The Wax Pack

by Brad Balukjian

  I tell him about my visit to Camargo, sure to mention that I had met with his coach, Bob Ward.

  “It’s interesting, right?” he says with a chuckle. “It’s a whole different world. You can see why, when the scout from the Phillies came, I didn’t even know what city they played in. That’s how little I knew about Major League baseball,” he says. “I’m from Oklahoma. To me, a filly was a female horse.”

  Every year from age fourteen to eighteen he grew at least an inch, many years several inches, topping out at six feet three. He played first base for Leedey High (Camargo was too small to have its own high school), where he was a slow runner and a mediocre hitter. But the one thing he could do, maybe the only thing he could do, was pitch. Although his high school coach didn’t give him a second glance, Bob Ward made Don the ace of his American Legion team staff. Don seized the opportunity, once striking out twenty-four of twenty-seven batters in a single game. Despite that success, he remained off the radar of Major League scouts because of his marginal role on the Leedey team.

  As usual, Don took charge of his own destiny.

  Following graduation, he sought out the meanest coach in the entire state of Oklahoma, someone who would push him the way he knew he needed to be pushed. That man was Lloyd Simmons of Seminole State College, a community college three hours southeast of Camargo.

  “I knew how much the players hated him. Three guys quit on the first day,” he says. “I went into his office and said, ‘Listen, I want to play here for a year and see if I can make it to pro ball, and if not, I’m going to the University of Oklahoma.’ The last thing I wanted was a friend. I wanted someone who was going to pound me into the ground.”

  Simmons pounded him. Don blossomed.

  “I went 7-2 and got into the starting rotation. I didn’t see him smile all season. I go in the last day of the season and made sure the door was open so I could run. I said, ‘I want to thank you. It’s been great here for me, but I’m not going to be coming back,’” Don says. “Apparently, he didn’t think I would follow through on my promise to leave after one season. He said, ‘You’ll never step on another field, you piece of shit.’”

  Don got his big break on August 25, 1978, when the Phillies held an open tryout in nearby Oklahoma City. Scouts Doug Gassaway and Don Williams watched him throw, then took him out to an Oklahoma 89ers (a Minor League team) game, where they offered to sign him.

  “I kind of feel like I was manipulated by the scout, because he said, ‘Look, you might never get this opportunity. You need to decide by the end of the game or it’s off the table.’ They offered me a Minor League contract and $7,500, plus $7,500 in education expenses, which I never got.” He adds, “I had nobody to talk to. It’s just me sitting there. I pretty much made all my decisions from the time I was eleven or twelve. When to go to bed, when to get up, when to do whatever I wanted to do. My mom was busy and hardly ever saw me play. I think she saw me play once in American Legion ball when I was eighteen, but she hadn’t seen me play since Little League. It was just impossible with that many kids.” I think back to Camargo, where I stood on the site of the Carman homestead, imagining how hard it must have been to squeeze ten people into the two-bedroom house.

  His voice grows soft.

  At three in the morning, having just turned nineteen, Don signed the contract that would forever change his life.

  “I was kind of like Mayo, ‘I’ve got nowhere else to go.’ I got in my car and drove away. I said, ‘I’m not going back to Camargo.’ Even when I was a kid I knew it wasn’t for me.”

  I do a mental double take, thrown by his dated reference to An Officer and a Gentleman.

  “Did that have more to do with the place or your family dynamics?” I ask.

  “That’s a tricky question, because I’m sure the family dynamics had a major impact on the way I viewed the town,” he says. “It’s difficult to separate them. But I hated farming. I hated working cattle, I hated pigs. I hated them all. I swore I’d never make my kids grow up there and do those things, even though they might have loved it.”

  His one escape lay in the endless fields of the Oklahoma prairie, where he and his best friend, Bobby Sumpter, would hike, ride motorcycles, and dream. They learned to swim by pushing an inner tube to the middle of a pond outside of town and willing themselves to not drown trying to reach it. They both left Camargo at the first chance, Don through baseball and Bobby through books—he went on to get his doctorate in chemistry from Cornell.

