Ray & Me

by Dan Gutman

  Wait a minute. My house wasn’t built in 1920. There was no place to hide a note for my parents to find.

  I sat down and leaned against the wall next to Dr. Wright. My eyes were watery, and my shoulders were heaving. I didn’t even try to pretend that I wasn’t crying. I just let it out. I couldn’t even wipe the tears off my face.

  Dr. Wright leaned against me and told me everything would work out. We’d find a way out of here, he insisted. He was just trying to make me feel better.

  We were both quiet for a few minutes. I was trying to resign myself to my fate.

  “If we get out of this,” Dr. Wright finally said, “what will you do when you get home?”

  “Hug my mom,” I said right away.

  “No, I mean, with your life?” he asked.

  “I don’t know,” I replied. “Something I never did before. Maybe learn how to play guitar. Drums, maybe.”

  “What about baseball?” he asked.

  “I’ve been playing ball for a long time,” I said. “The kids are getting bigger and stronger, throwing and hitting the ball harder. A lot of guys are giving up baseball.”

  “Coach Valentini told me you’re one of the best players on the team,” Dr. Wright said.

  “Not good enough to get out of the way if a ball is coming at me,” I replied.

  “Look, Joseph, bad things happen in life sometimes,” Dr. Wright said. “That was a fluke. You can’t just avoid things every time something bad happens to you. When I was in med school, we had this patient who got hurt in a traffic accident, so she decided not to drive anymore. Fair enough. Then she had a bad experience at a supermarket, and she decided not to go grocery shopping anymore. Eventually, she just sat inside all the time. She figured she would never have a bad experience that way. And she didn’t. She never had any experiences.”

  “I have nightmares about getting hit again,” I confided. “That ball came at me so fast. I never even saw it.”

  Dr. Wright struggled to his feet and went over to examine the padded wall.

  “You know, I almost quit medicine right after I finished school,” he said, as he looked to see if there was a crack or another door somewhere along the wall.

  “What happened?” I asked.

  “I was performing an endoscopic pituitary procedure on a man,” Dr. Wright told me. “He was one of my first patients. I did the operation correctly, just the way I was taught. But the guy died, anyway. Sometimes, no matter what we do, the patient still dies. I was aware of that possibility. But I was devastated.”

  “Why didn’t you quit?” I asked.

  “I thought about it,” Dr. Wright said. “I could have gone to law school, or studied business or something else. But I knew that wouldn’t make me happy. I love medicine. I love the idea of taking a sick person and making them better. If you do what you love, you’ll love what you do.”

  I thought about what he said for a few minutes, then asked him the same question he asked me.

  “If we get out of this, what will you do when you get home?”

  “Me? I’m hoping to travel to the future.”

  “Huh?”

  “Joseph, do you remember that envelope I brought with me?” Dr. Wright asked.

  “Yeah,” I said. “What was in there?”

  “Before we left home,” he said excitedly, “I wrote out the proper way to do an epidural hematoma. I explained why the surgery needs to be done as soon as they find a skull fracture in a patient. I also wrote all I knew about penicillin; the polio vaccine; the dangers of cholesterol, trans fats, cigarette smoking, and AIDS. I told them about seat belts, air bags, and CAT scans. I told them about all the advances in the health care field that have taken place in the last 90 years.”

  “Them?” I asked. “Who’s them?”

  “The doctors of 1920,” Dr. Wright said. “You see, Joseph, I’ve always wondered what would have happened if the lightbulb, for instance, or the airplane had been invented a hundred years earlier. Technology would have moved along a century faster. It would almost be like traveling to the future.”

  “I don’t quite get it,” I admitted.

  “Joseph, if I can travel back in time and give the doctors of the past something they don’t yet have, or teach them something they don’t yet know, I can essentially push time and medicine forward.”

  “So when you return to your own time, everything would be more advanced than it was when you left?” I asked. “Because the people living in the past had a century to use what you told them?”

