We walked the quarter mile from the hotel to Fenway Park, where she bought two of the best box seats in the place for three dollars each. Attendance that day was 7,412 in a park with a 35,000 capacity. Getting great seats just walking up minutes before the game was no problem.
Knowing Fenway Park, I led the way, down the concrete ramp from the street-level ticket booths to the concession stands stationed cozily behind the third base line where our seats were. The most exciting plays happened at third. Also, from here I could see into the Red Sox dugout, blocked from view if you sat behind first base.
As we walked through the stands, I did my usual inner genuflect, marveling at how perfect a setting this place was for something I loved to do: watch baseball. Four rows behind the third base dugout, I easily found our seats. We had arrived early, so some of the visiting Detroit Tigers were playing catch in front of us, while Red Sox players were doing the same across the way. Other players did sprints in the outfield.
I went back behind the stands, part of my ritual, to get my mother a Coke and me two hot dogs and a Coke. I think the hot dogs went for 25 cents, and they tasted better at Fenway than anywhere else. I smeared the hot dogs with tons of mustard and packed them into a cardboard tray along with the Cokes and napkins (my mother would insist), making my way back to our seats lickety-split.
A teacher at Fessenden once asked me what my idea of heaven was and I immediately replied, “Sitting in a box seat along the third base line eating a hot dog in a close game at Fenway Park that never ends.” So here I was with my mother, as close to heaven as I could get.
Dave Morehead, a young arm who’d shown some flash, made his first start for the Red Sox, and the future Hall of Famer Jim Bunning started for the Tigers. The Red Sox were a bad team, the Tigers a much better team, so the chances for a Sox victory were slim, especially up against Bunning.
But we managed to get one run off of him. However, the Tigers soon tied it up. Arnold Early, a journeyman relief pitcher, came on in the sixth to relieve Morehead, while Bunning just kept on pumping.
By the seventh, Dick Radatz had taken over for Early. Radatz was immense, but so was Bunning. Radatz matched him and did what is now unthinkable for a closer, going seven innings until he pooped out and gave up two runs in the top of the fifteenth. He had performed a Herculean task, shutting out the Tigers for seven innings, but he finally proved to be mortal.
Game over. Totally dejected, I said to my mother, “We might as well leave now and beat the crowd. There’s no way they’re coming back.”
“What are you talking about?” she replied as if I’d spoken treason. “They can still win. The game is never over until it’s over.”
“Mom, that sounds nice, but they can’t win this game, and I really don’t want to stay and watch them lose.”
“Well, I’m staying. You can do whatever you want,” she said, and folded her arms in a stubborn pose.
“All right, Mom, but this is painful.”
“Just you wait and see. My daddy, your grandfather, Skipper, always taught us that the game is not over until the final out.” My mother had a way of giving a person’s several relationships when she spoke of them, as in “my daddy, your grandfather,” or even “my son, your brother.”
“I know, Mom. Skipper used to say that to me as well. But it’s just a stupid cliché. I don’t care what Skipper said, this game is over.”
Still, I couldn’t leave without Mom, so, grumpy as hell, I sat watching the Tigers’ pitcher take his warm-ups as the infield went through the ritual of fielding ground balls thrown by Norm Cash, the first baseman. They must have felt great, knowing they had the game in the bag. But Mom wanted to stay as a matter of principle. She was nothing if not stubborn.
Frank Malzone, one of my favorite players, led off the bottom of the fifteenth, with a single to left. “You see,” my mother said, looking over at me, “there’s hope.”
“This is exactly what the Red Sox do, Mom. They tease you. Just watch. They’ll probably load the bases just to lead us on, and then someone will hit into a double play and end it. I refuse to take the bait.”
“Just you wait.”
The next hitter, shortstop Eddie Bressoud, flied out to left field. “See?” I said. “Can we leave now?”
“Just watch,” she replied. On the next play, Red Sox luck (i.e., bad) struck. With Malzone still on first, Bob Tillman lofted a pop-up into the swirling early evening winds of short right field. Dick McAuliffe, the Tigers’ second baseman, circled under the ball but a sudden gust took it just out of his reach. However, the great Al Kaline was alertly backing up the play from right field. He easily forced out Malzone, who’d had to hold up thinking the ball would be caught. So now, instead of the Sox having runners on first and second with one out, they only had a runner on first with two outs.
