The Phenomenon Page 3

  Though I was named for my grandfather, Richard Leo Turton, irony held that the name was close to that of Richard Patrick Ankiel, my father. For that distinction, I’d paid with parts of my childhood. I didn’t hate him then. Not always. I wanted him to love me, and love my mom, and act like it. The hate would come later.

  When anyone asked, my father was a professional drywaller. Or he was a professional fishing guide. Sometimes he really was too. According to the local cops, however, he was a professional drug smuggler, a thief, a habitual crook who’d been collared at least a couple dozen times and convicted half that, sometimes with my half-brother alongside.

  You can’t pick your father. You’re assigned a father. And if you’re lucky, he’s not the guy in the aluminum stands calling your pitches and screaming at your coach, and he’s not the guy on the barstool while you’re asleep in the backseat of the car in the parking lot on a school night, and he’s not the guy whose business brings the DEA to the front door during breakfast, and he’s not the guy who abuses your mother in drunken fits. I was not lucky.

  The upshot to his being a two-bit crook and not some criminal mastermind was that he got caught a lot, and then it didn’t take long before he’d done his time and was home again and in a very foul mood.

  He was my father. But nowhere did it say I had to be his son, not forever. I took the calls from prison and tried to explain to him that, yes, I was healthy, and, no, I didn’t know what had happened, and, yes, maybe it was mechanical, and, no, he could not just fix this, certainly not from a prison pay phone in the Florida panhandle, and, yes, OK, I’d send along some autographs for his new friends on the cell block. There were enough voices inside my head already, voices of doubt and fear and approaching panic. There wasn’t room for another. I’d already done that time.

  If it was unfair that I’d fought my way out of that house and out from under my father for all those years only to step into an arena where there could be no winner, then it didn’t occur to me at the time. If, by grinding my self-esteem semibare, he’d contributed to that single pitch and the emotional pandemonium it wrought, I’d refuse to recognize such weakness. This was me. All me. The ball in my hand, a strike to throw, and a game to win. That’s it. They could whisper all they wanted about my “background,” my “upbringing,” all that nonsense, like it had caught up to me at the worst time, when a week before it had been my background and upbringing that had made me a competitor, a fighter, the man who would take a game one start at twenty-one years old and not flinch.

  Until, like my left arm had grazed the third rail, I flinched.

  I exhaled, composed myself, decided to move on, and threw another pitch to the backstop. Then a walk. Another wild pitch. A wild pitch for a walk. Another wild pitch. Uh-oh, I thought. This isn’t going away, I thought. Braves kept coming to the plate, and I kept coming undone. Spiked curveballs, fastballs to the screen, poor Carlos Hernández, sore back and all, looking like a hockey goalie defending the world’s largest net, the crowd not sure whether it should be boisterous in its support or solemn in its discomfort. I was going to pieces out there, and my breath was leaving in gasps, in part because of the anxiety and in part because I was racing to cover the plate every other pitch. Brian Jordan, the Braves’ number-five hitter, singled, and I could have hugged him for swinging at the first pitch. (At a Cardinals fantasy camp sixteen years later, I did hug Brian, and we laughed when I told him the reason.) I was over thirty pitches in the inning, and I hadn’t had the slightest idea where most of them were heading when I let them go. The Braves had put one ball in play, and I’d allowed two runs. Then Walt Weiss singled and put me out of my misery. La Russa walked to the mound and waved in a reliever, and I handed the ball to La Russa. It was the first time in my life I was glad to leave a baseball field. I’d get used to it.

  The tally for the third inning: thirty-five pitches, two hits, two runs, four walks, five wild pitches, and, it turned out, one psyche forever hobbled.

  You know how many wild pitches Greg Maddux, the Braves’ pitcher that day, threw that season? In 249 1/3 innings? One. Knowing him and his reputation for control and tactics, he probably did it on purpose too. You know how many years it had been since someone had thrown five in a single inning? A hundred and ten. You know what the record was for wild pitches in a postseason career? A whole career? Six. I was one away, and it had taken me all of twenty pitches from the first wild pitch to, as of that afternoon, the last.

