“I plan to go back to the game next year,” he says. In order to begin collecting your Major League pension you can’t be employed by a Major League organization, but now that he’s started receiving the money, he can go back and continue to collect. One day he would love to have the privilege of managing at the Major League level; he reached the interview stage twice before, with the Mariners and Astros, but never landed the job. I wouldn’t bet against him.
Randy finishes off his third Miller Lite, and I decide it’s time to issue a challenge. “Let’s bowl, Randy. I’ll smoke you,” I say, brimming with false confidence. The last time I bowled (sober) was at a birthday party in fourth grade, when Randy was playing left field for the Philadelphia Phillies.
He laughs and says he doesn’t have any socks. But I pressure him, telling him that as a professional athlete he’d better be able to beat me in anything, socks or no socks.
“Alright, I’ll beat your ass, but only one game. None of this best out of three,” he says.
We change into our bowling shoes and grab lane 3 next to a group of girls in their early twenties. Randy is having fun, stretching out, swiveling his hips, getting ready to roll.
“Man, I’ve got to get back out there. Right after the divorce, I was going out a lot, took hip hop lessons,” he says, his eyes scanning the bar.
“Why did your ex want to move to Dallas?” I ask.
“I guess to divorce me?” he shoots back. “Good question, why would I come here? Have you seen San Diego?” he asks, referencing his former home.
I keep my feelings about San Diego to myself.
He cradles one of the bowling balls, sizing up the string of pins. He takes three steps, swinging back his right arm and rolling the ball forward with good velocity. It tails left, knocking down only four pins. I needle him, putting my hands around my throat.
“You pulled it,” I chirp.
“Yeah, I did,” he replies, hanging his head. “Let’s see what you got, kid.”
I proceed to do the exact same thing, hooking the ball left despite my every effort to roll it as straight as possible without any spin. Why is this sport so hard? He laughs.
“Didn’t we just talk about this?” he says. “C’mon, use your Ivy League education to figure this out.”
One of the girls in the neighboring lane squats low, her feet in a wide stance facing the pins, and rolls the ball at a glacial pace from between her legs, using both hands. The ball inches down the lane, hitting the first pin softly but triggering a slow-motion cascade that eventually topples all ten for a strike.
Randy gives her a high five, saying, “Wow, you had a nice throw on that!” It’s not hard to imagine him in a baseball clubhouse, pin-balling around the room with boundless enthusiasm, calling everyone “kid.” I feel like I’m out with an old college buddy.
We chat while we roll about his hot yoga class (not Bikram, but still heated) and his love of hunting and fishing. He’s a Renaissance man, shattering stereotypes of the ex-jock. I look up at the TV screen and realize how close I am to actually beating him, only a few points behind. But when the last frame is done, the cream has risen to the top: Randy 130, Brad 129. I snap a photo.
“Put that on Twitter,” he says with a wide grin.
* * *
*
“Are you here yet?” I text Randy.
Today is the day I ask him about Dorene.
I spread my feet in a wide stance, sucking in my stomach and keeping my back as straight as possible as I lean over to the right, grabbing behind my right knee with both hands. My hamstring screams as my head drops with gravity, trying to pull it closer to my knee, feeling the accumulated knots of thousands of miles on the road. I’ve only managed to squeeze a few workouts in so far, and I can already feel my muscles tightening from disuse.
From this bent-over position I glance up and see Randy bound into the gym, his hair flopping to one side, earbuds wrapped around his neck. He walks by, gives me a “morning, kid,” and chitchats with the trainers and staff gathered behind the desk. He’s got an appointment with his therapist at 11:15, and since I’m in bad need of a workout, I asked if I could join his morning routine at Gold’s Gym.
“What time did I tell you to meet me here? Nine a.m.?” he says to me, exaggerating every word, pretending to be annoyed. “And what time is it now?” he asks, craning his head toward the clock on the wall. “Ten of. Ten of! And you’re already texting me. You’re so high maintenance,” he says, cracking up the entire staff, then adding, “Give this kid my guest pass.”
