The New York

by Bill Branger

  Major league fighting is not like hockey in that no one ever gets hurt, unless it’s by accident. Flaherty threw out Tio and the Sox second baseman and me. That left it for Sam to interpret for Sparky. I don’t know what Sam said to Sparky, but it wasn’t much good. We came out on the losing end, but the Sox wouldn’t let it go, they were yelling insults at us all the way off the field. Orestes wanted to go back and fight, but I shoved him hard into the tunnel and told him no one paid extra for a fight, this wasn’t hockey. They were teaching the Cubanos a thing or two, the fucking Sox sons of bitches. Nothing personal except it was all personal. Even the Panamanian shortstop on the Sox joined in on dogging the Cubans.

  The Cubans got their dander up at last and took it out on the Indians, who came over to play us a friendly one in the afternoon.

  The Cleveland tribe was just its usual lackadaisical self with it being so early in spring training and them thinking that in a few short weeks they would be freezing their cookies off up in northern Ohio,

  Raul came up in the first inning because I had him batting number three. I say “I” because I was working through Sparky, who deeply resented ending up his career as chief cook and bottle washer to a bench of Communist foreigners. He got himself in such a funk that he refused to talk to anyone except me. And he only talked to me to complain about what George had done to him. Sparky was becoming even more of a pain in the ass than he usually was.

  Raul took a strike and looked insulted and complained to the umpire. The ump didn’t speak Spanish and Raul didn’t speak English but the ump got the gist of it and warned him. He said it loud, the way you have to talk to foreigners.

  “You wanna get thrown outta this game, Commie?”

  Now that was unfair. I said to Sparky, “You gotta go out and bitch for Raul”

  “Raul?”

  “The kid at the plate.”

  “I thought that one was Orestes.”

  “Orestes bats eighth.”

  “I can’t keep these assholes straight.”

  Strike two. Raul just glared at the umpire this time.

  The next one was high and dry. Raul reared back and whipped his wrists and the bat came around faster than a chopper blade. Splat. I told you about that sound a home run makes when it’s clean? It made that sound.

  The ball tore a line through the middle of the infield and the pitcher saved his own life by hugging the dirt. Ever see a sweet liner about six feet off the ground just blazing ahead? The ball just soared from there, like it was launched from a catapult. Just kept climbing into that lazy, hazy Florida sunshine sky. The center fielder ran back to the fence for exercise because everyone in the place knew where that ball was going.

  Raul, the crazy son of a bitch, dogged the Cleveland pitcher, barely trotting around the bases, practically walking. And he wasn’t looking at the ball, just staring at the pitcher, putting the sign on him.

  I want to skip ahead now to the next time Raul came up. Same pitcher, same game. This time he took a tumble in the dirt, which is normal for a first pitch after giving up a home run the last time. Just routine meanness. Then Raul spit — first time I seen him spit — and waited. Didn’t take a practice swing or nothing. Just waited. The pitcher — it was Sanderson — did a big windup, all arms and legs, and laid it down a little too low. Raul swung and popped a line down the first base side. He rounded first when any fool could see he only had a blazing single. But he didn’t stop and didn’t listen and the right fielder grabbed the ball on the second hop and flung it into second where the second baseman was waiting.

  He shouldn’t have been.

  Raul slid into second about the time the ball got there and about the same moment that Raul’s spikes tore a chunk out of the second baseman’s calf. He went down with a yowl and dropped the ball and then all hell broke loose.

  The shortstop for Cleveland was offended by the slide and told Raul he was a dirty Communist cocksucker but, again, he wasted it because it was in English.

  Raul grinned at him, and at the second baseman writhing around the vicinity of the bag, and that was the end of that.

  The shortstop charged him and the umpire backed off so that he could more clearly assess the carnage to come. As is the rule of baseball, any fight must immediately be joined by everyone on both teams. I looked out and it seemed a long way to second. I try never to be the first guy to pile on because punches are still being thrown at that point. I like to jog to a fight in a nonchalant way and find someone easy at the outside of the fray to jump on.

