by Bill Branger
“Ryan, there isn’t a team that is going to give you a better offer.”
“Sure there is,” I said, as if I believed it.
“I need you next year,” he said.
I just looked at him.
“Six hundred thousand. But the proviso is you don’t tell anyone what you’re getting, not anyone.”
“George, my agent will know and the union will know, all kinds of people get information.”
“Not if you don’t tell them.”
“Six hundred fifty," I said.
“Six and a quarter,” he said.
I couldn’t believe it. I thought this time next week I’d be selling Buick Regals for a three-hundred-dollar-a-week draw and now the old crocodile was giving me one more ride on the merry-go-round. I thought I should call Sid and just check it out with him, but Sid hadn’t been returning my calls promptly like he did when I was twenty-nine and burning up the league with the lowest ERA in baseball. Damn, I was beginning to think like George and that was a scary thought. Fuck Sid.
“Draw the contract,” I said.
“Where will you be in the morning?” he said.
“I was gonna be in Texas,” I said.
“Fuck Texas. Texas’ll wait. And while you’re waiting, practice up on your Spanish.”
“Why?” I asked.
“Because, Ryan, I gotta have one ballplayer who speaks English,” George said.
That didn’t make any sense to me at the time. I thought George was going off the deep end again, jumping into a martini and swimming his crazy old way from rim to rim.
I wanted to just stare at him like the cold-blooded old reliever I am, but I couldn’t.
“What are you talking about, George?” I finally said.
And those Gila eyes twinkled at me and that Gila tongue darted out and stabbed a fly.
“Cuba,” he said, like that explained everything.
2
For a couple of days after that, I didn’t hear a word from George, although he’d said he’d call me as soon as the contract was ready. It’s like waiting for the check that’s always in the mail.
I called him a couple of times and got his private secretary, Miss Viola Foster. She was nice on the phone, but she said Mr. Bremenhaven was away on business in Washington. She would tell him I called; I believed her. George was just doing one of his disappearing things and it annoyed heck out of me. It also annoyed me that I was sticking around New York, taking it, because of the thought of working another year for just a $25,000 salary cut.
I even believed George was down in Washington, D.C. on business, other business, not baseball business.
The trouble was that Washington didn’t have a baseball team, and that Baltimore was the closest city in the playoffs. I watched some of the games on television at night with a six-pack of MGD close at hand. I thought about George. Every owner worth his weight in gold — and they all are, no matter how they poor-mouth —- was at one or the other playoff game. Baseball owners have a weird social life, like umpires. Owners can’t fraternize with anyone except other owners and they jump at any chance to hang out with the other guys in the Owners’ Club. Umpires stick together because they don’t fraternize with ballplayers and they need someone to eat with at night on the road.
One thought led to another while I was drinking beer and surfing through the games on television. I thought about speaking Spanish. And I thought a disturbing lot about Charlene Cleaver, who was waiting for me down in Houston.
I called her the first night after the last game of the season. She was disappointed, she said. She had made reservations for us for dinner at Tony’s and now would have to cancel them. I said for $625,000 for another ride in the Bigs, I’d make up the dinner to her.
This was the wrong thing to say. Or maybe I put it in the wrong way. George had upset me some and I let our conversation carry over to Charlene by the tone in my voice.
“I happen to know $625,000 is a lot of money,” Charlene said. Then nobody said anything for a moment. “What does Sid say?”
She talks about Sid Cohen like they are co-conspirators and I am the conspiratee. I resent the hell out of it. Charlene and I were close, but, I thought then, not that close. Same with Sid.
I have to admit here that Charlene is a prattler at times and goes off on her own tangents, which, combined with her stunning good looks, might lead some people to think there is no brain behind those pretty eyes. But there is. When we first started going together, I showed off my wallet to her, in a manner of speaking. Talked about my CDs and how I would be fixed when I retired and so forth. She set me straight on that.
