The Wax Pack

by Brad Balukjian

  The foyer opens into a spacious, high-ceilinged living room arranged around the centerpiece, a pool table. The Templetons moved here two and a half years ago, a welcome downsize from their huge home in Poway. The desk by the door, the drop spot for keys and other knickknacks, holds a stack of slightly yellowed Garry Templeton postcards like long-forgotten trick-or-treat candy, the photo capturing him midthrow to first base.

  I’m sitting on the plush brown leather sofa talking to Tempy’s senior prom date. Glenda, fifty-five, is wearing a black-and-gray dress, her pretty brown eyes embellished by just the right amount of eye shadow, a gleaming cross dangling from her necklace. She has a classy, regal air, an instinctive emotional intelligence evident in her give-and-take, never too much. She is also a first for the Wax Pack—the first wife who has remained the only wife.

  “It’s kind of weird,” she says. “I have a lot of friends that are divorced. When the guys leave baseball and they leave that paycheck behind, all of a sudden they start having problems. All of a sudden they’re home all the time.”

  Or maybe the problems that were always there now have a chance to surface.

  But Glenda was an exception—an athlete herself, she understood the pressures of the game, the daily, grueling test of will. And she went along for the ride at every opportunity. She was there when the upstart Padres knocked out the Cubs in the 1984 National League Championship Series and Graig Nettles, that playful bastard, dumped a bottle of Champagne on her head to get her back for pushing him into the pool at a team party. Wanda Jones, Angie Wiggins, April Wynn—the players’ wives and girlfriends were her teammates too. She and Tempy grew together, the way any couple needs to if they want to last as long as the Templetons have. When Tempy was on the road, she filled in everywhere, the ultimate pinch hitter—she was Gerome’s Little League coach. And through it all, when she looks across the room at her husband she still sees that playful, even shy high schooler who first approached her through a secret admirer note, asking if she’d go to a dance Friday night after the football game.

  Glenda’s five-year-old granddaughter, Gracelynn, walks over, cradling her Barbie doll, which has lost a limb.

  “Say, ‘Excuse me,’” Glenda admonishes.

  “Excuse me,” replies a small voice, showing her grandmother the injury.

  “She’ll just have to go to the hospital later,” Glenda replies.

  Tempy now takes his turn as head counselor of Camp Templeton with the grandkids.

  “He does everything that I used to do with the kids that he missed out on,” she says. Chauffeur extraordinaire, he takes them to their softball games, gymnastics classes, and horse shows. They make pretty good caddies too on the driving range—golf is now Tempy’s competitive outlet, playing three to four times per week. Right now he’s at the Titleist office testing their clubs.

  Tempy’s always been a giver—he’s just not ostentatious about it. For years, in St. Louis and San Diego, he would buy an entire section of seats for local underprivileged kids, calling it “Templetown.” When he finished playing after the 1991 season at age thirty-five, he sat out two years before the itch for the game overwhelmed him. From 1994 until 2013, just like Steve Yeager, he got back on the bus, coaching the next generation.

  “He’s a good teacher; he can deal with the kids. A lot of players still call him. He can look at a game and just dissect the fielding and the hitting,” Glenda says.

  The front door swings open and the head counselor walks in, wearing a navy Padres golf shirt and matching navy shorts.

  “You know he’s recording your ass,” he says to Glenda. She laughs.

  “Oh, I know. How much did you cuss yesterday when you talked to him?” she asks.

  “Not too much,” he says quietly.

  She turns to me: “Sometimes he cusses a lot.”

  Tempy and I move to the other living room by the TV, which he clicks on, lowering himself into the sofa. His Padres, muddling through another tough season, are playing the Giants, fresh off their third World Series victory in five years. He keeps track of the Padres but rarely will sit and watch a whole game. It’s too long, too slow—ironic, considering the decades he spent doing just that (even as a player you spend almost half the game watching from the dugout). It’s also hard for a man of Tempy’s pride and vision to sit and watch something over which he no longer has any control. His greatest skill—and there were plenty to choose from—was not his defense or his bat but his eyes—the first part of his eyes, hands, feet formula for success. While us mere mortals see a white blur when a pitcher unleashes a ninety-five-mile-per-hour fastball, Tempy can pick up the stitches on the ball, telling him its rotation and thus the type of pitch. He can tell based on the angle of the bat’s contact with the ball where it’s going to end up. He doesn’t need a computer to tell him the launch angle; he sees the launch angle.

