Have Glove, Will Travel_ Adventures of a Baseball Vagabond - Bill Lee [37]
Then there was our twenty-year-old catcher, Jim Nelson. Lean and broad-shouldered with a full head of curly goldilocks, Jim possessed a movie-star smile that he flashed at full wattage whenever a female ventured near. Did not matter if she was nineteen or ninety, single, married, or a Carmelite nun. All that racing testosterone made Jim a Molotov cocktail itching for a match. At the start of our journey, we voted him the player most likely to be found dead in his hotel room. Everyone figured some KGB operative would ice him after finding the kid rolling around on a mattress with the agent’s wife, his daughter, and the family’s prize heifer.
A loud, blustering New York businessman was the only team member who did not fit in. During conversations, he gave the impression that he never heard anything you said; he just waited for your lips to stop moving so he could continue his monologue. He sat in the Kennedy Airport bar before we embarked, boring anyone who listened with travel stories obviously meant to reveal his worldliness. Talk about karma. After our plane touched down in Russia, whom do you think the Soviet customs officials detained on the spot? That’s right, the global traveler himself. He had forgotten his passport. Three days passed before any of us saw him again, and he remained relatively quiet for the rest of the trip.
Our group stayed at the Olympic Village, a concrete-and-steel complex of lowdown high-rises overlooking a Moscow train station. My small room resembled a monk’s den, sparsely furnished with just a table, a few chairs, and a slate-hard metal cot. The mattress on that bed was less than three inches thick and barely six feet long. My toes hung over the end even when I assumed a fetal position.
Freight elevators provided access to every floor of the building, but we rode them with trepidation. Power outages regularly occurred on that side of the city; the odds of getting stuck in an elevator increased every time you stepped into one. I could not shake the feeling of being constantly watched while we lived in the complex. Perhaps it was my American paranoia. Or perhaps I was just spooked by the continuous presence of the KGB agents in the front lobby, humorless men whose eyes narrowed whenever you passed as if they could scan you right down to your shorts with X-ray vision. Their constant surveillance played on the dark side of my imagination. Our apartments overlooked an atrium dominated by a large white wall. I remember thinking what a dandy spot it would make for a firing squad. Now that was my paranoia talking.
On Saturdays a flea market operated in a soccer field across the avenue from where we stayed. Most of the tables and booths offered an inventory of forlorn items that sold for only a dollar or two: old military uniforms and medals, broken rhinestone jewelry, statues whittled from pine, secondhand clothing, and watches that ran backward.
We did find one man whose goods looked extraordinary. He was a pale, emaciated artist with a runny nose and a hacking, tubercular cough. He had rescued the gray woolen coat on his back from a garbage bin. Some tailor had cut it for a much broader frame. His fingers disappeared beneath its floppy sleeves, and when he stood up, the coat’s hem scraped the ground. You could have wrapped the garment around him three times over.
He moved slowly, an old-timer at twenty-six. There was no vitality to him except for the dark, intense eyes that peered from beneath the bill of his grimy black linen cap. You could guess his vocation if you noticed how he observed the life around him. He never casually glanced at anything. Instead, his eyes absorbed people and objects as if he could store every aspect of their appearance for future reference. Nothing escaped his gaze.
A beige leatherette portfolio lay open on the table in front