Molina Page 8

  There was no Internet then, so you waited by the phone. Pai joined Mai and me when he returned from work. Cheo and Yadier popped in and out between school and practice. Cheo would be eligible for the draft the following year, when he finished high school. Already the scouts were fluttering around him in a way they never fluttered around me. Cheo could hit with power, and he was a catcher, a position always in demand. Not everyone had the particular skills and the particular personality required of the position.

  Yadier was ten years old and so much better than either Cheo or I was at that age. He was thick and solid and had a cannon for an arm. He could already hit the ball over the fence at the park across the street, a feat I didn’t accomplish until well into my teens. He batted cleanup for the Little League team that Pai, of course, coached. Yadier had been kissed by the baseball gods not only with his body and talent but with being born into a baseball family. He had the advantage of three coaches in Pai, Cheo, and me. I helped Pai coach Yadier’s Little League team. He soaked up everything we said, even when it looked like he was fooling around and not paying attention.

  I stared at the phone for four days, leaving occasionally to watch José or Yadier. On the fourth day, as I sat in the stands at one of the local fields, one of Pai’s friends said the draft was over. A scout had told him. One thousand four hundred ten players had been drafted. The teams stopped picking after fifty rounds.

  I couldn’t believe it. I was so angry with the Puerto Rican scouts. Why didn’t they have my back? They knew how I played. Why didn’t they stick up for me? I wasn’t worthy of even a fiftieth-round pick? I didn’t want to have anything to do with baseball at that moment. I didn’t play for two weeks. I didn’t pick up a ball or bat. When Mai and Pai asked me why I wasn’t going to Maceteros, I said, “What difference does it make? Who’s going to notice?”

  They let it go. They knew how much pain I was in. I played in one game in three weeks. I needed the seventy-five dollars.

  After the Maceteros season ended, Pai and I were at the park, talking with three or four other coaches. No one could understand why I didn’t get drafted. There were guys signing for thousands of dollars who weren’t as good as I was.

  “Listen,” Pai said. “You’re going to get your chance.”

  You didn’t, I thought. How could he still believe in the fairness and—what was it?—the beauty of baseball when it had screwed him over just like it was screwing me? The scouts were morons. They couldn’t see my father’s talent twenty years ago, and they couldn’t see mine now.

  “You can play amateur ball here,” Pai said. “They pay college kids about a hundred a game.”

  I thought about giving up, but I was too pissed off.

  I hooked on with Hatillo again in the Double A league in early September and talked to Pai about getting a job at the factory.

  “Just focus on baseball,” he said. He knew I was running out of time. I had just turned eighteen.

  My friends were marrying their high school sweethearts. That was how it worked. You dated a girl, and you married her. So over the pay phone at the corner market, I asked Josefa to marry me.

  MAI AND PAI got married when she was twenty-four and he was twenty-two. Pai refused to wear a suit. He wore a long-sleeved, white guayabera shirt instead. Mai didn’t mind. She wore a white blouse and white slacks. A church wedding was out of the question. They didn’t have the money. They were married in Titi Rosalia’s living room. Jacinto Camacho was the best man and paid for the cake. No one brought gifts. Mai and Pai didn’t expect any.

  “What better present than me?” Mai always said when she told the story.

  For a honeymoon, they spent two nights at a hotel on the beach in Vega Alta.

  Pai already had a job as a machine operator for $1.40 an hour at the Westinghouse factory. His assembly line made electrical circuit breakers. Back then, before I was born, he worked the overnight shift so he could practice baseball in the afternoon and, during the season, play games in the early evening. Mai never missed one.

  IN SEPTEMBER, I left the Hatillo team and flew to my fiancée’s home in San Luis, Mexico, to ask her father’s permission to be married. The wedding was planned for December. I didn’t have enough money to return to Puerto Rico then fly back for the wedding, so I stayed in Mexico, sleeping on the family’s sofa. I played baseball on Sundays and looked for a job.