  Tempy’s superpowers are evident even now watching TV. It’s the top of the third inning, and the Giants are already leading, 2–0. Matt Kemp, the Padres’ superstar slugger who has disappointed since being traded from the Dodgers in the off-season, stands in against Chris Heston, a twenty-seven-year-old rookie. Kemp works the count full and then flails for strike 3, his bat meeting nothing but air.

  “What happened there?” I ask. All I saw was a swing and a miss.

  The professor begins his lecture, his voice rising in a crescendo as he talks, acting out the moves as he explains: “I don’t think he starts on time. See that swing right there? He started when the pitcher’s arm was right here [holding his arm out in front]. That’s too late—by the time he’s ready to release the ball, the ball’s on top of you. He has to start a little sooner, when the pitcher’s arm is back, so he can get his foot down and be ready to pull the trigger. If he’s not getting his body in position on time, he damn sure isn’t seeing the ball,” he says. “All he has to do is come see me, and I’ll tell him what’s going on.”

  Tempy misses the game. He’s still young enough to be on the road coaching, managing, doing what he does best. Golf, his current obsession, is a band-aid solution; he’d like to get back out there, drop the twenty-five extra pounds hanging around his waist, work with kids. But the phone hasn’t rung since he last managed in 2013.

  “Do you ever watch your old games?” I ask.

  “Nah, man, I don’t give a shit about that,” he says. “You can’t live in the past; you’ve got to live in the present. You want some water?” he asks, getting up and gingerly walking to the kitchen, where he pops a couple of Aleves. That goddamned left knee, even after eight surgeries.

  “Now it’s bone on bone. I need a knee replacement,” he says. “I played shortstop on one leg and was still better than most of those guys.”

  Bored of baseball, he switches on his favorite channel, El Rey, to see if there’s a kung fu movie on. If the trip has taught me anything so far, it’s to be careful about expectations—watching kung fu with Garry Templeton was nowhere in my pretrip planning.

  “I like to watch the fighting part because I’m intrigued with how they come up with all the fight scenes. I mean, how long do they practice all of this stuff just to make this one scene?” he wonders out loud, hands animated.

  We chat about the next leg of my trip, the long haul to Houston, where I have a very tentative meet-up with the next Wax Packer, Gary Pettis. As the current third-base coach for the Astros, Pettis is the only Packer still in the Show, still riding the carousel, and so my time with him, if any, will be very limited.

  “Man, you got a long way to go,” Tempy says, giggling.

  Just then little Gracelynn walks over with her Barbie doll, apparently looking for a second opinion.

  “Looks like she has to go to the hospital,” he says gently. “When I get back from the doctor, I’ll fix her,” he adds, bringing a smile to Gracelynn’s face.

  Camp Templeton is in full swing. And its head counselor is better than most, even on one leg.

  While Tempy has (literal) plastic
surgery to perform for his granddaughter, I have to prepare to leave the cocoon of California—I’m due in Houston in three days. But first, I have a date with my own checkered past.

  5

  Houston, We Have a Problem

  Maybe I don’t show my anger when things aren’t going right, but that’s part of Gary Pettis. I try to appear that nothing is bothering me.

