God, if You're Not Up There . . . (5 page)

Southwest Junior High School integrated while I was in eighth grade. There had been riots in Tampa the previous year, so things were a little tense, not least because a lot of the adults I knew were racist. I remember standing in line in the cafeteria with a forlorn-looking young man whom I tried to engage in conversation about busing and integration. I was probably twelve or thirteen. I was only trying to be interesting. The kid didn’t want to talk about it at all. I thought, Great, I’m a fag. You were suspected of being a fag like it was a crime whenever you did something different.

But for a kid, it was an enchanted time. We didn’t worry about predators and pedophiles. We went fishing and swimming. We were just little kids running down to the creek, jumping in. Stupid fucking kids. The creek in Florida? Water moccasins, alligators. But we did it with no fear. Someone had hung a ship rope from an oak tree over the most gorgeous stretch of sun-dappled stream behind the church that ran into the Indian River and out into the Atlantic Ocean. We’d swing out over the stream on the rope and let go, dropping a long way into the golden water below.

I
f I wasn’t playing baseball, I was daydreaming about it. The Little League season lasted only three or four months a year, so the rest of the time we played in the street with tennis balls, or we played in the dirt field at the end of Dunbar Avenue. I made myself a sliding pit there and walked over most evenings at dusk to teach myself how to slide—hook slide, headfirst slide, stand-up slide, any kind of slide I could think of.

When we were out in the street, late in the afternoon and early evening, or in the field at the end of Dunbar Avenue, we would go out of our way to be inventively profane—ball-sucking cock butt-fucking shit sperm cunt-licking fuck-you-up-the-ass cock dick butt motherfucker cock-sucking shit fucking dick cunt fuck—trying to outdo each other in a delirium of cursing. We lived in a very repressed Christian white neighborhood, where we weren’t allowed to even say “damn.” We laughed our heads off.

Then there were the spitting contests. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but baseball players spit like crazy. And we wanted to be just like the pros, so we practiced our spitting technique. A lot. I became a first-ballot Hall of Fame spitter. Eventually, I could spit out of all the compass points of my mouth: far left, left, center, right, far right. They were joyous afternoons of spitting and holding forth the most unimaginable tirade of bad language we could summon up.

Despite what our parents and the church told us, the earth didn’t open up and swallow us whole.

F
or some reason, there were a bunch of older kids in eighth grade—fifteen- and sixteen-year-olds who’d been to reform school—and they were
rough
. During phys ed classes, the coaches had to figure out a way to keep them from going AWOL, so they put them all in one class with us thirteen-year-olds—we were frightened out of our wits. One day when were playing softball, this man-kid named George Robinson hit an infield fly that I barely had to run to catch.

After the game, he came up to me and said, “Don’t you ever—
ever—
do that again.”

I assured him that I would not.

One kid named Angus Verandah was like twenty years old. He’d been in major scrapes and was considered violent. Apparently, he thought I had seen him do something and had fingered him as the culprit at a school event, which caused him trouble with his parole officer. Kids in school told me this guy was going to beat me up, or cut me. He was a real kingpin, so I knew where he hung out. For two days, I avoided him. Then I decided I’d rather be cut than run from this guy anymore.

“I hear you been looking for me,” I said, trying to muster some bravado in my squeaky white voice.

“I heard you fucked up my shit,” he said with a voice so deep it made my sneakers vibrate.

“I don’t know you. I don’t know what information you’re getting, but it’s not right.” I noticed I was surrounded by a group of his friends now. “If you’ve got to do something, I understand.”

He looked in my eyes to see if there was any mendacity there. When he didn’t detect any, he walked away. Then his friends walked away, and it was over. That’s when I realized that in life there are moments of truth for all of us, and there is no getting away from them. Sucks, right?

