by Joe Pepitone
This crap kept playing on my mind the next day when I had to stay over in New York to make a court appearance with Diane regarding her alimony payments. The bullshit all seemed to come down at once again, and it made me sick to my stomach. I joined the team in Houston and vomited my guts out before the game. Leo had me back in the starting lineup, but I couldn’t play that night or the next one. My stomach was screaming and tearing at me.
When we got back to Chicago, I saw the team physician, Dr. Jacob Suker. But then I felt okay, my stomach had settled down. I seemed to be a little more relaxed at home with Stevie. Then suddenly my stomach started ripping at me again. I didn’t report to the ball park on Sunday, April 30. Leo called, and I told him I was sick. He told me to meet Dr. Suker at Wesley Memorial Hospital. The doctor said I had gastritis, which is an inflammation of the stomach lining. I also had an inflammation of the brain. Once again, I hated baseball, hated the shit it was constantly putting me through.
Dr. Suker had given me antacids and told me to see him again on Monday. I didn’t show up. I’d had enough baseball bullshit. Ever since I’d been in the game I’d disliked and rebelled against the establishment, against authority, against anyone who put pressure on me. I realized now that the rebelling stemmed from my father, who had smacked me around and forced me to do everything he told me to without allowing me to even begin to question his directives, to tell him how I felt about any part of them. Once he died I was free, on my own, and I know now I had needed some strong guidance along the way. I never got any that I respected enough to follow. And it was far too late now to allow myself to be put down by a game I was finally beginning to play properly. It wasn’t worth that pain in my gut.
I reported to Wrigley Field on Tuesday, May 2, and was told that vice-president John Holland wanted to see me in his office. He was just the man I wanted to see. Before he could open his mouth, I said, “John, I want you to put me on the voluntary retirement list. I’ve had it with baseball. I’m not going to play any more.” Holland spent half an hour trying to talk me out of it. He pointed out that once my name went on the retired list, I couldn’t return to baseball for sixty days even if I decided to. I told him that I understood, but that I didn’t plan to come back.
“You’ll be welcome, Joe, if you do want to rejoin us,” he said.
“Thank you, John,” I said.
John Holland was a nice man, but there was no point in trying to fool myself. I wasn’t going to help the Cubs or myself in my frame of mind. I was thankful I had my “Thing” to turn to. I liked to fish and there was good fishing in Lake Michigan. I had bought an eighteen-foot powerboat, and I was looking forward to having plenty of time during the summer to use it. I loved toys. I’d also bought a 650CC custom-chopped Triumph motorcycle that Stevie and I cruised around on. It was fun, and we’d be able to do a lot more cruising now. It was really going to be nice not having to go to the ball park every afternoon. I felt as if the driver who had parked his truck on my head ten years ago had finally returned and backed it off.
The lounge was going great. I was clearing as much as eight hundred dollars a week. But even with Dominic and Billy, it was no easy gig. We put in a lot of hours, and there were always problems to deal with. There was a small back room in the place with a horseshoe-shaped bar, a working fireplace, one table, and chairs. When it got too hectic out front, I’d sit in there with a few friends, escape from the crazies. We had plenty of them hanging around. One guy, whom I’ll call Kelly, was funny as hell, and he was always carrying great dope. He’d come in, pull out a whole sack of grass, and put it on the bar, yelling, “Heyyyy—here is some super smoke.” He was so nutsy, he didn’t care who was in the place. I liked him, but I told him if he didn’t knock off that stuff, I would bar him. If the police observed his act, they’d take my license. Kelly was funny. I’d get a phone call from him and he’d say, “Joe, you got to come pick me up. My car broke down in Oak Park and I can’t get back to Chicago.” I’d yell, curse him out, and finally agree to go get him. Then I’d hear a scream of laughter across the room. I’d see Kelly doubled up by the phone on that wall.
One night I was sitting in the back room when Billy came in and said, “Joe, Mrs. Phil Wrigley and her son are out front.”
