The Autograph

My son, Dylan, was ten when I took him to a baseball card show. Stan
Musial was scheduled to be the Guest of honor. Yeah, "The Man." Stan's
as much an icon in St. Louis as Davy Crockett is in Tennessee; a legend
in a town that takes its baseball as seriously as New Orleans its jazz,
Boston its culture or Washington D.C. its politics. Dylan and I took
our places in the long autograph line, impatient as two felons waiting
for a bureaucrat to finish filling out their parole papers. To us the
line was moving as slow as a Friday creeps toward the weekend. We were
excited though as we eagerly awaited our audience with perhaps the
greatest of all Cardinals.

As Dylan leafed through our autograph scrapbook, my thoughts sprinted
off like a hitter would at the crack of the bat, toward the first base
of adolescence; baseball and Walter Kwiecinski. Walt was my best
friend's six foot four father. He was a lean, weathered telephone pole
of a man; soft spoken, as quiet as a home dugout when its pitcher is
taking a no-hit game into the top of the ninth. The scent of
enamel and fiberglass always clung to him like an olfactory business
card; that identified him with his auto body shop as surely as a
pinstriped uniform is a hallmark of a New York Yankee.  During the
summer his repair shop would resound with the voices of Halsey Hall and
Herb Carneal, the play by play announcers of the Minnesota Twins radio
network.

Walt was a survivor of the Bataan "Death March." After the surrender at
Corregidor, the Japs marched their prisoners through the Phillippine
jungle to where they would be imprisoned. He watched many of his
comrades collapse with hunger or exhaustion only to be kicked, prodded
with a bayonet or dispatched with a bullet if they couldn't keep up
with the column. Walt always credited baseball with keeping him
alive.

"I'd try to replay all the games that I'd ever watched or listened to
in my mind," he explained. "It took my thoughts away from the hunger,
the pain, the stench of rotting jungle and the death that could spring
out suddenly at one like a howling monkey out of the jungle. It kept me from fixating on
the brutality of the Japanese guards; those callous umpires who were
deciding our fates with a toothy sneer or the butt of a rifle."

To Walt, his son Steve and I were excuses to go to a ballgame. When
we'd go to Wade Stadium, that magnificent old structure built by WPA
labor during the Depression that preceeded Walt's war, my old man would
keep a tight rein on us. If we were with Walt though, he would set us
free to roam the stands, to chase foul balls as if they were the pot of
gold at the end of the rainbow, to bother the players and to hassle the
young vendors.

They'd bellow "Ice cold pop!"

We'd holler, "tastes like slop, sugar on the bottom and water on top."

Yeah, we were proud of our ten year old wit, and Walt would let us
flaunt it as loudly as we wished to.

His eyes would rarely waver from the ballfield or his scorebook as he
watched the kids who would be Tigers, Detroit's single A franchise, the
Duluth Dukes. It can get awfully cold watching baseball on a Northern
Minnesota evening, and Walt would have a blanket wrapped around him,
trying to banish the chill with a cup of hot chocolate as he followed
the game. We kids, of course, were impervious to the cold.

We discovered that the way to Walt's wallet was to get him to reminisce
about the game that he so passionately loved;  he'd share his heroes with us
 as though they were treasured possessions.  "DiMaggio was flawless,"
he'd marvel. "Cinema perfect, caviar and Hollywood. Did you boys know
that he was married to Marilyn Monroe?  Man, it was something to watch
 him range the outfield with the grace of a gazelle."

"Then there was Ted Williams, the God of Hitting. He played
the game as though it was a war, seeing enemies everywhere, from the
pitcher's mound to the pressbox to the stands. If the good Lord ever
would have returned and reached down to pick up a ball near the mound,
Teddy Ballgame would've had the steel to pick up a bat and try to face
him down with a glare as well."

Stan Musial, though, was the most wonderful diety in Walt's baseball
pantheon.

"You kids should've seen him," Walt would exclaim with admiration.
"DiMag may have been vintage wine, and Williams champagne, but Stan was
one of us. More of a "beer and a bump" kind of guy. Before the Twins
came to Minnesota I was a Cardinal fan, and I watched him carry the
team for quite a few seasons. Old Stan, he was a three time MVP, and
had a lifetime batting average of .331. He was durable too. He holds
the National League record for games played, hits and runs. Yet, I'll
bet you could sit next to him in a bar, and I'll bet he'd shake your
hand and act as if it was HIS pleasure to meet YOU. Stan would be the
kind of guy that you'd like to have on your bowling team, or that you'd
like to go fishing with."

The Kwiecinskis were a devout Catholic family. Many was the night I
waited for Steve on their front porch while they counted their beads.
They always had to do the rosary right after supper. Now that I'm at an age
where I have a bit more insight into human frailties, I can envision
Walt's mind wandering to the diamond during that Holy time as well.

