About eight of us were on hand, crowded into Cashen's office. Cashen, of course. Nelson Doubleday, who had come in from Palm Beach. A couple of coaches. Jay Horwitz, the publicity director. Davey Johnson, the manager, looked in a couple of times, and then crept out. I suspect Dr. Burns' manner not only put him on edge but his analysis of Sidd Finch constructed a portrait so foreign to the manager's concept of a baseball player that, quite simply, he was discomfitted. It was as if he were being asked to insert a weird, otherworldly freak into his lineup, someone who would cause no end of dissension and ill feeling among the others. He didn't want to hear about him.
Dr. Burns had started as follows: "Everything I've heard about Sidd Finch leads me to believe that what we have here is almost surely a trapa, or aspirant Buddhist monk."
A grunt, perhaps more of a moan, emerged from Nelson Doubleday.
"Technically," Dr. Burns continued, "it is more likely he is a gaynyen, who is a kind of ordained layman."
Dr. Burns, who had come down the peninsula from Florida State University, was wearing a dark doublebreasted blazer with four large polished gold buttons on each sleeve. He looked like a retired sea captain. On his wrist was a large double-faced watch with a red second hand that moved in little jumps in its cycle across the complexity of dials on the watch face.
Dr. Burns went on to say that though he had not spoken personally with Finch, from what he'd seen out in the enclosure, the pitcher was almost surely a disciple of Tibet's great poet-saint Lama Milarepa, who was born in the eleventh century and who died in the shadow of Mount Everest.
"The sect is called the Karmapas," Dr. Burns told us. "They were the first to establish any kind of influence with the Chinese Emperor Kublai Khan. In Marco Polo's journals there's a marvelous account of a competition between teachers of Christianity, Islam, and Taoism to convert the Emperor to their particular faith. The Kar- mapases' representative won out by causing a cup to rise to the Emperor's lips of its own accord. Quite something, eh?" Dr. Burns rolled his eyes. "The extraordinary thing about Milarepa and his followers," he went on, "is their ability to perform astonishing phenomena like this. Milarepa himself could produce `internal heat,' tumo-heat, which allowed him to survive blizzards and the intense cold of the Himalayas wearing only a thin white cotton cloth. That is what Milarepa means-`cotton cloth.' He could walk through boulders and come out the other side as if he were walking in and out of a room. He once turned himself into a pagoda."
"A pagoda?"
"On another occasion he came down among his disciples in the form of a shooting star. People who can do this are called lung-gom-pa -someone who has learned the dynamic nature of the physical self and is able to exert a direct influence upon any part of the body ... in the case of Sidd, of course, the arm and the wrist. What he has been able to achieve is a parallelism of thought and movement ... a kind of astonishing rhythm that has gathered a tremendous amount of cosmic force into its service."
He sat forward in his chair and raised his finger.
"Gom ..."
"How do you spell that?" It was Jay Horwitz who was taking notes, presumably to put together a press release one day.
"G-O-M. Gom means the meditation, the contemplation, the concentration of the mind and soul upon a certain objective-namely, in the case of Finch, the desire to throw a ball with absolute accuracy to a specific target. This requires a gradual emptying of the mind until it is supplanted by an absolute identification of the baseball and what one wishes to do with it. Lung-which is spelled L-U-N-G-represents the energy or psychic force that is physically generated by Gom. So the two words together represent what Finch has done-namely that he is a person who understands the body as an expression of the mind and is able to control directly any part of the body. Pa, of course, is someone who can do this. So what we have in Sidd Finch is a lung-gom-pa."
"Does that last word, pa, have an h on the end?" Horwitz asked.
"No. Pa. They say the really good, the great lung-gompas after years of practice no longer touch the ground and they glide on the air with great speed. Those who do this," Dr. Burns went on, "are called the hang gyog ngo dub, which means `success in swiftness of foot.' " I saw Jay put down his pencil in exasperation. "You might ask what it feels like. It's apparently as if the runner were anesthe tized. He can bump into rocks or the trunks of trees and it doesn't affect him. He can't feel the weight of his body. It has been described as being the faint euphoria you get when you drive a car at great speeds.
