Molina Page 5

  I was using an outfield glove that a player I knew in Double A was throwing out. It was ripped in the palm and along the side; a lot of the stuffing had come out. It was thick at the thumb and flat in the palm. I stuffed newspaper into the palm then sealed the rips with Krazy Glue. Every time I caught a ball, I checked the lines of Krazy Glue to see if they held. The newspaper disintegrated quickly from my sweat. But it was the only big outfield glove I had.

  Cheo and I talked all the time about what it would be like to play in the pros. But whenever Pai heard us, he told us to think about today’s practice, today’s game. The rest would take care of itself. But I couldn’t help myself. I imagined how proud Pai would be. Could there be a greater gift than to pick up my father’s dream and carry it to the finish line? If I made it to the Major Leagues, it would be like we both made it.

  One big baseball man.

  MY GROWING CONFIDENCE on the baseball field had no effect on the rest of my life. I hated looking in the mirror. My unruly Afro earned me the nickname fosforo—matchstick. I was so introverted and self-conscious I barely talked to girls much less dated them. There were times in baseball when I burned to stand up and tell my teammates to keep believing, to keep picking each other up. It was in my head pushing to get out, but I couldn’t say it. If I was late for class, I sat on a bench outside rather than bring attention to myself by walking in. In my senior year, we had to read Don Quixote and give a talk in front of the class. The guys I hung out with every day persuaded me to practice in front of them. I’d start reading then feel lightheaded and queasy, like I was going to throw up. I couldn’t do it.

  After class one day, I handed the teacher a written version of my talk.

  “I don’t know if this counts,” I said, “but this is what I’d say.”

  She said I had to deliver the paper out loud in front of the class. That was the assignment.

  “I can’t.”

  The teacher was nice. “Okay, just read it now in front of me.”

  My voice caught in my throat as it always did. I couldn’t do even that.

  The teacher said okay and took the paper. She gave me a C. It would have been an A, she said, if I had delivered it out loud. The truth is I would rather have taken an F than speak in front of the class.

  EVERY BALLPLAYER IN Puerto Rico raced a ticking clock. Before 1990, Puerto Rican players weren’t part of the amateur draft. They were signed as free agents like every other Latin player, usually as teenagers. The youngest were sent to team-run baseball academies on the island until they were mature enough to move on to the farm system in the States. Teams wanted to get you young and develop you themselves. If you weren’t signed by eighteen, your chances of signing diminished. Your best hope was to land a spot on a college team in the States and hope you got noticed there. If that didn’t work, there was a factory smock with your name on it.

  I graduated from high school in 1990, the first year Puerto Rico participated in the June amateur draft. I was sixteen, the age most kids in Puerto Rico graduated from high school. Everyone told me I’d be drafted. I was invited to one or two Major League tryouts a week. Cheo was often invited, too. At fourteen years old, he was already on many scouts’ radar. He was a born catcher, with thick legs and a strong arm. So was Yadier.

  Not me. I was a pitcher, outfielder, and infielder. I played everywhere except catcher. I hoped my versatility would increase my value. The scouts didn’t see it that way. They clocked my pitches at 88 mph, but they wanted 90. They timed my speed over 60 yards at 7.1 seconds, but they wanted 6.9. Still they said, “Here, fill out this information. Give us your number.” But they never called.

  The scouts liked the six-foot-five guys who looked great on paper, whose numbers could be recorded in the appropriate rows, plotted on a graph, fed into a calculator, and ranked accordingly. They didn’t like five-nine guys with big hearts and smart baseball minds. They didn’t know how to measure that.

  The June draft came and went. Nine guys from my American Legion team were drafted. My phone didn’t ring.

  PAI HAD TURNED pro when he was still in high school. He was fourteen when a scout named Jacinto Camacho first saw him playing Class B ball in Maricao, a sector in Vega Alta. Jacinto had a good eye for talent, and he had ties to the best players and teams in Puerto Rico. He saw something special in the undersized teenager with raw talent and unrefined skills. He swooped and dove at the ball like a bird. At the plate, he slapped one sharp single after another with half a bat. He decided to take the boy under his wing. He threw him in with older players who were hoping to make it to the pros in the States.

