Alou Read online

  In the distance we could always hear the gentle sounds of the Caribbean Sea lapping against the shore. My father was a great fisherman, and I would often eagerly rise at 3 a.m. so I could go with him to the shoreline and try to catch enough fish to feed our family for that day. My father’s fishing pole was bamboo, probably not much to look at today, but it was a prized possession and a serious sin if any of us kids thought to take it.

  One day I took it.

  About two miles from our home there was a rocky spot where the men fished. Although I was only around twelve years old, nobody noticed me as I rooted around the rocks to find some leftover dead baitfish the men discarded as unusable. My father’s bamboo pole had a wire string and a large hook. I put a small dead fish on it and dropped it into the ocean and waited. After a while I got a bite and a fairly strong tug from a crevalle jack, a ravenous predatory fish that often feeds along reefs and shorelines. For a second the strong pull almost jerked the pole out of my hands. My heart leaped with panic. Evidently, my struggle was noticeable because one of my father’s friends saw me and instinctively knew I shouldn’t be there—and definitely not with my father’s fishing pole. The fish wriggled away, which I was thankful for, because I might have lost that bamboo pole entirely. I, however, was not off the hook.

  “Hey, what are you doing?” my father’s friend demanded. “I’m going to let your father know you were here.” From leaping with panic one second, my heart sank the next.

  The waiting, anticipating my punishment, was worse than the whipping itself. I returned home and put the bamboo pole back exactly the way I found it. One day went by, then another. Maybe the man hadn’t told my father, or, better yet, maybe he wouldn’t. On the third day my father approached me, telling me he knew what I had done. I knew what the consequences had to be. He gave me three good lashes. That was my father. Mom would spank, but Dad would go for his symbol of authority, that thick cowhide belt, which he would hang on a nail when he came home from work. Dad was about five feet ten, a muscular and powerful man, and an extremely fast runner. Even into our teenage years, if he came after my brothers or me for some type of disciplinary reason, it was futile to try to outrun him.

  Another whipping I received came from more innocent reasons. All these decades later, I can’t even tell the story without laughing. Between the ages of ten and twelve, I along with two of my cousins and two of our friends had this ritual of going to the ocean naked. Anytime it would rain people would shut their doors to prevent water from coming in. That’s when we would sneak out of our homes, strip off our clothes, and head down a worn pathway that cut through the brush toward the beautiful, but sometimes treacherous, Caribbean Sea. We would cling to the rocks to keep the waves from pulling us into the churning sea, feeling the saltwater splash over us while fresh rainwater fell on us from overhead. It felt so good—good enough for us to disregard that we were forbidden from going to the ocean alone, much less to shamelessly walk around naked.

  We obviously had no telephones or any way of knowing what the weather would be like from day to day. Instead, we were always studying the clouds, something I still do today, and without a word we knew when the rain came it was time to discard our clothes and meet for our naked jaunt to the sea. We did it countless times, and we weren’t careless. We had the timing down perfect, always making it back home, past all the homes with the doors still closed, before the rain stopped.

  One day, though, our timing was off—way off. Just as we arrived at the ocean, the clouds parted, the sun emerged, and we were a long way from our homes, about a mile. It was the worst feeling. The trek back was agonizing, and we made it with our hands folded in front of our naked bodies, covering our crotches, like surrendering prisoners. As we passed house after house, all the doors were now open. I would have to pass them all naked because my house was the last one. As the other boys made it to their homes, I could hear their cries as they were getting their whippings, their yelps ringing in my ears as I trudged onward, like a condemned man, heading for the same fate.

  Mostly I avoided whippings. My brother Jesús was another story, though. He got the most whippings, mostly because he had a quick temper and a bad habit of taking meat right out of the pot where it was still cooking over an open fire. He loved meat and always seemed to have a ravenous appetite. He would brazenly reach in bare-handed and take some, eating it before anyone could stop him and well before it was time to sit down for a meal. Out of the three Alou brothers who played Major League Baseball, Jesús was the one who grew the tallest and filled out the most: six feet two and about 195 pounds during his playing days.

