Wherever I Wind Up: My Quest for Truth, Authenticity and the Perfect Knuckleball Read online

  Two pitches into the game, I am already down a run. Not the start I had in mind. At all.

  I get the next two guys and then Ordóñez steps in. On a 1–0 pitch, I float another knuckleball toward the plate. He coils and takes a rip. A loud thwack fills the park, and then another ball disappears over the left-field wall. Two-nothing is the score, and .500 is the Tigers’ batting average against me, and even in that moment I know why.

  I had prayed for confidence but the fact is I don’t have any. Once there are real live hitters at the plate, I turn into a completely different pitcher than I was in the pen. I am afraid to make a mistake. I’m not going after the Tigers hitters, and the upshot is that not only are my knuckleballs not confounding the Tigers, they are coming in looking like beach balls.

  I get Dmitri Young to ground out to end the inning. I come into the dugout, and try to forget about it. Pitching coach Mark Connor—we call him “Goose”—comes over and pats me on the back, and reminds me that plenty of pitchers get roughed up early on before settling into their rhythm.

  You’ll be fine. Just keep battling, Goose says.

  We get two hits but don’t score in the bottom half, and now I am back on the mound.

  One hitter at a time, I remind myself. It may be baseball’s oldest cliché, but I’ve learned that a lot of clichés gain currency for the best possible reason: they work.

  The first Tigers hitter in the top of the second is Chris Shelton, a power-hitting first baseman. Ahead, 1–2, I throw another knuckler that sits up. Shelton waits. He takes a huge slugger’s cut at it and an instant later the ball is in orbit, another knuckler leaving the premises—quickly. I try not to think that I’ve already given up 1,200 feet worth of dingers. Shelton isn’t three steps out of the box when I ask the umpire for a new ball. I am not going to watch him round the bases. What would be the point? I know what his destination is. I stand on the mound and rub up the ball and look vacantly toward the sky. I can’t fathom what is happening. I turn around and look at the blank faces of my infielders, shortstop Michael Young and first baseman Mark Teixeira, and feel terrible that I am letting them down, letting the whole team down. The infield is as quiet as a library.

  Forget it. Go get the next hitter, I tell myself. This can still be a quality start if you stop it right here.

  I retire the next three guys and manage to get through a bumpy third inning, despite a long fly and two line drives. It isn’t pretty, but it is scoreless, and that constitutes progress. The first batter in the fourth is Dmitri Young. I strike him out, my first strikeout of the night. I am happy Dmitri is in the lineup. Then it is Shelton’s turn again. I go up on him, 1–2, just as I did the last time.

  Don’t make the same mistake, I tell myself. If you miss, make sure you miss down. If I get him, I’ll be an out away from a second straight scoreless inning. I can maybe salvage this start and show something to Jon Daniels, the general manager, and Showalter, the men who had given me this opportunity.

  Except that on my next pitch I throw another beach ball up in the zone and Shelton crushes it to left, way over the fence, farther than any of the others. Goose comes out to the mound. He looks like an undertaker, only sadder. Goose knows me as well as anybody on the club. He lives in Knoxville, about three hours from me. All winter long, I’d drive to see him and throw to him, and then drive home. He wants me to succeed as much as I do, and one look at his face tells me he is feeling every bit of my pain.

  Hey, R.A., let’s just take a breath right now, okay? he says. Let’s slow the game down right here. Just keep fighting. Keep grinding it out. Don’t fold up. Take a breath and give us some innings.

  Goose is right in everything he says. It feels reassuring to hear his words. I take the breath. I tell myself I am going to stop the carnage here, once and for all, and get out with no further damage. The next hitter is Carlos Guillen, the shortstop. I walk him, and that brings up center fielder Craig Monroe, who swings at the first pitch, one more knuckleball that does almost nothing. Monroe hits it halfway to El Paso. Now it is 6–0, and a full-blown debacle. I could take breaths until the 162nd game and it isn’t going to change the hideous truth: the biggest start of my life has turned into the worst start of my life.

