The Wax Pack

by Brad Balukjian

  “Mickey Mantle!” she exclaims when I explain the baseball theme of my journey.

  “Well . . . not exactly,” I reply. “More like Don Carman.”

  I get crickets in response.

  I offer to buy her a drink, but she says she’s already had a couple and wants to be responsible. She was born in Buffalo and is studying to be a traveling nurse.

  “What’s dating like here?” I ask, hoping to learn if she’s single.

  “I’ve been in a relationship for about a year,” she replies, friendly but not flirtatious.

  “How did you guys meet?”

  “We worked together. He really liked me, found out when my shifts were, and asked me out like five times before I said yes.”

  The expression on my face betrays my thoughts, because she quickly adds, “But I really liked him when we finally went out.”

  She goes on: “I thought it was kind of tacky that we worked together, so I resigned and found a new job.” The sleeves of her billowy peach-colored top spill past her elbows.

  “How old are you?” I ask. I’ve always felt that the taboo against asking a woman this question is silly.

  “Twenty-five. Getting up there.”

  Ha.

  “I want to make sure before I get engaged and married that he has a plan. More than anything else, I need security,” she says. “He’s studying for the MCAT right now. I haven’t seen him in a week. He failed the first time but didn’t really show any initiative.”

  “Are you actually into this guy?” I ask, now fully skeptical that her relationship has any future. In the five minutes we’ve been talking, her boyfriend’s sole redemptive quality seems to be that he was nice after having stalked her.

  She giggles nervously and replies, “Well, he doesn’t really listen to me.” She holds her drink with both hands, tracing the brim with her index finger.

  “You don’t seem too happy to me,” I reply. “I don’t think it’s going to work.”

  “What should I do?” she asks.

  “Well, obviously, I’m not objective here, since I’m attracted to you, but I think you know the answer. Better to end it sooner than later. Don’t drag it out.”

  Damn, that was blunt, I think to myself.

  She is not thrilled to hear this, but a glint of agreement flashes in her eyes, and for the first time, a hint of seduction spreads across her face.

  “Well, if I do, I’ll come find you,” she says, finishing her drink and wishing me a good night.

  I settle in to listen to Maurice’s solo scat, his encore now having stretched to forty minutes because the crowd is eating it up. I wish Jesse and the Kid were here to raise a glass with me, to recap the interaction with Lacey. I know she will probably not take my advice, that even though she may complain to her friends about her boyfriend and spaces out in the shower wondering what life could be like, she will probably wake up ten years from now with two young kids and a distant husband and will see a picture of Mickey Mantle and remember this night and smile wearily.

  She will have the security she wanted. But will she be happy?

  * * *

  *

  In western Oklahoma, diversity consists of blond, strawberry blond, and dirty blond. The moment I walk into a restaurant, all heads turn toward my pastel shirt, tar-black hair, and swarthy complexion, which add up to definitely not from western Oklahoma.

  “Would you like white gravy or brown?” the server at Home Cookin’ Café asks me the next night. Back in Oakland, gravy is a novelty that hipster restaurants serve with an ironic sneer, but here it comes in multiple colors.

  I pick at the iceberg lettuce on my plate, its translucent tissues drenched in Italian dressing, washing it down with coffee I sip out of a thick white ceramic mug. Coffee has become my emotional crutch, appropriate at any time of day. Home Cookin’ is attached to the Econo Lodge, which for only forty-six dollars is my quarters here in Elk City (population: 11,997), a cosmopolitan hub compared to where I’m heading. The police log in the local paper is dominated by entries such as “cattle standing in road.”

  The motel is located in a cavernous three-story hangar with the rooms facing an indoor pool and a courtyard festooned with potted plants on a concrete floor. I look around at my company in the café—there’s a pair of women in their fifties or sixties sitting at the table next to me, one with short dyed brown hair and a floral print button-down shirt, the other with the fiercest mullet I’ve seen since walking by a mirror in fourth grade. I eavesdrop for a moment on their conversation. “I haven’t been with anyone for eighteen years!” the mulleted one says. They giggle. My server brings some brown gravy.

