Читать книгу The Bullpen Gospels: - Dirk Hayhurst - Страница 12

That night, after I met with my family, I lay on my air mattress at Grandma’s, flicking a baseball up into a cloud of swirling thoughts. I sent the ball back spinning in tight, four-seam revolutions, trying to see how close I could make it come to the ceiling without striking it. Next, I tried to make the ball spin like a slider, seams forming a tight, red dot, indicative of a well-spun punch-out pitch. The ball clumsily wobbled up and thunked against the ceiling, then wobbled back down. I caught it on the return; then, irritated, I heaved it into an open suitcase across the room. My bags were packed, though I had no idea why. I couldn’t fix my slider, I couldn’t fix my career, and I couldn’t fix my family. Spring training was around the corner, and the only reasons I had for going was it was better than being at home.

Someone once told me a great way to take your mind off your own problems was to help people with theirs. I’m sure it was some great spiritual leader who said it, the kind who frequents mountaintops and deserts for perspective. I could use some perspective myself. Unfortunately, Ohio doesn’t have any topographical features that lend themselves to enlightening breakthroughs. Even so, the idea of helping someone was appealing to me, if not for perspective, then at least to know that there were some things in the world I could fix.

The next day, after a lard-soaked marathon breakfast, I made my way to a homeless shelter on the eastern edge of Canton called the Total Living Center, or TLC. It sits in a run-down area on the tip of the city’s sprawl, surrounded by project homes and government housing. Cops patrol the streets at all hours, and I swear I always hear emergency sirens echoing in the distance when I drive through the area.

I should tell you, this wasn’t my first time volunteering at TLC. I started doing it a few months before because, to be perfectly honest, I thought it would make me look good. I can’t blame all my actions on the institutionalizing of pro baseball, but one thing a public opinion–based job had taught me was that appearances meant something. Just like people assume things when they hear the words “pro baseball player,” they assume things when they hear “volunteers at a homeless shelter.” The words conjure visions of caring and self-sacrifice: humility, mercy, and charity.

All I did was take names. I sat at a desk by the door, signing people in, making sure too much warm air didn’t escape, doing a job a pencil on a string could have managed. I was a regular Mother Theresa. Originally, I wanted to fly over to Calcutta and help heal people who got bitten by tigers or by whatever they had over there. I didn’t research the topic that well; I just thought I should go. When I found out how much it would cost to buy a plane ticket, I had to settle for working at the shelter a couple miles from my house. It wasn’t exactly playing baseball with the kids from the “just seven cents a day” style commercials, but it was better than sitting on my hands, I guess.

The experience was a letdown, actually. Taking names at the local shelter wasn’t as dramatic or as awe inspiring as picking fleas off people who speak in clicks and pops. No witch doctors grabbed my head and prophesied my fastball’s future. No women with rings in their noses fell in love with me. No one thanked me for saving his life with my semicelebrity presence, and I didn’t walk away from the place transformed, ready to market Kabbalah water.

Today I sat at the shelter’s door, lethargically making clicks and pops with my pen. Most of the folks who came for the shelter’s meal and grocery handouts had already shuffled in. I signed them in, as usual, directed them to the meal, and then closed the door so the winter air didn’t leak in. There wasn’t much else for me to do except twiddle my pen, wrestle with my thoughts, and wait for the remainder of my time playing benevolent saint to pass.

In hopes of jump-starting an enlightening experience, I brought a collection of my minor league baseball cards. I had this ingenious idea to bring cards so I could sign them for the people who frequented the place. I got the notion because a lot of people asked me for cards once they found out what I did. Some thought it would be worth money someday, if I made it big. Some wanted a card to commemorate their brush with a quasi-famous person. Most wanted it so they could pass it on to their kids. Whatever the reason, there was an undeniable ego stroke from doing it. Someone was asking me to sign a picture of myself like a person would ask a movie star or Pamela Anderson. I thought every smiling face that asked for one of my cards would inspire me to keep soldiering on in my career.

In the same pocket I kept my cards, I kept the meal tickets—nothing more than worthless shards of scrap paper you could forge at home. In my boredom, I plucked one of my cards free and looked it over. It wasn’t a great picture of me, my face was puffed out like a blowfish and my hair desperately needed a cut. I wished I had a more impressive picture, let alone stats. I didn’t even bother reading the back side where words like “Hayhurst ranked among the top 200 pitchers in the Cal League in ERA and mound visits” were inscribed.

