Billy was a ballplayer himself. Not quite as good as Al, but still very good. He was drafted by the Minnesota Twins in the eighth round in 1972 but declined to sign, wanting more money. It was a mistake. When he signed with the Cardinals two years later (the same year Tempy was drafted number 1), he had dropped all the way to the nineteenth round. He played in the Minors for a couple years but never made it past Double-A. Just like Tempy, he felt the squeeze of racism, sometimes overtly, like when a landlord refusing to rent a room to him showed him his KKK hood, sometimes more subtly in the competition with white ballplayers.
“You just had to be much better [than the white players].” He points to me: “If you and I were playing the same position, and let’s say you hit .310 and I hit .310, and you steal twenty bases and I steal forty bases, and your fielding percentage is .960 and mine is .970, you get the job,” he says.
Al, it turns out, is a fitting player to end the Pack. As I retrace his upbringing and his career with Billy, multiple connections to the other Wax Packers come out: Billy was roommates with not only Tempy but also Scott Boras, Don Carman’s boss; Billy now helps out at Major League Baseball’s Compton Youth Academy, where inner-city kids get baseball coaching for free, and is friends with Rod Davis, who is friends with Stacey Pettis, Gary Pettis’s brother; in 1979 Al was traded from the Royals to the Angels as part of the deal that included Rance Mulliniks. The baseball world is small, its inhabitants closely interconnected. Al has brought my journey full circle.
Given their similar skills and upbringing, I’m curious why Billy thinks Al made it where he did not. Based on how quickly he replies, Billy has clearly thought about this before: “Nothing ever fazed Al. He didn’t get rattled. Some people have bad days, and they bring it back the next day. He would never do that,” he says.
“How did you deal with failure?” I ask Billy.
“I was not like that,” he replies. “It would bother me.”
As we walk around the Compton Youth Academy grounds where Billy volunteers, past baseball fields ranging in size from Little League to Big League, I ask him, “What else did Al like to do?”
He pauses to think it over. “Man, Al loved to fish. Just loved it,” he says.
Because Al knew fishing isn’t about catching fish.
* * *
*
I want to talk to Velma, Al’s widow, to hear what happened to Al. I had read in the papers that he was diagnosed with congestive heart failure in 1999 and that he died at home of a heart attack on March 11, 2002. He was fifty. But beyond that, there’s little known about the story.
I had written Velma a letter explaining the project but had had only one phone conversation months ago in which she expressed reservations about being interviewed. Billy told me she is a very private person, and she hasn’t replied to any of my voice messages. But her eldest son, Purvis, who lives in Grants Pass, Oregon, suggested I drop by her house, since he couldn’t make it down himself due to work obligations. I have an address for Velma in Downey, one of the many suburbs of eastern LA County, and Billy told me that Al’s daughter, Trinetta, still lives there with her mom.
After leaving Billy back at his car, I head for Downey. I find a Toyota Avalon and Nissan Altima parked in the driveway of the modest ranch-style house. The neighborhood is silent, and the green of the well-kept lawn looks dull in the light of dusk. Two plastic chairs sit on the lit porch along with small statues of elephants and a dog with a bone in its mouth.
Cradling my notebook and with my backpack slung over one shoulder, I ring the doorbell. A moment later, a young girl, no more than seven or eight, answers with a cautious look on her face. This can’t be Trinetta. Maybe it’s Trinetta’s daughter? I smile, trying to reassure her that I’m harmless.
“Hi, I’m Brad Balukjian, the writer.” (I hate saying my last name; even I struggle to pronounce it.) “Is your mom or grandma home?”
She immediately turns and calls for someone. A moment later, a young woman in her twenties appears in the doorway. I presume she must be Trinetta.
I introduce myself and explain the book project about her dad; she says that she wasn’t aware of it and that her mom is still at work but should be back around 8:00. I tell her I’ll come back later.
When I return an hour later, the cars are gone from the driveway, and the porch light is off. The house has gone completely dark, the message clear—leave us alone.