"As he goes the lung-gom must neither speak nor look anywhere else than at a distant object-a star at night, for example, watching it so intensely that if a cloud crosses it, it will remain in his mind's eye. He must concentrate his thoughts, his steps in time, not only to the cadence of mystic incantations known as ngags, but to the in-and-out breathing. That is very likely what Finch is doing when he winds up and throws the ball."
Nelson Doubleday interrupted. "Can he teach other guys how he does it? Our pitchers?" He produced a small hollow laugh. "Can he teach me to hit a golf ball four hundred yards?"
Dr. Bums paused to let the murmur of laughter die away. Then he said, "Breathing, to produce inner heat, or tumo, is important. One must clear the lungs of pride, anger, covetousness, sloth, stupidity, and then inhale in the five corresponding wisdoms. After a while one imagines that a golden lotus exists in one's body, just below the navel. In this lotus is the syllable ram, and just above it, the syllable ma. These two are called bija mantras and some Tibetan authorities believe that these words, carefully pronounced and chanted, can produce a glow of warmth, as if the person were a kind of Franklin stove, even set things ablaze! In fact, in extreme cases this heat can be emitted through the navel like a blast from a blow torch. Quite a spectacular-"
"For Chrissakes!" Nelson Doubleday exploded.
Dr. Bums raised his hands. "I can assure you that Sidd Finch is incapable of doing such a thing. But what he does undoubtedly is to imagine his body as a vast enginelike sling. He recites ngags-these incantations-to himself. They could be dangerous, these exercises. Tibetans worry about overdoing them. It is possible to kill oneself `by one's own imagination.' Indeed, I should remind you that all of this is quite fragile," Dr. Burns said. "It is dangerous to break the concentration necessary to perform. It is something you will have to consider in your treatment of Sidd Finch."
Frank Cashen asked him to explain.
"Well, if you made the mistake of stopping a lung-gompa clipping along at forty miles an hour, skimming the ground, to question him, or offer him a sandwich or something, that could very well kill him. What they say is this -the god who is in them escapes if they cease to repeat the ngags, and that in the process of leaving, the god shakes them so hard that the lung-gom-pa simply succumbs from the trauma."
"There's a god inside Finch?"
"Perhaps. It is more accurate to say that a lung-gompa is in a kind of trance. If you shake someone out of a trance, it can be quite an assault on the nerves-that would be the Western way of looking at it."
"Are you suggesting," Cashen asked, "that it would be a bad mistake for Davey Johnson to go to the mound for a conference? Or for his catcher to walk out to check the signs? That would kill him?"
Dr. Burns shrugged. "You must remember that I know only the texts. I've never even been to Kathmandu, the old brown city. But it would be dangerous, yes."
One of the Mets coaches wanted to hear how "these lung" people trained.
"It takes years," Dr. Burns replied. "The ascetic sits cross-legged on a large and thick cushion. He breathes in very slowly, filling his body with air, and then with his legs still crossed he hops up in the air as if . . ." Dr. Burns looked up at the ceiling for inspiration.
"Someone stuck a pin in him ..." rose a voice from the room.
"Something like that. He repeats that exercise a number of times. According to Tibetan authorities, if you discipline yourself that way for many years, you become very light. They say you can even stand on an ear o
f barley without bending its stalk."
The door clicked shut. Davey Johnson had left.
"Why baseball?" Frank Cashen asked. "Why didn't he go back to England and play cricket?"
Dr. Bums put his fingertips together. "Baseball is the perfect game for the mystic mind. Cricket is unsatisfactory because it has time strictures. The clock is involved. Play is called. The players stop for tea. No! No! No!" Bums sounded quite petulant. "On the other hand, baseball is so open to infinity. No clocks. No one pressing the buttons on stopwatches. The foul lines stretch to infinity. In theory, the game of baseball can go on indefinitely."
After a moment Frank Cashen stirred and said, "Dr. Burns, something about baseball disturbs Sidd. In his note of conditions to us he wrote of certain elements of the game of baseball not adhering to what he called `tantric principles.' What does this mean?"
