Ain't no asylum here.

Stein, Allen

When you live in the Bronx, things can get weird. But you just have to shrug and keep moving. This was worse than usual, though, I swear to God. I mean I've seen people do crazier stuff--but the thing is Coach G was the last guy you'd think would pull something like that, a real great guy, you know? So I guess I'm just not shrugging so good right now.

The thing is we shouldn't have been going over there in the first place, and I knew it right off. Sure, Father Prioli's always looking for ways to get our school doing helpful stuff, you know, like our civic duty, but I have to wonder whether you're doing mentally sick people a favor making them watch St. Dom's go against Mary Our Mother. I mean we're both pretty good dubs, but high school baseball's just high school baseball. It's not like they're gonna be watching any A-Rod or Derek Jeter, right? And who wants to get a bunch of sick people bored even sicker? You go out there and it's almost like you're looking for trouble. Over there, nothing really adds up, no box score, if you know what I mean, not ever, and who needs that? And I'm not saying that it's necessarily like what they got over there is catching or something but I don't know.

Don't get me wrong, neither: it's not like I don't care about the mentally sick people. In fact, I always feel so sorry for them that I can't even stand to look at them. I don't know, maybe it's because I had to look at my grandmother too much or something. Sweet Jesus, she had her problems. After my father died, we couldn't even talk about him when we were around her because she'd go wild, yelling that we were all playing some kind of trick on her, and he was alive somewhere, hiding and laughing at her, his own mother, and at his wife and kids, too.

And he was such a good guy, always playing ball with me and everything, even with the cancer, right up to the last. I know she couldn't help what she thought, but it really gave me the creeps. I mean she was allowed to talk about seeing the Pope buzzing her window lots of nights in a little plane--no kidding--and I couldn't talk about my dad. Craziness. And, oh God, she'd get so upset sometimes when the Pope wouldn't look her way when he flew by. She'd cry to me, "The Pope, he don't return my love, Matty. The Pope, he ignores me. Maybe I should just kill myself and burn in hell and be done with it."

She was also convinced my grandfather was running around with bimbos--which only could have been true if bimbos went for bald, half-blind little seventy-year-old Italian tailors without all their teeth, a guy whose idea of a good time was falling asleep in front of a TV ball game while he's telling the grandkids for the hundredth time that he saw Joe DiMaggio play in person.

But he stayed with her to the end. She didn't kill herself. She just died. I guess it's almost a year now, and a month later the old man's heart quit, and he joined her. Loyalty. You got to tip your cap to it.

And, oh God, this one day she meets Coach G. I'm out with her on the street and we run into him. This was back just before his first wife died when she accidentally took too much of some kind of medicine she had for depression or something. Everybody figured he was a lot better off anyway when he married Miss Clancy, that gym teacher with the nice ass. Well, when I have to introduce Coach G to the woman the Pope gave the cold shoulder to, she's not getting any cold shoulder now. Coach grins and says, "Gee, you could've fooled me, Matty. I thought this gorgeous young thing was your date." She's got legs like chunks of telephone poles and a mustache like Geraldo Rivera's, but Coach G's just trying to be nice. So I go 'heh heh,' to try to show my grandmother that the nice man is making a little joke, you know, but she stares at him like he just got off the ship from Saturn, and then she says, "This is not my boyfriend. This is my grandson, my Matty, he plays baseball. I can prove it. I have a picture of him in a baseball suit. My husband, he saw foe DiMaggio play. At the Yankee Stadium--where the Pope had that big mass I went to." She said it like the mass had been just the other day, but she's talking about maybe three or four Popes back and like forty years ago. Then she goes, "He runs around with women. He's going to run off with a floozy. You know what I'm talking about, don't you?" And she points her finger right at Coach G's face. "You know," she says, her finger trembling, and then she lowers it and jabs him in the center of his chest, till he's not grinning anymore. I figure it sounds like she means it's the Pope that has the girl on the side, so I whisper to Coach that she means my grandfather, and then I say out loud, "No, Grandma, Coach Guerra don't know nothing about any of that." She slowly puts down that trembling finger and says, "I can tell he does, I can tell!"

I don't say another thing, and Coach G, who looks kind of dazed now, gives her a little unsure smile, and tells her that she has a fine grandson and all that. She tells him my father's hiding somewhere far away, and he nods, pats me on the shoulder, and walks off, his head down, feeling kind of sorry for me, I guess. And after that, on the ballfield, he seemed to holler "attaboy" at me even a bit more than he used to, but it's hard to tell, 'cause he was always the kind who was encouraging guys.