But here we were now, at "The Man's" table.
My son swapped smiles with him, then the Hall of Famer offered him his
hand, which Dylan accepted with the nonchalant aplomb of a parking
attendant taking one's keys. Watching my boy with him, I thought of how
much it would've meant to Walt to have gotten the same opportunity, to
have gotten to meet and shake hands with Stan "The Man" Musial.

Dylan picked up the autographed postcard of Musial's Hall of Fame
plaque at Cooperstown and held it up triumphantly, as though he was a
corporate raider holding the proxy vote that he needed to take control
of a rival company. As we were leaving the building he whispered "His
autograph will be worth lots of money when he dies, won't it,
Dad?"

"When You're a God....."

"Good Evenin, Mitch. How's she going today?" Monk O'Bannion greeted one of his Happy Hour regulars from behind the bar as the slender,jet-black haired sporting goods salesman came through the door. By the time Mitch found himself an empty barstool, Monk would have a couple bottles of beer placed in front of him.

"I'm surviving, Monk," Mitch answered after pausing a moment to pour part of his first beer into the glass that he held in his left hand and sloped toward the bottle. Monk didn't acknowledge the response. He'd already turned to serve Vance Bolton, a heavy equipment operator, greeting him with the same standard "How's she goin?" query. MONK'S MENAGERIE was a popular spot in the late afternoon in the nineteen-eighties; a good place to unwind a bit after a full-day's work.

"Monk," was short for "Monkey," bartender

O'Bannion's nickname from back when he pitched for the Minneapolis Millers of the American Association in 1938-39. No one in this generation of Happy Hour regulars knew him by any other name. In fact, Vance Bolton suggested once that "Monkey" was the old bartenders baptised name because he was
born "as goddamned ugly as a chimp."

The big-eared, ape-faced, white haired bartender never denied it. "If I'd reached the majors," he once admitted wryly, "I would've replaced Don Mossi as the pitcher in the All-Ugly Hall of Fame." Yeah, compared to Monk, Yogi Berra was Clark Gable to Warren Spahn's Charlton Heston.

Old Monk's failure to reach the major leagues didn't sour him on baseball or leave him a bitter, defeated man. On the contrary, he had over the years turned the MENAGERIE into a shrine to the game. It was as if he was reaching back toward the Spring of his youth when he had been the happiest he'd been in his life and trying to recapture it, chasing after it like a youngster pursuing the bright orange fascination of a Monarch butterfly.

There was a trophy case against the west wall of the seating area. Besides the obligatory collection of bar league softball and bowling trophies, it housed the mementos of Monk's short-lived pitching career. Those relics commanded as much veneration as the bones of a Saint in a European cathedral. There was Monk's glove, his old Miller uniform, a game-used bat autographed by Harmon Killebrew, a baseball autographed by Bob Feller, a picture of Monk shaking hands with a young Hubert Humphrey, and a ball signed by Ted Williams, as well as a picture of that Boston diety, inscribed "Sorry about that, Monk...Ted Williams."

The Williams memorabilia demanded center stage in the display case. The MENAGERIE'S increasing collection of trophies could encroach upon the space alloted to Monk's items, the Feller ball or the Killebrew bat, but God help the barmaid whose placement of a new plaque or trophy obscured the Williams mementos.

Even "the Hump" could be shoved aside. "I'm no goddamned hippie," Monk would say, "but I lost a lot of respect for old Hubert when I saw him hugging Mayor Daley at the podium in Chicago in 68 while his cops were out there beating the shit out of the kids who were protesting the war. Those kids had every right to be out there demonstrating. I know a sellout when I see one, and the Hump, he sold out that day, major
league."

When Monk talked of Ted Williams, though, he spoke in reverential terms. Mitch knew the litany, which always went something like this....

"Yeah," Monk would begin, "I faced him during batting practice when he came up with the Millers. It was during an intra-squad game. Our team was leading 5-2 in the bottom of the ninth, but the bases were loaded,so our manager, Donny Bush, called me in from the bullpen. This young kid came up to pinch-hit for Lemmy Lemasters. Lemmy was slick with a glove, but he couldn't hit worth a shit. He never made it to the big leagues either. Anyway, I'd seen this Williams kid hit in the batting cage a few times, and he looked pretty good, but I figured I had experience going for me, you know."

Old Monk would always smile as he would recollect the scene in his mind before he'd begin to recount it.
"Well anyway," Monk would continue,"I worked the count to two and two on this kid. I figured that I had a pitch to play with, so I threw him a change-up. It was a FINE pitch. I had a helluva change at that time, you know. That Williams kid, he got around on it and that goddamned ball shot from his bat like a lightning bolt. He must have driven it over five hundred feet."

About this time in his soliloquy old Monk would pause and shake his head, still marvelling at the titanic power of the blast.

"That was it for my baseball career," he would shrug. Our manager figured that anyone who would serve up a mammoth shot like that wasn't major league material. I was cut from the team the next day."

Here it would come, Mitch thought. He'd heard old Monk recite his devotions often enough to be able to recite them by heart as well. Monk's soliloquy would now degenerate to hero-worship.