“What?” Who the hell ever expected the wife of the owner of the Cubs to show up at my saloon? I cleared everyone out of the back room and told Billy to show them in. I was a nervous wreck. What if crazy Kelly popped in and laid some grass on the table?
Mrs. Wrigley walked in and said, “Joe, this is a nice little place you have here.”
“Thank you, Mrs. Wrigley,” I said, as she and her son Bill sat down. “What would you like to drink?”
“A pitcher of beer,” she said.
We sat there and drank most of it, had some funny conversation, and they left. Two minutes later Kelly burst into the back room smoking a joint and singing a dirty song.
The lounge wasn’t all fun and games, though. I closed the place late one night, locked the doors, and turned up the street for home, when a guy came out of nowhere and hit me in the back of the head. Luckily he didn’t catch me solid. I whirled around and knocked him down. “What the fuck is this?” I said.
He sat on the sidewalk rubbing his jaw and explained that his girl had asked me for an autograph earlier in the evening and never got it. I remembered the girl. I’d been called in back by Dominic right at that moment, and I told the girl I’d return in a minute. When I did, she was gone. I thought she had left the place. I’d forgotten about the whole thing until I got hit in the back of the head.
Another night I came in a little late, and there were two cops in the place with a guy whose face was bleeding. The police were questioning my brother. It seemed that the guy had stolen one of the decorative plastic batting helmets we had hanging on a wall. Billy saw him slip it under his jacket, took it back, and told the guy to leave. An hour or so later, the guy was back. Sure enough, he took the same helmet again. Billy caught up to him as the guy was going up the steps. Billy told him to return the helmet and never come back in the lounge again. The guy kicked Billy in the stomach. Billy got up, ran after the guy, and beat hell out of him. I knew one of the cops, and he said he’d take care of the guy without anything going on the records.
But for all the fun I had and all the fishing I got in, after about three and a half weeks of not playing ball, I had to admit to myself that I missed it. Quitting the Cubs had been the stupidest thing I’d ever done. Simply because I’d been benched for one game. I’d acted like a spoiled kid, because that’s exactly what I was, what I’d always been. When something went wrong, it was easier to run from it than deal with it. When the fuck, I wondered, was I ever going to learn?
I started going to Cub games, going early so I could stop into the clubhouse, hang around the dugout. When the game started, I had to retreat into the stands, where I’d sit and watch and wish I was out there with the guys. What the hell was I doing in the stands when my team was on the field, when there wasn’t a goddamn thing wrong with me physically? Maybe I should have had my psychiatrist go on the road with me, move in with me.
On Saturday, May 27, I was in the dugout talking to a couple of the guys before the game when coach Pete Reiser came over and said, “You’re coming back, aren’t you?”
“Yes,” I said. It just popped out of me. I hadn’t planned it. But I meant it. I wanted to come back. John Holland called me and I told him I was serious about what I’d told Reiser. I wanted to start working out with the club. The Cubs put me on a workout program to get into shape by June 30, when I could go back on the active roster, and I even traveled with the club till then. I could be paid meal money, but not salary. I would be out twenty thousand dollars in salary.
The writers thought money was the main reason I was returning. Actually, I was living comfortably on the income from the lounge. I told the writers that my mother, who had visited me over the Memorial Day weekend, was a big factor. She wasn’t, even thou
gh she had urged me to get into uniform again. The only factor in my return was my head.
I told Phil Pepe of the New York Daily News that the reason I was coming back was because the fish had run out. “When the coho stopped running,” I said, “there was nothing to do. I love fishing. I’ve always loved it. I started in the sewers of Brooklyn, and worked my way all the way up to Lake Michigan. Imagine.”
Pepe asked me what guarantee was I giving the Cubs that I wouldn’t quit and go fishing again before the season ended.
“No guarantee,” I told him, honestly. “I don’t know what I’m going to do. I was thirty-one in October, but my body is eighty-five, and my mind is sixteen.”
Pepe sent me regards from Ralph Houk, who said I was a good guy and that I could have been a great ballplayer.