  I can remember only two times when I was not hungry enough to eat supper with my family. Once was another time when I sneaked off with my father’s fishing pole, and with a friend I went down to the ocean. This time I caught a four-pound grouper. Of course, I couldn’t bring it home, because this would expose me to the sin of taking my father’s bamboo pole and ensure another whipping. So we went to my grandmother’s house, where I knew I could sneak away with matches and a pan. My friend and I retreated into the woods, where we built a fire and cooked that grouper, eating as much of it as our bellies could contain. The other time I didn’t have an appetite was when a cockfighting rooster I had, and had grown fond of, got killed by a passing truck. Not wanting to waste anything, my mother cooked it. When I saw my once proud rooster on a supper plate, I couldn’t bring myself to take even a bite of him.

  The worst day of my childhood was the day when we had no food to eat. As a parent now I can’t imagine the stress my father and mother must have felt every day of our youth. Usually, though, there was enough for that day’s sustenance. And although we didn’t have much, I can assure you that if you came to my home, you were going to eat—boiled yucca, plantain, rice and beans, fish, avocado slices. Mango season was a highlight. It wasn’t uncommon that by noon our house was a magnet for people, sitting around outside, talking, laughing, eating. I got to manage Vladimir Guerrero years later and got to know his family, and they were the same way: simple, generous, salt of the earth.

  Everything back then seemed simple—simple and natural. Black coffee, rich in flavor, was a staple and something we drank almost as soon as we stopped feeding on our mother’s breast milk. Coffee and dark, dense bread were often our breakfast. Creamy, sweet goat milk was readily available, too. Lunch was the main meal, and a main dish was fish with another island staple, rice and beans. Dinner was usually more fish along with boiled plantains; my mother could save a penny by not frying them in peanut oil, even though they tasted better that way. Chicken was an occasional dish. I never tasted steak until I became a professional baseball player in the United States.

  Fruit was usually plentiful—grapefruit, orange, mango, papaya, soursop, coconut. I became adept at climbing coconut trees and, later, especially skilled at throwing rocks and knocking those tasty coconuts off their high perch. I’m convinced that my desire to nail a coconut hard enough with a rock built up not only my arm strength for baseball but also my accuracy. If I didn’t hit a coconut hard enough to knock it off its perch, I would at least put a dent in it with enough rocks, deep enough that it would surrender its sweet water. When that happened we would stand beneath those coconut trees with our heads tilted back, like freshly hatched birds in a nest, catching the dripping nectar in our mouths.

  Coconuts dropping from trees could be dangerous, too, if you weren’t careful. Once, a coconut fell on my mother’s arm, breaking it. At the time we didn’t know it was broken. We only knew that my mother’s arm gave her trouble the rest of her life. It wasn’t until years later, when my brothers and I became Major League players and could afford to have an X-ray done, that we learned she had suffered a break.

  One of the more dangerous things we did for food was hunt for crabs in the caves along the shoreline. You had to be careful in those caverns not to get trapped by a sudden strong wave or the rising tide. We were forbidden from going there, but Matty, Jesús, and I c
ouldn’t resist scavenging those caves for crabs. I can’t tell you how many bites on my fingers I endured. One time when Matty was a little boy, a giant crab got hold of his forearm and wouldn’t let go. Matty ran all the way home that way, yelling and yelping. Mostly, though, he was a very tough kid, a fearless boy who grew up to be the most fearless man I ever knew. He was a small guy—he only grew to be maybe five feet nine, probably shorter—but he would go up against anybody. And he was an excellent marksman, too. We used to fashion slingshots from any kind of twig that formed a V, attach some rubber from an old tire inner tube to it, and launch rocks at anything that moved or didn’t move. Matty was good at both. He could hit a stationary object from a good distance as well as birds in flight. I admired his skill.