I remember the first loving words out of her mouth that night. I kissed her long and deep, and she said, “Latin American funds.”
I was so intoxicated by her at the time that it took me a moment to react. “What did you say?”
“Latin American funds are returning twenty-five percent the last I looked. What do your CDs return?”
One thing led to another. One kiss led to another to an invitation to share breakfast with her at her place. And I started listening close to Charlene after that, transferring out of my CDs and into strange things like Latin American mutual funds and some gaming stocks. Damned if she wasn’t right about all that stuff I never paid much attention to.
But she wasn’t Sid Cohen. I had cut this deal for myself by myself.
I tried a silence-breaker. “Charlene —” I began.
“Anybody works for a living ‘stead of playing baseball knows what that kind of money is. I might have to work fourteen, fifteen years to see that kind of money, Ryan Patrick, so don’t high-hat me. But what does Sid say?”
“I didn’t talk to Sid.”
“Oh. I see,” she said.
“Honey, I just wanted to point out the obvious. If I was to tell you I had a chance to make twenty-five dollars an hour shoveling shit in some godforsaken place like Albuquerque, you’d give me a kiss and pack my lunch before I left. Bet I tell you I got another chance on the merry-go-round, you sound like you ain’t happy.”
“I’m not happy,” she said, stating her feelings and correcting my English in the same three-word sentence. “I miss you.”
“Hell, I miss you, honey,” I said.
“I was jest thinking about you comin’ up the drive.”
Charlene don’t have no drive. She lives in an apartment building.
“I was thinking’ it, too,” I lied.
“Was you?” Sometimes she slips like that. She went to community college, not a regular four-year place, bet she works hard to root out that East Texas way of talking.
“I was.”
When we start talking like characters out of “Li’l Abner,” it is a sign that the squall is passing.
“Isn’t that less money than you made last year?” Charlene said.
“A bit”
“Why’s that?”
“Why’s what?”
“Why’re you getting paid less?”
“I’m lucky to be paid,” I said.
“I know that,” she said. “I mean, why would he pay you again? You ain’t that good, not anymore.”
“You never complained.”
“I don’t mean about that,” she giggled.
“He don’t pay me for that,” I said, sort of sly and giggly myself.
“I miss you, honey.”
“I miss you. Couple of days here, settle this contract up, and I’ll be heading home, Charlene. Come up that driveway, you better look out, girl.”
“You been good, Ryan?”
“I been good.”
“I know you’re lying when you say it.”
“I ain’t lying, Charlene. I’m sittin’ here in my box in Fort Blessed Lee, New Jersey, dosing myself with Miller beer and taking cold showers morning and night.”
Giggles.
“I mean it, honey. You’re worth waitin’ for.”
I did mean that and maybe it showed in my voice because her tone got
cooey and soft. Actually, Charlene Cleaver was the first serious girlfriend I had had in some time.
She was very pretty, which goes without saying, but she was very smart as well. I ain’t half-dumb, so I know smart. She studied to be a nutritionist at Houston West Community, said nutrition was a growth field in the years to come. Looks like she was right if you half-read USA Today most mornings, all that stuff about B’s and C’s and E’s and bulk fiber, which is one of my favorites. She had a good job with Rice University Hospital working on improving the diet habits of Texans, which is a lifetime job in itself. It’s a lot like selling grizzly bears on a low-fat salad diet when they would much rather chomp on hikers and campers.
Part of my loving her was letting her work on me. I still drank beer when watching the ball games. Every now and then, I fell over a rack of ribs, too, but I also partook of at least six servings daily of vegetables and fruit, and there were whole parts of weeks passing without me taking in any animal meat at all, not even a cheeseburger.
We talked some cuddly talk that carried some explicit sexual language and hung up at last telling each other we loved each other and what we were going to do to each other when we saw each other again.
