Imperfect: An Improbable Life (10 page)

The games were unforgiving. If I hadn’t already figured it out, nobody was going to feel sorry for me. More likely, they were going to force me right, and that was true in basketball and in life.

While I’d always felt different and knew I’d have to live with it, I began to stand up to those feelings in high school, sometimes in those gyms, but mostly on the baseball field. I was never completely comfortable or free of uncertainty, but I had my protected place.
When I was unsure, baseball would tell me I was all right, that I’d done something well. It was my self-image. Hey, I’d been in the newspaper. I’d been on TV. The doubt would come and go, but I could lean on my parents, all they’d instilled in me, and I could lean on the game, and what it meant for me. There was always another issue, it seemed, no matter how I tried to outrun it. But I’d done stuff on the field, been better at something.

And I’d won my share, no matter what my hand looked like.

CHAPTER 6

B
y the time he was done, Jim Thome would be one of the great home-run hitters in baseball history, right there with Mickey Mantle and Reggie Jackson and Frank Robinson, pushing 600 home runs for his career.

On September 4, 1993, he had five.

In 285 at-bats, he had struck out 64 times. He had turned twenty-three eight days before, and at that age was what you’d call a swing-hard-in-case-you-hit-it guy. It wouldn’t be long before he swung hard and hit it a lot, but for the moment he was a young man with a puncher’s chance of completely ruining an otherwise promising afternoon.

Thome was a big, strong hitter who had a long swing from the left side, meaning my cutter—if I wasn’t careful—was generally running into the path of all that barrel. The strategy was to throw the cutter at his right hip and maybe have it catch the inside corner, then go away with the cutter off the plate. Even at that age Thome could keep the inside fastball fair, so if I missed, I wanted to miss in on his hands.

Yankee Stadium was a wonderful ballpark, particularly for a left-handed pitcher. Guys like Thome, however, made that right-field fence feel very close.

On a bit of an uppercut swing, he flied to Bernie Williams in center field.

From one hitter to the next, you couldn’t get much more extreme than Thome to Junior Ortiz, the Indians’ catcher who, in thirteen big-league seasons, would hit five home runs. In fact, by the time I saw him, he hadn’t hit one in four years and wouldn’t ever hit another—that fact alone was reason enough to pitch around Thome if it came to it. Ortiz was smallish, right-handed, and could be pesky, in that way where you didn’t want the number 9 hitter extending an inning, getting on base for the top of the Indians’ order or making you work any harder than you had to.

He grounded out to second baseman Mike Gallego.

So, I was through the order once. I’d walked a couple, struck out a couple, and generally stuck to the plan—Nokes’s, pitching coach Tony Cloninger’s, bullpen coach Mark Connor’s, mine. It wasn’t spectacular—we weren’t even winning yet—but the ball was coming out of my hand pretty well. I’d given myself over to Nokes and our plan entirely, throwing what we wanted, hopefully in the area we wanted. His intentions were exactly mine, so I almost could see his fingers call for pitches before they uncurled from his fist.

By comparison, at this point six days before in Cleveland—two out in the third inning—against a similar batting order, I’d already given up nine hits and seven runs. The only difference for the day game after the night game was that Indians manager Mike Hargrove had subbed out Sorrento, Espinoza, and Alomar Jr.

Maybe I’d worked the Indians’ lineup to overconfidence.

I finished the third inning by getting another ground ball, this
time pitching more aggressively to Lofton, this time trusting my cutter and Nokes’s feel for it. I followed the ball to Gallego and then to Don Mattingly, and made my way to the dugout, by then allowing myself the notion that this would, indeed, maybe, quite possibly be a better day.

CHAPTER 7

T
he brick, mortar, and soaring gloom of Central Community High School stood four stories above Crapo Street in Flint’s East Village, commanding the sort of stern consideration a medieval fortress would against its sprawling fiefdom. The campus covered forty-three acres, spanning at least four blocks on each border. Better known as Flint Central or simply Central, the school opened in 1923, twenty years after Buick Motor Company began building engines in a single-story plant in town and nineteen years after William Crapo Durant took control of Buick.

Bookended by a public library to the north and Whittier Middle School to the south, Central was distinguishable for its capital E structural design, bell tower, solemn architectural details, and stately carriage. The place had heft, as though it had risen from the earth of its own diligence. Sixty years after its first graduating class, there was little one would consider fanciful about the place; not the low ceilings, not the broad concrete steps at the main entrance, not the tall windows painted shut, not the people in its locker-lined hallways, and not the neighborhood it dominated.

Once, as many as two thousand students over three classes—tenth through twelfth—walked over the lawns, along the cement sidewalks and past the flagpole into its classrooms each morning. By the time it closed in 2009 from neglect and economic circumstance, the school’s population was closer to one thousand over four classes. People were leaving Flint and taking their kids with them.

I arrived in the fall of 1981, having graduated from across the parking lot at Whittier and now just another of the faceless hundreds endeavoring toward something like adulthood. My family lived by then in a house on Burroughs Park, a tree-lined meadow that broadened as it curled north and west over three hundred or so yards toward the middle and high schools. Gilkey Creek skirted one side of the park, which served many purposes for the boys who lived on its perimeter. Depending on the season, the park was a football field, a hockey rink, a baseball diamond, a snowball battleground, a wrestling mat, a cover for a few secret minutes of a budding romance, and a place to kill time before the sun went down. Every summer night, clumps of dirt and smears of grass from the park went home on the knees and elbows of every kid who ran it, no exceptions—not the middle-class white kids from the east border or the lower-income black kids from its west side. The distinctions in our park were not drawn from race, however, but from the final scores of the games we played, and from the courage shown in those knockdown-drag-outs, and from the hospitality of moms who poured Kool-Aid from the porches closest to the park. This is where we scored the first significant touchdowns of our lives, and learned to drag the bat head to go the other way. We practiced our hockey stops on the frozen creek until our knees and elbows were raw. It’s where we threw and took our first punches, leaving us breathless and sad.

