I used to go out in my yard at night, with a streetlight casting my shadow on the wall of our house, and practice my swing. My teammate Bruce Bochy and I used to go out in the field sometimes and he’d pitch to me, just me and him, in our bare feet. You could get lost hitting baseballs in the summer heat. My best friend Wayne Tyson pitched to me endlessly.
That was a glorious season. I would be out there sweating, spitting, cursing, laughing, getting sunburned, loving it when I had to dive for a ball. It was a heady, wonderful experience. I hit .334 that year. The year before, we’d been on a Little League field, but now we were playing on a major league-size infield. I could barely lift the fucking bat. I did a one-hop one off the fence that year, but the fence was only 300 in the center and 297 down the line.
Bochy was already functioning at a higher level. He was small then, but he had a major league arm. The first time my dad saw him throw the ball, he stood up like a shot and said “Jesus H!”
Twelve was good, but thirteen and fourteen were better than anything that ever happened. Nothing but sweating, body surfing to cool off, sweating, swinging, sweating, swinging, sweating all day. Some of the folks in the neighborhood would let us use their garden hoses to cool off. Heavy calluses formed on our hands. Every day, the second I woke up, I wanted a bat in my hand. I couldn’t wait to get my hands around the bat handle, go out in the neighborhood, and rustle up the kids for another game with a tennis ball. Drag bunting, sliding, everything. We were entranced.
There’d be two games per day in Babe Ruth League. Even if your team wasn’t playing, after you jumped in the ocean to cool off, you went to the games. And to the people of our little community in the stands, those games were as important as any major league game. A lot of the guys on our team were surfers. That’s what that community was: football players and surfers. On the inland side, you had the baseball players. The other guys would surf all day before the games. Both sides would come together at the baseball games and we would play like it was the fucking World Series. Every swing of the bat was the same as if it were Mickey Mantle at the plate. Sometimes before going out to do an SNL sketch, I’d think about the two doubles I hit off of C. P. Yarborough in one night. If you were a baseball player in Melbourne, that was one of the big things that happened to you: you were going to bat off this guy. He was one of a number of fabulous athletes I knew who demonstrated tremendous prowess, then lost interest and went off to do something else.
For the rest of my life, in the most dire circumstances, I would think of certain base hits to remind myself of a time when all was well.
During my freshman year in high school, 1969–70, women decided it was okay not to wear bras. You’re a thirteen- or fourteen-year-old boy, and now there are nipples everywhere. These were all beach girls. No matter what color their hair really was, the sun transformed it—in brunettes there would be lovely auburn streaks, girls with brown hair would have these startling natural streaks of blond. Everyone had deep tans. These were girls we’d known since we were five, and now I couldn’t make eye contact. I’d get so weak I had to sit down. If a girl brushed against you in the lunch line, you could burst into a sheet of flame. There was a chick named Lisa Kasarda I’d known for years, and now she wasn’t wearing a bra. How was I supposed to talk to her?
Veronica Baxter was a year or two older than me, and she was the loveliest thing—human, mammal, flower, anything—I had ever seen. And I wasn’t the only boy who felt that way. When she walked past, I would have to stop what I was doing, walk over to a bench, sit down, and put my head in my hands. My God. Veronica used to dress in a kind of European style, so she showed cleavage. The first time I saw her cleavage was the only time in my life I said Jackie Gleason’s words, “Hommina hommina hommina.” She took me for a ride in her European sports car once. I never intended to try anything with her at all, I was too intimidated by anything with that majesty and power and beauty. Also, she had a boyfriend who was a mastodon. I’m still afraid of him.
And the guilt helped. We were all going to church every Sunday, so we knew we’d go to hell if we partook of what we were seeing if through some outlandish stroke of luck we should be alone in the same room with a Lisa Kasarda or a Veronica Baxter. Clearly God didn’t want that. In fact, I was convinced the whole world was going to hell because those girls couldn’t be allowed to show their breasts like that without God intervening.