Charlene is tall and leggy, but that doesn’t stop her from wearing slacks most of the time when you know her bare legs would send half of Houston into a catatonic state. I admire her for that. Also for letting me see her legs from time to time. And knowing all that shit about NAFTA and its effects on Latin American mutual funds. If you ask me, there is far too much book-judging by covers, especially when it comes to women. The cover is so pretty, you forget the words inside.
I tried Sid, my agent, on the second day, partly because when Charlene makes an offhand hint the way she did about Sid, it works on me like an itch. She wanted me to talk to Sid and it was probably a good idea. But his office said he was in Hawaii with his newest best buddy, a quarterback named Bret Branson.
Bret Branson. Why is it that football quarterbacks all have these soft and pretty names that make ugly-named linemen want to chew them up? It’s like taunting them.
I left my number with Sid’s service, but I figured Sid would get the message and think I was calling him about shopping me around and he wasn’t ready yet to talk to me about how I was unsalable. The hell with him.
On the third day, when Baltimore beat the Angels for a second time, George dumped Tommy Tradup. I knew he must have loved it because of the way he did it. Called Tommy into his office at the Stadium and said he wasn’t going to even niggle about a new contract, that Tommy was history with the Yankees.
You have to understand something about baseball. For a player of Tommy’s caliber — if you trade him, you trade him for someone else. Tommy hit 321 that year with 34 homers and 102 ribbies. This is a solid performer and George was letting him go, not even waiting for the winter trades.
George is not a dope. He is mean, vindictive, and a complete asshole, but those are qualities shared by most of the club owners. Howsoever, George was dumping a salary and it didn’t make any sense unless there was a lot more going on that I didn’t understand.
While I was hanging around that week, waiting for George to call me with the contract, I did my usual sightseeing.
I have a studio apartment in Fort Lee, New Jersey, just across the Hudson River from Manhattan. It’s a nice view, of the city and the prices there are about half, so I keep the studio year-round, I was not going to renew the lease that fall, but that changed when George offered me another year at the Dance.
I’ve got a Buick Park Avenue only four years old that Jack Wade sold me down in Houston, and I park it in the open lot of the Holiday Inn up the street from my building. They never check the lot to see who’s parked there, so it doesn’t cost me anything. One nice morning, I drove across the George Washington Bridge into the city and down the West Side Highway to Midtown.
Maybe it’s my Texas eye and appreciation for absurdity, but there are things to love about that city. Like the West Side Highway, which used to go downtown, that now stops at Midtown because the rest of it collapsed a few years ago and everyone thought it would be a good idea not to rebuild it. So they didn’t and the traffic just funnels into the city at 56th Street through this gauntlet of black men wielding spray bottles, towels, and window sponges. They insist on washing your car windshield whether you want them to or not, sometimes even when it’s raining. This is car washing through intimidation and it annoys the suburbanites backed up at the lights off the West Side Highway. The car washers usually give me a pass because I got Texas plates and Texas people are crazy about their cars and about not wanting strangers to lay hands on their windshields.
I park in a pay garage on 56th Street. It costs more to park in Manhattan for a day than it does to rent a room at the Motel 6 in Amarillo, which tells you something about both places. After I park the car, I get this spring in my step and go out on the sidewalk to see the parade. It is held every day of the year. I jest wander all over that island, watching the parade. It steps off with a bang on Mondays and it’s dried-up, pale-faced, and crushed in the shoulders by Friday afternoons. Never saw people work so hard as New Yorkers. It makes me tired to watch them, bet it’s a pleasant kind of tired, the way you get when you were a kid in summer and spent the whole day jumping in the swimming hole with your buddies, getting burned deep to a lobster shade and, after everyone is called home, just falling asleep under cool sheets, dreaming little fever dreams. I think about things like that, watching people running around working so hard.
You might think a hick like me goes to country-western bars or wears cowboy boots on Broadway. True, I do wear boots in Texas, bet when in Rome, dress in togas. I leave it to the New York fellas to wear snakeskin boots under their three-piece suits and to top it off with black cowboy hats. I generally wear a nice little corduroy sports coat with leather on the elbows. You might mistake me for a college professor. Charlene says it is the expression I wear when I’m watching the parade that makes me look like a college teacher she once had, I think it was in modern American literature.
