Have Glove, Will Travel_ Adventures of a Baseball Vagabond - Bill Lee [41]
Cheesy Astroturf covered the infield. Base runners between first and second had to dash up a pronounced grade. We found so many holes—each the size of a miniature crater— gouged into the turf around the pitching mound, it looked as though the engineers had deliberately dug them as tank traps just in case the Panzer division returned.
To their credit, the Yugoslavs had installed modern outfield fences complete with protective vinyl padding. They’d made one small mistake, though. The engineers had anchored the fences backward, so the padding faced out. Any player who crashed into the flat, hard panels on the field side while racing after a fly ball risked permanent brain damage. And this turned out to be Yankee Stadium compared to the other fields we played on. Baseball is hard. You cannot learn how to play the game properly on inadequate diamonds. Our group finished the tour undefeated, and the thing is, we were not that good. Any half-assed American saloon team could have demolished us.
Now about that first brush with the Soviet police. My teammates and I were taking a cab to dinner in a downtown Moscow restaurant. Halfway there, our driver made a sharp turn around a corner and cut off a spanking-new silver Mercedes with tinted windows as it darted from a driveway.
Within minutes, the wail of police sirens deafened us. Russian traffic cops waved the cab to the side of the avenue. The Mercedes pulled up, its windows rolled down, and this man, his face as cuddly as a stone gargoyle’s, began jawing with one of the officers while jabbing his finger toward our driver. The Mercedes owner clearly carried weight. After he flashed a card on the police, they fined us two hundred rubles (about ten dollars) without even bothering to hear our side of the story. Not that we had one.
Ah, the Soviet judicial system! Whatever it lacked in even-handedness, it made up for in expediency. Back in the States, when the police pinched you for a traffic violation you paid your fine in court or through the mails. Russian police eliminated the middleman. They did not issue a summons or schedule a hearing. Instead, we settled our penalty with the cops on the spot. In cash.
I don’t mean to imply that they pocketed this money, though I did notice later that Russia has the best-dressed police force in the world. Its officers appeared in the top Moscow night spots sporting Rolexes, Brioni suits, and Sulka ties while smoking foot-long Havanas. Expensive items, but over 325 million people lived in the USSR in 1988. That’s a lot of cars to pull over.
We arrived at the restaurant, located in a pockmarked but elegant brownstone, only to discover that it doubled as an art gallery. The owner had put in a few tables and offered a menu of black-market food to augment his declining profits. One look at the artwork on the restaurant walls revealed the reason for the tepid sales. Most of the paintings resembled bad imitations of Salvador Dalí and Paul Klee, dull splatterings without an ounce of perspective or passion to make them interesting. The least expensive of the lot cost over $100, a bit too pricey for the average Russian in 1988.
As a waiter led us to our table, my eyes shifted from the abstracts to a ravishing young woman munching caviar and pâté at a corner table, a dead ringer for the model Christie Brinkley. Guess who sat next to her? That guy with the Mercedes.
He stared at us while we ordered, and mumbled something about “pushy Americans.” What followed was not my best moment. I shot back with a retort—something clever constructed around the word fuck as both a noun and a verb—and the Cold War suddenly flamed hot. The man jumped to his feet and growled, “To my chin you say that, why don’t you?”
No one could tell us how this fellow made ends meet, but his reply immediately ruled out English translator as a possibility. Judging by his slick wheels, the runway looker on his arm, and