reacted to the incident in different ways, but neither was so traumatized by the true source of the meat on his plate that it ruined his appetite for the many, many snacks they sampled to great delight at the baseball game I took them to later that day.

  It seemed only natural that Rinku and Dinesh should spend their first day in America taking in a baseball game. The college matchup of the University of Washington Huskies versus the University of Southern California Trojans was not only the first time either of them got to watch the sport that they were about to attempt to play professionally. It was also the first live professional sporting event they had been to in their lives.

  They were filled with questions before the top of the first inning. It was a perfect day, not a cloud to be seen. The stadium was about three-quarters full, and we were sitting fifteen rows up and to the left of home plate. The sights, sounds, and smells Americans take for granted at a baseball game—fresh-cut grass, fried foods, the crisp uniforms on the players—were all new to them. They thought the field was beautiful—the greenest grass they ever saw. As USC’s first baseman threw grounders to the other infielders while the pitcher warmed up, Dinesh pointed to the shortstop and asked me what he did wrong.

  “Nobody did anything wrong,” I told him. “The game hasn’t even started yet.”

  But Dinesh was insistent. When I pressed him about why he thought the shortstop was in trouble, Dinesh, pointing to the third baseman standing next to the third base bag, said, “He has a square.” The second baseman had a square; so did the first baseman. The pitcher had a mountain, and the guy in the armor (the catcher) had a pentagon (also known as home plate). But the shortstop? What did he have? Nothing.

  Where could I even begin?

  I decided to distract him by calling over the Cracker Jack vendor. Indians typically enjoy snack foods such as spicy nut and rice mixes, but Rinku and Dinesh gobbled up the candy-coated popcorn and peanuts. I had to buy another box quickly; otherwise I thought they were going to come to fisticuffs over the last handful. That was just the start of their gastronomical tour of Dedeaux Field, the USC ballpark. They sampled French fries, real Coke (Thums Up rightly got a big thumbs-down by comparison), and the pièce de résistance: nachos. They ate so many of the chips slathered in the taxicab yellow cheese that I was scared they were going to develop sodium poisoning.

  When they were able to tear themselves away from the food, they marveled at the high level of every part of the game being played: the pristinely manicured green grass of the field, the bright white of the uniforms, the excited chants from the crowd, the thwack! of the aluminum bat hitting the ball, the smoothness of the plays, and, of course, the speed of the pitches.

  I hoped that the most trouble the guys would get into was a stomachache from indigestion, particularly as I had set them up with their own room at the Radisson hotel right by USC, where they would be training. Even though the first five floors of the hotel are actually USC dorm rooms, Dinesh and Rinku found a way to get on the nerves of the other people staying there. They didn’t do anything typical of an American college student, like passing out drunk in the hallway or in somebody else’s room. The boys were so blown away by the motion sensor in the elevator that they took any opportunity to see it in action. (They were also amazed by escalators; Rinku in particular didn’t understand who could be so lazy that they needed moving stairs.)

  Rinku and Dinesh called the elevator even when they had nowhere to go. Once inside, they waved their hands right before the doors closed so that they popped back open. This delighted them to the point that they didn’t care if they held up other guests. And if someone else happened to step into the elevator, that didn’t stop them. Demonstrating the sensor for the new arrivals, Rinku said, “See, this magic!”

  That wasn’t the only way they made their presence known. They knew that they had to use every waking minute of the following year to become baseball players if they were going to have a shot at the major leagues, and they wasted no time getting started. In their room, they practiced the towel drill: where one person holds an open glove in front of him while the other, who has a baseball wrapped up in the end of a towel, goes through his pitching motion, trying to smack the towel into the other guy’s glove.