During that golden summer before my sophomore year at Melbourne High, I hit .500 and lost my virginity on the beach to Miriam Bonaparte. She was a fuckin’ knockout.
There wasn’t a lot of discussion about the facts of life in my house or anywhere else. It seemed best to everyone, including my parents and friends, if sex didn’t exist at all. My mom’s best friend Theresa had a male dog, and one day he mounted a girl dog from the neighborhood. Theresa came running from the house, screaming and clapping her hands together, as if a murder was being committed.
That was the kind of world I was in. But two fourteen-year-old kids left by themselves, not quite understanding, don’t need any more help than what Mother Nature and DNA will provide. When I finally lumbered into a sexual relationship with Miriam, my powers as a human—my power of speech, my reasoning center, my executive command center—all that shit was out.
I did understand that babies came from this, and I was horrified, but far worse than any concern about unwanted pregnancy was the guilt. I thought something horrible would happen to me, that I would go to hell because I could not stop having relations with the stunning Miriam Bonaparte. At that age, you have lots of interest and lots of energy, but I felt like a sinner the whole time.
After I had sex, I was never sane again.
That same summer, some friends of mine miraculously got their hands on a six-pack of Busch beer. We sat down in the ditch between Parsons Avenue and Dunbar, Australian pines covering us to the right, paper trees covering us to the left, a stream trickling beside us. I drank two Busch beers, and the world changed—no longer a harsh and lonesome windswept prairie, but a lush fertile valley bursting with luscious fruits and spring lambs rollicking in the meadows. Like something out of a Disney cartoon or Dorothy landing in Oz, the universe went from black and white to color. I half expected a little blue bird to land on my shoulder and start singing or a band of orange-hued little people to escort me to Emerald City.
That shit was good.
As I went into my sophomore year of high school, I tried out for the junior varsity football team, even though I’d never played football. My father really wanted me to play, so he was pleased when I made starting quarterback. But rather than teach actual tactical skills of combat within the rules of a contact sport, the coaches focused on teaching us how to be brutal.
The coaches used to have us line up across from our best friends and take turns slapping each other in the face six times. Everyone laughed about it at first. You strike the guy mildly, and he laughs. But he strikes you back harder, and you laugh a little less. You strike him back harder than he struck you, and he doesn’t laugh now. He strikes you hard. You hit him back harder. That’s the natural human instinct.
There was this one kid named Johnny, fifteen years old, six foot four, a fabulous athlete. But he also surfed, and to some people on the inland side of the Indian River in Melbourne, surfer boys were reprehensible, or even worse, gay. One day a coach was slapping Johnny on the helmet while he ran in place.
“Whatchoo doin’, surfer boy? C’mon, surfer boy.” Then leveling the ultimate accusation, “I don’t think you want it.” It was the greatest indictment that could be leveled against a player, that he didn’t want it.
Johnny stopped running and said, “You know what? You’re right. I don’t want it, okay?” And he left the field.
As punishment for “not wanting it enough,” the coaches put us in a ditch thick with red and yellow glass-cutting sandspurs to fight each other. We’d get those spurs all up in our helmets and practice jerseys. I don’t think I’d ever been i
n a fight before, except once when I was really young and I boxed with another little kid; we wore professional boxing gloves that were larger than our heads, so we did little harm. I was afraid that I wasn’t a man because I didn’t want it, so I got in the ditch with the third-string quarterback. I dropped the guy with a quick blow, and something inside of me convulsed.
The coaches started yelling, “Get you some! C’mon, Darrell, get you some!” exhorting me to continue to strike a man who was down. I hit him one more time when he was down. I’ve never hit anyone since then. I can’t tell you how much shame I felt. It really isn’t sport if the other guy is already down. It certainly isn’t football. It reminds me of the coach from Eau Gallie High School who used to bite the heads off live frogs in the interest of getting his players fired up. The bloodlust of hurting someone who was down was supposed to toughen us up.
The slap drills ended when my friend Frank Facciobene got a punctured eardrum.
