My first rotation at the Gilbert Fire Department was at Station 1, Engine 251. I could not have found a better place. I liked our department’s service ethic. If that meant changing a tire for someone in 113-degree heat, we did it. If someone fell and got hurt while trimming a tree or cleaning a pool, we would finish the job for them. It was all about serving others—and I was proud to be part of the department. In a devotional I found these lines, by the blind Scottish preacher George Matheson, which sum up the philosophy I wanted to live by: “When all our hopes are gone / It is best our hands keep toiling on / For others’ sake: / For strength to bear is found in duty done; / And he is best indeed who learns to make / The joy of others cure his own heartache.”
My captain, Joe Sperke, a smart-ass with a keen wit, caught me one day grabbing my food out of the fridge and taking it to the bay to eat alone.
“What are you doing out here?” he demanded.
I told him I was hungry but still cleaning stuff and looking things over.
He said, “I don’t know what you are used to coming from California, but get inside here, sit down, eat, chill, and hang out with us.”
Most of the department at Gilbert was equally friendly and pulled their share. On our days off the guys invited me to go bicycling or hiking with them. Twenty of us hiked the Grand Canyon—my first time there. I began to feel part of the family. As in baseball, pranks are played all the time in the fire service. This one guy could not stand to have food thrown at him, so what did we do? Took handfuls of powdered doughnuts, snuck up to his room where he was sleeping, and hurled dozens of donuts at him. Another guy’s helmet and car keys were put in a Jell-O mold. You always had people dunking water on your head or squirting you. I participated—I threw a stink bomb into the restroom and held the door shut for as long as I could. Someone put live chickens in the chief’s office, really funny until the birds lost control of their bowels. Soot smeared around the helmets and headsets that leaves a mark on your head; oranges stuffed in your shoes so they squished when you put them on. It was a great release to just laugh.
Looking back, one of my great regrets is that I didn’t have more of this sort of camaraderie in the baseball teams I played on. I had it early on in junior high girls’ basketball but not so much in baseball. Oh, I had a close connection with guys like Dave Glick but never the whole team. I think if I’d had that in baseball, it would’ve helped me tolerate a lot of what I went through. Too bad I wasn’t in the place I was now. I’ve learned to kid around. Example: when one of my crewmates teased me about my celebrity. “Oh, look,” he said, “We have a famous person right here who has her own entry in Wikipedia. . . . When the book comes out, we have to tell people how she made this mistake and that mistake.”
I just laughed and said, “Yeah, and don’t forget to tell how I slipped on a crate and shot up in the air five feet and landed on my back.”
Was there hidden animosity in those remarks? Maybe, but I’ve learned that laughing at yourself helps diffuse the attitudes of people who may feel threatened by you. Living out of the closet taught me that. Just wish I’d learned it sooner.
My first day on Engine 251 we got a code (no pulse, no breath). A driver in a black SUV had run a red light and smashed into a small car. At the scene, I saw that the front of this little car was gone. I checked the man inside for a pulse: nothing. I put on the monitor and printed out an electrocardiogram strip, which showed a flat line, or asystole. I noticed his wedding band and sent up a silent prayer for his family. Something told me right then, Ila you are where you are supposed to be. I could see the captain watching me, likely wondering how I was going to handle this. Wow, I thought, Shannon had been even more messed up. I had been upset that she pretty much disintegrated upon impact, but now I found peace in knowing she had died immediately. As I left the accident scene, I continued to pray for the man’s family, knowing what they were about to go through. After the call, our engineer asked, “Everyone cool?”
All of us said, “Yep.”
Yes, I was cool with whatever came my way. As firefighters we see a lot of bad stuff, and some people may think us cold because we don’t usually react emotionally. Through baseball I had developed a high threshold for pain. That had prepared me to cope with losing Shannon. Now I had more empathy. I wanted to make Shannon proud. During my years in baseball it had been all about me. When Shannon showed me what unconditional love was, it changed my heart. Because of her, I began to move from being critical—as athletes we are judged every second—to seeing the good in others, and in myself.