“I was a great ballplayer last year,” I said.
I wanted to find out if I still could be. Durocher was a little cool to me: “What can I say about him?” I heard him tell a writer. “I can’t open the man’s head.” So were most of my teammates. Virtually all of my teammates. One reason was that when I quit we had a 4-10 record, and then the Cubs went on to win sixteen of their next twenty-three games. I knew the guys resented the fact that I’d left them when the club was going bad and that I was rejoining them when they were going well.
I couldn’t let the coolness bother me. I couldn’t put on any kind of act. I rejoined them as the same loose Joe Pepitone I’d always been. I worked hard to get into shape, which they observed, and I had some fun.
We were all watching Roberto Clemente take batting practice before a game against the Pirates, and he was pure magic at the plate. “Notice how nothing moves when he swings except his arms and hips,” I said. “That’s the way I want to hit when I grow up.”
When I stepped into the cage for my swings, our batting practice pitcher, a young rookie, threw me a scuffed baseball. “It’s dirty!” I yelled. “Is that any kind of ball to throw to a former Yankee great?”
Most of the coolness had withered by the time I went back on the active roster. But Durocher put me right into the starting lineup, and the coolness reappeared. I took care of that by hitting good for a couple of weeks. I couldn’t sustain it. Whitey Lockman replaced Durocher as manager in late July, and Whitey started platooning me against left-handed pitchers. I kept my mouth shut, because that’s all you can do when you’re not pounding the ball. I wasn’t.
I finished with a .262 batting average, only eight home runs, and a miserable twenty-one RBIs. The team finished in second place, eleven games behind Pittsburgh. I wondered how many of those eleven games I might have won if I had been present. It was apparent that my teammates were wondering, too.
Of course, no one was rooting for me to grow up more than I was. I knew it was getting awfully late in my game. Awfully late.
XXII
“Why are you doing this to me, Whitey?”
I stopped seeing my teammates at the lounge. Ron Santo came by occasionally, not because he had a small piece of the place but because we were friends and he was sympathetic even if he couldn’t understand my head. That was understandable.
Soon none of the ballplayers could go to “Joe Pepitone’s Thing” if they wanted to. A newspaper story reported that all the bars on Division Street were being investigated by the police, who suspected that some of the lounges were employing people with criminal records, particularly drug-related violations. The headline on the story said: JOE PEPITONE’S BAR UNDER DRUG PROBE. Holy shit, I thought, that’s not going to do me any good, even though at the end of the story it said that I wasn’t implicated. I wasn’t worried about turning over my employee records, which I did, because I knew that all my girls were clean.
But the day that headline appeared in the paper, every ball club in Chicago put my place off limits to its players. And where my day business alone had been bringing in between three and five hundred dollars, that afternoon I took in thirty-seven dollars. That night we had less than half our normal crowd.
Brent Musberger came down to do a radio interview with me, and I said, “Look, this probe is on the whole street, but I’m a baseball player and because my name is Joe Pepitone it makes the headlines. Everyone thinks they are investigating only me. And this is just a check on employees. There is no proof that any of my people have criminal records or anything like that. Why don’t the papers wait until the police prove something before they print this kind of scare headline?”
Then Dominic walked over, and Brent asked him what he thought about the situation. Dominic said, “Let me tell you something. I know this kid and I’ve known him for years. I know how dedicated to baseball he is. You understand? It’s terrible what these newspapers are doing to this kid. If he ever found anybody was doing drugs in this place, he’d break their heads, he’d bust open their faces. You understand? I’m his manager, I run this place with Joe, and I got a daughter, fifteen years old, back in Brooklyn, and if I ever knew she was doing drugs I’d bite her face off. You understand? I love this kid, and I know what he’d do to anyone who did drugs in his place—he’d break their legs and throw them out in the street. He’d destroy them. You understand?”
Dominic convinced the radio audience that I hated drugs—but that I was a potential murderer.
