The Boys of Summer (18 page)

“So this is your boy,” he said, after I made introductions.

“Yes, sir,” Gordon Kahn said. He beamed and ashes fell.

“I take good care of him. Ya gotta watch these young guys.” Dressen winked at my father. “But I set you straight,” Dressen said to me. “Ain’t that right?”

Fellatio equals perspiration, I remembered. “You’re a helluva head counselor, Chuck.”

“Aaah,” Dressen said, pleased, and the elevator arrived.

We rode up silently, my father and Dressen eye to eye. As we entered the press room, Gordon said, “I’m sorry the game didn’t turn out more satisfactorily, Mr. Dressen.”

“Huh?” Charlie said. “The way them cocksuckers played? The fuckers din’ deserve to win. They played like pansies. Shit. Know what I fuckin’ mean?”

My father nodded solemnly. Dressen started gulping his Scotch and White Rock black cherry. I whispered to my father, “I’m sorry about the language. He’s a little, uh, coarse.”

“Nonsense,” my father said, his deep voice overloud. “I can tell at once that he’s an intelligent man.”

It was the hottest July anyone remembered. According to the New York Weather Bureau, the daily maximum temperature averaged 86.9 degrees, the second highest in the annals. Heat was everywhere in our travels from St. Louis to New England—heat squatting over the ball parks, making pitchers sweat through shirts, heat pent in drab hotel rooms with sheets that crackled as you went to bed, heat rippling the heavy air beyond train windows, soiled by splashes from a thunderstorm that had suddenly broken somewhere weeks ago. Between New York and Boston, coves curled toward the railroad tracks, and the pale-blue water speckled with sunglint and sail. On the longer ride to Pittsburgh, hills humped upward, green Eastern hills of maple, birch and elm. Farther, in Indiana and Illinois, in Ohio and Missouri, farmland lay in curving furrows, and houses clustered into all the Winesburgs. So summer came, tempting and hot, but of all the new scenes what compelled me most strongly was the crowded and drab clubhouse under the right-field grandstands in Ebbets Field. It was not air-conditioned as clubhouses are today; ventilation came from narrow windows ten feet above the ground. In 1937 I had watched from across Sullivan Place as teen-agers shouted insults at the Dodgers
until someone heaved a bucket of water through the windows. Now, I myself could go inside.

The clubhouse was a long rectangle, with a trainers’ room and a corridor to Dressen’s office opening on the west. Old metal lockers ran around the walls. Reese, as captain, was assigned the first locker along the outside wall. This came with a battered metal door, a rough symbol of eminence since no other locker had a door of any kind. A small electric heater stood nearby. Reese reclined in an old swivel chair someone had found for him once. The other ball players sat on three-legged milkmaid’s stools.

Hodges, Snider and Robinson dressed close to Reese. Campanella’s locker stood in the center of the room near a locker used by Billy Cox. On other teams, black players dressed together, so that there was a kind of segregation within the newly integrated sport. The Dodgers dressed according to seniority and according to importance. Robinson would not have had it any other way. Reese was inclined to agree.

In the stark clubhouse players assumed roles, repeated day after day with variations. On the field they won and lost before a nation; the clubhouse was sanctuary, and once inside you tried to relate public performance with private role. Small, sharpfaced Billy Cox, the possessor of phenomenal hands and a strange disquiet, discouraged personal conversation. Preacher Roe said he and Cox talked mostly baseball. Cox could take a drink, and Roe imposed one condition on his roommate: “When I say, ‘Come home, Billuh,’ you got to come along.”

The players called Cox “Hoss.” Some shouted, “Hey, Hoss. Hey, Hoss Cox,” then burbled laughter.

Cox responded with a strange gesture. Holding his right hand at the hip, and extending the index finger, he thrust the finger outward and said, “Fuckit.” He was always making extraordinary plays at third base, and after a while the Dodgers responded with derisive cheering, a harsh professional compiiment.
Cox had begun the finger waggle in response, along with a sidelong cry of “Fuckit.” Afterward the waggle was enough. Leap. Stop. Assist. “Yah, yah, yah,” from the dugout. Putout. Finger waggle. “Fuckit.” Cox was a kind of punctuator of scenes.

By late July the lead was seven games. The team was winning and suspected that it was going to win. Pee Wee Reese stood in front of his locker holding his uniform pants. “I wonder,” he said, “how many times I’ve put these things on and off.”

“I wonder,” Duke Snider said, “how many times you’ve added figures to your bankbook.”