Despite the ache that wouldn’t leave, I kept trying to dedicate whatever resources I had to serve my family, my friends, and society. I decided to become a paramedic. I wanted to be the one on call when people experienced the worst day of their lives. For eighteen months, I worked my regular firefighting shifts while attending school for my paramedic certification. I had plenty of support from my co-workers, who gave me time to study or take a quick nap during the day. Why I was not taken, and Shannon was, I will never know, but I am so damn thankful for the three years God gave us. I used to wonder why I went through so much in baseball. Now it clicked. The game had prepared me to go through the toughest loss of my life.
Epilogue
August 28, 2014, St. Paul, Minnesota. Tonight the Saints play their last game ever at Midway Stadium. Next season the club is moving to a trendy new ballpark in the Lowertown area of St. Paul. I was to throw batting practice and play catch with the Saints co-owner, Bill Murray, before being introduced to the crowd, but plane and weather delays rained out the plan. The game is about to begin as the taxi drops me off at the ballpark, right in front of the mural of Twig and me. My heart rises—I’m home. I drop my bags in Connie Rudolph’s office—she flashes me a thumbs up—continue through the front office and under the stadium behind home plate, where the field equipment is kept and where Mike’s pig hangs out. This year’s ball pig is named Stephen Colboar, after the comedian Stephen Colbert.
I enter the field. The game is a sell-out, with people sitting on the outfield warning track. Besides Connie, the Saints’ longtime groundskeeper who was honored at last night’s game, they’re all here—Mike Veeck and Bill Murray, and Annie Huidekoper, now the Saints’ vice president. Dave Stevens, the guy with no legs who was with the club the year before I came, is coaching first base. It’s a true Mike Veeck homecoming. As I start to jog over to the area behind home plate, a guy grabs my arm, “Ila!”
I look up but don’t recognize the face. “Ila,” he repeats, “I’m really happy to see you. You’ve always been a pro in my book.”
Then I realize it’s Marty Scott, my old manager. He has lost a lot of weight and looks fantastic. Marty now works as vice president of player development for the Florida Marlins. He says that he is proud of me, and that feels good. We talk about my time with the Saints and his work with the Marlins, and exchange phone numbers.
Annie comes over to say that Bill Murray wants to say hello. I make my way to where Bill is talking to Minnesota’s junior U.S. senator, Al Franken. Bill turns, gives me a big smile, and says, “Hello, Ila, good to see you again. Glad you made it.”
He introduces me to Senator Franken and explains to him about my career. We talk baseball and about my work as a firefighter. I always found Bill easy to talk with. After ten minutes or so, I ask if I can take a “selfie” with him, and he says, “Sure.”
I spot Mike Veeck and catch up with him. His son, William “Night Train” Veeck, works in group sales for the Chicago White Sox, the club his grandfather once owned and where Mike once worked. Rebecca, his sweet daughter who mourned my trade to Duluth, is in ill health and lives at home under her parents’ care. Mike asks how this book is going and will it be a movie—questions that call up my old baseball uncertainties, given that the book proposal has yet to sell and no film producers have come calling.
Annie comes over and says, “Okay, it’s your time.”
Mike and I shake hands, and
I thank him for all the support he gave me through the years. Annie sends me to stand on top of the third-base dugout, where I wave to the fans and sign autographs. People still remember.
“When Ila finally arrived,” Annie later recalled, “I kept trying to enjoy the moment. I thanked her for coming and gave her a big hug. I finessed the schedule and brought her to the grandstand, where she had a really cool moment. She was going to speak, but the fans’ cheers drowned her out. We had asked Ila for an item for the Saints’ time capsule, which would be buried for fifty years at our new park in downtown St. Paul. She handed me her SSK glove from 1997. I knew it was something special, and thought, No way is this going to be buried in the ground for fifty years. It’s going into the glass case of memorabilia in our front office.
The rain stops, and we get the ball game in. Afterward I stand at home plate with Connie, the players, Mike, and Bill while we watch the fireworks. I continue to sign autographs. It’s been great to return to Midway, where so much is the same. I used to shower and change in the extra umpires room—some still call it Ila’s room. I linger as long as I can, taking it all in.
