The Wax Pack

by Brad Balukjian

  I head outside to the backyard, along the shore of Slacks Pond, where I spent a good deal of my childhood fishing. I grab an old pole out of the tattered shed, bait the hook, cast the line, and then stare at the bobber on the pond’s surface.

  The yellow-orange-and-black orb dances along the water to the whims of the wind. Few things delight like the eruption of green in the heart of a New England summer, oak trees towering thirty feet above and casting dazzling reflections on the shimmering water. The air smells like damp leaves and mud, the boundary between earth and water. Slacks was built by the town in 1822 to provide a backup water source for the growing textile industry, but to me as a kid, it was simply “the Lake.”

  My eyes are locked on a fixed point, the bobber, which darts underwater if a fish grabs the worm squirming below. But for the most part the bobber just floats there, directing all my focus and attention to its slightest shift in direction. My breath slows, my body loosens, and the spaces between my thoughts grow larger, creating stretches of complete presence where the past is long gone and the future is still in motion.

  Control what you can control, Rance told me.

  Let it go, Steve Yeager said.

  I don’t get to write the script. Whatever it is, I just get to respond, Don Carman said.

  I’ve been sitting here on the dock for an hour without having caught a single fish. I feel as content as I have since leaving Oakland.

  Fishing isn’t about catching fish.

  * * *

  *

  “The price of freedom is eternal vigilance,” reads the monument in the town square in Norwood, Massachusetts. Above the slogan is the town seal, depicting Revolutionary War patriot Aaron Guild, who, according to lore, left his oxen (also depicted in the seal) to fight the British in Lexington. Atop the monument base stand a man and woman cradling a toddler, with two soldiers standing guard below.

  Patriotism is ubiquitous here. Across the street, in front of the Memorial Municipal Building, a sign with an American flag reads “Norwood Welcomes Home Lt. Col. David A. Doucette; Thank You For Your Service,” which is also stamped with the town seal. The Municipal Building’s steeple, granite rock, and stained-glass windows give the impression of a church, but the building is and has always been secular. Or as secular as anything gets here in Norwood.

  Downtown’s other corners are home to actual churches, the United Church of Norwood and St. Catherine’s of Siena. I approach a town worker with green eyes and gray hair who’s fixing yet another sign honoring veterans.

  “Have you ever heard of Richie Hebner?” I ask him, holding my notebook at my side.

  He studies my face hard with just a hint of suspicion, then breaks out into a huge smile.

  “Richie Hebnuh?” he says in a heavy Boston accent, dropping the r just like his British ancestors. “Of cawwse I know Richie Hebnuh!”

  Here in Nahwood, anyone over fifty knows the town’s prodigal son. The worker leads me inside the Municipal Building and begins an impromptu guided tour: “The Memorial Carillon has fifty-one bells and weighs 43,076 pounds,” he says. “The fifty-first bell is the fire bell. At Christmas they play some amazing carols. It’s the biggest attraction in town. Do you want to go up and see it?”

  I had forgotten that in small towns in this part of the country there are about six more hours in a day than everywhere else.

  “Thank you, but I’ve got a meeting coming up,” I say. “I’m actually wondering if you know of anyone who might know Richie personally,” I ask.

  “I didn’t grow up here, but I can point you in the right direction,” he says.

  A few minutes later I’m knocking on the door of the assistant town manager, Bernie.

  A rail-thin bald man wearing a bright yellow shirt and necktie, Bernie greets me warmly and offers me a seat. Every inch of his desk is covered with mountains of paper, several of them positioned at angles to each other.

  “Nice filing system,” I joke.

  He is not amused.

  Bernie grew up with the Hebners. “My brother-in-law played hockey with Richie,” he says. “Richie came from a working-class family. No pretensions.” He tells me about Richie’s hockey heroics and launches into the history of Norwood, describing how many of the town’s industrial employers have moved south or overseas, hurting the economy. “We had a few baseball players come out of Norwood. But Richie had the longest career of all of them.”

  Old ways of life linger in places like this. When I ask for more referrals to people who know Richie, Bernie rattles off landline phone numbers from memory.