Some of the early founders of Flint once lived along Burroughs Park, but, like so much in Flint, things weren’t what they once were.

After a lot of bouncing around, settling in neighborhoods and then—for one reason or another, often because of the schools—moving on, the Abbotts and their two boys moved into the middle of three houses at the end of a short road overlooking the park. By then, some of those big, beautiful homes were showing their age. The lives of many of the breadwinners in the cul-de-sacs and verdant streets near Burroughs Park would change in the 1980s, just as they would all over Flint, when General Motors began boarding up its manufacturing plants. For decades a man in Flint could chart his course from the playground to high school to an assembly line or management job at GM, the path their fathers and grandfathers had taken to middle-class stability. When the jobs disappeared, so too did Flint’s hope, and the street corners that had been edgy in my father’s youth became strictly off-limits in mine.

We settled there when I was in fifth grade, between an elegant old couple on one side and a professor and his wife on the other. Gardens colored their backyards. Our house, by our previous standards, was huge, with spacious rooms and fireplaces that heated them. A furnace dominated the basement. Running it was expensive, so Dad bought a wood-burning stove, attached it to the furnace, and fed the stove with the wood from pallets he’d collect from the family meat business. One afternoon he called me over to the stack of pallets in the backyard and said, “Jim, lemme show you how to take these things apart.” Then, with a grin, he cranked up a chainsaw. I swept up the sawdust. In spite of its size and the large property it sat on, the house was affordable because the streets that led to ours had begun to reflect the coming economic recession. Chad and I walked
to school—through the backyard, over Gilkey Creek where once a wanderer’s dead body had been discovered and dominated our conversations for weeks, across the park, and up a hill, where we’d turn back toward the house. Mom and Dad would wave from the front door—
Everything all right?
—and we’d wave back.

Some of the best friends in my life were made in the Wiffle ball games in that backyard, and in the trees scaled in that park, and at the ends of the bike rides that would deliver me to pickup games that might or might not accept me. After all the moving around, it was good not to be the new kid, the different kid, and better to be the familiar kid. It was good not to answer the questions. And it was especially good to be simply one of the guys, no better or worse. It took a few beatings to get there. The neighborhood mirrored a diverse city, one that was hurting in a lot of ways. So when dusk came and the games thinned out, the white kids and black kids would wave their good-byes and head to their neutral corners until tomorrow, just like the skinny kids and chubby kids and the one-handed kid.

By the time I tromped across Burroughs Park for my first classes at Flint Central, the city’s unemployment rate paralleled those of crime, inflation, and despair, each racing to determine which would sink Flint first. As GM was planning the celebration of its seventy-fifth anniversary and the United Auto Workers its fiftieth, nearly a quarter of the city’s working-age population was idle. Downtown, Montgomery Ward, J. C. Penney, and Smith-Bridgman closed. When the local food market advertised to fill a couple entry-level positions, applicants stood two-deep around the block. Some brought sleeping bags, coolers, and lawn chairs. Crack cocaine became the new industry, homicide and arson the new hobbies. As the decade wore on,
Money
magazine surveyed three hundred major U.S. cities
for their livability; Flint was three hundredth. Few who lived there were surprised, though they cloaked their reactions in outrage.

We were okay. Dad was selling beer. Folks always had money for beer. Mom was an attorney. Folks always needed a way out of trouble. We had food to eat, clean clothes to wear, and plenty of pallets to carve up and burn.

Years before, I’d worn down my parents on the subject of the prosthetic limb, so by my freshman year I couldn’t have said whether it was in a box in the garage or in a hospital storeroom or in a city landfill or on some other kid’s arm. As I’d neared the end of elementary school, the last place I saw it was on the floor of my bedroom closet, there with five sneakers that were too small or tattered, toys I’d outgrown, a pair of snow pants, and a plastic bat split along its seam that one day could be brought back to life with duct tape. “I haven’t worn that in a long time,” I thought, “I don’t think I ever will again.” While I was glad to be rid of it, that arm held more than cables and bands. It symbolized my parents’ efforts to help me. Their intentions were good and pure, and I felt a responsibility to them, though not enough to wear it. I felt bad about that. Sometimes, as heavy as it was on my shoulder, it was heavier on the floor.

The arm was in the clothes closet because that’s how I thought of it—as a part of my wardrobe, along with the pants and shirts and jackets I wore to school. It went on in the morning and came off the moment I walked through the front door at the end of the school day. The stump socks were folded in the sock drawer of the dresser. The elastic bands that operated the pincers but wore out so fast sat in a tangle on the bookshelf. “Where’s your arm?” Mom would ask before breakfast. “Where’s your arm?” Dad would demand as I gathered my lunchbox and homework. Some days I’d huff away, return to the closet, strip off my shirt, strap on my arm, and stomp off to school.
Others, I’d plead for a respite, just one day off, promising to wear it again the next day. Eventually, gloriously, there were no more tomorrows for my right arm, though twenty-five years later a man I didn’t know contacted me, said he was in possession of my arm—guaranteed it—and asked if I would like to buy it back. I was mortified, though less so when he described what he had, and it turned out what he was hoping to sell could not have come from my closet. It was a left arm.