The Great American Novel (15 page)

But even when he himself had settled upon the nickname he wouldn't have minded seeing printed beneath his picture on a bubble gum card, or hearing announced over the loud speaker when he stepped up to bat, his teammates refused to address him by it. Mostly, in the beginning, they did not address him at all if they could help it, but just sort of pushed him aside to get where they were going, or walked right through him as though he weren't there. A fourteen-year-old kid weighing ninety-two pounds playing in their infield! “What next?” they said, spitting on the dugout steps in disgust, “a reindeer or a slit?” In the meantime, Damur began tugging at his cap every two minutes, hoping they would notice and start calling him Cappy; he took to talking as though he had been born on a farm, saying “hoss” for horse and calling the infield “the pea patch,” expecting they would shortly start calling him Rube; suddenly he began running out to his position in the oddest damn way—“What the hell you doin', boy?” they asked. “That's just the way I walk,” he replied, “like a duck.” But no one took the hint and called him Ducky or Goose. Nor when he chattered encouragement to the pitcher did they think to nickname him Gabby. “Shut up with that noise, willya?” cried the pitcher—“You're drivin' me batty,” and so that was the end of that. Finally, in desperation, he whined, “Jee-zuz! What about
Kid
at least?” “We already got a Kid on this club. Two's confusin'.” “But he's fifty years old and losin' his teeth!” cried Damur. “I'm only fourteen. I
am
a kid.” “Tough. He wuz here before you wuz even born.”

It was Jolly Cholly Tuminikar, the Mundy peacemaker and Sunday manager, who christened him Nickname. Not that Damur was happy about it, as he surely would have been, dubbed Happy. “‘Nickname' isn't a nickname, it's the
name
for a nickname. Hey—how about Nick?
That's
the nickname for nickname! Call me Nick, guys!” “Nick? That's for Greeks. You ain't Greek.” “But whoever heard of a baseball player called
Nickname Damur?”
“And whoever heard a' one that weighed ninety-two pounds and could not endorse a razor blade if they even asked him to?”

Indeed, so slight was he, that on the opening day of the '43 season, a base runner barreling into second knocked Nickname so high and so far that the center-fielder, Roland Agni, came charging in to make a sensational diving two-handed catch of the boy. “Out!” roared the field umpire, until he remembered that of course it is the ball not the player that has to be caught, and instantly reversed his decision. The fans, however, got a kick out of seeing Nickname flying this way and that, and when he came to bat would playfully call out to him, “How about Tarzan? How about Gargantua?” and the opposing team had their fun too, needling him from the bench—“How about Powerhouse? How about Hurricane? How about Hercules, Nickname?” At last the diminutive second-sacker couldn't take any more. “Stop it,” he cried, “stop,
please,”
and with tears running down his face, pleaded with his tormentors, “My name is Oliver!” But, alas, it was too late for that.

Nickname, obviously, had no business in the majors, not even as a pinch-runner. Oh, he was swift enough, but hardly man enough, and if it was not for the wartime emergency, and the irresponsibility of the Mundy brothers, he would have been home where he belonged, with his long division and his Mom. “How about Homesick?” the sportswriter Smitty whispered into the boy's ear, a month after the '43 season began, and Nickname, black and blue by now and batting less than his own weight, threw himself in a rage upon the famous columnist. But what began with a flurry of fists ended with the boy sobbing in Smitty's lap, in a wing chair in a corner of the lobby of the Grand Kakoola Hotel. The next day, Smitty's column began, “A big league player wept yesterday, cried his heart out like a kid, but only a fool would call him a sissy…”

Thereafter the fans left off teasing Nickname about his size and his age and his name, and for a while (until the catastrophe at Kakoola) he became something like a mascot to the crowds. Of course, being babied was the last thing he wanted (so he thought) and so under the professional guidance of Big John Baal, he took to the booze, and, soon enough, to consorting with whores.
They
called him whatever he wanted them to. In sleazy cathouses around the league they called him just about every famous ballplayer's nickname under the sun—all he had to do was ask, and pay. They called him Babe, Nap, Christy, Shoeless, Dizzy, Heinie, Tony, Home Run, Cap, Rip, Kiki, Luke, Pepper, and Irish; they called him Cracker and Country and King Kong and Pie; they even called him Lefty, skinny little fourteen-year-old second baseman that he was. Why not? It only cost an extra buck, and it made him feel like somebody important.