“Can you believe that?” I said. “We get lucky on a pop-up that drops in, but we’re up against the best right fielder in baseball who throws him out. That’s the Red Sox.” Even at my young age, I’d learned how to talk like a long-suffering Red Sox fan.
My mother looked over at me and stuck out her tongue. I actually laughed.
Down to our last out, Billy Gardner tortured us and kept the game alive by singling to left. Runners on first and second with two outs. Chuck Schilling then further tantalized us by driving in Tillman with another single to left, making the score 3–2, Detroit. Now, down by just one run, we had runners on first and second. There was legitimate hope. However, there were two outs, and, much worse, the pathetic Román Mejías was due up.
“Oh, God,” I said. “Not Mejías. Anyone but Mejías.” Over the winter, the Red Sox had traded one of my favorite players, Pistol Pete Runnels, the reigning AL batting champion, for Mejías. Now, just a few weeks into the season, Mejías was hitting .120 and had already proven to be a total bust.
“C’mon, Román,” my mother cheered, having alertly picked up his name from the announcer. I was impressed by that. Gotta give her credit. She’s into the game. She even got the pronunciation right, so “C’mon” rhymed with “Román.”
By now the couple of thousand fans still left in the stands had been suckered into the possibility of a win. These fools, including me, were on their feet, cheering, screaming, yelling.
Román stood in the right-handed batter’s box, taking practice swings. Could it happen this time? Could the pitiful Román possibly deliver? We all knew the answer was no, but even I was not jaded enough not to root for the possibility. Maybe this time …
But Detroit had scored against the monster, Radatz, the greatest relief pitcher of his era. Once they scored against him, fate would deem the game over.
Mejías stepped into the box and looked at strike one. Of course. But I was standing up cheering nonetheless. It felt ridiculous, cheering for what the sane part of me knew was flat-out impossible. But that’s what fans do. Here I was, only in the seventh grade, already practicing the habit of going nuts, torturing myself by hoping for the impossible. Why did Skipper and my mother think keeping the faith in impossible situations like this was so noble? What was good about keeping faith in a sure loser? What was to be gained in getting your hopes dashed over and over again? Isn’t that just stupid?
The second pitch almost hit Mejías in the head. But, damn, wouldn’t you know it, as he dropped to get out of the way, the ball happened to hit his bat and glance foul. Strike two. “C’mon, Román!” Mom cheered again. She was up, fist raised, yelling as loudly as she could, such a trouper.
Caught up in the collective insanity, I joined in, yelling as loud as I could, “C’mon, Román!”
The Detroit reliever took the ball, rubbed it up, went into his stretch, then reared back and fired what would be the game’s final pitch.
Miraculously, Mejías turned on that fastball and shot a rising liner out to left center field, right where the left field wall meets the center field wall. Billy Bruton, the Tigers’ speedy center fielder, ran down the ball and quickly fired
it back to the infield.
Gardner scored, tying the game, but Billy Herman, the third base coach, gambled and also waved in Schilling. Digging hard, Schilling rounded the bag just as shortstop Coot Veal took Bruton’s throw, pivoted, and fired a perfect strike home. But Schilling, gritty as ever, was able to slide home under the tag, barely in time to beat Veal’s throw.
Red Sox win! Red Sox win! The team mobbed Mejías. I jumped up and down, hugging Mom. The small crowd left in the park roared as if we were millions. You would have thought we’d won the World Series. As far as I was concerned, we had.
Walking back to the hotel, my mother took obvious pleasure in giving me the lecture I deserved about never giving up, but I was so happy I didn’t argue back. She was right. I was wrong. It’s never over until it’s over.
I presume I’m one of just a few people who remember that game now, more than fifty years later. I told the story of it in my eulogy at my mother’s funeral. Not long after, my brother Ben sent me a bat he’d had inscribed with the name Román Mejías.