  I turned and saw Sparky just sitting there and I said something like “Hey, Sparky, let’s go fight.”

  Sparky just looked at me. “Fuck those greasers, I ain’t fighting for them.”

  Well, the old rah-rah spirit had to be upheld so I upheld it myself by trotting out to the infield just as Raul and the shortstop had disappeared under a pile of bodies.

  The ugly thing was that the Cubans didn’t seem to understand the rules of combat. They thought a fight was really a fight.

  They were kicking, gouging, and biting up a storm, and the home plate ump, Bill Donnelly, shouted to me, “Somebody is gonna get seriously hurt out of this.”

  So I started shouting in Spanish.

  — Stop fighting, stop it!

  Nada.

  — The police have machine guns!

  That started slowing it.

  — They are going to kill everyone!

  It was still rolling but calming a bit.

  — Heads down, they’re getting ready to shoot!

  Well, sanity more or less got the upper hand and when the bodies were cleared up, nobody was really that badly hurt except the Cleveland backup catcher, who got a finger in his eye. Everyone got thrown out of the game, of course, and letters were sent to the league office and the newspapers made too much of a fuss about it. But the reaction, I saw, was already setting in. Say what you want bad about Americans, they hate being seen as unfair and the way the other teams were dogging the Cuban kids, well, it just wasn’t baseball. There was even an editorial about this in the Miami Herald and ! thought it augured good for us. After all, the Cuban kids couldn’t help it if Doctor Castro and George Bremenhaven were cooking up secret deals —- they were just kids who wanted to play ball, and what was more American than that?

  The whole time, George pulled his disappearing act. Never made a show.

  Spring training was not pleasant the way it usually is. The crowd was big at games, but it was a quiet crowd, full of curious people who had never seen a Cuban play baseball before. The park holds seven, eight thousand and they must have been uncomfortable, sitting on their hands for nine innings at a stretch. The other teams had at least stopped putting this thing on a nuclear threat basis. We were all in Florida just to play ball and get tan and not overexert ourselves. Every team had a hothead or two, and some of the Cuban kids got regular baseball slurs, but the other players saw that this thing was not the missile crisis. They resented the Cubans as scabs, but they had come to play ball.

  The quiet crowds, though, that got to me. The people paid their money and bought tickets and went through the metal detectors — the FBI guys insisted on that — but then they just sat on their hands. I hoped it wasn’t going to be that way all year,

  I told all this to Charlene when I called her at night. She was still in the habit of being out some nights, but I was learning that Charlene was not going to be anybody’s little housewife and was coming and going as she pleased. But when we talked, it was real pleasant. I didn’t tell her what Castro said to me, but I did tell her he smelled like Old Spice. That made her get the giggles. She has a nice, deep-in-the-throat giggle that has appreciation for your wit written all over it, I counted myself a lucky man in that, at least.

  The cops arrested a half-dozen Miami Cuban exiles one night when they staged a demonstration in the lobby of our hotel, but I didn’t pay any attention to that and neither did anyone else. The Cubans on the Yankees were getting to be old hat. The onl
y one who was clearly destined to get ink in the future was Raul.

  Damn. Arrogant son of a bitch though he was, he could hit a ball. Not just home runs but singles and doubles and triples and liners and towering drives. The man seemed determined never to let an appearance at the plate pass that he didn’t whack into the ball. Throw outside the zone and he’d reach across the plate with those long arms and just flick that ball over the second baseman’s head into center, bouncing fifty feet in front of the outfielder. Whack, whack, whack. I hate to say it was a pleasure to watch him hit, but it was.

  The real thorn in my side was Romero, Castro’s spy and the designated chaperone. He counted all the time. He counted the kids on the bus to the park and counted them on the bus on the way back. He counted them in their rooms. He had a room at the end of the hall and his light was always on and his door was always open. Little fucking bean counter. I tried to talk to him one time and it was no go. Then, when the agent for the player’s association came by, I tried to explain to the players they had to join the union. They said OK. The rep said OK, Romero didn’t get it.

