Ball Four (RosettaBooks Sports Classics) (63 page)

While all the big companies are merging, acquiring and leveraging, I’ve licensed a small local outfit to market my invention. The Wecolite Company, run by a nice fellow named Ralph Stern, is introducing Table-To-Go in 1990. Still, it’s always tempting to bring your idea to a big company first. As my friend Bob Bell at Licensing Corporation of America says, “A big dog takes a big shit.”

When I’m not playing Gyro Gearloose (the Donald Duck character with the propeller hat), I give motivational talks to corporations. I tell them that people need to do what they love or find a way to love what they do. That if you focus on the process rather than the goal, you’ll achieve the goal more often. Of course, I always mix in a few Joe Schultz stories to keep everybody laughing.

Sometimes Paula joins me if the business meeting is at a nice resort. Or I go along as the spouse when Paula gives one of her Communicational Judo seminars. And I’m learning to live with an independent woman. I always introduce her as Paula Kurman, not Mrs. Bouton. This did not, however, prevent Paula from introducing me once as her husband, “Jim Kurman.” It was an accident but I get a lot of mileage out of it.

Yes, the Magic Lady and I are married now. It’s lots of fun and we’re always learning from each other. Paula has taken up jazz ballet dancing to be more of an athlete and I wheel and deal in the business world with Communicational Judo.

And we try to separate our business from our personal lives, but it’s not easy. The other morning at breakfast I said to Paula that the strawberry jam seemed to be “a hot item” because we were “out of stock.” She said she couldn’t keep the pipeline filled and that the jam “was on back order.”

Paula and I are enjoying having the house all to ourselves. The kids are all out on their own now. Lee, twenty-eight, is an attorney with Cravath, Swaine & Moore in New York. We need all the free legal advice we can get. Hollis, twenty-six, is working in the Paris office of McKinsey, the international consulting firm. She covers the European market for us.

Michael, twenty-six, is still very active in politics. He fought to lower car insurance with New Jersey Citizens Action and is now working to save the environment with Greenpeace. Mike is disproving the theory, popular in college, that you can’t make a living as a philosophy major.

David, twenty-five, a Phi Beta Kappa from Rutgers, is in a management training program at First Fidelity Bank. And he’s learning to speak Korean. We may join David in a trip to Korea to try and find his biological mother.

And Laurie, twenty-four, is back in college, working toward a degree after a couple of years in the business world. When I asked Laurie if she wanted to add any comments, she said, “Just say, ‘Laurie Bouton, twenty-four, still as beautiful as ever.’” That’s easy. I believe in telling the truth.

It’s been quite a decade, with all the ups and downs of steering five kids through their teenage years. Marrying Paula, opening our own businesses and the Wrigley lawsuit.

My mom died of cancer five years ago. She was much too young. Dad remarried some time later. And then this past summer he had cancer, too. They had to take one-and-a-half kidneys out of him, but tough guy that he is, he was up and on his feet in a week. Now he’s back in Florida getting ready to play in the over-seventy softball league. As brother Bob says, “He should be faster, now that he doesn’t have to be lugging all those kidneys around.”

So, I’m fifty years old but I don’t feel any older, although I think I’m a little wiser. I have some wrinkles, but I’ve been squinting at batters in the sunshine for a lot of years. I’ve earned them. And when I look at my life I realize how lucky I am. I still have plans and dreams. And every day is a new adventure.

About five years ago, just to get a little workout, I pitched some batting practice for a local semipro baseball team. One thing led to another and before I knew it I was pitching in a game the next weekend. Today I’m the ace pitcher for the Little Ferry Giants in the North Jersey Metropolitan League. When the knuckleball is working, I’m tough to hit. When it’s not, Paula can’t stand to watch.

No, I’m not nostalgic about playing in the major leagues. I have no interest in getting on the road again or reliving any part of that. It’s just that every year in the spring I get this urge to play some ball in the sunshine. Just for fun. And, while my life is fun, I know it’s not that way for most people. There is too much poverty, too much greed, and too much ignorance in the land. As one of the lucky ones, I’d like to help make things better. That’s my dream these days.