I
used to go out in my yard at night, with a streetlight casting my shadow on the wall of our house, and practice my swing. My teammate Bruce Bochy and I used to go out in the field sometimes and he’d pitch to me, just me and him, in our bare feet. You could get lost hitting baseballs in the summer heat. My best friend Wayne Tyson pitched to me endlessly.

That was a glorious season. I would be out there sweating, spitting, cursing, laughing, getting sunburned, loving it when I had to dive for a ball. It was a heady, wonderful experience. I hit .334 that year. The year before, we’d been on a Little League field, but now we were playing on a major league-size infield. I could barely lift the fucking bat. I did a one-hop one off the fence that year, but the fence was only 300 in the center and 297 down the line.

Bochy was already functioning at a higher level. He was small then, but he had a major league arm. The first time my dad saw him throw the ball, he stood up like a shot and said “Jesus H!”

Twelve was good, but thirteen and fourteen were better than anything that ever happened. Nothing but sweating, body surfing to cool off, sweating, swinging, sweating, swinging, sweating all day. Some of the folks in the neighborhood would let us use their garden hoses to cool off. Heavy calluses formed on our hands. Every day, the second I woke up, I wanted a bat in my hand. I couldn’t wait to get my hands around the bat handle, go out in the neighborhood, and rustle up the kids for another game with a tennis ball. Drag bunting, sliding, everything. We were entranced.

There’d be two games per day in Babe Ruth League. Even if your team wasn’t playing, after you jumped in the ocean to cool off, you went to the games. And to the people of our little community in the stands, those games were as important as any major league game. A lot of the guys on our team were surfers. That’s what that community was: football players and surfers. On the inland side, you had the baseball players. The other guys would surf all day before the games. Both sides would come together at the baseball games and we would play like it was the fucking World Series. Every swing of the bat was the same as if it were Mickey Mantle at the plate. Sometimes before going out to do an
SNL
sketch, I’d think about the two doubles I hit off of C. P. Yarborough in one night. If you were a baseball player in Melbourne, that was one of the big things that happened to you: you were going to bat off this guy. He was one of a number of fabulous athletes I knew who demonstrated tremendous prowess, then lost interest and went off to do something else.

For the rest of my life, in the most dire circumstances, I would think of certain base hits to remind myself of a time when all was well.

D
uring my freshman year in high school, 1969–70, women decided it was okay not to wear bras
.
You’re a thirteen- or fourteen-year-old boy, and now there are nipples everywhere. These were all beach girls. No matter what color their hair really was, the sun transformed it—in brunettes there would be lovely auburn streaks, girls with brown hair would have these startling natural streaks of blond. Everyone had deep tans. These were girls we’d known since we were five, and now I couldn’t make eye contact. I’d get so weak I had to sit down. If a girl brushed against you in the lunch line, you could burst into a sheet of flame. There was a chick named Lisa Kasarda I’d known for years, and now she wasn’t wearing a bra. How was I supposed to talk to her?

Veronica Baxter was a year or two older than me, and she was the loveliest thing—human, mammal, flower, anything—I had ever seen. And I wasn’t the only boy who felt that way. When she walked past, I would have to stop what I was doing, walk over to a bench, sit down, and put my head in my hands.
My God.
Veronica used to dress in a kind of European style, so she showed cleavage. The first time I saw her cleavage was the only time in my life I said Jackie Gleason’s words, “Hommina hommina hommina.” She took me for a ride in her European sports car once. I never intended to try anything with her at all, I was too intimidated by anything with that majesty and power and beauty. Also, she had a boyfriend who was a mastodon. I’m
still
afraid of him.

And the guilt helped. We were all going to church every Sunday, so we knew we’d go to hell if we partook of what we were seeing if through some outlandish stroke of luck we should be alone in the same room with a Lisa Kasarda or a Veronica Baxter. Clearly God didn’t want that. In fact, I was convinced the whole world was going to hell because those girls couldn’t be allowed to show their breasts like that without God intervening.

D
uring that golden summer before my sophomore year at Melbourne High, I hit .500 and lost my virginity on the beach to Miriam Bonaparte. She was a fuckin’ knockout.

