Storm Tide (2 page)

D
AVID

    I was born with a talent, a peculiar accident of reflex and bone, like an eidetic memory, or the facility to play an instrument by ear, an aptitude as curious as it was admired. I was a phenomenon, a teenage celebrity, for by some fluke of chromosomal alchemy that in no way resembled the physiology of my parents, I could throw a baseball faster, harder and with more accuracy than any other boy in my school, my county, my state. I became the focus of my family, the obsession of the local media and the hope of an entire town.

My abilities revealed themselves accidentally. We were not, except for my uncle Georgie, a family inclined toward sports. My father had been a manufacturer of women’s dresses who had lost two businesses on Seventh Avenue before going into debt to buy a curtain factory on Cape Cod. Because of the size of the town and the simplicity of the product, my father assumed he could master the transition with ease. But just as his stitchers had sewn half the collars backwards on a big Christmas order of red velvet dresses for Macy’s and his best salesman defected, taking the buyers with him, the crises presented themselves in Massachusetts as frequently as they had in Manhattan. My father had no time for games. Baseball, like poker and local women, were the bad habits of his younger brother Georgie, who worked for my father. Georgie—never George to my father; never “my brother” but “my kid brother”—had followed us north. In charge of maintenance and shipping, he partied with the workers his age and the local fishermen as if he were native born. Up at five
A
.
M
., never home at night before eight, my father lived exactly as he had in New York, preoccupied with the business, while Georgie dated girls from town and drank beer in the oyster shacks, cast for bluefish and sea bass on the back shore and learned to bait his hooks by the light of the moon.

My father’s factory was the largest business in Saltash and the least solvent. As payroll day came around, my parents’ arguments began, the recriminations and slamming doors, the curses. My mom took private piano students and worked when she could as a substitute teacher, but every Sunday night my parents sat at the dining room table, staring into the account books, willing the figures to change with the same concentration and futility as if trying to make the furniture levitate.

My sister Holly was too young for the carping to upset her, but I got
out of the house whenever I could. What I didn’t hear couldn’t bother me. My world was the old wooden bridge at the mouth of the Tamar River (long since replaced by a cement dike). When the tide was low, a steep sandy beach full of shells and crabs and acres of stones glistened in the sunlight. When the tide was coming in, waves rolled under the bridge or crashed against the causeway. During spring and fall, the alewives migrated underneath and I tried to catch them in an old wire net. The fact that I was different came up occasionally, as when a girl refused to kiss me in a game of spin the bottle or when I was held down and stripped by some older kids who wanted to see a circumcised prick. But the incidents were generally benign. (Soon after we moved to Saltash—I was in first grade—the teacher gave me a generic picture to color, a horse instead of a Santa Claus because, as she announced to the class, Jews don’t believe in Christmas.) And the truth is, we were different. We spoke more quickly and with accents that turned heads in the street; we didn’t eat shellfish, the one product native to the town, and nobody had ever heard of our holidays. We were stocky, with coarse dark hair and light eyes. My mother asked for books that shocked the librarian. If isolation bothered me, I wasn’t conscious of it, until the day I snapped.

I was sitting on the old wooden bridge with Corkie Pugh, watching a quahog dragger slowly crisscross the harbor. Corkie was an overfed, freckle-faced boy with a lisp and an inclination to sadism. Corkie so enjoyed dismembering small animals and embarrassing his sister in public that even I, who had no friendships to speak of, shied away from him. But because his sister took piano lessons from my mom, I was stuck with him. Corkie’s mother usually stayed for coffee after the lesson, and if my mom hadn’t made what she called any “real” friends in Saltash, Lucinda Pugh was the woman she saw most often.

Nobody believed this, but there was no precipitating animosity that day, no shouting. We were tossing rocks at an empty beer can in the sand, watching it jump, when Corkie, as easily as he told me how he watched his sister on the toilet through a hole he had drilled in the bathroom wall, said simply, “Your parenth are gettin’ a divorth, y’know.”

