When Second Base Was a Handbag

My friend Scott was nothing if not resourceful.

After we climbed the hot metal fence with the spikes on top into the parking lot of the Catholic Diocese of Bridgeport, we counted our blessings.  This lot was one of the biggest and the best in which to play baseball from Maplewood Ave., over to Clinton Ave., and on up to North Ave. (which became the more regal King’s Highway once you crossed into Fairfield.)

English: St. Augustine Cathedral Bridgeport Patrick C. Keeley (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

On this happy occasion, we also happened to have a full complement of neighborhood boys, including a couple of kids from way over on Howard Ave. whom I didn’t know too well.  It was rare that we had enough kids (not to mention bats, gloves and balls) to play an actual game between two teams.

Normally, we’d play four-on-four, with anything hit to right-field an automatic out.  Fewer than eight kids meant mere batting practice for the day, desultory fly balls dropping well out of reach out of our de facto outfielder.

Scott was the first one to notice it.  The smooth handbag rested, discarded and disgraced, near the green metal dumpster under the stained glass image of Jesus extending His hands, sans glove, for what must have been a low line-drive.

We had the usual piece of damaged roofing tile for first base, Johnny’s mother’s Neil Sadaka L.P. for third base, and, despite our proclivity for high scoring games, what was left of a ONE WAY, DO NOT ENTER sign for home plate.

But Tony’s mom would no longer let us use his grandma’s crocheted Lord’s Prayer on a doily for second base.  So we knew we would have to improvise.

Except for the one used Kleenex tucked hopelessly away in the loose change compartment in the front, the brown leather handbag was empty.  If we could pull the strap off (which the Jelliff brothers did, quickly and efficiently), we’d have ourselves a satisfactory keystone to slap down in the middle of the steamy asphalt.

Scott, craving the validation from his friends he never got from his bastard of a step-father, let out an adolescent, voice-cracking war-whoop as he raised the handbag over his head like an Algonquin war trophy

Johnny, always quick to kick the chair out from under Scott’s skinny legs while the self-induced noose was wrapped firmly around his neck, shouted, “Shut the hell up, Scott!  Let’s freakin’ play!”

Remington Arms demo Bridgeport, Ct. (Photo credit: 826 PARANORMAL)

Johnny was the youngest of our group by an unheard of four years, but he could hold his own with even the 7th graders.  His dad actually hung around with my dad on similar turf in the days when Bridgeport’s impending collapse was delayed by the still sinewy bonds of church, work and family.

Once the work went away, to Taiwan, Malaysia, and even fucking Arkansas, the families fragmented, leaving only the churches to sort through the scattered bones and abandoned souls of the old, neglected neighborhoods.

But at least we had our second base.

English: Stained glass panel in the transept of St. John’s Anglican Church, Ashfield, New South Wales (NSW). This scene illustrates Jesus reigning as King on high. The window is approximately 1m in diameter. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

At precisely 4:00 p.m., Tony hit a shot that approached, on a line, the red and orange stained glass windows of what we thought of as the Diocese H.Q.  It was the mysterious place that only priests and the occasional civilian grownup had ever set foot inside of, and we couldn’t even begin to imagine what Holy Rites and adventures went on inside that place.

Even my grandpa, who seemed to go to church whenever he was awake (and he didn’t sleep much), had never entered that cloistered universe.

Tony’s line-drive, perhaps aided by the irregular shape of the lopsided nine-month old baseball itself, curved away from the window, slamming into the stone border just six inches away from Jesus’ outstretched hand.

We knew it was exactly 4:00 p.m. because at the exact moment that ball hit stone, the bell inside the office chambers tolled four times.  For a second, our young minds searched for some connection between the line-drive and the bell but, of course, there wasn’t one.

Until one of the priests, a middle-aged man wrapped in a black cassock with white trim, approached us purposefully.  Without a word, he strode up to our pitcher, one of the boys from over on Howard Ave., and held his hand out for the ball.  Assuming that excommunication would probably follow close on the heels of the surrendering of the baseball, I was just glad it wasn’t one of my buddies.

English: Fred Russell, Sadaharu Oh and Sparky Anderson in Tokyo, Japan in 1981 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

As the quiet priest, tall and calm, held out his hand, doing his best impersonation of Reds manager Sparky Anderson, purple clouds bruised the sky above us.  I thought, “Holy shit, we’re sunk.  We’re gonna lose the baseball, then it’s going to freakin’ rain.”

