The New York

by Bill Branger

  “I gave it a lot of careful thought on the plane. I even keyboarded myself’ a few notes. What you’re going to do is say you had no idea that George worked out a secret deal to trade off the whole team and import Cubans and that you want to resign, but that you have signed a valid contract and you can’t back out on it. You know, blah blah, your word is your bond and blah blah blah,” Sid began.

  “But that isn’t the way it was,” I said.

  Sid looked up at me sharp across his salad. “Who am I talking to? Diogenes?"

  “Well, for one thing, there was Sam the equipment man. A couple of days after the season was over, George brought him into the office and had him speak Spanish at me, to see if I spoke Spanish.”

  “You’re telling me George told him what was going on?”

  “No, I don’t think so. George just told him to try out my Spanish.”

  “So?”

  “So what if Sam says anything about that?”

  “Why would he?”

  “Same reason people go on the Phil Donahue show, to make fools of themselves just to get on the TV.”

  “I know Phil Donahue and I know he doesn’t want to put a Mexican equipment man on his show. Unless he wears a dress in the locker room.”

  “Well —”

  “Look. Don’t tell me Sam wears a dress in the locker room, I would have heard. George wanted to know if you spoke Spanish. You pass his test. You ask him why. He says, I can’t tell you. He says, sign a contract. You sign a contract. Adios. The next thing you know, George tells you to go to L.A. You go to L.A. — and, I might add, you don’t even give me the courtesy of a phone call to tell me you’re in town — and the next thing you know, George is announcing the end of baseball as we know it and implying that you’re part of the conspiracy. Now, that’s not true.”

  “That’s sort of not true.”

  “It’s not true for reasons of clarification.”

  “All right, it’s sort of not true for that reason.”

  “Not sort of. We’ve got to get ‘sort of out of your vocabulary if you ever are going to do anything. I’ll hold a press conference Thursday, after I meet with the Cubs tomorrow. We’ll do it in New York. You’ll stand up and —”

  “I ain’t ever gonna do no press conference again.”

  “That’s right. I forgot. You’re terrible. All right. We’ll issue a press release and I’ll do the press conference and say you are in seclusion with your family.”

  “I don’t have no family left, not anywhere. Except for Uncle Dave in the Panhandle, he’s three bricks shy of a load. I’m not sure he wasn’t adopted by my grandfather, because they never spoke about where he come from.”

  “It’s an expression, Ryan, don’t get tedious with me. Being % seclusion with your family’ means you’re going through the grieving process, and the press likes that, believe me. It shows you’re human even if you’re a Commie lover and a beanball pitcher.”

  “I told you about beaning that guy in Kansas City, he was practically hanging over the plate with that goofy pumpkin head of his.”

  Sid held up his forkful of lettuce. “Joke, Ryan. Chill out.”

  “I can’t chill out when that son of a bitch has made me a goat.”

  “Oh, George? He hasn’t managed to do that yet. What we have to do is damage control. And then we go back into the burned-out hulk and do damage assessment.”

  “I sound like a building.”

  “It’s like that. And I’m the fireman petting out the fire.”

  “Then what?”

  “We wait on the pleasure of the Yankees. On George, On whether this mild protest from Miami goes into a full court press and the government backs down and revokes the permits for the Cubanos. In which case, George is holding a sack of shit. This is a gamble on George’s part, Ryan, not a done deal. I made a couple of calls to people inside the Beltway, The Democrats want to make the bold move, bet they would jest as soon have a Republican creep do it for them if they can get the eventual credit. An old Democratic trick is to get Republicans to do their foreign policy work for them. Nixon in China, Bush saving the oil states. If it terns south, they cut loose and George will have no payroll, bet also no team. Unless you can pitch and catch at the same time.”

  “What about the other owners?”

  “If this works, George is a genius, he’s their hero, the first guy to seriously show how to stomp”“ the player’s union since the strike. If it doesn’t work, they force him to sell the franchise to the next sucker in line. They are actively neutral, believe me, bet they are secretly cheering for George.”

  Sid cut another piece of lettuce. Northern salads have lots of lettuce, a reason it’s so hard to order a salad seriously.

  “The Cubans in Miami are a smaller problem. Everyone hates everyone else in Miami — it’s what holds the city together. They’re like lobsters in a pot. Every time one climbs up to get out the other lobsters pull him back in. The Haitians hate the Cubans, they all hate the Anglos, naturally everyone hates the Jews, it’s a mess. Which can work to the Administration’s advantage. It’s unlikely the Cubans are going to burn down the city, since they seem to own so much of it. The Haitians might be confused enough to riot, but who cares, Haitians are always rioting. Besides, they speak French. The Miami contingent is a wild card but a small one.”

  “What about the player’s union?”

  “Well, I’m going to try to get you in their good graces again — you know, kiss and make up and stand by your man. What’s done is done insofar as getting rid of the old lineup…. This salad sucks, you know that?”

  “I ordered steak.”

  “It’ll kill you.”

  “I feel self-destructive.”

  “Don’t let me down.”

  “I won’t, Sid.”

  “You did once.”