  “When I talked to your mom and your brothers, they said you were really quiet and shy as a kid,” I say.

  He considers this, turns it over in his head a few times the way you study a shell you just picked up on the beach.

  “I was crazy quiet. I used to just watch people. I would make assessments when I was a little kid. I would take little pieces of everybody I ran into and try to build the kind of person I wanted to be,” he replies. “I was afraid of everybody. I was that kid in school at the end of class who would take his books, put them in the desk, and then wait until everyone else was gone so I wouldn’t bump into anybody. I thought I was sick all the time, but I had allergies. I always had a runny nose. I thought I was ugly, I was stupid, because I had been told that so many times.”

  It’s surreal to realize that my hero could just as easily be talking about me. I think back to being bullied in junior high, ostracized to the nerd table in the lunch room wearing headgear and praying my allergies wouldn’t flare up.

  “But I also felt like I had something else, something that made me really special. I was especially weird, especially quiet, especially geeky, and I felt especially stupid, but I did feel special in a way, and I didn’t know what exactly it was. But I knew I was different,” he says, his voice even.

  Up until now I’ve been reluctant to ask him about his father.

  I know the basics—his name was Marion, he worked in the oil business, and he died of a heart attack when Don was only fifteen. But when I interviewed his mom and brothers in Camargo, they seemed suddenly vague and evasive when the topic of Marion came up. Clearly there was more to this story.

  “How old were you when your dad passed away?” I ask, even though I already know the answer.

  His voice gets quieter. “Fifteen.”

  “How did that affect you? Were you close with your dad?”

  He leads with a deep breath, then a heavy sigh, and looks around the zoo. He’s processing, feeling for a grip on his own thoughts and emotions. I watch, trying to appear neutral, waiting.

  “My wife asked me earlier today if I was going to talk about that,” he finally says, almost to himself.

  “I don’t know. I don’t know.”

  Then a third time: “I don’t know if I am.”

  He’s straddling the picnic-table bench, hands on his knees, shoulders taut.

  “The only reason I say that is, just to give you an idea . . .”

  Another deep breath. A long pause. The humidity is unbearable.

  “Let’s say this: I never spoke directly to my father his whole life. And he spoke to me directly maybe twice, other than for, let’s say . . .”

  His voice trails off.

  “Let’s just say ‘disciplinary reasons.’ We’ll use that.”

  I hold eye contact, but it’s more difficult, watching the pain increase in his eyes with each word. Moving even slightly feels intrusive.

  “He never talked to me. Not ‘hey, how was the game?’ He never saw me play, not one game, not basketball, baseball, nothing. The dad thing was, umm . . .”

  There’s not a trace of anger in Don’s voice. But the sadness finally overwhelms him, chokes his next syllable, and he stops, his eyes filling. I don’t know what to do, how to react. My eyes start filling as well, and now I break off eye contact, overwhelmed by his raw vulnerability. I want to hug him, to give voice to his emotion, but instead I just sit with him and wait.

  He collects himself, takes another deep breath, then continues in a to
ne just above a whisper: “I will just say this: he died in our front yard. He had gone to find my sister, who was late from a date, and we were all afraid of when he was going to come home. He had a heart attack and crashed into a tree in the front yard at two miles per hour. We were all home. Everybody, Mom, Arthur, Glenn, ran outside.

  “But I didn’t,” he adds. “And I justified that by huddling the little ones and telling them that everything was going to be fine. But . . .”

  Long pause.

  “I’m debating whether or not I should talk,” he says, his blue eyes, full of tears, looking greenish in the light.

  He lets go.

  “I felt bad because I was hoping he would die.”

  He gives a little nod and looks away. Several moments of silence pass, several long breaths. I picture that kid in the cramped two-bedroom house in Camargo, scared and angry and confused.