*   *   *

“Batting in third position, the first baseman, No. 11, JOHN BAAL. BAAL.”

Big John (TR, BL, 6′4″, 230 lbs.), said never to have hit a homer sober in his life, had played for just about every club in the league, including the Mundys, before returning to them in '42, paroled into the custody of their benevolent manager. Baal joined the club after serving two years on a five-year gambling rap—he'd shot craps after the World Series with the rookie of the year, and wiped the boy out with a pair of loaded dice. Not the first time John had walked off with somebody else's World Series earnings, only the first time they caught him with the shaved ivories. In prison Big John had had the two best seasons of his life, earning the ironic appellation (coined, of course, by Smitty) “the Babe Ruth of the Big House.” With Big John in the line-up, Sing Sing beat every major prison team in the country, including the powerful Leavenworth club, and went on to capture the criminal baseball championship of America two consecutive seasons after nearly a decade of losing to the big federal pens stocked with hard-hitting bootleggers. Inside the prison walls a Johnny Baal didn't have to put up with the rules and regulations that had so hampered him throughout his big league career, particularly the commandment against taking the field under the influence of alcohol. If a slugger had a thirst around game time, then his warden saw that it was satisfied (along with any other appetite a robust man might develop), because the warden wanted to
win.
But out in society, you couldn't get past the dugout steps without some little old biddy in a baseball uniform sniffing you all over for fear that if you blew on their ball with your sour mash breath, you might pop open the stitching and unravel the yarn. Consequently, aside from his criminal record, the only record Big John held outside of prison was for the longest outs hit in a single season. Christ, he clouted that ball so high that at its zenith it passed clear out of sight—but as for distance, he just could not get it to go all the way, unless he was pickled.

Now, every ballplayer has his weakness, and that was Big John's, If he didn't drink, if he didn't gamble, if he didn't whore and cheat and curse, if he wasn't a roughneck, a glutton and a brawler, why he just wasn't himself, and his whole damn game went to pot, hitting
and
fielding. But when he had fifteen drinks under his belt, there was nobody like him on first base. Giant that he was, he could still bounce around that infield like a kangaroo when he was good and drunk. And could he hit! “Why, one time in that jail up there,” Big John told Smitty upon his release from the prison, “I had me a lunch of a case of beer and a bottle of bourbon and got nine for nine in a doubleheader. Yep, everytime I come up, I just poked her into the outside world. But this rule they got out here—why it's disgustin'! It ain't for men, it's for lollipops and cupcakes! It's a damn joke what they done to this game—and that there Hall of
Fame
they got, why, that's a bigger joke! Why, if they ever asked me to come up there and gave me one of them poems or whatever it is they give, why I'd just laugh in their face! I'd say take your poem and wipe your assholes with it, you bunch a' powder puffs!”

Big John's contempt for the Hall of Fame (and his antisocial conduct generally) seemed to stem from grievances against Organized Baseball that had been implanted in him by his notorious father, who, in turn, had inherited from
his
notorious father a downright Neanderthal attitude toward the game. John's grandfather was, as everyone knows,
the
Baal, the legendary “Base,” who is still mistakenly credited with the idea of substituting sand-filled bags, or bases, for the posts used to mark off the infield in baseball's infancy; in actuality he earned the nickname early in his career because of his behavior on the playing field. If we are to believe the stories, Base Baal played on just about every cornfield and meadow in America before the first leagues were organized, before stadiums were built and men earned a living as players. Like many American boys, he learned the fundamentals in the Army camps of the Civil War. The game in that era consisted of several variants, all of which would be as foreign to the American baseball fan of today as jai alai or lacrosse. This was long before pitchers began to throw overhand, back when the bat was a stick that was narrow at both ends, if it was not a fence post or a barrel stave, back when there would be as many as twenty or thirty players on a team, and when the umpire, chosen from the crowd of spectators, might well be punched in the nose and run off the field if his judgment did not accord with everyone else's. The ball was a bit larger, something like today's softball, and “plugging” or “soaking” was the order of the day—to get the runner out, you had only to “plug” him (that is, hit him with the ball while he was between two bases), for him to be retired (as often as not, howling in pain). Frequently a fielder, or “scout” as he was called in some parts of the country, would wait for the runner to come right up to him, before “plugging” him in the ribs, much to the pleasure of the onlookers. And that was Base's stock in trade. In fact, when the old fellow finally broke into the newly formed four-club Patriot League in the eighties—by which time the game had taken on many of its modern, more civilized characteristics—he apparently “forgot” himself one day and “plugged” a runner heading home from third right in that vulnerable part of a man's anatomy for which he always aimed. He was instantly mobbed and nearly beaten to death by the other team—a bearded giant of a man, close to sixty now—all the while crying out, “But that's out where I come from!”