  “I won’t, Sid “

  “The union can be made to see it’s getting no sympathy going after you, they have to keep their focus on George. The solution is pretty simple.”

  “Solution?”

  “George wants to break the union, demolish the agents, end arbitration, et cetera, all the things the owners always want. Remember the Big Strike. And he wants to do it in the name of international peace and brotherhood, which is a neat trick.”

  “So what’s the solution, Sid?” I said again.

  Sid put down his fork and covered the remains of his salad with a red napkin. I thought he might say a prayer over the departed, but he said something else.

  “Get rid of George.”

  And he was smiling.

  13

  I was right about one or two things that would happen next, but so was George.

  Sid Cohen issued a statement Wednesday that made me a victim of management greed and a good guy promoting international healing. It was good enough for a lot of papers that weren’t necessarily mad at me — or angry, as Charlene would say — but were distracted at first by George.

  I was right about the editorials. The liberal papers weighed in with editorials endorsing the combination of baseball and the State Department to end squabbling in the Caribbean, and even the New York Times picked up George’s line about baseball ending the cold war. I was also right that it wouldn’t matter on the sports pages of the selfsame newspapers, where everyone was still upset. A columnist in the New York Times sports section practically had a stroke in print about a field full of Castro Cubans, as if politics had anything to do with baseball. Only everything.

  Next day, Fidel Castro made a six-hour speech in Havana and introduced every ball player who would be going to New York. It was covered by CNN and C^Span.

  I thought the New York Post and the Daily News got it right, though. On the same day, both papers had as their headlines the same words: NEW YORK YANQUIS!

  You couldn’t get those papers in Chicago, but Sid sent them to me by Federal Express. George was up to his ass in alligators for a few weeks while the season ticket cancellations came in. One lawyer filed
a class action suit on behalf of season ticket holders who felt cheated by the shoddiness of the product George was going to be putting on the field next season. What clients want to go out and see the Havana Nine on the field in the House That Ruth Built?

  It was a mistake on their part. George went on public television and denounced the unconscious racism of the fans who wouldn’t turn out to see Latino ball players. He denounced the union for the same reason. This put both groups in a box, even though everyone knew that George was about as unconsciously racist as they came. In a way, I admired his using political correctness to lie his way out of something that was so obvious, though I didn’t let it blind me into admiring the son of a bitch in general, just in particular.

  New York Yanquis. Damn. The people I admire in the print media are the guys who write the headlines.

  I could even see George restitching the uniforms with that name, Yanquis, He’s a bastard, but he’s got a stubborn streak in him. This was about money to him, at least it was at first. But maybe after he saw Lincoln’s ghost that night in the White House and Lincoln gave him the thumbs up on the way to the bathroom for a midnight tinkle, maybe he — George, not Abe — started believing his own lies.

  I couldn’t blow the whistle on George without blowing the whistle on myself, and getting fired in the process. So 1 said nothing.

  After a week of hiding out in Chicago — I spent a couple of hilarious nights on the dark side of town with Deke and company — I went back down to Houston. It was all right. Everyone had lost interest in me for the time being. It was January, and Charlene and I had missed Christmas. Texas A&M missed another bowl bid. San Francisco was set to go to the Super Bowl in New Orleans at the end of the month, so you might say football was over.

  Missing Christmas. At least /had. She’d spent Christmas at her mama’s and baked cookies. I believed it, but I couldn’t see it, exactly. Besides, the cookies were all eaten up. I took her to Tony’s again, but she wouldn’t let me come up to her apartment. We were strained, you might say.

  And then, January 14th it was, this guy shows up on my doorstep at the Longhorn Arms with George.

  This guy was a bean pole on which was hanging a gray suit. George was a fatty in a blue suit. They were a pair, though, and I counted my fingers after we shook hands.

  There are two places to sit down in my room. On the bed or on the single chair by the credenza where I eat breakfast. The gray suit didn’t sit down, but George flopped on the bed like he lived there.

  George looked around the room and then fingered the material of the bedspread. He looked at me. “This is a dump, Ryan.”

  “Just a room,” I said.

  “Barely,” George replied. “Where do you keep all your money? In shoeboxes?”

  I didn’t say a thing.

  George said, “1 got something for you to do.”

  “What’s that, George? Last time you had something for me to do,1 was tied to a can.”

  “You know you don’t even have a passport?”

  Another strange thing to say. I replied by saying nothing. I sat on the straight chair backward, legs spraddled and resting my arms on the back.

  “Grown man, thirty-eight years old, doesn’t have a passport?”

  “I never had need for one,” I said.

  “All the money you’ve made, you never wanted to see another country?”

  “Been in Toronto. Ciudad Juarez, As far as I wanted to go,” I said.

  “Well, Ryan. Well.” He seemed to be searching for words, but this was a feint.

  “That was a dirty trick you pulled with your slime-bucket agent Sid Cohen, saying I fooled you. I never fooled you.”

  “Is that right?”

  “I could let hard times be hard times, but I’m not a hard guy. I’m a guy trying to do what my country needs me to do. Trying to do the right thing for a lot of poor spies who just want a chance to play the American game.”

  “George, you just want to cut the payroll and cheap your way to a pennant.”