  “Exactly!” said Dr. Wright. “I didn’t come with you to 1920 just to save Ray Chapman, Joseph. I came here to save thousands of people. Maybe millions. I gave the envelope to that doctor. If he reads what I wrote and publishes that information, it will be a different world when we get home. Medical science will have advanced nearly a century.”

  “What do you think will change?” I asked.

  “Each of us is born with a certain number of nerve cells. We don’t grow new ones, and we gradually lose the ones we have. The holy grail for doctors like me is to regenerate nerve cells, to figure out how to create new ones. We could cure so many diseases, and help so many people. If I could be around to see that—well, it would be my way of traveling to the future.”

  I always thought it would be cool to travel to the future too. They’ll probably have flying cars and microwave freezers, stuff like that. But I would need a future baseball card, of course. And they’re not printed yet. So traveling to the future is pretty much impossible.

  It was interesting to think about, but none of that stuff mattered. We were stuck in 1920. Dr. Wright couldn’t find any cracks in the wall. The door was sealed shut. We weren’t going to the future. We weren’t going to the past. We weren’t going anywhere.

  “Man, you’d have to be a Houdini to get out of this place,” Dr. Wright mumbled.

  I stopped.

  “What did you just say?” I asked.

  “I said you’d have to be a Houdini to get out of here.”

  Yeah, Houdini. He would be able to get out. He could escape from anything.

  That’s when I figured it out.

  “I know how we can do it!” I told Dr. Wright.

  “How?”

  “When I got hit by that ball,” I said, “I fell down and dislocated my shoulder.”

  “So?”

  “So when I came to 1920 the first time, I saw Houdini escape from a straitjacket while he was hanging upside down outside a building,” I said excitedly. “Later, in that bar we went to, he told me how he did it. His trick for escaping from a straitjacket was to dislocate his shoulder!”

  “What?!” Dr. Wright said. “That’s crazy.”

  “Houdini told me that when your shoulder is dislocated once, it is easier to dislocate it again.”

  “Well, that’s true,” said Dr. Wright. “The ligaments become slightly lax. You’re not actually planning to dislocate your shoulder, are you?”

  I wasn’t waiting around for anybody’s permission. I moved my shoulder up and down, forward and back. There wasn’t much give inside the straitjacket, but there was a little. I closed my eyes, gritted my teeth, and rolled my shoulder around in its socket.

  “Careful, Joseph.”

  It hurt. It hurt bad. Whenever I moved my shoulder forward, a bolt of pain shot through my upper body. Sweat was dripping off my nose.

  “You don’t have to do this, Joseph,” said Dr. Wright. “We’ll find another way out of here.”

  “And what if we don’t?” I yelled at him.

  I forced my shoulder forward, fighting the pain. Sweat was pouring off my forehead. I was reaching the threshold of how much pain I could bear.

  “Stop it, Joseph! I’m afraid you’re going to permanently damage—”

  “I’m not quitting!” I said. “You didn’t quit!”

  I strained just a bit further. And then I felt a pop.

  “I did it!” I grunted.

  The pain was so intense I
could barely breathe. But with my shoulder out of its socket, there was just a little extra room in the straitjacket. The pain was unbearable, but I wriggled around until I could feel the straps start to loosen. I jumped up and down, trying to get gravity to do some of the work. I must have really looked like a crazy person.

  Little by little I was able to get one strap loose. Dr. Wright pulled at it with his teeth. I had some breathing room now. The other straps were starting to slacken. I wriggled and twisted and spun around, trying to get them off.

  Finally, the straps fell away. I ripped off the straitjacket with my good hand and flung it aside.

  “I’m Houdini!” I exclaimed.

  I started untying Dr. Wright’s straitjacket. It wasn’t easy with just one good hand, but I did it. Dr. Wright finished the job and tossed his straitjacket against the wall. Then he grabbed me by the shoulder.

  “You’re going to feel a little pressure, Joseph,” he said. Before I knew what was happening, he pulled on my shoulder hard.

  Craaackkkk.

  “Owwwww!” I yelled, as my shoulder popped back into place.