  In order to hit the glove consistently, the guy with the ball needs to replicate the exact same motion over and over, which is one of the keys to being a successful pitcher. So all night long, a strange, loud, and annoying smacking noise came from their room. Whap! Whap! Whap! They barely ever slept, because they were that committed to their goal. (When they weren’t running baseball drills, they were calling home. Having found a loophole that allowed them to make two minutes of free phone calls on Skype when you opened a new account, they must have set up a hundred new Gmail accounts for the free minutes.) As a result, the hotel staff wasn’t sorry to say good-bye when the beautiful mansion that Ash had found for us right on the USC campus was ready for us to move into.

  The word “mansion” doesn’t do this place justice. This was more than a house; it was a historical monument. Built back in 1890, it had five sprawling bedrooms and an attic that we turned into our personal film room. But the coolest part of the house was its secret passageways. Just like in those old mystery movies, there was a bookcase on a wall with a certain book that if pulled spun the bookcase around and led to a hallway that dead-ended in a wine rack. Except that it wasn’t really a dead end. On one of the bottles there was a button, which if pressed sent another secret door sliding open to reveal a whole downstairs area. It was wild. I had no idea what it was for; maybe a secret party room back during Prohibition? But we turned it into a home gym.

  There are very few houses like this in America—or the world, for that matter. For Rinku and Dinesh, used to one-room houses where entire families slept together, it was truly unbelievable. They were in shock that each of them had his own bedroom and bathroom! They walked around checking out every single aspect of the place, staring openmouthed at the giant plasma TV, turning on the water from the rain showerhead, reclining in the overstuffed armchairs, touching the soft green lawn, and smelling the bright pink roses.

  And just like that, I inherited a ready-made family of three Indians.

  Deepesh didn’t just translate but also acted as a chaperone. Although he wasn’t more than five years older than the boys, Deepesh was a natural babysitter. That’s because he took his role and everything I demanded of it seriously. Maybe a little too seriously.

  After handing Deepesh a copy of Baseball for Dummies, with the instruction to quiz the guys on game situations (If a ball is hit to left field with a runner on first, where do you throw?), he held nightly tests that often went well into the wee hours—and by all accounts got pretty animated.

  I could always count on Deepesh dotting all the i’s and crossing the t’s. He did exactly what I asked, and I mean exactly. When he arrived in the United States, I gave him a video camera and told him that one of his jobs was to video everything Rinku and Dinesh did. A couple of weeks into their stay, when I went to look at some of Deepesh’s footage, I discovered hours and hours of Rinku and Dinesh walking in the rose garden at USC, deciding what to have for lunch, eating Chinese food for said lunch, sitting in a hot tub to relax their sore muscles, and even watching TV. When I asked him why there was all this random footage on the camera, he got flustered: “You said to videotape everything, sir. That is what I am doing. I am videoing everything.” I had meant that he should video everything they did for their pitching, not everything.

  I had to be very careful with my words around Deepesh, and not just because of his literal interpretations of my instructions. A dedicated worker, Deepesh lived in fear of disappointing me. His biggest worry was being yelled at—a fact that Rinku and Dinesh used to tease the crap out of him.

  “Sir, please do it,” Rin
ku pleaded while we were watching TV downstairs.

  “Oh, come on.”

  “Sir, please!” Dinesh whined.

  “Please,” they both begged.

  I rolled my eyes and then yelled at the top of my lungs, “Deepesh, get down here!”

  With papers flying, Deepesh came careening from his room where he was working, practically killing himself on the stairs. When he was in front of us on the couch, panting and, of course, flustered, he said, “Sir, sir, what’s the matter?”

  The boys broke out in hysterics.

  “Why are you doing this to me, sir? You are making me so scared that something is very, very wrong.”

  Rinku and Dinesh made me pull this prank over and over, and each time it worked, because Deepesh never could be sure it was truly a joke. I was sorry that Deepesh had to add “fall guy” to his job description, but with all that Rinku and Dinesh were dealing with, I couldn’t begrudge them letting off a little steam.

  It wasn’t just having to contend with the herculean task of learning baseball in six months. Every single thing was new, and even the littlest element of American life—stuff that I took for granted as ordinary—was extraordinary to them.