  I don’t even know my mother’s cell phone number.

  As I’ve shared the Pack with each Wax Packer, no one has elicited a stronger reaction than Richie Hebner. (“Tell Richie we need to go chase some nurses,” Steve Yeager said with an impish grin.) And that reaction was always overwhelmingly positive. By all accounts, Richie was born to do one thing: play baseball. Although he was an even better hockey player in high school, he knew that baseball players generally played longer and stayed healthier, so he spurned the Boston Bruins’ advances in order to sign with the Pittsburgh Pirates as a number 1 draft pick in 1966. He chose wisely: he went on to play nineteen seasons before retiring in 1986 at age thirty-eight.

  Richie was spoiled with success early. Fast-tracked to the Majors as part of the Pirates’ youth movement in the late sixties, he found himself the Opening Day third baseman at age twenty-one, batting second ahead of Roberto Clemente and Willie Stargell. The Pirates won five National League East titles in six years, including the World Series in 1971. It was easy having fun with all that winning, but Richie brought the fun everywhere he went. He never got cocky, never forgot his modest upbringing here in Norwood. He would befriend everyone at the ballpark, from the team president to the ushers and clubhouse assistants.

  “He loves to play, loves to have fun. After all these years, he’s not doing you a favor to come to the ballpark. You can’t have enough guys like him. A pro,” said his manager, Jim Frey, when Richie was winding down his career with the Chicago Cubs in 1984.1

  Nicknamed “the Hacker” for his free-swinging ways, Richie could flat-out hit. He racked up 203 home runs and 1,694 hits while playing third and first base. And starting at age fifteen, he dug graves with his father and brothers back in Norwood, where his dad was the foreman for a Jewish cemetery. Richie made sure to never let his pro baseball career get in the way of his gravedigging—every off-season he would return to Norwood, grab a spade or jackhammer, and start digging. He liked the workout and the extra money, and the manual labor was a good outlet for all his nervous energy. Richie never did like sitting still.

  But did he love baseball too much? After being released by the Cubs in spring training in 1986, he coached American Legion ball and then returned to the pros as the manager for the Single-A Myrtle Beach Blue Jays. From 1988 until now, he’s been on the road every season but three, ranging from the low Minor Leagues to two stints as a Major League hitting coach. During his four kids’ formative years, he was on the road. But at what cost? At the beginning of this coaching run, shortly after taking the job in Myrtle Beach, he told the Pittsburgh Press: “My wife is expecting again in September. We have two girls. Maybe we’ll get a little baseball player. I get a call once in a while and the wife will say every time a truck comes down the driveway they [his daughters] think daddy is coming home. It ain’t happening, Elizabeth [his oldest daughter, then four].”2

  Elizabeth is now a teacher, thirty-one, with two kids of her own. Richie is still in uniform.

  * * *

  *

  “Ah, fuck!” Dennis Hebner yells, fumbling with the keys of his white rental car as the alarm wails. “How do you turn this fuckin’ thing off?”

  Richie is fast asleep at home a few miles away, having arrived at 1:30 in the morning on the team bus from Buffalo. He’s the hitting coach for the Triple-A Buffalo Bisons, still enduring the long bus rides across small-town America. The Bisons are playi
ng later tonight in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, where I’m scheduled to see Richie before the game. But to maximize my time, I’ve scouted out his younger brother Dennis, whom I’m now meeting in a Dunkin’ Donuts parking lot.

  Dennis is cut straight from New England cloth. “Ask me anything,” he says, shaking my hand firmly. “My daughter tells me I talk too fuckin’ much, but what the hell, right? I may say things I shouldn’t, but I’ll always be honest.” He’s wearing an army T-shirt and jeans, with a ball cap pulled over his gray hair.

  “My son just turned twenty-one in February, and he’s been in the ahhmy for three years,” he says in that Boston accent, his light eyes brightening. “He was over in Afghanistan. He says, ‘I can’t wait to go back. It’s such a fuckin’ high.’”

  Dennis finally silences the car alarm, and I climb in for a tour of the town. He opens up a canister of tobacco and packs a large wad under his lower lip, easing onto the road.

