Sheets to the Wind: Going the Distance
I was 6 when Victor, who was 11, offered to teach me how to bat. I stood behind him in Ibsen Court, where we lived, watching as instructed, as he swung through and all the way back to my eye. My brothers led me home as I cried, and I had to start first grade with a shiner. Usually when I got hurt, it was scraped knees and elbows from running like hell during hide-and-seek. If the blood was really gushing, I’d go home for a Band-Aid and come right out after to play some more. My knees were covered in scabs most of the time, and I loved my cuts and scars, wearing them like badges of honor.
My various scrapes made me look tough, I thought, and that was everything to me in those days. I’d roll the sleeves up on my T-shirts and walk with my arms puffed out at my sides, thinking this made me look stronger. It was a glorious age of Kool-Aid mustaches and fireflies, chasing the ice cream man in summer, and in fall running from house to house with the other trick-or-treaters, and you never had to make a playdate, you just went outside with a ball, and pretty soon all the other kids would be there with you.
By middle school, there was almost no one left in Ibsen Court. Everyone was inside doing homework or at a school game, playing baseball in a uniform, taking it all very seriously. I joined the swim team, and got more involved in dancing school, all of which was so stressful I still occasionally have nightmares in which I can’t remember the choreography, or I’m moving through the water, but it’s thick and viscous and holding me back, and those long blissful afternoons playing baseball in the court with our motley crew of neighborhood kids faded along with my scar.
When I heard about the annual Artists and Writers Game in East Hampton, how it started with a crew of local artists like Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning at a picnic in 1948, just some friends in the neighborhood getting drunk and screwing around with a ball, how it grew to include writers like Terry Southern and George Plimpton, something old and lost in me stirred, and I asked my editor to sign me up. Ken Auletta, the writers’ captain, responded within minutes that I was on the team.
I was excited but also nervous. I hadn’t played any team sports since those days in the street, and I didn’t know anyone else on the team, though I sure as hell recognized the names of former players, a roster of writers I worshipped growing up. With the Nobel Prize winner Saul Bellow and the “Catch-22” author Joseph Heller, it seemed to me like the gods (my gods) organized a softball break on Mount Olympus. Not wanting to join a team of my heroes as the weakest link — what if Kurt Vonnegut passed me the ball and I didn’t catch it? What if the writers lost because of me? Would Norman Mailer stab me in the chest with a penknife? Would I have had it coming? Not knowing who would be on the team this year, my imagination filled in the images of former players now deceased.
“Do you even know the rules?” my editor asked, interrupting my reverie.
A few days later I was at a ribbon-cutting ceremony for the new baseball field in Springs, where the East Hampton Little League was about to play a scrimmage. I’d spent the previous half-hour with their coach, Tim Garneau, who’d agreed to lend me a mitt and give me a quick lesson in catching grounders, throwing, and hitting. “If they ask what position you play, tell them first. You’re good at catching,” Tim told me before Peter Van Scoyoc threw the opening pitch. I watched the kids and studied their confidence, and a few minutes later Tim put me on first base. I left with a bag of balls, a batting practice stick, a bat, and a pair of mitts to practice.
That night, I watched “Rocky” to prepare and called my best friend and mentor, the novelist Frederic Tuten, to be my Mickey (played to perfection by Burgess Meredith). Yes, “Rocky” is a boxing movie, but it’s also my favorite. “I have a great arm,” Fred said, referring to his days playing stickball in the post-Depression Bronx. “Come over.”
In his driveway a few hours later, he held the batting stick for me to take swipes at, but not before I emailed Almond Zigmund, the artist, and Jason Weiner, the chef, who own Almond restaurant in Bridgehampton:
“When Rocky trains for the big fight with Apollo, he goes to a butcher shop and punches the meat. I’m playing in the 70th Annual Artists and Writers Softball Game this Saturday and was wondering if you had any meat in your kitchen that I might strike with my bat.”