There wasn’t a lot of discussion about the facts of life in my house or anywhere else. It seemed best to everyone, including my parents and friends, if sex didn’t exist at all. My mom’s best friend Theresa had a male dog, and one day he mounted a girl dog from the neighborhood. Theresa came running from the house, screaming and clapping her hands together, as if a murder was being committed.

That was the kind of world I was in. But two fourteen-year-old kids left by themselves, not quite understanding, don’t need any more help than what Mother Nature and DNA will provide. When I finally lumbered into a sexual relationship with Miriam, my powers as a human—my power of speech, my reasoning center, my executive command center—all that shit was out.

I did understand that babies came from this, and I was horrified, but far worse than any concern about unwanted pregnancy was the guilt. I thought something horrible would happen to me, that I would go to hell because I could not stop having relations with the stunning Miriam Bonaparte. At that age, you have lots of interest and lots of energy, but I felt like a sinner the whole time.

After I had sex, I was never sane again.

T
hat same summer, some friends of mine miraculously got their hands on a six-pack of Busch beer. We sat down in the ditch between Parsons Avenue and Dunbar, Australian pines covering us to the right, paper trees covering us to the left, a stream trickling beside us. I drank two Busch beers, and the world changed—no longer a harsh and lonesome windswept prairie, but a lush fertile valley bursting with luscious fruits and spring lambs rollicking in the meadows. Like something out of a Disney cartoon or Dorothy landing in Oz, the universe went from black and white to color. I half expected a little blue bird to land on my shoulder and start singing or a band of orange-hued little people to escort me to Emerald City.

That shit was good.

A
s I went into my sophomore year of high school, I tried out for the junior varsity football team, even though I’d never played football. My father really wanted me to play, so he was pleased when I made starting quarterback. But rather than teach actual tactical skills of combat within the rules of a contact sport, the coaches focused on teaching us how to be brutal.

The coaches used to have us line up across from our best friends and take turns slapping each other in the face six times. Everyone laughed about it at first. You strike the guy mildly, and he laughs. But he strikes you back harder, and you laugh a little less. You strike him back harder than he struck you, and he doesn’t laugh now. He strikes you hard. You hit him back harder. That’s the natural human instinct.

There was this one kid named Johnny, fifteen years old, six foot four, a fabulous athlete. But he also surfed, and to some people on the inland side of the Indian River in Melbourne, surfer boys were reprehensible, or even worse, gay. One day a coach was slapping Johnny on the helmet while he ran in place.

“Whatchoo doin’, surfer boy? C’mon, surfer boy.” Then leveling the ultimate accusation, “I don’t think you want it.” It was the greatest indictment that could be leveled against a player, that he didn’t want it.

Johnny stopped running and said, “You know what? You’re right. I don’t want it, okay?” And he left the field.

As punishment for “not wanting it enough,” the coaches put us in a ditch thick with red and yellow glass-cutting sandspurs to fight each other. We’d get those spurs all up in our helmets and practice jerseys. I don’t think I’d ever been in a fight before, except once when I was really young and I boxed with another little kid; we wore professional boxing gloves that were larger than our heads, so we did little harm. I was afraid that I wasn’t a man because I didn’t want it, so I got in the ditch with the third-string quarterback. I dropped the guy with a quick blow, and something inside of me convulsed.

The coaches started yelling, “Get you some! C’mon, Darrell, get you some!” exhorting me to continue to strike a man who was down. I hit him one more time when he was down. I’ve never hit anyone since then. I can’t tell you how much shame I felt. It really isn’t sport if the other guy is already down. It certainly isn’t football. It reminds me of the coach from Eau Gallie High School who used to bite the heads off live frogs in the interest of getting his players fired up. The bloodlust of hurting someone who was down was supposed to toughen us up.

The slap drills ended when my friend Frank Facciobene got a punctured eardrum.