One Fell Soup

by Roy Blount

  Slick first went up in a balloon a few years ago, in the balloon of Eric Sosbe, who as a Vanderbilt football player distinguished himself by his response to a disparaging remark he heard while coming off the field against the University of Tennessee. His response was to go up into where the UT band was sitting and whip the piccolo player. (If that had happened at the time I was at Vanderbilt in the early sixties, it would have been the high-water mark of a whole era of VU football.)

  Slick crewed on the balloon owned by Allen T. Sullivan, a stockbroker, and Franklin Jarman, a shoe magnate, until finally at his own insistence they certified him trained, and now he’s an FAA-licensed aeronaut and the owner of The Ubiquitous Serpent, which has huge serpents of Pueblo Indian design emblazoned around the surface of its envelope, the part of the balloon that inflates. The envelope, made of Dacron, is the size of a seven-story building.

  The part you stand in is the basket, made of wicker and suede, about three feet deep and big enough around to hold three propane tanks and three people standing. The basket is tough; we dragged and jounced through the treetops in it, and Slick once entered the annual Atlanta raft race by landing the basket in the Chattahoochee River.

  The part that makes the balloon go up, by converting the propane to hot air, is the burner, which is suspended over the basket and is about the size of a chain saw. Sometimes you “gimble the burner.” Or gimbel. I asked Slick’s ballooning confrere David Eastland how you spell gimbal and he said, “Hell, I don’t know. Why would a writer ask me how to spell something?”

  Gimbal the burner is the only technical ballooning term I picked up. It sounds like the title of an Isaac Bashevis Singer short story, but it means to rotate the burner at an angle, because the wind is pushing the envelope out at an angle and you have to direct the hot air into it.

  There isn’t any part that steers the balloon. You can cause the balloon to soar by turning on the burner and to subside by turning it off, and you can make the balloon sink abruptly by pulling on a rope that opens up a big hole in the top of the envelope, and you can navigate by soaring or subsiding into the wind currents that ease and swoop and shift along valleys and up and over slopes, but you can’t sail into the wind. You usually don’t even feel the wind, because you’re not resisting it, you’re in and of it. There are “hound and hare” competitions that entail following the hare balloon’s course as closely as possible, but you don’t know where you’re going to wind up. You’ve got a chase car following you to pick you up, and you just aim not to come down on power lines or interstates or farm animals. Or barn roofs. Or bonfires. The best ballooning stories are about coming down.

  When another Tennessee balloonist landed in a farmer’s field, the farmer got off his tractor and came up to him and said, “Where you headed?”

  “Nowhere in particular,” said the balloonist.

  “Well, you made it,” the farmer said. Then he went back to his tractor and resumed plowing.

  Six people were killed ballooning in this country during the past year, Eastland told me before I went up, “but in every case it was pilot error.” He acted as though that point should reassure me. “But my pilot is going to be Slick,” I told him.

  “That’s true,” said Eastland. After all, Slick is, by his own account, a man who once seized a fire extinguisher at a black-tie affair and covered two prominent Nashvillians with foam because they were taxing him for his informal dress and then on leaving the party went to a restaurant called The Gold Rush, did a backflip through the front door, whirled and exclaimed, “Who in here wants to fight or fuck? Either one, because I don’t get out much.”

  Slick, however, gave us an orderly ride. Someone had stolen the stereo and headphones out of The Ubiquitous Serpent’s basket, so we weren’t listening to Mozart, but I didn’t need any Mozart, myself. I must have flown five hundred thousand miles in my life and that was the first time J ever felt like I was flying—and I mean really flying, like in a dream. We came over those hills easy and smooth as the moon.

  The first man who ever achieved flight in anything, you know, was Jean Pilâtre de Rozier, in 1783, in a hot-air balloon whose paper-and-cloth envelope was made by the Montgolfier brothers, who burned wet straw and wool on a pan and thought it was the smoke that made the balloon rise. Ballooning moved from hot air to gas, and Pilâtre de Rozier was later killed when another Montgolfier balloon exploded while he attempted to cross the English Channel in it. It wasn’t until the 1960s that people started getting back into hot-air ballooning. Hot air is a lot cheaper than helium; you can have a nice hour-and-a-half flight for just eight dollars’ worth of propane.