"Ah!" said Dr. Bums. "I must conject. I suspect he's referring to such aspects of baseball as stealing second" -Dr. Burns' eyebrows rose as if to accentuate the horror of what he was saying-"or the hidden-ball trick. Or robbing someone of a base hit. Or fooling a batter with an offspeed pitch. There simply may be too much chicanery in the game to his liking.
"Mind you, there are many Buddhists who wouldn't think much of what Sidd is devoting himself to-this dabbling with baseballs-it's a sort of a silly juggling, twiddling of thumbs, show-offy, soft-shoe shuffling kind of thing. They bring up the story about the Yogin and the Buddha. Do you know it?"
We all stared dumbly at him.
"Well, the Yogin told the Buddha that he had been practicing for twenty-five years and by arduous mindmatter exercises he had learned to cross the river by walking on the water.
"The Buddha said, 'My poor fellow ... to think you've spent all that trouble to get to the other bank of the river when all you had to do was to get the ferryman to take you there for a few pennies.' "
Dr. Burns began to laugh in delight at his analogy ... such a high wheezing laugh that he eventually had to produce a large red bandana-sized handkerchief from the breast pocket of his blazer to subdue it.
Nelson Doubleday then made an astute observation. "It's important in that case," he said, "that we promote baseball to Finch. We've got to convince him that baseball is worth all the mind-matter he's spent learning how to throw a ball. He must not feel ridiculed by what he's done. We've got to glorify baseball-make him think that he's involved in the National Pastime, a holy tradition. Crossing the river ... that Buddha is nuts if you ask me. I mean, who wouldn't rather cross a river by walking on it with his damn bare feet than ride on a ferry boat?"
"Right!" someone called out.
"We could call in some of the great custodians of the game-Red Barber, Mel Allen. Get him to read Roger Angell's books. We could get him to see Robert Redford in The Natural. Maybe we could get Robert Redford down here to see him. Get him up to the Hall of Fame in Cooperstown ... impress him with Babe Ruth's bat, things like that...."
"Isn't Redford a San Francisco Giant fan?" someone asked.
"We can work around that."
"Doesn't Redford get shot with a silver bullet in the film?"
"Yes, but it works out quite nicely in the end."
I walked out of Cashen's office into threatening weather. It was good to be going back to the bungalow in Pass-a-Grille. When the hard warm winter rains came to the Tampa area, thrashing the palmettos, the bungalow seemed to settle down in the sandy earth-cool and dark -and it was like those times in Vietnam in the monsoons when you knew little bothered to move.
I parked the car in its shelter and then walked out to the Gulf and stood on the seawall at Pass-a-Grille to watch the storm come in ... a thunderstorm, violent, unseasonal, and quite terrifying, as all meteorological oddities on such a mammoth scale tend to be-a black cloud the length of the horizon that seemed to ache to drop funnels to the water. Lightning flickered out of it. I hurried back to the bungalow. When the storm reached in and went through Pass-a-Grille, it bent the palms and thrashed their fronds with such a racket that I barely heard the little bell-like front-door chimes my sister had installed.
The figure standing at the door was rain-soaked, his hair plastered down, a drop of water quivering at the tip of his nose. He bowed. "Namas-te," he said. "The Mets have given me your number and your address," he said. "I am very embarrassed. I tried to telephone."
"I'm sorry about the telephone," I said. "I very rarely pick it up."
I invited him in. The heavy rain pounded on the bungalow roof. We walked through the leafy-like gloom to the back porch. "I'm sorry about the light," I said. "The elec tricity goes off in any kind of storm. Even with candles, it's like living in the bottom of a well."
In the darkness I could barely make out his features. He was tall, as I suspected, small-headed, and when he sat in front of me out on the porch in a straight-backed wicker chair, his knees rose up like a basketball player's at courtside.
"My name is Sidd Finch," he said. "I believe you know that I am a tryout with the New York Mets baseball organization. I am a pitcher. My relationship with them-by my own request-is very tenuous."
"So I understand," I said.
"You know some of this?"
"The Mets people have told me a few things."