  My phone chimes with a text from Wax Packer Jaime Cocanower, whom I’ll be seeing in a couple days in Arkansas: “Brad, Gini [his wife] and I would like to invite you to celebrate the Fourth with us. We live on Beaver Lake and our neighborhood puts together a fireworks display. You and anyone traveling with you are invited. How many should we count on?”

  As usual, no plus-one is necessary. Unless Lacey is free . . .

  I’ve been pleasantly surprised by how accommodating the Wax Packers have been, but this raises the bar to another level. I remember sitting on the floor of my bedroom as a kid, organizing and then reorganizing my baseball cards and always liking Cocanower’s in particular. I’m not sure if it was his unique name or the pensive expression on his face, but it’s surreal to now think that the dude with the bushy eyebrows just invited me to a Fourth of July barbecue at his house.

  I finish up my steak dinner, picking through the gristle, and walk the forty yards to my room. The discordant odor of dirty socks mixed with lemon-scented air freshener blasts my face as the door swings open, and I collapse onto the bed, glancing down at a maroon carpet showing the scars of many beer binges and highway trysts. I open up the drawer of the bed stand to see if shitty motels in middle America still have Yellow Pages (no) and Bibles (yes) and then crumple back into the clammy sheets.

  I read over my notes. Earlier in the day I drove from OKC to Weatherford, a midsize college town where Don Carman’s mother, Betty Walker, now lives. It’s the kind of community where people other than UPS workers still ring doorbells. Eighty years old, Betty is a throwback, a deceptively tough woman who is proud of all eight of her kids. Although only one was a professional athlete, she speaks of each of them with equal reverence. When I ask about Don, she makes sure to also mention the others, such as Charles, who she tells me worked for a security company in Iraq and wrote for his college newspaper. (“Isn’t that a cute picture?” she says, showing me the clipping.)

  Betty lives in a modest ranch-style house with an excitable dog that hurls itself against the screen door on my approach, and she has an assortment of scrapbooks ready for my arrival. Wearing a pink-and-white floral top, her gray hair falling to her shoulders, she brews a fresh pot of coffee while I scan the walls of the living room, decorated with the famous “Footprints” poem, a framed copy of the Ten Commandments, and yellowed pictures of the kids, including a clock with a photo of Don in his Phillies uniform. Betty met Don’s father, Marion, at a grocery store in San Jose, California, when she was only eighteen; they married a year later and moved to Camargo in September 1954 to be close to Marion’s family. Marion died of a heart attack at age forty-six, and her second husband also passed young. But Betty keeps on. For years she cooked in the elementary school cafeteria, then came home and played catch with Don and the other boys. She was an athlete in her day, competing in basketball, softball, swimming, even ping pong, filling the dad niche for Marion, even when he was still alive.

  “He was always working in the oil fields, sometimes double shifts,” she says.

  Three of Don’s brothers who live nearby join us to share their memories, each of them very different, but all of them sharing a western reticence when we veer from facts to feelings.

  “What was Don like as a kid?” I ask.

  “He was kind of shy,” Betty replies in a slight drawl. />
  “Yeah, shy,” one of the brothers says.

  Back in bed in the Econo Lodge, I curl up under the sheets with my phone, feeling the urge to connect with someone, listening to a midsummer thunderstorm pelt the pavement outside. My brain, always trying to think one step ahead, hasn’t shut off in two weeks. I wonder what Kay is doing right now, think about Tempy and whether or not he fixed his granddaughter’s Barbie doll, worry about whether I’ll get to the more challenging Wax Packers like Carlton Fisk and Vince Coleman. I take a deep breath and clear my head, opening my text messages and writing to a few women back home whom I have casually dated.

  “Hey,” I type to each of them.

  I stare at the artificial glow of the screen, waiting, hoping for a response.

  I fall asleep to the sight of my own messages, unrequited, the phone dropping out of my hand and onto the stained floor.