Our week’s net fell from eight hundred dollars to six hundred; then five hundred, then four hundred, then three hundred, and kept sliding, even after we were cleared by the police. When a bar’s “in,” you can’t keep the people out. Once that appeal is smudged, you can’t get people in. You can’t make it with an occasional crowd. You’ve got to have your basic regulars. My brother Billy went back to Brooklyn and joined the police force. I had to let several of the girls go. Dominic and I tried to keep the lounge going all through the fall. Just before New Year’s, 1973, I was sitting in my apartment looking over the books and I realized it was hopeless. Where we once regularly cleared over a hundred dollars a night, we were now clearing twenty dollars—on a good night. I called Dominic at the lounge and told him to pack up all the liquor in the place and bring it up to my apartment. Then I called my friend Leroy who ran the garage in the building.
“Leroy,” I said, “if you come up to my apartment in about an hour, I have a rare buy on liquor for you and any of the other guys down there who are interested in a one-time-only special. I’m selling every bottle from my lounge at seventy percent off.”
I got rid of my entire stock in fourteen minutes and thirty-six seconds, and I was now out of the saloon business. I had earned back my investment, plus a little. But if it hadn’t been for the headline in the papers, I could have really done well with the lounge. That was the story of my life, a lot of “I could have done ifs . . .”
I decided the lounge experience was just another pile of shit I had to step in, just like the hairstyling salon, the wives, the treadmill sex. At least I had gotten off that treadmill after I’d been with Stevie a while. I began thinking back on all that screwing, all those different girls, and I realized there was no feeling involved, that there was nothing good about it, really. It was all raw sexless sex—in, out and on to the next. Shit, I couldn’t even remember what most of the girls looked like, much less their names. All those names, all those faces.
A girl had come into the lounge during the summer, a pretty redhead with a beautiful smile, gleaming teeth. “Hi, Joe!” she said, and threw her arms around me. “How are you?”
“Fine . . . fine,” I said, looking at her closely.
“Don’t you remember me?” she said.
“Oh . . . uh.”
“The Carriage House in New York three years ago. Sylvia.”
“Uh, let me think . . .”
“We spent two weeks together, at your place. Don’t you remember?”
“I’m sorry. I’m really sorry, Sylvia.” I just couldn’t remember her, couldn’t remember anything about her, and I couldn’t lie to her, bullshit her along, fake it, as I would have a few years ago. I had come to realize
that virtually all the people who are in charge, the people in authority, are phonies, hypocrites, liars. And that I was just like them. I was the worst phony and biggest liar in the world. As I got older, people began to see through me, through what I thought was a great act. Now I couldn’t look anyone in the eye and lie any more. I felt better, being honest with others, and with myself.
It took an incredibly long time for me to get any perspective at all, but I was thankful that it was finally coming. Stevie helped. It was great to really dig somebody, like being with them as much as possible. I thought I loved her, thought about divorcing Diane and marrying Stephanie Deeker. We had such good times together. For the first time, I was happy simply sitting home with a girl, just being with her. But I still had this thing about Diane in the back of my head: maybe I’d want to go back with her some day. It was weird. I had a super relationship going with Stevie, yet I was still hung up on my second wife. Maybe, because I’d mutilated that relationship, it was simply guilt poking at my head, the feeling that I should make it up to Diane eventually.
All I knew for certain was that I loved living with Stevie. She was the most relaxed, together chick I’d ever known. She cared about as much about neatness around the apartment as I did. We liked to live, not straighten up a place every minute. I had Dominic staying with us for a few months, and he’s a fanatic for neatness. He drove Stevie crazy with his puttering around. It reached the point where she told me he had to go. We had two dogs, a poodle, and a big sheep dog named Cockeye, one of which he happened to have. Cockeye also had a lot of hair, which he happened to shed constantly. Dominic couldn’t stand the dog hairs in his room. One day Dominic hung up a sign on his door that said “No Dogs Allowed,” and locked the door from the inside. Our only bathroom was off Dominic’s bedroom.