A-Rod: The Many Lives of Alex Rodriguez (4 page)

White House that the political tumult there might foster a Com-munist regime and a second Cuba. As U.S. soldiers poured into the country, they were met with resistance from organized militants and snipers. Civilians fl ed from the fi ghting; fi ve-year- old Victor
Jr. and his mother evacuated to the countryside, where they lived with relatives.

A year later, Victor Jr. and his mother returned to their home, now pockmarked by bullets. He grew up with only a fl eeting interest in baseball. “I played,” he says. “I was okay. I wasn’t anything special.” He was more fascinated by academics, believing books would open new worlds to him. By his teen years, he too, lived in the United States. On occasion he saw his half brother, Alex, who was only fi ve years old when Victor Jr. went off to see the globe as a U.S. Air Force offi cer. He was stationed overseas as Alex grew up, unaware that his half brother was developing into a baseball superstar.

Young Alex sits transfi xed on his father’s lap, a binkie on a string tied around his neck, as his father watches baseball’s
Game of the
Week
on their old black-and- white in a scene captured in family photos and described by relatives. His father’s chin brushes Alex’s soft, curly brown hair as he leans toward the convex screen no bigger than a hubcap, trying to see what is happening in the game.

From the TV’s tiny, tinny speaker Joe Garagiola’s excited mid-western voice rises as he announces, “Another hit for the Reds!”

Victor quickly analyzes the trajectory of the skipping rock hit by Pete Rose into the hole between short and third. “Defense was in the wrong place,” he says to no one except Alex, whose vocabulary is limited to “truck,” “cat” and “ball.” He is just two years old, after all, but he listens as his father peers into the screen through thick glasses with black square rims.

Victor is 48 but still has smooth skin and a toned body. He is active, trim and neatly groomed. His second wife, Lourdes Navarro, is an animated, beautiful woman with expressive eyes like those of Sophia Loren. Victor is on another lap with fatherhood with his second family. “Alex was a gift,” Victor says. “Such a good boy.”

In a whirl, Alex slides down his father’s shin like a fi reman twisting down a brass pole, picks up a balled sock and throws it to his father. They play catch until Victor, trying to keep his eye on the game, hurls the sock out the door. “Go run it down, Alex,” he says. And off Alex waddles in his denim overalls, searching for a grounder sliced into the corner of the home. “He was always crazy for baseball,” Victor says. “He could not get enough.”

His parents say that Alex was always bouncing things off the walls— rattling the framed photos of family and the Catholic crosses hanging on picture hooks— in what was, in truth, half a home. The sand-colored brick apartment on 183rd Street in Manhattan— a two-lane road that divided a Yeshiva school from a Latin bodega in Washington Heights— was also a storefront.

“Victor’s Shoes” fi lled the front room of the apartment. Shelves fi lled with wedge sandals, pumps and zip-up go-go boots lined the walls. Victor had a smooth patter for the ladies looking to buy shoes, a twinkle in his eyes, and a fl irtatious lilt in his voice. He fl attered his customers and diligently made note of every change in hairstyle or pound lost on a diet. He remembered their names, knew their stories and asked about their lives. Eloquent and charming, he would try out a sales pitch in his head before delivering it to one of his regulars. He was methodical about his work and meticulously— if not expensively— dressed. “Hardly anyone else wore a tie for their business on that street, but he did,” recalls Doreen Ruiz, who lived on the same block as the Rodriguez family.

“He was a very handsome, kind man.”

Victor had always been good with numbers— baseball stats and profi t margins— but he also knew people. “The women loved my shoes,” he says with a chuckle. “I’m telling you, the ladies would wait for
my
shoes.”
The store was a success, but the living accommodations were stifl ing for Victor’s family— two bedrooms for two adults and three children. There were Susy and Joe, still in elementary school, from Lourdes’s previous relationship, and the baby, Alex. He wedged his way into the fl at after his birth on July 27, 1975. Since there was no living room— except when the children played in the store after hours, throwing boots into sale bins— open space for playing indoors was confi ned to one long hallway, where Alex would pedal his red, yellow and blue buggy while tugging on his diapers. When he got to the end of the hall, he’d pick the buggy up, spin it around and go speeding off the other way, wheels slipping and sliding on the fl oor.