Reese made Cox’s motion for “Fuckit” and dropped into his chair. “Look at those legs,” he said. They were strong and straight, downed with light hair but rutted by cuts and scrapes and scars. “Spikes,” Reese said. “By the end of the year my legs look like a road map.”

“Tell us about it, Pee Wee,” Snider said. He turned away, losing interest.

“I never realized that,” I said.

“What do you think happens around second base?” Reese said. “They come at you and come at you and the spikes are not made of rubber.” Reese leaned back. The chair made a grinding noise. “I remember when I used to think that playing baseball was the easiest thing in the world. I don’t think so any more.”

“When you were a kid,” I said, “you dreamed about this?”

“No, sir,” Reese said. “I did not dream about the lights. There were never any night games in my dreams. I’m thirty-three years old and after a night game I’m all worked up—hell, you don’t calm down right away—and I have trouble falling asleep and the next day I dread the game. I ought to run before I play, to get my legs loose. Sometimes I hit a bleeder first time up and I have to break from the plate in a hurry. You can pull a muscle if you haven’t loosened up, but if you’re tired enough, you won’t run before a game because you have to save your strength. So
maybe you pull a muscle. Fuckit.” He got up and began putting on his pants.

Dressen sent Labine to St. Paul for several weeks to pitch his arm back into shape, and Labine gathered his possessions shortly after dawn and left without saying good-bye to anyone. He felt humiliated. Robinson was worried about his wife. She had to undergo surgery for a growth which proved benign. Three days later Robinson, still overwrought, protested an umpire’s call by kicking his glove thirty feet.

“Yer outa here, Robinson,” bawled Augie Guglielmo. Dressen moved Bobby Morgan to third and sent Billy Cox to replace Robinson at second. “He was right to do what he did,” Cox muttered.

“What was that?” Guglielmo said.

“I said, ‘Fuckit.’”

“Yer outa here, too, Cox. Git outa here.”

Still the team won.

Campanella was hitting poorly. He had chipped a bone when his throwing hand struck a bat as he tried to pick a man off third. The lead reached eight games. Dressen drove the team, and in the rage of summer, geniality began to fade.

On August 15, Robin Roberts of Philadelphia won his nineteenth game, beating the Dodgers, 8 to 3, at Ebbets Field. The Dodgers smacked flies to the base of the wall in left field, long drives that center fielder Richie Ashburn caught in stride, and numerous two-out singles. Roberts controlled a game without appearing to dominate it. Recounting this frustrating evening, I wrote:

The Dodgers got their final run in the eighth inning when George Shuba hit his fifth homer of the year. But indicative of the “fighting” spirit this hot night was the fact that after Shuba circled the bases and got the customary handshake from Andy Pafko, he walked to the water cooler and sat down in the dugout, untroubled by further handshaking, or by back-slapping and applause from his teammates.

Campanella waited in the clubhouse the next day. “Hey,” he shouted. “I saw what you wrote. I can’t clap. My hand’s broke.”

“I didn’t mean just you,” I said.

A number of heads turned. Snider looked on curiously. Shotgun Shuba laced a shoe.

“What do you want me to do?” Campanella said. “Jump up when he hits one and knock my head against the top of the dugout? Is that what you want?”

“That’s not what I want.”

“How can you, sitting up there,” Campanella shouted, “see if we got spirit down here?”

“Roy,” I said. “Would you do me a favor?”

“What’s that?”

“Stop reading the
Tribune.
Try the
Times.”

“I would,” Campanella said, “ ‘cept the
Tribune
is the onliest paper I can get delivered in time for me to read it in the shithouse in the morning.”

“I’ll remember that when I write about you.”

“Sheet,” Campanella roared, and paraded naked and stately to the trainers’ room, where he would soak his sore hand in a whirlpool bath.

Reese was grinning from the swivel chair. Hodges gazed solemnly into his locker. Across the corridor, Preacher Roe sat cross-legged puffing a corncob pipe. No one spoke. I was the only man wearing street clothes, the only civilian, in the Dodger clubhouse. I retreated.

Later on the field, Robinson motioned to me. “What you wrote,” he said, “was silly. Some guys thought it was anti. But you were right to stand up to Campanella.” A few hours later the story was forgotten. The Dodger fighting spirit came around nicely. The team defeated the Phillies, 15 to 0.

“You shouldn’t rile Campy,” Dressen suggested over drinks. “He’s worried about himself.”