Okay, so then we've got the game at the asylum four days ago, and boy does everything get messed up. On the bus going over there everybody's cracking stupid jokes like don't go chasing anything too far into foul territory or some Hannibal Lector type will send you back out onto the field missing your cojones or like the whole place is going to smell of come because half the guys in the asylum spend all their time jacking off. You know, junk like that. And Frankie Calderon says to Joey Rella, "Hell, you should talk about them jackin' off, ha, when you got more fingerprints on your dick than the FBI has in their files!" I don't know, maybe they were kidding around so much 'cause they were nervous about going over there to play. Anyway, Coach G told them to can it, that we were trying to do something nice, so we ought to act like it, with some class, you know.

If guys weren't nervous before we got there, they were once we pulled into the place. It's off in this kind of little woodsy place, right up near the Westchester line, and it was like you weren't in the Bronx anymore, because it was just too neat and clean and quiet, there behind this tall chain-link fence, with every building just this blank-looking tan and thick screens over all the windows, and everybody dressed in gray pants and shirts, just sitting around staring, on benches or walking slowly, and almost none of them talking to each other, though some of them were saying things to people who weren't there.

Well, the bus is real quiet now, and we pass through the main part of the place and follow a little road through a bunch of trees, up to this ballpark that you couldn't see was there. It's actually a nice ballfield, too, well-kept and everything. And they even have a little grandstand behind home plate, you know permanent seats with a roof over them. It looks like it can hold maybe about five hundred people, no kidding. I thought maybe it was there from before they built the asylum, and I wondered for a second whether anyone who'd ever played on that field as a kid ended up back there on the inside. It gave me a chill, so right away I made myself think about the game.

But things are just so fuckin' strange, because all through pre-game practice and right into the first inning it's only the two teams and the umps and the empty seats. You see, Father Prioli had told us that none of our family or friends would be allowed to come, only the mental patients, but they weren't showing yet. One of the guys whispered to me that maybe they were all too busy jacking off or eating each other's brains or something. I laughed and told him I hoped so. I mean I never played with absolutely no one watching before, and it was pretty eerie, but I figured it would be a lot better than playing in front of the guys we were expecting.

But during the top of the first, Father Prioli shows up with a guy who's got a suit and tie on and looks like he might be the top keeper, and I think "Oh shit, they're on their way!" And I'm right, because in the bottom of the first I'm in the dugout waiting to come up--I'm batting fifth--and I see the leftfielder and the third baseman for MOM looking out toward the trees we drove through. And then the leftfielder calls over to the centerfielder and the third baseman calls over to the shortstop, and I hear the shortstop whistle and say "Jesus Christ!" out loud, and then everyone in the field is looking--even the pitcher's not looking in at Rella, who's up at bat.

So it's not just me, of course, right? I mean nobody's feeling real good, I can tell, about what's heading towards us. From where we're sitting we can't see just yet what it is, because we don't have the right angle, but obviously it's not too hard to tell. Now Rella and the MOM catcher are whispering together and just staring, and I tell you, when Rella turns toward our bench, with his eyes, I swear, wide and round as baseballs, only without the stitches, it's no big surprise to me when he says, "He-e-e-re they come."

Another minute or so and all of us in the dugout can see them, too. It's two long lines of guys, maybe a couple of hundred, all dressed in gray, and walking really slow. And from where I am it seems like none of them are saying anything. Oh man, talk about weird-looking! You ever see a crowd coming to a ballgame and they're all dead quiet? It was something. And there were maybe only about ten keepers watching them, and I didn't see any guns or clubs on the keepers neither.

And you know what also was so weird? The way they came in and sat down in the grandstand. I mean the way the keepers led them all in. You know when you're at the ballgame how the stands fill up with small clumps of people here and there, right? Until the spaces between the clumps fill in and you have a crowd at the old ballpark. Well here they filled it row by row in straight lines. I mean, I know that doesn't sound so strange, but it is when you see it, I swear. A straight gray line just winding in, row by row, like a big, quiet snake.

And, mostly, they stayed quiet till they left, except for a couple of times. I think it was the bottom of the sixth when they started marching them out just the same way they brought them, the long gray snake going back now to where it crawled out of. I guess what it must've been was that they had a time limit or something on how long they could be on the outside, and that's why they missed the first inning and the last. But, like I say, they didn't miss much, because we weren't in the game after the second inning and played pretty bad.

I mean I didn't do so bad myself, with a double past third in three at-bats, and I made a pretty decent running catch deep in the left-center gap, but it's a team game, so who gives a shit how I did, right? And we could've done better even though we were overmatched a little. I mean we could've done a little better than going down 8-2 to them. Just wasn't our day, I guess.

But like I say, the "fans" were pretty quiet mostly. I think maybe half of them must've been all drugged up anyway, because so many of them just sat there staring straight ahead and hardly moving the whole time, like with their eyes glazed. Or maybe we just bored them into being dead men sitting, I don't know.