  “Your father was scared to be with these other guys,” Jacinto told me when I sat with him about a year after Pai’s death. “He was just a boy of fourteen. But he proved to be better than any of them.”

  He was more driven, too. Jacinto said he’d never seen a boy as single-minded about baseball. “It was all Benjamín thought about,” he said. “He didn’t think about anything else.”

  The following year, when Pai was fifteen, Jacinto took him to practice with players in Double A, the highest amateur league in Puerto Rico. It was often where the US scouts found their next Major League players. It was crazy that a fifteen-year-old could hold his own in Double A—only one or two new players were chosen from the hundred or so who tried out each season. But not only did Jacinto show up with a fifteen-year-old kid, he announced to everyone there, “This boy will be the batting champion.”

  Sure enough, the kid from Espinosa made the cut. He signed with Maceteros in Vega Alta for twenty-five dollars per game. (Though the players were classified as amateurs, they were paid to play.) He promptly quit high school, happy to devote himself to baseball practice every afternoon and three games every weekend. Though he wasn’t batting champion that first year, he fulfilled Jacinto’s prediction a few seasons later, confounding convention with his weird grip.

  OUR AMERICAN LEGION team won the Puerto Rican championship in the summer of 1990. We flew to the United States for the national championship. I’d never been off the island. I’d never been on an airplane. Pai and Tío Papo were assistant coaches, so they’d go, too. My cousin Papito loaned me his glove so I wouldn’t be embarrassed by my Krazy Glue one.

  Before we left, Felix Caro, a family friend, said he might be able to get me on a college baseball team in America. There were supposed to be more scouts at the college games than at tryouts in Puerto Rico. And they were American scouts, who had more pull to sign players. The college would probably be in Florida, Felix Caro said. Good. Not too far from home. I didn’t give it much thought. I was too caught up in our trip to the States. I got a seat on the plane by the window and pressed my forehead to the glass. Was that Dorado down there? I knew it so well, yet nothing was familiar from so far away.

  In Arkansas for regionals, we stayed four to a room in a hotel that had color TV, an ice machine down the hall, a maid to make our beds, a wrapped bar of soap in the shower, and free breakfast in the lobby. Living large.

  When we won in Arkansas, we flew to Oregon to play the other regional winners. Felix Caro called me at the hotel room there. He had found a college in a city called Yuma. There were other Puerto Rican players. I would fly there after I was done playing in Oregon. Pai was happy for me. He said to make sure I studied hard to learn English. It was the language of the Major Leagues. He said to get an American roommate so I could practice every day.

  I couldn’t think about college yet. The tournament was too exciting. I led the tournament in RBIs and stolen bases—such a long way from my failures of just a few years earlier. ESPN broadcast our championship game against Maryland. We lost, but the sellout crowd and TV cameras gave us a taste of what a life in baseball might be.

  The night before we left Oregon, Pai pulled out his wallet and handed me twenty dollars.

  “Make it last a month. Then I can send you more.”

  It didn’t seem real until we boarded the team bus to the airport. I began to feel
sick. I had never lived away from home. I had never played baseball without Pai. I couldn’t picture it. Baseball was my father.

  The bus stopped at my terminal first. Everyone else was flying back to Puerto Rico from a different terminal. Pai followed me off the bus. I retrieved my bag from the baggage compartment. Pai gave me a hug.

  “God bless you, mi hijo,” he said. “Go out and make something of yourself.”

  “I’m going to miss everyone so much,” I said quietly. I was going to miss him especially.

  “This isn’t the time to think about that. Play baseball. Have fun. Be yourself.”

  He boarded the bus. I stood at the curb as my teammates slapped the windows and yelled, “Good luck!” Pai didn’t look at me as the bus sighed and pulled away. I felt like a piece of me was gone.

