Lights Out (3 page)

A few weeks later Marianna’s father called Jake’s agent, Stu Fox, accusing Jake of statutory rape. When Stu broke the news to Jake, Jake said, ‘Who the hell is Marianna Fernandez?’

Stu explained and then Jake said, ‘Oh, her. What do they want?’

‘Fifty grand,’ Stu said.

‘They go to the cops yet?’

‘Nope, but he said they will if you don’t pay.’

Jake started to realize how serious this situation was. A conviction for statutory rape meant jail time, but even getting accused would scare the hell out of the ad nerds and cost him millions. He considered giving the Fernandezes the money. People had probably seen him and the girl sucking face on the dance floor, and guests at the hotel had definitely seen them together, and they might’ve even been caught on security cameras. On the other hand, making a payment would make him look guilty as hell, so he decided to gamble and ignore the whole thing and hope the guy backed off. The strategy seemed to work until a month later - this was August now - Stu got another call from Mr Fernandez, asking for a hundred Gs. Now Jake knew there was no way he could pay. How did he know Fernandez would stop at a hundred? He could ask for another hundred, or a million. Next year Jake would become a free agent and was planning to sign a blockbuster two-hundred-million-dollar deal. He couldn’t get caught up in paying off a greedy blackmailer when he was on the verge of making that kind of dough.

So Jake told Stu to ignore Fernandez again and see what happened, but that Mexican bastard didn’t give up. He made more calls, demanding the hundred grand, continuing to threaten to take the story to the cops and the newspapers. Then, during the last week of the season, Jake tried to make a deal. He had his lawyer draw up papers, agreeing to give the Fernandezes the money in exchange for signing a document swearing that Jake and Marianna had never had sex. Jake didn’t know if they’d go along with it, but if they balked he had a plan B anyway - marry Christina. The good PR of setting a wedding date with his high school sweetheart would have to offset the bad PR of getting accused of rape. If setting the wedding date wasn’t enough, Jake had a plan C. Two days ago, in Pittsburgh, he had hired a PI to dig up some dirt on Marianna Fernandez. Maybe she had a drug problem, or a sex addiction, or her father had tried to blackmail other people. If they found something on the family, Jake would hire a PR guy to do a major smear campaign, totally discrediting them, and the problem would be solved.

Jake was confident that everything would work out for him somehow. He’d marry Christina next December, and they’d move to Hollywood Hills, Beverly Hills, or some other hills where the houses went for at least ten mill a pop, and he’d become the new right fielder for the LA Dodgers. Jake’s goal was to pull a Shaq -go play for an LA team for a few years, then branch out of sports into movies. He’d already acted in commercials, and the next step was to break into real acting. But he didn’t want to be a joke, like OJ . and Jordan. No, none of that
Naked Gun, Space Jam
crap for Jake Thomas. He didn’t want to be in movies, he wanted to be in
films.

Jake was jolted from his thoughts by the stench of raw sewage drifting across the highway. He pulled up his suit jacket to cover his mouth and nose, then said, ‘Vladimir, can you close the fucking window up there? Jesus.’

The driver shut his window, but the odor lingered, and it reminded Jake that he was on his way to Brooklyn. Sometimes he couldn’t believe he was actually
from
Brooklyn, that he’d spent eighteen years of his life living in such a hopeless dung heap. His neighborhood, Canarsie, had been built on landfill, and that was exactly what the neighborhood was to him - a big pile of garbage and dirt. Every time he visited it seemed to get worse - infested with gangs and drugs - and he thought his parents were out of their minds for still living there.

All of a sudden Jake felt claustrophobic and not nearly as pumped as he had before. Maybe it was the idea of going back home, or maybe it was because he was trapped in the backseat of this coffin on wheels. Or maybe it was his parents - the fact that they’d been married for thirty-one years and they seemed more boring each time he saw them. What if the same thing happened to him and Christina? While Jake liked the idea of setttling down and having kids - being known as a family man would be great for his image and would probably bring him more lucrative endorsement deals - the idea of being committed to one woman scared the hell out of him. It had nothing to do with Christina herself, because he knew he couldn’t do better for a wife. She was caring and loving and beautiful, and he knew she’d pump out some great-looking babies. The only problem with Christina was that she was one person. If he could split her up into, say, twenty Christinas and spread them out over the country, maybe he could handle being married -
maybe.
Otherwise, he didn’t know how he’d stay faithful.

