The New York

by Bill Branger

  Copyright © 1995, 2011 by Granger & Granger

  All Rights Reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without the express written consent of the publisher, except in the case of brief excerpts in critical reviews or articles. All inquiries should be addressed to Arcade Publishing, 307 West 36th Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10018.

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  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Visit our website at www.arcadepub.com.

  10 9876543 2 1

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

  ISBN: 978-1-61145-618-9

  Also by Bill Granger:

  NOVELS

  Drover and the Designated Hitter

  Drover and the Zebras

  Drover

  The November Man

  Schism

  The Shattered Eye

  The British Cross

  The Zurich Numbers

  Hemingway’s Notebook

  There Are No Spies

  The Infant of Prague

  The Man Who Heard Too Much

  League of Terror

  The Last Good German

  Burning the Apostle

  Time for Frankie Coolin

  Public Murders

  Newspaper Murders

  Priestly Murders

  The El Murders

  Sweeps

  Queen’s Crossing

  NONFICTION

  The Magic Feather*

  Fighting Jane*

  Lords of the Last Machine*

  Chicago Pieces(*with Lori Granger)

  This is dedicated to the memory of the late Bill Veeck, the best thing to happen to baseball since they made it round. Thanks for the afternoons we spent together in Miller’s Pub under the El tracks, drinking beer and figuring out the way of the world.

  Preface

  I don’t even know what a preface is, but Bill Granger and the editor who read this thing said it was necessary to explain myself. I thought a story this long explains its own self, but they are in the business and they probably know what they’re talking about.

  Well, it all started after the last baseball strike, and since everyone wrote about that to death, I don’t have to bring it up. After the strike, nothing changed much except the owners were just as greedy as ever and so were we, the ball players. That means, I suppose, that I should explain my position, but I don’t really care to. I just played baseball is all and kept my mouth shut until now.

  I told this stuff to Granger and he had the easy part of just taking it down the way I told it and typing it up. Here and there, he corrected my way of talking, and here and there I let him. Then the editor read it over and he corrected here and there and sometimes made me hot, like when he didn’t know what a “red ass” was. This is about baseball, for the love of God, not about the English language. I think I said that to someone, and pretty soon they just went away.

  I don’t go on and on about what happened to Raul Guevara after the season because my agent, Sid, told me that’s another story and if they want to know, they should pay more. I agreed with that. No use putting water on the table if they don’t ask for it. A waitress in New York told me that one and it stuck.

  What can I tell you about the strike except what you already know? What can I tell you about guys like Bremenhaven except what you already feel about guys like Bremenhaven? But I tell you one thing, when I look back on it, that year which I am describing here was a hoot.

  Sincerely yours,

  Ryan Patrick Shawn

  P.S. Charlene made me put in my middle name. I didn’t let her see the story as it was written because she would have wanted to leave some stuff out. Never show anyone what they don’t need to see.

  1

  The thing began when Bremenhaven’s accountant showed him what he was spending in salaries to finish third in the American League East. Fifty million dollars.

  I pitched last in the last game of the season, after it was lost anyway.

  Hoak Wilson was nursing a 1-0 lead in the eighth when the White Sox decided to go on a last-ditch salary drive. After the second homer of the inning, old Hoak just stared into the darkness of the dugout, pleading with his eyes for Sparky to take him out of the game,

  Who says Sparky doesn’t have a heart? Sparky dropped a dime to the bullpen and the next thing was I was on the mound, trying to staunch the bleeding. The Chicagos were up 4 to 1 at that point and it never got any worse. Or any better.

  It was a lousy finish to a lousy season. The fans still in the park were too tired to even boo when Dave Belfry popped up to finish the thing off. Not that we would have heard them because there were too few of them to make much noise.

  After the game, I showered up and packed my stuff in a ditty bag and said good-bye to Sparky in his office and good-bye to the clubhouse man, Sam, which was an envelope with $300 in it.

  When you finish a shitty season with a shitty game, well, there’s not much sentiment left to squeeze. You pack your bag and go home and hope you’ll be invited to Florida in the spring.

  Except this was my last good-bye. I felt it in my thirty-eight-year-old bones.

  Time for Ryan Shawn to hang it up, catch the last train to Clarksville, hasta la vista.

  I had had my innings and won nearly 160 games over the years. I was planning my retirement at least three years before that last game. Auto dealer named Jack Wade in Houston was going to give me a job selling cars and promoting the firm, and it was better than a sharp stick in the eye. Besides, my girlfriend, as she then was, Charlene Cleaver, lived in Houston and whatever I was going to do, I wasn’t planning on going back home to El Paso. You ever get out of El Paso, you stay out, take my word on it.

  So I was surprised when old George came down the runway just as I was leaving and asked me to talk to him.