I placed the card back into my jacket pocket and resumed clicking my pen. The door of the center opened, and the room filled with a gust of frigid air. In hobbled a ragged, old man. His face was worn, weathered like cracked leather. His eyes were dull and gray, sunk into his face. He looked like some old prospector who lived his life on the edge of humanity back during the years when the West was wild. Multiple layers of clothing, all of them stained with what looked like dirt or grease, made a patchwork outfit that shielded him from winter’s bite. His scraggly beard was matted and tangled in clumps and knots. A green stocking cap covered his head, the top pulled up high like a cartoon elf. His pants were filthy, splattered with road salt toward the bottom and well into the later stages of fray. Slung over his shoulder was a stuffed sack, bulging with lumps on every side. He pushed his forearm across his face and snorted.

“Good afternoon,” I said with a big beaming smile. I was clean, well dressed, and ready to sign for such an obvious charitable cause.

This was his lucky day, and I knew it. He didn’t respond to my greeting, but walked over to the desk in a side-to-side motion, continually smearing his hands on the sides of his outfit as he came. He took my offered pen, hunched over the table, and began to sign.

“Will you be dining with us tonight, or just here for some groceries?” I asked in a saccharine-sweet voice.

The ragged man coughed, finished scribbling his name, then let the pen drop. He mumbled to himself, wiping his hands on his sides again.

“Will you be eating with us today, sir?” I repeated.

“Yeah, yeah. What ya havin’?” He traced the architecture of the room as he spoke, like an animal measuring its cage.

“We are having yummy roasted chicken with noodles,” I said. Then I added in the same camp counselor voice I used earlier, “It’s mmm-mmm good.”

“Shit, ain’t as if it matters….” His voice trailed off and he returned to mumbling to himself.

“Well, Phyllis and the girls are fantastic cooks, and I’m sure you’ll love it.” I beamed back at him.

It was as if I were Willy Wonka. Everything I said was uttered with an über-excited ring, as if eating chicken and noodles were orgasmic. “Well, you certainly seem excited about it,” the ragged man said. “Can I have my tickets now?”

“Oh, right.” I reached into my pocket and grabbed for the meal tickets. I felt a baseball card’s stiff, cardboard backing, and I pulled it out instead.

“I don’t know how to tell you this, but, I am a professional baseball player. I pitch in the minor leagues with the San Diego Padres.” I’m surprised I didn’t brush my nails on my shirt after I said it.

“Uh huh.”

“I brought some of my cards with me. I can sign one for you if you like.”

“You are a professional baseball player?” the man asked.

“Yes, sir, I am,” I said, as if I were allowing him admission to a very elite club.

The ragged man reluctantly took the card from my hand, looked at both sides as if it were a shiny rock, then tossed it back down in front of me. I watched the card as it twirled down and spun on the table.

“There,” he said, as if he had done me a favor.

“Do you, uh…do you want me to sign one for you? A lot of people like that kind of thing.”

“No.”

“Are you sure? I mean, I am a real pro athlete.”

“No.”

“I’ll go ahead and sign one for you and you can give it to your wife or son or…”

His eyes came out of the dark clefts of his dense silver eyebrows. His face, so worn and beaten, still had such intensity. “Look at me kid. What in the hell am I going to do with a goddamn baseball card?”

“I, uh…I just thought it would make you feel good,” I said, and then smiled.

“Make me feel good?” he heckled. “I live on the goddamn street!”

“Well, I know, but—”

“Do you know why?” he interrupted. I did not, and my blank expression proved it.

“’Course you don’t, why the hell would you bother to find out?”

“…”

“My wife got sick. I lost my job, and our insurance went with it. With no insurance, we couldn’t afford to keep her in medicine. Then”—if he was remorseful, it was buried in his frustration—“she died, ’cause I couldn’t get a job to pay for treatment. We were married twenty years. Twenty years! I lost everything trying to keep her with me and now she’s gone. I got nothing and nobody. I walk around, and everyone thinks I’m on the street ’cause I’m some crackhead or something. I live handout to handout, and you think you’re just gonna fix it all with your goddamn baseball card?” He stared right through me, his words stealing the noise out of life around us. Then he picked my card up and looked at it again. “Oh, you look real good underneath that jersey, don’t you? Not a care in the world.” Then he crumpled the card in his dirty hand, and tossed it at me. “You can keep your bullshit card.”