  “You’re a college professor?” he asks while he drives, making an unsafe amount of eye contact.

  “Yeah,” I reply, wishing he’d show more interest in the road.

  “My god, how old are you?”

  “Thirty-four,” I say, gripping my seat.

  “You look good for your age!” he says, spitting tobacco juice into a cup.

  Dennis is the youngest of five, all boys. His dad came from a German family and grew up in the area, while his mom moved from Ireland in her twenties; together they raised the boys in the Catholic Church, Dad working as a foreman at the Jewish cemetery and Mom part-time as a nurse’s aide. “We had food on the table, we had clothes, but we never had anything new, we never went on vacation. The first vacation I ever went on was my honeymoon,” he says.

  We drive past a senior living facility. “Believe it or not, this is the baseball field we first learned to play in,” Dennis says, pointing out where the field used to be. “We lived right over there, and there was a hole in the fence we’d come through from our backyard to the field. There were so many kids around here. Back then everyone had four or five kids in the family.”

  All the Hebner boys were athletes, but Richie had the most talent. (“I had a better arm than him, but he’d never admit that,” Dennis confides.) Despite being an alpha jock, Richie was quiet and introverted as a kid. “He was a real homebody. He never went out,” Dennis says. “He never dated girls. But he made up for it once he left Norwood.” Steve Yeager’s comment about chasing nurses with Richie pops in my head.

  We drive past the new high school, an impressive, beautifully landscaped campus that looks more like a college. “They ripped down the old high school where we went and put up a soccer field,” Dennis says.

  “Is there any chance we can go to any of the cemeteries where you would dig graves?” I ask, eager to learn more about the family business.

  “Nah, it’s about twelve miles from here,” he replies, practically a day trip for New Englanders. Instead he explains the process of hand-digging graves: “It all depends on the soil. Some of it was easy stuff, some of it was hard, like gravel. It would take us two, three hours. We didn’t use vaults.”

  “Must’ve been a lot harder in the winter, right?” I ask.

  “Yeah, but what’s good with the snow is that we could have a drink,” he says.

  “I’ve always wondered—do you really dig six feet down?” I ask.

  “No. We’d try to go at least three and a half feet down,” he replies. “Richie, he still works at a funeral parlor.”

  There’s an undercurrent of melancholy as he talks. While Dennis is upbeat and cheery as he chronicles the family story, that story is heavy with misfortune. In under an hour, we’ve done a lap around the entire town, but Dennis isn’t done talking.

  “We can park the car over in that lot and chat some more,” he says, packing more dip into his lower lip. “Wanna hear the weirdest fuckin’ thing?” he asks. “This should be in Ripley’s Believe It or Not. Within nineteen days in April of ’06, my wife and two of my brothers’ wives all died of cancer.” Richie’s wife, Pat, was not among them, but Dennis lost his love, Martha. He went into a tailspin, giving up his job in the cemetery and gaining fifty pounds in only a year and a half. But after four long years he pulled himself out of it and now is focused on a warehouse job and raising his twin girls. I notice that he’s still wearing his wedding ring.

  “I’m supposed to meet Richie at the ballpark at two,” I say, changing the subject.

  Growing up, Richie and Dennis were close but competitive, the way brothers close in age tend to be. Richie was older, but Dennis was more outgoing; he even taught his older brother how to drive. When Richie came home in the off-season they would drink pints and play darts at a bar called the Irish Heaven for hours at a time on Saturday mornings. They both had wood-burning stoves in their homes and would order a truckload of wood and make a weekend out of chopping it together. But now, despite living only ten miles apart, they barely talk.

  “How would you describe your relationship with Richie now?” I ask as Dennis pulls back onto the street to drop me off at my car.

  “I don’t see him that much. It’s a long story,” he says. He doesn’t want to talk about it, at least not on the record. I respect his wishes.

  “Does Richie know you’re upset?” I ask.

  “I’m sure Richie knows. I know Richie has a feeling something’s going on,” he says. We drive past a long driveway dipping down to a house out of sight. “Richie lives down there. I don’t want to stop,” he says.