Later, Annie Huidekoper asks how I am doing. It’s 2014 and at last I can talk honestly about my life, myself. She tells me that before I joined the Saints in 1997, Mike Veeck had sort of pushed her out of the closet. In 1993 Annie left town to take part in the March on Washington for Lesbian, Gay, and Bi Equal Rights and Liberation. After she returned, she was in a front-office meeting when, as she recalled, “[Mike] took a deep breath and said with a big grin, ‘So, Annie, how was the March on Washington?’”
I had always sensed that Mike would’ve been fine with my being gay. In fact, I think he probably would have found a way to lighten up my heart about the issue After all, lots of clubs sponsor bobblehead nights, but only Veeck would think to host a Larry Craig Bobblefoot Night in response to the conservative Republican Senator Craig’s arrest in June 2007 for allegedly soliciting sex with an undercover policeman in a bathroom at Minneapolis–St. Paul International Airport. But of course, it was not Mike I had worried about; it was the responses from my coaches and teammates. I still wonder whether I could have lasted in baseball had I told the truth of my sexual orientation. I doubt it. But likely I would have pitched more consistently without that burden.
So I tell Annie that I am single and my life is good, but that I would like to find a lifetime partner. Annie has been with her partner for twenty-five years, and I envy her that. As we talk, I realize that throughout my life there have been women like Annie—out-of-the-closet, productive, respected women—but I had been too scared to identify with them or, heaven forbid, to reach out to them. If you’re not living true to yourself, people who are can put you off. So I stayed aloof.
After the last game at Midway, Connie Rudolph and I traveled to the Wisconsin IRONMAN race in Madison. There it was: Madison, another fondly remembered place. During the race we ran right past my old apartment building on Milton Street and inside the football field at Camp Randall Stadium. Because the hotels were pricey, we camped out in Connie’s motor home. My goal was to finish the IRONMAN, and I did.
After the competition was over, we camped out a couple days more and talked. I gave Connie an update on my life. Shannon’s death had sent me back to living like an island, as I had done for most of my life, except during those three magical years with her. But a couple of years ago, my family told me that it was time to start getting out. After reeducating Mom again about why I would not be dating guys—she still prayed for a miracle—I went online and, for the first time, seriously surveyed the dating scene. I found a woman I liked, and we dated for a couple of years until she decided to return to her home in the Midwest. It felt so good to go out in public with my girlfriend—to be honest with the world about who I was.
I wish that being honest about these things always had a happy ending. But then I remember Mike Penner, the Los Angeles Times sportswriter whose work I admired during my college years. In April 2007 Penner published the most honest writing of his life in the Times: “Old Mike, New Christine” began like this: “I am a transsexual sportswriter. It has taken more than 40 years, a million tears, and hundreds of hours of soul-wrenching therapy for me to work up the courage to type those words.”
Christine had the support of her editor, Randy Harvey; Christina Kahrl, the cofounder of Baseball Prospectus, the game’s stats bible, who had successfully transitioned from male to female in 2003; and, as it turned out, a substantial number of the column’s readers. But as Christine’s celebrity grew so did others’ expectations of her to be an activist for transgender people. In the end she was unable to maintain her identity as a woman and returned to being Mike. Along the way, he got badly lost. The day after Thanksgiving 2009, Mike Penner took his life. It made me wish I could’ve talked with him honestly back in college. I hope for a time when people like Mike Penner have the freedom to live as they were created, in peace.
But even a few years ago this sort of honesty had yet to seep into all parts of my life. When I began to write about falling in love for the first time for this book, I titled the section “Shane.” After all, I had waited a long time to tell my story and just couldn’t see my way clear to telling an inspirational story for baseball-loving girls without lying about my sexual orientation, as I had to my coaches, managers, and teammates for all those years. Coming out as gay would destroy the book’s chances, I feared. I also wanted this book to be about baseball, not about being gay. So I chose a man’s name, “Shane,” as code for “Shannon.” Then I woke up. Screw it, I thought. To truly honor Shannon, you have to tell the full truth. You can’t be honest about everything else and not this, since she was a huge part of your life.