“What expression?” I asked her once.
“Bemusement. Not unfriendly, just sort of amused and uncomprehending at the same time,” she said.
“You mean I don’t get it?”
“I mean more like no one else gets it, bet that’s all right, you’re just there to see the show,” she said. When she talks like that, she gets very thoughtful and still. It’s like she’s seeing something else when she says it, not me listening to her.
I walked all around the town and drank a couple of MGDs and went back to get my car out of the garage and drove uptown to the GW Bridge jest before rush hour. It was a cool day and the lights were all lit on the Palisades on the New Jersey side.
When I got back to my little apartment, I saw the message machine was lit. I rolled the tape and the only one on it was George.
“Where the hell are you, Ryan? You suddenly pulling a doublecross on me? I thought we had a contract worked out, you son of a bitch, what am I doing here with paper in my hand, what am I, chopped liver?”
With that, the recording recorded a slam as in a phone being abused. Here I’ve been hanging around for three days and he decides to call me when I’m hanging out in Manhattan. Fuck him.
Baltimore won the third game and advanced to the next round of the playoffs that night. I saw it on my 25-inch Mitsubishi. I turned in at eleven and George called me at one.
“So what’s going on, you trying to cut another deal for yourself?”
I mumbled. It’s what I do at one in the morning.
“You drunk, Ryan?”
“Are you, George? It’s one o’clock.”
“Why didn’t you call me?”
“Miss Foster’ll tell you I called you twice, looking for my contract. I decided to take the afternoon off. Drove over to Manhattan and wandered around for a while.”
“You were here? In the city? When I was here trying to reach you?”
His questions had a rising tone as though I lived in Venezuela and he was my best buddy and I had passed through New York without giving Mm a call. George gets away with his crazy act, of course, because he’s rich.
I decided not to say anything. After a moment of silence, George continued in a less-aggrieved tone of voice.
“I want to see you tomorrow morning in my office at ten.”
“You got my contract, George?”
“We can talk,” George said.
“What does that mean, George?”
“We can talk. You’re awfully anxious about that contract, Ryan.”
“George, you offer me a contract for one year and I take it. So I’m hanging around now because you wanted me to hang around and I now get the feeling maybe we’re not talking about a contract.”
“What makes you think that?”
“George, I’ve got a mind to get in my car around dawn and just aim it for Texas,” I said.
“Why? What have I said to make you do a thing like that? It’s your fucking agent, Sid, that son of a bitch is trying to torpedo —”
“George, I haven’t talked to Sid.”
“Then what is it?”
“It’s you, George. It’s one in the morning, George.”
“Look, put Texas on hold until tomorrow at ten. In my office.”
“In the ballpark.”
“No, no, no. My office on Park.”
“You gonna have the contract?”
“Trust me,” George said. “And nighty-night.”
He hung up and left me sitting there, wide awake. 1:21 A.M. I got up and went to the icebox and took out a can of Miller Genuine Draft beer and opened it. I took the beer to the window. It was only a studio, bet there was a sort of half-ass view of Manhattan and the bridge and the river. I do some of my best thinking there, looking at the city.
Sixteen years in the Bigs was a good career. The only way I’d see Cooperstown was to buy a bus ticket, bet, what the hell, I was a major leaguer and there were a lot of boys who’d played baseball and never got as far as Single A in the minors. I had a major league pension coming and wasn’t a spendthrift, so a lot of money was in mutual funds and such. I wouldn’t starve even if it turned out I couldn’t sell Buicks. Charlene was talking about us opening up a healthy food fast-food restaurant, although I didn’t know that most of Texas was ready for that just yet. We might jest have to go to Santa Fe on that one and sell tofu to the movie stars buying up New Mexico.