  A teammate got me on a crew picking cauliflower in Yuma. We set out from San Luis at four thirty in the morning with Tupperware containers of burritos and beans for lunch and crossed into Yuma. My teammate showed me how to grab the crown of the cauliflower, cut the stalk, turn it right side up, cut away the leaves, then quickly place it on the truck bed as it moved alongside us. Workers on the truck washed, wrapped, and packed the cauliflower in boxes. I couldn’t cut the cauliflower fast enough. I played catch-up all day. By the second day, the supervisor conceded I was hopeless. I became a washer/wrapper/packer on the truck. Fourteen hours after our day started, we’d arrive back in San Luis. I’d eat, fall dead asleep, and do it all again the next day, rising before the sun.

  Pai wasn’t happy I was working the fields.

  “Is that what you want?” he asked.

  “I have to make money.”

  “If you want baseball, you have to do baseball.”

  He was right, but I was about to be a husband. I had to think about making a living.

  When the cauliflower harvest ended, I got a job at Jack-in-the-Box in Yuma for $4.25 an hour, midnight to eight in the morning. My fiancée drove me to the border, and I walked through customs to a bus stop and rode the bus into Yuma. My fiancée’s shift at Jack-in-the-Box began when mine ended. She’d arrive in her family’s Chevelle at 8 a.m., and I’d sleep in the car until she punched out at 2 p.m. We’d drive back into Mexico together. Then I’d go to baseball practice.

  Mai and Yadier flew in for the wedding in December. There were only about twenty-five people. Pai had to work, and Cheo couldn’t afford the plane ticket.

  In March, after five months of flipping burgers and wiping tables, Pai’s voice grew louder in my head. If you want baseball, you have to do baseball. Scouts didn’t go to Mexico. So if I wanted to have a chance, it wasn’t going to be in Mexico. My wife agreed we should move in with Mai and Pai so I could play Double A and go to whatever Major League tryouts I was invited to attend. There was still more than two months left until the June draft.

  Pai was thrilled to get me back on the field across the street, where he hit me grounders and threw batting practice like he always had. He and Mai divided their time between Cheo’s American Legion games, Yadier’s Little League games, and my Double A games for Maceteros in Vega Alta. I went to see Cheo and Yadier as often as I could. Cheo was in his last year of high school and had blossomed as a player. He had gotten taller and stronger in the previous year and could throw to second base with such power that runners rarely tried to steal. You could see how well he controlled the game behind the plate.

  Yadier at that time pitched and played third base and catcher. He still batted cleanup and hit the ball everywhere. It seemed there wasn’t a pitch he couldn’t hit. He was more mature than when I coached him as a small boy. Mai always told the story that Yadier was the only five-year-old in the history of Little League to infuriate an umpire enough to get tossed from a game. Little Yadier apparently called the ump a cabrón, roughly equivalent to “asshole.”

  “There’s always one bad apple,” Mai joked.

  Pai would get mad at Yadier, but he also cut him slack that he didn’t cut José or me. Once when Yadier threw his helmet after a rare strikeout, Pai upbraided him in the dugout.

  “That’s the last time you throw a helmet!” Pai said.

  “It’s because I want to win! I want to hit!” Yadier said.

  If José or I had thrown the helmet, Pai would have sent us home. But he let Yadier stay in the game. He disliked the behavior but loved Yadier’s fire, his burning drive to win. I remember Yadie
r at seven or eight years old tossing his catcher’s mitt to the ground and wheeling around to yell at the umpire—who happened to be a close family friend.

  “Where do you want the pitch? It’s right in the strike zone! What are you looking at?”

  Another time he took his catching gear off in the middle of a game because he was angry about something. “I’m not going to be a catcher anymore!” he said. Pai benched him. Cheo and I sat with him and talked kindly to him about respect, about being a leader and a role model. If you wanted Yadier to listen, you couldn’t confront him. You just had to talk.

  Now, almost a teenager, Yadier was calmer and clearly a leader on the team. Mai, on the other hand, hadn’t mellowed a bit. When a fight broke out during one of Yadier’s games, Mai rushed onto the field with a baseball bat to protect her boy. I saw Pai explode like that only once, and it happened during the season when I had returned to Puerto Rico for one last push at getting signed. I was playing three games a week for Maceteros—shortstop, outfield, and as the closer out of the bullpen. My teammates called me College Boy and kept asking why I hadn’t been signed. Most college guys they knew had gotten contracts. Wasn’t that the whole point of going to college in the States? Why go for two years if you don’t get signed? I didn’t have an answer.