  Matty also became a pretty good golfer as a boy. He caddied for the wealthy people at the Santo Domingo Country Club, bringing home whatever money he made to our parents. It was, and still is, a beautiful golf course, built in 1920 and designed by Robert Trent Jones Sr. On Mondays caddies were allowed to play about a half a round of golf. Matty was left-handed, which was considered a curse. For a couple of years, when he was two to four years old, my parents would tie his left hand to force him to use his right. But Matty was hardheaded and stubborn, and he wouldn’t give in. He would try to eat rice with a fork in his right hand, and the rice would fall onto the floor. The poor kid. I felt sorry for him. But Matty never complained. He also never gave in. My parents didn’t know they were trying to ruin a future batting champion. But when he got older and wanted to play golf with the other caddies, there were no left-handed clubs, so Matty learned to play right-handed.

  While we were allowed to play and have a childhood, my parents were hard workers, and it was never any question in our minds and hearts as to how devoted they were to the family. My father had his carpentry and blacksmith shop next to the house. He was well respected and built many of the small shacks that passed as homes in our area. Whatever he built was always quality. There were times when I saw roofs on lesser homes flying away during storms. Not only did that never happen to our home, but, whenever violent storms arrived, our home became the default destination for shelter for some of our relatives.

  My mother, a tough woman, used to crack rocks with a hammer for 3 pesos a truckload, 3 pesos being equivalent to $3 at the time. Mom’s toughness sometimes surfaced in other ways. My father would often repair horse-drawn carts, and almost equally as often people didn’t pay right away. One day a man who owed my father 8 pesos for fixing his cart came by, and my mother stopped him, stepping in front of his horse and grabbing it by the reins.

  “Where is the money?” she demanded. “You say tomorrow, you say tomorrow, but tomorrow keeps coming and you don’t pay! Pay or this cart is going to stay right here! You’ll have to kill me first before you leave!”

  I was just a boy, and I was scared, really scared. Then I saw the man pull the money from his pocket and pay what he owed.

  I saw fear in my mother only once, when I was six years old. My father had gotten a job with one of the military generals to fix windmills. Often he would come home from his work as late as 11 p.m. Sometimes, because of the distance and the amount of work he had, he didn’t come home at all. About twelve miles north of our home, the dictator’s brother Hector Trujillo had a farm. There was a prison there where they would torture people. On one of those days when my father was away working, we heard news of a jailbreak and that the escapees were dangerous and might have weapons. Late that night, with my father still not home, a man abruptly appeared at our open door.

  “Buenas noches,” he said, meaning good night. It was a friendly greeting, and he seemed to have a kind face. But I could also see that he was wearing a prison uniform with the telltale black-and-white horizontal stripes and that my mother was shaking.

  “Where is the man of the house?” he asked.

  Shaking even more, my mother told him that he wasn’t home. He was looking for clothes—a man’s clothes he could change into. But the only clothes my father owned were on his back. The man was desperate.

  “Look at what I have,” he said, pulling at his prison uniform for emphasis, his eyes pleading. “And they are looking to kill me.”

  Finally, realizing my mother could not help him, he left, and as I heard him running through the brush I also heard shouting: “A suspicious person! A suspicious person!”

  Looking back, he probably wasn’t a criminal but rather a political prisoner, likely one who was caught and killed later that evening, if not the next morning. It proved to be a long night for us, especially because it was one of those nights when my father didn’t come home at all. That was the last time my mother ever left our door either open or unlocked. Until the day she died in 2008, at the age of ninety-three, she always looked under her bed before going to sleep, sweeping a stick or a broom across the outer reaches, just to make sure. That might sound extreme, but even to this day I still have dreams about someone coming into my home, dreams that will awaken me in the middle of the night. Those dreams never go away, and none of those dreams are ever good.

  The biggest fear any of us had on the island was of the dictator, Rafael Trujillo, and for good reason. Trujillo was brutal. Historians say his ruthless thirty-one-year reign, representing most of the rich and much of the military, was the bloodiest in all of the Americas, with some estimates saying he was responsible for the deaths of fifty thousand people. I saw the fear in the eyes of the men in my neighborhood. People disappeared. You heard about women, young women, being taken to him. My father was politically minded, and in that way he shaped me, too. In 1941, when I was six, Trujillo declared war against Nazi Germany, and my father was incredulous. “He’s crazy,” he said. “He’s going to get us killed.” Soon after, German submarines torpedoed and sank two Dominican merchant-marine ships that Trujillo had named after himself—the San Rafael and the Presidente Trujillo.