  “You call yourself a Communist and you ain’t gonna let them join the union? What kind of a Communist are you?” I said in plain English.

  Romero just glared at me with lazy, bad eyes.

  The players’ rep was Bill Ofmeyer from headquarters. He said, “Whaddaya mean, Communists? We aren’t Communists.”

  “I know you ain’t Communists, I was just making a point with Castro’s toady here. Hey, Romero, you want Castro to get the dog for sending in scabs to break the union?”

  Romero didn’t understand this at all so I tried again in more formal Spanish.

  — Señor, I was told nothing about this (Romero said).

  — Fine, fine, I’ll handle it.

  I turned to Ofmeyer and said, “Whadda they gotta do?”

  “Sign up,” he said.

  I personally took the papers around to the boys and made them sign. I said they had to sign to play. Señor Romero watched this and made out that he was reading the form, but he couldn’t read English any better than I could read Spanish. He said he would have to call El Supremo. I said he could call his Aunt Tillie, they’d still had to sign with the union. In the end, they did.

  I did get together one night with Tommy Tradup and we became semi-hilarious in the bar at my hotel. The team stays at the Palm Aire Hotel, which is nice digs and has a nice little bar. More important, the Cuban kids didn’t drink there because it cost too much. Instead, they bought six-packs and drank in their rooms and watched the Spanish station out of Miami.

  I was never close to Tommy when we were teammates, but we did hoist a few from time to time because when you’re on a long road trip, even teammates can substitute for friends. This night was one of those times, and Tommy didn’t tern mean on me until he’d had his sixth stinger.

  “Your new friend, Raul, he’s an uppity spic bastard, isn’t he?” Tommy said.

  “No more than you, hoss. All you hitters got the disease. All the great ones,” I added, stroking him down the way you do a horse.

  “That cunt is gonna find out that we play the game different here,” Tommy said. He sneered. He was a mean drunk. I had forgotten that. I should have been counting his stingers for him.

  “Well, I’m sure hell learn. He’s just a rook, Tommy.”

  “You, you fuckin’ traitor, I expect you to say that,”

  “Now, hold on, Tommy. You ask me to have a beer with you and then you insult me. You don’t wanna do that.” I said this calm, looking down the dark bar at the bartender, wishing I was back in my room. I didn’t need this shit.

  “You fuckin’ rummy pitcher, you suck George’s cock and whatcha do now, the same for that cunt?”

  See, when a drunk gets mean, he swears and the words seem to lose their impact through the alcoholic haze, so they just pile them on, one after another, much like a baseball brawl. After a while, words fail them and that’s when the bottles start flying. I wasn’t in a flying mood myself and I started to look at my watch as though time meant something to me.

  “I gotta run, Tommy,” I said.

  “Fuck that, stay for another drink,” he said.

  “Can’t. Got to call my girl.”

  “Aw, you ain’t got a girl, you just sucking cock these days.”

  “Tommy, don’t be saying things you don’t mean.”

  “I do mean them,” he said.

  “Then don’t say them anyway.”

  “Oh, yeah, You wanna stop me saying things I don’t mean?”

  This is the moment when Glint Eastwood gets that squinty tic in his eye or John Wayne hauls back and the fight commences. Except I am not in a movie and I am neither of those guys.

  “Grow up,” I said and turned.

  He conked me on the back of my head with my own empty beer bottle. The bottle did not break, thank goodness. But it hurt like hell so I turned around, as though he had tapped me on the shoulder.

  He still held the bottle by the neck.

  “Put the bottle down, Tommy.”

  He dropped it on the bar and it broke, This got the bartender’s attention and he edged down toward our end. (Where was he a couple of minutes earlier?)

  “You got trouble, take it out of here,” he said.

  Tommy said, “Go fuck yourself, monkeyface.”