  “Okay!” Dr. Wright said. “Get one of your baseball cards! Let’s get out of here!”

  I found the cards in my pocket and quickly ripped open the pack. It felt warm. I grabbed a random card in one hand and held Dr. Wright’s hand with the other.

  We closed our eyes. I thought about going home. To Louisville. In our time.

  In the distance, I heard what sounded like footsteps coming down the hallway.

  “Hurry, Joseph!” urged Dr. Wright. “I think they’re coming.”

  I concentrated on the card in my hand; and after what seemed like an eternity, the tingling sensation arrived on my fingertips.

  The footsteps were getting louder.

  The vibrating feeling moved up my hand, up my arm, and across my chest.

  “Something’s happening!”

  The footsteps stopped outside the door.

  My whole body was vibrating now. I had reached the point of no return. My entire body was buzzing.

  There was the sound of a key in the lock.

  I almost felt like my body was rising up, floating over itself, and spinning around.

  The door squeaked open. I resisted the temptation to open my eyes.

  “Hey, what’s goin’ on in here?!” somebody yelled.

  “So long, sucker,” Dr. Wright mumbled.

  And then we disappeared.

  20

  The Decision

  DR. WRIGHT AND I TUMBLED INTO MY LIVING ROOM HEAD over heels, crashing into the coffee table and knocking over a floor lamp. My mother was standing there with the vacuum cleaner.

  “What happened to you guys?” she asked.

  Dr. Wright and I looked at each other. We were a sweaty, disheveled mess. A lot of Dr. Wright’s makeup had been rubbed off, so part of his face was white and part was black.

  “It’s a long story, Mom,” I replied.

  “I hope nothing bad happened.”

  Dr. Wright and I looked at each other again.

  “Not really,” he said, getting up and brushing off his pants. “Joseph is a very…resourceful young man.”

  “It was really an educational trip, Mom,” I said before he could give her any details.

  I always tell my mom that stuff is educational. If she thinks I’m learning something, she doesn’t give me such a hard time about it. But if she knew that I was straitjacketed and thrown into a padded cell in an insane ward, and that I’d intentionally dislocated my shoulder to avoid being stuck in 1920, she’d never let me travel through time again. It’s better for her to think the whole experience was like a field trip to a living history museum.

  “So, were you able to save that baseball player’s life?” my mother asked.

  “No,” Dr. Wright said, “that didn’t quite work out as we had planned.”

  “Mom,” I said, “did anything change while we were away?”

  “Change?” she asked. “Like what?”

  “Like, do you have a flying car now? Or a microwave freezer? Anything like that?”

  “Well, sure!” Mom said. “Doesn’t everybody? I was just going to fly over to the supermarket now to pick up some liquified ice cream. Want to come?”

  “You’re kidding, right?” I asked.

  “Of course I’m kidding!” she replied. “Flying cars? Joey, are you out of your mind?”

  “Let me ask you this, Mrs. Stoshack,” said Dr. Wright. “Is everything the same over at the hospital? Have there been any major medical advances in the brief time we were in 1920? Techniques for regenerating nerve cells? Or for treating head injuries, perhaps? Anything like that?”

  “Not that I know of,” my mother said. “Everything is pretty much the same. I’m sorry.”

  Dr. Wright’s shoulders fell. He sat down on the couch with a sigh. I sat next to him.

  “We tried our best,” I told him. “That’s what counts, right? I guess that doctor didn’t open your envelope.”

  “Or maybe he just didn’t believe that what I wrote could possibly be true,” he said sadly. “If some strange doctor showed up at my hospital and told me what was going to happen in the next hundred years, I guess I would think he was crazy too.”

  “I don’t know what you guys are talking about,” my mother said.

  The phone rang, and she ran to the kitchen to answer it. Dr. Wright told me he should be heading home. He got up and shook my hand.

  “Thanks for taking me with you,” he said. “Even if we didn’t save any lives, it was an experience I will never forget.”