Miracles do happen. The greatest gift my mother ever gave me, aside from loving me enough to send me off to boarding school and away from Unger and the world of Charleston at the age of ten, was her gift of unshakeable, rock solid optimism. No matter what happened, she never gave up.
27.
My brother John, called Johnny, escaped Uncle Unger and Charleston by going to Exeter for high school and adopting the house on Kettle Drum Lane or Gammy Hallowell’s Wianno house as his homes for vacations. He did well at Exeter, winning writing prizes and getting into Harvard.
All was fine and dandy until the week before graduation, when Johnny took the train from Exeter to Boston for a Saturday outing. This was within the rules. However, while in Boston he got drunk—not within the rules. By the time he boarded the train back to Exeter, he was stumbling. His friends loaded him onto the train and tried to keep him hidden in a corner seat.
He might have gotten away with it had not bad luck intervened. It turns out the elderly wife of one of the most senior teachers at Exeter was on that train. Let me call her Eloise Whittington, and her husband D. Loomis Whittington. When Johnny got up to go to the bathroom, he stumbled past Eloise, but she didn’t recognize him. She lived off campus and knew few students.
Returning from the bathroom, however, when Johnny drew abreast of Eloise, it didn’t matter whether she knew him or he knew her because he suddenly tossed his cookies all over her.
Johnny’s friends rushed to intervene and try to make things better but there really wasn’t anything they could do other than offer the sputtering Eloise napkins and paper towels, which she angrily accepted. She demanded to know who they were, how old they were, and where they were going. One thing led to another and before you knew it, she had them nailed.
“Wait until Dean Kesler hears about this, young men!” she snapped, heading off to the lavatory to clean up as best she could and try to reconstitute her flagging dignity.
Dean Robert Kesler, with his legendary ardor for expelling students, must have smacked his lips as he listened to Eloise tell him her story. It was just what Kesler needed: an ironclad case for expelling a student mere days before graduation, a student heading to Harvard, no less. That would show all the complacent seniors that they couldn’t take graduation—or the rules—for granted, no matter what. An ideal lesson for the entire community. No way Saltonstall, the principal and a more forgiving man, could get in the way of this! A perfect kick-off to graduation week.
Although Kesler himself could not expel a student—it required a vote of the full faculty, because Exeter was a faculty-run school—in this case it was a done deal. D. Loomis was revered, and a faculty wife, any faculty wife but especially Eloise, wife of D. Loomis, was as protected a species at Exeter as the whooping crane was around the world. It would most certainly be curtains for one John Hallowell.
Enter David D. Coffin, instructor in classics, cousin of William Sloane Coffin, and one of the most brilliant men ever to teach at Exeter. He also happened to be Johnny’s adviser. As such, it was his job to advocate for Johnny after Dean Kesler presented the case against him to the full faculty.
Naturally, I wasn’t at that faculty meeting, nor was Johnny. I don’t know what points David Coffin argued; my guess is he played the troubled-family card in his advisee’s defense. But most of all, he must have channeled a pyrotechnic combination of Daniel Webster, Clarence Darrow, and Cicero himself, because, incredibly, against all possible odds, the faculty voted not to expel my brother.
How I would love to have seen the look on Kesler’s face when the hands went up and the vote was counted! If ever there was a case when Dean Bob, as he was called, could have made book on a conviction (“conviction” was the way he thought), this was it. But David Coffin, and a mercy rarely shown at Exeter, prevailed.
Johnny would go on to Harvard, where he would have a spectacular academic career, as well as come out of the closet. He wrote an autobiographical play called “A Short Safari Through Purgatory,” about being seduced by a Harvard Square hustler. A Harvard grad student in English named Ed Hood staged it at Harvard’s Loeb Drama Center, and the play received rave reviews.
In addition to developing his life as a gay man in Cambridge, Johnny hyperfocused on his studies. He wanted to excel, and excel he did. Majoring in English, he got such outstanding grades he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa in his junior year, a special group at Harvard called the Junior 16, honoring the top sixteen students in the class.
