The Wax Pack

by Brad Balukjian

  Seth, on the other hand, is understated and calm, almost delicate. He’s got a black belt in karate and makes wallets out of duct tape for fun. I instantly like him.

  Rance is invigorated by the kids’ presence.

  “Everything is awesome!” he half sings from The Lego Movie.

  While Rance and Lori set up dinner and Shaylee plays in the backyard swimming pool, I challenge Seth to a game of ping pong. I like the kid’s serious countenance, his precociousness. He’s got his dad’s good sense of humor, maybe a little drier. We rally back and forth, me pressing him, not wanting to let him win just because he’s a kid.

  “Who’s more talkative, your mom or your dad?” I ask, pushing him deep into the corner of the table.

  He returns the ball to my backhand.

  “My dad talks a lot when it’s about sports or something he likes to talk about. Otherwise he’s pretty quiet,” he says.

  I laugh. “A lot of dads are like that,” I say.

  About fifteen minutes of ping pong in the ninety-degree heat and we’re both soaked. I walk inside to a fully set dinner table and feel like one of Seth’s playmates, half expecting Lori to tell me to wash my hands before eating.

  A delicious meal of corn, steak, salad, and potatoes awaits, and I bow my head with the rest of the family and listen to Shaylee say grace. I silently thank the Lord that this wholesome family has no idea that I was passed out on the side of the freeway a little more than twelve hours prior.

  Before long Shaylee’s up and out of her chair, twirling and dancing to a song playing in her head, offering me a party hat, which I gladly don, while Seth sits by dutifully.

  Following the meal, I sense family time dawning (tomorrow is Father’s Day, after all) and gather my things. Rance walks me outside to my car, parked on the street.

  This tony suburb, an oasis of potted palms and in-ground pools and church rummage sales, is where Rance belongs. He’s happy here. But you can still remember, without attachment, where you’ve been. And it’s not the strategy, or the home runs, or the lefty/righty matchups that Rance misses most about baseball.

  “If someone said, ‘Rance, you can go four to four with a couple of doubles and a home run tomorrow, or you can spend the day with some great friends and just experience that camaraderie,’ it’s an easy decision for me,” he says.

  I nod. I get it. Anyone who has spent a day on a sports team, whether it’s the Toronto Blue Jays or my beer-league ice hockey team, the Sofa Kings, gets it.

  “I didn’t know coming in how this was gonna go, but it’s been a great experience for me,” he says. “I’d love moving forward to have the opportunity to get together again or just reconnect, talk on the phone to stay connected.” He asks me if I have Facebook.

  I feel giddy, and not just because my hangover is finally gone. A few days ago Rance was another hero from my childhood, and now he wants to be pen pals.

  Later that night I lie in my boxers in an Airbnb that smells of sweat and garlic, the heat so oppressive that each movement takes twice the effort. I pull out the Wax Pack, shuffling to Steve Yeager, whom I will visit next in Los Angeles. Yeager promises to be an entirely different animal from Rance. While the newspaper accounts repeatedly describe Rance as steady and quiet, the rap on Yeager is the opposite. “A cocksure guy with a Type A personality,” wrote the Dayton Daily News; “one of the more spirited belters in the neon league, where games have been known to go all night,” said the Atlanta Constitution.3 His exploits off the field were always colorful, posing for Playgirl in 1982 (in a pair of Daisy Dukes that needs to be seen to be believed) and teaching Charlie Sheen how to pitch for Major League (Yeager played pitching coach Duke Temple). Via a series of text messages we have tentatively planned to meet on Monday, and I’m already excited by the thought of exploring the Hollywood nightlife with the Dodgers’ longtime catcher.

  I put the cards away and open the YouTube video of the last out of the 1992 World Series, Rance’s last breath as a player. Otis Nixon of the Atlanta Braves drops a bunt down the first-base line; pitcher Mike Timlin scrambles over to field it and throws to Joe Carter at first, clinching the Series. The Jays dugout empties, a melee of mustaches and mullets, ending with a pig pile on the mound.

