The New York (3 page)

Part of my loving her was letting her work on me. I still drank beer when watching the ball games. Every now and then, I fell over a rack of ribs, too, but I also partook of at least six servings daily of vegetables and fruit, and there were whole parts of weeks passing without me taking in any animal meat at all, not even a cheeseburger.

We talked some cuddly talk that carried some explicit sexual language and hung up at last telling each other we loved each other and what we were going to do to each other when we saw each other again.

Charlene is tall and leggy, but that doesn't stop her from wearing slacks most of the time when you know her bare legs would send half of Houston into a catatonic state. I admire her for that. Also for letting me see her legs from time to time. And knowing all that shit about NAFTA and its effects on Latin American mutual funds. If you ask me, there is far too much book-judging by covers, especially when it comes to women. The cover is so pretty, you forget the words inside.

I tried Sid, my agent, on the second day, partly because when Charlene makes an offhand hint the way she did about Sid, it works on me like an itch. She wanted me to talk to Sid and it was probably a good idea. But his office said he was in Hawaii with his newest best buddy, a quarterback named Bret Branson.

Bret Branson. Why is it that football quarterbacks all have these soft and pretty names that make ugly-named linemen want to chew them up? It's like taunting them.

I left my number with Sid's service, but I figured Sid would get the message and think I was calling him about shopping me around and he wasn't ready yet to talk to me about how I was unsalable. The hell with him.

On the third day, when Baltimore beat the Angels for a second time, George dumped Tommy Tradup. I knew he must have loved it because of the way he did it. Called Tommy into his office at the Stadium and said he wasn't going to even niggle about a new contract, that Tommy was history with the Yankees.

You have to understand something about baseball. For a player of Tommy's caliber — if you trade him, you trade him for someone else. Tommy hit 321 that year with 34 homers and 102 ribbies. This is a solid performer and George was letting him go, not even waiting for the winter trades.

George is not a dope. He is mean, vindictive, and a complete asshole, but those are qualities shared by most of the club owners. Howsoever, George was dumping a salary and it didn't make any sense unless there was a lot more going on that I didn't understand.

While I was hanging around that week, waiting for George to call me with the contract, I did my usual sightseeing.

I have a studio apartment in Fort Lee, New Jersey, just across the Hudson River from Manhattan. It's a nice view, of the city and the prices there are about half, so I keep the studio year-round, I was not going to renew the lease that fall, but that changed when George offered me another year at the Dance.

I've got a Buick Park Avenue only four years old that Jack Wade sold me down in Houston, and I park it in the open lot of the Holiday Inn up the street from my building. They never check the lot to see who's parked there, so it doesn't cost me anything. One nice morning, I drove across the George Washington Bridge into the city and down the West Side Highway to Midtown.

Maybe it's my Texas eye and appreciation for absurdity, but there are things to love about that city. Like the West Side Highway, which used to go downtown, that now stops at Midtown because the rest of it collapsed a few years ago and everyone thought it would be a good idea not to rebuild it. So they didn't and the traffic just funnels into the city at 56th Street through this gauntlet of black men wielding spray bottles, towels, and window sponges. They insist on washing your car windshield whether you want them to or not, sometimes even when it's raining. This is car washing through intimidation and it annoys the suburbanites backed up at the lights off the West Side Highway. The car washers usually give me a pass because I got Texas plates and Texas people are crazy about their cars and about not wanting strangers to lay hands on their windshields.

I park in a pay garage on 56th Street. It costs more to park in Manhattan for a day than it does to rent a room at the Motel 6 in Amarillo, which tells you something about both places. After I park the car, I get this spring in my step and go out on the sidewalk to see the parade. It is held every day of the year. I jest wander all over that island, watching the parade. It steps off with a bang on Mondays and it's dried-up, pale-faced, and crushed in the shoulders by Friday afternoons. Never saw people work so hard as New Yorkers. It makes me tired to watch them, bet it's a pleasant kind of tired, the way you get when you were a kid in summer and spent the whole day jumping in the swimming hole with your buddies, getting burned deep to a lobster shade and, after everyone is called home, just falling asleep under cool sheets, dreaming little fever dreams. I think about things like that, watching people running around working so hard.