  We were facing one of the league’s top pitchers in the Double A North championship. Over several games, I had gone 7-for-7 against him. When I came up to bat in the championship game, he threw at my head. I got out of the way. The next pitch hit me on the elbow. I saw Mai in the stands yelling and waving a baseball bat. After the game, I was in the dugout changing out of my spikes and jersey—visiting teams didn’t have locker rooms—when I heard a commotion. Pai had waited for the pitcher outside the home team’s clubhouse. He and my brothers confronted him, and Pai threw two punches, which the pitcher was nice enough to dodge. He knew Pai, as everybody did. This was out of character.

  “Mr. Benjamín! What are you doing?”

  Players were holding both men back when I got there. Pai’s face was red and his nostrils flared. His jaw muscles twitched. I had never seen him so angry. On the way home, he told me if I pitched in the next game I had to retaliate and throw at one of their players. Not at the head, he said. Go for the butt. Luckily I didn’t pitch, because I had no intention of hitting anybody. But I understood Pai’s anger. He knew I was working so hard to get signed and that I was running out of time. And here was this pitcher trying to hurt me and ruin whatever chance I had.

  When Pai couldn’t come to the games, he tried to listen on the radio. Then he’d go over everything with me afterward, inning by inning, analyzing my at-bats and pitching strategy. I never bristled at his comments. I loved those talks with him. I had his full attention. I relished every compliment.

  I was in the best shape of my life. I worked out harder than ever, driven almost to obsession by the ticking clock in my head. I ran with my sanitary-sock Walkman, jogged on the beach, lifted my soda-cracker barbells. El Caballo Loco. I’d go with my cousin Julito to the field across the street and we’d pitch to each other from Pai’s bucket of balls. When we got tired of chasing the balls, we hit them against the flimsy backstop. Cheo would join us if he was around. Yadier, too. We’d take grounders and fly balls. I’d practice throwing from the outfield to Cheo at home. Cheo practiced gunning down base runners. We raced around the bases, trying to make our turns as efficient as possible, hoping to shave a tenth of a second off our times.

  There wasn’t room in Mai and Pai’s house for my wife and I to stay. I couldn’t afford rent on the hundred dollars a game I earned from Maceteros. I needed another job. Tío Papo was a supervisor at General Electric, so he got me on the assembly line at the factory in Manatí, twenty minutes from Espinosa.

  When I arrived for my first day of work, two of my Los Pobres teammates were on the assembly line. They quickly and emphatically explained, as I did, that the job was absolutely temporary, a stopgap until they got signed, which would definitely happen if the scouts had half a brain.

  The Puerto Rican scouts were our favorite topic of conversation on the assembly line. We all agreed they were idiots and scumbags who knew everything about statistics and nothing about baseball. They fell in love with players who looked like baseball players. Tall and broad-shouldered. They couldn’t see the real baseball guys right in front of them. We trashed the latest young superstar, assuring each other we were as good as that kid. He simply had the advantage of being big enough to turn heads. We held fiercely to our hopes of reaching the pros—or as fiercely as any man can as he’s building electrical outlets on an assembly line.

  My job was to screw three pieces of plastic onto a partially assembled outlet, then hand it on to the guy next to me. He did his part and handed it down the line. We churned out a finished outlet every three to five minutes from 7:30 a.m. until 3:30 p.m. Every day. The same thing. On our feet most of the time.

  How had Pai done this for two decades? I never thought about what Pai did when he wasn’t at home. All I knew was that he worked at a factory. Now I knew a little more. He calibrated the finished electrical breakers before they were boxed up and shipped. “You do what needs doing, even if it’s sweeping the floors,” one of his longtime coworkers told me. Pai stood all day except to fill out daily reports. In his fifties, the coworker said, Pai made twelve dollars an hour. Friday was payday. Pai and the other workers cashed their checks during lunch and splurged at a restaurant across from the plant. After work, they’d stop for drinks at Rafy’s Place, Barceloneta, El Motivo, or Guacaro. People told me Pai often slapped the bar and announced, “A round for the house!” The cheers went up and the round poured. Soon he’d slap the bar again. More cheers, more beer. But if his Little League team had a baseball practice, the coworker told me, Pai was out the door. “He never failed those kids,” he said.