"They gave me a list. Your name was on it. They said you would be helpful. Forgive me. It's quite an emergency, I'm afraid. I would like to explain."
I nodded.
He went on to tell me that he had been staying with Mrs. Butterfield on Florida Avenue. She had been a kindly lady, understanding in every way, although sometimes he could feel she was not especially keen about his musical aptitudes. "I play the French horn," he explained. He drew out the word horn, very nasal and British. "The fact is that Mrs. Butterfield asked me to leave."
"The French horn?"
I could tell that he was shyly heading up to some kind of admission: one knee swaying, his words halting, he began fidgeting in his chair; increasingly he looked like a gawky adolescent. For a moment he stared intently into a potted palm in the corner.
"My habit," he finally said obliquely, "after practice at Huggins Field, where I pitch in a canvas enclosure, is to be driven to one of the beaches near here. I sit on the sand dunes and meditate. I cannot drive," he said, spreading his hands woefully.
"Sometimes after meditating I set up targets and pitch at them-tin cans, and pieces of paper stuck against the sand."
He paused again.
"The other day I was doing this when a girl stepped off a Windsurfer down by the water's edge and came up toward me."
I have often thought back on that meeting between the two-the girl pulling the Windsurfer with its bright sail up beyond the reach of the water and Sidd noticing her setting out determinedly for him through the dunes, the puffs of sand kicked up by her bare feet, almost as if a rendezvous had been prearranged. In fact, its coincidence had always made me slightly suspicious-it was all too pat. I could not rid my mind of the notion that she had been sent by someone.
Sidd told me her name was Debbie Sue. She had been tacking back and forth that afternoon just offshore and had seen him throwing things in the dunes. She was wearing a red tank suit. She climbed up the slope of a dune and he looked up to see her staring down at him. For a while he continued pegging baseballs at his tin cans until finally, under her steady gaze, he glanced over and said, "Namas-te"-that word that means both "hello" and "good-bye." He stammered out that they had chatted rather shyly on the beach and the upshot of it was that Debbie Sue asked him to have dinner with her and that he had nodded and accepted. She sailed her Windsurfer back to a cluster of the craft where she had rented it earlier ... Finch walking along the water's edge, watching her.
Mrs. Butterfield took immediate exception to Debbie Sue. She had been out to a movie that night. On her return she had found Debbie Sue in her parlor holding a figurine made of coquina shells in her hand and commenting on it -not disparagingly, Sidd assured me-but in wonder. "Will you look at this
?"-that sort of thing, and then not long after Debbie Sue announced that what with the storm raging outside, she wished to spend the night.
Mrs. Butterfield took Sidd aside. "I do not wish to embarrass you or her. But I will not stand for this. Your companionship with a French horn I find acceptable, if barely, but not with a young female."
Sidd tried to explain to her how they had met.
"Nice girls don't step ashore from surfboards," Mrs. Butterfield had announced.
Apparently, Debbie Sue, standing in the kitchen, had overheard this exchange and called out loudly, "Mrs. Butterfield is an old goat!" which, as Sidd described it, "Kind of cemented things."
"Where is she now?" I asked.
"Mrs. Butterfield?"
"No. Debbie ... ah ... Sue?"
"She's out in the rain. She's standing by the bird bath."
V
TELEPHONED the Mets the next morning and told them that Sidd had appeared at my bungalow. I said that his sudden presence had so surprised me that I hadn't time to get really angry at the Mets for putting him on to me. I explained that he had apparently had a small run-in with Mrs. Butterfield ... something to do with his French horn playing. I was not going to tell them about Debbie Sue. But of course they knew.
Jay Horwitz came immediately to the point. "We understand from Elliot Posner that Sidd Finch is involved with a woman."
I replied after a pause, "That could very well be so. She windsurfs."
He explained that the kid who drives Finch to Pass-aGrille after practice had seen the pair together. In fact, he had driven them from the beach to Mrs. Butterfield's boardinghouse.
"Yes. They arrived here by taxi in the middle of the rainstorm."
"Has she moved in with you, bag and baggage?" he asked.
The Curious Case of Sidd Finch Page 6