I follow him toward the free weights, and he says, “I’m not working out with you, I’ll tell you that right now. You do your own thing.” An impish grin spreads across his face as he talks out of the side of his mouth. I convince him to spot me on the bench press and add a 45-pound plate on each side, for a total weight of 135 pounds.
“What do we got, kid?” he asks, and I tell him I’m shooting for six reps.
“Can I get help on the liftoff?” I ask.
“Man, you’re high maintenance,” he replies with that grin.
I push the bar up (with his help) and do my best to control its descent toward my chest, feeling the microfibers in my pecs tear with each inch.
“Straight up, you got it, no problem,” he coaches as I grimace with each rep, breathing hard through my nose. I stand up panting and tell him that when he was traded from the Padres to the Phillies in 1989, my dad told me after he read it in the morning paper and how excited I was that Randy was now on my favorite team. That year in fourth-grade art class, each student had to design a plastic dinner plate. Most students drew pictures of their favorite animal or a scene from a family vacation; I used the space to write out the name of every single player on the Phillies. Not a single drawing or picture, just letters, including R-a-n-d-y R-e-a-d-y. I still eat off that plate in my room back in Oakland.
Following our workout (true to his word, he ditches me for his own series of exercises while I huff on the elliptical), we walk across the street to Southpaw’s Grill for some breakfast. Randy orders the Major Malcolm, a sandwich with two eggs, Swiss cheese, bacon, sliced turkey, jalapeños, and tomatoes, and shows me pictures from the medical mission he just completed in Guatemala. Always giving back, Randy joined 120 doctors to provide relief and assistance to the village of Chimaltenango. He was on the stove team, assembling seventy-six stoves in ten days. He beams as he shows me photos of the families he worked with, multiple generations crammed into single-room huts with mats on the floor for beds.
“It was crazy, dude. It’s way out in the middle of nowhere. It was nuts. It was so rewarding.”
I want to know more about his childhood—he’s a Bay Area boy at heart, having been born in San Mateo and then moving to Fremont at age six. I’m also curious about his father—my experience with Rance (fantastic father) and Boomer (alcoholic father) has me thinking a lot about the vital role that dads play in these elite athletes’ lives.
“What was your dad like?” I ask, taking a swig of the Muscle Milk he bought me at the gym. (“Don’t say I never bought you anything,” he said as he tossed it to me.)
“Super tennis player, Oklahoma State wrestling champion,” Randy replies. “Moved to California when he was eighteen. I tried to find out if he graduated high school, but I’m not sure that he did. He loved the horses, loved betting on the horses. He used to take me out of school to go to the horse races,” he says. He talks over the whir of blenders as people file in and out of the bustling café.
“Were you guys close growing up?” I ask.
“Well, you know, he was busy working. We went camping as a family, we fished a lot together, but he wasn’t at a lot of sports events because he was working all the time,” he says evenly.
Not exactly a yes.
He tells me that one day when he was about ten, he came home from school and found his dad in their backyard. “Look what I did for you,” his dad told him. “I built you a pitcher’s mound.”
Randy was ecstatic. He grabbed his glove as his dad positioned himself behind home plate, a Pall Mall hanging out of the side of his mouth. Randy prayed that he would throw a strike.
“I threw him one pitch,” he tells me, his voice void of any emotion. “He said good job and figured that was good enough. Satisfied the requirement.” His dad walked back inside and never played catch with him again.
Six years later, Randy’s dad dropped dead of a heart attack while working in Alaska, the night before the family was set to fly to Juneau to meet him for a vacation.
“I remember the last time I saw him was one of those moments where he wanted to give me a hug, and I said, ‘Hey, we’re in public. We should probably just shake hands.’ It wasn’t cool hugging your dad in public at that time. So I backed off and shook his hand, and I never forgot that. Later I said if I have children, I’m gonna do it different.”
He hugs his six boys every chance he gets.
I glance at my watch and realize it’s already 10:30. Randy has to leave soon for his shrink, and I haven’t yet worked up the nerve to ask him the question I’ve come all this way to ask.
I glance down, then back up to meet his eyes.