"Yeah," Monk would say. "Ted Williams took me out of the ballpark. Literally. I'm not bitter though. It took the best in the game to get the best of me. He took 521 major leaguers over the fence as well, so I can't feel too bad."

About this time Monk would lean back against the beer cooler and get a reflective, worshipful look on homely face.

"He was the greatest hitter ever," Monk would say firmly. "The God of the game. You've got to realize that he lost five of his best years to the service. When he went off to fight in World War II he had just won the Triple Crown. When he got called to Korea he'd just finished a year in which he batted .388 and hit 38 home runs. Figure five lost years would equal 200 more homers and at least a thousand more hits. And that's not even figuring in the designated hitter rule, which wasn't around when he played. With those kind of stats no one should deny that he was the greatest hitter who ever played the game. God, he was magnificent!"

Mitch could never understand Monk's attitude. If Williams had denied him a chance to fufill his dream, he would have nursed an implaccable hatred for the man. Monk's idolization of Williams reminded Mitch of the faith of a Latin American peasant, a peon who would always attribute his social standing, poverty and even natural disasters that affected him to "God's Will," but whom you'd still see on Sundays kneeling in rapt devotion in church.

Yeah, if by this time Monk hadn't been interrupted by a customer, he would finish up with a flourish.

"I saw Ted at a banquet twenty years later," he would say. "When I introduced myself, that Sonuvabitch remembered the stadium, the count and even the pitch that he'd hit off me. God, it was almost supernatural."

Yes, Mitch mused. If Monk O'Bannion worshipped anyone, it was the batter that knocked him out of baseball. He shrugged. Some guys were just tough to figure out.

Mitch waited for a lull in Monk's activity. Finally, as the old man leaned back against the cooler to relax a bit, Mitch saw his opening.

"Hey Monk. Did you hear who was voted into the Hall of Fame today?"

Monk turned and grunted. "Yeah, I heard. I wouldn't have voted for him, though."

"Why not?" asked Vance Bolton, looking at the bartender quizzically. "Shouldn't winning over 300 games give a guy almost an automatic entry?"

"I met him once," Monk growled as he drew a draft for another customer. "He's an arrogant
asshole."

"Where'd you meet him?" wondered Mitch.

"One of the guys that I used to hunt with lined him up to do a charity gig down in Dubuque." Monk paused to ransack through his memory a bit. "It was the Kiwanis Club or something like that."

"Yeah," Vance demanded. "So why does that make him an asshole?"

"From what I heard later," Monk explained as he bent down to get a bottle of that "non-alcoholic crap" from one of the floor coolers, "he'd spent the day huntin pheasant and boozin. Time he got to the banquet he was half-shitfaced. He wouldn't even take the time to sign autographs. Not even for the kids. He said that he was 'too goddamned tired.'"

"So," Mitch said, goading him a bit. "Your hero Teddy Ballgame wasn't much when it came to fan relations either."

The bartender glared at Mitch as though he's just uttered a blasphemy. "That's a load of crap," he retorted.
"Some reporters will write anything just to file a story. Ted was just so focused on the game, that's all."

"Did Williams sign autographs?" Vance Bolton asked."

"I remember reading," Monk said, "where once after a loss to the Yankees the Sox were pissed off. They wanted nothing more than to put New York City and its asshole fans behind them. There was a young boy, though, waiting by the team bus with his autograph book. Most of the ballplayers had shoved their way past him and onto the bus, but Ted, he noticed the discouraged look on the kid's face. He grabbed the autograph book and stormed onto the bus with it. After he got all of his teammates to sign it, he leaned out of the door of the bus and tossed the book to the astonished young boy, dismissing him with a curt "here you go kid, now beat it."

"What the hell does that prove?" asked a guy near the end of the bar, "other than that he's a jerk, too."

"You don't know nothin about baseball," Monk growled, dismissing the man contemptuously. "At least he got the kid some autographs."

"I heard that he wouldn't even tip his hat to the fans after his final game," Mitch volunteered.

Monk looked over at the life-sized cardboard icon of his hero that occupied part of the wall next to the jukebox. "He shouldn't have been expected to," he finally responded. "It was enough of an honor for us just to have been able to watch him play the game."

"Yeah, I hear what you're saying," Vance Bolton said sarcastically, holding his beer bottle sideways to signal that he needed a refill.  "When you can hit over .400 and whallop over 500 home runs you can get away with being an asshole."

"You don't understand anything," the old bartender bellowed defensively. "Trying to talk baseball with you guys is like trying to talk politics with that row of liquor bottles along the mirror there."

Monk paused to catch his breath as his memories drifted back to the Miller's home field, then to Fenway, then to the House that Ruth built.

"You had to have seen him play," Monk finally said. It was like watching a God when he'd stride up to the plate."

"An arrogant God, then" Mitch reminded him smugly, feeling that he'd gotten the better of the
argument.

"Well," Monk finally said softly, as his gaze moved from the bantering guys who were trying to get his goat to the trophy case where Ted's personal message to him was enshrined. "When you're a God, you've got the right to be arrogant."