In junior year, we got a new coach. At practice one day, while I was calling plays in the huddle—“Hut One! Hut Two!”—he said, “You gotta say it faster.”
I said, “Like H-T, instead of H-U-T?”
I might as well have dropped to my knees, pointed to his crotch, and pointed to my mouth. “I wouldn’t know about that.”
With so much sin in my life, I was a haunted vessel, a satellite of the Dark One. I first got drunk on a Saturday night at the end of the summer before school started. I figured I was already ruined, since I’d been having sex. How much worse could it get?
My friend Ernie from the football team—a real tough kid—called me up one afternoon. “Come over to my house. We’ll get drunk, man. My parents are out of town.”
So we took two eight-ounce highball glasses, filled them roughly three-quarters of the way up with Seagram’s Seven, and added a little 7UP. And we drank them down. We had no idea we were handling nitroglycerin. The next thing I (vaguely) recall, we were slow-dancing with each other.
I was supposed to stay over at his house, but I ended up walking the five miles back to my house, vomiting the whole way. My parents came home from a party not long after me, and they came into my bedroom. My mother was trying to have a conversation with me, but I was unable to have that conversation. My father suddenly said, “Ohhhhhhh. Margaret, c’mon, let’s go to bed. Leave sombitch alone.”
The next morning, I was in church with my mother, desperately hung over and full of evil. I’d already had sex, and now I had gotten drunk, and I had slow-danced with my teammate. I was waiting for the gates of hell to open right there in the church, the winds to pick up, and the preacher to point his finger at me: “YOU!”
When nothing happened, I was even more confused. I knew guys were smoking pot and drinking and having sex, and none of us were going to hell. It threw me forever after. I was always nagged by the terrible reality that God had not shown Himself when I had sex, that God had not shown up when I drank two beers. The week after I drank all the Seven and 7s with Ernie and ended up slow-dancing with him, I hit a magnificent double in Eau Gallie. Is God here? Does he care? Is he paying attention?
Then I thought, Maybe there is no God, and the whole structure started falling down for me.
And then my mom caught me masturbating. As was her custom, she didn’t knock on the door, she just barged in. Since no one had explained to me what was happening to my body, and why my hands wanted to wander there, I was fumbling my way through that process as well. I was mortified.
My mother’s reaction was silent rage. In the days that followed, I’d walk up to her and try to have a conversation, and she’d behave like I wasn’t in the room at all. Finally, I grabbed her by the arm and said, “Why won’t you talk to me?”
“Why don’t you go into your room and pee on yourself?” she spat back.
I thought, Wow, this sex thing is really gonna work out good, huh?
Not long after this, my mother came up to me one day and, for no reason I could fathom, started hitting me, really trying to knock me off my feet. I was fourteen years old, and I was a good athlete, strong. I was probably four or five inches taller than her. I put my arms out in front of me and let her swing away at me in her blind fury. She kept swinging and slapping, and then, too tired to raise her arms anymore, she stopped and looked at the ground. That was the end of it.
I had reached puberty and was changing into a full-blown fur-bearing sexual creature, and it had made me an object of scorn. I had every reason to believe that I was a malignant and terrible person for allowing this to happen to my own body, as if I were somehow responsible for it all.
CHAPTER THREE
There’s Something Wrong Here
When I was still in grade school, my grandfather decided to pull his money out of the Western Auto business. My father couldn’t keep it going on his own, and the store went bankrupt. Ironically, my sister and parents and I had to move in with my paternal grandparents on the western side of Florida in Tampa while my father found work as a traveling sporting goods salesman. After a year or two, he was able to move us back to our house in Melbourne—they’d rented it out while we were gone—so from then on my father was on the road a lot.
But he took a great interest in my young baseball career. He came to as many of my Little League games as he could. The second year I played, I graduated to Babe Ruth League, and my team had the great misfortune of being sponsored by Howard’s Meats. (Go ahead, laugh. Nobody can laugh about that name more than a bunch of thirteen-year-old boys did.) My dad became assistant coach.