  The plane made a stop, where I boarded another plane that would take me the rest of the way. This plane looked no bigger than a school bus. It landed again just forty minutes after takeoff. We were in Florida already?

  “Yuma?” I asked the man next to me.

  “Yuma,” he said.

  I stepped out of the plane and into a blast of hot air. The land beyond the runway was a moonscape. Flat and desolate as far as you could see. No water anywhere. This didn’t look like any pictures I’d seen of Florida. I followed the other passengers to baggage claim. A white man in a baseball cap approached. He was short and thin, in his thirties or forties.

  “Bengie Molina?”

  “Yes!”

  “Welcome,” he said, shaking my hand. He continued to talk, but I couldn’t understand a thing, though I deciphered that he was the college baseball coach.

  “Lo siento, no comprendo,” I finally said.

  “No problem,” he said, smiling. We took a sun-cracked two-lane highway through flat expanses of the driest land I’d ever seen. On the horizon rose craggy mountains without a speck of green. How could anything survive out here? But here and there a lettuce field appeared or a citrus grove. And then, suddenly, buildings.

  The sign in front said “Arizona Western College.” Arizona? I had never heard of Arizona. I had no idea where it was. I also had no way to ask. We pulled up to a row of three identical two-story buildings with lots of windows. Classrooms, I figured. When the coach parked and pulled out my suitcase from the back, I realized this was where I’d be staying. It looked like a caserio, buildings with tiny apartments where poor people lived.

  The coach took me inside to a lobby, where I signed some papers and was handed a key and a folder of information. Someone around my own age showed me to Room 116 on the first floor. I was instantly homesick. The room smelled like dirty clothes. Men’s smell. There was a bunk bed already made up with sheets, blanket, and small pillow, and a duffel bag on the bottom bunk. There was a little table. The walls and floor were bare.

  Behind a door, a bathroom with a shower and a toilet connected to a second dorm room. I dropped my bag into a corner and didn’t unpack. I already knew I wasn’t staying. I was sixteen, an age when American kids were still in high school. I didn’t speak English. I had never been away from my family or, until the American Legion trip, away from Puerto Rico. What was I doing here in this strange, lonely place?

  I climbed to the top bunk, sat next to the room’s only window, and pushed it open. An oven. I could see the mountains in the distance and a few other buildings. The air had no smell of trees and ocean. No smell of rain or flowers or Mai’s home cooking. Just dust and dirt. I stretched my arm out the window and flipped my palm over and back, wondering how long it would take to bake a human hand in this heat.

  The room had no TV or radio. I didn’t know what I was supposed to do. I walked back to the lobby. A couple of kids sat on couches watching TV. No dominoes. No music. Back in my room, I flipped through the “Welcome” brochure. I could read a few words from taking English in high school, but mostly the sentences were just letters on a page.

  I had made a huge mistake. I didn’t belong here. I would go back to Puerto Rico and play amateur ball and try to make it to the Major Leagues that way. I returned to the lobby and managed to get someone to show me how to use the pay phone in the hallway: Push zero, say “collect call,” push two for Spanish, then give the operator the number.

  “This isn’t for me,” I told Mai, trying to sound businesslike. I knew Pai wasn’t home from the American Legion trip yet. I pictured her in the kitchen in her bata, and Cheo and Yadier watching TV in the living room. I wanted to be there.

  “I don’t like it,” I said. “The air’s too dry. I don’t speak the language. I won’t understand anything the coach is saying.”

  “Oh, Bengie, don’t start with that! You haven’t even been there one day. Give it a chance.”

  We didn’t speak long because collect calls were expensive.

  I was hungry, but didn’t leave the room. The coach had pointed out the cafeteria on the drive in, but I didn’t know how the system worked or when I was supposed to go.

  Around ten thirty that night, the door burst open.

  “Bengie! Llegastes!” You’re here!