Base's son, and Big John's father, was the infamous pitcher, Spit, who in the years before wetting down the ball was declared illegal, would serve up a pitch so juicy that by the end of an inning the catcher had to shake himself off like a dog come in from romping in the rain. The trouble with Spit's spitball was, simply, that nobody could hit it out of the infield, if they could even follow the erratic path of that dripping sphere so as to get any wood on it at all. Once it left Spit's hand, carrying its cargo of liquid, not even he was sure exactly what turns and twists it would take before it landed with a wet thud in the catcher's glove, or up against his padded body. As opposition mounted to this spitter that Baal had perfected—it was unnatural, unsanitary, uncouth, it was ruining the competitive element in the game—he only shrugged and said, “How am I supposed to do, let 'em hit it out theirselves?” On hot afternoons, when his salivary glands and his strong right arm were really working, Spit used to like to taunt the opposition a little by motioning for his outfielders to sit back on their haunches and take a chew, while he struck out—or, as he put it, “drownded”—the other side. Angry batsmen would snarl at the ump, “Game called on accounta rain!” after the first of Spit's spitters did a somersault out in front of the plate and then sort of curled in for a strike at the knees. But Spit himself would pooh-pooh the whole thing, calling down to them, “Come on now, a little wet ain't gonna hurt you.” “It ain't the wet, Baal, it's the stringy stuff. It turns a white man's stomach.” “Ah, ain't nothin'—just got me a little head cold. Get in there now, and if you cain't swim, float.”

In the beginning, various conservative proposals were offered to transform the spitter back into what it had been before Spit came on the scene. The citrus fruit growers of America suggested that a spitball pitcher should have to suck on half a lemon in order to inhibit his flow of saliva—fulfilling his daily nutritional requirement of vitamin C in the process. They tried to work up public interest in a pitch they called “the sourball,” but when the pitchers themselves balked, as it were, complaining there was not any room for a lemon what with teeth, tongue, and chewing tobacco in there already, the proposal, mercifully, was dropped. A more serious suggestion had to do with allowing a pitcher to use all the saliva he wanted, but outlawing mucus and phlegm. The theory was that what the ballplayers euphemistically called “the stringy stuff” was precisely what made Baal's pitch dance the way it did. A committee of managers assigned to study his motion maintained that Spit was very much like a puppeteer yanking on a web of strings, and that the rules had only to be rewritten to forbid a pitcher blowing his nose on the ball, or bringing anything up from back of the last molar for the problem to be solved, not only for the batsman, but for those fans who happened to be sitting in its path when it was fouled into the stands. It might even bring more of the ladies out to see a game, for as it stood now, you could not even get a suffragette into the bleachers on a day Baal was pitching, so repugnant was his technique to the fair sex. Even the heartiest of male fans showed signs of squeamishness pocketing a foul tip to bring home as a souvenir to the kiddies. But Spit himself only chuckled (he was a mild, mild man, until they destroyed him). “When I go to a tea party, I will be all good manners and curtsy goodbye at the door, I can assure you of that. But as I am facin' two hundred pounds of gristle wavin' a stick what wants to drive the ball back down my gullet, why then, I will use the wax out of my ears, if I has to.”