The priest stood, shadow-less in the diffused sunlight, with his back foot planted on our pitcher’s mound (a paper-plate from Carvel Ice Cream.)  When his left leg came up to his belt, his head sank slightly into his left shoulder as his right arm began to arc high over his head.  His fastball exploded into the mitt of Matt, our 13-year old catcher.  Matt just blinked as he tossed the ball back to this still-silent priest.

Now he had our attention.

He motioned for Tony to get back in the “batter’s box,” a crude outline of chalk on pavement.  Tony, perhaps feeling what the guests of the Inquisition might have felt in 16th-century Spain, held the Chris Speier model Louisville Slugger high and back, his right arm cocked at the elbow.  This time, the pitch started heading for Tony’s face, then about eight feet out, it curved over home plate, catching the outside corner for a strike.

English: Hall of Fame baseball pitcher Bruce Sutter (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Scott and Johnny, always looking for something to argue about, merely glanced at each other, mouthing “What the fuck?” silently behind their baseball gloves.

Strike three was what appeared to be that new pitch, the split-fingered fastball, recently made prominent and popular by Cardinals relief pitcher Bruce Sutter.  Tony just looked down as he leaned on his bat.

The priest walked over to Tony, and loud enough for most of us to hear, simply said, “Son, thanks for letting me play.  It’s been a while.”  With that, he handed Tony the baseball, then strode evenly and without arrogance back inside the priestly vault.  At first, no one said anything.  We weren’t even sure if this was some kind of unspoken message on his part that we should get the hell out of there.

This was, after all, priestly property, and we weren’t exactly invited.

Finally, Johnny broke the ice, yelling at Tony, “You just gonna lean on that bat all day, or are we gonna play?!”

We played until our hands were raw and our shins were sore, until the universal call of mom’s announcing supper rang throughout the neighborhood, and encroaching darkness dimmed our enthusiasm.

As for the priest, despite playing in that parking lot several more times throughout the summer, we never saw him again.

Wherever he ended up, though, I like to think he’s still mixing fastballs and curves on a sandlot in some half-forgotten town that exists on the periphery of the American Dream.

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Baseball Summers in the 1970′s

By the time my brother Mark and I were ten and twelve-years old, respectively, our summers had settled into a comfortably predictable pattern.  Wake up to a sultry, summer morning, have some Hawaiian Punch fruit drink (5% real fruit juice!), King Vitamin cereal, throw on some mismatched clothes, then head out to round up our friends.

Scott, Johnny, Tony, and occasionally the Jelleff brothers comprised our small, stable group.  In later years, my older cousin Jimmy would sometimes come all the way over from Stratford to flesh out our crew.

Charlie Finley’s Oakland A’s had just finished a remarkable three-year run as World Champions.  Now the Big Red Machine, as relentlessly efficient and mechanical as The Terminator, dominated the baseball diamond.

I was a Mets fan.  My brother Mark was a Braves fan because he liked their logo.  Scott was an A’s fan, and Johnny liked the Yankees.  Tony, a quiet, wiry Portuguese kid, kept his loyalties to himself.

Stopping first at Scott’s house just down the street, we might first trade some baseball cards (Tony Perez for Bert Campaneris straight up), then Scott would show us his latest Iron Maiden or Black Sabbath record.  Eventually, we would gather up our uncertain assortment of bats, gloves and balls before sauntering down Maplewood Avenue to collect Johnny and Tony.  They lived side-by-side in identical gray two-family houses with no yards, front or back.

Tony’s black-clad grandmother was always sweeping the sidewalk in front of their house.  Her smile offered us a view of her few remaining teeth, each one a sentry guarding her ironic, foreign laugh.

Johnny was once again in trouble with his dad, as his younger sister would always gleefully announce to us upon opening the back door to their modest home.  Johnny was a tough little nine-year old with a keen sense of humor.  He would back down for no one.  Slow as Ernie Lombardi wearing a ball-and-chain, Johnny could hit and field, but if a ball got by him, you knew you had yourself at least a triple.

For some reason, it never occurred to us to bring any water along as we trekked over to middle-class Fairfield to play ball.  The thirty minute walk wasn’t so bad in the late morning, although the burnt orange sun was already high in the sky.