  The next hitter is Marcus Thames, the left fielder. No matter what, I am not going to let him hit a knuckleball out of the park.

  Instead, I throw a fastball. And he hits that out of the park. It is my sixty-first, and last, pitch of the night.

  As Thames circles the bases, I look up into the half-filled stands and listen to boos rain down on me. It’s hard to get baseball fans in Texas to boo you, but I have done it, with a pitching line that isn’t just bad, but epically bad, tying the post-1900 record for most home runs given up in a start. My line is 3⅓ innings, 8 hits, and 7 runs. Buck is on his way out to get me now. The whole scene is completely surreal, as if I were at the center of a slow-motion highlight reel, Tigers swinging, Tigers slugging, balls flying out of the park, a home-run derby come to life. It seems as if it takes Buck a half hour to get to the mound. I stand there and wait and feel more alone than I ever have on a ball field.

  It feels very, very familiar.

  How long have I felt alone? How long have I been fleeing from my shame and my secrets, bobbing and weaving through life, terrified about people finding out about where I’m from and what I’ve been through?

  In a strange way, as I wait to hand Buck the ball and get out of there before any more Tigers can take me over the wall, I realize that I’ve spent my three and a third innings doing the same sort of bobbing and weaving.

  I’d trusted myself and pitched with conviction during my warm-up. I’d thrown good knuckleballs, and thrown them with a purpose—knuckleballs that had big movement, late movement, the kind that could make even the best hitters look silly. I was fully in the moment. And then the game started, and I hid. I pitched with fear, pitched like a wimp, doubting whether I was good enough to beat the Detroit Tigers and letting that doubt rob me of any shot I had at succeeding. As I let each pitch go that night, I had voices in my head saying, Please, let it be a strike and Please don’t let them hit it.

  It is no way to pitch, no way to live.

  As I walk off the mound, I take in all the details of the scene around me: the vitriol of the fans; the little white lights telling the hideous truth on the scoreboard; the grim reality that I am indeed a marginal big-league pitcher. I want to believe that God has better things in store for me, and that this is not how my baseball life will end. I want to hold on to hope. I look out at the outfield walls that couldn’t contain the Tigers.

  There is still hope for me. Isn’t there?

  CHAPTER ONE

  PLASTIC SPOON

  Harry Lee Dickey and Leslie Bowers got married on May 29, 1974, wearing jeans in the Davidson County Courthouse in Nashville, Tennessee. It was the anniversary of the day when Abraham Lincoln said, “You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can’t fool all of the people all of the time.” I don’t think that had anything to do with their choice of day. I think they picked May 29 because there was a judge available and a clerk to fill out the certificate. My father was twenty-two years old, my mother nineteen. They had met eighteen months earlier through a mutual friend at a school in town called Aquinas Junior College. Things moved quickly.

  My parents didn’t get married because they were hopelessly in love. They got married because my mother was pregnant with me.

  So life begins as an accident. It begins with a lot of strife and the predictable money problems, and a dump of an apartment in a complex called Natchez Trace on Nolensville Road, a part of town teeming with pawnshops and used-car lots and fast-food joints, including one named Taco Tico. Nolensville Road is your go-to neighborhood if you want to sell a ring and eat cheap nachos. The rent in the apartment is $175 per month and my parents get what they pay for. The paint is peeling and the walls are dingy and the cockroaches have the ru
n of the place. My mom does battle with them as best she can, standing on a chair and squishing them with a towel, but they keep coming in nocturnal platoons. You don’t win against cockroaches. You just move and hope the next place doesn’t have them.

  Our apartment has another problem. A neighbor problem. He lives downstairs and his name is Pitt. The centerpiece of his apartment is a pyramid of Coors Light cans that almost goes to the ceiling. When he isn’t working on his aluminum skyscraper, Pitt, a skinny man with long, shaggy hair, keeps to himself and keeps away from bathing. My parents don’t have much to do with Pitt, other than keep their distance. When they scrape together enough money to move out, they pity the next person who has to deal with Pitt, until something terrible happens.

  Did you hear the news about Pitt?

