The Eastern Stars - Mark Kurlansky [61]
Macorisanos came every night until late, on foot, on scooters, by car—whatever they had—and cruised the Malecón, the women dressed in tight, sparkling fantastic clothes contrasting with a lot of exposed skin of every color, the men drinking and looking. If you had a car, you could do the “Malecón crawl,” driving five or ten miles an hour, checking everything and everyone out.
Traveling north from downtown most hours of the day, the traffic was crammed into unmarked lanes—as many lanes as would fit. Mixed in with ailing buses coughing black smoke, trucks, and cars were carts pulled by those lean and fearless Dominican horses.
There were traffic lights, but they didn’t always work. The rule was to drive up to them and see if anything happened, then the bravest started through first. The system worked so well it made you wonder if towns really need traffic lights.
Anyone with a car who stopped at a traffic light was quickly swarmed by tigres—local boys who washed windshields and demanded pay. They were a little gentler than the tigres of Santa Domingo, and they tried to do a good job on the windshields before the light changed. They were hardworking, enterprising youths earning pennies on a hot afternoon, looking for some way to survive other than crime. Another possibility was to work the Parque Central or the Malecón with a shoeshine kit, as Sammy Sosa did as a boy. But with the popularity of canvas sports shoes, that was getting to be an even tougher business. Another possibility was to go to the rural outskirts and get some cane, oranges, plantains, or other produce to sell on the street.
On Calle 27 in San Pedro, the neighborhood Rico Carty brought electricity to when he built his own house, a row of mansions sprang up. A large Mediterranean-style house that somehow ended up looking more like a Pizza Hut was the home of George Bell. Alfredo Griffin’s house was there. Joaquín Andújar also had a large house, but either out of modesty or for reasons of security, it was hidden behind a wall. The neighborhood used to be known as a baseball player’s ghetto, but Bell and Andújar lost their houses in divorces. Still, the houses stood as a reminder to young tigres of what a major-league career could do for them.
Nearby, on Calle Duverge, was a sprawling two-story building with balconies, an ornate gate, and seemingly the largest satellite dish in San Pedro—the house Sammy Sosa built for his mother. Also nearby was Plaza 30/30, a small, three-story, horseshoe-shaped, turquoise-colored shopping center with pricey shops built by Sammy Sosa in 1996. Actually it said PLA 30/30, because the sign had lost its ZA. The name referred to Sosa’s 1993 season, in which he hit thirty-three home runs and stole thirty-six bases. Two years later he hit thirty-six home runs and stole thirty-four bases in the same season. As of 2009, there had been fifty-two “30/30” players—those who have hit at least thirty home runs and stolen at least thirty bases in a single season—starting with Ken Williams’s thirty-nine home runs and thirty-seven stolen bases in 1922. Despite the arbitrariness of the figures, it is considered a distinction to be a 30/30 player, because home runs are the ultimate baseball test of strength, usually hit by large, burly men, and base stealing is the ultimate test of speed, usually performed by smaller, lithe men. Few players have both the speed to steal bases and the strength to hit home runs. But Sosa’s record of having done it twice does not even stand in San Pedro, since Alfonso Soriano, born in the sugar-mill barrio of Quisqueya, debuting in 2002 for the Yankees, did it four consecutive seasons. In 2006, Soriano hit forty-six home runs and stole forty-one bases, becoming one of only four 40/40 players. In fact, the same year he hit more than forty doubles, so he became the first 40/40/40 player in major-league history. This statistic, which