Mentor: A Memoir

by Grimes, Tom

  “You arranged the Mets trip. I don’t want to embarrass you.”

  “Your sister tried to kill herself, for God’s sake.”

  I shrugged, acknowledging the fact that one situation paled in comparison to the other. “I know.”

  “Listen, do what you have to do. If necessary, I’ll call Frank Cashen. He’ll understand. How could he not? And strictly between us, I’ve got a crazy sister, too. Nothing this bad, but, you know, telephone calls. ‘Look out your window, Frank. The sky’s on fire.’ That sort of thing.”

  I zipped up my leather jacket, which I’d begun to wear once the bitterest days of winter had passed. “I’ll see you,” I said.

  “Call me.”

  “I will.”

  As I turned to leave, he said, “And remember something.” I looked over one shoulder. “This isn’t your fault.”

  In New York, I stayed with my mother. She still slept in the single bed adjacent to the one left empty after my father died. The house seemed cramped, and I’d forgotten the gloomy atmosphere of my sister’s bedroom. Its one window overlooked a virtually sunless alleyway, and on cloudy days dusk seemed to fall by 2:00 PM. A six-by-nine-inch photograph, taken when my sister looked pretty at seventeen, leaned against the dresser mirror. With one fingertip, I slid open the hollow closet door and set my bag beneath a dozen bare wire hangers. I refused to unpack. Emotionally, I wanted to remain detached. I had no interest in my past. In fact, I feared it. Every time I returned home, I had one goal: to feel as little as possible.

  Although I’d arrived late, my mother wanted to cook me dinner. Instead, I made her stop on the drive from the airport so I could buy a twelve-pack of beer. Then we sat at the round kitchen table where a cardboard salt-and-pepper set and a ramekin packed with NutraSweet pouches huddled at the center of a white plastic cloth dotted with images of summer fruit. Since my mother was four foot eleven inches, her black, imitation leather lace-up shoes barely touched the indoor-outdoor carpet. A thyroid disorder had caused her to gain weight over the years, so she wore polyester stretch pants and loose-fitting blouses. She worked as a teacher’s assistant at a local grammar school. At lunchtime, she monitored kids from the fourth and fifth grades. Once or twice, through the chain link enclosing the schoolyard, I’d seen her ordering them around. It seemed to be the only time she felt anyone in the world respected her. Attached to the yellow refrigerator door by a magnet in the shape of tiny cow was a note scrawled on multicolored construction paper that said, “We love you, Mrs. Grimes!” At home, though, none of us took her seriously, and she had come to believe that she could only command our attention and obedience by acting like a bully.

  “How long have I been saying something’s not right with your sister?” she said.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Since your father died.”

  Which had been three years earlier.

  “Did your brother notice? No.”

  “He lives in North Carolina.”

  “Did you notice? No.”

  “I lived in Key West. Now I live in Iowa.” I didn’t mention my impulse to call my sister the previous night.

  “Her husband. He doesn’t notice, either? What state does he live in?”

  “He’s a licensed mortician in New York. So I guess he lives in New York.”

  “Don’t be a wiseass. Your sister just tried to kill herself. And he should have been paying attention instead of taking her shopping every ten minutes to cheer her up. Do you know people who commit suicide because they don’t shop enough? No. Who thinks like he thinks? I’ll tell you who. An idiot.”

  I didn’t argue. After years of her plotting with my sister to lure my brother-in-law into an early marriage (my sister was nineteen, he was twenty-one), my mother began to criticize him before the wedding rice hit the church steps, and I no longer found the situation perverse, amusing, or tragic. Years earlier, my family, particularly my father, had decided that I was headed for disaster. At one point, when I was in my twenties, in debt, taking drugs, and drinking too much, they were nearly right. Then things changed. I met Jody, started to write seriously, developed what little talent I had by working twenty hours a week for a decade, and made it to Iowa. But as my life came together, my sister’s life unraveled. And all I could do was to watch it happen.

  “I’m tired,” I told my mother. “I have to go to bed.”

  “How long are you staying?”

  “Not long. I’m supposed to be in Florida.”

  “You know,” she said, “when your sister woke up in the hospital, you were the first one she asked for.”

