The New York (29 page)

Charlene came to the second game and I got her good seats behind the dugout, which she didn't appreciate probably because she didn't really appreciate baseball. She wore dark slacks and a light blouse with a red bandanna around her neck. She also wore sunglasses that worked for her, even though it was the middle of the night.

Raul wanted to know if this was my girl so I introduced him to Charlene. He said he was honored and he kissed her hand, which charmed the hell out of her and she sort of giggled the way she does. And she took off her sunglasses to see him better and, I suppose, let him see her pretty eyes. Raul took it in, inhaled even, and then smiled at her.

Then he said to me in perfectly understandable non-Ricky-Ricardo English, “You must marry this beautiful woman before another man steals her heart.”

Well, you could have knocked me over with a feather. He was like a talking dog, is all. Charlene was so honored that she batted her eyes and waved every time Raul came to bat or trotted to the dugout. She said she wanted tickets for the next game. I told her they were all sold out, which was not true because you can't sell out baseball in Texas.

June is when the pitchers are supposed to lose their edge because the hitters are always slower in coming along. I didn't think it was possible for Raul to hit any better, but he did, raising his average to a phenomenal .452, which is scarcely human.

We had a doubleheader in Boston and Raul went nine for nine. Nine for nine. He didn't have no home runs, though, because of his line-drive style of hitting, which hit the big Green Monster wall in left and merely turned into doubles. I saw the bright side of things, nine for nine, and congratulated him, but he was just too angry and upset to get happy.

—- That fucking wall, I hate that wall, why do they allow a ballpark with a wall like that?

— Because it's always been this way, I guess.

A team from
People
magazine went down to Havana and did a profile on Raul and his family and friends and even included a nice picture of Maria Velasquez.

This, in retrospect, was probably a mistake. Castro loved the publicity and Raul's family and friends loved it, too, and so did George. Anything Castro and George could agree on was bound to be trouble for someone.

Raul got a copy of
People
in New York and wore it out reading it over and over. He tore out the photograph of Maria and placed it in a Wool-worth photo frame and put it on Ms desk in the hotel room. And commenced to write another stem-winding letter to Maria back home.

One night, I tried to shake him out of his melancholy by taking him to the bar in the Ed Sullivan Theater building where they shoot the David Letterman show. I just wanted to get him out of the hotel and I didn't want the FBI to be hearing what I had to say to him because I was going to tell Raul the truth about being lovesick.

This was time for a little heart-to-heart with Raul and I was up for the occasion. We didn't start with the birds and the bees, because I assumed he knew about that stuff, being a hot-blooded Latin and all. But I went right into the honey pot and pulled out love.

“Love, Raul, is not everything.” It was a start. Pretty blunt, but you have to start somewhere. I waited for his response.

“It is the only thing,” he said. His English was picking up, but I couldn't point out that he was really quoting Vince Lombard! on football.

— Raul (I said, going back to Spanish), love is a great thing. It is beautiful It is nice and gets you through bad moments. When you are in love, you can eat bologna and like it. When you are in love, you notice sunsets. When you are in love, Raul, you wear purple shirts because your girl likes them. Love is full of crazy shit like that. I know, I know, I been there. But it is not the only thing, the way you make it. You make yourself sick with love and that is not good. Beer. This beer is a good thing. We drink beer and we feel good. But if we drink too much beer, we feel bad. Why do we feel bad? Because it is too much. Too much love is bad.

— I cannot help myself, Señor Shawn. My body is on ire with love every moment of the day every moment of the night. I dream of love, I think of love, I stare for hours at her photograph in
People
magazine.

— Look, Raul. When the season is over, you can go home and get married. Then you can have all the love you want and it'll be right there waiting for you. It wouldn't be the worst thing for you now to relieve … well, to get rid of your tensions.

He smiled at me.

— You mean, to “handle” it?

— Well, that too. It's not for me to tell you what to do but you got to give yourself a break, Raul.

