For use: Wednesday, March 14

mfinley.com: "Forget it, Jake"

by Michael Finley

Last summer, when I was helping coach youth league baseball, a boy I was trying to help hit better hit a line drive right at the shortstop. He scowled as he headed back to the dugout to get his glove.

"Forget it, Jake," I said to him as he passed me on the baseline, "it's Chinatown."

The kid couldn’t possibly get the reference to the 1974 movie. Every now and then I do that, drop some odd tag-line from some ancient source into conversation. In this case the message was right on: "Don’t feel bad about being out, there was nothing you could do about that." But the kid, whose name was not Jake (Jack Nicholson was Jake), would never know that.

This put me in mind of a city softball team I was on in the 1970s. It was barely organized ball. The police had a team, the fire department had a team, and various neighborhoods had teams. Ours was the Fair Oaks Freaks, because we hailed from a stoner's paradise not far from the art museum in Minneapolis. Several on our team were heroin users, lining up for methadone every morning. Our pitcher was an Ojibwe of indeterminate age named Julius, who sometimes seemed to fall asleep on the mound.

I had two roommates on the team, Tony and Paul, and each was a powerful hitter. To my memory, nearly every pitch to them was lifted back over the field and over the chain link fence separating us from the tennis court. They were good, and we were the number two team in the league, after the cops, who just beat hell out of everyone.

This was in the very early days of gay liberation, and one of the teams was the gay team, and they didn’t have one strong player, and they lost all their games that first season, by hideous margins. But what I remember was that the first time I came to the plate against them, the catcher, an overweight young man with the expression of Mary at the foot of the cross, tried to comfort me.

"Don’t worry if you swing at the ball and miss," he told me. "Just do your best, and whatever that is, that's OK."

He wasn't trying to psyche me out, like a lot of catchers will. He said this from the heart.

I would like to say I took the advice to heart, but it had the opposite effect on me -- I felt I had to hit the ball, and pretty well, too. I did not want to be consoled, I wanted to get on base.

One of my two roommates, Paul, was a Clark Kentish sort of man, built big, and wearing black-rimmed glasses. Paul was an orphan, his parents having been killed -- this is my recollection -- in a car accident when he was a boy. What I remember about Paul is how hard he worked to stay positive, to perform well, to drive that ball predictably over the chain link fence. He was a full time good guy. I think he felt he had to be extra good to belong at all.

Once, he was helping me launch my abortive home soda pop business ("Sonny Boy's Root Beer" -- had a picture of my dog on the label. We were eventually shut down by the city of Minneapolis for manufacturing comestibles in non-industrial zone.) Paul's job that day was capping the bottles of root beer, but he applied the cap with such force that the bottle shattered, and the glass cut his thumb, severing a nerve. Red blood and brown root beer swamped the kitchen table, and mingled on the linoleum floor.

Paul could never feel his thumb again after that, and as his employer -- I never paid him anything, but it was my root beer  -- I have to carry that around with me.

I went to Paul's wedding that year. He married a woman named Paulette. He was the first peer of mine to get married. I wonder what became of him, and Paulette, and his thumb.

Me, I loved playing ball that year. I hadn’t played since I was 13, and I was too old for the Pony League, and not good enough to make the high school team. But I was good enough for slow-pitch. I loved to put myself in front of a screaming grounder, snag it somehow, and fire it to first and hear the whap! of the ball smacking the trapper. I couldn’t hit, but I was murder on those ground balls.

I started going to Met Stadium about that time, and discovered it all over again. I would drink too much beer and scream deliriously as the mediocre Twins ground into one double play after another. The names of greatness: Bobby Randall,  Paul Thormodsgard, Pete Redfern, Willie Norwood.

It's great when the Bambino busts one and the ball dwindles to a dot and drops behind the Marlboro ad. But I always found meaning in the muffed pop-up, the dribbler to first, the swing and the miss. In the players' misery at having failed, I wanted to tell them, Hey guy, I understand.

Like the man said, it's no disgrace. In Chinatown, or any other place.

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