I have one play left. Pulling out my phone, I dial Purvis and fill him in on what just happened.
“I don’t know why my mom is being so fucking stupid,” he says, clearly agitated. “She’s so close-minded. This is bullshit. I want you to go back there and knock on that fucking door with me on the phone!”
I pace the street in the darkness.
“I’m not gonna do that, Purvis. But why don’t you just tell me your dad’s story?” I suggest, sitting on the curb under a streetlight. For the next hour, Purvis vents and then relaxes, running the full gamut of emotion. He has got a lot to say and seems grateful to have the opportunity.
Now forty-three, Purvis was the only one of the Cowens kids who was old enough to appreciate his dad’s time in the big leagues. He would shag balls in batting practice with the other players’ sons and videotape his dad’s at bats so he could analyze them with him later. Once Purvis was older and playing baseball himself, Al taught him everything he knew about the craft of hitting. “My dad was a family guy. He was a quiet, quiet man,” Purvis says, echoing everyone’s favorite descriptor for Al. “But if he said something, it was meaningful,” he adds.
There was a lot going on beneath the surface throughout Al’s life. When I had asked Billy about Al getting drafted by the Royals, he was matter-of-fact, saying it was a great day and that the family celebrated. Purvis, a much more open book, has a different version of the story: “The night he got drafted, he got shot. One of his friend’s brothers shot him.”
My mind flashes through all the other Wax Packers’ draft stories—Lee Mazzilli running home to hug his dad, Rick Sutcliffe’s grandfather haggling with the Dodgers for $85,000. And Al Cowens got shot.
“Was it an accident?” I ask.
“I mean, it may have been an accident. But I don’t know how you accidentally shoot your brother’s friend,” Purvis replies.
“Where was he shot?”
“Somewhere in the stomach. He was okay, he just had to wear something to protect his stomach. They told him not to slide headfirst,” he says.
Until the family moved to the quieter suburb of Cerritos, Purvis grew up in the same streets as his father. “I got jumped every day at school because the kids knew who my dad was, and they wanted to take my stuff,” he says.
The most important lesson Al taught him was to always have his guard up, to always be vigilant. “My dad was a fighter, a warrior,” he says proudly. “He came from the ghetto. And he instilled that in me.”
Purvis looked up to his dad, but he also clashed with him. When he was still living at home, attending Compton College, he got a girl pregnant. Al wasn’t happy. He told him he had to leave. “That was just my dad. He said I couldn’t bring a kid there. He loved his granddaughter, but he wasn’t taking care of her,” Purvis says.
About a year before he died, Al found God. He and Velma had grown up religious, but for that last year of his life, Al was on a crusade. A quiet man most of his life, he suddenly spoke out, heard a calling to tell people, especially kids, what he felt baseball was all about. He would give talks and presentations to inner-city kids about the cruel nature of baseball, about a game that he loved more than anything but that chewed him up and spat him out when it was done with him. He talked about the heartless side of the game, the way players were pressured to take amphetamines and steroids and then, once their careers were over, boom, they were done, it was over, like being thrown into a freezing cold shower. He was angry with the game, with the struggle to find life and meaning after his career ended, and he encouraged people to always mak
e God and family priorities in their lives.
In the weeks before his death, Velma noticed him grow quiet and distant, as if he knew something bad was coming. Two weeks before he died, his behavior turned downright scary and irrational.
“Me and my dad had a fistfight,” Purvis says. “I don’t even remember what it was about. He got into an altercation with my brother. And he had his baseball ring on, so he sliced my brother’s head with the diamond of the ring. He told my mom, ‘Purv’s next!’”
I watch as a car drives by, so riveted by the craziness of this story that I forget I’m sitting on a curb in East LA.
“We went out in the street. It was raining, and the neighbors came out to watch. I had no shoes on. I busted his glasses and bloodied him up. I was tired. He was like, ‘What’s wrong, son?’ I told him my feet hurt, and he said, ‘Okay, let’s take it to the grass.’ So we went to the grass and kept fighting. It was crazy,” he says.