  “No, she didn’t.”

  “If you leave now, I have no one to help me take care of her.”

  “You have her doctors and her husband.” I stood, quickly opened a cabinet door, and peered inside. “Do you have a cookie?” I said. “I’m hungry.” My mother had decided to make me feel guilty and, as I’d learned over the years, my best defense was to distract her.

  “What kind?” she said.

  I stared at the array of treats she’d stored, hoping for visits from her grandsons. When I didn’t see any chocolate chip cookies, I said, “Chocolate chip,” to lay the guilt on her. “Why don’t you ever have what I want?”

  She came up beside me, her graying hair as high as my chest. “I have Ring Dings.”

  I saw the box. “Where?” I said.

  “Here.” She stood on her toes to reach for it. Then I let her take one out and pass it to me in its foil wrapper. “You want two?”

  “No. One’s good,” I said. “Night.” I kissed the top of her head. Then, before I could move, her arms circled my waist and she pressed her face against my ribs. She shook for several moments, but I didn’t say anything. Finally, I touched her shoulder lightly. I patted it. As I pulled away, she sniffled. “It’ll be all right,” I said.

  “Okay.” She wiped her eyes.

  “I’ll see you in the morning.” I started to leave the kitchen.

  “You don’t want milk?” she said.

  “No, I’m fine.” I looked at her. Never before had she seemed so small. “Get some sleep,” I said. Then I walked through the dark dining and living rooms, climbed the stairs, and closed the bedroom door behind me.

  I undressed, pulled back the sheets, and turned out the light. But when I slipped one hand beneath the pillow to cradle my head, I felt something thin and dry. I sat up and turned on the light. In my hand were several desiccated, two-foot-long leaves, each folded in half. My sister hadn’t slept in that bed for sixteen years. Nevertheless, my mother had blessed it with leaves she’d collected at church on Palm Sunday.

  At 8:00 AM, my brother-in-law picked me up. He was short, sandy-haired, worked sixty hours a week, and earned twenty thousand dollars a year. He wore Brooks Brothers suits and regularly slipped this fact into conversations, and he always tailgated the car in front of him. During high school, walking to my job as a waiter and dishwasher at a luncheonette owned by a callous, penny-pinching old German couple, I would see my future brother-in-law racing along the avenue beneath the elevated train tracks, his bicycle basket filled with fish wrapped in white butcher paper, as he hustled to make deliveries for tips. In college, he studied mass communications and aspired to be a disc jockey. When he decided to marry my sister, he became an undertaker, like his brother, who’d arranged the job. Studying for his mortician’s license, he learned how to embalm bodies and apply makeup to a corpse’s face. Once hired, he collected the dead from morgues and, often, from the homes where they’d died. (Soon after that, I worked for the same firm as a night watchman and professional pallbearer to put myself through college.) We played hoops together. Years later, when he visited Jody and me in Key West, he asked me why I hadn’t lost my mind living on a one-by-one-and-a-half-mile island. I reminded him of the Atlantic Ocean, where I took him snorkeling. I didn’t mention the limited scope of his life, from home to funeral parlor and then home again, the trip less than ten minutes by car. I liked h
im. He was a decent guy and a good father, but completely out-matched by my sister’s illness, which he would never comprehend.

  “What do you think?” he asked as we sped past buildings and parks vaguely familiar to me, the way the ghost of someone I once knew might be recognizable, yet not quite real.

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “She’ll get better, right?”

  “I hope so.”

  My sister had been moved from Queens General Hospital, where she’d been abandoned for hours beside a raving woman handcuffed to a radiator pipe, to the relative calm of Holliswood, a psychiatric clinic surrounded by a leafless arboretum. His health insurance would pay one thousand dollars a day for thirty days. Afterward, my sister would have to be released, or the two of them would lose their life savings in a month.

