by Joe Pepitone
George, who owned a small business, and Dominic, who wasn’t doing much of anything since he’d left the Diplomat, also wanted to get a business going. They liked the hairstyling salon idea. We were going to have a big place with twenty chairs in it, as well as a men’s apparel and jewelry boutique. We found a perfect location in Brooklyn, then went to some people who underwrote new businesses. They liked the idea, but wanted more information. We put together all kinds of figures on how much business we could expect. It took us two months to convince the underwriters to put up the money. Meanwhile, throughout that period, I was getting publicity about my hair, my hair dryer, my hair spray, my entire hair act. One day I hit a home run to win a game and I told everyone in the locker room afterward that I was so happy I felt like yanking my hair out. With that I pulled the partial hairpiece off the front of my head, and everyone laughed.
Until that time, I’d been too embarrassed to admit I was wearing a hairpiece. A year or so before I had done a hair spray commercial on television, and later I had been offered five thousand dollars to do a hairpiece commercial, which I had turned down in embarrassment. It had taken me a while to realize that the fact that a man wore a hairpiece was nothing to be embarrassed about. Hell, guys wear hats on their heads to make them look better. If a hair hat made you look better—and feel better—why not?
The underwriters agreed to invest $100,000 in “Joe Pepitone’s My Place,” and we were all excited about the shop. It was going to be a beautiful place. We got twenty of the very best hair stylists in New York to take care of our customers. We made them an offer they couldn’t refuse. We rented them the chairs for a flat fee, and they in turn paid us five percent of their profit and kept everything else they made. George and Dominic and I were there every day supervising the construction. We could hardly wait for My Place to open.
Then we had a serious problem among ourselves. Dominic and George had a heavy disagreement that ended up in a fight. Dominic is a sweet man and a very funny guy. But he’s husky, can handle himself physically, and he comes on a little like a racket guy, talking in a raspy, full-bore Brooklyn voice. George had a tendency to put him down regularly. One night George accused Dominic of being dishonest. Dominic dove over a desk and busted open George’s face. George threatened to get even with him. And I’ll be goddamned if a few nights later I didn’t run into two guys I knew and they were out looking for Dominic. They said they were going to work him over good.
“Dominic’s a close friend of mine,” I told them. “What if I’m with him when you come around? You mean to tell me you’re going to give him a beating in front of me?”
“Joe, that’s the way it is. We got the job.”
“Well, fuck that,” I said. “If I’m there, there’s no way I’m gonna stand around while my friend catches a beating. You guys wouldn’t think shit of me if I did that, and you know it. I’m not gonna just stand there. That’s how it is with me.”
I walked away from them, called Dominic immediately, and told him to stay off the street until I straightened things out. If that was possible and if George would listen to reason.
But I just couldn’t believe any of it. Every single thing I touched turned to horseshit. Even when I made an effort, tried my damndest, nothing ever fucking worked out right.
All my past failures were also bombarding my head without letup. In the blackest, quietest moments of the night, I was still hung up on Diane, on the fact that I’d destroyed a marriage to a fine woman. I couldn’t live with her, couldn’t make it with her, but I couldn’t get her out of my mind, either. I visited her and Lisa less and less frequently, even though Diane and I were still married, were not even legally separated. I was separated by some three thousand miles from Eileen and my son, and that fact continued to fester in the back of my mind like a tumor.
As if I didn’t have enough shit coming down on me, I was now such a popular target for subpoena servers that even friends were nailing me. I’d bought a hairpiece from a friend for three hundred dollars early in the season. He had asked me for the money several times, and I’d told him that I would take care of the bill as soon as I got the cash. One night he was in a box seat at the stadium, and he called me over before the game. “Joe, come here. I want you to meet someone.”
I walked over at the end of batting practice, and he introduced me to the girl with him. Then he said, “I’m sorry,” and handed me a subpoena. I saw fans all around looking at us.
“Thanks a lot, you prick,” I said. “I really appreciate your doing this in front of all these people.”