Vladimir Pain-in-the-ass-ovich exited the Belt Parkway at Pennsylvania Avenue and drove through the Spring Creek Towers housing complex. Brooklyn always looked bad, but it looked worse after being away for a long time. Tall, cramped-together, project-style buildings prevented the sunlight from reaching the street, and kids in do-rags stood huddled on corners, protecting their turf. When the car turned down Flatlands things didn’t get much better. There were more projects, burned-out buildings, and empty lots overrun with garbage. The avenue itself looked narrower, more run-down than Jake had remembered. An angry mother was pulling her sloppily dressed kids along the sidewalk, a homeless guy was sleeping in a refrigerator box, and burnouts sat on stoops and garbage cans, staring at nothing. Awnings, brick walls, and bus shelters were filthy and covered with graffiti. When Jake was growing up, the neighborhood had been a working-class mix of blacks and whites; now it was almost all black, and it didn’t look as working-class either. Maybe it wasn’t the worst neighborhood in the city, but give it a couple of years and it would be another East New York.

Jake decided it was time to get his parents the hell out of Brooklyn. He’d buy them a fucking condo in the city and send them the key. Or maybe move them out to LA, get them digs on the beach in Santa Monica or somewhere out there. Meanwhile, he’d keep it mellow this weekend - stay inside most of the time, set the wedding date with Christina, then split. Hopefully after this weekend he’d never have to visit his old neighborhood again.

As the car turned onto East Eighty-first Street, Jake was getting that closed-in feeling again, probably because the street was lined with butt-ugly attached brick houses with tall stoops and no front lawns. He couldn’t wait to get out of the car, to stretch, and then he saw the crowd ahead. There were maybe two hundred people on the street, and tables set up with food and drinks, and a big banner hung over the street that read,
WELCOME HOME JAKE, OUR HERO
. The car double-parked, and a swarm of kids, most wearing
THOMAS
24 jerseys and Pirates caps, surrounded it, cheering as if it were bottom of the ninth, bases loaded, two out, game seven of the World Series.

Thinking that he was going to kill his parents for this, Jake got out of the car, giving the crowd his best Hollywood smile.

The paint job was going much faster than Ryan had expected, probably because he and the guys didn’t screw around all day the way they usually did. Actually, they didn’t talk much at all, and, without talking, there was nothing to do but work. By five o’clock they had finished all the wall repair and laid on the primer in the entire house, and Carlos had even put on a first coat in the dining room. Ryan was cleaning his brushes in the kitchen sink when Franky came in.

‘Hey, just wanted to say sorry for before,’ Ryan said.

‘Sorry for what?’

‘All that bullshit I pulled. It’s got nothing to do with you. I just have a lot on my mind - personal shit, you know?’

‘Eh, forget about it,’ Franky said, smiling.

Driving home, Ryan listened to rap on a college station at the end of the dial. An ad came on for a Ja Rule concert at the Garden next month, and Ryan decided he’d go online later and buy two tickets. Christina hated rap - unless it was Will Smith or, after she saw
8 Mile,
Eminem. She’d definitely bitch about going to the concert, but Ryan knew he could convince her. Maybe they’d make a weekend of it - rent a hotel room in the city, like they sometimes did. But in the past Christina had had to tell her dad she was going to spend the weekend at her friend Nancy’s in the Village, and Ryan would make up some story for his parents, and then they’d meet in a hotel room in Midtown. This time they wouldn’t have to make up any lies or worry about being seen together. Finally they could be a real couple, able to hold hands and kiss in public, do whatever the hell they wanted. Ryan would pick her up at her house, then they’d drive into the city and spend most of the weekend in bed, making love, except on Saturday night, when they’d go catch Ja.

Ryan couldn’t imagine a better two days.

At Flatlands Avenue, Ryan turned right, passing South Shore High School. As usual, he tried not to look to his left as he drove by the athletic field; sometimes he drove home a different way, looping around on Glenwood Road and back to Flatlands on Seventy-ninth Street, just to avoid it. He managed not to turn his head for most of the way, but then he stopped in traffic, and he noticed the back of the car in front of him and the
BROOKLYN LOVES JAKE
bumper sticker.

‘Shit,’ he said. Then, looking away from the car in disgust, he turned toward the field and saw himself on the mound, on that raw April day, pitching against Wingate.

When the game started there’d been a small crowd, maybe twenty people, watching. Later, when word got around the school and the neighborhood that Ryan Rossetti had a perfect game going, more people showed, and by the last two innings there must’ve been a hundred fans there. Jake had hit two monstrous solo homers, giving Ryan all of the run support he needed. He had awesome command of his pitches, striking out practically every batter he faced. In the last inning there were two outs, and Ryan was pitching to Wingate’s cleanup hitter. It was a three-two count, and Ryan didn’t want to walk him and ruin the perfect game, bringing the tying run to the plate. He also knew the guy was expecting a fastball so he threw him a sharp breaking curve, which sliced the outside corner for the final out.

