It was bad enough going 0-for-5 and committing a dumb-ass error that led to two unearned runs in the bottom of the ninth that beat you. Not to mention the postgame buffet of overspiced anchovy pizza and lukewarm lite beer. In Cleveland, no less, on a sticky night with a room in the Embassy Suites that had the loudest air-conditioning unit this side of a 747. This was just your average, everyday run-of-the-mill shit.
What was really upsetting was what just almost happened in the shower. Jesus. He didn’t even want to think about that. That fell into the category of unthinkable things. That was banished to the Siberia of his conscious thoughts, where, he hoped, it would freeze to death and never be heard from again.
Often of late, following a road loss, Randolph MacArthur Dreyfus, Jr., a.k.a. The Shovel, found himself having peculiar thoughts. It had nothing to do with the game itself. It was something deeper and more troubling that stuck in his throat with the anchovy pizza and wouldn’t go away. He felt like he was about to start crying. Like his insides weren’t zipped down securely. He was hitting .335 and was a leading candidate for MVP, for chrissakes. And he was sitting in front of his locker fighting back tears. What the hell was going on?
The error was already history. The official scorer could have gone either way on it. The ball was in the hole, and even if he hadn’t kicked it he probably wouldn’t have nailed the Cuban. The guy had led the Pacific Coast League in stolen bases last winter.
Bernie Lazarre, the catcher, had gone over to him before the shower and told him that the scoring was fucked and besides he got Axel Most off the hook on the unearned runs, keeping his E.R.A. below three, so Axel actually owed him a favor. Randy Dreyfus wasn’t interested in any favors from Axel Most or Bernie Lazarre, or anybody else, at the moment. He wanted to take a walk and think things out.
But you didn’t take a walk in the neighborhood around the ballpark in Cleveland. You took the team bus back to the hotel, or you took a cab. Rennie Pannizardi was trying to organize a trip to Omar’s, a downtown strip joint, where for five bucks you could have a nude girl sit down on your lap and gyrate for one minute. It was the cheapest hard-on in the American League.
There was one whirlpool free in the trainer’s room, next to the one where Willie St. James was soaking his bad hamstring. Randy climbed in and felt his heart turn over as the rush of adrenaline kicked in to accommodate the heat. Maybe he could just sit in the stew pot and bake the peculiar feeling out. He closed his eyes and tried to drift, but Willie St. James’s cracked soprano pulled him out of it.
“You know anything about tax-deferred municipal bonds, man?”
“What?”
“My tax guy wants to put me into low-yield bonds and some other shit.”
“Oh yeah?”
“Yeah. He says my portfolio is too high-yield.”
“That so?”
“What are you in?”
“Bunch of things.”
“You know what Ephard’s in?”
Randy shook his head.
“Windmills. Those things up north near San Francisco. Ephard’s guy put him into a couple of dozen. Ephard says they’re going to look good in twenty, twenty-five years….”
One of the trainers came in to tell Randy that Charlie Gonse wanted to see him.
“If he gives you shit about the error, tell him no one in the whole fucking American League could’ve nailed Morales. The guy runs faster than a Mexican with a chili pepper up his ass.”
Charlie Gonse’s office was on the far side of the trainer’s room, separated by a glass partition through which he could watch what was going on in the whirlpools while he ate his postgame Greek salad. Ever since he got the bad news on his cholesterol count it was all he ever ate. He was up over 220 and convinced that he would keel over dead if he so much as looked at a pat of butter.
The manager beckoned Randy to a chair across from him. Still dripping from the whirlpool, Randy sat down, and a small puddle of chlorinated water began to collect underneath the chair. Gonse polished off the Greek salad with a plastic fork and meticulously wiped an olive stain from his mouth. Then he took out a fresh toothpick and began to work over his upper teeth.
“Can I tell you what I think the problem is here?” Gonse said finally.
“Problem?”
“Lack of focus. That’s the problem. E6 in the bottom of the ninth. The bottom of the ninth is no time for E6.”
“Charlie, I’m hitting .335. I’ve got seventy-eight RBI’s. So I blew a ground ball. It happens to everyone.”
“You’re not in the ball game…”
Randy closed his eyes for a moment, took a deep breath, and flexed his back. He felt a slight stab in his right rotator-cuff muscle, which had been bothering him since April, when he tried to nail a guy at the plate on a cold night in Boston.
