Perfect Day
The ’75 Red sox made me a baseball fan. The Cincinnati Reds won in seven games. Game six was Carlton’s game, my idol, and his seemingly willing-it-fair wave of his hands as his 12th inning, game-winning homerun just cleared the left-field foul pole. I was still an Orioles fan in my heart but for whatever reason, Carlton Fisk, the Boston catcher had become my model for how an eleven-year-old little catcher should play and stand in to face other little boys trying their damndest to “just throw a strike!” And so, with that one swing of the bat from his straight upright stance complete with his compulsive thrusting back of his elbows to stretch his chest before even stepping into the batter’s box, he tied the series and gave that little version of me so much hope. At that age I don’t even think it was hope; it was something more like God had simply assured me. I knew the Sox would win and how could anyone see this late, school night homerun and feel anything different?
God shouldn’t promise little boys things he can’t deliver.
The next night it ended. Everything seemed to end. I was destroyed for the first time in my life. It hurt so much more than The Thing and in fact, it was as if all the years of torment I’d endured had been condensed into a single moment of disappointment. At eleven years old I cried for, as I remember it and see it floating like some sort of little, flickering cloud in my mind, for days. I’m sure it was likely more something like the rest of the evening when The Reds won game seven. But I know I was heartbroken. That was my first experience with heartbreak. And so, when Melinda left me or Nery told me she dreamed about other men proposing to her and that she’d be happy if they did, I was very familiar with that sort of stomach-churning, panic-inducing pain. Part of me yearned for it. Be careful what you wish for. And then I think that maybe we only feel what we’re waiting to feel and heartbreak and all the romantic and poetic trappings that come with it, at least after it’s over, is something I’ve reached for. I’ve lept towards it. The little boy inside me who was so trampled by that World Series loss is the same little boy who then grew up to love sad songs and movies that made me cry and girls who broke my heart. Maybe I’m a masochist. And maybe that’s where the heroin fits in. Punishment and reward.
***
At some point, after a few years of making demos, and A&R guys leaving and being swapped around in the Westside offices of Interscope Records, we just gave up. Lifter ended. I don’t think at that moment, in those days we’d accepted it was actually over; I’m sure we had lofty, scared and fragile goals about what we could eventually do but it nothing else ever happenned. Lifter was done.
That was a period of ephemeral guessing and wondering and questioning. I really had no idea if there was any money left and although I was sober at the time and lived in a cheap Los Feliz one-room hovel which still had the TV Brian had bought me sitting on top of a large cardboard box, I really had no idea what to do. I try so hard to pull back memories of that time and I remember clearly sitting with Tony, who’d replaced Johnny as he was the first one to see the writing on the Interscope walls and just said farewell. I’m sitting in the little office of Cole rehearsal, where we’d spent days and weeks and months for the last year or so, working on new demos for our never-to-be-made second record. I see myself from a vantage point hovering above us, just looking down at the floor and, with a pause and an exhaled breath, saying, “Ok, let’s just call them and tell them we want out.” I see myself, head down, realizing that it meant the end of the one dream I’d been able to cultivate. I can’t really see in my archives anything after until life just went back to what it was before Lifter. Just normal life, working on TV commercials and looking for her. Whoever she was.
***
I was still very much into baseball. Baseball has been a throughline holding together all of the life I’m writing about until Nery left. Now I can hardly watch an inning and I don’t dare look at any sort of standings, or box scores and I try so hard to filter out anyone’s excitement about the Dodgers or whatever team they might be attached to and still route for regardless of geography. You keep your first team. You don’t move from Michigan to Denver and suddenly drop the Tigers and become a Rockies fan. That is unforgivable. And so, I remained and still do an Orioles fan but even that undying love, despite them being one of the perennial worst teams in baseball, has retreated to some far-away place in me. I’ve lost baseball. It feels worse than almost anything. It was Nery’s complete support and willingness to understand the levels to which I loved baseball that went with her when she left. Who could imagine such a thing? She didn’t take it; I pinned it to her, and it followed her to New Mexico like a little ball of lint.
***
One day, I called my friend John Albert, or he called me, and one of us said, “let’s go to the batting cages.” John had gone to Impact and stayed sober well before I got there. Somehow, we met and became friends in those early days in which so many junkies moved from Hollywood Narcotics Anonymous to the much larger, and brighter and prettier AA. It was fun to go to this little space on Colorado Blvd. in Glendale, long gone, and pay a few bucks to stand in and laugh at our failures or be injected with dopamine if we actually connected against machines well too fast for our skill level. I wasn’t the 13-year-old All-Star anymore. That kid would have done fine against these 75 mph yellow plastic baseballs. But the me who showed up that day floundered. But we had Starbucks, and nothing really mattered, and we poked fun at each other and called one another pussies for stepping out and we had fun. There were two other guys taking pitches in the fast lane. And they were hitting more than they were missing. Both wearing shorts and what I assume to be some sort of Jimmy Buffet T-shirts or something similar. I just sat there while John alternately failed and triumphantly fouled a ball off and I called him a pussy with a laugh. Or maybe a “fag.” Some sort of juvenile epithet.