At 4 a.m. each day, Lourdes would get out of bed, pull the curlers from her hair, pat on her makeup and slip into the pre-dawn darkness of 183rd Street for her shift on a GM assembly line.

When it was time for Victor to open the store, he would leave Alex with an elderly lady in an upstairs apartment.

These were tense times in New York. The streets were dirty and dangerous, crack cocaine was decimating the ghettos, graf-fi ti was as prevalent as rust and disco was blanketing the country with appalling clothes and worse music. Even the good news came with a black border— in 1977 an extraordinarily dysfunctional Yankees team overcame a toxic clubhouse to win the World Series, the subject of Jonathan Mahler’s social history–cum–sports biography,
Ladies and Gentlemen, the Bronx Is Burning
. But the story that dominated the tabloid headlines in the summer of 1977 was the manhunt for the Son of Sam, a serial killer who had been on the loose for a year, targeting women. He used a .44-caliber handgun to terrorize New Yorkers, shooting victims as they walked a dog late at night or sat in a car in the early morning hours or strolled home from college.

In that atmosphere, there was no way Alex would be allowed to play outside or scurry about the streets of Washington Heights.

Indoors became his outdoors. “Alex started carrying a little red bat [in the house],” Susy says. “He would not let go of that. He’d hit us with the bat when he got out of the stroller. You’d turn around and he’d be, like,
pow!
Or, if he wanted something and didn’t get it, he’d hit you. I had red marks on my back from that bat. He was a baby who would really throw fi ts. He’d throw a fi t if you took his bat.”

As a child, Alex seldom did without. “He was doted on,” Susy says. He was excused when he wielded his bat wildly and coddled when he cried. “Once he was born, it seemed that everything in our house turned to plastic,” Joe once said. “All he wanted to do was throw a baseball or swing a bat. So we couldn’t have any china.”

On hot summer days, the family would sometimes venture to the area beaches, where Alex liked to build sand castles. “You’ll live in a castle just like this one day,” Victor told him. “A castle big and great.”

Years later, Alex would say, “I remember New York as my perfect world.” He doesn’t remember the danger, the constant scream of sirens, the bitterly cold winters or the busted heating pipes. He doesn’t remember being cooped up in half an apartment or the New York City that was littered with burned-out car carcasses left beneath underpasses. As a child, he didn’t see the suburban exodus of residents running from the crime and moral decay linked to the rise in crack cocaine. “New York City wasn’t like it is now,” Susy says. “It wasn’t safe then. We didn’t play outside. But my mom realized that being in New York was making a future for us to live better in the Dominican.”

That was Victor’s goal: to make enough money in New York City so that he could build a bridge back to the Dominican, where his children could live in a fi ne house with a beach within walking distance. “Monday through Friday we’d come home from school in New York and stay inside and do laundry, run errands, cook or clean,” Susy says. “And it gets cold in September. In the Dominican, everything is open and you have housekeepers, so you go outside and play with your neighbors. You play all year round.”

Victor took his family back to the Dominican Republic in 1979.

Their new stucco dream home outside Santo Domingo had a decorative four-foot- high wrought-iron fence that protected a modest patch of grass from the road. The warmth of the sun in the D.R.

felt like a healing balm— no more slushy snow, no more frozen pipes, no more neighbors stomping on the fl oor above their heads.

Breezes from the beach a block away cooled each of the four bedrooms, and the neighborhood was safe. “We even had a live-in maid,” Alex recalls. It was paradise in so many ways compared to 183rd Street. This is what Lourdes and Victor had worked so hard for, understanding that the peso-to- dollar exchange rate would buy them a comfortable existence in the D.R. It would also allow them to send Susy, Joe and Alex to good schools.

At age fi ve, after putting on a pink button-down shirt and brown pants, after grabbing a blue lunchbox and kissing his parents good-bye, Alex left for his fi rst day of classes— at an Ameri-canized school in Santo Domingo. Victor and Lourdes knew the world revolved around English and wanted him to have his education rooted in it.