Everything was depressing me, particularly the Yankee situation that I had to live with every day. Although we had been going bad for the last four years, we had always had a number of veteran stars, former super players whom I kept telling myself would get over their injuries, recapture the magic, do it all again in time. Time, of course, was what had taken them. Tom Tresh was traded early in 1968, Mickey Mantle was retired, and the rest were all gone: Bobby Richardson, Tony Kubek, Clete Boyer, Roger Maris, Elston Howard, Yogi Berra, Johnny Blanchard, Hector Lopez, Phil Linz. Of the players who were with the Yankees in my first season in New York, only pitcher Al Downing and I were left. I had always been a follower, and in the early, winning years I had fought to keep up with the stars. Now there was no one to keep up with. Now I was the guy who should have been carrying the club, coming up with the big hit. I wasn’t doing it. Even when I did drive in the big run late in a game, the run that should have given us the win, we somehow seemed to find a way to lose. We were fifth in a six-team division on merit.
There were moments when guilt and regret overwhelmed me. I thought about what I could have had, what I could have been, if I had had an attitude like Tom Tresh. I had all the talent. Only two months earlier Ted Williams had said, “With his talent, Joe Pepitone should have been a hundred-thousand-dollar ballplayer.” With just a little more concentration, a little more conditioning, a little more sleep, I could have been the leader on the field the Yankees needed. Shit, I could do it right now.
But all I kept thinking about was the chick in the stands I was going out with after the game. Please, I’d say to myself at first base, don’t let it go into extra innings, don’t keep me here any longer than I have to be. Let me go party and try to shove the shit aside. Even though the parties are brief and the nights are long, during those brief moments at least I can breathe.
It took several days of steady talking to George to straighten out things between him and Dominic. I pointed out that if he didn’t knock off the vengeance bullshit, he was going to blow the whole hairstyling business. The three of us had started the thing together, and I said we were going to finish it together or not at all. He finally came around, and then the three of us spent a lot of time telling each other how well we were going to do, what a tremendous success “Joe Pepitone’s My Place” was going to be. But, based on my own corroded history, I wasn’t really that certain, not in my heart.
One afternoon the three of us were goofing around the Deauville Beach Club in Coney Island. When it came time for me to leave for the ball park, I lent Dominic my car because he was coming to the game that night, and I took a cab to the stadium. But during the ride toward the Bronx, all the shit in my head suddenly surfaced at once, hit me like a punch from my father, and I began thinking, It ’s not going to work . . . nothing ’s going to work right for me, no matter how good it looks going in.
I became so depressed, I thought I would choke. I told the cab driver to turn around and take me to a boatyard at Sheepshead Bay. I had the keys to a friend’s boat that was docked there. I went aboard, smoked a joint or two, and escaped into good thoughts, convinced myself that “Joe Pepitone’s My Place” would be my thing, would make me independent, would allow me to once and for all be free of the bullshit I was dragging around like a 1940s wedding car.
Dominic was sitting down front in a box before the game that night. Elston Howard, now a coach, went over and asked him, “Where’s
Joe? He’s not here yet and the game starts in thirty minutes.”
“Not here?” said Dominic. “I was with him this afternoon when he left for the ball park. He’s gotta be here.”
Ralph Houk walked over and told Dominic to hop the railing and come into the clubhouse. “Get on the goddamn phone and call everyone you know who might have some idea where Pepitone is.”
“I don’t understand it, Ralph,” said Dominic. “He was fine this afternoon. Look,” he held out a paper bag, “I brought him peppers-and-egg sandwiches.”
There was no way he could have called Freddy’s boat, even if it occurred to him that that was where I was. Dominic found me by accident the next day. I was having lunch in the Barge Restaurant in Sheepshead Bay when he walked in, followed minutes later by my brother Billy and a friend of my mother. They talked me into calling Houk. I apologized, said I knew I was hurting the team, but my head was messed up and I needed another day away from baseball to straighten out. Ralph gave it to me.