A few of them here and there acted up a little, though, but not in any real bad way, you know, just some silly crap like when Taverez teed off on one for MOM, a three-run shot so high out over the left field fence you'd need reservations to ride on it, this one fat old guy, maybe fifty or so, comes sprinting over to the top of MOM's dugout and starts doing this weird dance to some music in his head, maybe welcoming Taverez back to the bench, I don't know. Taverez, I guess he's feeling good because of the shot he hit--who wouldn't?--he's laughing his ass off looking at the guy and he blows him a kiss. The guy pretends like he faints, falls flat on his fat ass on top of the dugout and lays straight out, his belly bulging to the sky. The keepers come and get him back to his seat, and all of us are laughing a little now, except for most of the guys in gray in the stands. They don't show anything much at all.

And there's this one poor nut in the stands who keeps yelling stuff like "Hey, where's Willie, Mickey and the Duke?" You know from that baseball song from years ago about Mays and Mantle and Snider? He must've yelled that for an inning or two, and nobody bothered to stop him, not the other nuts sitting near him, who didn't even turn and look at him, or the keepers, who probably are so used to that kind of stuff they don't even know they're hearing it anymore.

And then he starts yelling "Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio?" And he yells that for an inning or so. I'm sorry my grandmother wasn't around anymore so she could go over to him and tell him that her husband saw Joe DiMaggio play in person. I got so tired of hearing him yell that line that I felt like going over to tell him that Joe had gone off to where my dad and grandparents and Marilyn Monroe had gone already. After awhile I guess the nut's throat finally gave out, because his voice got lower and lower and then he finally stopped. But he was a garner all right.

But the thing is there was this one other guy yelling stuff, and this guy was even weird for there: he's small and skinny and he's pale as a ghost. And this guy starts in, right about when things begin going against us, with "Get Dr. Kevorkian, I want Dr. Kevorkian, I can't take this anymore."

Well, he keeps yelling shit like that, and it almost seems like it comes out most when St. Dom's is having things go wrong, like we did most of the game, of course. So MOM's scoring runs, and we're looking bad, and this guy's screaming for Kevorkian and carbon monoxide and shit like that, and the keepers aren't doing much to quiet him down, and Father Prioli is turning around like he's getting annoyed about it, and Coach Guerra, well normally nothing much gets to him, but I see he looks kind of pale and upset, like the whole thing is really getting on his nerves, and he keeps staring at the guy, even while the game's going on. I mean the thing's a pain, but I'm really surprised it's getting to him like that.

And then the guy yells something like "You betrayed me, and I only wanted to love you. Give me my tranquilizers now, you bastards, all of them. I want to sleep and never wake up."

Well, it was like both real sad and real funny at once. One of our guys, Donnie Donovan--he's a real pisser--says "Jeez, I know we're playing bad today, but I didn't think it was bad enough to betray his fuckin' love." That cracked us up, of course. We're trying not to, but we're really cracking up, just about dying, me too. I mean I know you're not supposed to laugh when you're losing, but we couldn't help it, I swear to God. I mean it was such a strange day, that right then it was like hilarious.

Good thing we were batting, so Coach Guerra wasn't on the bench with us, or he would have gone nuts fight then. But he was coaching down at third, and this time he yells up into the stands, "Hey! Isn't there somebody up there who can quiet that guy? We're trying to play a ballgame here, and he's making the kids nervous. If you don't stop him now, I'm going to pull our team. I'd rather take a forfeit than have them hear this kind of stuff."

Well, maybe about seven or eight of the head cases start booing Coach Guerra, yelling at him for being mean and not letting the poor pale guy alone. And now Father Prioli's kind of upset at Coach Guerra. In fact, he calls him over, and I can see he's giving him some kind of lecture, and Coach Guerra's nodding his head yeah, yeah, though it's kind of obvious he's still worked up.

But he gets what he wants anyway, because two keepers go over to the guy and say something to him, and I can see he's telling them, "uh-uh, no way." And next thing you know, they've got him by the arms and they're dragging him away. He lets out one big yell, "You always spit on my love," I think is what it was, just before he's out of the ballpark, and then we can see him going off with the keepers. They've got him by the arms, but he's not fighting them, he's just walking along now, back down the road to whatever locked-up place they're gonna put him in.

Coach Guerra is just standing there now, his head down, poking at the ground with his baseball cleats, and doesn't even seem to be paying much attention to the game anymore. I mean he gives us signals and stuff and every so often calls out something kind of encouraging, but you can see his heart's not much in it now, and he's just waiting for the game to be over and for us to get out of there. And that's not like him at all because he's usually a never-say-die kind of guy. And you can see too that he never lets himself look in the stands anymore or at Father Prioli either.