Ryan remembered how great it had felt being mobbed by his teammates, getting carried off the field on Jake’s and the catcher’s shoulders. A short article in the
Daily News
the next day said it was probably one of the best games ever pitched in Brooklyn high school history. Ryan had struck out seventeen of the twenty-one batters he had faced, and the other four outs had been on weak ground balls.

At the time Ryan had thought that the perfect game would be the beginning of a perfect career. Although he’d always been shorter and skinnier than other kids his age, he’d worked his ass off to get where he was. Most kids played baseball only in the spring and summer, then turned their attention to other sports, but Ryan was different. Ryan played some basketball and roller hockey to stay in shape, but he focused on baseball year-round. If he couldn’t get into a game or find somebody to have a catch with, he’d go to Canarsie Park and self-hit a bucket of balls, or he’d go to a schoolyard with a rubber baseball and pitch to a spray-painted box against the side of the wall. In the dead of winter, while other kids were playing in the snow or sitting home watching football or basketball on TV, he’d shovel out a big area in a parking lot or a schoolyard or a dead end, and pitch to a backstop. Instead of blowing his allowance on video games and comic books, he used his money for baseball equipment and sessions in the Gateway batting range on Flatbush.

When he wasn’t playing baseball, Ryan was usually thinking about it. Sometimes he lay awake at night, or stared out the window in school in a daze, imagining pitching in the World Series at Yankee Stadium. He had a perfect game going, and when he blew away the last hitter - usually Mark McGwire - with a blazing fastball, his teammates mobbed him and carried him off the field on their shoulders. He took baseball cards of Ryan Klesko, and old ones of Ryan Sandberg and Nolan Ryan, and whited-out the Kleskos, Sandbergs, and Nolans, and wrote in
Rossetti.
Then he pasted the cards onto the wall next to his bed and stared at them every night before he went to sleep.

Ryan was the superstar of his team in the Joe Torre Little League. He was a good hitter, but his pitching stood out. When he was eleven years old he had better poise on the mound than most high school kids, and he had great movement and outstanding control. But Ryan knew that if he wanted to pitch in the big leagues, his height would be a major obstacle. Most big-league pitchers were at least six feet, and most successful ones were taller than that. The tallest person in Ryan’s family, his uncle Stan, was five-ten, and Ryan’s father was only five-eight. Ryan’s Little League coach told him that if he was serious about making it as a baseball player he should focus on playing second base or shortstop where height wouldn’t be as much of a factor. Ryan was thinking about it, but then, when he was fourteen, he saw an Olympic gymnast interviewed on TV. The gymnast had some childhood disease that she’d overcome to make her dream come true, and she said she’d made it because she didn’t quit; she knew in her heart what she was meant to do, and she wouldn’t let anything stop her. Ryan felt the same way, and decided either he’d make it as a pitcher or he wouldn’t make it at all.

During junior high and all through high school, Ryan did yoga stretches and hung upside down on gravity boots, and took vitamins and minerals and drank protein drinks with brewer’s yeast, bee pollen, and soya lecithin, trying desperately to increase his height. But when he was seventeen, he stood at only five-nine and three-quarters. His lack of size didn’t seem to have much of an effect on his pitching, though, because he was still the most dominating high school pitcher in New York, and maybe the whole East Coast. Although he didn’t throw particularly hard -his fastball peaked in the low to mid-eighties - he still had great movement on his pitches and uncanny control. Most games he walked at most one or two hitters - remarkable for a teenager. He also threw a great hook. You weren’t supposed to throw curves until you were finished growing, because it could tear up your elbow, but Ryan’s curveball broke so sharply, and he had such great control of it, that he couldn’t resist tossing at least a few of them every time he pitched. He’d wait for the key spots in the games, when he was ahead in the count and really needed a strikeout, and then he’d let one fly. The batter would usually duck out of the batter’s box, thinking the ball was heading right toward his head; then a stunned look would appear on his face as the pitch nailed the inside or outside corner and the ump called him out.

During the spring of his senior year of high school, scouts became seriously interested in Ryan. They watched every game he pitched, and there was talk that the Dodgers, Cubs, Indians, and Astros wanted to sign him. But while the scouts were very impressed with Ryan and viewed him as one of the top prospects in the country, Ryan was always ‘the other guy’ scouts came to see on the South Shore team. The guy they were really drooling over was Ryan’s South Shore teammate, Jake Thomas.

Unlike Ryan, who’d worked his butt off to get where he was, baseball came easy to Jake. His father, Antowain Thomas, had been a star running back in high school and college, and Jake had inherited a perfect athlete’s body. He never had to work out or do anything extra to improve his game. While Ryan was living and breathing baseball as a kid, Jake played other sports, and after school and on weekends he spent his time doing things that other kids did, like playing video games and going to movies and chasing girls. Jake played in Ryan’s Little League, and, although Jake never showed up for practice and didn’t seem to care very much about the games, the coach always put him in the cleanup spot in the order, and every time he came to the plate he seemed to hit monstrous home runs or screaming line drives.