“How did it end?” I ask.
“When he saw that he wasn’t going to whoop my ass, he went into the house and grabbed his gun. My mom stepped in front of him. The cops came and told me to leave. He told me, ‘Don’t ever come back to my house.’ Two weeks later, he was gone.”
The intensity that defines the father-son relationship can take many guises. For Purvis and Al, all the unspoken raw emotion that had existed between them erupted like a volcano into the open that day and then was left to dissipate in the streets where they came from.
“How did you find out about him passing?” I ask.
“My grandma called me and told me to come over to the house. And I knew instantly,” he says. When he got there, Al was lying in bed, having already passed. “I just stayed in the room, hugging him and crying, trying to wake him up until the coroners came,” he says, his voice still steady and calm.
“After that, I would write letters to him every day, and then at the end of the week I would go to Huntington Beach Pier and rip them up and throw them in the ocean. I was writing him shit that I didn’t tell him,” he says, choking back tears.
Purvis never figured out what made his dad so mad that day, mad enough to threaten to kill his own son. He has some ideas that sound a bit out of left field, deep-state conspiracy-type stuff. But stranger things have happened. “Once he started speaking out, something happened,” he says, referencing Al’s evangelism about the dirtiness of baseball. “Something happened, man. Somebody killed my daddy. And I would take that to my grave. My daddy did not have a heart attack.”
Purvis doesn’t know who or how, but he remains convinced that the kind, gentle man who was his father was punished for being too real, too honest, too black. He has seen too much ugliness, too much racism, to believe his dad just got sick one day.
When Al signed with the Mariners in 1982, he traded in his number 18 jersey for number 16. An eight-year-old Purvis was confused: “Why didn’t you get number 18? Why did you get number 16?” he asked his dad in the clubhouse. Al grabbed the new jersey and threw it to his son: “That’s for you,” he said, walking away to the trainer’s room. “When he came back I said, ‘Dad, I don’t understand.’ He goes, ‘P. That’s the sixteenth letter in the alphabet. That’s for you.’”
* * *
*
On my final day there is only one thing left for me to do: find Al. I locate his grave online—it’s in the Inglewood Park Cemetery, Acacia Slope Plot, Lot 432, Grave F. But when I get there, I find acre upon acre, row after row of headstones without any guide or map. I think of the final scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark when the Ark of the Covenant is wheeled into a warehouse with thousands of identical-looking boxes. After spending way too long driving around at five miles per hour scanning the plot names painted on the sides of the curb, I finally find Acacia. But that still leaves me with at least a couple hundred yards of headstones to search, each row with maybe fifty to sixty graves. I’m fighting daylight.
As I watch the sun dip toward the horizon and I start to think about giving up, I spot it, a simple slab on the ground: “Cowens, Husband, Father, and Grandfather, 1951–2002,” the gravestone reads.
I rest his baseball card on top and take a picture.
Most people have one life to make it count. On my journey, I’ve learned that baseball players have two. Al’s first headstone might have read “1974–1986,” along with this John Updike quote: “The little death that awaits all athletes.”
A player’s baseball life is built in the James Dean mold—live fast, die young. It is marked by dramatic peaks and valleys, the home runs and the strikeouts. That life brings incredible fame, even for the most marginal of Major Leaguers. But it’s a mirage that comes at a steep cost—broken marriages, estranged children, substance abuse.
Although Al was gone too soon, most ballplayers get a redo. And in that second life, the challenge is to learn to live like the rest of us, to understand that most of life is not a home run or a strikeout but a line-drive single to left or a groundball to second. Coming down off the high of their baseball lives is an excruciating hangover that for some players, especially the biggest stars, lingers. Those who made the adjustment realized that they were just people like you and me who happened to be good at baseball and that the key to contentment was something inside them all along, the same skill that enabled them to reach the highest level of their craft—the ability to accept whatever is right in front of them, good or bad, success or failure, without resisting.