  “What’s yer initial cost getting into a balloon?” some curious old boys hollered up at us once when we swooped low. “About six or seven thousand,” Slick cried. For the price of a station wagon, you can move like the down of a thistle.

  Another Tennessee balloonist once came down way out in the middle of nowhere, didn’t know where he was. His chase car didn’t show up. He waited and waited. It got dark. He saw two big headlights bearing down on him. Realized, then, he was standing in the dirt bed of an unfinished stretch of highway. Saw the headlights start to tumble. Saw them smash into a bank a few feet away.

  Ran to the car and found the driver, who was of a race different from his own, badly hurt. Wondered whether he should do mouth-to-mouth. Resisted the notion. Saw the driver die.

  Another car approached. The balloonist hollered at the driver to come help. The driver, who was of the victim’s race, got out of his car and saw a man in a fancy flight suit beckoning. “Come on, I need to show you something,” the balloonist said, casting about for the appropriate words.

  The driver edged close. He finally peered into the car. There, where the balloonist was pointing, was a corpse. He ran back to his car and drove away.

  And there was the balloonist, no more lights of any kind in sight, a downed balloon and a dead man on his hands.

  Peasants, thinking they were seeing either a demon or the moon that had fallen because of something they had done, would set upon the early French balloons with pitchforks when they landed. But nothing like that happened to us in Slick’s balloon. Our chase Jeep showed up right away, and Slick went and introduced himself to the man in whose field we’d landed—a Mr. Frazier, who sociably opened his fence gates for us so we could get the Jeep and trailer in and load up the Serpent. Then we were off to a nearby restaurant for steak, eggs, grits, turnip greens, beer and, in my case at least, a sense of dissatisfaction over not still being afloat, not still looking intimately down into the trees the way I used to think only birds and angels could.

  MY B.P.

  IF YOU GET CAUGHT, pummeled by security police, and hauled before Commissioner Kuhn like a common Finley, don’t say I told you this was legal. All I’m saying is that if you’re very discreet and act like you know what you’re doing, you can probably get away with it. Pick a nice unspectacular weeknight game. Get to the park early, at least two hours before game time. Buy a field-level ticket, avoid ushers once you’re inside the park, stride purposefully past your seat to one of those little gates in the fence near the dugout, walk right onto the field, proceed to the batting cage and lean against it.

  Now remember, you’re not out there to solicit autographs, cop baseballs or broach business propositions. Try any of that stuff and you deserve pummeling. You are out there as a student of the game who can’t really nurture his feel for it without a close-up view of batting practice.

  Often batting practice at close range is more impressive than the game. In bad weather at home the Reds hit in a small netted enclosure under the stands. Just a pitching machine, a bunch of baseballs, sixty feet six inches, a home plate, and Morgan and Bench and Rose and all those guys, one after the other, swinging away. Deep in the cellarlike bowels of Riverfront Stadium. It’s dark under there. FOOP of the machine, hiss of the offering, grunt of the Red, ineffable sound (Crack will have to do) of sweet vicious contact, CLONK or THWOP or SS
NK of the ball stopped by metal, pad, or netting. FOOP sss unh Crack CLONK. FOOP sss mf Crack THWOP SSNK. (Sometimes the ball bounces off the pad and into the net and you get both a THWOP and a SSNK.) Stadium mice dig deeper into their holes and the concrete walls resound. Vulcan at his forge doesn’t touch it. It is like Joan Sutherland singing in the shower.