During their sophomore year of high school, the
Canarsie Courier
did an article about Jake and Ryan, calling them ‘The Dynamic Duo,’ and the nickname stuck throughout their high school careers. Additional articles in the
Courier
and other local papers made a big deal about how Jake and Ryan had grown up on the same block, had played Little League baseball together, and were a sure thing to make the majors. Even
Sports Illustrated
did a small article about them, calling the two Brooklyn kids ‘hugely talented,’ and ‘can’t-miss prospects.’

Although the press made out as though Jake and Ryan had been best friends all their lives and that making it to the big leagues together would be a dream come true for both of them, this was far from the truth. Ryan and Jake had never been friends. When they were kids they played together all the time because their mothers were best friends and they lived three houses away from each other, but they’d never gotten along. There had always been a rivalry between them, a competitiveness about everything they did. It didn’t matter if they were playing Wiffle ball or stickball or having a footrace on the street on the way home from school -they always tried their hardest to beat each other.

Jake and Ryan dominated in high school, breaking most of the Public Schools Athletic League’s hitting and pitching records. Jake was pegged as the surefire number one pick in the nation. While the scouts were impressed with Ryan’s control, toughness, and competitive spirit, they were concerned about his size. Ryan tried to convince them that he was still growing, that he’d have a growth spurt while he was in the minors, but the scouts had researched the heights of people in Ryan’s family and knew the chances that Ryan would ever be taller than five-ten were slim.

It helped Ryan’s cause that he was pitching so lights-out. In his senior year, his record was eleven and oh, he averaged thirteen strikeouts and less than two walks per seven innings, and he tossed five shutouts and the perfect game. Despite his lack of size, Ryan got drafted, in the fourth round, by the Cleveland Indians. At best he had hoped to be drafted in the sixth or seventh round, so he was thrilled. Meanwhile, Jake got drafted as the first overall pick in the nation. The night of the draft Ryan and Jake and most of their teammates stayed out all night partying. It seemed like the fairy-tale story of the two kids from Brooklyn was going to have a fairy-tale ending.

But things didn’t work out so well - or at least, they didn’t work out so well for Ryan.

While Jake tore up the minor leagues from the get-go and got on the fast track to the majors, Ryan struggled in his first season in instructional ball at Winter Haven. He got blown out in his first two starts and was demoted to the bullpen. After a few solid outings, he made it back into the rotation and pitched well the rest of the year, including tossing a two-hit shutout. The next season he was promoted to A ball at Kinston. After a couple of rocky starts, he settled down and became the team’s number two starter. His career seemed to be moving along. His goal was to make it to double A the following season, or even triple A, and then make it to the majors within two to three years. He was pitching in his last game of the season, a Carolina League play-off game against Lynchburg, when it happened. The funny thing was, he never even felt it. He had just completed what was probably the best inning of his minor-league career. He had struck out the side on nine pitches and, although he wasn’t being clocked at the time, he felt like he was hitting the low to mid-nineties - a good five miles per hour faster than he’d ever thrown in his life. Then he took the mound for the next inning and he heard a pop. He was pulled from the game and taken to the hospital for an MRI, and it was determined that he had torn the ulnar collateral ligament in his left elbow. The doctor explained that the injury could have happened that day, but more likely it was cumulative. Ryan realized that all of those curveballs he’d thrown in high school had finally caught up with him.

Ryan was finished for the season and had Tommy John surgery about a week later. The procedure, which replaced the ligament in his left elbow with one from his right forearm, was considered a success, and the surgeon told Ryan that, assuming everything went well with his rehabilitation, there was no reason why he couldn’t pitch again next season.

But a few weeks after the surgery, Ryan knew something was wrong. He felt tingling and numbness in his pitching arm that didn’t seem to be getting any better. His surgeon explained that he probably had some mild nerve impairment, which was normal, and told him to have patience, that most pitchers eventually returned to full strength. Ryan rehabbed over the winter at the Indians’ spring-training complex in Winter Haven, but by March he still felt weakness in his arm. He continued to work out vigorously and pitched in a few simulated games. Although he didn’t have any pain in his elbow, he had lost velocity on his fastball - velocity he couldn’t afford to lose. His top heater maxed out at eighty-one miles per hour. Even worse, his bread and butter, his great control, was gone. His fastball didn’t hit locations and his curveball didn’t break nearly as sharply. With the loss of speed and a lack of movement on his pitches, he wasn’t much more effective than your average batting-practice pitcher.