  The first night in the new house, when I was trying to decide what we should have for dinner, Dinesh asked, “Sir, pizza possible, sir?” Possible? Pizza was always possible! I ordered three large pies so that they could try pepperoni, veggie, and plain. When the bell rang forty minutes later, Dinesh was the one to answer the door.

  “Sir,” he said excitedly, having run back in to find me, “it’s the pizza god!”

  No. It was just the pizza delivery guy.

  Dinesh addressed the kid holding the pizza: “Sir, how you knowing what we want?”

  The surly teenager looked at Dinesh like he was a freak. I handed him the money, took the pizza, and closed the doors.

  Over the pies that the boys demolished, Dinesh was full of questions. Although McDonald’s delivered in some Indian cities, food delivery was unheard of in the villages, where even the presence of a restaurant was rare. Dinesh puzzled over how the man, if he wasn’t the god of pizza, knew not only that we wanted pizza but also where we lived.

  I solved for them the mystery of food delivery, but food in general—the quantity of choices and portion size—continued to be a major point of amazement for two boys used to a steady, daily diet of dal. The first time Rinku and Dinesh experienced the USC food court, they walked around in a daze of abundance. As they circled the space over and over, they couldn’t believe that a single area had thirty different restaurants to choose from. Pizza, burgers, salads, pastries, overstuffed deli sandwiches, falafel, burritos, tacos, ramen, doughnuts, chips—foods that they had never seen or even knew existed. Eventually they responded to the Chinese food counter’s sign to “Wok on over!” where they ordered the number 13: chicken fried rice. They happily shoveled the mountain of greasy rice dotted with dark pieces of chicken and green peas into their mouths. Despite all the choices at their disposal, they ordered the number 13 every time they ate at the food court, which was a lot, so that after a while, the girl at the counter started plating it up as soon as she saw them coming.

  While the four of us certainly ate out our fair share, I also insisted they learn how to cook. I considered their time in the kitchen part of their training to become baseball players. If they were going to enter minor-league baseball, they were going to need to know how to take care of themselves in every way. I had seen the life up close, and it was far from glamorous and very unforgiving. To prepare them, I turned into a drill sergeant, demanding self-reliance and orderliness. I knew that most of the coaches in organized baseball were old school and didn’t consider it their job to be a nanny, chef, or life coach. Many pro sports, in fact, view athletes more as investments than as people.

  So I set about teaching Rinku and Dinesh how to cook. But I was no Julia Child. Before the guys came to live with me, I hadn’t cooked a meal in about a decade. My diet consisted of nothing for breakfast, a sandwich grabbed on the go for lunch, and takeout for dinner. As far as I was concerned, the fridge was simply a large Diet Coke cooler.

  Now I was like a soccer mom, walking the supermarket aisles nearly every other day, because those kids went through food like you wouldn’t believe. I’d load up on groceries, fretting that the cupboards would be bare when they came home from practice for lunch, and restocking their favorites—including ice cream, which rivaled their passion for fried rice.

  Meals in our little household were not beef Wellington and coq au vin. We ate a lot of sandwiches and eggs. Not that Rinku and Dinesh lacked for enthusiasm when it came to preparing food. One night when I was out of town, they decided to barbecue chicken for a friend I’d asked to come over and check on them. After pouring a bottle of sauce over a whole raw chicken, lighting the grill only partially, so that the whole backyard smelled of gas, and then putting the bird on the fire for about eight seconds, they proudly plated up their barely warm barbecued salmonella.

  Their skills were much better suited to breakfast, where they perfected the art of the pancake. I had taught them how to make pancakes—meaning that I showed them a box of Bisquick and a pan. Pancakes quickly became a favorite, and the boys made them over and over. One morning, they wondered what it would be like if they filled the whole pan with batter.

  “Sir! Sir!” they shouted from the kitchen. I rushed in, thinking that they had finally set themselves or the house on fire.

  “Sir, supercake, sir!”