“So yesterday you mentioned your first wife,” I say.
“Y-y-essss,” he replies slowly and cautiously, clearly nervous about what comes next. But the horse is out of the barn.
“So what ended up happening?”
“She had a heart attack.”
“I know the story from the press, but what ended up happening in the long run?”
“Um, she’s still alive,” he replies. I hadn’t realized until this moment that I had expected her to have passed.
“She’s fifty-two, fifty-three years old. She lives in Tucson, she’s set up in a nice house, her brother takes good care of her, her parents are since deceased.” He talks like he’s reading off a checklist.
“Did she recover anymore?” I ask.
“No. Still the same. The boys go and visit her. They spent Christmas with her this year. I was there on Christmas Day; it was a lot of fun.” He shows me pictures to lighten the mood.
“Is she able to talk?”
“Eh, about the same. Like I said, she’s well provided for, and . . .” He pauses. “The kids over the years have learned to have a relationship with her.”
“Even though she can’t speak, she knows who people are?”
“Ah, ya know, it’s hard to tell. Seven to ten minutes without oxygen is a long time.”
I can sense the burden of these questions growing heavy on him.
“Anyway, she’s doing good. She’ll probably outlive us all. Next question.” He giggles, then adds, “See how I got out of that?”
I smile but decide not to drop it. Not yet. I now know the facts, but I want to know what’s underneath them. I push on.
“Can I ask you a little more about it? Are you okay talking about it?”
“Right. What do you want to know?” he replies, not defensive, willing to continue.
“What got you through it?”
It’s not a great question. It’s cliché and one he’s clearly been asked a thousand times before, but in this tense moment I can’t think of any other way to ask how you possibly keep moving forward when life has just delivered you a knockout blow.
Randy recognizes the banality of my question and replies, “Everything that’s been put down on paper, the support, friends, faith, all those things.”
I ask him to elaborate on the faith part.
“I think everyone has to have a belief, some type of foundation. You have to have something.”
“Did you ever think about retiring when all that went down?” I ask.
“No, not at all. I figured if I can pull this off somehow, some way, it’s just going to make me stronger.”
And it did. Because Randy is not afraid. All his life he’s been dealt a five of clubs, but he doesn’t discard it, doesn’t tear it up and leave the table; he adds it to his deck, ready to play the next hand.
A few minutes from now, I will get back on the road, driving backward (west) to Oklahoma to do some research, and Randy will drive to see his psychologist to talk more about his feelings. It’s not easy—back in 1985 a writer for the Milwaukee Journal commented that Randy tends to bury his feelings deep inside. That may have been true then, but it isn’t now.
Randy is ready.
7
Carman’s Cradle
Farm. Work in the oil fields. Crystal meth.
—Resident of Camargo, Oklahoma, when asked what people do there
Days 14–15
July 2–3, 2015
Miles driven: 3,401
Cups of coffee: 33
Dallas TX to Camargo OK
None of the Wax Packers live in Oklahoma. At least not anymore.
My favorite baseball team growing up was the Philadelphia Phillies, which in the late 1980s was a bit like saying your favorite Star Wars character is Aunt Beru. By geography (growing up in Rhode Island), I should have been a Boston Red Sox fan, but two things conspired against that outcome: I never followed the crowd, and my favorite letter was F. Apparently, I also couldn’t spell.
Scrawny, industrious, and shy, I was picked on a lot as a kid—throw in a debilitating stutter, and I had season tickets to the nerd table in the lunchroom. I attributed my academic success more to a diligent work ethic than any innate intelligence—I got straight As because I worked hard, I figured, not because I was naturally smart.
My parents provided the most idyllic childhood one could hope for—long days spent playing by the backyard lake, limitless support for all my quirky hobbies, unconditional love—but also made it clear that I was expected to excel in school. “Your education is what will get you ahead,” they told me. My brain became my best friend. It wasn’t until many years later with the onset of OCD that I saw my best friend’s ugly side.
I followed my parents’ marching orders, churning out All-Star numbers on my report cards year after year. As early as the third grade I was creating spreadsheets on my grandfather’s medical pads in order to track my school assignments.