I sat there on that little wooden bench, I suppose designed to harken to the benches in a dugout or maybe just a simple bus stop and listened to these guys talking. They were talking about playing baseball. I could tell they were both playing together on some team as they mentioned other players and other opponents who they, likewise, called pussies and I was flummoxed. Were they actually playing baseball somewhere? Actual hardball? Until that moment, that very moment, I’d just assumed that there was some unwritten and certainly unspoken rule that said once you were 18, or hell, maybe even 16, and unless you were on your way to winding up in The Show, you just had to play softball for the rest of your life. The very idea, and I was sure I was hearing it wrong, that an adult could play actual baseball, which is wildly different from softball was magical. That 11-year-old kid, crying in his bed after Pete Rose and his miserable teammates dashed all my hopes, came alive. That dead kid awoke in me, and I walked over to them and said, “Hey, do you guys play actual baseball?”
And so, it began. They were, um, less than embracing but they answered. I’m sure my sub-athletic visage complete with what I imagine was a Birthday Party t-shirt, dyed purple-black hair and long black pants made them feel like maybe this question was a setup but I waited and finally they answered, “Yeah, we play in the LA Municipal Sports League.” They gave me just enough information that I was able to go home and fight my way through the second wave of the internet and find a website for the league. Son of a bitch! I can play baseball!
It took a year or so.
The first thing I learned when I found out the location of the various fields this league played on and what was closest to me was that I had a long time to wait. Crystal Springs or Pote field was and is a beautiful baseball diamond in Griffith Park. Griffith Park is a sprawling area of hills and parks and home to the Griffith Park Observatory, home of the pendulum that knocks down the pins after mesmerizing you into almost unconsciousness. And within this park is Crystal Springs (we never called it Pote Field). I’d go there every Sunday for a while and watch guys play. I’d sit up in the stands and drink coffee and smoke and marvel that guys like me, and others were in full uniform and playing actual hardball. This meant fast pitch (or as fast as they could) and guys getting beaned and hard-hit Rawlings baseballs straight to lucky shortstops who had moments of glory after fielding and throwing out another crestfallen guy at first base, their evenings and wives and beds accounted for, and the pain when they’d lose and the contagious glory when they’d win. Everything softball lacks and why it never, ever seemed like a replacement for baseball.
Sometimes, when the amount of coffee in me was right and I felt particularly courageous, I’d walk up to one of them and ask them about the league and how to get in and, if I was totally out of my mind, I’d ask if they needed any players. I was so far away from playing baseball at this level, this, almost 40-year-old fantasy camp level but still well beyond what my sedate and heroin and music-afflicted life had brought me to. But sometimes I’d still ask. Most of them were kind. Bored but kind and say “No, Your best bet is forming a team.” And in walked Michael Jordan.
Over time, as I started going to these Sunday games fairly regularly for an hour or two each Sunday, I started to notice another guy kind of watching but also pretending to pitch against the right field fence. He’d sort of throw the ball so slow it defied gravity and softly bounce off the chain-link fence and he’d all but fist pump and convulse in triumph. Small triumph. As I stared at him across the diamond and through the fences, I saw someone sucking in the joy of baseball. He didn’t give a damn how he looked. And that mesmerized me. Just some other Los Angeles character in shorts and a Dodger’s jersey and a mitt and a pile of baseballs at his feet. I’d seen him a few times and finally got up the nerve to go talk to him.
That changed everything.
***
On some sunny and hot Sunday morning on the Eagle Rock High School dirt baseball field which is now just three blocks from this little house I live in, I heard a gunshot, or what sounded like a gunshot and reflexively pulled my right arm into my stomach in a move to contract my muscles or whatever reflexives tell our body to do in such a moment. The ball I’d just thrown to the third baseman after taking a warmup cutoff from right field went wildly to the right by what seemed like the entire length of a base path, 90 feet. The gunshot sound coincided with this weirdly, errantly thrown ball and my mind flicked switches and the only thought in my mind, as I stood there at deep second base was, “They’re going top have to give me painkillers.” I’d just broke my right arm.
Everything stopped and everyone just looked as they’d all heard it. Turns out when you snap your humerus clean in half it makes quite a sound and after their initial moment of confusion, everyone ran up to me. I’m not proud of this but I just went into leader mode and told everyone what to do because I had no faith, in that moment, that anyone would have any idea how to help me. As if amplifying this thought, Dino, our feet-obsessed catcher reflexively reached out to grab my right shoulder and exclaim, “He’s just dislocated his shoulder” and as he touched me and started to push my shoulder inward the shock of pain was so electric it, I almost passed out. Instead, I just screamed, “Get me a cigarette! It’s not my fuckin’ shoulder.” I arranged my own triage. I told Chris, our drag-queen catcher to ask his Dad, who was in the stands, to drive me to the hospital. I turned over the lineup, between feverish inhales of many offered cigarettes, and I asked someone else to gather up my stuff and in my beautiful Griffith Parks Pirates uniform which was a call back to Roberto Clemente’s glory years and its sleeveless jersey and shining black and gold I got in the car with Chris’ father and went to LA Children’s Hospital in Los Feliz.