  * * *

  *

  This is truly the middle of nowhere.

  I’m standing next to the Accord on the outskirts of Camargo, if Camargo can even be said to have outskirts. Sky and land meet halfway at the horizon, the gently rolling Great Plains blanketed with grasses covering sandstone and shale dating back hundreds of millions of years. These lands are the closest our world gets to permanence, but they change too, slowly but inexorably.

  Founded in 1911, four years later Camargo already had four general stores, two hotels, two lumberyards, and two grain elevators. The population peaked at 315 in 1950, but at the last census in 2010, it had dropped to 178. At one time, the Carman family almost had a quorum (the town was nicknamed “Carmango”): Don’s father, Marion, was one of ten children who settled here, and now only one, Tom, is left. A railroad leading to the town of Leedey, eleven miles to the south, acted as the town’s main artery from 1912 to 1972, sustaining local commerce as a shipping route for livestock, wheat, and bentonite. But like so many other small towns across the country, once infrastructure and transportation routes changed, so too did the town’s fortunes.

  A 1984 clipping from the Daily Oklahoman shows Don and his childhood coach, Bob Ward, standing in front of an enormous road sign that said “Welcome to Camargo” in cursive on top and “Home of ‘Don Carman’ of the Philadelpia [sic] Phillies” in even larger lettering below. I chuckle at the incorrect usage of quotes around Carman’s name, as if he was an idea and not a person, and the omission of the second h in Philadelphia. Carman and the sign are now long gone, but Bob remains, perhaps the most famous resident in the town’s hundred-year-plus history. He’s best known for his contributions to baseball, founding an American Legion team, the Travelers, in nearby Woodward and turning it into a factory of corn-fed professional ballplayers. Don’s mom and brothers told me yesterday that it was Bob and Bob alone who saw potential in the scrawny, sniffly kid who got picked on in school. What did he see that no one else could?

  When I called Bob from Elk City earlier this morning to get his address, he scoffed.

  “We-ell,” he began, his drawl adding syllables, “you don’t need no address. Just drive straight to the north edge of town, and my house will be the last one on the right. There are three cars in the driveway. Two of them are white.”

  I follow those directions up Route 34, and sure enough, there on the edge of town, is the Ward homestead, one block away from the now-vacant lot where the Carman family home once stood. A lawn sign with big black letters spelling WARD marks the house. Planted next to the sign is a large American flag. When Don comes back to visit, this is where he stays.

  Bob, seventy-nine, is waiting for me on his porch with a firm grip. He’s wearing a Woodward Travelers hat and T-shirt, the American Legion team he coached for thirty-seven years. His rough skin is splotched with sun damage, his faded green eyes are slightly sunken behind a pair of thin-rimmed glasses.

  We walk into the air-conditioned comfort of his living room, where his wife, Sharrie, offers me a cup of coffee (number 33 of the trip) and sits in an adjacent room to knit. A photo of their ten grandkids sits on the mantle, and on top of a coffee table is a lit candle and an open Bible.

  It takes a bit for the old man to warm up to me, but once we get into baseball, his eyes come alive.

  “I played at the University of Oklahoma,” he tells me proudly. “And I had a chance to sign with Boston when I was a junior. This was before the draft and everything. Then I broke my leg sliding into home plate in Nebraska. That took care of that.”

  Like so many other men who devote their lives to coaching, Bob was a player first, one who had exceptional talent and promise but who never made it. His own dreams dashed, he’s lived vicariously through the feats of his pupils.

  “My grandfather established Camargo in 1911. He started First Bank here,” he says.

  “Is Camargo incorporated?” I ask.

  “Oh yeah, but it’s still just a town. My granddad was mayor, then my dad was mayor, then I was mayor for thirty-seven years, and my youngest son, Mark’s the mayor now.”

  “Is it an elected position?” I ask, curious how a hundred-year political dynasty came to be.

  “No, I don’t think it’s ever been voted on,” he replies.

  Wait, what?? I think.