  George Bremenhaven, who owned the Yankees, liked to think he was a hands-on kind of owner, but the truth was he didn’t give a rat’s ass about the players. I’m not saying this with any kind of bitterness, because if you want to know the truth, the players didn’t give a shit about him either. So it surprised me to see George in the weight room, trying to banter. He even tried banter on Sam, but Sam wasn’t buying it and emphasized his distance by dumping a bunch of used towels on the floor between them.

  “I want to talk to you, Ryan,” George said to the next victim of his bonhomie mood, and I winced only a little. “Come on up to my box.”

  George was grinning at me as we went up to his box hanging over the open-air boxes below. I had never been in the owner’s box before and it struck me as crude, with a little icebox and a couple of television sets tuned to catch the action you couldn’t see just by looking out the plate-glass window down to the field. He opened the icebox and asked me if I wanted a beer and I said sure, and then he gave me a green bottle. No, it wasn’t Heineken; George was never that generous. Rolling Rock, as I recall. It must have been on sale that week.

  George said, “You know, Ryan, Sparky called you in one inning too late,”

  “Year’s been like that, George,” I said, man-to-man, using his first name. I settled on a cushioned chair that George probably smuggled out of a Holiday Inn someplace. In fact, the whole suite that was his
private box looked a lot like a lot of motel rooms I’ve been in.

  “I know the year’s been like that and I’m gonna change that,” George said.

  I studied the man while he let the silence hang there. He was drinking something in a martini glass that I supposed was a martini. He has a round sort of face, puffy, and the only sharp things on his body are his eyes and his suit. Nice suit. Bad eyes that make you feel you’re getting an IRS audit.

  There we were, the only two people left in the world, surrounded by 60,000 empty seats. Actually, it is now 57,000 and something seats, but who was counting except George? Sixty thousand seats sounds just right for a great old place like the Stadium. Nothing is as empty as Yankee Stadium after a losing game. The neighborhood is sort of crummy, but I been in crummier ballpark neighborhoods, believe me. When people get it into their minds that a neighborhood is bad, it stays bad even when it gets better. I think it was the reason the ballplayers split so fast. That and it being autumn. It had been a cool day and cooler night and my arm twinged when I was warming up. Getting old, I sipped the Rolling Rock and just waited. When you’re a relief pitcher, you learn to wait until the other guy makes a mistake. He wants to foul off twenty pitches, you let him. Just wait the son of a bitch out.

  “You speak Spanish, don’t you?” George said.

  I just stared at him. I couldn’t have been more amazed if he had just announced he was the Queen of France. I can deal with non sequiturs with the best of them, but this was more like walking into a phone booth and finding out you’re standing in the oracle at Delphi. Or finding out it’s already occupied by Superman. (Got that oracle thing out of college.)

  “Don’t you?”

  He’s got eyes like a Gila monster. Little glinty eyes that are colder than the desert floor at midnight. Or a woman’s good-bye.

  “Yeah, I speak some.”

  “You study it in school, when you went to Arizona?”

  “You come from down where I come from, you speak Spanish just to survive. I guess it’s the same the other way around. I mean, from across the river. At Ciudad El Paso.”

  “You come from El Paso,” George said. He sipped on his drink some more.

  “Yep.” I don’t really talk that way but I let out a “yep” every now and then to satisfy people’s preconceptions.

  “You going back to El Paso for the winter?”

  For the winter. This was a peculiar turn of phrase applied to a thirty-eight-year-old relief pitcher soon to begin selling Buicks and Hondas in Houston. “For the winter” sort of implied there might be spring coming and winter was just a temporary setback instead of a permanent condition. I studied the question the way we relief pitchers like to study our baseballs before we fling them.

  At this point, I didn’t know all the things I know now. I didn’t know, for instance, that George had toted up his payroll and decided on drastic action or that he had met with his old friend who was now secretary of state or that he had once slept in the Lincoln bedroom at the White House or that he had actually seen Lincoln’s ghost. None of those things.

  “You made what this year?” George said.

  I may be a dumb ball player, bet I’m not dumb enough to believe that George didn’t know exactly what I made. I thought about telling him that, bet I didn’t. I’ve seen George when he’s rattled and it isn’t pleasant.

  “I don’t remember exactly,” I said.

  “Six hundred fifty thousand,” George said.

  “I’ll take your word for it.”

  “You plan on coming back next year?”

  “You plan on inviting me?”

  “Three hundred thousand,” George said.

  Now George knew and I knew that I had an agent out there somewhere and it wasn’t seemly for an owner to start negotiating with a ball player with no one agreed except all those empty seats.

  “Take it or leave it,” George said.

  This is the new style of negotiating in the nineties, sort of like IBM firing ten thousand workers who were hired for life and calling it downsizing. One day you make a living wage and the next day you’re selling pencils. My Daddy always told me about the Great Depression and the dust storms and all of it, and I believed every word, bet we both thought at the time we were talking about the past, like talking about jousts and knights in armor and guys wearing powdered wigs. Jest goes to show you.

  “Well, I’ll have to consider it. With Sid. My agent,” I said.