  Rinku slapped a pancake the size of a garbage can lid on a plate so that it flopped over on all sides and handed it to me.

  “This is good supercake,” he enthused.

  He was right! The supercake with caramelized banana on the bottom was good and became a staple of our lives.

  Rinku and Dinesh were certainly a lot better at cooking than at cleaning. Obviously, I could have hired someone to clean the place, but I wanted the guys to learn responsibility. I put them in charge of cleaning the bathrooms; each was handed a bottle of Clorox spray bleach and was instructed to use it once a week to clean the showers, sinks, and floors.

  About a week later, I was doing the laundry when I noticed that all of my towels were covered with bleach spots. I assumed that I’d accidentally added bleach to the wash, although that was very unlike me. Over the many years I’d been living as a bachelor, I’d become a pretty fastidious housekeeper. But it kept happening. I finally put two and two together and asked the guys to show me how they cleaned the bathrooms. After drying off from the shower, they sprayed the Clorox and then used their towel to wipe down the shower. Then they replaced the towel on the rack to dry and use it again the next day for a shower and Clorox scrub! I had neglected to mention the need to use cleaning rags, so they had turned every single towel I owned into a cleaning rag.

  Some of the discrepancies in our notions of proper hygiene were cultural. I had trouble selling Rinku on the concept of a garbage bag. He thought I was absolutely out of my mind to pay good money to buy a brand-new plastic bag for the sheer purpose of filling it up with garbage and throwing it away. Where he came from in India, everyone piled his trash on a street corner, where it would sit for a week, attracting flies and who knows what else, until it was shoveled into a truck. To me, that wasn’t only crazy but revolting.

  A number of our differences had just as much to do with the fact that, nearing my forties and used to living alone, I was now living with two teenage boys.

  “I am an extremely neat person,” I said as a cautionary note when they moved in.

  “Sir, I am very tidy,” Dinesh assured me.

  Not to me, he wasn’t.

  I took orderliness to another level; everything had a designated place, and nothing could be out of place ever. The TV remotes should be lined up on the left corner of the coffee table. The magazines should be fanned out on the side table by the recliner. And the dishes should be in the kitchen cupboards—put away, clean.
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br />   It was a constant struggle getting Dinesh and Rinku to pick up after themselves. For two young guys learning to play ball all day, tidying up just wasn’t a priority. But when I discovered bowls with cruddy Cheerios decaying in milk in the sink all day, it was like nails on a chalkboard. Same with a towel on the floor or draped over an upholstered chair instead of on the towel rack. And leaving the sheets and blanket all crumpled up at the end of the bed? Really?

  I mean, is it so hard when you are done brushing your teeth to rinse the gunk from the side of the sink? The answer is no; all it takes is a few splashes of water.

  Reduced to a nag, I constantly cajoled the guys to clean their dirty dishes, hang up the towels, and make the bed.

  “It only takes thirty seconds to pull the covers up,” I implored. “I’m not talking about a military inspection. I’m not going to bounce a quarter.”

  I knew it was slightly irrational bugging these two exhausted kids who were a million miles and worlds away from home about making their beds. But I was so set in my ways that not doing things my way seemed even crazier than bothering them about it. I couldn’t help but put their clothes away in their closets. Anything else was uncomfortable for me.

  In spite of it all, we quickly found a domestic groove that collectively began around six o’clock when they got up and did their morning rituals of yoga and meditation. (I was already up, because I am up all the time.) Over one of the fireplaces in our house, they hung banners for the Hindu gods Ganpati and Shiva and arranged a couple of small statues into a little shrine. Whatever it took to get them going. While they prayed and stretched, I wrote emails.

  Rinku and Dinesh found other ways to decompress during the day. We set up a garden outside, where they liked to relax by watering the flowers. They also unwound by watching a lot of TV. They were in awe of the plasma and how real—better than real—everything looked. And the surround sound nearly made them flinch. We watched a ton of movies; they couldn’t get enough of American action flicks and Westerns.