Wherever I Wind Up (8 page)

Home, to be honest, is a place where there is no tending to the heart. We don’t have many meals together, or play board games together, or do much of anything together. My father seems to be there in body only, as if he’s got something much bigger on his mind. I don’t know what that something is. An enigma? Yes, that’s what it is. An enigma. There are no rules or discipline, no curfews or consequences. I just come and go as I please. I am a kid who is crying out for limits, and getting none.

The nomad checks back in, my father says when I come home after a few nights away. He doesn’t ask where I’ve been or what I’ve been up to. I could’ve been stealing cars or dealing drugs, for all he knows. I want to believe my dad is proud of me and that he loves me, but it’s rarely spoken. I want him to tell me. I want him to hug me. It’s not that I’m angry with him so much as I miss him. I want it to be the way it used to be. I want him to be the most important man in my life.

Can you do that for me, Dad?
I want to ask, but again, I never do.

More and more, I spend time at places like the Bartholomews’ and the Fitzgeralds’ and with my aunt and uncle, Billy and Lynn Caldwell, whose doors and hearts are always open. I don’t tell anybody, but this is what I want. What I crave. I want to be in a place where hearts are open. I want to sit around the dinner table and listen to people talk about their day and share their feelings and concerns. I want to pray together as a family. Now that I am a Christian, I want more. I don’t want to be a tenant in my own house.

I drive around Green Hills, trying to think of my options. I could sleep in my car, I tell myself. No, that wouldn’t be comfortable. I wouldn’t get any sleep. I’ve got a warm sweatshirt in the car and a couple of towels in the backseat. What about sleeping outside, on the golf course? Nah, I’m not a sleep-under-the-stars kind of guy, and besides, the grounds guys will start mowing and raking traps at five in the morning.

All through Green Hill this goes on. I keep driving, thinking,
What am I going to do?
Ahead on the right I see a sign:
FOR RENT
. I slow up and pull over. It’s a brick home with a nice fenced yard. The house is dark and appears empty.

Dueling voices fire up in my head.

VOICE ONE
: Maybe you can stay here tonight. Who would ever know? You won’t damage anything. You’ll sleep and leave. No harm, no foul.

VOICE TWO:
You can’t break into somebody’s house and sleep in it. Are you out of your mind? That’s a crime. That’s the most ridiculous idea you’ve ever had.

VOICE ONE:
It’ll be fun. It’ll be an adventure. It’s just one night.

VOICE TWO:
Stop it already. It’s insanity. You are not doing this.

I park up the road a bit and walk back to the house and do some minor reconnaissance, peering through the windows. I don’t see an alarm or a dog or furniture. The house is vacant. I decide that if I can find a key, this is where I am spending the night.

Voice One wins.

Now I have to find the key. It’s probably under the mat or on the doorframe. Real estate agents aren’t that imaginative when it comes to hiding keys. I poke around for a few minutes, but no luck. I contemplate breaking a window, but my vagrancy has limits. I go around to the back of the house. There is a single pot on the back porch containing a half-dead fern. I lift up the pot and there is a single key amid sprinkles of fern dirt. I feel like Bilbo Baggins in the Misty Mountains when he stumbles on the Ring of Power. I put the key in the lock and, after a quarter turn to the right, I am in.

I walk into the darkness, tiptoeing. I’m in the kitchen, I think. My heart is throbbing and I realize I would be a terrible criminal. I move slowly into different rooms just to confirm the house is empty. Voice Two, the Voice of Reason, resurfaces.

What if I am arrested? Or caught by the owners and turned in to MBA? What will happen? I’ll be a goner from MBA, that’s what’ll happen. This is reckless, stupid. Yes, it is. There is still time to turn around and get out before trouble arrives. So get out now.

All valid points. I ignore them. I decide:
This is where I am spending the night.

I head to the car to retrieve my sweatshirt and towels, the extent of my supplies. I brush away a few dead bugs and lay the towels down in a corner of the bare living room floor and build a terry-cloth bed. I put on my sweatshirt, lie down, and look at the water stains on the ceiling.

They may want to check that out,
I think.
It could explain the vacancy.

My heart settles down. My breathing is even, rhythmic.

I go to sleep quickly.

The next morning, I gather my towels and head out the back door as if it were my own house. I lock it up and put the key back under the fern. I head to football practice.

I sleep in vacant houses another half dozen times over the next two years, and I get much better at it. On nights when I think it might be a possibility, I go to the library and look at the classifieds. I find places that are close to school and scout them out. I look for quiet streets with ample parking and make sure I have a sleeping bag and pillow in the trunk of my car at all times, just in case. It gets easier, breaking into other people’s houses. I enjoy the hunt for the key, the rush of being somewhere I’m not supposed to be. I don’t know why. Other than speed limits, I have never broken a law. I like the danger, the independence, and maybe, most of all, the power to choose. I am still lonely, but it is a loneliness of my choosing. And that makes a big difference.

BY THE TIME
I’m a senior at MBA, I’ve stayed at a lot of different houses, both occupied and vacant, and played a ton of ballgames, as a quarterback, shooting guard, and pitcher/shortstop. Some Division II and Division III schools offer me scholarships for football and basketball, but I know by now that baseball is my game. The first man to impress that upon me is Fred Forehand, whose name suggests he should be coaching tennis, but who is in fact the MBA baseball coach. He’s a small guy who seems much bigger than he is because of his personality, and who perpetually wears a maroon-and-white MBA warm-up suit. In the winter in my eighth-grade year, Coach Forehand tells me he wants me to try out for varsity.

You’ve got a chance to be our shortstop, he says.