  My sister’s wrists had been wrapped in cotton gauze and then taped. She wore a nightgown that repeatedly fell open, exposing one breast, before my brother-in-law refastened it. She stared at me, less animated than a zombie, and her mouth remained frozen, as if she had something to say but couldn’t summon the power of speech. She knew me, but I must have seemed like a hallucination to her from the sedatives they’d fed her. If she sensed my impulse but decision not to call her the night she attempted to commit suicide, she didn’t show it. Still, her gaze seemed to beg me to rescue her from the opaque world she inhabited. When I leaned over to kiss her cheek, her eyes followed me, swinging like a pendulum. While her psychiatrist, a slight man with a brown mustache, hovered nearby, observing, my brother-in-law spoke to her. My sister didn’t respond. I knew she wouldn’t. Ordinary entreaties wouldn’t reach her. “How do you feel?” or “Talk to me” were meaningless questions and requests. She didn’t need to speak; she needed to be spoken to. And, intuitively, I knew she counted on me to do it. So I said, “Well, you really fucked up.”

  The others looked at me, as she suppressed a rosebud of a smile, one waiting to bloom.

  “You just couldn’t wait for someone else in the family to commit suicide,” I said. “You had to be first.”

  My brother-in-law thought my remark would upset my sister. Instead, she tried to keep her smile from widening.

  “And you’re telling me the best you could do was a knife? You think a knife is original? You couldn’t have clubbed yourself to death with a dumbbell?”

  She laughed through her nose, which made her sound like a dog sniffing a patch of urine.

  “I have to tell you, I’m disappointed. I fly out here and you don’t even have the decency to be dead. Next time, get it right. Okay? Otherwise, I might as well stay home.”

  Her psychiatrist asked to speak to me in the hallway. “Why did she respond to you?” he said.

  “Because we have something in common. We both hate ourselves. What drugs are you pumping into her?”

  “Lithium and Haldol. Why do you hate yourselves?”

  “My father, mother, and twelve years of Catholic school. How long will she be here? ”

  “Until we get her stable. Do you believe your father molested her? ”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because he never wanted to touch any of us.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  In Florida, the humid air opened my pores and seeped into my skin, replenishing the moisture that had been sucked dry by Iowa’s winter. From my motel room, I called Frank. I told him my sister had been taken off suicide watch and was semi-lucid again. “Good,” he said. “I’m glad to hear it. Now, you know you can’t do any more to help, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Okay then. Get your head back into the book and do what you went there to do.”

  Which was to study professional baseball players; to use, as Flannery O’Connor advised young writers to do, my five senses. What did the stadium and its locker room look, sound, smell, taste, and feel like? For my novel to succeed I had to be able to write, “In the air I could smell the vinegarish aroma of sauerkraut, the musty fragrance of ballpark beer.” I needed to transform what I saw into the words “It was a sky-high fly ball. At its peak, I lost sight of the ball as it climbed above the band of light that crowned the stadium, into the envelope of darkness and low-flying smog.” I was required to know that every professional team employs a public relations manager. For the Mets, this was Jay, a pudgy, curly-haired forty-year-old who wore wrinkled suits, eyeglasses that slid down his beaked nose, and a perpetually wide-eyed expression, as if he feared someone might push him off a cliff at any moment. After I’d been cleared to enter the players’ parking lot by an armed guard to whom I’d shown the invitation from Mr. Cashen, Jay confronted me the instant I stepped out of my rented car.

  “Who are you? ” He tore the letter out of my hands. “What paper are you with?”

  “I’m not with any paper,” I said. “I’m writing a novel.”

  He pushed his glasses up toward his feathery eyebrows. “A novel?” He pronounced the word as if he suspected me of trying to steal nuclear launch codes. “What for?”

  What for? I didn’t have an answer. What are novels for? Entertainment? Metaphysical inquiry? Chronicling one’s times? Could I tell Jay that the world is chaos and an artful novel satisfies our human desire for order, or that the novel excavates meaning from the rubble of incomprehension? That a novel is a thing to be read upon a beach in July for pleasure, or that I was an Iowa Writers’ Workshop student and writing a novel was my homework? Or that I never want to die and when I’m writing a novel I believe I never will? Then it became clear to me. My novel had changed my life. A year earlier, I’d been a waiter. Sixty pages of prose later, I had a letter permitting me to dissect the lives of millionaire athletes.

  “For a lot of reasons,” I said.