I spent my free time poring over everything I could find related to the Phillies and my favorite player, pitcher Don Carman. I felt an intrinsic kinship with Don, a cerebral type in a world of alpha jocks, possessed of limited ability but tireless work ethic. His career statistics don’t jump off the page, they crawl: fifty-three wins and fifty-four losses with a 4.11 earned run average (ERA) compiled over ten Major League seasons. I met him briefly in 1994, when he was trying to make a comeback with the Phillies and my family took a vacation to spring training in Florida. My dad and I caught Don for a few seconds during practice, just long enough for me to get his autograph and take a picture, my thirteen-year-old head coming just to the letters of his jersey. I was so smitten by the experience that I wrote a letter to the editor of Phillies Report, the team newspaper, which got printed, my first-ever publication.
Carman grew up here in the Sooner State, which I cross into a couple hours after leaving Randy Ready behind in Dallas. Although this is a complete detour, I only have one favorite player of all time, and so spending a little extra effort telling his story seems perfectly reasonable to me. A week from now I’ll meet Carman himself in Florida.
Oklahoma is as opposite California as you can get. Born late to the Union (the forty-sixth state), it was constructed out of land discarded by neighboring states or set aside in perpetuity for Native Americans, who now number more than a quarter million here. Overwhelmingly white and conservative (Mitt Romney won two-thirds of the popular vote in 2012), the urban areas lean liberal. My goal is to visit Camargo, the tiny outpost where Carman grew up, but I decide to rest for a night in the capital, Oklahoma City (OKC), smack in the middle of the state.
Like many other cities, OKC experienced an urban revival in the 1990s following decades of nearby suburban development. The rebirth brought baseball, shopping, and a canal bustling with water
taxis and nightlife to a downtown dominated by the fifty-floor Devon Energy Center skyscraper. Having saved some money by staying in an Airbnb in Dallas, I splurge, knowing my dollar will go a lot farther here than it will on the East Coast, where I’m soon headed.
I park at the Sheraton Downtown and in the short walk to the lobby am reminded of why this part of the country is nicknamed tornado alley, a blast of wind tousling my gelled hair and sending strands in all directions.
Another city, another hotel front desk, I think, the same kind of routine the Wax Packers endured for six months at a time while living out of a suitcase season after season.
At the front desk, Colin, not a day over twenty-one, greets me behind a bowl of Red Delicious apples, his hair slicked straight back in clumpy wet tendrils.
“Since we’re low occupancy, we’re going to upgrade you to our deluxe California room,” he says, handing me a key. (To the rest of the country, California is still exotic enough to inspire the names of special rooms.)
“I actually have the room right next to you,” he adds. “Last night I had people on both sides of me having, shall we say, intimate moments, and I couldn’t sleep. I figure I’ll get some quiet with you next to me.”
I’m insulted.
I head out, hoping to prove Colin wrong, and end up at the R&J Lounge and Supper Club in the midtown neighborhood, northwest of downtown. An homage to the supper clubs and cocktail bars of the 1950s, the lounge occupies a one-level beige brick building that used to house a printing company. I walk into a den of red and gold, the lighting low, with multiple retro accents (record player, pin-up-girl posters). I take a seat on the patio, covered in plastic grass, where a large man named Maurice is onstage strumming an electric guitar. He finishes a song, and someone calls out “Happy birthday!”
“Fifty-six,” he says softly, winking to everyone.
It’s a decent crowd for a Wednesday night, locals slurping grasshoppers and whiskey sours to fight off the humidity. I order a Cuba libre (only $4.30!) and turn to the two women at my table, one an older brunette and the other a redhead named Lacey. The brunette is a nurse and bartender with some miles; “I don’t drink,” she tells me, “but most of my friends who work in bars are alcoholics.” She excuses herself (early shift at the hospital in the morning), leaving me alone with Lacey, whose green saucer-eyes are devastating. She sits with her legs crossed, her seafoam purse positioned perfectly straight in her lap.
The Wax Pack Page 10