Imperfect: An Improbable Life (11 page)

The back-and-forths with my parents petered out when I was maybe ten, when they’d recognized I was better off finding my way with what I had and, anyway, they had tired of the sulking arguments about it. I couldn’t hold a bat with that thing, couldn’t swing a hockey stick, and couldn’t even run without it clattering against itself and whatever else was nearby. The technology that was supposed to be extending my physical boundaries was keeping me off the playground at recess and slowing me to a walk. The best it did for me was to grant the motivation to be rid of it, which meant working the right arm I had until it became more reliable. My true arm was thin and slightly short and lacked the mobility of my left arm, but it had some life in it. Not having fingers was problematic, but my wrist worked okay. With my right arm, I could push things around, wedge things between my forearm and body, trap things, hold things steady, carry things with some nimbleness, and that all seemed to be a reasonable place to start. I was forever staining the right side of my shirts, where I cradled oranges in order to peel them and bike parts in order to fix them and baseballs in order to pitch them. I dropped a lot of stuff. I was frustrated when the easiest tasks required two hands, and so were nearly impossible for me. But it was better than the alternative, better than being Captain Hook. I’d left that behind; where, I didn’t know and didn’t care.

Where it was not—cinched neither to my body nor my
consciousness—was good enough. Into a new world of the usual high school frailties and rather pointed tensions, enough of them drawn along racial lines, I arrived at Central a little gangly, a little intimidated, a lot self-conscious and with my right hand stuffed deep into my right pocket. This was a tough school, a burdened school, and a basketball school. It also was the neighborhood school, which meant a few warm faces and a somewhat soothing intimacy. I’d played pickup ball on the gym floor for years, so I’d crawled the grounds and hallways before. That’s not to say it wasn’t at times a dangerous place. Just like Flint itself, there were shadowy corners at Central where being young, alone, and unimposing drew unwanted interest. The rumor on campus—supported anecdotally by various bloody noses and black eyes—held that a black gang was recruiting new members. Gang leaders required their candidates to batter a predetermined number of white faces, which might have grown their membership but did little for the rest of the school’s morale. This seemed a long way from the color blindness of Burroughs Park. I’d avoided those rites until a couple months into my freshman year when one morning I was climbing the stairs past the auto shop, heading for first period. The stairs amounted to a back entrance into school, the quickest route to my locker from Burroughs Park. Halfway up the first flight, I heard from around the corner what must have been a half-dozen boys coming from the other direction. They were talking loud, laughing, and at a quarter to eight in the morning quite obviously not coming to school but leaving. My stomach churned.

I paused, considered retreat, was caught in between, realized it was too late to run, and finally surrendered to the mobile gauntlet, thinking, “Aw, this isn’t going to be good.”

I reached the landing as they did and stood to the side as they
passed. Single file, they looked me over coldly, one after the other, four of them, then five, and when I came to believe I’d been thankfully unworthy of their scorn, the last of them balled his fist and hit me square in the jaw, sending me staggering into the wall. They whooped and hollered, a celebration for the pledge who’d come a white kid closer to full membership. My mouth hurt, my books were scattered on the landing, and I felt like a dope for wandering into the ambush, but mostly I was relieved they kept going. It wasn’t until I reached my locker that I began to shake. I brushed a few tears from my cheeks with the sleeve of my jacket. I’d assumed my turn was coming at some point, and I hoped that would be the worst of it. My buddy Mark Conover once made the mistake of allowing a stray basketball to roll into another game in gym class. The kid tripped by the ball waited for him in the locker room and beat him pretty good for it. Mark’s attacker was expelled, but that hardly calmed a population of white kids who felt terrorized.

For a long time, at least the first couple years, that was life at Central. If you fit the victim profile, you kept your head down, minimized eye contact, and hoped it wasn’t your day. The tough school in the tough town took its victims, and these were desperate kids who preyed on insecure ones. Fortunately, it was also a sports school in a sports town, which meant there were places where there were rules and pockets of etiquette and at least one way to rise above the random cold-cockings.

So started high school and the adolescent lessons. There were plenty of punches to be taken, ducked, and thrown. The next connected closer to the gut.