I got it back together enough to play for a couple of weeks. Then I hurt my neck and shoulder overswinging (someone asked, “On the field, or off?” I didn’t say, but the answer was, “Both”) and sat out a game. I couldn’t stand sitting in the dugout through an interminable baseball game, so I left the stadium without permission. I couldn’t play the next night, either, and Ralph warned me not to leave until the game was over. I sat through four innings, almost went berserk sitting there thinking about all the debris in my head, then left. Ran.
Ralph got me on the telephone the next day and screamed at me. He told me that if I didn’t show up that night, I’d be suspended. No problem, Ralph. I didn’t show that Friday night. I became the first Yankee ballplayer to be suspended since Buddy Rosar in 1942, which was a disappointment. I had thought the last one was Babe Ruth, a nice league to be in. Who the hell was Buddy Rosar?
On Sunday morning I realized I was being stupid, that I wasn’t doing myself any good at all running from baseball. I was a baseball player. The hairstyling business was for the future, but I wasn’t helping it by not playing ball. We could use all the publicity I could get us in uniform. I wasn’t going that bad at the plate; I had twenty-four home runs, which gave me a good shot at thirty for the season if I could regain some feeling for the game and concentrate. I couldn’t do that by running away.
I called Ralph and told him I wanted to come back. He asked me about my neck and shoulder. I told him they were still sore, that I wouldn’t be able to play the doubleheader that afternoon, but that I should be all right by Monday. He said I was being fined five hundred dollars. It could have been a lot more. Both Ralph and Michael Burke, the president of the Yankees, were very understanding with me.
The Yankees called a press conference for me to make my explanations in public on Monday morning. I met with Houk for forty-five minutes and approved the release the club would issue which said I “was not psychologically prepared to rejoin the team.” Then I met the press for twenty-five minutes and tried to be honest in general terms about my emotional problems, my depression, without specifying the depths. My mother was very much on my mind, all the sorrow I’d brought her, and at one point I said, “Everybody likes to give his mother something, and I can’t give mine anything except trouble. I gave her grandchildren, and they’re gone.” I hadn’t meant to say that much, it just slipped out, and I was happy when no one pressed me on these words.
I spotted Howard Cosell with his television crew edging close to me, and I gave him a big smile and said, “I’ll be with you in a minute, sweetheart.” Everyone got a kick out of that. I had nudged them away from follow-ups on the kids, and my mother, who knew how I felt, what I was going through. Her heart went out to me so much, and that only made me feel worse.
One of the magazine writers started pushing me on my debts, and I got defensive. “I only owe out forty-eight hundred dollars,” I lied. “Who doesn’t owe forty-eight hundred dollars?”
“He’s confused,” I heard Michael Burke tell Bob Lipsyte of the New York Times, “but I think most of the problem is money. We’ll see what we can work out together. Maybe you’re always more lenient with the sheep that strays.”
When I went back and finished the season, some of the writers reported that my teammates had had it with me. Certainly I’d given them plenty of reasons to be annoyed. But I didn’t hear anything personally. I think Jim Ogle, writing in The Sporting News, conveyed the feelings of most of the Yankees toward me:
“‘I’m glad we have him,’ said one teammate. ‘People forget he is a great defensive first-baseman, and he’s the most dangerous hitter we have. He is a lot more of an asset than he is a liability, so we take him as he is. Sure he does some crazy things and makes you mad at times, but he also produces.’
“‘Pepi is Pepi,’ said another teammate. ‘He makes you mad, but he also makes you happy. The infielders love him because he saves them a lot of throwing errors with great catches.’”
I just wished I could live on infielders’ love.
XVIII
“The last and most controversial of the old imperial New York Yankees was traded today.”
“Joe Pepitone’s My Place” opened to sensational reviews. All kinds of men were getting into long hair, mod clothes, and jewelry, and we happened to have some of each. The money poured in. George, Dominic, and I were suddenly entrepreneurs. We started making plans to franchise the shops in cities around the country and in Puerto Rico. The underwriters were also excited and talked about the corporation going public, issuing stock. That would really make us tycoons.