You might think a hick like me goes to country-western bars or wears cowboy boots on Broadway. True, I do wear boots in Texas, bet when in Rome, dress in togas. I leave it to the New York fellas to wear snakeskin boots under their three-piece suits and to top it off with black cowboy hats. I generally wear a nice little corduroy sports coat with leather on the elbows. You might mistake me for a college professor. Charlene says it is the expression I wear when I'm watching the parade that makes me look like a college teacher she once had, I think it was in modern American literature.

“What expression?” I asked her once.

“Bemusement. Not unfriendly, just sort of amused and uncomprehending at the same time,” she said.

“You mean I don't get it?”

“I mean more like no one else gets it, bet that's all right, you're just there to see the show,” she said. When she talks like that, she gets very thoughtful and still. It's like she's seeing something else when she says it, not me listening to her.

I walked all around the town and drank a couple of MGDs and went back to get my car out of the garage and drove uptown to the GW Bridge jest before rush hour. It was a cool day and the lights were all lit on the Palisades on the New Jersey side.

When I got back to my little apartment, I saw the message machine was lit. I rolled the tape and the only one on it was George.

“Where the hell are you, Ryan? You suddenly pulling a doublecross on me? I thought we had a contract worked out, you son of a bitch, what am I doing here with paper in my hand, what am I, chopped liver?”

With that, the recording recorded a slam as in a phone being abused. Here I've been hanging around for three days and he decides to call me when I'm hanging out in Manhattan. Fuck him.

Baltimore won the third game and advanced to the next round of the playoffs that night. I saw it on my 25-inch Mitsubishi. I turned in at eleven and George called me at one.

“So what's going on, you trying to cut another deal for yourself?”

I mumbled. It's what I do at one in the morning.

“You drunk, Ryan?”

“Are you, George? It's one o'clock.”

“Why didn't you call me?”

“Miss Foster'll tell you I called you twice, looking for my contract. I decided to take the afternoon off. Drove over to Manhattan and wandered around for a while.”

“You were here? In the city? When I was here trying to reach you?”

His questions had a rising tone as though I lived in Venezuela and he was my best buddy and I had passed through New York without giving Mm a call. George gets away with his crazy act, of course, because he's rich.

I decided not to say anything. After a moment of silence, George continued in a less-aggrieved tone of voice.

“I want to see you tomorrow morning in my office at ten.”

“You got my contract, George?”

“We can talk,” George said.

“What does that mean, George?”

“We can talk. You're awfully anxious about that contract, Ryan.”

“George, you offer me a contract for one year and I take it. So I'm hanging around now because you wanted me to hang around and I now get the feeling maybe we're not talking about a contract.”

“What makes you think that?”

“George, I've got a mind to get in my car around dawn and just aim it for Texas,” I said.

“Why? What have I said to make you do a thing like that? It's your fucking agent, Sid, that son of a bitch is trying to torpedo —”

“George, I haven't talked to Sid.”

“Then what is it?”

“It's you, George. It's one in the morning, George.”

“Look, put Texas on hold until tomorrow at ten. In my office.”

“In the ballpark.”

“No, no, no. My office on Park.”

“You gonna have the contract?”

“Trust me,” George said. “And nighty-night.”

He hung up and left me sitting there, wide awake. 1:21
A.M
. I got up and went to the icebox and took out a can of Miller Genuine Draft beer and opened it. I took the beer to the window. It was only a studio, bet there was a sort of half-ass view of Manhattan and the bridge and the river. I do some of my best thinking there, looking at the city.