Playing in Fairfield was always a crapshoot.  Sometimes, you got lucky and would be able to play uninterrupted for most of the day.  But as often as not, a station-wagon full of pampered, interchangeable suburban kids would invade our field like chubby white locusts.  This would usually happen, of course, in the middle of a game.

A mustachioed dad – they always looked vaguely like either Robert Conrad or Lee Majors – would gruffly announce that they had “reserved” the field.

We knew this was bullshit, of course, but in those days young boys generally didn’t argue with adults.  And we never happened to have a handy grown-up of our own tagging along to provide us cover.

 

Johnny would just mutter, “Aw fuck,” to himself, and we’d trudge off back up and across King’s Highway past Caldor and the County Cinema Theater (some movie about a man-eating shark was very popular that summer.)

Back in Bridgeport, we would inevitably stop off at the family owned and operated A&G Market where I bought my first pack of baseball cards in 1974.  We would purchase a lunch of RC Cola (look under the cap to see if you’re a winner!), and a bag of funyuns.

Fortified with this food pyramid-busting meal, we would climb a chain-link fence and spend the next several hours running, shouting, hitting and throwing on the hot black-tar pavement.

We took the game deadly seriously.  Every pitch, swing, and tag was grounds for an argument.  Scott, hot-tempered as a drunk Red Sox fan at a Yankee game, would throw his glove to the ground, yelling in his nasally, pre-pubescent voice about what total crap the final call was.  Johnny would just laugh at Scott’s antics, which pissed Scott off even more.  Eventually Tony or I would have to step between them to get the game going again.

If not interrupted in late afternoon by someone’s mother or young sister coming by to collect one of us for some unsavory, real-world task (Johnny needs to take out the garbage; Scott needs to come home to watch his two brothers; Mark and I need to go to church:  “Christ mom, on a Wednesday afternoon?  You’ve got to be kidding”), we would play all the way up to suppertime.  As if triggered by some ancient primordial reflex, mothers all over the neighborhood would start shouting out the door for their children to come in and get washed up for supper.

Exactly when all of this ended, I can’t really say.  It must have been around 1978 or ‘79, but I can’t be sure.  One day I was just a kid playing ball with my friends.  Then, without warning or regret, it just stopped.  Someone may have moved away.  New friendships were forged at new schools.  Girls suddenly popped up like dandelions on a spring lawn.

I’m quite sure, though, that I had no idea then that the most important time of my life — the period that essentially shaped the man I have become – had disappeared for good, and would one day, many years later, try desperately to avoid being pinned down and recaptured by mere words.

Beanhead, and the Sandlot Kids

Image via Wikipedia

Growing up in “The Park City,” Bridgeport, Connecticut, in the 1970′s, it was surprisingly difficult to actually find a park in which to play baseball.

Sure, there were parks around.  And if you wanted  a hooker, drugs, or a gay encounter in a bath-house, Bridgeport’s many parks offered all of this, and more.  If however, you were an eleven year old boy who just wanted to play some ball, well, good luck my friend.

Usually, the best we could do was an overgrown, abandoned field, or a lightly used parking lot.  One lot in particular, however, became our most consistently available playground.  We called it the Insurance Lot, effectively foreshadowing the dry, corporate major league ballpark names we would  come to despise two decades later.

No one knew why we called it The Insurance Lot, and I’m quite sure none of us ten to twelve-year-old kids could even explain to you just what insurance was, but once applied, the name stuck.

The lot, directly behind my friend Tony’s house, was paved and shaded by a couple of huge elm trees.  It was bordered by an eight foot high wooden fence in the back (home-plate and the backstop.)  A long, copper-wire fence interspersed with high scrub-grass and bushes on the right side represented the right field line, and a 1940′s era two-story wooden building painted red in the front was center field.

The small, fenced in property of an old bald man we kids called “Beanhead,” due to the strange shape of his skull and his olive skin-tone, was left field.  It was a very bad idea to hit the ball into left field.

A pitcher would stand a few feet from the middle of the lot and toss a hard, rubbery sphere on one hop towards home-plate.  When a player hit the ball, he might smoke it down the driveway along the wire fence leading out to Clinton Avenue for at least a double.