I regarded myself as a reasonably proficient basketball player, a certainty that blossomed on the asphalt courts around town and open-gym nights on the floor. Shortly after the flyers were posted
announcing freshman basketball tryouts, I showed up on the first of two days in my shorts, T-shirt, and high-tops. Half the boys of the freshman class, it seemed, turned out. This was Flint; everyone could play basketball. Those who couldn’t thought they could. Basketball was part of the culture of the city, like cars and unemployment.

The coach had a strategy that lacked nuance, but suited the crowd. He rolled out a few basketballs, blew his whistle and, from a distance with his arms crossed, sorted through the mayhem. On the hardwood of the Lavoie Field House, sides were chosen, games reared up, and the good players began separating themselves from the not-quite-good-enough players, and when the cuts came I was going to miss those not-so-good guys. I mixed in, made a very clever no-look touch pass with the coach—I was sure—staring straight at me, got a few rebounds, and a day later came to open-gym night for a pickup game when a few of us noticed the tryout results had been posted on the bulletin board. The names of the boys who’d made the team—fifteen of them—were listed in alphabetical order. It didn’t take long, then, to realize Abbott was not going to be there. None of my friends’ names were there, either.

Two months into high school, I’d been ambushed in a stairwell and lost the chance to play basketball.

Central basketball, as it turned out, was loaded. We—and by “we” I mean the guys who made the team—won three consecutive state championships beginning in 1981, drawing crowds from all over Michigan. As each banner was hung over the gym it became clearer to me why my name wasn’t on that bulletin board. Flint was a hoops city, and Central was in those years its heartbeat. Stan Gooch, the varsity coach then, won 406 games at Central. The real glory years were in the early eighties, when he won with city legends Eric Turner, Mark Harris, Marty Embry, Darryl Johnson, and Terence Greene.
The Central basketball dynasty ended in 1984, when Flint Northwestern showed up with Glen Rice, Andre Rison, and Jeff Grayer.

Long before then, I’d turned to baseball.

The game had come to me, and I to it, at Pierce Elementary School, a low-slung building less than a mile from Burroughs Park. I entered in fifth grade, so another new classroom, thirty new classmates, and thirty more explanations for what happened to my hand. We’d covered that ground—“I was born this way.” “No, it doesn’t hurt.” “I don’t know why it looks like that.” “No, nothing ‘happened.’ ”—when in late winter the teacher passed around a signup sheet for Little League baseball, finally. My new friends, most of whom lived in the neighborhood and ran Burroughs Park with me, had played organized baseball together the year before. They talked about the hits they had and the teams they beat and who could pitch and who couldn’t, and I was envious. I’d played T-ball and enough backyard Wiffle ball and, after being turned away a hundred times, I’d earned my way into some of the neighborhood games. Dad, of course, had played a large role in that, staring down at his sniveling firstborn in the kitchen and ordering him back to the park. If the older kids were going to ignore me and my hopeful gaze and my stunted arm, Dad wasn’t going to hear it. This was the man, after all, who’d once convinced me I would do hard time for grand theft bubblegum.

I
WAS MAYBE
ten. Chad and I had accompanied Mom to the grocery store and on the way through the checkout line a pack of gum practically jumped into my pocket. On the way home, I’d dragged Chad into the crime, and we chomped away merrily in the backseat. Mom was on to me. Dad got home, drama ensued, and he and I left the
house with him announcing, “Say good-bye to your mom and your brother.” Chad, I think, eyed the big bedroom. We drove to Flint jail, the kindly officer played along, and it wasn’t until the cell door was open and I was standing on the precipice of solitary confinement that Dad figured he’d taken the lesson far enough. Mom was kinder, but just as firm. Since the drive back to Flint from Grand Rapids and Mary Free Bed years before, the course was set: Jimmy was going to find his way, one way or the other. This was a boy, and that’s what he’d be raised as. The world was unforgiving, and Jimmy might as well learn that now.