It was dinnertime and Almond was packed when I showed up with my bat on Tuesday. “I’m here to beat the meat,” I told the maître’d, Nick Maracz, before introducing Fred, leaning on his fluorescent cane. “This is my manager, the Bronx Brisket.”
Nick ushered us past the dining room, through the kitchen, into the basement, and into the meat locker offering a choice of toothsome cuts. “Take your pick.”
I began with a shell steak that was on day 30 of a 35-day aging process and went to work as the Brisket remarked on my form. Fearing my blows, a sous chef called G-Unit left the room. I was beating up a salami when G-Unit returned with a smile and a plate of shrimp cocktail. Famished, the Brisket made swift work of the sauce. Appetized, we headed upstairs to talk strategy over dinner next to the window looking out into the rain.
The next day, the Brisket and I headed over to the Iacono chicken farm in East Hampton. I left my bat in the car, not wanting to scare anyone, and introduced myself to the owner, Eileen. “I’m playing in the Artists and Writers Softball Game,” I said proudly, “and was wondering if I could chase one of your chickens. In ‘Rocky II,’ Mickey has Rocky chase a chicken to increase his speed.”
“You can’t chase a chicken.”
“Why not?”
“In this heat? It’ll drop dead.”
“What if I come back at night?”
“You can’t chase a chicken,” said a young woman passing behind her.
“Why not?”
“It stresses them out,” she said, as a man behind both of them lay two plucked chickens with dangling necks on a slab and raised an ax.
“But you’re going to slaughter them anyway,” I whispered. The ax went down on both.
“Yeah, but they’re happy till the day they die. How would you like it if someone chased you?”
I thought about this.
“What if I buy a chicken?”
Frederic: “Where would you put it? In the car with you?”
“Do you sell chicken cages?”
“We don’t sell live chickens,” the young woman said sternly, as Fred ran into an old friend who just picked up “two beautiful butterflied chickens,” which sounded much more monstrous to me.
Changing tacks, I bought a bright orange Iacono Farm baseball cap for the Brisket and invited everyone to Saturday’s game. Our training session thwarted, Fred and I stopped into the Candy Kitchen in Bridgehampton to talk strategy over ice cream sundaes.
The next day the Brisket was busy, so I decided to go to the Amagansett playground alone. The sun had already set as I set up near the batting cage. I had a bag of balls Tim had lent me, which I practiced throwing to no one as the sky grew dark.
“I like your outfit!” Jordan Smith of the Eric Firestone Gallery said Friday morning, when he opened his front door. When I’d stopped into the gallery for their “Montauk Highway II: Postwar Abstraction in the Hamptons” show (featuring works by many former softball players!), I’d told him and Eric about the impending game, and Jordan, who’d played in camp, invited me over for some catch. Jordan surveyed my knee-high athletic socks, my NASA baseball cap with the Shuttle on it, my T-shirt sleeves rolled up, and then I followed him through the house to the backyard, puffing my arms a little at my sides.
The morning of game day, I headed over to Plaza Surf & Sports in Montauk, worried, because it was raining. What if the game was rained out! And also worried because if it wasn’t, I’d forgotten to buy eye black (that black paint the professionals put under their eyes to block the glare). After I got the under-eye stuff, I hit Dylan’s Candy Bar in East Hampton for a healthy supply of Big League Chew bubble gum and felt ready.
At 2 p.m., I walked to batting practice in Herrick Park, my heart pounding with worry. The storm clouds had cleared and the sun baked the asphalt as I made my way across the parking lot alone, hearing the announcer in the distance and the voice of Alec Baldwin, who’d stopped by to wish luck to the entrants in the home run challenge.
Remember, this is fun, I told myself, not for the first time. This is a lesson I always have to relearn, as my fears can sometimes get the better of me, tempting me to sit this one out, whether “this” is a party, a first date, a softball game, the prospect of beginning a new novel, or even this column. Remember, this is fun, I tell myself. This, being life.
Iris Smyles is the author of the novels “Iris Has Free Time” and “Dating Tips for the Unemployed.” Read more “Sheets to the Wind” at easthamtonstar.com/iris.