  It was Kenny Marrero from Espinosa. Kenny’s dad worked with Pai. He was with four other Puerto Rican guys. I knew Angel “Bambi” Sanchez from Little League; I’d played against him my whole life. I knew Alex Cordoba from school in Vega Alta. I didn’t know anyone else, including my roommate, a freshman named Rene Reyes, whom everyone knew as Flaco, which means skinny.

  Classes had started, so all those guys except Flaco and me had been on campus for a few days already.

  “You know who this guy’s father is?” Kenny said. “He’s one of the most famous players in Vega Alta. My dad used to tell me he hit like Rod Carew.”

  He told Flaco and me to meet in the lobby at seven the next morning for breakfast before class. We met up with other ballplayers in the cafeteria, where, following what everybody else did, I showed my food card, got a tray, and, unable to speak English, pointed to the eggs, bacon, potatoes, and something that looked like avena, our version of oatmeal. I was so hungry, I took everything. The lady behind the counter spooned each choice onto a plate divided into compartments. I wolfed it down.

  “I could eat another plate,” I said.

  “Go back. You can get as much as you want.”

  I got eggs and bacon again. Kenny showed me another counter where I could get cereal, juice, fruit, bread, anything I wanted, and all I had to do was give the cashier my food card. There was a soda dispenser like you’d find in a fast-food restaurant. Kenny told me I could fill my cup with Coke or 7-Up as often as I wanted.

  Flaco and I were the new students in class. English as a Second Language. Three other Spanish-speaking teammates were also there, along with ten or so adults from the Yuma community. That was our only class, though it lasted all day with a break for lunch. We received credits toward an ESL certificate that prepared us for higher-level college courses.

  “Bienvenidos! Me llamo Señora Davene El-Khayyat.”

  I had taken a seat in the front row, intent on learning as quickly as I could the language of the Major Leagues.

  “This is English as a Second Language,” Mrs. El-Khayyat told Flaco and me in Spanish. “This is the last time you’ll hear me say anything in Spanish. If you have a question, don’t be shy to ask in Spanish. But since we’re learning English, from now on, it’s English.”

  She was middle-aged with short salt-and-pepper hair and about Mai’s height. She wore jeans, a flowered collared shirt, and glasses. Her voice was direct and even. She had an accent, but not a Spanish one. Maybe Middle Eastern.

  “You will give presentations to the class,” she said.

  Presentations. My stomach fluttered. There was no way I was making any kind of presentation. It was nerve-racking enough speaking in front of a class in my own language, much less in English. I had been watching American television in Puerto Rico and in the hotel rooms in Arkansas and Oregon. Everyone said that was a good way to learn English. I picke
d up almost nothing.

  “Everyone participates. This is the only way to learn. Do you understand?”

  No one spoke.

  “Understand?”

  “Sí!” we said.

  “No sí—yessss!”

  “Yessss!”

  Mrs. El-Khayyat gave Flaco and me workbooks and told us to stay after class to review what we had missed.

  “Ricardo!” she said, looking up from her class binder. “Please come forward and read the first sentence on page seven.”

  Ricardo was short and round and looked to be in his fifties or sixties. He laughed nervously and shook his head. “Ay, no, no.”

  “Thank you, Ricardo,” Mrs. El-Khayyat said, as if Ricardo had agreed. She stepped to the side of her desk to make room for the old man.

  Ricardo rose slowly. He held the open book in both hands like a hymnal. At the front of the room, he turned to face us and suddenly burst forth with a string of butchered English words, triggering a ripple of muffled laughter. My heart pounded as if it were me up there. I was embarrassed for him. But he looked up from the workbook when he had finished and smiled.

  Mrs. El-Khayyat pronounced the butchered words correctly and told him to try again. The second time was no better.

  “Thank you, Ricardo.”

  Her eyes swept the room. I sank into my chair. She called on one of my teammates, who was as awful as Ricardo. One after another, the students stood and mangled the unfamiliar words. By now, we were laughing out loud, even the speakers and even me. But not Mrs. El-Khayyat. She clapped her hands like a coach. “Come on, come on!” she’d tell the fumbling student. “Slowly!”