  No, what happened?

  He died of a drug overdose.

  Oh, that’s too bad.

  He didn’t look too good, so you had to figure he was on something.

  My mother works as a receptionist at a supply business. My father works construction by day, operating heavy machinery, and at the Davidson County Juvenile Delinquent Center by night as a security guard. One of the perks of his night job is access to jeans, which are standard issue to the delinquents upon admission.

  After the delinquents wear them, my father brings them home for him and my mom. You know they’re from the JD Center because the pockets are cut out of them.

  My parents learn how to get by, but not always how to get along. They almost never kiss or hold hands or have an arm around each other. When I watch Luke Skywalker and Princess Leia kiss in Star Wars, it’s the first time I see people being affectionate. Maybe my parents are too busy or too tired from work, or maybe they just don’t belong together and they both know it. They grit it out for as long as they can. People in my family are good at gritting things out. But when you fight a bunch and you don’t kiss at all, all the grit in the world isn’t going to get you through.

  The marriage doesn’t last five years.

  My father is a big, strong man, a quality athlete at six feet one inch and 205 pounds, a guy with shoulders that go on forever. He’s a man who doesn’t complain about anything, the sort of guy who could have a gaping wound in his leg and might—might—ask for a Band-Aid. There are people who specialize in high drama, making mountains out of every available molehill; my father specializes in no drama. He’s had surgeries that he hasn’t even talked about until he was back home. My mother is the same way: no drama at all. Together they’d make for a terrible reality TV show.

  I spend my early years in Betty Waters’s day care center in Nashville, playing with toys and getting my diaper changed in the basement of Betty’s house. Mom picks me up one day after her shift is over. She is driving a Chevy Vega that has a 50 percent chance of starting on any given day; she’s constantly opening the hood and jiggling the wires in the distributor cap to get it going. On the way home that day, the Vega breaks down about a half mile down the road from Betty’s, so my mom leaves it on the shoulder, puts me on her hip, and starts walking back to Betty’s to call for help.

  She’s about halfway there when a big German shepherd comes out of nowhere, running right at her, barking and baring his teeth. She keeps walking and tries not to act scared, even though she is terrified. She shifts me to her left arm, away from the dog, which keeps growling at her. She takes a few more steps, hoping he’ll give it up, but he’s all over her and now he’s biting her leg. She yells and tries to shake free, but her mobility isn’t great with Baby Dickey in her arms. The dog gets another couple of bites in. She yells again and just keeps holding tight to me, telling herself over and over: Don’t let him get my baby.

  Finally, the dog retreats and my mom continues on her way to Betty’s.

  If you are a mother, you protect your children no matter what, my mother says. Nothing gets in the way of that, no matter what the story is.

  My father’s story, meanwhile, takes him all over Aquinas Junior College. He is an A student who gets his grades with minimal effort. He is an actor in the school’s theater group whose work drawsfavorable notices. Most of all, he is a star in baseball and basketball, an athlete who big-league scouts like as a pitcher. Everybody calls my father Horse. People say he could’ve had a pro baseball career, especially after his impressive tryouts for the Cubs, the Reds, and the Cardinals. The Reds are the most interested and offer him $2,000 and a bus ticket to Plant City, Florida, to join their Florida State League team. It is a dream opportunity for a promising young pitcher.

  But it is also 1974, the year I am born, which screws up everything.

  I want to finish my education, my father tells the Reds. I can’t see leaving school to go down to Plant City to see if I can be the one-in-a-thousand ballplayer who makes it to the big leagues.

  I don’t know if the Reds tried to change his mind or if my father agonized over the decision. He has never talked to me about his baseball dreams or about how he felt when the door on them closed. He has never talked about how hard it was to be a young father, or about why he went from being a dad who would do everything with his son to a dad who more or less checked out.

  My dad’s approach to problems and emotions is to not say a word about them, to lock them away. It’s a skill I perfected, too, getting me through a lot of rough times as a kid and causing me a lot of rough times later.