  “Fuck Sid, fuck agents. I’m up to here with agents. Fuck them all,” George said. The Gila monster’s eyes flickered then. I wouldn’t have been surprised if his tongue had darted out and stabbed a fly.

  “The trouble is, George, I’m not very good at negotiating these things. I could probably do it for someone else, bet not for myself. I’m jest too personally involved.”

  “I paid fifty million dollars in payroll this season to finish third,” George said. “If I paid fifty million to be in the World Series, that would be one thing. I thought that’s what I was paying for, to be in the Series. Bet no. I paid fifty million dollars for twenty-five assholes to finish third, fucking third. New York does not stand for third. They love that shit in Chicago, fucking Cubs could finish in Triple A and they’d be standing in line to throw their money into Wrigley Field, bet I am in New York, this is New York all around you, Ryan, this is not third place, not for a fifty-million-dollar payroll. What do you think the last baseball strike was all about? We have to take control of the game before you people rein it.”

  “I just play, George, I don’t rein nothing,” I said.

  “That’s what they all do. They all play, the greedy bastards,” he screamed. “I walk in the locker room and they got their boom boxes on and they dance their watusi jitterbugs when they should be concentrating —”

  “Maybe you should get us chess boards,” I said.

  Nothing I said was getting through. He was standing now, gesturing, walking around that Motel 6 room of a box, staring out at all those empty seats like the empty stadium was the sea and he was King Lear.

  “Money! Money is raining this game! In the old days, a ball player was happy to have something to do in the summer and if he got paid for it, all the better! But not any more, no he needs BMWs and broads and Johnny Walker Black Label not Red and a fucking farm in Florida or some such godforsaken place!”

  “I live in Houston in a motel,” I said. I wasn’t being humble. I was trying to distract the bull because that little vein in his forehead was swelling up. It would have been alright if the damned thing ever burst but it didn’t, it just made everyone else miserable.

  “You’re bums, illiterate fucking bums, all of you!” George said, not looking directly at me. I suppose he meant not me personally but in the collective.

  “We finished third! Third! The New York Times, I’m surprised they still carry the box score. You know what the Daily News said this morning? No, I forget, you probably don’t read. I read. The Daily News, the rotten bastards, the News says, GEORGE BOMBS AGAIN!”

  He said it exactly that way, with capital letters, just like a headline. I just sat there, deciding whether I could take another sip of Rolling Rock before he turned to look at me. I snuck it.

  “Oh, you arrogant scum, you strike baseball, you blow the World Series even, you break little boys’ hearts for your filthy paychecks!”

  “George,” I began.

  “Shuddup, Ryan. You should talk! You had 10 saves and a 536 ERA and that sucks, Ryan, that sucking sound you hear is six hundred fifty thousand of my — MY — dollars going into your pocket for shit. For total unvarnished unpolished unimpeachable shit.”

  Well, I figured I would go out quietly, not with a bang and not with a whimper neither. George didn’t look like he was going to die of a stroke so there was no point in sticking around. I think an employee can tolerate a certain amount of abuse from a boss, but not so he’d make a habit of it. I put down the Rolling Rock and got up quietly and started for the exits. For just
a moment, I saw all those empty seats in the old place and tried to feel the way George must feel, but then I thought, fuck it. Empathy was wasted on a prick like George Bremenhaven. Never have sympathy for an owner.

  “Where you going, Ryan?”

  “Texas.”

  “Is that your answer?”

  “What was the question?”

  “Three hundred thousand.”

  “Doesn’t have a question mark at the end of it, so I figured it wasn’t a question.”

  “And that’s your answer?”

  “What was the question?”

  “You asshole, I’m offering you a one-year, last-hurrah contract for three hundred thousand dollars.”

  “Shit, you got guys on the team make three million a year for lingering on the DL list half the season,” I said.

  “Those days are over, Ryan. There’s a new reality in baseball The fans are sick and tired of paying thirty bucks a pop to watch losers shuffle off into third place.”

  “We drew pretty well till toward the end,” I said. “You got your television money. It wasn’t all expenses, George. Ball players are just one of the unavoidable costs that go with owning a major league team. They must’ve told you that at Owners’ School before you bought the Yankees.”

  He glared at me then, but he didn’t say anything. Maybe he saw I was getting personally pissed off, which is not the way I usually am. I do a professional piss-off, but that’s to scare the shit out of the batter. I wasn’t doing that now.

  When he started talking again, he started soft and low.

  “Ryan, I want to keep you. Like Ishmael. You’re going to tell everything you saw and heard and did when George Bremenhaven declared a one-man revolution and seized his team back from the bloodthirsty, bloodsucking, scum bag agents and players and unions and showed he could win the pennant on his own terms.”

  It’s true I spent three years at Arizona State before I got into the minors and I did officially major in English, although it was mostly fooling around. I knew who Ishmael was, but I didn’t know then that George was really planning something and not just spouting off. So I just opened the door of the skybox and said, “S’long, George.”