Have Glove, Will Travel_ Adventures of a Baseball Vagabond - Bill Lee [1]
I also want to thank those friends and relatives who have given me the emotional sustenance every writer needs. My heart is crowded with love for all of them: my brothers Joseph and Sean; cousins Michael and Bernard; Aunt Kathy and Uncle Tom; my violet-eyed, raven-tressed partner-in-crime Maria DiSimone; the late Brother Leo Richard and his Clan of the Cave, including Dr. Patrick Murphy, Father Ed Doran, Brother James Norton, Brother Regis, Chris Dougherty, Ray DeStephens, Brother Dan O’Riordan, and two absent friends: Brother Ronald Marcellin and Dr. Robert Englud; that superb English teacher Joseph Smith for teaching me to revere the written word; my blood brother Al “Sonny” Lombardo who has amazingly survived the streets of Brooklyn, Iraq, and Afghanistan as well as our teens, and his wife, Cathy; Karl Durr, the Burgermeister of Forest Hills Gardens and his gorgeous wife, Margrid; Richard Erlanger, Fenway’s own Duke of Earl and his duchess, Jessie, with the laughing eyes; Joyce and Emma Altman; The Budny Family: Alecks and Michaela, Paulina the budding artist, Mathilda, who never lets us forget she’s in charge, and my very best pal Rasmus, also known as the incredible “Mr. Mookie”; the gang at the gym, including Stan Enden and Andrew Alexander, two men I can count on; Alan Flusser, my SGI godfather; President Daisaku Ikeda and all the members of my Soka Gakkai International family, especially David Edwards and Arthur Fitting; and Vesna, Jean, Joey G., Gil and Roz, Chris and Hazel, Andy, the goldenthroated Cy Curnin, and the rest of my rollicking crew of madcaps at Q Thai Bistro in Forest Hills, still the best damned restaurant on the planet.
—Richard Lally
PROLOGUE
Frozen Out in Port Hawkesbury
It is a November night in 1984. My name is Bill Lee, and I used to play professional baseball with the Boston Red Sox and Montreal Expos. I just unpacked my bags in a chilly, narrow locker room. Now I stare at a spot. Well, bigger than a spot actually, it is a stain, a dark inverted triangle of damp seeping through the ceiling directly above me and trailing midway down the wall of my locker. If you call this a locker: a concrete cubicle, stark and bare with metal hooks to hang my clothes on. We do not have a clubhouse boy to pick up after us.
I rest my feet on a worn rubber mat, coal black in parts but faded to dusky gray at the edges. Dull wooden slats lead out the door to a colorless hallway. This room smells of stale sweat and camphor. I sit on a wobbly red bench whose legs some large razor-clawed beast must have recently used for a scratching post.
My uniform clings to my body even though we have yet to play. Perspiration has soaked through these double knits. Our team has appeared in thirteen towns in the last fourteen days; we live out of a bus and must cram our clothes into duffel bags immediately after each game and the fabrics never get an opportunity to completely dry. As I walked from the shower a few days ago, a teammate pointed out a growth on my left calf. It resembled a small chanterelle. A closer look revealed that I had contracted a body fungus, the price for continually playing in a mildewed uniform. A doctor prescribed Lamisil tablets for this condition. The fungus uses them for after dinner mints.
Breath hovers above me in a wreath of fog. It felt so cold when I walked through the door, I expected to find a side of beef hanging from one of the clothes hooks. Except it could never fit in here. Unlike the spacious big-league clubhouses that allow players to spread out, this room is cramped. My teammates and I sit huddled in front of our lockers, facing each other as if we were attending a consciousness-raising group. All we need to complete the setting is for Tony Robbins to appear clapping those big ham hands of his and exhorting us to go for it. With the mood I’m in, though, the only thing I would go for is his throat.
Actually, the close confines count as a plus, since the body heat we generate staves off frostbite.