  With my $187 weekly paycheck, my wife and I rented a one-room studio for $250 a month on the first floor of a sad, hulking apartment building with drug dealers hustling sales in the stairwells. It wasn’t far from Mai and Pai. Espinosa had never been Mayberry, but now it had a criminal undercurrent that had everyone locking their car doors and keeping their children closer to home. We heard gunshots our first night there. I began keeping a baseball bat under the bed. I made sure my wife spent most of her time at Mai and Pai’s house when I was at work, at practice, working out, or attending a tryout.

  I was playing better than ever. I led the Double A League in RBIs and was among the top five in home runs and batting average. It was late May 1993. The draft was in two weeks. I had been going to tryouts every week since I arrived back in Puerto Rico. There was always some scout who was impressed that I played so many positions. He’d ask for my phone number. Then never call.

  One night in late May, on the last Friday of the spring season, I went 4-for-5 with two triples and two doubles.

  One of my best nights ever. And it happened in Utuado, where Pai had made his name.

  “What a game!” Pai said on the way home. “That triple was a perfect swing.”

  Instead of lifting my spirits, Pai’s compliments depressed me. I couldn’t play any better than that. It was my best. And it was never going to be enough. The truth of that hit suddenly and with clear-eyed clarity. I was never going to get signed. I would never be what the scouts wanted. I didn’t hit with quite enough power. I didn’t pitch with quite enough velocity. I couldn’t get down the line with quite enough speed.

  How was I going to tell Pai that he had just seen my last game of baseball?

  In the car on the way home, we passed baseball parks in every neighborhood. Instead of magical places, the fields now seemed like terrible mirrors showing me who I really was. An also-ran. A wannabe. A young man destined for a factory smock and a time card.

  In bed that night, I finally quieted my brain and fell asleep, only to jolt awake from someone pounding on the door. I pulled the bat from under the bed, jumped up, and shouted at my wife to hide in the
closet. I positioned myself next to the door. If somebody broke in, they were going to feel it. The knob rattled. I lifted the bat. I heard the scrape of shoes and footsteps moving away.

  What kind of life was this? Derelicts and addicts. Crumbling walls. Begging for rides on La Número Dos to get anywhere because I couldn’t afford a car. Eating at Mai’s because we had nothing left in our cabinets.

  “Listen, I know you miss home,” I said to my wife, climbing back into bed. “I’m just so tired of this crap. Let’s pack up. I’ll get a job in Yuma.”

  I knew I could make a thousand dollars a week picking lettuce; Yuma was the lettuce capital of America. After the harvest, maybe I’d go back to school like Mrs. El-Khayyat had said and do something with computers.

  When I opened my eyes in the morning, they fell immediately on my baseball bag on the floor by the bathroom. I pulled it to me and sat on the edge of the bed. I lifted my blue Pony spikes out from under my bats and gloves. I wondered how many miles of base paths these spikes had covered. I tied the shoelaces together.

  My wife rolled over. “What are you doing? What time is it?”

  “I’ll be right back.”

  The sky was orange-red through the pomerosa branches, and the air smelled clean and cool. Even the rotting apartment building looked almost gentle in the morning light. Cars hummed low in the distance along La Número Dos. A rooster screeched. The street was empty. I walked in the direction of the highway to the first set of telephone poles. I looked up at the power wire stretched above me. I assessed distance and angle, taking a step back, then two. Holding one shoe in my right hand, I swung the other shoe. One twirl, another—then whoosh. I let go and the shoes flew toward the wire, spinning and kicking. Their last dash. The laces slammed into the wire and the shoes whipped around it. Tied to the wire now, the spikes swung for a few moments then stopped. They hung above me like something dead.