  “That’s American, isn’t it?”

  He had me there.

  “Ryan, Mr. Baxter here is with the State Department. He arranged a passport for you.” He pointed at the bean pole.

  “Why?”

  “For Cuba, of course.”

  “I’m not going to Cuba.”

  “Ryan, someone has to evaluate the team that Señor Fidel picked out for me.”

  “This wasn’t no part of the deal,” I said.

  “The deal is you’re my employee,” he said.

  “I ain’t never been to Cuba.”

  “No. They require a passport. You never had one before. Mr. Baxter got you one.”

  I admit 1 have a reverence for government objects. Saw the Constitution once under glass. That was one. Went down to D.C. for a day trip when we were playing the Orioles up the road. Saw the Lincoln Memorial, that was something. Couldn’t make sense of the Washington Monument, though. Got there too late for the White House tour. But I saw the Constitution.

  The dollar bill. That’s another thing that looks government to me. And important. And this passport, with its blue cover and seal and all, and inside, a picture of me that had a seal across it to make me official — it was like a deputy sheriff’s badge. I just looked at it and all the blank pages that followed it. It was a beautiful thing and made me proud of myself. Then I realized something: I still didn’t want to go to Cuba.

  “I don’t wanna go.”

  “I don’t want a pig in the poke. Neither does the government,” George said. “We want you to evaluate the players and if you turn thumbs down on someone, he doesn’t get to go to New York.”

  “I'm no scout.”

  “Not yet,” George said.

  That was a teaser. Charlene said I had no future left in baseball. But what if it was known that I scouted this team and it turned out well?

  Well?

  I started to calculate. If it turned out well, I could parlay this into something the year after next, maybe shop around to a decent club that would forget I betrayed the whole baseball world by carting in a bunch of wetbacks from Cuba. I realized I was even starting to think the way Charlene and George talked, but as I say, when in Rome. It made you wonder if there was ever a time when you weren’t in one Rome or another, wearing that toga and pretending you’d go back home and put on regular cowboy boots someday when the toga days were over.

  “This is over and above what we were talking about, when I signed the contract,” I said.

  “No it isn’t,” George said,

  I just sat there, staring at him. Mr. Baxter looked uncomfortable in the room.

  “You want a can of beer?” I said in general.

  Baxter shook his head. George said, “You have any vodka?”

  “No, George. Just beer.”

  “I haven’t had a beer in twenty-five years,” he said.

  “You want one?”

  “No. It bloats me.”

  I just looked at him. Then I got up and went to the icebox and pulled out a can of Miller’s and popped the tab. It tasted cold and I made a slurping-burping sound with the swallow. I went back to the straight chair and sat on it the wrong way again.

  “You always drink in the morning?” George said.

  “You were the one wanted vodka,” I said.

  “You got to take care of yourself.”

  “George, how much you want to give me to be your scout?”

  “I don’t have to give you anything, you’re already on the payroll.”

  “To play baseball.”

  “Five thousand dollars. And your expenses,”

  “Twenty-five thousand. Brings me back to par.”

  “You greedy cocksucker, I can get someone else to look at the team in Cuba.”

  “You oughta, then.”

  “Look, I thought we were in this together.”

  “You keep reminding me that I’m the Indian and you’re the chief. I like to keep it that way.”

&nbs
p; “Are you and that son of a bitch Sid Cohen cooking up something else?”

  “George, you wanted me to go to L.A. for the winter meetings and I did and you sandbagged me right in front of the nation’s medías. I’m already thinking that twenty-five thousand more is too little for whatever is going to happen. If I go down there and bring the team back and they stink up the Stadium, you’ll put the blame on me.”

  “Would I do that?”

  Silence. We both knew the answer.

  “Ten thousand,” he said.

  I shook my head.

  “I thought you told me once you’re no good dealing for yourself.”

  “I’m getting better. The more time I spend with you, the better I get.”

  “You are screwing up a beautiful deal. We’re two weeks from spring training and I got to get moving,” George said.

  “Thirty-five thousand. Now that I think about it, this is going to be a lot of trouble for very little money for me.”

  “No, no, no. You said twenty-five thousand.”

  And that was that. We made the deal right there and George signed an agreement and Mr. Baxter put down his signature as a witness, though I could see he didn’t want to. The contract was written on the stationery of the Longhorn Arms, by hand, but my writing is very neat and legible because I went to the Catholic school in El Paso and the nuns were insane on the subject of handwriting.

  “Now give me some expenses,” I said.

  George peeled ten hundred-dollar bills off his roll. His roll is big enough to have a custom clip holding it together. In the middle of the clip is a diamond, I guess in case George gets down to his last few hundred and he needs to pawn it,

  “A thousand dollars?”

  “And your airline tickets. Mr. Baxter?”

  Here was an employee of the State Department and he was doing major lackey work already for George. They had probably only been together for a couple of hours. George certainly has his way with retainers. Baxter gave me the tickets and George said, “You only need a couple of days in Havana. Put them through a camp, see how. they handle things. Then call me in New York and bring ‘em down to Sarasota through Mexico City and get this show on the road.“