  And at the bottom of that pile, hidden from the TV cameras, is a thirty-six-year-old kid from Woodville, his face marred by dust and sweat (but probably not blood), shedding failure, daring greatly.

  3

  Yeager Bombs

  Between the lines, when the game started, you were going to war.

  —Steve Yeager

  Days 3–5

  June 21–23, 2015

  Miles driven: 640

  Cups of coffee: 9

  Visalia CA to Los Angeles CA

  In a properly functioning human brain, thoughts operate much like the scan button on a car radio. The same way the radio pauses for a few seconds on each station before moving to the next, thoughts typically arise and just as quickly dissipate.

  The OCD brain is different. Instead of the radio skipping along from station to station, imagine getting stuck on Nickelback’s “Rockstar” and never moving off. When an irrational, intrusive thought emerges, it sticks, and the more you try to get rid of it and “change the station” (through some kind of compulsive mental or physical behavior), the worse the anxiety gets.

  3. Steve Yeager

  I was first diagnosed with OCD during my senior year of college. It started with some physical tics, having to pick my nose or shift my pants a certain number of times before I could start studying, and then worsened during a biostatistics midterm. When the professor handed me the exam, my brain immediately began running through a checklist of mental compulsions as I desperately tried to neutralize the obsessive fear that I had left the iron on in my dorm room. I would later learn that the content of the obsessive thought doesn’t really matter. People with OCD tend to be scrupulous individuals to begin with, and the disorder often attacks with whatever fear the person finds most morally reprehensible: the deeply religious obsess over the fear that they are Satan worshippers; antiviolence pacifists fret they will stab their child with a butcher knife; I apparently couldn’t stand the idea of appearing rumpled in public and burning the dorm down as a result. But I couldn’t even begin to calculate the standard deviations in front of me until I had run through the list one more time: Yes, I definitely remember turning off the iron. I saw the red light switch off. I even unplugged it! The more I tried to convince myself, the more the fear grew.

  I flunked the exam.

  A therapist at the college counseling center stitched together my bizarre symptoms and gave me my official diagnosis, which actually came as a great relief (knowing what you are dealing with is half the battle). He prescribed me some antidepressants, the symptoms subsided, and I moved to Santa Barbara following graduation to begin my adult life.

  Three years later, my OCD roared back with a vengeance right here in the City of Angels, the adopted hometown of the next Wax Packer, Steve Yeager.

  Los Angeles is a perfect match for Yeager, known to his teammates as Boomer for his big personality. The Hollywood lights have nurtured him since signing with the Dodgers out of Meadowdale High School in Dayton, Ohio, in 1967, only the third year of the baseball draft’s existence (before then, owners simply scouted and signed players at will). The consummate Dodger, Boomer rose through the Minor League ranks, playing for five years in towns like Ogden, Utah, and Dubuque, Iowa, before cracking into the big leagues in 1972. Much like Rance, for most of his fifteen-year career (all but one with the Dodgers), Boomer had to compete for a starting job, accumulating his share of splinters while riding the bench. But every time the team tried to replace him with someone younger, stronger, and shinier, Boomer proved them wrong.

  He was ahead of his time. He played catcher, the most grueling position in baseball, which he fell into as a high school freshman when all the prospective players lined up by desired position at tryouts; dozens of players
congregated at each infield position, while only one stood behind home plate. Doing the math, Boomer joined that player and never looked back. In the 1970s and 1980s, before the Moneyball revolution replaced traditional statistics (batting average, runs batted in) with newer metrics that better measured a player’s true value, Yeager’s paltry offensive numbers undersold his true worth, which was bolstered by his defensive prowess. Had it not been for a guy named Johnny Bench, Boomer would have won multiple Gold Gloves. And he wasn’t afraid to let you know it.