“Well, I’d figured that he’s an intelligent guy who’d respect my right to write.”

“What? What’s that? What’s that word? Starts with a ‘I.’”

“Intelligent.”

“Yup. That’s it. All ball players is dumb.”

“All?”

“And outfielders is the dumbest.”

“Why do you say that?”

“I wisht they was all Reese and Robi’son. But that Shuba, that Snider, that Furiller.
That
Furiller. He can’t even bunt.”

Carl Furillo was suffering a frightful season. Grit lodged in a cornea restricted his vision, which no one knew, and he listened to a variety of useless suggestions from Dressen without heeding them. “Skoonj,” they called him, and Skoonj, good year or bad, was a ball player who walked his own way. “How’m I gonna bunt if I can’t bunt?” he said. “Anybody ever ask fucking Dressen that?”

To bring Furillo into the Brooklyn organization, Larry MacPhail purchased the franchise at Reading in the Interstate League following the 1941 season. War had made the franchise inoperative. “Worthless,” MacPhail explained, “except for two assets. A bus in good condition and Carl Furillo.”

During my seasons with the team, Furillo had a mean batting average of about .300. The first year he hit .247. The second year, after eye surgery, he hit .344. He was solid, handsome, dark, with short curly hair, and a Roman nose that had been broken many times. Women who saw him in dungarees and T-shirt were stirred. Some men felt envy.

Furillo’s responses to people and situations were intuitive. He sized me up, carefully, when I joined the club, considered my 140 pounds and quickly named me “Meat.” By August he had decided to trust me with his thoughts. “Hey, Meat,” he said. “You know what I’m gonna do when I’m all through? Open an Italian restaurant in Vero Beach.”

“You really think that would work?”

“Look, Meat. You give good food, spaghetti, it’s gotta work.”

“But I don’t think there are many people around Vero in August.”

“You give good food,” Furillo said, “it don’t matter where you are. People will come.”

“But why Vero? Why not a bigger town?”

“Look, Meat,” Furillo said. “When I open this place, you come down to Vero and you’ll get a free meal. On the house. And that’s a promise.”

“Well, thank you, Carl,” I said.

For mysterious reasons, he felt antipathetic toward Bill Roeder. “That Roeder thinks he’s smart,” Furillo said.

“Well, he is pretty smart,” I said.

“Yeah, but he don’t know everything. Nobody knows everything, except Him.” Furillo jerked a thumb upward, signifying God. “Hey. How many feet in an acre?”

“I think it’s two hundred by two hundred.”

“Let’s ask Roeder, Meat. He’ll get it wrong, and that’ll show you. He ain’t as fucking smart as he thinks.”

Furillo liked to fish and work with his hands. In right field, in front of the short wall and tall screen, he was an emperor. He knew the angles of the wall and the scoreboard that jutted out and how a ball would carom. No one ruled that field as he did. He threw out dozens of runners at second before people stopped challenging him. Charging apparent singles, he was said to have thrown out a half dozen men at first. “This man,” wrote Roscoe McGowen of the
Times,
“is armed.”

Once in Boston Sid Gordon, then with the Braves, slapped a long line single to right. Ed Mathews, a swift rookie, broke from first. Furillo ran toward the foul line from right center, caught the ball on a bounce, whirled and loosed his throw. For a remarkable instant you could see the baseball and Mathews racing on converging paths. The ball bounced fifteen feet from
third base, as Mathews dipped into a slide. The ball accelerated with the bounce, spin biting dirt, and skipped low over Mathews’ legs. Cox whipped the Whelan’s glove and in one motion caught the ball and made a tag. Furillo trotted to the dugout, apparently unimpressed by his own play, seemingly emotionless.

I saw the other side in the clubhouse. One hot afternoon Bob Rush of the Chicago Cubs threw an inside fast ball and Furillo could not duck. He threw up his left hand and the ball glanced off his knuckles and smashed into the bridge of the Roman nose. Furillo fell, without a sound, and lay without moving. He was borne from the field on a stretcher.

In the trainers’ room, I found him on a white table, supine and still. Dr. Harold Wendler, an osteopath, had placed an ice pack on his face. It ran from brow to nostril and covered both eyes.

“How is he?” I whispered.

“Severe impact,” Wendler said. “We’ll need X-rays.”

I took Furillo by the hand. “Hey, Carl. It’s me. Meat. Doc Wendler says you’re going to be fine.”

The palm was curiously soft. Furillo clutched my hand weakly, like a child.