With a name like Wallace Quesenberry, I took a certain ration of razzing when I was a kid. Queezy-Berry, Qually Weezenberry, and later on the high school ball team, guys with names like Buck Foster and Jack Zonka dubbed me Wheezin’ Dingle Berry.
Whatever crap I got though, stopped as soon as I stepped onto the mound. Fingering the leather ball behind my back, searching for its seams and shaking off the catcher’s call, I could stop time. I could stop the yapping of the Zonkas and the Fosters in the outfield. My dad’s barked directives from behind the dugout became all but inaudible; a mere buzz of a fly in the distance. The crowd, the bench, the ump were all in my control. The batter’s fingers twitched around the bat’s sleek pine neck, his weight rocking back and forth on each foot in the smudged out batters’ box. Even the biggest smart-ass on every team would rock himself like a baby in a bassinette, soothing himself while waiting for my pitch.
Would it be the rocket fastball, the one they all bragged they could get a piece of, until they’d actually seen it–or rather not seen it, blow by? Or would it be the slider that hovered like a thing of beauty that waited for their Herculean swings, then ducked just beneath the whiff of their bats? How I loved that dopey, whatthefuckwasthat look on those Brutus’s faces when they heard the thwack of leather on leather as the ball smacked the catcher’s mitt.
But my best pitch was what Coach Singer coined the M-F-C-B. That would be the “Muthuh-Fucking-Crazy-Ball”. This ball was as likely to fly over the head of any blue that stood behind a catcher as it was to hit a batter square in the ass. The MFCB was legendary; near mythic local lore in our small town and our catcher’s signal for it was a fully erect middle finger.
What made the MFCB a true phenomenon—and different from just any wild pitch was that it first appeared as though it was going to be a straight-down-the-middle fastball. The Fosters and the Zonkas throughout time have hated to let a fat one cross the fillet of the strike zone untouched. It pinches at their manhood somehow. So when the MFCB left my fingertips, those thick-thighed beasts dug their toes in for the big hero’s swing. Visions of glory throbbed in their undersized imaginations. Split seconds later they’d hit the dirt, hop a low one like school girls jumping rope, or scratch their chins as they watched a ball whirligig its way into the visitors’ dugout—but only after they’d flung beefy bodies akimbo and drawn laughs from the bleachers.
And me…what did I do after delivering the illusive MFCB? Nothing. Not a thing. I didn’t change my expression. Wouldn’t give them the satisfaction of knowing my satisfaction. Strike or ball, curve or crazy ball, my stare remained steely. On to the next pitch, business as usual. My triumphant celebration would be only an invisible surge of blood I could feel racing at my temples. My private reverie. But then hiding my reactions was much more than a competitor’s strategy for me. Game face was my way of life.
Looking back now, I know that it was the crazy ball that bonded me with the guys on the team. Were it not for my pitching skills and the MFCB in particular, I’d have been the target of the same jibes suffered by Stevey Collins, an effeminate kid with volcanic acne who played classical piano like a virtuoso. Or Josh Weinberg; the rotund sophomore with bags of Hostess snack cakes bulging the pockets of his oversized army-surplus camouflage pants. I knew then as I do now that I’d have shared the whipping post with all of the Steveys and Joshes, but for my athletic skills, my deep voice and my ability to keep a my mouth closed. My teammates were crude and rough. They talked in vulgarities about girls’ anatomy and what they liked doing to it. More than a few were just talking, but I didn’t know that. I thought I was the only imposter back then.
I liked books, but read them only at home. Listened to my mom’s Barbra Streisand and Lena Horne albums in private, but sported only Bachman Turner Overdrive eight-tracks in my car. Took dives on exams and kept completed homework in my book bag while weathering public scoldings from teachers about my unmet potential. Were it not for my baseball scholarship, I’d never have made it into Cal.
I liked girls–to talk to, thought them more evolved than the Neanderthals that shared my locker room. Girls seemed less another gender than a different species altogether from the sweaty animals that rode the team bus talking of pussies and faggots, and proudly emitting malodorous gasses from every possible orifice while planning their next abuses of those with less apparent testosterone.
Oh, I didn’t actually join in the taunts of my hefty classmates or those with unfortunate skin conditions or girlish gestures. I never hurled an epithet or wrote a vulgar limerick on a locker room wall. But no morsel of pride clings to my whiskers from this bereft banquet of the abuses in which I did not partake. For where was I? Right there, of course. Hiding behind my hand a putrid mixture of shame and guilt which formed a twisted grimace on my face that passed for member-of-the-pack laughter to my cohorts.
Now, looking back, I know that the MFCB was more than my signature pitch. It was my beard. It was my crest—my destiny. It wasn’t simply something that came from me. It was me. Just like the pitch, I started out with the appearance of another kind, but no one knew where I would go. How could they know?
It’s thirty years since the last time I threw the MFCB. I try to trace the trajectory of that crazy ball…me. I sit here beside Fernando’s hospital bed. Stevey Collins’ younger sister, Patricia—as the fates would have it–has been one of Fernando’s nurses. She has washed Fernando’s withering body with tenderness though in this last phase he knows nothing of what is done to him or around him. His gaunt face is frozen into a perfect picture of agony and changes not with touch, or his beloved Chopin, or the sound of my voice.
When Patricia, Fernando’s most regular nurse, first came into his room I didn’t recognize her. Only after she told me she was Stevey’s sister could I see in her pretty, smooth skinned face the phantom of her brother’s pimply high school image. When I made the connection between Stevey and Patricia, shame oozed through my veins, viscous and honey thick with the memories of ridicule Stevey had suffered at my witness. Patricia knew who I was–remembered my pitching. If she knew about my participation in Stevey’s miserable high school taunts, she didn’t let on.
Stevey had become a concert pianist, of course. He was to record with the Boston Philharmonic. On the first day of recording he held his hands above the black and white keys, unable to remember where to place them. Years of withering later, Stevey’s suffering ended. Patricia had been by his side just as she was beside Fernando’s.
And here she is–Patricia, shaving Fernando’s wan cheekbones. Rubbing lotion into his tissue-thin skin. Changing his soiled linens.
Fernando’s love and simple goodness made me feel small when we first met. Just as Patricia’s does now. But Fernando knew me. He heard my confessions of my high school sins of omission and cowardice—and loved me anyway. “Wallace,” he said to me, “Maya Angalou said, ‘you did then what you knew then. You know better now, so do better now’.” That’s all I can do for Fernando now, better than I’ve done—because I’ve been loved enough to know better.
The crowd of our friends has left. They’ve said their last good-byes. They’ve left me to say mine—alone. Tubes from Fernando’s arms tether him to unknown liquids, the benefit of which has become irrelevant. I kiss the sweet hand, the ring that matches mine—now loose on his thinned finger; and I wonder…where will this crazy ball land?