  “Defensively, we’re even in one respect. We both have strong throwing arms,” he told the Los Angeles Times in 1975. “Otherwise I think I’m a better defensive catcher than Bench. Maybe I shouldn’t say it, but as long as I feel that way, I will.”1

  As I drive the freeways of the gleaming fortress of LA, I think back to one newspaper quote about Yeager that stuck out from the rest: “Steve Yeager is not a complex man,” wrote the Los Angeles Times in 1981, the year the Dodgers won the World Series for which Yeager shared the Most Valuable Player Award.2

  I don’t believe it. I’ve read too much about his life—three marriages, Hollywood aspirations, returning to the low Minor Leagues to manage after his playing career ended—to believe that his story is that simple.

  Crawling through traffic on Route 405 with the San Gabriel Mountains in the distance, my thoughts flicker back to my battle with OCD as I see the exit for my old psychologist Tom Corboy’s office, putting me right back on his sofa, where I sat ten years ago, face in hands, peering through the spaces between my fingers while he calmly explained why I absolutely under no circumstances should take my ninth HIV test in the past two weeks. I was living in LA with my girlfriend, Kay, a pixieish brunette with soulful brown eyes, killing time before starting graduate school. I had fallen hopelessly in love the day I met her in the Islands magazine office in Santa Barbara, immediately declaring her “the One” despite our significant age difference (she was thirteen years older).

  In early 2005 I left my job at Islands, taking a leap of faith to write the biography of my favorite professional wrestler, the Iron Sheik (a failed experiment that ended with a drug-addled Sheik threatening to kill me in his living room), and then retreating to LA, where Kay was in culinary school.3 Then things really went sideways. Stress exacerbates OCD, and as I sat in our tiny Pasadena apartment copying and pasting my résumé, my mental illness came roaring back to life, hijacking my brain. Kay was my life raft as I floundered in a sea of depression and self-doubt, unable to land a job even at the local Blockbuster Video.

  I was a shell of myself. During a trip to the beach in Rhode Island that summer, I slunk away as often as I could just so I could go through my mental rituals of reassurance seeking. On the outside, I was just another curious beachcomber, but inside my head, I was refereeing a civil war. I have never been that scared in my life—scared not of dying but of never getting the light back in my eyes.

  Kay remained steadfast and compassionate, even when the OCD dial in my brain started flickering all over the map, from fears of leaving the stove on to the fear that I had contracted HIV and would now give it to Kay. I spent hours researching HIV online trying to find definitive, 100 percent proof that there was no way I could possibly have contracted the virus (and in case you’re wondering, there was no rational reason to be concerned, as I had not engaged in any risky behavior). But I was chasing my own tail. The more I sought reassurance, the more I fed the OCD monster.

  As I pass that freeway exit for my therapist Tom’s office, I recall his words when advising me to not take yet another HIV test. A kind, avuncular man, he said, “I know it feels like walking through fire to resist that compulsion. But this disorder is about your action, not your thoughts. If you resist taking action, the anxiety-provoking thoughts will eventually subside.”

  He was right. I got through that episode without getting another test, but my relationship with Kay did not survive. I have not seen her since the day we broke up nine years ago because of something that I did.

  I pull over, shaken by all the memories, and glance at Steve Yeager’s 1986 baseball card, pulling myself back to the present.

  I take out my phone and text him: “Looking forward to meeting you tomorrow. Do you still own the Jersey Mike’s? Do you want to meet there?”

  * * *

  *

  LA is a city on steroids, a gleaming monument to excess, and, its consistently sunny weather notwithstanding, a terrible place to be poor. Reminders of what you don’t have are everywhere, from the fleet of Teslas and Hummers choking the six-lane freeways (and that’s just in one direction) to the nine-story billboards advertising the latest Hollywood blockbusters. In the trendy cafés and hip restaurants, people gather to not talk to one another, preferring to sit vigil by their smartphones for a message from someone who is anywhere but right in front of them. On my way to a “hot power fusion” yoga class last night (whose soundtrack, featuring a Jimi Hendrix “Voodoo Child” dance club remix, would make Siddhartha’s mat curl), I walked by a plaza with these three stores next to each other: Just Food for Dogs (made-to-order gourmet dog food), VM Custom Upholstery, and Monica the Psychic Advisor.