  He studied Mr. Cashen’s signature, searching for any hint of forgery. Then he said, “Fine. Get a press pass inside. And whatever you do, don’t talk to Darryl.”

  He was referring to the team’s superstar, Darryl Strawberry, who shared a common trait with my narrator, Mike Williams, who appears on Sports Illustrated’s cover when he’s twenty-one. Strawberry had appeared on it when he was nineteen. He stood six foot six inches tall and had a chest as broad as a refrigerator door. When he strode through the locker room wearing only a towel, his abdominal muscles resembled ice cubes. His biceps swelled to the size of grapefruits whenever he curled his arms, he hit home runs the way normal people swat flies, and he had a temperament as brittle as an eggshell. In successive years, he had been a Most Valuable Player finalist, and, in 1986, he’d won a World Series title. But the season before I arrived, his ability to hit the ball vanished, and the fifty sportswriters who covered the team had only one question for him: “Why?” Frustrated and brooding, he stopped granting interviews. Several columnists punished him by penning savage articles that belittled his talent and criticized his sullen behavior. Finally, he checked into an alcoholic rehab facility after threatening his wife with a loaded pistol. Before I could assure Jay that I wouldn’t interrogate Mr. Strawberry, he darted off to intercept members of the press who had descended on Bobby Ojeda, a starting pitcher who had slowed to a halt in a red Ferrari, which he left purring as his fashion model girlfriend, a creature minted, it seemed, out of pure platinum, circled the car, kissed him, and then dropped into the driver’s seat and sped out of the lot.

  I walked to the office Jay had directed me to and collected my press card. In my back pocket, I kept a small, gray memo pad and a blue ballpoint pen, although I’d vowed never to scribble notes in anyone’s presence. To the players, I wanted to become familiar to the point of invisibility. Professional athletes live in a fishbowl. Therefore, they tend to be skittish around people who ask them direct questions. So I planned to ask as few as possible. I entered the locker room and drew a few curious stares. Within an instant, I was forgotten. I found a corner chair, sat, listened to reporters conduct interviews, and watched the players dress. First, they pulled long white socks above their knees and secured them w
ith navy blue stirrups. Next, they hoisted jockstraps over their hips, stepped into Spandex shorts, and then reached inside them to snugly place a hard rubber cup over their testicles. They tugged short-sleeved Mets T-shirts over their heads, slipped into immaculate white, blue, and orange pinstriped uniforms, and then knotted the laces of their polished black cleats. Finally, they crossed the cool, low-ceilinged locker room and studied the blackboard bolted to a cinder-block wall to see who was in the starting lineup. The ones who weren’t said, “Fuck.” The ones who were said nothing, but their bodies swelled when they inhaled, which said everything. Alone and in pairs, they headed for the tunnel that led to the dugout. Civilians were not allowed to follow.

  I wandered out to the field. For a moment, the blue sky made me light-headed. I’d become accustomed to Iowa’s muted winter landscape, its subtle shades of gray. I scanned the grass, looking for Strawberry. Instead, I saw Mr. Cashen peering through the fence behind home plate. He wore a tan suit, eyeglasses, and his signature bow tie. Despite being nearly seventy, his dull blond hair and short, swift gait made him appear younger. He and tall, lean Al Harazin, the team’s senior vice president, studied hitters taking batting practice. From a distance, the two seemed to whisper to one another, but mainly they frowned, as if they had been forced to choose between one piece of rotten fruit and another. As I strolled toward them, noting the texture of the third-base bag, the brightness of the white baseline, the palpable calm radiated by the empty expanse of left field, and the stadium’s small scale, I recognized the three sources of my disorientation. Sunshine, a balmy breeze, and the freedom of being outdoors, which Iowa’s winter had erased from my memory. Also, I’d escaped the pressure of my novel. The six months I’d spent hunched over my desk in a small, cold room near an ice-glazed storm window had ended. I felt as if I’d ascended from the ocean’s frigid, black floor, broken the water’s surface, and taken a deep breath. A world did exist apart from the intensity of making sentences and the anxiety of scratching my way toward an ending. The stadium no longer seemed unreal, the players no longer like images in a dream. The shift from one reality to another became complete. And I went to meet Mr. Cashen.