— You are so cool, so North American. You have a beautiful woman in Houston in Texas who loves you, but you go about your business as if it didn't matter. You do not write her, you told me that yourself. Do you expect her to wait and wait and wait? I have met her. A woman like that does not need to wait and wait. She is not ugly. You are a fool to let her be alone without you in Texas.

I was suddenly getting a clue. There were a lot of hoofprints and it wasn't that clean a clue, but it was a clue nonetheless, Raul was talking about himself. The truth is, I figured it out too late. He was a hot-blooded Cuban, he knew that the country was full of hot-blooded Cubans just like him and that Maria Velasquez was a looker. He was talking about his own anxiety, which is why he was up half the night writing letters and verses to Maria, to keep her distracted from all the male humanity around her.

Which led me to think about Charlene again. Not that Charlene couldn't wait a bit, she was thirty-five years old and she could control herself when she had to. Besides, she was English, I think, and there wasn't a trace of Latin in her.

Still, she filled out that green dress she wore like someone inspired, like someone who never even read the
Wall Street Journal

— Señor, what are you thinking of?

— I was just thinking.

— You were thinking of your woman. “Along those lines.”

— And I am thinking of my beloved as well.

— Yeah, well. Here we are on Broadway in New York on a hot June night and there's not much we can do about it, is there? Except get drunk.

— I don't want to get drunk. 

—- Fine, then don't.

— You get drunk sometimes so that you will feel nothing. But I want to feel the pain of love.

—- You talk like an asshole, sometimes.

— I talk to you of the pain you understand. You are not so wise or clever as to hide this from me.

— Sonny, you're twenty-three years old going on twelve. I am a grown, mature man. How did I get mature? Aging had a lot to do with it. When I was younger than you, I had a little girl named Sue at Arizona State who was just about the lovingest thing you ever saw. All golden and sweet and pleasing in her nature. I mean, she could cook and sew and keep house and wear sexy underwear and there wasn't a bed made that could stand up to her. This was the Olympics, you understand? And she just thought I was the greatest thing invented since flour tortillas.

— And?

— Well, I was going to school on baseball scholarship and the scouts were giving me the eye and I was going to the Bigs. I just knew I was if I gave it a chance. So that's what I did.

— What did you do? About Sue?

— I dropped her.

— You dropped her?

The way he said it, I just looked away. Through the window of the saloon. Up the street. Cab making a left turn. Bus stopping. Guy selling shit on the street. Homeless guy in a doorway, drinking something. Fascinating things. I just kept looking away, trying not to see Sue, as she was a long time ago.

— She didn't it in with my plans. First thing you know, I would have had kids and a house to worry about. I wanted to be free to play baseball and play it as best as I could.

— Oh, that is the saddest story I have heard in a year. That is just so sad.

— Why is it sad? She married someone else and probably has achieved every goal she ever set for herself.

— Except to marry you.

— Well, you got to make sacrifices. That's what I been trying to tell you about growing up. Every day isn't going to be Christmas, Raul. Everything is a trade-off. You get this, but you give up that. You want that, you have to give up this.

— But love is not a commodity.

— Tell that to the hookers on Eighth Avenue.

— This is not prostitution. Love is not sex, it is not debased.

— You sure you're not a secret Jesuit infiltrated into Cuba by the Church? You talk like a priest.

— Ah, I can't talk to you. I can't talk to you anymore. You have told me a sad story of your own life and you do not even see the sadness in it.

— I didn't say I didn't see the sadness in it. I said being sad is part of the price.

He stared at me then as though he was seeing my skull under the cover of skin and it horrified him.

Then, very slowly, he shook his head and there were tears in those doe eyes. He stood up and put out his hand and rested it on my shoulder.

—- You don't even understand, Señor Shawn. But you have made me understand for the first time. Made me understand for myself and for my beloved Maria.

— Understand what?