Well, the game finally ends, and we go down the line of the MOM guys, shaking hands with them. By the way, their coach told me "Good game," and he called me by my name too. And I don't think he did that with anyone else on St. Dom's, so, like I say, I guess I myself didn't play all that bad out there. And their coach gives Coach Guerra his hand and says "Rough circumstances today." Coach Guerra shakes the other coach's hand and then he says this strange thing: he says, "They're the only kind of circumstances I know." He sort of mutters it almost like he's talking to himself more than to the other coach. And he looked real down, like it was more than just from losing a game, you know? But I figured, okay, we get back on the bus and get out of that place that could depress anybody and that'll be the end of it. We go home, start fresh tomorrow and everything's back to normal, right?

But of course things don't work out like that at all. I mean at first on the bus it seemed like they were going to. We started rolling, and then Coach Guerra, who was sitting up front by himself like always, turned around to talk to us, and he seemed pretty much okay by then. I mean he didn't say anything out of the ordinary, just told us that there are gonna be days like that, so just shake it off and the sun'll come up tomorrow. You know, that kind of stuff, though his voice was kind of sad, which wasn't like him.

Okay, so then we're on the bus, driving along, and things are quiet and starting to feel a little like usual, and we're almost home, and that fuckin' idiot Tony Aranda, whose brains have got to be somewhere buried deep in his ass, starts giggling and then sort of moans in a high-pitched voice, "You betrayed my love. I want to sleep and never wake up." And most of the guys laugh. I don't, though, and I've got a real bad feeling now. And a couple of guys start singing in a kind of doo-wop style, "I want to slee-ee-ee-eep and never, never, ever, wake up."

Well, Coach Guerra turns around and I can't believe what he says. And he's not even screaming or anything either: his voice is real calm, calm and cold. He says, "You guys find all that funny? You just don't know a goddamn thing about love or anything else--certainly not baseball. Those other guys dumped all over you today and you just lay there and took it and curled up and died. You're worthless, every goddamn one of you, not worth a smeared dog turd stinking up the sidewalk. I don't know why I bother, I'm through with you." And I can't tell for sure, but I think he's got tears in his eyes as he's saying all this.

Well, I do know I have some tears in my own eyes fight then, I really do, and I don't think I'm the only one. I mean I really liked the guy, all of us did, and then to hear him tell us that, it was rough.

Nobody says anything, not a word. The driver just stares straight ahead, so does Coach Guerra, and none of us can look at each other. Another minute or two and we pull into the parking lot at St. Dom's. There are a few cars there, waiting for us. I see Father Prioli, standing by his, there are a couple of parents at theirs, and there's Coach Guerra's new wife.

Well, we roll to a stop, and Miss Clancy, Mrs. Guerra, I mean, gives this cheerful wave and comes trotting up to us. She looks real good, too, in these tight little gym shorts and a nice close-fitting sweatshirt. The bus door isn't open just yet, and she comes up to the window at Coach Guerra's seat up front and looks up at him and smiles.

Coach Guerra stares at that smiling pretty face for a second and then--and I still don't really believe this--but I swear to God, he hauls off and throws a punch right at her through the glass window. Well, he doesn't reach her, but now his hand and wrist are bleeding all over the place, and she's screaming. The bus door opens, he heads out, and you know what? He goes over to her, as she's standing shocked and all white now, and with this wild nasty laugh, he grabs her hands and smears his blood all over them. "it's on both of us, isn't it?" he screams, "we both got blood on our hands, don't we?"

She gets hysterical, a couple of parents come over and get her away from him, and, I don't know, it's all kind of a blur, but the next thing I remember, Father Prioli is talking to Coach Guerra. He's got his arm over his shoulder, and Coach G is sobbing, and Father Prioli's getting him into his car to take him away somewhere, over to a hospital, I guess.

That was four days ago, and we haven't heard anything about any of it, and none of us are saying anything much to each other about it either. Coach Diaz from the jayvees has been running our practices, and it's okay, but it's not a whole lot of fun anymore. I wish things would go back to what they used to be, but I can tell it's not gonna happen. It never did with my grandmother, and I bet it never does with the skinny little pale guy out there at the ball game or with lots of others guys who were part of that big gray snake the other day. What I need to do is stop wishing and just learn to start shrugging a little better. Maybe if Coach Guerra could've shrugged a little better that stuff out at the asylum wouldn't have bothered him so much and he would have gone on being happy, you know, with his new wife and all. But somehow he let it get to him. Why, I'll never figure out, I don't think. Maybe he was just too nice and couldn't shrug the way you have to when you live in the Bronx.