“No, sir.”

“Yes, thir. Your mom tol’ mine.”

I hopped down. Walked off. Kicked a few stones. Flipped one flat stone side-arm over the water’s gray-green surface and watched it hop, once, twice, a third time. Then with no thought whatsoever, I began to hurl stones at Corkie, as quickly as I could pick them up, fast and hard. I had aimed at targets before, but never with such delight in my accuracy, pinging his elbow, his knee, his left buttock as he ran off threatening
me with reform school. I wasn’t aware of being angry or frustrated. I had no words with which to explain myself. It was as if everything I needed to say could be expressed through the violent articulation of my arm. I walked home without lifting my eyes from the ground. I blew out our garage windows, one after another at thirty feet. I took aim at my mother’s car, smashing the taillights, rattling the hubcaps. I was shaking when they stopped me. I dropped to the ground. I was a human gun, an eleven-year-old catapult of accuracy and rage.

I was taken before the school psychologist and the chief of police, but only Georgie seemed to know what to do with me. He set up beer bottles on a tree trunk and bet me a nickel each I couldn’t hit them. I did. He took me to the town dump, gave me rocks and pointed: that rusty old alternator. Plink! The fender of the abandoned truck. The headlamp socket. One Friday after work, Georgie gathered some of the factory guys at the loading dock and took bets on what I could hit. A can at forty feet. A stop sign at fifty. A pinecone on a dead branch. With his winnings he bought me a baseball glove.

Saltash was a town with a grade school, three churches, and a movie theater open on weekends only. Saturday night after the show, teenagers raced cars down Hill Street from the town’s only grocery to the harbor, whipped around and started uphill again. The stores closed at six and the churches banned bingo. A Little League pitcher who allowed nine runs all season and could strike out half the junior high school team was something to watch. I took us to the state finals three years running. The local paper printed my stats every week in a sidebar on the sports page headed:
SALTASH
’
S DAVEY GREENE
. I started pitching for the high school team in ninth grade. In tenth the bird dogs arrived, retired baseball junkies who traveled all over New England searching out talent, notifying the big league scouts who showed up the following year smoking cigars, sitting in their own aluminum lawn chairs instead of the bleachers and logging every pitch I made on their clipboards.

After school, after work, after the season (he never missed a day), Georgie worked out with me. The next Sandy Koufax, he called me. The little Jew that could. Georgie was a veteran who in his army pictures looked like Elvis Presley: pompadour, pouty eyelids, lips in a smirk. I had once heard my parents whispering about a woman and child in Korea. Georgie lived in an apartment built in the loft of the barn behind my parents’ house. His window shades were always drawn. He kept Miles Davis albums in milk crates and his mattress on the bedroom floor. One day, when I reached for a baseball that rolled under the couch, I found his girlfriend’s black lace bra. Georgie used to meet me every day at the town field for practice. He had a piece of foam rubber
he stuffed into his catcher’s mitt so his palm wouldn’t sting from my fastball. He taught me how Whitey Ford held a runner on first base, how Bob Feller stared into a batter’s eyes with contempt. He taught me how to raise my leg and stretch like Warren Spahn so that my delivery was as swift as the recoil of a bow.

In my junior year, I didn’t lose a game. My parents and I were invited to ride in the backseat of a yellow convertible in the Fourth of July parade. My mother was suddenly David Greene’s mom to every merchant in town. My father mail-ordered a new baseball glove and a pair of white leather baseball shoes from Herman’s Wonderful World of Sports. We were invited to the annual Lynch family barbecue.

Georgie said I had the closest thing to a perfect fastball he had ever seen. He had watched Koufax pitch and Larry Sherry and said I had their speed, their power. He convinced my father that he should be given time off from work at the factory to be my coach. It was an investment, Georgie insisted, because when I graduated, I would get a bonus to sign with a professional team.