“…you’re spread too thin, you’re all over the place. You’re Mr. Baseball. Mr. This, Mr. That. You’re going to have a goddamn shopping center named after you, for chrissakes. You can’t nail a guy in the bottom of the ninth if you’re thinking about what you’re going to say when you cut the ribbon of a shopping center in Van Nuys. Can you?”
“Charlie, Morales is one of the fastest guys in the whole league.”
“Marty Marion would’ve gotten him. Marty Marion would’ve nailed him by three steps. Marty Marion didn’t have a shopping center named after him.”
At this point Randy wished he had gone to Omar’s. The chlorine puddle was getting larger. The anchovies were digging in for a firefight. The team had lost a game in the standings to both Oakland and the Angels. His head hurt. The air conditioner in his hotel room sounded like the “Anvil Chorus.” And a very weird thing had just happened in the shower.
“You’re twenty-eight years old. You got the best swing since Ted Williams. You’re the fastest white guy in the league. You’ve got a nice wife, a family, you’re pulling down two point three a year not to mention the TV and merchandising money. You’ve got a shot at the Hall of Fame if you don’t get hurt or start putting powder up your nose. All you’ve got to do is keep your eye on the ball. You understand what I’m saying?”
“Right.”
“And you don’t answer your fan mail.”
“Huh?”
“My sister Francine’s got a kid in Glendale who wrote you a letter a while back. You never answered it. You know what noblesse oblige means, Dreyfus?”
“I’ve got a service that takes care of that.”
“Give your service a call. Tell them to take a look for a letter by Ernest Turnack, 3890 El Rosarito Drive, in Glendale. The kid thinks you walk on water. That’s it. Over and out.”
When he got back to the trainer’s room, it was empty except for Willie St. James. Randy didn’t feel like discussing municipal bonds with the left fielder so he ignored him and went straight to his locker. Lying in front of it was a bagful of baseballs to autograph and a copy of a Sports Illustrated cover story with a note from his publicist clipped to it:
What about the 24th for Arsenio Hall? You’ll be on with Bobby Vinton and Princess Caroline of Monaco. Need to know by Wednesday. Please call.
It was going to be a hell of a home stand. First the dedication of the shopping center in Van Nuys and then the Arsenio Hall show. His literary agent told him that if he wanted the hardcover sales of his book to move at all he would have to do the talk shows. Otherwise it would be on the remainder counters in two months selling for $1.98.
He had written Free Swinger: My Life in Baseball during the off-season with a wiseass sportswriter from New York, who sat in his den with a tape recorder asking him embarrassing questions. Randy hadn’t liked the experience at all, but his literary agent told him it was done that way and that the sportswriter had put Canseco on the best-seller list.
Randy decided to leave the baseballs for tomorrow. He was too tired to sit there and sign them right now. In his locker was a pair of Bill Blass slacks and a Lacoste knit sport shirt. He had twenty-five Lacoste knit sport shirts that his wife, Susie, had bought for him at Bullock’s in Sherman Oaks. Five of each color. They wore well and didn’t shrink up on you, and he liked the little alligator on the front.
Had he promised to call Susie tonight? There was a problem with one of the twins’ orthodontia, or was it a problem with the brakes on the 560 SEL? He couldn’t remember. He’d call from the hotel, after he dropped a couple of Nuprin for the headache. Maybe they could do something about the air conditioner.
Maybe he could take a sleeping pill and wake up in the batting cage before tomorrow’s game and go 4-for-4 and be out of Cleveland without anything ever almost happening. Things used to be a lot simpler. There was just the matter of getting the fat end of the bat around on the ball, a split-second reflex that he had been born with and lived in fear of losing. Nobody was able to explain why ballplayers lost it. They woke up one morning and couldn’t get the job done anymore. It was as if whatever gene or chromosome that handled that operation had been removed overnight. The competition was so fierce these days that if you lost a millisecond on your bat speed you were history.
Fortunately the reporters were all gone by now. What the hell do you say about a ground ball anyway? You picked it up and you threw it to first base, and either it got there on time or it didn’t. In this case it didn’t. The ball wasn’t hit hard and was three steps to his right. Charlie Gonse didn’t know what he was talking about. Marty Marion wouldn’t have gotten the Cuban. You couldn’t have gotten the Cuban with a howitzer.