But he just shook his head and took his hand off my shoulder and turned. He went to the door. He stopped and looked back at me. Then he went through the doorway into the steam of a New York summer night,

I just sat there a moment and thought about Sue as she was, nubile little thing. She was making someone happy somewhere.

And Charlene.

I wanted to call her just then, but I was in a saloon on Broadway in the middle of Manhattan and what could I say to her anyway?

And there was a worse thought.

What if she was out when I called?

The All-Star break in the season came the second week of July and none too soon for me. When you're thirty-eight, going on thirty-nine, 162 games is just too many. I looked forward to the break. I planned on lying down to Houston and picking up Charlene for a short trip to Vegas. I don't gamble to make it count, but this guy on the White Sox can get you five nights in a nice hotel on the Strip and comps to the Siegfried and Roy show, the one with the white tigers, and some funny money to play with for less than three hundred dollars. Besides, I needed to recharge my batteries and I was missing Charlene very much.

The team was a semi-solid second, three behind the Red Sox in the American League East. Raul had been second in the voting for the American League All-Star team and the team manager had picked him as a sub, so Raul was scheduled to be at the big game in Cleveland while me and Charlene would be at the gaming tables on the Strip.

That was the way it was supposed to be. I admit I was feeling lax. I hadn't seen Baxter since that afternoon in my room in Fort Lee. I wondered whether he was fretting about how well we were doing. There had been six more certified brawls. The New York papers had turned around and were starting to love us. We were the Scrappy Yanks, the Go-to-Hell Gang, the best thing in baseball brawling since the Gas House Gang operated in St. Louis in Dizzy Dean's day. I was balancing everything, the players who were not pussy (Tomas had picked up his fielding percentage after someone explained to him what a croquet wicket was), George, who still called me at one in the morning, and Charlene in Texas, who didn't know what to think about it all.

I just wanted her to think about me in Vegas. Our little hideaway.

It was nice, the first day, with us gambling a little on the video poker machine and taking a swim in the outdoor pool. It felt good to relax and Charlene was just this side of legal in her bathing suit, which made me very proud of her. Everything was going to be nice. So I thought at the time. It lasted most of the day and the night.

Then it happened. I got this frantic phone call at four in the morning in our room at the Mirage Hotel. It was George. Who else would call me at four in the morning? I said something to him that wasn't polite and slammed down the receiver.

“Who was it?” Charlene said. She was naked and mussed. We had had a wonderful evening and a half crammed into one.

“Who do you think would call me at four in the morning?” I said. “Your friend George.”

“You keep saying that. I met the man once in my life and he was thoroughly charming.”

“And Hitler had cute bangs,” I said.

“Really, Ryan —”

The phone was ringing again. I turned on the light this time and picked up the receiver.

“Ryan, how dare you hang up on me?”

“George, I'm taking a few days off.”

“I'm in fucking Cleveland,” George said.

“Was it a good game?”

“It was a good game, who gives a shit if it was a good game or not? The important thing is he's not here. He's gone. Vanished.
Vamenos.”

“Who's vanished?” I said.

“Raul Guevara, you son of a bitch. This is some trick of yours, some sneaky little way to get back at me for sending those Roxanne Devon letters to your broad.”

“I knew you did it —”

“That was part of the fun, you knowing. But now this isn't funny, this is serious, and I want you to stop playing games and produce that Cuban cocksucker before I get the FBI to tear you a new asshole, asshole.”

“You're stuttering, George.”

“Is he there? Is he there with you right now? You gone queer for him, is that it? I don't care if you two want to play daisy chain, just tell me he's there in bed with you right now and I won't say a word. You know what Castro does to queers? He cuts off their gonads and fries them up for breakfast, you cocksucker! Give me that shit about poor little Raul sitting all alone in his room pouring out his heart to his alleged girlfriend in Havana when all along you been taking him out to your queer spots in the Village and hanging around with your sissy friends and —”