The corporation owned an enormous six-room apartment over the shop. I had the use of it (as well as a corporation car) and lived there some of the time, and at the Carriage House in the city the rest of the time. Dominic and I decorated the apartment, which was a small mistake. We opened a gallon of red paint to do the large, raised dining area. While we stirred it, I smoked a joint, and it felt so nice I had another one as we started applying the enamel. By the time we finished the three walls, I decided the white ceiling wouldn’t do. It needed something arty to set off the area. We awoke the next morning and found the ceiling covered with childlike renderings of red cows, chickens, and horsies.
Soon after we opened My Place, I took Dominic, George and his daughter, and a few other people from the salon to the Copa one night. Tom Jones was opening there, and the club was packed. Joe Namath came in with a party and couldn’t get seated. I’d called Carmine in advance and he gave us a front-row setup. When we walked in, my eyes bugged out of my head. In all the years I’d been going to Copa, I had never seen so many racket guys in there at once. It looked like Appalachin. There must have been more than fifty wise guys at tables.
As we walked to our table, I heard about twenty-five “Hey, Joey’s,” which made me feel good. I also heard a few remarks I didn’t need: “Joey, wha’ happened? You coulda made us proud. You coulda made us all proud of ya.” I had the feeling right then it was going to be a weird evening. It was.
Tom Jones hadn’t been performing more than two minutes when several beautiful girls at tables down front took off their panties and threw them at him. The racket guys didn’t think a whole lot of this. They started yelling wisecracks at Tom Jones. When the panties continued to fly up at Tom Jones, a racket guy I knew named Larry, a nice man who has since passed away, went into the bathroom. He came out carrying his shorts in his hand. His shorts were white, and covered with bright red hearts. He walked down to the stage, threw the shorts, and they hit Tom Jones in the head. He was a great performer, very cool, and simply laughed it off as if the whole bit was part of his act.
Then some of the racket guys who were sitting around us started saying in their deep, husky voices, “Joey, get up there. You can outsing him.” They’d heard me sing a number of times in clubs late at night over the years, but there was no way I could even compare with a professional. I wasn’t about to leave my seat, make a fool out of myself.
Th
en they started saying, louder, “Joey, get up there. You can outdance him.” They started chanting it. Jules Podell, the owner of the Copa, was going crazy in back. He sent his manager down front to call for quiet, ask everyone to let the man do his show. A racket guy rose about three inches off his seat and said, “You—get outta here.” The manager spun some rubber and withdrew. And the shouts at me grew louder.
“Joey, get up and dance.”
“No, no. I can’t do that,” I said.
“Joey, get up and dance/”
“No. C’mon, you guys.”
“JOEY, GET UP AND DANCE!”
There was no way of getting out of it. I looked up at Tom Jones, who had stopped singing and was just dancing around, smiling. I guess he figured the only way to shut them up was for me to get up there with him. He gave me a wink.
I stood and climbed on stage to a tremendous hand, a lot of cheers. Carmine came running down, saying, “Joe, you gotta get off the stage.” One of the racket guys stood and, amidst a barrage of shouts, leaned his lips next to the maitre d’s ear. Carmine vanished. Pooff.
Then they all started shouting at me. “Dance, Joey! Joey, Dance! Do it! Do it! Show him how!” It sounded like there were two hundred voices, and I felt as if I were having bullets shot at my feet. I danced. Tom Jones danced. Everyone in the place went berserk. It was a wild, weird, embarrassing, fun moment. When I sat down, Tom Jones was able to finish his performance without having to dodge any more shouts or snotty remarks.
Afterward, about a dozen racket guys—who regarded the whole thing as great fun—took me and my party backstage to see Tom Jones. I apologized to him, and he said, sotto voce, “It wasn’t you. No big thing.”