His baseball education, though, was strictly Dominican. All around him was a love of the game, an obsession with it. Kids swung at dried kidney beans with sticks when there were no balls and bats available. They invented games that sharpened their baseball skills. One was called platicka: In a park across the street from Alex’s house, with grass that grew knee high in the sultry summers, children placed old license plates in the weeds. A pitcher aimed at the plates with a rubber ball while the hitter tried to protect the plate with a stick. “Whatever game I played, I couldn’t handle losing,” Alex once said.

He didn’t often feel that sting. He was very good at baseball from the beginning and hardly ever lost at platicka. When he did, he was smothered in love by his parents, his siblings, his grandpar-ents. Making sure Alex was happy was the family’s mission, a project of utmost importance. Not that anyone considered it an oner-ous job— Alex was irresistible with his handsome features, soulful eyes and charming disposition. His satin cheeks were pinched early and often. He could get just about anything with the crook of his small fi nger— or an earnest “Please, oh,
please
. . .”

There was a basketball court in the park across the street from the Rodriguez’s front yard where Joe played hoops with his buddies, but all Alex wanted to do was play catch and hit balls. “He wanted to play catch
every
day for a couple of hours,” Joe once said.

“I couldn’t get rid of him.”

When Joe couldn’t stand another minute of catch, he would hit the ball as far as he could, forcing Alex to chase it down the road. While Alex ran one way, Joe would run the other way with his friends. There was always someone else there for Alex, though.

Susy often became his battery mate.

Alex walked around the neighborhood with a toy bat in his hand, constantly honing his swing. He would set up bases to steal in the yard. He would swing his arm around and around as if hurl-ing an imaginary ball.

He can remember his fi rst home run, when he was six. It was a ball he ripped over the third baseman’s head and down the line.

As Alex rounded third, he recalls, “I was almost crying, I was so happy.”

He started playing organized ball that year— he was small and the youngest player on his team, so the coaches decided that second base was the safest place to put him. There he wouldn’t need a strong arm, just an accurate one.

Joe, Alex and Victor would talk about the mental part of the game, strategy, as well as the stats of the game and critique the um-pire’s calls. They bonded over the love of baseball, but Victor didn’t pressure Alex to play. “You never saw his father out there running with him,” Susy explains. “He’d pitch to him with a whiffl e ball or beans, but he wasn’t pushing him to play. He wasn’t one of those parents.”

Victor would have been proud of Alex no matter what path he’d chosen. It just happened to be a base path. Victor says he was amazed by Alex’s speed and baseball acumen at such an early age: “When he was seven years old, I said to his mother, ‘Someday you’re going to see him be a superstar playing in the major leagues.’ ”

Young Alex lived a charmed, middle-class life in the Dominican, but in 1980 the family fi nances began to crumble and it was time to move on. The Washington Heights shoe store, which Victor had left in the care of relatives, went under. An investment he’d made in a pharmacy in the Dominican wasn’t paying off, and Joe and Susy, about to graduate from high school, were eager to go back to the United States for their college education. Lourdes didn’t want to remain in the D.R. without Joe and Susy, so by 1981, it was time for the family to fi nd their way back to America.

This time they settled in Miami. Victor found a rental in suburban South Miami, a white cinder-block ranch home. The neighborhood had sidewalks and palm trees and plenty of grass. At night, Alex would listen to the breathing of his parents lying in the bedroom next to his. He would know by the sound of it— heavier, slower, getting heavier and slower— when he could sneak in, wiggle in between them and fall asleep in a human sandwich. “When we woke up, there was Alex,” Victor recalls.

Even though they were scratching out a living, Alex’s parents made sure their son went to a good school. “I always sent him to private schools,” Victor says. “I think public schools didn’t give enough attention to children.”

One day, when Alex was eight, he watched a team practice on a fi eld next to his elementary school. The coach, Juan Diego Arteaga, a warm man with a thick mustache, saw Alex sitting alone next to a tree.

“Hey, kid, do you want to play?”

“What do you want me to do?’

“Have you ever caught before?”

Although his father had been a catcher, Alex had never played behind the plate. But since it was Victor’s position, Alex knew enough to fake it. “Sure,” he said. “I’m a
good
catcher.”

That day, Alex caught a beautiful game, even though he was playing with boys two years older than he was. Arteaga’s son J.D.