Starting shortstop for a really good high school baseball team? In eighth grade? I can’t believe Coach Forehand thinks that much of me that he’d give me a shot at that. His faith empowers me, makes me feel like somebody. I may be a nomad and I sure have my secrets and I’ve gotten good at not letting anybody get close to me. But now I finally have an identity:

I am an athlete.

You can’t be in the running for the MBA shortstop in eighth grade if you aren’t an athlete.

The competition for the starting job comes down to a freshman named Brett Miller and me, and the last day before our games start. Coach Forehand has a fungo bat in his hand and he’s running a situational drill, with a guy on first and two out, and a batter running from home. He smacks a grounder in the hole between third and short. It rolls up the third baseman’s arm and bounces off his shoulder. I am behind him and catch the ball off his shoulder, deep in the hole. I gun the ball to first.

My throw beats the runner by a half step.

The next day I am the starting shortstop, and I stay there for four years, except when I am pitching.

Through good games and bad, Coach Forehand is right there for me, a kind and fatherly constant. All I want to do is be around him. I ask him about two hundred questions every day. He starts calling me Lapdog, because I am practically in his lap all day long. The other guys pick up on it and soon everybody on the team is calling me Lapdog. The day the uniforms arrive, Coach whispers to me in an almost conspiratorial voice:
Go pick out the one you want, Lapdog, before the troops arrive
.

Coach Forehand does thoughtful little things like that all the time. One day he motions to me to meet him on the side of the field. I run over to him from shortstop, with the Mag, my old $12 glove from Little League, in tow. I’ve never done a survey but I’m sure the Mag is the oldest and worst glove on the team.

Just in case you are thinking about getting a new glove, Poe’s Sporting Goods is a good place to go, Coach Forehand says. Mr. Poe has real nice gloves and he’s a friend of MBA and he’ll give you a good deal.

Okay, thanks. It’s probably time I get an upgrade on the Mag.

Granddaddy takes me down to Poe’s, off Highway 100, west of Nashville. There’s a wall of beautiful gloves, and the whole place smells like leather. I could stay there and smell it all day. I try out a few gloves, and then come upon a Wilson A2000. It’s black and has a beautiful, deep pocket. It’s the nicest glove I’ve ever seen. I want it desperately. I look at the price tag.

Oh, jeez. One hundred dollars. No way we can afford a $100 glove.

I put the glove back and keep looking. Mr. Poe comes over and says, That A2000 is a beauty, isn’t it?

Yeah, it is, but we can’t afford it.

He pulls the glove off the shelf and puts it back in my hands. I’m not sure what he’s doing; I just finished telling him we couldn’t spend that much.

Mr. Poe says: The cost of the glove has been taken care of, young man. Now go play some ball with it.

Excuse me, what did you say?

The glove is yours. It’s all squared away.

Squared away, as in mine? To keep?

I can’t even take it in. Somebody just bought me the best glove in the world? Is this for real? I thank Mr. Poe again and again and shake his hand, and leave the store with the A2000 on my hand.

It wasn’t until years later that I found out that Granddaddy andMr. Poe were in cahoots to get me the glove. And of course Coach Forehand was in on it, too, because he steered me to Mr. Poe in the first place. He’d seen enough of the Mag, that’s for sure.

Midway through my senior year, 1993, Jeff Forehand, Fred’s son, asks if he can talk to me for a minute. Jeff, a former second baseman for nearby Belmont University, is an assistant coach for MBA.

What’s up, Jeff?

I don’t know how to put this, but we just found out my dad has cancer, and it’s at a pretty advanced stage. He doesn’t want to make a big deal out of it and doesn’t even want to tell the team, but I wanted you to know.

Oh, no. I am so sorry, Jeff.

He’s starting chemo right away, so we just have to hope and pray for the best.

Your dad’s going to have every prayer I’ve got, I promise you.

Coach Forehand goes through chemo and radiation and keeps right on teaching and coaching. By the time our season starts he looks more gray and gaunt with each passing week. Everybody on the team knows what’s going on but Coach still never talks about it, never alludes to it, never complains. He just keeps running himself out there, directing drills and hitting fungoes and getting us ready to play, doing it all with a colostomy bag attached to his abdomen.

We win our district and region and make it all the way to the state championship game, against Germantown at Middle Tennessee State University. Coach Forehand looks thin and weak, the months of treatment having taken a huge toll, but he’s not stopping now and neither are his players. In the span of three days, I pitch twenty-one innings and give up one run. The title comes down to a single final game. I come in the game in relief in the fifth with the score tied, 1–1. It stays tied into the ninth. With pinch runner Ted Morrissey on second, Trent Batey, our shortstop, lines a shot over the Germantown left fielder’s head and within moments, we are all in a pile on the field, hugging Ted and Trent and anybody else we can find. It’s bedlam, a tangle of maroon-and-white uniforms everywhere you look, and right in the middle of it all I see is Coach Fred Forehand and his colostomy bag. He has a smile on his face and the game ball in his hand, and a single tear running down his right cheek. I walk over to him. Now I have a tear running down my cheek. I give him a hug and hold on to him for a long time, and say the only thing I can think of:

I love you, Coach.

SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 26, 2011

Port St. Lucie, Florida

Boys will be boys, and ballplayers will always be arrested adolescents at heart. The proof comes in the mid-afternoon of an early spring training day, when 40 percent of the New York Mets’ starting rotation—Mike Pelfrey and I—hop a chain-link fence to get onto a football field not far from Digital Domain. We have just returned from Dick’s Sporting Goods, where we purchased a football and a tee.

We are here to kick field goals. Long field goals.

A day before, we were all lying on the grass stretching and guys started talking about football and field-goal kickers, and David Wright mentioned something about the remarkable range of kickers these days.

I can kick a fifty-yard field goal, Pelfrey says.