  —Gary Pettis

  Days 8–11

  June 26–29, 2015

  Miles driven: 2,429

  Cups of coffee: 21

  San Marcos CA to Houston TX

  Leaving behind my beloved California, I steer the Accord through the dusty brambles of Arizona and New Mexico, surrounded by the Southwest’s stark topography and muted palette of reds, browns, and olive greens. I break up the trek over three arid days, the 689-mile haul from Phoenix to Fort Stockton, Texas, a particularly long slog made tolerable only by the compulsively addictive podcast Serial. Long stretches of empty freeway, save for the occasional billboard for gun shops and cheap gas (down to $2.29!), lull me into semihypnosis, the thirteen-year-old air-conditioning straining to keep up with the pounding heat. While I guzzle murky gas station coffee, history is made as the Supreme Court legalizes gay marriage in all fifty states. In less encouraging news, my mom (always being a mom!) texts me to be careful because she saw on the news that two prisoners escaped from a maximum security facility in New York. I remind her that I’m thousands of miles away from New York, and she replies (always being a mom!), “I know, but you never know!”

  5. Gary Pettis

  I also get the bad news that Gary Pettis does not, in fact, have time for me. Pettis is an enigma. While the first three Wax Packers were all relatively easy to find through public records searches (thank you, baby boomers, for keeping the land line alive), Pettis stymied me at all turns in my pretrip prep. My options exhausted, I had turned to THE LAST RESORT: public relations people. PR people have an agenda, and that’s to make their client look good no matter what. It’s their job to retain as much control as possible, to stay on message. Nothing personal—they’re just doing their job—but most great stories in journalism are not born through PR.

  And so I had emailed Steve Grande, the Astros’ PR guy, asking if I could interview Gary when I came to Houston. We had agreed that the June 29 game against the Kansas City Royals would be a good opportunity (no promises, though!), but now the chime of a text message from Steve turns dirge: “Gary declined the interview. He wants to keep a low profile,” it reads.

  Low profile?? I can’t imagine hordes of reporters are clamoring for time with the third-base coach, and Pettis has never been one to seek the spotlight. This, of course, is only a setback. You don’t put your life on hold for two months to chase the muse of stale cardboard and then give up at the first sign of trouble.

  No, no, no. Pettis may have quit me, but I’ve got a plan B.

  * * *

  *

  Up to this point, I’ve concealed the fact that when it comes to anything remotely mechanical, I am completely, hopelessly, utterly useless. I break into hives every time I walk into a Home Depot, its cavernous aisles, wide enough for buses, taunting me with tools I don’t even know how to hold, let alone use. Approaching Fort Stockton, both the Accord and I are hurting, the former gasping for oil. Having never changed a tire, let alone my own oil, I rank any type of breakdown among my biggest fears on this journey.

  On the outskirts of town, I come across a cluster of buildings—a muffler shop, an RV appliance repair store, and Mingo’s Burritos, along with a garage with a glint of hope. A stack of tires, three chairs lifted out of an airport lounge, and a plastic bucket of stagnant, muddy water guard the garage, whose front window reads RL Auto Service in big yellow block letters. No one is at the front desk, but a few customers stand around while two men wheel tires back and forth, calling to each other in Spanish.

  “Do you do oil changes here?” I ask one of them.

  He looks at his partner and says something in Spanish. They exchange several lines before the younger one returns, asking, “Do you have oil?”

  Is it bring your own? I wonder to myself.

  Although oil changes are clearly not part of their standard service, they study my notebook, polo shirt, and California license plates and realize this could be their good deed for the day.

  I’m dispatched to pick up the oil and filter (so that’s what an oil filter is!) at an O’Reilly Auto Parts down the road. Thirty-five minutes later I return, ready to apprentice. I pop the hood and watch while the younger mechanic jacks up the Accord (what a device!) and then brings over some flattened cardboard boxes to lie on. I stand in front of the car, notebook and pencil poised, slightly bent at the knees, leaning forward like a coach too nervous to stand up straight to observe the next play. From there it’s all a blur of wrenches and bolts and that filter, way beyond my feeble reach. I need diagrams, YouTube videos, and lots of practice. This is not the crash course I was hoping for.

  I will not be changing my own oil in the future.

  * * *

  *

  I’m about to see Kay, my ex-girlfriend, the only girl I’ve ever lived with, for the first time in almost ten years.