  A few minutes later, we get up to resume our walk of the zoo. The grayish gravel crunches under our sandals as we walk past families and tourists with fanny packs, peering into the striped hyenas cage, the Florida panther exhibit, the South African lions.

  Wanting to ease the tension and curious about his thoughts on “the baseball code” (the tendency for pitchers to throw at hitters when pitchers felt they were being shown up), I ask, “Did you ever catch guys peeking?” (Peeking is when a hitter steals a glimpse of the catcher’s hand signals, which indicate the next pitch.)

  “Yeah, but I was considered a little bit crazy. They knew I would dump them [hit them on purpose],” he says. “I had times when they would bring me in just to hit people because they knew nobody would charge the mound.”

  It’s hard for me to believe that this same man, this kind, deep thinker, could have once been a headhunter.

  “How do you square that?” I ask.

  “I think a lot was left over from childhood,” he says. “I fought all the time in grade school. I never lost. I didn’t care if I got hit or got hurt. I just kept coming. I never understood that, but it’s what I did. And I think that carried over.”

  When he found his second career of sports psychology, he started to understand his own trauma, and the anger dissipated.

  “When you’re that angry, what you’re really doing is feeling sorry for yourself. Anger and fear are not my motivators any longer.” He pauses. “A big part of my philosophy is, I don’t get to write the script. Whatever it is, I just get to respond. I quote Viktor Frankl a lot to players, where he said, ‘The only true freedom we have is the freedom to choose how we respond to a given situation.’”

  We’ve literally come full circle, back at the giraffe pen. One of the zoo docents standing nearby is eavesdropping on our conversation. Like almost everyone who works here, she is at least sixty, probably one of the herd of retirees who migrated from the Northeast.

  “If you have any questions, I might know the answers,” she offers.

  Beyond the fence, half a dozen giraffes mill about in a vast pen, browsing the tops of palm trees when there are no tourists to offer them organic greens.

  “Do the giraffes have names?” I ask.

  “They do, but we’re not allowed to give them out. Only the keepers can use them,” she says.

  “Do they respond to them?” Don asks.

  “Um, they do,” she replies cautiously.

  “Okay,” Don says, grinning. “Kevin! Bill!”

  “This could take awhile,” I say, laughing.

  The attendant does not seem amused.

  “Do they have friendships, like Bill prefers Kevin?” Don asks.

  “Actually, they’re all males. This is a bachelor herd, and there’s constantly fighting going on and different power struggles,” she says. “The one just coming out of the gate there is the current leader of the pack, but he was not the original leader. He had to fight his way to that position. We think there must be a power struggle going on now. So there may be a new leader soon. In fact, I’m putting my money on this one,” she adds, pointing to the giraffe closest to us.

  “You mean the one here trying to eat the pole?” Don asks dryly.

  Unamused, the docent continues with her narration of the herd: “He used to be the smallest. He got picked on all the time. But he’s getting bigger and starting to assert himself. I always said, someday he’s going to say, ‘I’ve had enough,’ and bam!, watch out,” she says.

  * * *

  *

  I walk into the Green Monkey Yoga Studio and spot Sophia in a pair of tight yoga pants and a snug top that features her ample cleavage. We exchange an awkward half-hug greeting, the way it’s always awkward when you meet someone for the first time after having had a deeply personal conversation online, and she leads me into an airy space with full-length windows and wood floors where she has kindly set out a mat, foam blocks, straps, a towel, and some water.

  “I thought I’d set you up,” she says, a bit embarrassed by her own thoughtfulness.

  With the adrenaline still pumping from my meeting with Don, I want to get out of my head and into my body.

  I sit on the mat and extend my legs straight out in front of me, reaching for my toes while using my core muscles to push my stomach forward, taking the hunch out of my back. My hamstrings burn as I strain to barely reach the tips of my toes, then force myself to reach farther, going over the top of my feet and pulling. The burn intensifies, blotting out all thought other than how horribly stiff my body is after being scrunched in a driver’s seat for three weeks.