The team bus was gone, and he had to ask the security guard at the door to call a cab for him. He wasn’t going to stand outside the players’ entrance at Municipal Stadium in Cleveland trying to hail a cab. The driver had an earring and listened to loud rap music on a portable tape deck, which didn’t help the headache that was throbbing behind his sinuses. Randy looked out the dirty windows of the cab as they drove through the war zone around the stadium and headed for the west side. You didn’t want to get traded to Cleveland. Not even for a guaranteed $5 million a year and a full package of perks.
When Arizona didn’t wind up with a team during the expansion in ‘95 there had been some talk of moving the Cleveland franchise to Phoenix. But nothing ever happened. They had given L.A. a third franchise instead, which pissed a lot of people off. The networks were calling the shots, and Phoenix didn’t have the demographics that the San Fernando Valley did.
Randy Dreyfus had come up in the Angel organization, a first-round draft pick out of USC. He played only half a season in Double A before being traded to the Dodgers and sent to Albuquerque. Even though he had led the Pacific Coast League in hitting, the Dodgers left him unprotected in the expansion draft, and he was snapped up by the Los Angeles Valley Vikings. The Dodgers had been trying to get him back ever since, but there was no way the Vikings’ owner, John D. F. White, Sr., or his son, John D. F. White, Jr.—or John/ John, as the players called him—would trade him. Not even for Chavez Ravine and Vin Scully, they told Peter O’Malley whenever the Dodgers’ owner inquired what it would take to get Randy Dreyfus.
As far as Randy was concerned, the Vikings were probably a better deal than the Dodgers or the Angels. The new 125,000-seat stadium that they’d built on the old Sepulveda Reservoir site between the San Diego and Ventura freeways was far and above the best facility in baseball and a lot closer to his house in Valley View Estates. In the course of a few years, the Whites had put together a team that was a legitimate contender in the American League West. They had been six games back before Randy failed to throw the Cuban out. Now they were seven out, but it was only July.
The hotel lobby was deserted. The guys who hadn’t gone to Omar’s were either in the bar or watching soft-core porno movies on the closed-circuit cable hookup in their rooms. At the desk Randy was given two phone messages along with his room key. One was from Susie and the other from Barry Fuchsia, his agent. He was in the final year of a three-year deal and at the end of the year he would become a free agent. The Vikings were trying to extend his contract before Randy tested the free-agent market. The price kept going up in increments of $500,000. Barry said that if they kept saying no he’d get the White boys up over $7 million, maybe even $7.5 million.
As soon as he was in his room, Randy dialed Barry Fuchsia’s home number in Encino. The phone rang half a dozen times before a nasal voice answered.
“Yeah.”
“Barry, it’s me.”
“Who?”
“Randy. Randy Dreyfus. ..”
“Where are you?”
“Cleveland.”
There was a long silence. Randy could hear a TV going in the background.
“Right. Uh…I got a call from John/John this morning.”
“What did he say?”
“The usual shit. The inmates are taking over the asylum. He’s going bankrupt. How good they’ve been to you. Et cetera.”
“How much?”
“Four point seven-five in the first year, five two in the second, a base of six in the third with incentives up to six point seven-five.”
“Jesus. What do you think?”
“The elevator’s still going up.”
“It’s a lot of money.”
“It’s not even August yet.”
“Yeah, but what happens if I go into a slump?”
“You planning on it?”
“No, but it happens to everyone. Now and then.”
“Listen, you manage not to get killed or maimed between now and October one and I’ll get you seven going in with escalators in years two and three and a pension package that’ll keep you off the streets in your old age.”
“You really think so?”
“No, I’m bullshitting you. I’m not interested in putting a five-hundred-thousand-dollar commission in my pocket. I want to make life difficult for myself.”
“Jesus…”
“You’re not becoming one of those newborn Christians, for chrissakes, are you?”
“No. Barry, listen, maybe we ought to think about this before we say no. You know, sleep on it.”
“It’ll be hard in the morning, believe me.”
“Huh?”
“It was a joke. Sleep on it. Hard in the morning…”
Randy got a flash from Siberia. The ugly thought somehow managed to disinter itself from the frozen tundra where he had buried it and fly over the pole to Cleveland. Not now. This was no time for those thoughts. He was in the middle of a contract renegotiation. He fielded it on one hop and flung it back.
“Anyway,” Barry Fuchsia was saying, “I turned it down. It’s gone. The train left the station.”
“Well…uh…okay, I guess you’re right.”