  In an alternate universe, we are married with an eight-year-old daughter. We live in Santa Barbara; she’s got her own bakery, where she goes every morning at 5:00 a.m. following a run in the dark, coming in to kiss me on the forehead before leaving for work. I am a postdoc at UC Santa Barbara, its proximity to the Channel Islands providing the perfect opportunity to continue my island biogeography research. We still send each other letters through the mail even though we live together, still call each other by the same mutual pet name.

  Kay was supposed to be the One, the same way I’m sure Rance and Boomer thought their first wives were their Ones. They learned to accept change and have found joy in their second (or third) chances; now it’s time to accept mine.

  Kay and I didn’t speak for a long time after the breakup, but gradually the ice thawed—we became Facebook friends, then started texting each other on our birthdays. But I still haven’t heard her voice, seen those soulful brown eyes, since the day I walked out in early 2006, ashamed but still certain that I was doing the right thing. The relationship had ended, and it was my fault.

  My battle with OCD took a remarkable turn for the better in mid-2005. My therapist, Tom, introduced me to a form of cognitive-behavioral therapy called exposure and response prevention in which you overcome your fears by learning to coexist with them. How do you do this? Lots and lots of homework. In my support group, I learned of other people’s suffering and their tickets out: people who had the irrational fear of stabbing their own baby had to work themselves up to holding a knife in front of their baby; those who were afraid of being gay had to watch gay porn. While these treatments may seem radical, they work because they desensitize your brain to its own bullshit. Since my compulsions were mostly mental, I had to listen for hours to a tape on a loop in which I spelled out the worst-case scenario of my irrational fears (“I contract HIV from kissing someone, give it to Kay, who leaves me, and I end up homeless and covered in sores on Skid Row dying of AIDS . . .”). That, coupled with antidepressants and a dash of metacognitive Buddhist philosophy (accept uncertainty, learn to let go) is the gold-standard treatment for the disorder. You learn that it’s not your thoughts and feelings that matter, it’s how you respond to them.

  During the depths of my OCD, the romance in my relationship with Kay withered. We stopped having sex altogether. But her commitment never wavered, even when depression and panic attacks layered onto my OCD like an anxiety casserole. When I turned the corner, it was like stepping back into color—my humor returned, my eyes brightened, and with my wits back, I came to the horrific realization that Kay had been right all along when she had initially balked at the prospect of our relationship. You’re too young, she had said. We’re too far apart in age. I had insisted that I was more mature than most, that I was
different, that I knew that we would last where others had failed.

  She was right.

  Sadly, this epiphany was not one that I reached responsibly. I was in too deep a state of denial for that. Instead, I acted out, doing the one thing that I found most reprehensible: I cheated.

  Growing up in a conservative, traditional family, the kind that holds hands and says grace at the dinner table, I considered cheating to be a cardinal sin. My parents set the example, taking us to church, showing their love for each other, certainly not coveting their neighbors’ wives or husbands. There was no way I would ever cheat.

  Yet there I was, at a conference in Chicago, absconding to the hotel room of a comely brunette from the Bahamas I would never see again. I couldn’t blame it on alcohol, couldn’t excuse it in any way; as it was happening I knew it was wrong, yet I wanted it anyway. And I didn’t just want it, I craved it.

  I flew home the next day, racked with guilt, not recognizing my own reflection. How could I have done that to someone who had done nothing but love me even when I was all shell and no meat, damaged and lost? But I knew the answer. She had been right. I wasn’t ready.

  I clung to that truth, knowing that if I stayed, the relationship would end even worse than it would now. The stakes would be higher, the damage greater. I had to go. And so I did.

  * * *

  *

  What do you say to your ex-girlfriend after leaving her and not having seen her for nine years? What do you say to the person to whom you once promised the stars and the moon and truly meant it, only to realize too late that they’re not yours to promise?

  You start by letting go. You recognize that if you say anything out of a sense of obligation, it’s not coming from the right place. As Tempy told me, the past is the past. Live in the present.