  So I didn’t have any doubt my father was against the dictator. Most everyone I knew hated the dictator. In the evenings, after my godfather would buy a newspaper, the men in my town would gather around and hear it being read. My father was often the reader, usually beneath a gas lamp someone would hold overhead. Whenever the conversation turned political, which was usually the case, the glances became furtive, the voices more hushed. Trujillo had caliéses, informants who would spy for him, all over the island. Sometimes you didn’t know if your own neighbor was a calié. It was scary. People would disappear, never to be seen again.

  As a boy I felt that fear. But I was still a boy, full of energy and occasional mischief. One time, testing our arms, Matty and I took target practice on anything that would pass by. On this particular day we threw rocks at an ambulance racing past us with its siren wailing. It was going too fast, though, and we missed it. Soon, a military truck rumbled by, with two soldiers riding in the back, carrying guns. From what we thought was a safe distance, we struck it with a couple of rocks. Big mistake. We saw that the truck was transporting boys, and we knew what that meant. Those boys were going to a notorious correctional institution in San Cristóbal, and this now meant we could be joining them. Two soldiers came after us. We took off running to a field—the same field where I cut down the coconut tree—and quickly integrated into a group of boys who were playing baseball. When the soldiers got to where we were playing, they demanded, “Did you see any guys running?” We all shook our heads no. The other boys had no idea why they were asking, but Matty and I knew, and our hearts were racing.

  Finally, they moved on, and we continued to play baseball.

  2

  A Childhood

  I never played organized baseball growing up. In the Dominican Republic of my childhood, in the poor town where I was raised, there were no equipment, no coaching, no true baseball field, no leagues, no parental involvement, and no dream of ever playing the game beyond my youth.

  I was around fourteen years old when I got my first baseball glove. It was a gift from my mother’s br
other, Uncle Juan, who was a captain in the Dominican army and had a little bit of money. I went from playing baseball with my bare hands, or with strips of canvas sewed into a makeshift mitt, to a genuine Wilson glove. I held it to my nose, and to this day that smell, the smell of a real leather baseball glove, is even better than a new-car smell—no matter how expensive that new car is. My uncle instructed me to put oil on it, that it would preserve the glove, so that night I doused it with coconut oil. Later, as I slept contentedly, dreaming of what feats I could perform with this new leather appendage for my left hand, rats attracted by the coconut oil invaded my baseball glove and ate holes in it. The next morning, as I inspected the carnage, crestfallen, I saw that most of the pocket was eaten away. It would not stop me. I was determined to use that glove. My mother procured patches of heavy canvas and sewed it into the spots the rats had eaten, and I used that glove for the next several years.

  This would have been about 1949, two years into Jackie Robinson breaking Major League Baseball’s color barrier. We were especially aware of Jackie Robinson because in 1948, the Brooklyn Dodgers conducted their spring training at Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic—the capital city, which at the time the dictator had renamed Ciudad Trujillo, after himself. On March 11 we were bused from school to go see Jackie Robinson’s Dodgers play the Dominican Republic All-Star team. I didn’t even know what spring training was, but I knew this was something special. I was mesmerized seeing grown men play baseball with four real bases and wearing dazzling uniforms that shimmered in the spring sun. It was the first time I saw two baseball teams actually wearing uniforms—uniforms that contrasted each other with their different colors. The Dominican team lost, 4–3, thanks to a towering two-run, walk-off home run that a gigantic six-foot-five left-handed pitcher named Paul Minner hit. He was the same pitcher who two years earlier had surrendered the first home run in future Hall of Famer Frank Robinson’s Major League career. But that didn’t matter to us. We hated Paul Minner, reviling his name for years, because he was the man who hit the home run that beat the Dominican team.