  I didn’t remember much about it. Not the next day. Not a decade after. A lot of it looked the same after that. I didn’t want to remember it. Nearly fifteen years later, I’d look at a video and be surprised at how together I appeared. Because I wasn’t. I sat in the dugout and looked out at the mess I’d made and didn’t say anything, didn’t throw anything, didn’t destroy anything, didn’t feel like crying, didn’t feel like anything. I was in shock, probably, the kind of shock that comes when a twenty-one-year-old learns he is vulnerable. There’s a blind spot. There’s something in there, deep in there, that’s not right. And he’s going to have to live with this for a while. Those boxers who get knocked out for the first time, they all bear the emptiness in their eyes. Presumably, 90 percent of it is from getting hit in the face so hard. But that other 10 percent? That’s their invincibility leaking out. I may as well have been hit in the face and dragged to the bench. At least then I’d have had a bruise to show for it. An explanation.

  I told everyone afterward that my delivery was out of whack, and this sort of thing would never happen again, and—ha ha—at least I’d put my name in the record book, but the truth was it would happen forever now, and I hadn’t even gotten started on the record book, and my pitching career was officially and forever hopeless. That’s a lot to digest after fifteen minutes of clumsiness and emotional free fall.

  This thing, or “the monster,” as my agent, Scott Boras, called it (though never in front of me), had trailed me—hounded me—like it had the rest, and it won. It undid me like it had pitchers Steve Blass and Mark Wohlers. Steve Sax and Chuck Knoblauch, second basemen, had it. So did Mackey Sasser and Gary Bennett Jr., catchers. Many more. Some were big leaguers. Most were guys no one had ever heard of. They’d lost their release point and then their nerve. Or maybe it was the other way around. Who’s to say? It was the easy throws, and the men hired to make them, that were primarily afflicted. Sixty feet, six inches from the pitcher’s rubber to the plate, another couple feet to the catcher’s mitt. That same distance for the catchers. A little more for second basemen.

  Oh, there were others. I heard plenty of their stories. The names would change, but they could all throw one day but not the next and never again, not like they once had. Their arms had vertigo, and it was, almost certainly, fatal. That was their story, from beginning to end. I didn’t much care. Sure, I had some sympathy for them. A little. Soon I’d have empathy for them. But I had enough with just myself to deal with, and the stories of how they’d suffered and then failed didn’t leave me much to ponder. What was there to learn from a guy who was skilled one day, unskilled the next, and out of baseball the day after that?

  What I had instead were nightmares. Sometimes the perspective would change: I was watching myself pitch, or I was seeing a game through my own eyes. Either way, the ball was in my left hand, the batter waiting, the catcher raising his mitt. It was my job to throw it there. But it was more than a job. In my dream, taking that baseball and delivering it to that mitt was all I’d ever wanted. My life hung on that pitch. I hesitated. For, as simple as it seemed, I sensed disaster. The ball was too heavy. The air was too thick. I was sweating. Breathing too hard. What was I afraid of? People were watching, gaping, wondering why I wasn’t doing anything, and I wanted to throw that ball, wanted desperately to, if only I could take another minute.

  Give me time. A little more time.

  I couldn’t see the tunnel. Where was the tunnel? Finally, I’d nod and raise my right knee and tilt my head back and stride toward the
plate and pull the ball from my glove. I’d pick up the catcher’s mitt in the corner of my right eye, my arm would start back, and I’d push hard off my left leg and land on my right foot, my mechanics were perfect, feeling the slope of the mound, and this was going to happen. My arm would whip forward and I was going to throw a strike and then I’d throw another and then another. Forever. I’d be free again. Me again.

  The ball would refuse to come out of my hand. My hand would refuse to release it. I would stumble forward, dragged by the momentum of the windup and gravity and the dreams of a thousand nights, horrified that the ball and I had remained attached to each other. I’d avert my gaze from the ball in my hand and find the people staring, judging, demanding to know what had happened. Disgusted by me. Just throw the ball, they’d say. Just throw it. How freakin’ hard could it be?