  Here I am, 7,286 miles into the journey and right outside Richie Hebner’s door, and I can’t even knock. It’s frustrating, but I’m not about to defy Dennis.

  “Is Richie the kind of guy that doesn’t like to talk about personal stuff?” I ask.

  “Oh, he never talks about that, never. He never talks about anything he’s done,” he replies, misunderstanding my question.

  “I mean more like his feelings, what’s bothering him,” I say.

  “No, never,” Dennis replies.

  “You don’t have heart-to-hearts, anything like that?” I ask.

  “No,” he says. Then again: “No.”

  * * *

  *

  They don’t build ballparks in towns like Pawtucket, Rhode Island, anymore. Driving through the modest neighborhood of family homes, past the Agnes E. Little Elementary School and Galway Bay Irish pub, I expect to see a Little League field around the next bend. Instead I find the last stop on Minor Leaguers’ journey to Fenway Park, McCoy Stadium, home to the Triple-A Pawtucket Red Sox.

  The PawSox were the affordable alternative to Boston when I was a kid, a place where big school groups could go for less than ten bucks to pass a low-key summer evening. I pull into the parking lot a bit early for my meeting with Richie and walk around the outside of the stadium, admiring the PawSox Walk of Fame banners along its edges. There’s Marty Barrett, the handsome second baseman whom I looked up to as a kid. I chuckle when I see Carlton Fisk’s banner, his mouth wide open flashing his white teeth, looking happier than I’ve ever seen him. I walk toward the clubhouse entrance and see eight people milling about waiting for the team buses to arrive. A plus-size woman wearing a purple-and-white top and holding a cane sits near two younger, also-overweight men clutching albums full of baseball cards. They appear to be her sons. I share the gist of my project with them, going through the list of Wax Packers. When I tell them about Vince Coleman, the bigger one laughs and says, “He’s a dickbag.”

  When one of the buses pulls in, the woman in purple gets up and asks her sons, “Do you need me?,” positioning herself in front with her cane. The players, wearing Bose headphones, backward hats, and street clothes, start to trickle out. As they walk toward the guardrail by the clubhouse entrance, the autograph seekers do their best to engulf them, thrusting forward Sharpies and baseball cards. Here in the Minors, most players are happy to oblige, muttering “thank yous” as they sign.

  I stand off to the side and
observe, fascinated and disturbed by the spectacle of grown men and women flocking to athletes for their signatures. Kids I understand, but adults with albums full of baseball cards and sleeves of Sharpies? Then again, I’m driving eleven thousand miles to meet the players in a pack of twenty-nine-year-old baseball cards; who am I to judge?

  I tell the stadium security guard that I’m here to see Richie Hebner, the Buffalo Bisons hitting coach, and I’m surprised that he seems to be expecting me. As I walk into a stairwell and approach a simple white door with the PawSox logo, I realize this is the first time I’ve ever been in a baseball clubhouse. Feeling a frisson of excitement (and a bit of guilt for having judged the autograph seekers outside), I push open the door and emerge into a roomful of lockers with freshly pressed uniforms neatly hanging inside and a spread of food covered with foil lids. I immediately recognize Richie, who’s still wearing his civilian clothes. He’s got thin brown hair, green eyes, and ruddy cheeks and is wearing green cargo pants, a long-sleeve blue shirt, and sandals. He looks ready for a backyard barbecue in Norwood.

  He leads me into the dugout. We sit on the green cushioned bench, spitting distance from the field, and, just like his brother earlier today, he packs a wad of tobacco into his lower lip. I’ve never been this close to the field, so close I can see the individual grains of clay of the infield dirt. I’m shocked by how red they are.

  “How long was the drive from Buffalo?” I ask.

  “Light for the minuh leagues, only seven owuz,” he replies in the accent, his voice a bit stronger than Dennis’s.

  “What did you do on the bus?”

  “I read James Patterson. I read a lot of James Patterson books,” he says. “You got so much spare time in this game. A lot of kill time.” Following this three-game series in Pawtucket, he’ll hang back for a brief break at home while the team travels to Syracuse.