I’d done what I’d had to do to play baseball. I met Mike Jordan. He was a weirdly obsessed baseball fan who was somewhere on the spectrum but Christ, he loved baseball. Together we cobbled a team from all the various people that orbited me. Mostly sober junkies and ex-convicts but a fair amount of “normal” people who “loved baseball! I was an All-Star in high school!” Or college. Or hell, the majors. The only ones who showed up on the dismal but so beautifully, magical first practice were the junkies and criminals and losers and ruined. The only ones who showed up had nothing to lose and we set about forming a baseball team.
For those years, playing baseball with my cobbled-together group of friends, all trying to redeem themselves from years of drugs and jail and massive derailing, all trying to recapture the one thing that they’d loved as a kid before the skies went dark, was all that moved me forward. Playing baseball and waiting for Sunday to roll around and eventually Saturday too when we joined the wood bat league was all I cared about. Oh, I still got high when I’d falter and there were multiples of her whose love I’d do anything for until she’d leave me disintegrated. But knowing that I got to play baseball in a few days made all of what used to send me far, far downstream, bearable. It actually made it all seem pointless compared to baseball.
***
We played in various configurations for about ten years. Or at least that’s how long I played. Some of the guys are still at it and it tugs at me. My arm healed all wrong and eventually, I had to have an operation which broke it again and screwed it together with a plate and which still makes airline detectors go off sometimes. I came back and pitched better than ever, sometimes. But for those ten years, baseball meant everything to me. Everything. I never touched a guitar or wrote a song. I rarely listened to music. I remember thinking about all the baseball time I’d lost wasting it on music. I came to hate music or more precisely, making music. I hated it like someone might hate an ex-girlfriend who cheats on you with your best friend and your Father, just dismantling you in the process. The Lifter experience had taken on all the trappings of a heartbroken failed relationship. Baseball was my new her. I still shot heroin on and off, but I think it was at its lowest ebb then. Although the last year I played, I was completely strung out from start to, almost, finish, eating my dog’s painkillers before, and inevitably winding up scoring and getting high in my baseball uniform to and from the games. A white guy in a clean 70’s era Pittsburgh Pirates uniform frantically rushing around Skid Row on a bright Sunday morning, looking for dope and an outfit is anything but subtle. Maybe Phil was right; I was as subtle as clubfoot. But damn if it didn’t help me! I led the league in batting that year, almost all my at-bats so completely engulfed with thoughts of copping or the shame of copping or the fear of running out that I never thought of the pitch. I just swung reflexively and drove ropes to right-center or down the third base line for a double. Thinking about hitting a pitched baseball is almost assuredly to miss a pitched baseball. It was as if I was finally a wizard. With two games left in the season, I kicked and got sober. I struck out all final eight times at bat.
***
I could write an entire book about these years, especially the first two in which we went from the most laughable, last-place team the league had seen to the champions in our second year, beating teams of wayward eighteen-year-olds and mustachioed cops. But that book has been written. My friend and our perennial right fielder, John Albert wrote it. “Wrecking Crew” All the joy and the loss and the sex and the drugs and the heartbreak, he’s already chronicled. Can you just stop writing about something and send the reader away to another book? Well, let’s see. I’m trying.
***
One Sunday I woke up. Newly sober, I drove across town to the “Tar Pits” meeting on Melrose just west of Fairfax (which for a moment in the 60’s was almost going to be changed to “Koufax” but they lost their nerve and LA will forever be looking up from Hell for it). I’d told the guys I had to miss the game as I had to get to a meeting, or I’d use. Something like that. Half of them by that time were new guys who had no concept of what being a junkie was, but I spoke with Willy, my Cuban co-manager of sorts and likely the actual manager by that point and he’d been through it, so he knew and understood. I remember sitting there looking at the speaker from the podium and just realizing that baseball was over. It had been ten beautiful and often heartbreaking years and that’s the most I could hope for. I’d started to ramp up on my using and then trying to get sober and I knew I needed to move on and try anything different. Baseball wasn’t going to save me. Not even baseball could save me. And so, I decided to tell Willy I wouldn’t be coming back anymore. It wasn’t as hard as it seems it might be because so many of the original bunch had moved on and I was one of the few remaining. I got up after the meeting and walked outside and lit a cigarette and I felt sad but free.
I had nothing to do anymore but look for the next thing.