Or if he hit a line-drive to straight away center, it would bounce off the red house, and you would often end up with only a single.  If a kid hit it over the second floor windows, however, that was an automatic double.  A roof shot was an automatic homer, but it could also mean the end of the game if the ball got stuck up there somewhere.

An extreme right-handed pull-hitter, though, always faced the danger of depositing the ball into Beanhead’s backyard.

Beanhead, of course, was always home, just waiting for an opportunity to shake his bony fist at us and confiscate yet another baseball.  It was rumored that Beanhead had the largest collection of baseballs in all of southern New England.

We sometimes fantasized about kicking in his small basement window, dropping down into it with a few flashlights, and liberating a boatload of baseballs.  No one, of course, ever had the courage to even climb his fence.

As a result of the ever-present threat posed by Beanhead, most of us kids who hit from the right side of the plate learned to shorten-up our swings, and to angle our body away from that dangerous left field corner.

If the New York Mets ever decide to try to break Jason Bay of his dead-pull hitting tendencies, they might consider the tried and true Beanhead School of Hitting so that Bay could learn to use the whole field.

Eat your heart out, Charlie Lau.

One fine summer afternoon, going on about supper time, my little brother hit a long drive that one-hopped itself up…and over…Beanhead’s four-foot metal fence.  We all waited silently for the inevitable result.

Sure enough, Beanhead, spry old man that he was, came charging down his little back porch in his khaki pants and leather slippers, a gleam of triumph and a flash of anger battling for equal time on his pinched, green face.

In the late afternoon shadows, it seemed to me that his complexion appeared greener than usual, as if he was gradually morphing into an exotic vegetable.

Beanhead hesitated for a moment as he looked around at us, confident that we were all paying attention.  Then he slowly reached down and picked up the ball.  At that moment, my brother, already standing on first base, said something loud enough for all of us to hear.

“I hope he dies.”

Now, even by our de facto Lord of the Flies childhood philosophy of life, this qualified as one shocking statement.

I’m not sure that Beanhead heard it, but if he did, it was the last thing he ever heard any of us say.

We never saw Beanhead again.

About three weeks later, our friend Johnny’s dad told Johnny that Beanhead had died of cancer.  When Johnny told us this during one of our final games of the season, we all looked directly at my little brother.

“Holy smokes,” someone said, “you wished him dead and now he’s dead.”

With that, we broke off the conversation and resumed our game, still not sure how safe it would actually be to hit a ball into Beanhead’s yard.  Playing it safe, no one hit another ball into his yard for the remainder of the summer.

By the following summer, two of my friends had moved away to the suburbs, and our shrunken little group had suddenly outgrown the tiny little insurance lot.  Venturing out now all the way to Tunxis Hill in Fairfield, a thirty minute walk along Kings Highway, we had discovered what the rich kids already knew.  A couple of legitimate baseball diamonds existed, there for the taking.

We never again played in our old home ballpark, The Insurance Lot.  Like Ebbett’s Field, it exists now only in our collective memories.

I imagine, though, that whoever inherited the task of emptying out Beanhead’s basement, attic and closets must have been puzzled by the presence of so many balls of varying color and condition.

But who Beanhead really was, and why he did what he did, are part of the dark mysteries of childhood, a time when the adult world often collides unpleasantly with the uncluttered truth of youth.

A time when the sandlot kids just want to play some damn baseball.

Baseball, and the Neighborhood Girls

Image by enda_001 via Flickr

During the decade of the 1970′s, parents were not yet in the habit of stalking their child’s every activity, video camera in hand.

By and large, our parents lived separate, mysterious lives.  We kids would run out of the house, screen doors slamming behind us, as soon as we’d finish eating breakfast, and we’d drag ourselves inside through the back door come dusk.

Of course, on weekdays there was school.  Ten months out of the year, we tolerated grown-ups teaching us many things we just knew with absolute certainty we’d never use again.  Things like long division, diagramming sentences, and that hideous book,  “Silas Marner.”

And weekends, our parents would occasionally drag us over to an elderly aunt’s house to drink grape juice while watching Mutual of Omaha’s, “Wild Kingdom.”

At that time, it was always clear that, even if you had a sister within our age group, she was, by definition, not invited to play directly with us boys.  We boys set the daily, ad hoc agenda.  Girls could tag along at a safe distance if they had nothing better to do, but they were not to interfere with the serious business of boy-play.