Laurie died on August 15, 1997.

And I’m not the same guy who wrote
Ball Four
. I’m not so cocky, not so sure of myself. I’m anxious about the future. I get nervous when the phone rings. I can’t just will things to happen anymore. I worry about losing it. I’m not living a charmed life. I’m not the luckiest guy in the world.

But I was until that night.

It had been a very exciting summer. Paula and I were on top of the world, literally, in our mountaintop home in the Berkshires. Paula had just appeared in a Williamstown Theater production of
Dead End
. I’d just finished a brief stint with a troupe of
Athletes as Dancers
at Jacob’s Pillow. Our life was rich with friends and activities. We were feeling good about ourselves, happy as can be.

We had met some friends for dinner and gone to an outdoor performance at Shakespeare & Company. It was a warm summer night with a full moon. It had been a lovely day. When we came home, we had just stepped inside the door, hadn’t even taken the messages off the blinking machine, when the phone rang. Paula picked up and it was Lee.

“Oh, no,” I heard her say. “Oh, my God! Oh, my God!”

A jolt of terror shot through my body. I had never heard Paula sound like that before. I just hoped it wasn’t one of the kids.

“What is it?” I said, my heart hammering. “Who?”

“Laurie’s been in a terrible accident,” said Paula, who was shaking now and gasping for breath.

“How bad?” I moaned, terrified of the answer.

“Very bad,” said Paula, still on the phone, trying to learn more.

“Is she dead?” I heard myself say, not believing I was saying it.

“No… but it’s very bad.…”

I fell on my knees and vomited.

“No, no, no, no…” I wailed. “Not my Laurie… not my Laurie.”

I pounded the floor in my helplessness. Laurie was in danger and there was nothing I could do to fix it. And she was so far away.

“We have to go to the hospital
right now
…” said Paula.

I couldn’t think straight. How could we get to the hospital in Newark? That’s four hours away. Neither one of us could possibly drive in this condition.

Now David was on the car phone with Paula. He and Lee and Lee’s fiancée, Elaine Wood, were driving to the hospital from Manhattan and would be there in twenty minutes. Bobbie and her husband, Phil Goldberg, were already at the hospital. Michael and his then fiancée, Melanie Knapper, were being driven from Brooklyn by a friend, Tom Lanier. Hollis was in Europe and couldn’t be reached.

“I have to take care of your dad,” said Paula, hanging up the phone. “We’ll get there somehow.”

Somebody has to take charge when things are falling apart, and nobody’s better at that than Paula. In minutes she was on the phone to the driver service that takes me to and from airports when I have to fly. It was now after eleven, but a driver showed up in twenty minutes. Just enough time for us to throw some things in a suitcase if we needed to stay over.

It was the longest ride of our lives. We held each other and cried and talked. David had said Laurie was in a coma and would probably never walk again. This was inconceivable for someone like Laurie, “The Unsinkable Molly Brown,” girl daredevil. We knew they were doing everything possible to save her. Evidently, a helicopter had flown her to the hospital from the crash scene.

We called the hospital during a pit stop. The news was not any better. Just get there as quickly as possible. The accident had occurred about seven-thirty that night. We wouldn’t be there until three in the morning. I didn’t want her to go without me being there. If she was still alive, I’d want to hold her hand and try to comfort her. But I didn’t want that to be my last memory of her either. We numbed ourselves against the possibilities. The full moon followed us all the way. It’s only been recently that I can even look at a full moon.

University Hospital has about a dozen entrances. David had said we should go around to the back, but we didn’t know where that was, and we didn’t have time to drive all around. So close and yet so far. Then we saw Michael in the distance, waving at our black sedan. Probably waving at any black cars that came along.

The three of us hugged on the run, and Michael led the way through a series of hallways, walking fast, toward the Intensive Care Unit. Laurie was still alive, Michael said, but in a coma, hooked up to monitors. He and David and Bobbie had been taking turns holding her hand. Michael said he’d been singing songs to Laurie—nonsense songs with funny rhymes—that they’d sung together as children. He said the only reaction was a few blips on one of the machines, but he believed she could hear him. Michael had told her I was coming and would be there soon.