  It turns out Boomer does still own a Jersey Mike’s sub shop, located in Granada Hills of the San Fernando Valley (or simply “the Valley”; yes, that valley). It also turns out that my dreams of slamming Jägermeister shots with him were short-lived. My evening text invitation to check out a cowboy bar in Chatsworth, where he lives, was met with this unexpected reply: “I’m not going to be able to make it tonight. I haven’t had a drink in twenty-seven years. Call you tomorrow and try to find some time to talk and meet.”

  Well, shit.

  The next morning I’m sitting across from him at a Starbucks near his Jersey Mike’s.

  “So what’s this all about?” he asks, cupping a mocha with whipped cream. He’s wearing khakis, brown loafers, and a blue-and-green Hawaiian-print button-down shirt splashed with plant fronds. He’s slightly hunched but solidly built, like a block of ballast. Sinusoid lines cross his bronze, handsome face in parallel streams, his hazel eyes twinkle beneath a pair of glasses, and his silver hair is swept back.

  I produce my props—the Wax Pack and a copy of a recent New York Times article that mentions my journey—and explain way too quickly why I’m buying him coffee and writing down every word he says.

  He laughs at the sight of the Pack.

  “They don’t make those anymore, do they?” he asks, flipping through the cards, annotating with comments about his old colleagues.

  When he gets to Richie Hebner, a huge grin breaks out.

  “Tell Richie we need to go chase some nurses,” he says of his fellow nocturnal free spirit.

  He sets the cards down, and I notice his 1981 World Series ring on his left hand, bright and bold, just like Rance’s.

  “The thing is, if we had done this when the ball club was in town, you could have followed me for a day. I get up, go to the ballpark, mingle with the players, sit in the video room. But you follow me around today, I’m gonna get the car washed, go home, and watch the game. I’m sixty-six years old. I don’t do a whole lot of anything.”

  I laugh. Boomer is still in the Dodgers organization as a coach for the big club’s catchers. I don’t care that the team is out of town, because watching him get his car washed is exactly what I want to do. I tell him this, and he shakes his head, baffled.

  We make small talk about his restaurant, the thirty-eighth Jersey Mike’s in the LA area. His third wife, Charlene, owned a deli when they first met and then went into real estate. When that bubble burst, she found herself at a loss for what to do next. She ate a particularly tasty sub at a Jersey Mike’s, got inspired, and told her husband she wanted to open one of her own.

  Hell, go for it, he told her, having learned long ago the necessity of taking action. It’s been a great success, except for one little detail.

  “The corporate people at Jersey Mike’s won’t let us
put stuff on the walls,” he says, explaining the lack of baseball paraphernalia. “‘We don’t want to take advantage of our celebrity friends,’ they told me. Hey, asshole, they’re not your friends, they’re mine,” he says.

  And there, within five minutes of meeting him, is the Steve Yeager I’ve read about.

  Brash. Cocky. Outspoken.

  “I came to play. I came to beat you. That’s still my attitude today. I think in order to be successful you have to walk around with a little chip on your shoulder. You’ve got to walk with a little swagger.”

  But only a few minutes later, I unexpectedly discover where that swagger came from.

  “Tell me a little bit about growing up,” I say.

  Silence.

  I follow up: “You were in Dayton through high school?”

  “I was originally born in West Virginia, stayed there until I was six or seven years old.” He was an only child.

  “And your dad was a coal miner?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What about your mom?”

  “Mom didn’t do anything. My dad passed away about 2001. Mom’s still alive; she’s back in Ohio. I keep trying to get her out here, but she won’t come.”

  “Why did they move to Ohio?”

  “I guess jobs. My dad got a job driving a bus for city transit.”

  “Was he an athlete at all?”

  “I guess he was an athlete in the service. I think he boxed a bit, played baseball. Threw a hellacious knuckleball. I know that.”

  He drinks his mocha, the whipped cream now having dissolved away. I take a sip of my coffee, eyes locked with his. “He drank a lot,” he says, adding, “I know that.”

  His voice is quiet. He takes his glasses off for a moment, then replaces them.

  And it’s here where Steve Yeager suddenly isn’t so simple.