  Normal outdoor live-pitching batting practice (or b.p., as players call it) is airier and more social. Journeyman outfielder Jim Gosger used to do an imitation of Babe Ruth. He would put batting helmets in his shirt to simulate the belly, and he’d take mammoth swings and little prancing pigeon-toed steps. Once in Yankee Stadium the Angels’ late Chico Ruiz, a light hitter, drove a b.p. pitch over the fence. Immediately he dropped his bat, ran into the right-field corner, vaulted into the stands, and wrote his name and the date on the seat where the ball had landed. When humorist ex-catcher Bob Uecker threw batting practice for the Braves he would do his impressions of various odd-looking pitchers around the league. “Dick Hall!” Braves around the cage would cry, and Uecker would give them Hall’s strange turkey-neck delivery.

  Even outdoors, however, b.p. is not just whimsy. Standing behind the cage you appreciate the force of a pitch, even a relatively easy one. The lower half of the batting cage is covered with canvas. When a pitch strikes that canvas it makes a loud FOMP! On television the ball is a thin white streak. In the cage it is not only sudden but strong. It puts up resistance. Getting into a high inside fastball and pulling it for distance is like snatching an outboard motor off your chest and horsing it up onto a chin-high truck bed in one smooth move.

  Not that heft is all. To see the young whippy wrist-hitting Henry Aaron flick his bat out to arrest a ball’s momentum and convert it into a long carrying streak in the opposite direction was to see a form of power. … Well, to me power has negative connotations—armaments, bossism, throwing weight around, Michael Korda. The young Aaron’s power was fine like dancing.

  But fiercer. “Rip city,” you might hear a crowd of on looking hitters cry in admiration of a b.p. cut that produces a savage line drive. The ball a batter slashes into is something that under game conditions might come at him and fracture his head.

  Some players don’t like batting practice. The Dodgers’ John Roseboro thought it was bad for his timing, the Mets’ Art Shamsky was bothered by it in cold weather (“You hit a ball on your fists and it stings, then you go into the game psyched”), Richie Allen disapproved of it because “your body is just like a bar of soap—it gradually wears down from repeated use.”

  But most hitters eat b.p. up. One will say to another, “Go long ball with you,” and then they will see who can hit farthest. Willie Mays would ride one way up into the seats and younger Giants would whoop, “Are you that strong? Are you really that strong?” Not many people in this country regularly get to whang away at something as hard as they can with a good stick. The hitters jump in quickly when it’s their turn so as not to waste a second. They accuse each other of taking too many swings. They berate the pitcher when he doesn’t get the ball over the plate. They keep looking anxiously over at the nearest coach and asking, “How much time?”—meaning when will the groundkeepers come to roll the cage away. The coach, dumpy and aged, says, “Pretty soon.”

  B.p. is also a boon to the fan. Even from the stands you can watch the batters moving around like horses in the paddock. Dave Kingman may strike out four times in the game, but in b.p. he is bound to hit one several miles. Once in Montreal I watched Ron Hunt, a distinguished bat-control man, take b.p. one-handed, holding the bat with his left hand in a right-handed stance, and rap out fairly sharp, though quickly dying, little grounders. Once in Vero Beach, Florida, at the Dodgers’ spring training camp I watched Jim Lefebvre work on the all-but-lost art of place hitting. Tom Lasorda, then a coach, would say “Harrelson” or “Kessinger” or “Beckett” or “Tito Fuentes” just before the pitch reached the plate and Lefebvre would try to hit the ball toward the position—shortstop or second base—played by that man. Dixie Walker, another Dodger coach, was also giving Lefebvre advice. As he was leaving the cage Lefebvre said, “I enjoyed that, Dixie. I got a lot out of it.”

  Dixie said, “Well, you don’t just swing your head off. You take batting practice.”

  An old lady who used to live in Brooklyn watched all this with me. “You know, in Ebbets Field, Dixie Walker hit a foul ball that hit my late husband. Oh, yes,” she said.

  “Who was pitching?” I asked her.

  “Howie Pollet.”

  The best thing of all about b.p. is that it can be a participant sport. B.p. is available to the civilian. I don’t know whether there is a batting cage near you, but there is one fairly near me, which is the main thing I care about, if you want to know the truth. There should be one nearer me, though. I have to drive forty-five minutes. But it’s worth it. B.p. is the only sport I can engage in at the highest level.