And, of course, except for the periodic war games we would play (Americans vs. Germans; Seventh Cavalry vs. Indians), we mostly played baseball.

It was rare that the six of us boys who formed the core of our neighborhood group did not have gloves, bats and a couple of baseballs with us wherever we ventured.  Finding an actual place to play usually constituted the most challenging part of our day.  There were no actual baseball parks or little league fields within several square blocks of us, so we would improvise a playground wherever we could, always without express written permission to do so.

Meanwhile, at a safe distance, someone’s little sister, or later, a trio of young Puerto Rican girls, would tail us throughout our wanderings.

I never once saw a girl in our age group actually put on a glove, or lift a bat in those days, even just to try it out.  If softball existed anywhere at all, it was probably in the distant and bizarre suburbs, where logical, discernible street patterns simply did not exist, and no one ever walked.

My slowly evolving interest in the opposite sex could be measured by the degree to which I noticed them in proportion to how far I was able to hit a baseball.  At first, as a seven or eight year old, when slamming a short line drive past the pitcher was all my thin frame could muster, I couldn’t tell you if a female was within shouting distance of our zip code or not.

By the time I was ten or eleven, I enjoyed the smiles and cheers of the girls as I pulled into third base after a bases-clearing triple over the U.P.S truck in what we considered to be right field.

At thirteen, I wanted to know their names, and where they lived.

Well, I kind of knew where they lived, the brown house on the corner of Maplewood and Howard Avenue.  But we’d never crossed that street before.  Everyone over there spoke Spanish, and there was simply no telling how a bunch of skinny white boys would be received, even if we were bold enough to venture onto their property.

Her name, as it turned out, was Ruth.

She was the middle sister of the Puerto Rican trio that used to follow us around Bridgeport.  In all the time she and her sisters trailed us, cheering for home runs, clapping and shouting when the ball skipped its way into an outfield gap, I never once spoke a word to her.  Not even a “See you later,” at the end of a satisfying but exhausting day, the sun a purple-red bruise over distant Stratford.

Then one day, as I was walking along with my gang to one of our favorite haunts, the empty (on Sundays) paved lot of a local insurance company, I was startled to notice that Ruth had fallen in beside me.  Her hands were thrust purposefully into her blue jeans pockets; her white blouse a direct assault on my immature male sensibilities.

She began speaking to me, and I immediately began to feel panic that one of my gang would make fun of me for having a “girlfriend.”  It just wasn’t something I was prepared to be tagged with, even if I really was flattered by her attention.

Ruth asked me a few questions at infrequent intervals about things like how long I’d been playing, what my favorite position was, and why we didn’t go find more kids to play with so we could have two full teams.

I kept my responses short and simple.  Better to show her who was boss.  Mostly, though, we walked side by side in silence.  I glanced over at her a couple of times, feigning interest at a passing car or a beat-up stop sign.  Inwardly, I felt something I’d never experienced before.

I felt validated.

I knew at that moment that although I was still a kid, the days of being primarily mom and dad’s child were rapidly being replaced by an overwhelming  desire to truly become my own person, my own man.

Ruth’s presence filled me out and gave me definition.  The clothes that I wore, the way I walked, my choice of words, now all seemed to come into much clearer focus to me.  They mattered.  I mattered.

The rest of that day is lost to me like the smoke of a birthday candle.

But just a few short weeks later, Ruth, her sisters, and her entire family were mysteriously, and without warning, gone.

Although as kids we weren’t supposed to learn of human tragedy when it hit close to home, the word on the streets was that Ruth’s younger sister had been found suffocated in an abandoned refrigerator, and that the cops suspected foul play.  Indeed, a little while later, a suspect, who it turned out was an adult male friend of the family, had been taken into custody.

The gang and I were suddenly alone, and I felt lonely.  Occasionally, as I stepped to the plate, wooden bat resting comfortably on my  right shoulder, I would steal a glance at the spot where Ruth and her sisters used to sit and watch us play.

At some point, I stopped looking for her, and went back to playing ball for myself, and for my gang.

For me, I’ve loved and followed baseball for over thirty years now.  It’s been the one constant in my life that I’ve been able to depend on.

For Ruth and her sisters, I can only offer this blog post.

Thank you girls, for being our fans.