“I’m right. Besides, all I have to do is call John/John back tomorrow morning and we’ll be at five for year one before I say good morning. You want me to do that?”
“I guess not.”
“You’re beginning to understand how this works. Get some sleep.”
Barry Fuchsia hung up so fast that Randy didn’t realize for a moment that he was off the phone. He sat on the bed holding the receiver in one hand, rubbing his temple with the other, before getting up and getting the Nuprin. He washed down two with a glass of tap water that tasted like Lake Erie and went back to the phone to call his wife.
It rang four times before the machine picked up: “Hi. This is Randy, Susie, Molly, and Dolly. We’re not home right now, but we left Calvin on guard so if you want to visit bring a porterhouse steak and a suit of armor. Just kidding. If you leave your name and number after the beep we’ll call back. Honest. Bye…”
Randy hung up. He refused to talk to his own answering machine. He went over to examine the noisy air conditioner. Maybe it was just a dirty filter. A hundred and fifty-five bucks a night, in Cleveland, and they can’t keep the goddamn air-conditioning filters clean.
The phone rang.
“Hello?”
“Was that you just now?”
Susie’s tone of voice was accusatory, as if she were speaking to a six-year-old who had just stuck his hand in her crotch.
“I don’t like talking to machines.”
“Randy, you know I never pick up when you’re not here. It could be some nut. You never know.”
“What’s going on?”
“I spoke to the vet.”
“The vet?”
“About Calvin. Don’t you remember?”
Their dog, a hyperactive two-year-old Dalmatian, had been showing signs of mental unbalance lately. He was drinking chlorinated water from the pool and systematically chewing his way through the leather upholstery in the house. Randy wanted to have him put to sleep, but his eight-year-old twin daughters told him that if he did, they’d never speak to him again.
“What’d he say?”
“Well, he thought that maybe we should see somebody.”
“See somebody? What are you talking about?”
“He said that Calvin is probably under some sort of stress. He said there are people who treat these kinds of problems. They see the family and the pet together…”
Randy put his free hand on the bridge of his nose and squeezed until his sinuses hurt. Sometimes this technique relieved the pressure that built up. At least until the Nuprin kicked in.
“Do we have to talk about this now?”
“Did you have a bad night?”
“Oh-for-five.”
“Who was pitching?”
“La Bella. Look, I got a problem with the air conditioner here. I got to get it fixed and get some sleep. Okay?”
“Okay, but think about what the vet said. There’s a three-week waiting list for an appointment to see this guy.”
“Right. See you Sunday night.”
“Good night. Love you.”
He clicked the interrupter and dialed the front desk. They told him that Maintenance had gone home for the night but that if he wanted they’d switch him to another suite. Randy wasn’t interested in moving at a quarter to one in the morning. He hung up and went and sat on the acrylic long-wear carpet in front of the TV.
As he assumed a yoga position, he turned on the set. Arsenio Hall was talking to Tina Turner or Whoopi Goldberg, he wasn’t sure which. He turned the sound down and tried to get the tension to drift away from his center. Last year the Vikings had brought a yoga instructor to spring training to teach the players relaxation techniques.
Randy tried to fine-tune his center so that it would vibrate sympathetically with the air conditioner. Jesus. Things were really weird. He had just turned down nearly $5 million to play baseball for a year. His manager told him he lacked focus. His dog had a severe personality disorder. And he had nearly lost it in the shower.
All right. Maybe he was making too much of the shower thing. It was an involuntary reflex, completely out of his control. It was probably just a crossed wire anyway. Things were probably getting a little screwed up inside because of the pennant race and the renegotiation. There could be a number of explanations for it.
Anyway, it wasn’t what had almost happened in the shower that really disturbed him. First of all it didn’t actually happen. There was a difference between something almost happening and something happening. There was something worse. And it had been going on for a while now.
Randy finally felt the Nuprin kick in, and the first wave of relaxation spread from his center into his extremities. He watched Tina or Whoopi get up and kiss Arsenio. He started to feel a little better. Maybe it wasn’t that important. Maybe he could work around it. Maybe it was just a deep-seated admiration. He was one hell of a ballplayer. Did all the little things right. Nobody in baseball made the pivot better on a double play.
Whatever the case, there seemed to be only one explanation for what was going on. Randy was falling in love. And it wasn’t with his wife or with some bimbo he’d picked up on the road. It was with his second baseman.