I pictured Laurie lying there. I wanted to see her, yet I couldn’t stand the thought. I had a flash memory of her as a little girl in a wet bathing suit, returning from lunch to a fenced-in swimming pool, with halves of a peanut butter and jelly sandwich in each hand. Rather than walk around to the gate, which would have taken all of twenty seconds, she chose to climb the chain-link fence using no hands, just elbows, feet and knees, so as not to drop her sandwiches. That was funny enough, but the best part came when she was halfway over, teetering on the balance point, two elbows and a foot straddling the metal pipe, and suddenly discovered a sandwich-half directly in front of her face. Not one to waste an opportunity, Laurie took a bite and proceeded over the fence.

The double doors of the Intensive Care Unit were just ahead. Through the glass windows I could see the distraught faces of Lee and Elaine. Someone from the hospital pushed open the doors and we entered the main room.

“He’s here!” I heard someone say.

The room was crowded with mixed-family members, and friends. The last time I’d seen this group together, ironically, was at Laurie’s graduation from college. It was eerily silent except for the beeping of machines. Half the faces turned to us, the rest stayed riveted on a smaller room off to our right. But before I could even glance in that direction, I heard the words that ripped my heart out.

“She’s gone.”

It was Bobbie, face streaked with tears, emerging from the small room. The group of family and friends exploded in a deluge of cries and wails. I rushed over to hug Bobbie and hold her close. This was our little girl and only we could share that particular pain. Then Paula and Phil moved in quickly to hold us both, and the others followed suit, forming a huddle of devastated souls.

“She waited for you, Jim,” everyone said. “She waited for you.” And I believe she did. Her incredible spirit lived nearly eight hours in a body with no viable organs, according to the surgeons who later declined our offer to donate them. What’s more, Laurie chose the precise moment—the very split second—that would make it easiest on me.

I never went in to see her. I relied on what others said later. That she looked beautiful without her make-up. That she looked peaceful.

I’m sure it’s been difficult to read this, but I thought you should know. If you’ve come this far, thirty years’ worth, you’re practically family.

The only person who would enjoy reading this is Laurie. “You
best
be writing something
good
about me, Dad,” I can hear her say, chin jutting from side to side, in that Jersey Girl way of speaking she shared with her friends. And her friends were legion, because she was loyal and caring and extraordinary fun to be around. At the funeral, half a dozen girls claimed “best friend” status with Laurie, who was godmother to several of their children. Laurie herself had no children, and she had never married, but it wasn’t for lack of boyfriends, several of whom showed up at the funeral and eyed each other with interest.

Laurie would also want you to know that the accident wasn’t her fault. She was the only innocent party, and the only fatality, in a multivehicle collision on a New Jersey highway. The police report said she braked to a complete stop, a few feet short of an accident that had just occurred over the crest of a hill, and was hit from behind by another driver who didn’t even touch the brakes. “The Unsinkable Molly Brown” never had a chance.

She always liked that nickname. Her other favorite was “Laurie the Great.” She liked the recognition that came with
Ball Four
. Even more than her brothers, Laurie loved the baseball life, the travel, adventures, hanging out with the players. And she had fun with the connection to her infamous father. She even enjoyed the fact that she looked like me. “You must be Jim Bouton’s daughter,” people would say. “That’s right,” she’d shoot back. “You want my autograph?” She was only half kidding.

Hundreds of people crowded the little funeral parlor. Some of them spoke, those who were able, about special times with Laurie and of her endearing quirks. She seemed to be everywhere in all of their lives. Where did she find the time? Now I understood about the parking tickets, which always got mailed to me because Laurie had never changed the registration on the car I gave her. The reason she couldn’t take time to find a parking space, I explained, was that she was always in a hurry to make people happy. So many people, so little time. Everyone nodded in agreement.

But the one who captured Laurie best was her stepsister Hollis, who read a letter she had written on the plane from Amsterdam.