  “It’s sort of unofficial?” I wonder aloud.

  “Yeah.”

  “There’s no government in a formal way?” I’m trying to clarify, so confused.

  “You’ve got a mayor and two to three council members and that’s it. They run the whole thing.”

  I give up trying to figure this out, and Bob doesn’t offer any further elaboration.

  “You pretty much know every person who lives in Camargo, right?” I ask.

  “We-ell,” he begins, “I did for a long time, but there’s been some migrants who have moved in who I don’t particularly know. At one time I could have told you everybody in town.”

  Everything changes, no matter how slowly.

  “How did you discover Don?” I ask.

  “I went to a Little League game over in Leedey. He was maybe thirteen. He knew nothing about pitching, but he had a tremendously free arm. He could throw. So I told him to come over to the house.”

  Bob started at the very beginning, lesson after lesson, hour after hour, starting with a tennis ball and working up to a baseball. While Don’s real dad, Marion, was always off in the oil fields, Bob picked up the slack.

  Don was a quick study but was slow to develop physically. Some of Bob’s players asked why he kept trotting the lefty out there when he couldn’t throw that hard, and Bob would just stick to his instincts. Don’s arm was just so loose. When Don went off to Seminole Junior College he was five feet, eleven inches tall; when he came back a year later he had shot up to six feet, three inches and had gained thirty pounds of power.

  “His fastball went from about seventy-five to ninety-three in that one year,” Bob says.

  “What gave you such faith in this kid?” I ask.

  “We’d have practices up in Woodward in the afternoon. We’d go up there at four, work out for two hours, and then come back here. Within thirty minutes he was over behind the gym throwing. Two more hours of throwing after practice.”

  Don knew his destiny. He would tell anyone who would listen that he was going to be a professional ballplayer when he grew up. They would laugh, and he would grab a ball and keep throwing.

  Bob leads me outside to his car for a driving tour. Even creeping along at five miles per hour, we cover the entire town in eight minutes. I ride shotgun, trying to avoid the various splatters of tobacco juice on the upholstery while he grabs his flip phone and an empty cup, stuffing a wad of tobacco below his lip.

  “You can’t be a good baseball man if you don’t have some chew,” he says.

  The tour consists of pointing out where things used to be—that’s the old abandoned elementary school over there (closed in the mideighties); there’s the old café, the old theater, the old grocery store. All that’s left is Jack’s Backhoe Service, the bank, and a Black
hawk Quik Stop. And the grain elevator, the main attraction to Bob’s grandkids.

  I thank him for the tour and his time.

  “When you see Don, tell him that his bed is waiting for him,” Bob says, turning me loose on Camargo.

  I park by the old elementary school to take some pictures and start wandering, fully aware that word has probably spread of a stranger carrying a notebook and driving a car with California plates. Is he a cop? is probably the rumor.

  I walk over to a house where two men and a woman are hanging out on the porch watching me, with four kids running around playing. They’re sitting on an aluminum bench, the ground a simple slab of concrete. It’s a Friday morning at 11:00 a.m.

  “Hi, I’m Brad Balukjian. I’m writing a book about Don Carman,” I say, putting their law enforcement fears to rest and then explaining the premise of the book. They instantly relax and invite me to sit.

  “One of Don’s cousins lives over there,” the woman says, pointing down the street.

  She’s youngish, with freckles and green eyes. She takes a drag of her cigarette and says, “I saw those California tags and said, ‘Please let it be someone I know.’” She grew up in Vacaville, an hour north of Oakland, but moved to Camargo to get away from all the people. One of the men, with a narrow face and a “Born to Hunt, Forced to Work” T-shirt, tells me about how great the town’s Fourth of July celebration will be tomorrow.

  “You have to work pretty hard to get a DUI in Camargo,” he says. “But I did,” cracking everyone up.

  “What do people do here?” I ask.

  “Farm, work in the oil fields, crystal meth,” the woman replies. “I like to just sit on the porch here and watch all the drug deals go down.”