Have Glove, Will Travel_ Adventures of a Baseball Vagabond - Bill Lee [46]
A few months later, the Berlin Wall fell. We were nowhere near it at the time. Honest.
8
STUMPED ON THE STUMP
I did not know Charlie Mackenzie when he first phoned in September 1988. A mutual friend had given him my number. Fans called our house all the time to talk baseball or invite me to some event. So it did not seem unusual when Charlie asked me to meet him on Duluth Street in midtown Montreal.
“I have a proposal I’d like to put before you,” he said in a slightly southern accent.
“Can’t we discuss this over the phone?” I had not planned on going out that afternoon.
“No. There are other people involved. I promise we won’t take up too much of your time.”
He described a place that was only a ten-minute drive from my home. Charlie had mentioned free beer and eats. I went without having any idea what he wanted.
We met in a dark tavern that straddled a street corner in a working-class French neighborhood of sidewalk bistros and three-family houses. Nothing fancy about this establishment—a beer-and-shot joint without the shots. L-shaped bar, a few tables, a row of wooden stools without cushions, one pool table in the back, and a lot of plywood paneling. A clock on the wall said it was just past 4 p.m., downtime between lunch and dinner. I walked into a room empty save for Mr. Mackenzie and his crew.
Charlie stepped forward to greet me. He had come to Montreal some years earlier, an American expatriate and Vietnam War vet with light brown, shoulder-length hair parted down the middle and a straw cowboy hat tilted back from his head. He had strung hippy beads around his neck, the kind I had not seen since visiting Haight-Ashbury in the late sixties. When Charlie spoke, his frames of reference indicated he was no more than fifty, but he appeared to be older. I noticed a lot of miles grooved into that face.
The men who accompanied Charlie introduced themselves as professors from the University of Montreal. They resembled a gang of Trotskyites. Most of them wore the same uniform: short beards, peaked berets, rimless glasses, and black jackets with no ties. One beetle-browed man with bushy gray hair sat apart from the group, looking off into nowhere while puffing on a Gauloise Blonde cigarette carrying four inches of ash on its tip. He was too lost in thought to notice.
Charlie explained that they all belonged to the Rhinoceros Party, an alternative political organization that had attracted a large following throughout Quebec in recent years. During the last election, several Rhino candidates had run strong, competitive campaigns, and one woman had even won a seat on the Montreal city council.
I had read several articles describing the Rhinoceros Party as a progressive, even anarchistic organization with a political philosophy based on Dadaism. A USC professor once told me all I knew about Dada, which is this: as soon as you understood what Dada was, it became something else. That logic sounded just quirky enough to appeal to my bent brain.
Charlie was the Rhinoceros Party coordinator for all of North America. Under his direction, over a hundred thousand Canadians had registered as members. Now he and his colleagues wanted to expand. When I asked how I might help, one of the professors, a tall, thin fellow with a thick French accent, said, “Every time the United States sneezes, we up here catch the cold.”
“Yeah, and what does that mean?”
“Just that when something small goes wrong in your country, we pay the price for it. It is time that we exerted some influence on U.S. politics.”
“You want me to introduce you to some congressmen?” Charlie responded, “No. We want you to run for public office.”
I had worked with political activists before. While playing in Boston, I campaigned in favor of school busing, handgun control, and the Equal Rights Amendment. But no one had ever put my name forward as a candidate for anything. I mean, this