  I’d lie awake in the dead of night, waiting for my heart to settle, cursing this thing that would not leave me alone, not even in my sleep.

  Man, could I have used a full night’s sleep. Just some peace. I wanted them to please look away. Just look away.

  I tried to drink those nights away. Medicate them away. I tried to pitch them away in the minor leagues, achingly far from the place I wanted to be and the pitcher I wanted to be, for the better part of four years. Then, when none of it worked, I walked away. There’s a story there too, after I’d worn out my arm and head and patience for long enough, after I’d started over and discovered it would never be the same, and after I’d seen defeat in everyone else’s eyes too.

  So, yeah, eventually I walked away. But I wasn’t done. I was starting over.

  CHAPTER

  THREE

  Denise Turton met this guy, Richard, in the summer of 1977. He was local, a surfer and a partier, good for a drink and a laugh.

  She was new to Fort Pierce, Florida, twenty years old and single. She had a young son, Phillip. They’d taken a Greyhound bus from Buffalo, New York. She’d never seen the ocean. It took her breath away, as if she’d come all that way to find exactly where she belonged. This was home. She’d be happy here, and Phillip would too. She just knew it.

  Her father—also named Richard—was worried. It could be a hard world out there, and his only daughter had this habit of trying to soften it a person at a time, and maybe that worked OK in their little neighborhood, in their little city, but what lay beyond those boundaries was a different matter, a different kind of hard.

  Like his father before him and then his son, Richard Turton worked at the local automobile plant in Buffalo. He was a machinist. He enlisted in the army, served in World War II, and came home to be a machinist again. He was kind and gentle, with these unusual eyes—not brown, not hazel, but almost golden, with blue rings on the perimeter—and he never had to look twice to correct Denise’s behavior or that of her older brother, Gary. Richard’s wife, Denise’s mom, was Mildred. She got the kids off to school and kept the house running and tended to Richard, who’d be weary at the end of the day. There was no tension. There was no shouting. They adored each other. They were perfect, as far as Denise was concerned.

  By the time Denise reached middle school, however, Mildred was nearly incapacitated by back pain, something in her spine, the doctors said. Countless surgeries only seemed to worsen her condition, so she spent months bedridden, sometimes at home, more often in a hospital. Richard went to the hospital every night after work. He sat by her bed and held her hand and caught her up on the day and on the children, just as he would if she were at home, just as she had when she was happy and healthy and Richard would come home from work. Mildred died of what the doctors called “complications” from the last of her surgeries—maybe it was an infection, or maybe Mildred, at fifty-one, simply could fight no more. That was in 1976. Denise, barely twenty, was struck then by an urge to discover, to lift herself from the loss of a mother who’d been drifting away for nearly a decade.

  Denise and Phillip left for Florida. Denise’s friend Maureen had a daughter about Phillip’s age, and the four of them traveled together. Maureen had relatives in Fort Pierce, a fishing, citrus, and cattle town on Florida’s east coast two hours short of Miami. They stopped there, and Denise got a job waiting tables. The two young mothers and their children settled into a two-bedroom apartment that wasn’t bad. Denise bought a little Datsun for $500 and then learned to drive it to the local community college, where she had signed up for accounting classes.

  Little by little, she fell in with the locals near her age, mostly at the beach. Denise loved the beach. That’s where she made her friends, and some of them were still her friends thirty-five years later. It’s also where she met Richard, who, in thirty-five years, would not be. He would be the father of her second son, though.

  When Richard Ankiel was about two years old, the Ankiels—Richard was the fourth of five children—moved from Syracuse, New York, to Fort Pierce. All but Richard’s father. Richard’s mother was on her own, surrounded by children and struggling to keep them clothed and fed. Richard was reluctant to talk about his childhood beyond vague references to his mother and alcohol and the sometimes violent boyfriends who came and went and how he and his brothers and sisters would scatter until things settled down. Then, at the end of those stories, Richard would shrug and wave it away, like it wasn’t important anymore and couldn’t touch him. “Whatever,” he’d say.