It felt so good to restore Shannon to her rightful place that I came out to the Gilbert Fire Department. The news that I was gay made barely a ripple. Were times changing or just me? Only a couple of people had a problem with it, one a man who attended the conservative Our Lady of Sorrows Roman Catholic Church in south Phoenix and came across as being all about “truth” though not so much about “grace.” A year or so after I came out, one of my captains thanked me. He told me that his sixteen-year-old daughter had just told him she was gay. He said he never would have known how to handle it if I hadn’t told him my story.
So maybe the inspirational book that I, masked as the all-American straight girl, had always wanted to write still can inspire, though in a different, more honest way. I can only say that this is who I am now: a Christian who loves the Lord with all her being and happens to be gay. My faith is not about religion; it’s about a personal relationship with Jesus, who loves and accepts me as I am. I still don’t attend church. As a Presbyterian pastor named Mark Davis said, “There’s a process where people have to forgive the church before they can return to it.”
I’m still working on that.
Speaking of forgiveness, in 2011 Dad and I began to repair our relationship. I told him it was time he started to repay the money he took from the SSK contract. “I don’t care if its fifteen dollars a month, but it has to be something,” I said. “You can’t owe me a lot of money and not pay it but then go on vacations all over the world.”
Dad did send money. He would occasionally send a fifty- or hundred-dollar check from his home in Napa, where he lives with his fiancée, but it was to pay off the $2,500 in student debt I still had. My $25,000 share of the SSK money has not been repaid.
Dad has always included my girlfriends in the holiday cards he sends. Maybe he has faced up to his own past and is growing more compassionate. I don’t know for sure, because we don’t talk about it. Through family members, I’ve heard that he wonders whether I would have turned out straight if he had not been so strict. Dad and I text occasionally and once a year meet up for a round of golf. I am grateful for the work ethic he instilled in me, the way he taught me to analyze situations, his encouragement to go after anything I wanted to. Never once did he shy me away from anything because I
was a girl. That made it possible for me to do what I did both in baseball and in firefighting.
Mom’s life has been financially hard since the divorce in 2004. She, too, has struggled with forgiveness. She lives now in the Phoenix area with Leah and her family. Mom and I often travel the I-10 freeway to visit my brother Randall and his wife Emma in Irvine, California. On the drive back, we stop at mile marker 27.2. My brother Phillip and his family now have a home in Napa, California, where he keeps Dad’s old home plate and the tire swing from our house on Olive Branch Drive.
When I was young I saw baseball as a sort of endless season—easy to do in a sunny place like Southern California. I thought it would go on forever, though it never does. It’s the athlete’s lament. The game itself may be timeless, but the faces of the people on the field inevitably change.
Mike Moschetti, my talented Little League teammate who always loved football more than baseball, is now the head football coach at La Mirada High School . . . Rolland Esslinger, my junior high coach, serves as the athletic director at Whittier Christian High School . . . Charlie Phillips, who gave me a college scholarship, teaches pitching and hitting at Lifeletics and works as pitching coach for a travel team called the OC Sun Devils . . . Pat Guillen, Southern California College’s sports information director, is now the athletic director at the University of Hawaii. He says that he still has the ball I threw for my first pitch at Southern California College . . . Barry Moss works as a sports agent specializing in baseball operations for Group Management . . . Dave Glick works as a pitching coach in Long Beach, California . . . I’m glad that these people, who meant so much to me, have found ways to stay connected to sports and work with young athletes. I recently worked again at the World Children’s Baseball Fair (WCBF) and remembered all over again how much I love teaching kids. No surprise then that in my spare time I coach young pitchers. Coincidentally they are all males—no females. I throw batting practice to some of the high school players to give them some tips on their swings and serve as catcher for the pitchers. I work on developing arm strength with the college players.
Making My Pitch Page 25