  He could throw the highest high pops in the world, my dad. We’d have a catch and he’d fire them up in the sky and I’d chase after them, wobbling around and trying to get under them and trying my best to have them wind up in my glove. My favorite days in school were when an announcement would come over the loudspeaker at Glencliff Elementary School:

  “Robert Dickey to the main office … Robert Dickey to the main office.”

  My dad would write down some little lie in the book, like a doctor’s appointment, sign me out, and then off we’d go to Harpeth Hills Golf Course. Maybe my mom knew about my father aiding and abetting me in playing hooky. Probably not. My dad would let me drive the cart and drink pop and knock the ball around. I wanted to play thirty-six holes.

  Everything my dad and I did revolved around sports. He’d take me to Nashville Sounds games and we’d get $2 tickets and I’d root for Don Mattingly, the first baseman, and chase foul balls into the parking lot. I loved the way the horsehide of the ball smelled, the way it felt in my hand.

  Look what I got, Dad, I’d say, showing the ball to my father.

  Way to go, Little Horsey, he’d say. “Little Horsey” is what he always called me.

  I’d spend a big part of the game down the left-field line, where the other kids and I would play a game of “cup ball,” batting around a crumpled up soda cup. I dreamed about playing in Herschel Greer Stadium one day, with my dad—the best ballplayer who ever lived—watching me. More than anything, I wanted to throw like my dad. When I won the beanbag toss competition at field day, it was the best day of the school year.

  My dad and I spent the most time of all, though, at the Green Hills Family YMCA, playing basketball. Although baseball was his best sport, my dad wasn’t a shooting guard to mess with. He could bury outside shots all night, and his range was legendary.

  Twenty-five feet? Thirty feet? Horse would start looking at the basket just a few steps inside half-court. I loved watching him play, and watching him referee games when he started doing that to make a little extra money.

  Money was always an issue. I won’t tell you that I grew up hungry, on the bad side of a trailer park, but every day was a battle to get by. My dad’s car would run out of gas every other week. I wore my uncle Ricky’s hand-me-downs and if I absolutely needed something new, I’d get it at Kmart. We didn’t go out to eat much, but if we did, it would be Western Sizzlin or some other place with a buffet where the food was cheap and you could load up your plate as often as you wanted. Western Sizzlin was where my parents got their first silverware. Not service for eight, just a few forks and knives and spoo
ns they smuggled back to Natchez Trace.

  After my parents split up, my younger sister, Jane, and I would sometimes visit our dad in his new place in a nearby section of Nashville. It wasn’t very nice or big, and didn’t even have a kitchen. Kind of like camping out, minus the campfire. He’d make us macaroni and cheese on his hot plate. There was only room for one bed, so that’s where the three of us slept.

  Whatever we did and wherever we went, my father’s advice to me was the same:

  Keep doing the work. You always have to keep doing the work.

  He never elaborated, but he liked saying those words. He liked language in general, liked the sound and texture of written and spoken English. He taught me one of my first grown-up vocabulary words: “enigma.”

  You know what that means? he asked.

  No, I don’t.

  It means mystery. As in: “He’s always been an enigma to me.”

  My mom played sports, too, and played them well. She was a star shortstop in softball. I had more catches with her than I did with my dad. I thought it was cool that my mom could make a play deep in the hole and gun a runner out, and that she’d slap a ball the other way and run the bases and hook-slide into home. One of her teams was Joe’s Village Inn. She worked there as a cook, a waitress, and a bookkeeper, but got most of her attention for the way she could pick up grounders. I’d go to her games on the weekends, and sometimes we’d be at the field until the early evening. Then the whole team would head over to Joe’s, a little roadside place on the corner with air that reeked of smoke and beer, with a big table in the back where all the old-timers hung out. Joe’s wasn’t a mean place; on the contrary, it was a friendly, Cheers-like place. But people acted different in Joe’s. I noticed that from the first time I went there when I was five. They were louder, happier. Sometimes much, much louder and happier. Joe’s had a bowling game by the door and a whole video arcade in the back. The bartender’s name was A.V. We had a routine.