When I was still at Fessenden, I remember stories of Johnny studying in Gammy Hallowell’s attic during most of a January, the so-called reading period before exams. He studied Chaucer so closely that on the notoriously tough final exam given by the quizzical, walleyed Professor B. J. Whiting, Johnny got an unheard-of A+. On the section where you were supposed to identify quotations from The Canterbury Tales, Johnny not only knew the source of every quotation, he was also able to supply the line that preceded it and the line that came after.
Harry Levin, who was a world-famous James Joyce scholar and close friends with C. P. Snow, guided Johnny as he wrote his thesis on “Moral Development in the Works of Charles Dickens.” By the time he handed in his thesis, not only did he know Dickens backward and forward, he and Harry Levin were banking that he would get the highest grade possible on his thesis. The only obstacle was that Reuben Brower, a notoriously tough grader, would be the main reader of the thesis. I remember the tension building as Johnny asked the whole family to root for him. Finally, in late April, Brower gave his verdict: summa cum laude.
Armed with his stellar record, Johnny went off to London on a Fulbright scholarship where he spent two years studying and, thanks to Harry Levin, all but living with C. P. Snow—Lord Snow—and his wife, the novelist Pamela Hansford Johnson, or Lady Pamela. Johnny would regale me with his animated discussions with Snow and Johnson ranking the greatest novelists of all time. Johnny made the case for Dickens as best he could, but Tolstoy was tough to knock out of first place. The five they settled on were Tolstoy, Dickens, Dostoyevsky, Proust, and Mann. Johnny loved discussions that ranked the greatest whatevers.
Having set his sights on being a star—and becoming one, at least in academia—when he got to Harvard, it was only natural that Johnny would look toward Hollywood when he came home. Although Harry Levin bred him to become an academic, that was just not who Johnny was. In his heart, he loved the bright lights of Broadway and Hollywood, he loved hanging out with stars, he loved fame, and like his favorite author Dickens, he wanted to write for the public, not the academics.
I had been watching Johnny from my vantage points at Fessenden and Exeter all these years. He was enough older than me—seven years—that I never felt intimidated by his academic record, but rather proud.
When he got to Hollywood, he started writing cover stories for Life magazine about movie stars. A contemporary of Rex Reed, he got invited to A-list parties and hobnobbed with celebrities such
as Bette Davis, Barbra Streisand, Paul Newman, Natalie Wood, Angela Lansbury, Rita Hayworth, Lauren Bacall, Shirley MacLaine, Gore Vidal, and many others. Some of them, especially Lansbury and Vidal, became lifelong friends.
He was riding high. During my first year in college, he published a book called The Truth Game, a series of interviews with movie stars. I remember thinking to myself, “His ship has come in.” The book was well received, so he continued to work as a journalist and wrote two more books, Inside Creedence, about Creedence Clearwater Revival, and Bodies Beautiful, a racy novel about a male hustler.
At one point, Jamie—who looked up to Johnny as a role model because, among other reasons, both were gay—went to Los Angeles to visit Johnny in his Malibu apartment. Jamie was hoping to get some guidance from him.
Instead, that visit was a disaster. The worst of Johnny came out as he viciously turned on Jamie, calling him a pathetic loser, a leech, and all kinds of demeaning and undeserved epithets. Devastated, Jamie came back to Cambridge. Amazingly, though, he never stopped caring about Johnny—care Johnny would sorely need in the coming years.
After Bodies Beautiful, Johnny’s genes, drinking and hard living, and unspecified inner demons caught up with him. He had a psychotic break and was hospitalized in Camarillo State Hospital, near LA.
At one point, Camarillo State had seven thousand patients and was the largest mental hospital in the world. When Johnny was a patient there, it was a highly regarded hospital, albeit a state facility. However, Johnny’s memories of it were brutal. He described the electric shock treatments he received as pure torture. This was 1971, and with the enhanced use of anesthesia, it is unlikely the shock treatments were painful, but Johnny loved drama. Also, to be fair, just being in a state mental hospital can be a deeply traumatic experience and can leave permanent scars, as it did for Johnny.
Because I Come from a Crazy Family Page 11