Georgie went out drinking with the scouts. He was being wooed by the Cubbies, the Pirates, the Mets, who competed to earn my family’s trust. He told me stories about athletes who had been swindled out of every dollar they ever made. Every time my fastball cracked into the catcher’s mitt, every time I struck out a batter, I glanced at Georgie in the stands. In my senior year, twelve major league teams had scouts at every game. I was working on a string of shutouts. I was throwing at close to eighty miles an hour, putting batters down in five pitches. As the string grew to four, reporters from the big city newspapers interviewed me in my living room at home. When no team scored off me in six games, the front office men arrived. “You’re the man,” Georgie whispered, rubbing my shoulder. I didn’t think about blowing the string because I had never blown it, because I was the only kid in school who didn’t have to take gym. (I could hurt myself.) The only kid from Saltash who had ever been asked to speak in front of the Masons (who recruited my father, their first Jew). The batters had heard of me and swung nervously, trying to kill my pitches, or cowered when I hurled a warning shot near their heads. They weren’t facing a pitcher but a legend, a seventeen-year-old who had never fixed himself a meal—“What if you burned yourself?” my mother said—whose arm had been kissed by God.

I signed with the Chicago Cubs for the largest bonus ever paid to a kid from my state. I was assigned to play in Wytheville, in the Appalachian League. I was given a going-away party by the entire town. There were fireworks at the pier. Local restaurants served free franks
and potato salad. The bandstand was decorated with streamers and a sign was strung across Commercial Street,
DAVEY GREENE SALTASH
’
S PITCHING MACHINE
.

Out of the million and a half guys who graduated high school, I was one of only five hundred signed to a professional contract—and every single one of them was a local legend. I was facing the best athletes in America. Like every other rookie, I had good days and bad. Only, I’d never had bad days before. I was shaken by the crack of bat meeting ball, the sight of the coaches’ narrowed eyes on the hitters, not on me, the jeers of the home team crowd when I walked a man after twelve pitches. I felt every hit off me as a whiplash across my back, a stinging pain that left me waiting for another. One night, after walking the streets of some town whose name I couldn’t even remember, I called Georgie from a phone booth, pleading for help. “What’s the matter with me?”

“Nothing’s the matter.”

“But I stink.”

“Did the coaches say that?”

“No.”

“’Course not, ’cause they know it takes time. How long did it take Koufax to find himself?”

“Six years, but—”

“But nothing. What did he lead the league in in ’fifty-eight?”

“Wild pitches.”

“Fucking right. He was a maniac out of control. Remember that. You gotta have patience. You’ve got the best stuff I’ve ever seen. You’re Davey Greene, the Pitching Machine.”

But my best was only good, not great. In this league they waited out my pitches. They understood the physics of the game, the slow rising trajectory as the ball picked up steam; they didn’t try to crush the pitch before it crossed the plate. At first Georgie was right, the coaches weren’t concerned. They’d seen a thousand kids like me. I was just another rookie getting his lumps.

But I wasn’t. I was the pitching machine. The kid who got his father invited to be a Mason, who gave his parents a reason not to get divorced. Other guys played cards after the games or picked up girls. I commandeered a catcher and pitched. The harder I worked, the more I tired my arm, but I didn’t know what else to do. On my best days, I’d pitch three or four decent innings then walk four men, hit a batter, send a pitch into the dirt before I was pulled. I went back to Saltash in October with a record of two wins, nine losses.

I worked indoors with Georgie all winter, determined to make my
reputation come spring. The club liked what they saw and sent me up two notches, to Winston-Salem in the Carolina League, where we took chartered buses to our away games instead of school buses and stayed in motel rooms two to a room instead of four. But as soon as I got behind on the count, I began to panic, to lose control, to throw harder, and harder still, until my arm ached. The coaches assured me that fastball pitchers took time to develop, that more important than strength, every movement of the arms, the kick, the follow-through, had to be in sync. I had to grow into my pitch, they told me. It would take years.