I sit down in the grass next to Al and look around. I sit completely still. The air feels warm and comforting, the sun filtering through wispy clouds and a nearby tree to illuminate the frenetic dance of a swarm of insects looking like wisps of confetti. I hear the dull roar of jet engines at nearby LAX and the chirps of unseen birds surrounding me. I look down and see a single maroon ant probing my feet with its antennae.
The lesson I learned in dealing with OCD has been reaffirmed throughout this journey, that we overvalue our thoughts and feelings, which are out of our control and ephemeral and often illogical, and undervalue the importance of our behavior, which we can control. And if we change our behavior in a positive way, our thoughts and feelings will follow.
Everything changes, except for this one constant: as long as you’re breathing, you will always have whatever is right in front of you. Make it count.
I think about what it means to be a fan, about the millions of people who idolize Major Leaguers, going so far as to wear jerseys with strangers’ names on the backs. We make assumptions about the fame and fortune that big leaguers experience and fantasize about what it would feel like, even for one day, to share in that.
But here’s the thing: we already know. Once the novelty wears off, what it feels like to be a Major League ballplayer isn’t that much different from what it feels like to play softball on your Sunday morning beer league team. Which is why Don Carman, standing on the dugout steps of Veterans Stadium, could not for the life of him understand why thirty-five thousand people had given up their Sunday and paid good money to watch him throw a baseball.
As I watch the ant at my feet, thoughts arise and form like single drops of water, then just as quickly are absorbed again in the sea of my mind. I shuffle the Wax Pack in my head, each card conjuring up memories in a disjointed stream—Randy Ready’s chatter, the infinite grass of Camargo’s prairie, Sophia’s smile.
Sophia. I almost forgot that she’ll be in San Francisco soon, temporarily relocated for work. I think back to the yoga studio in Naples, her easy laugh and big smile, and my irrational impulse to run away from it all, to think in terms of absolutes, all or nothing, home runs or strikeouts.
But most of life is just a line drive to left.
I pick up my phone and bring up her number to send a text.
The screen shines brightly against the dipping sun. I start tapping away with my thumbs.
“What time does your flight get in?”
16. 1986 baseball checklist
Epilogue
Ma
rch 2017
I’m back in a car again, back on the road. But this time the car is a rental and I’m playing Whitesnake on my phone’s Spotify app instead of on a CD.
Everything changes.
Sleet, which I haven’t seen in years living in California, smears my windshield as the wipers struggle to keep up. I blast the heat, fighting to stay warm as I watch clouds of my breath dissipate in the air in front of me.
I’ve flown back east for another college buddy’s wedding, this one in Philadelphia, and have absconded for the afternoon to drive two hours northwest to Duryea, just outside Scranton. The Topps factory is long gone, having closed in 1996, but its spirit endures in the former employees who still live in Duryea. Forget about the players; the last piece in the Wax Pack puzzle is to meet the people who actually made the cards.
Which brings us full circle, back to Mary Lou Gula.
Space is plentiful in the town of Duryea. The grounds are wide open around the old Topps factory at 401 York Avenue, now occupied by Pride Mobility, a company that manufactures scooters and other mobile vehicles for seniors. The softly undulating hills nearby create a pleasant landscape for a town that has experienced a lot of change since the 1980s. Topps closed its doors in 1996 (“outsourcing,” one former employee tells me), and other companies, such as RCA, took their manufacturing elsewhere.
Even the parking lot at Mohegan Sun Pocono Casino Resort in nearby Wilkes-Barre, where I’m scheduled to meet Mary Lou and several other former Topps employees, is vast. I pull my jacket collar as high as it will go and scrunch my neck down like a jittery turtle, protecting my bare skin from the bite of late winter cold as I walk into the casino. The smell of smoke smacks me as I enter the lobby and hear the assault of money, shrill slot machines mixed with thumping music and a too-loud emcee making announcements no one even tries to understand. I walk to a central bar area and spot what must be the crew—three old friends laughing hard, happy to interrupt each other and to be interrupted.
The Wax Pack Page 26