All I could muster was, “I’m sorry.”

“You can keep that too!”

I sat at the table, trying to escape his gaze.

“Can’t a man just get a meal here?” he bellowed. “I gotta get preached to before I can eat so I started comin’ late. Now, I gotta listen to your bullshit about how great your life is?”

I fumbled in my pocket and pulled out his meal ticket as ordered. As I plucked it free, the entirety of my pocket’s contents poured forth. Baseball cards and meal tickets splattered on the floor. Cards, worthless cards, with glossy pictures of an inconsequential idiot littered the space at our feet along with precious meal tickets written with a ballpoint pen on nothing more than shards of scrap printer paper.

I bent down on one knee and picked up the mess as fast as I could. The ragged man watched me labor at his feet. He wore black workman’s boots that were falling apart. One boot had duct tape wrapped around it and both soles looked like blown-out tire treads.

“Looks like those shoes have had it?” My voice was back to normal. I must have found my natural tone somewhere in the mess on the floor.

The ragged man kicked out one shoe. “These pieces of shit? Bought ’em at the Super Walmart just a month ago. One month! They’s already fallin’ apart.”

“Why didn’t you take them back?”

“Won’t let me. Didn’t believe me, and I didn’t keep the receipt neither—I finally got enough money to buy me some decent shoes and this is what I got.” He mumbled curses, looking down at his feet.

This time of year in Ohio, the cold weather turns from snow to rain almost every other day. The ragged man’s feet had to be wet; there was no way, with so many standing puddles of slush-filled water, he was keeping his feet dry.

I looked to my feet. I was wearing Bass Company boots, fancy leather workman’s boots but not for working—they were too dressy. I got them a few years back with some extra Christmas money and kept them in fine condition, only wearing them when the weather necessitated.

“What size are your boots?” I asked.

“They’re a ten.”

It was in my brain. Something was pulling at me. Maybe it was always there, and I just did my best to tune it out. My mouth started talking, “You wanna switch?”

“What?”

“I’m asking you if you wanna swap shoes?”

The ragged man frowned at me as if I were playing a cruel joke. Then as if this was a bet he couldn’t afford not to take, he wiped his face, tugged his matted beard, and said, “I’ll switch, but you’re the one getting the raw end of the deal here, pal.”

“I’ll be alright.”

“Okay then,” he said, and he wasted no time kicking off his mangled boots. I unlaced mine, slipped them off, grabbed the pair together gently above the tongue, and handed them to him. He kicked his across the floor to me to complete the trade. He placed my boots on his feet and tied them up.

“How do they fit you?”

“Real good, these are real good, and”—he took some steps—“fit perfect, like they was made for me.” Reaching down, he pressed the tip of the boot to indicate where his toe snugly stopped. Then he almost began to smile, but stopped himself and eyed me with suspicion.

“Enjoy man. They’re all yours.”

His eyes and face changed, almost softening. The wildness left his countenance. He seemed like a person, like a man, a broken one but no longer disconnected. As cracked and cold as it was, his face began to warm. Maybe it was the way I viewed him now, maybe he was always that way.

“Thank you,” he said, in voice of the most genuine appreciation I’d ever heard. “This is a great kindness you’re doing.” The rough grains of his voice had smoothed out, and for a second I thought he might tear up. Instead of speaking, he reached out a dirty hand. Without hesitation, I took his hand in mine, and we shook.

“Thank you,” I said, stunned by it all. I gave him his meal ticket, and out of my life he walked in his dry, new boots, enroute to a chicken noodle meal that was mmm-mmm good.

Having nothing else to wear, I put on the ragged man’s old boots. They were, as I expected, soaked through. The damp soles discharged icy water into my socks on contact, and I almost tripped when the blown-out soles caught the corner of the steps. Wet, cold, blown apart, those boots were the best shoes I’d ever worn.

I didn’t know that man in rags, and he didn’t know me, but we knew how to treat each other because of the clothes we wore. Yet, something deeper than stained rags, dirty hands, glossy pictures, and clean uniforms took place between us. In that moment, both awkward and perfect, something happened I didn’t quite understand. For a moment the burden of baseball left my shoulders, and I wasn’t a player to be labeled. Though I didn’t understand it all right there, I knew my life in the game was going to change.