  I didn’t say a thing. I just turned and started out of the lounge. Tommy held on to the bar for the good reason that he needed to, but I could hear him all the way into the lobby.

  “You lie down with Cubans, you wake up with fleas. Remember that, you son of a bitch!”

  It made about as much sense as anything did.

  16

  We escaped from the Grapefruit League with an 11 and 14 record, which was fairly miserable.

  The New York sports media is as vicious as they come and they bared their collective teeth at the sorry lot of es as we descended the American Airlines charter at LaGeardia. The team bus was waiting. I was glad to see it still spelled Yankees the regular way. Microphones cluttered the arrivals area inside the terminal, bet not for es. They were commandeered by our supreme leader, George himself, finally ducking out of hiding.

  The Cubans dutifully marched aboard the bus, bet I opted for a cab. I told the guy the address in Fort Lee and he grimaced and cursed and said it would cost me $40 and it was a trip out of his way and all the blah-blah I hear every time I take a cab to Fort Lee.

  I wanted to get home in the worst way. I wanted to see if the drive-away car service demon had delivered my car without denting it or stealing the lighter. I wanted to tern on the TV jest to hear some more English. The bilingual thing was giving me a headache every day.

  Mostly, I jest wanted to get away from baseball. It was the first time in my life I was beginning to feel like that, and it bothered me. One-hundred-sixty-two games with these kids who now had about twelve words of English between them — and one of those was cerveza, which isn’t English to begin with. It wasn’t that they couldn’t learn English. Some were actually smart. It was that they refused to. If Mexicans had been that arrogant, they’d still be living on the wrong side of the Rio Grande to this day and we wouldn’t have any cooks in our Italian restaurants.

  There was a dent in the right front fender, bet the lighter was still in its slot. The anonymous kid who had driven the car up from Texas had parked it in the pay lot of the apartment building. I’d move the car later. I was beat.

  There was a plastic garbage bag fell of mail accumulated over the winter. I took it along with my bags into the elevator.

  It was good to be home, even if home was just a studio in a high-rise on the Hudson River looking over at Manhattan.

  The beer I left in the icebox was still there and I had one and just sat in my armchair with my feet up on the windowsill and looked at the city. It was late on an April afternoon and the light was fine, angling low behind me and making the city shine,

  I started thinking about somet
hing and stopped when I realized I was thinking in Spanish. I never realized before what a straggle two languages were when you were working with people in another language. Made me wonder how those immigrants managed to hold up while straggling to make a living.

  The phone rang.

  I answered on the third ring.

  “You son of a bitch, what are you trying to pull on me now? I was at the airport.”

  “I saw you, George. I thought you had matters well in hand.”

  “You son of a bitch, I was going to introduce you “

  “I figured that. That’s why I’m here now.”

  “I give you an extra twenty-five thousand on your contract and you pull this shit on me, ducking your responsibilities.”

  “I’ve got no responsibility to talk to the media and act like your Charlie McCarthy”

  “What the fuck is wrong with this team? You guys stunk up the Grapefruit League this spring.”

  “It’s only spring training, George. They’re just learning to work together”

  “The fucking opening day is three days away, what kind of shit are you pulling? I could lose a fortune on this thing.”

  “You could hardly lose a fortune since you traded away your fifty-million-dollar personnel roster.”

  “Except for you, you broken-down son of a bitch. I kept you.”

  “Yeah, Now I wish you hadn’t.”

  “You gonna quit on me? You and that cocksucker agent Sid cooking up-”

  “George, I can see you now, those arteries pounding and your eyes bulging out of your head. I won’t tell you to calm down because I’d just as soon you had a stroke, then maybe you’d stop calling me all the time to hear yourself think out loud.”

  “I own you, Ryan, I own you!”

  “People don’t own people except in certain parts of the Middle East and Africa. So you’ve got a contract, is all you’ve got.”

  “And the contract says you got to help me with these Cubanos. They got their rooms at the East Side Hotel and they start complaining right away about the sheets and the beds and the bugs.”