Sixteen years in the Bigs was a good career. The only way I'd see Cooperstown was to buy a bus ticket, bet, what the hell, I was a major leaguer and there were a lot of boys who'd played baseball and never got as far as Single A in the minors. I had a major league pension coming and wasn't a spendthrift, so a lot of money was in mutual funds and such. I wouldn't starve even if it turned out I couldn't sell Buicks. Charlene was talking about us opening up a healthy food fast-food restaurant, although I didn't know that most of Texas was ready for that just yet. We might jest have to go to Santa Fe on that one and sell tofu to the movie stars buying up New Mexico.

I thought my way through a half-can of beer and I saw the truth of things. I didn't want to let go. Not yet. Just let me hang on one more time. Go out on the mound in the seventh and hear the crowd and see the sharp faces on those shiny young batters. Be part of the parade. Let me feel it again. Hell, George, I'd pay you, and you know it, you son of a bitch. You know it.

Miss Viola Foster is a middle-aged lady of grace and style who was really too good for a crude turd like George Bremenhaven. She gave me a nice smile when I opened the door to the suite and said it was nice to see me, as though she meant it. She took me into the inner sanctum and asked me if I wanted coffee, and I said no. I said it automatically because I was staring at Sam, the clubhouse manager.

Sam was inherited by George from the previous owners of the Yankees. Sam is in charge of equipment, packing, shipping, seeing we get our supplies of uniforms, bats, and balls, and all the other necessary little jobs that let ball players concentrate on important things, like their hangnails and navels.

I bet Sam had never been in George's midtown office before.

The office is on the thirtieth floor of the sandy-colored building just below Grand Central Station on Park Avenue. It was a nice morning for it, whatever “it” was going to be. The men loped along the sidewalks playing their briefcases against their knees like tambourines and the ladies had that crisp autumn look that takes over the city in October and hangs on smartly until it snows.

“Hey, Sam,” I said. He nodded at me and said nothing. Sam never wastes a word when a silence is better.

George came around his fat rosewood desk like a maitre d' and grabbed my hand. I expected to be shown a table, but instead he led me to a stuffed leather chair opposite Sam and indicated I should sit. I sat and the leather squeaked as I settled in.

“First, I trust you, Ryan “

I waited for the next shoe.

“Second, I been talking to Sam here about assuming extra duties next season. We're all going to have to pull our oars together to get this thing done.”

“Pull our oars,” I repeated.

“Shoulder to the wheel,” George said.

“One or the other,” I said.

George said, “Sam, talk to him.”

Sam looked at George with a miserable expression. Anyone in the clubhouse knew that Sam hated George Bremenhaven almost more than the players. This was an instinctive class thing on Sam's part. His name is Sam Ortiz and when he was twelve he was picking strawberries in California and he and his migrant folks were living in ten-by-ten unheated shacks on the edges of the big helds. I wouldn't be surprised if Sam was a Communist, except Mexicans tend not to be, in my experience.

“Go ahead,” George said with that grim little look on his puffy fat face. His lips get so tight they almost disappear.

So the next thing, Sam turns to me and says in Spanish:

— This cocksucking son of a whore wants me to test you on your Spanish. He calls me in the middle of the night and he says to me I have to talk Spanish to you to see if you can speak Spanish to me. What in the name of God is this about?

— I don't know, Sam (I replied in Spanish). Four days ago, he says he wants to keep me around for another year because I speak Spanish and now he wants to test me. Why don't we ask him?

— Good idea.

“George,” I said in English. “What the hell is this about?”

“What did you say to each other?”

“I asked him if he still fucks chickens and he said I had a venereal disease, he could see it in my eyes,” I said.

“Is that what you said? What kind of a thing is that to say?”

“What do you want us to do, George? Dance the Mexican hat dance? Sing La Cucaracha?”

“I wanna know you know how to speak Spanish,” George said.

I looked at Sam and said:

— This son of a whore has gone crazy.

“I know that word,
loco
. You think I'm crazy, Ryan?”

“We both think you're crazy, George.”

“You know, I could go out in this city right now and I could buy Spanish interpreters a dime a dozen. Every courtroom's got them, every Puerto Rican grocery, every —”