  “No problem,” I said. “Thanks for taking care of me at the hospital.”

  “Joey!” my mom called. “It’s Coach Valentini. He wants to speak to you.”

  I went to the kitchen and took the phone.

  “Stosh,” Flip said, “I just wanted to remind you we got a game today, and it starts in an hour. You don’t have to play if you don’t want to, but I wanted to make sure you knew about it.”

  “I…I don’t know,” I said into the phone.

  “It’s okay,” Flip said. “I understand. It’s up to you. But you’re our shortstop if you want it.”

  Dr. Wright was saying good-bye to my mom at the front door. I thought about some of the things he told me when we were locked up in that padded cell. I thought about how he almost quit medicine after one of his first patients died. I thought about the lady who never left her house. And I came to a decision.

  “I’ll be there,” I told Flip.

  I hung up the phone and went to change into my uniform.

  Facts and Fictions

  Everything in this book is true, except for the stuff I made up. It’s only fair to tell you which is which.

  The true stuff: Houdini really did live in New York in 1920, eat needles, and escape from a straitjacket while hanging upside down. Whether or not he was able to dislocate his shoulder on purpose is a matter of debate.

  Prohibition really did start a few months before this story takes place. At one point, there were more than 30,000 illegal saloons in New York City.

  Women really did win the right to vote the day after Ray Chapman died, when Tennessee ratified the 19th Amendment to the Constitution.

  Babe Ruth and Carl Mays really did not get along and almost fought on several occasions. Most of the baseball stuff is true and can be found in Mike Sowell’s great book The Pitch That Killed: The Story of Carl Mays, Ray Chapman, and the Pennant Race of 1920. Read it. I also learned a lot from old copies of The New York Times and Baseball’s Great Tragedy: The Story of Carl Mays by Bob McGarigle.

  What happened to the Cleveland Indians?

  After Ray Chapman was hit, the Indians went on to win the game. Cleveland kept a slight lead in the standings on the White Sox and the Yankees.

  But after Chapman’s death, the Indians lost seven of their next nine games. The White Sox (eight of whom would soon be banned from baseball for throwing the previo
us World Series) opened up a three-game lead. It looked like Cleveland might collapse.

  But they didn’t. Dedicating the season to their fallen shortstop, the Indians went on a rampage and won the American League pennant, then went on to win the 1920 World Series too. They only won it one other time, in 1948.

  What happened to Ray Chapman?

  The doctors waited until after midnight to operate on Chapman. He died four hours later.

  Thousands of people attended the funeral in Cleveland, and thousands more couldn’t fit into the church. Players on both teams attended but not Chapman’s close friend and manager, Tris Speaker. He had collapsed and suffered a nervous breakdown.

  The fatal game.

  Ray Chapman is buried in Lake View Cemetery in Cleveland.

  The ball that hit him is not necessarily missing. The Sports Immortals Museum in Boca Raton, Florida, claims to have it.

  Ray’s wife, Kathleen, was not actually at the hospital right after the accident. She got the news in Cleveland and didn’t arrive in New York until the next morning, after Ray had died. She was three months pregnant at the time; and a daughter, Rae Marie Chapman, was born on February 27, 1921.

  After Ray died, Kathleen never attended another baseball game; and in 1928, she took her own life. A year later, Rae died from measles. She was only eight years old.

  What happened to Carl Mays?

  After Ray Chapman died, Carl Mays was the most hated man in baseball. Mostly, it was his own fault. Instead of being remorseful (as he appears in Chapter 18), he blamed others for the tragedy. He claimed there was a scuff mark on the ball and the umpire should have thrown it out of the game. He said Chapman ducked into the pitch. Mays did not show up at the hospital after the accident and (upon the advice of the Yankee management) didn’t attend Chapman’s funeral either.

  Mays faced a strong reaction, from MAYS THE MURDERER being scrawled in locker rooms to opposing players yelling “Murderer!” from their dugouts when he was on the field. He received death threats. Many American League teams threatened to boycott games unless Mays was kicked out of baseball.