My father and I became obsessed with the 297 sign in the outfield at Wells Park. One day during the winter when nobody was there, he took me out to the field and stood at the plate, explaining why a hanging curveball was important if I wanted to get beyond that sign.
“If the pitcher puts his finger on the wrong seam, throws a two-seam curveball instead of a four-seam curveball, and that ball hangs in the air just for a second before it breaks down to the plate,” and he pointed to the 297 sign and, with missionary zeal, said, “Buddy, that sumbitch [pause for effect] is gone.”
It was one of the most exciting afternoons of my life. None of the boys could hit a ball over that fucking fence, but he was telling me I could. After years of being terrified of him, it was nice to have him on my side about something.
“Some time in your life, someone’s gonna hang you one right up there, and, buddy, it’s gone.” It was like Billy Graham saying, “Mine eyes have seen the coming of the Lord!”
Throughout his life, my dad had this charming habit of standing up whenever something in a game excited him, even if he was just watching the Florida Gators on his TV at home. So I knew I was doing well when he stood up during one of my games.
But my father being my father, there was a downside to his being so involved in my baseball world. During one game, there was an argument with the umpire, and my father must have had some Hitler flashback, because he went to the opposing coach, in front of the entire community, put his finger in his chest, and threatened to kick the guy’s ass.
When I was in high school, the opposing coach became the varsity baseball coach. From then on, if I didn’t get a hit my first time up, the coach would bench me. I didn’t handle the rejection very well, and I started to bat terribly.
Part of the problem was playing football. I played football until my junior year, when I threw my arm out due to improper weightlifting technique. I also got knocked out three times. In boxing they say a boxer has a glass jaw, which means if you pop him on the chin, he’ll go down. I have a glass head. If you hit me on the top of the head, you knock me out. By the time I was done, I had done permanent damage to my throwing arm as well as my back and knees.
Another part of the problem was my drinking. My buddies and I drank together a fair amount, but I had also started drinking alone. I didn’t know I was suffering from depression, or where it came from, I just knew I had this great need to escape myself. I started saving my lunch money and goin
g to this store where this zombie who appeared to have been recently unearthed, and who always seemed to have a dab of mayonnaise in the corner of his mouth, would sell us booze. I would sit in my closet in the dark with a bottle of vodka, and if I drank enough, I could imagine that I wasn’t part of my world. By the time I got to be fourteen or fifteen, I drank almost every day.
I was still trying to play baseball. I fully intended to make the major leagues. Even though I was drinking too much to really perform the way I could have, I was still good, if unreliably so. When I was sixteen, I finally conquered the 297 sign. In fact, there was a slab of concrete about eighteen feet long beyond the sign, and I was able to hit a ball well onto that concrete.
Then they built this gorgeous new field out in the forest where we played American Legion ball. Nearly three-quarters of all college players played Legion ball in high school, and more than half of all major leaguers did as well, including Yogi Berra, Ted Williams, and current New York Yankees first baseman Mark Teixeira. More than fifty Legion players ended up in the Baseball Hall of Fame. So, you know, no pressure.
Anyway, the fence in left, for reasons that no one could quite understand, was 340. One day, I hit a ball over that fence. My father was at that game, and he paced it off to 420.
My father hit me for the first and only time that year. When I got depressed, which happened more and more often then, he would say, “You got yourself sulled up,” which is “sullen” in normal people parlance. I guess I’d finally gotten sulled up once too often, and it pissed him off. Before I knew what was happening, he popped me a shot to the face.
Not long after that, I came home drunk one night, and my father started yelling at me in front of my friends. I was pretty big then, but still, they don’t call it “liquid courage” for nothing. I got up in his face.
“My whole life you’ve been telling me you’re gonna knock me halfway through that wall. Do it. Let’s go.”
God, if You're Not Up There, I'm F*cked: Tales of Stand-Up, Saturday Night Live, and Other Mind-Altering Mayhem Page 4