They weren’t exactly right. At least I don’t suspect so. There was a lot of forgiveness out there. For every five sneering kids on every sandlot field who couldn’t imagine how I could possibly help their team, there was a man willing to teach me to tie my shoes. There was a coach who would be sure I got my at-bat and two innings in the field. There was Dad, who in his hard lessons ached to toughen me for whatever lay ahead, and Mom, whose soft heart could hardly bear to watch any of it, but did, and with uncommon compassion. Coaches, all those coaches, seemed to line up to help. Even as a child, I could barely summon the courage to complain, other than about the hook. That, I hated. When the frustration bubbled up, and one too many kids gawked at me for a little too long, and I didn’t think I’d ever be free from what others must be thinking, I’d wonder how this thing had found me. Everybody else had been granted two hands and a life without complications. I was different, unfairly burdened, and always would be. How could I play ball like this? Meet a girl like this? Have a regular life? Immediately, I’d regret the thoughts, like I’d abandoned the fight for myself and my parents and all the people who were trying to believe in me. I’d burn it off by shooting hoops in the driveway, or lying on my back on the lawn and throwing
a baseball into the air, counting its revolutions before it fell back into my hand.

Because, in the end, there was always baseball.

Mark Conover’s father, Neil, coached that fifth-grade team. We played at Kearsley Park, a fifteen-minute bike ride from home, past the high school and the hospital and the community college, most of it following Gilkey Creek. For the first time, I had a team, and a game that wouldn’t send me away, and a real uniform. In my mirror, a mesh shirt, matching cap, and jeans counted as much as a uniform as Al Kaline’s whites and Olde English D. “Grant Hamady Realty,” written across my chest, might as well have said “Tigers.” I had a position: the left-handed third baseman. Mark’s dad even put me in to pitch once in a while, innings that often would course through a walk or two, some reasonable velocity and, I’m guessing, a few parents concerned for the safety of their little batters.

But I belonged.

Kearsley Park was in a floodplain. The baseball field was mostly dirt, except for the times it was all mud. On game days, we’d hang our gloves from our handlebars, wedge our bats under our arms, and ride as fast and straight as we could without sending a bat bouncing wildly across the pavement. We had only a few that weren’t already broken, after all. When it rained, we’d gather rakes and shovels from our garages, add those to our uneven loads, meet at the field, and push the puddles into foul territory. We couldn’t bear the thought of not playing. We lived for it. That team made the city championship game, which we showed up for in sweatpants that actually matched our T-shirts. It was a magnificent moment fouled only by the fact that we didn’t win.

By the time I left those alternately dusty and boggy fields and reached high school, my arm had hundreds of innings on it. Some
were in the park league, the summer league, and the Connie Mack league, where I was gradually finding the strike zone. But most of those innings were thrown in my backyard, or up the road in Harold and Howard Croft’s backyard, or in a corner of Burroughs Park, or against the side of the house. Again, my control was coming. By the end of the day, Chad generally was carrying fewer welts to the dinner table.

I played on the freshman team at Central, mostly as a pitcher and left fielder, occasionally as a first baseman. The season wasn’t long, and when it was over I thought I’d hung in there pretty well, except baseball was becoming my sport even at a time before specialization, and I’d batted .000. It seemed low. In fact, teammates who weren’t really ballplayers—as I was beginning to consider myself—got hits. But not me. I wish I could say it was bad luck.

Still, as I returned for my sophomore season, which presumably meant a promotion to junior varsity, two ideals were forming in me, one in my arm and another in my heart.

Baseball was the easy part. Not the game itself, but the mechanics of it and certainly my love for it. That spring came quickly, though the weather was wet and cold and so too was the field house at Central. On the first day of practice, the infielders spread out over the gym floor, the outfielders reported to the batting cages on the mezzanine level, and the pitchers went to the mounds—wooden risers topped with carpet—alongside the cages. The place was so alive with baseball I couldn’t help but grin. Baseball talk, baseball sounds, baseball smells, baseball everything; it meant another Michigan winter would soon be over and another baseball season was coming. The year before, Bob Holec, the varsity coach, had gathered the pitchers and held up the front page from that day’s paper. The photo was of Jack Morris, the Detroit Tigers’ ace. Opening Day at Tiger
Stadium had been postponed because of snow, but Black Jack was on the mound anyway and about to deliver a pitch. In his right hand he held a snowball. Holec pointed at Morris’s elbow, then his front shoulder, his hips, and his stride leg, all mechanically perfect. “This is what we’re looking for,” Holec announced. We nodded at Morris’s supreme snowball-throwing form and headed to our stations. A year later, I thought of that photo again.