  That’s right. I hit the big-league machine. The place I go to is on U.S. 7 just south of Pittsfield, Massachusetts. The Batting Cage has three compartments, three machines. The slow machine is for Little Leaguers. The medium machine is about high-school level. The fast machine can bring it.

  “That thing throws eighty-five miles an hour and it’ll put you in the hospital!” the lady who was supervising the Batting Cage told me on my first visit. “You put that helmet on.”

  “Actually it’ll get up into the nineties,” says Bill Mickle, whose wife owns the Batting Cage. Mickle never played professional ball himself, which is a shame. He and somebody named Claude Dine could have been scrappy little guys batting first and second. Their manager could have said of their opponents, “We’re going to Mickle and Dine ’em to death.”

  Up into the nineties! Think of that! That’s a good deal faster than Randy Jones and only ten m.p.h. off Nolan Ryan. Put a quarter in the machine and you get ten approximating-major-league fastballs. I spend about five minutes working out on the medium machine, just to make up for all the high-school pitching I didn’t hit while in high school, and then I put in a chaw of Red Man, spit out, tp, tp, two little flakes that have gotten on my tongue, and then I head for the big time.

  Because I can get around on the ball. I am not going to knock down many fences but I am going to make contact. The day they put down the rubber three feet too close to the plate and Kent Shalibo, the fastest guy in intramural Softball, was hurling, I was the only person in the entire Sigma Chi lineup who fouled a ball off. Finally after three innings and nine Sigma Chi strikeouts somebody realized that the rubber was too close, so we will never know whether I might actually have grounded to the second baseman off that incredible speed. I did some calculations after the game. I figured that fouling off Kent Shalibo from that close was the equivalent of hitting .180 for three weeks in Class D professional ball. And I was out of shape.

  Well, I’m going to tell you the truth. At the Batting Cage I don’t wear out the big-league machine right off the bat. I’m into it fifty cents by the time I’m hitting anything fair. But this is something I am willing to put some time and effort into. I’m there for six, seven, eight dollars’ worth of pitches. That’s what, over three hundred cuts?

  That means blisters. And the blisters break. And the ball is past me and I’m just kind of dabbing at it, it’s taking the bat out of my hands. The planes and vectors of hitting are more real and terrible even than under Riverfront Stadium.

  And then I pop one. Not a blister, a pitch. Now I’m getting some of my weight into the ball. It’s like I’ve been trying to bang a dull splintery stake into hard ground and all of a sudden I’m driving a clean blue nail into a soft pine board.

  Then I start figuring my batting average. I count every swing except fouls as a time at bat. Out of the last hundred at bats I generally get thirty-one, thirty-two clean hits. Some of them bloopers, yes. Certain bloopers do fall in. But no leg hits. Let’s face it, I never got a leg hit in Little League, why should I start getting them in the majors? When I’m going
good, I don’t need them. Thirty-two hits in one hundred at bats is .320. Joe DiMaggio’s lifetime average was .325.

  All right. I know what you’re saying. There’s a big difference between hitting .320 in a batting cage, at however advanced a level, and hitting .320 against real major-league pitching. I know that. I am willing to adjust for that.

  The pitching machine doesn’t throw breaking balls. I figure that’s worth a hundred points—now I’m down to .220. Doesn’t change speeds. Down another fifty. But then the machine does throw crazy wild pretty often. Goes for your head, your feet. And in the big leagues every twelfth ball doesn’t have a split cover. So put twenty points back. Then there’s the ATRBDEJOB, or A Three-month-old Rubber-coated Ball Doesn’t Exactly Jump Off the Bat, factor. Give myself twenty more points for that.

  A number of other factors enter in. If I were really in the big leagues I’d probably be writing a book about it, and the other players would forever be worrying about what I was going to disclose about them. They’d call time every now and then to ask me, and that would probably affect my hitting. Of course it would probably affect the pitchers, too.