  Sophia goes through her own warm-up, cracking with each contortion of her strong but limber body, her breath in perfect sync with her movement. She’s graceful and attractive, and I can’t help but be drawn to her. I have done my fair share of yoga, but this is clearly a fixture in her life.

  By the end of the hour, I feel restored and loose. My brain is calmer, less frayed, the distance between thoughts longer. It’s several seconds before I notice I’m staring at the bare studio wall.

  “Thanks, that was just what I needed,” I tell her as she walks by, her mascara smeared a bit below her eyes, making her cute face look even cuter.

  “So we’ll shower up, and then I’ll come by and pick you up at 8:15?” I ask as we walk out, greeted by the daily late afternoon downpour.

  We race to our cars through sheets of rain, drenching us.

  * * *

  *

  “Pull over here,” Sophia says as I swerve the Accord over to the curb.

  “If we’re quick we won’t have to feed the meter.”

  Sophia moved back to Naples five months ago from Washington DC, where she worked as an executive assistant. I’m grateful to have a local show me all the spots, including the best place to watch the sun set. I haven’t taken much time on this trip to appreciate the beauty of the places I’m visiting. I’ve already traveled through eleven states in twenty-one days, but whatever down time I’ve had has been spent in hotel rooms flailing away on my computer or scribbling in my notebook, trying to record every morsel of information before I forget it.

  We run to the beach, where a large crowd of tourists and locals is lined up along the edge of the water, their phones extended to the sky, a magnificent blend of purple, blue, and yellow. I fumble with my phone and Instagram filters, trying to capture the moment.

  “Let me see,” Sophia says, grabbing my phone as we dash back to the car.

  She laughs.

  “That’s terrible. Clearly not a social media guy,” she says, handing me her phone to show off her skills.

  It feels so good to have this banter, this connection with someone other than a former baseball player. I have rarely felt lonely since I left Oakland three weeks ago, but Sophia’s presence, her playful teasing, makes me feel physically lighter.

  “What was it like being an assistant for all these powerful people?” I ask.

  “It was awesome. I’d exhaust my type A self all over someone else’s life, leaving me free to be laid back in my own,” she says.

 
“The yoga must help.”

  “Yes sir.”

  I want to kiss her. Right here in the middle of the wide Naples street.

  “I could never do it,” I tell her, opening the Accord’s passenger-side door before going around to open my own.

  “Do what?”

  “I could never be someone’s assistant for a living. Doesn’t it drive you crazy having to be at their whim? Some of those people must have enormous egos.”

  I am suddenly aware of how haughty I sound.

  “Yeah, but it’s funny, I get so much satisfaction out of organizing their lives for them,” she says. “It’s like I know how lost they would be without me,” she adds.

  She navigates us to a restaurant downtown where there’s a three-person band playing rock and jazz covers.

  “I dated the harmonica player. He drank too much,” she says.

  I’m having one of the most romantic dates of my life in Naples, Florida, with a girl I met on Tinder—yoga, sunset, and dinner in a tropical paradise. It’s certainly more romantic than any date I’ve had recently back in Oakland. It’s kind of sad, I think to myself while we drive the brightly lit city streets back to her apartment, that I’m only willing to make the time when I know there is no chance of commitment, just a fly-by-night rendezvous with a stranger in a strange place.

  Unable to resist any longer and wanting to end this most romantic of dates, well, romantically, I put the Accord in park in the driveway and lean in. Her body responds, shifting to meet mine, our lips open and pressed together.

  She pulls away a moment later, looking flushed and guilty.

  “I’m sorry, I’m not good at casual sex,” she says.

  “It’s okay,” I say with a smile. “We’re not having sex. I don’t want to.”

  I’m full of shit, of course. Sophia knows this.

  “Yeah right,” she says, rolling her eyes.

  But first base is, in fact, as far as this date goes. We sit and chat for a while longer.

  “Why are you single?” she asks me.

  It’s one of my least favorite questions. I launch into a meandering explanation that she also rolls her eyes at.