  Denise, though, came from a good home. She could show him the beauty in that. The ease and the peacefulness that comes with trust, and with the common goal of raising their two boys—Richard had taken to young Phillip and Phillip to Richard—and all in this delightful town of friendly people and perfect beaches. Richard wasn’t so sure. He had his own life to live, which included another family—his ex-wife and their daughter—across town. He drank. He left. He grew jealous. He returned unhappy and looking to set things straight.

  Denise, my mom, wished she’d had the sense to leave Richard. Right then. The bruises generally healed while my father was away.

  My mother lives with me today in Jupiter. It’s my wife, Lory, and I, our two boys, and Mom. Occasionally, but not lately, Phil. We have a rule: no talk about Dad. Otherwise, Mom gets sad about that part of her life and I get mad for her—and for me—and the conversation always leads us into the same dingy corner. It happened. It’s gone. We wasted enough time on it when it was actually going on. He doesn’t get to put us into that corner anymore, not with regrets or horrible memories or even a rueful laugh over how absurd it could be.

  Truth is, I was a daddy’s boy when I was very young. I wanted to please him. I wanted him to like being with us. I wondered why he was so mad, why the beer made him so mad. And Mom believed that somehow she could salvage what had become of our lives and make a family. She also couldn’t bear to see me disappointed.

  He lived with us sometimes. When he didn’t, he would sometimes come visit. Or he’d call and ask if we—Phil and I—wanted to go fishing the next day or maybe go surfing. We’d say yes and hardly sleep the night before, because Dad was fun and made us laugh. It was comforting to have a father like the other kids, even if it was part-time.

  We’d wake up early the next morning and get dressed and sit in the living room waiting for Dad’s car to pull into the driveway at 9 o’clock, just like he said. At 10 one of us would turn on the TV, but not too loud, so we could hear the car. At 11 Mom would say that maybe we should go out and play, but we wouldn’t, because Dad was coming and we wanted to go fishing or maybe surfing. By noon or 1 she’d tell us Dad had called and said he had to work instead, and that he’d said to tell us he was really sorry and would make it up to us, except the phone hadn’t rung and we knew she was lying for him. The next Saturday, though, we’d be sitting on the couch at 9 o’clock again, wearing our stuff to go surfing, slathered in sunblock, smelling like coconuts, waiting on the sound of the car, trying not to cry.

  The cruelest part was how good he could be to us when he had the time and nothing better to do. We’d get in the backseat
with a whole day ahead, Dad in a great mood, surfboard strapped to the roof, waves rolling to the beach.

  He’d turn up the radio, some country song playing, and we’d know what was coming.

  “All right,” he’d say, “we don’t go anywhere until you guys start singing.”

  Didn’t even matter if we’d never heard the song before.

  We’d mumble into the refrain as soon as it was recognizable, grinning like this was the most embarrassing thing ever.

  “Can’t hear you,” he’d say, and we’d ramp it up so the neighbors could hear, and he’d put the car in gear. Off we’d go, happy as we’d ever be, singing about honky-tonk bars and broken hearts. They were playing our song.

  By the time I was nine or ten years old, Mom had run out of excuses for him, but she never stopped trying. She never stopped saying how sorry she was. She never stopped covering for him, because a boy needs a father, and a boy doesn’t always need to know the whole truth of it. A little bit of a father was better than none, she believed, and if he could only see our faces when he drove up that driveway, or see them when he didn’t, maybe he’d understand.

  She’d do it all on her own if she had to. Her father, Richard, sent $200 so the electricity wouldn’t be shut off. Or $100 to cover Little League fees and equipment. He sent Phillip and me cards with $20 bills tucked inside, always with the same handwritten note: “Don’t spend it all in one place.” She’d clip coupons and borrow rent money from friends and make do on a salary unfit for three if that’s what the day brought. It was what every day brought.