A Personal History of Shea Stadium, part three

The Mets win the 1986 World Series; We watch Game Seven at the Richie-dome; Two of the five people watching that game are gone now; Dwight Gooden enters rehab

Jun 04, 2024

Enjoy this occasional series, weaving together my life in NYC with the vicissitudes of baseball as it was played within the brutalist-adjacent concrete walls of Shea Stadium.

Game Seven

The TV is on in the Manhattan apartment known during the play-offs as the Richie-dome, bathing us in pale light. A few open beers sit on the coffee table, along with chips and salsa and a bottle of expensive tequila. The tequila bottle is mostly untapped.

We are watching Game Seven of the 1986 World Series, Mets vs. Red Sox. It is the last game of a seven game series. Whoever wins this, wins it all.

A small tray of cocaine is out in the next room, just off of the living room. We wander in there discretely, one at a time, though because of its placement we all know when one of us is walking into the side room to sample from the tray.

That coke tray detail does not loom as particularly ominous. In the Manhattan of 1986, cocaine is everywhere, as common as ants. You see it in bathrooms and bedrooms, on dancefloors, at concerts and parties. People snort it discreetly at tables, and sometimes right off the bar in front of God and everyone. Even the Mets do coke; the celebrity-sighting Page Six column of the Post regularly whisper about it.

If coke use is common, victims of coke use are nearly as common. This is the 80s, the age of the celebrity rehab clinic, and every week sees a famous name walking through the doors of rehab, staged before cameras with an accompanying “I had it all and threw it all away” bio in People. Non-celebrities handle it in much different ways, of course. Those drug victims are as common as celebrity victims, but their stories aren’t as widely shared, and are usually told in hushed tones. Cocaine can slash through people’s lives like a chainsaw.

I had a complicated relationship with coke. I’d seen my sister struggle with it mightily, even as I sometimes did it with her. I didn’t always say no—cocaine was fun, up to a point—but my heart always pounded when I was offered the drug, or when I even contemplated doing it. Sometimes I ignored the thumping in my chest, sometimes I heeded it. After my partying days were over, I’d sometimes feel that same panicky thump in my chest if I saw drug use in a movie or a play (my heart is beating a little hard now, just writing about it). Now, a string of decades later, I can see that physical response for what it was: trauma, pure and simple.

Five of us are watching the game. Two of the five—Clif and Robert—are dead now. One—John—has quit drinking, and if he hadn't he might well be dead too. I don’t know what happened to Richie, whose apartment we are in, though he does figure into this story later. I am the fifth man.

No, Game Seven isn’t the game where the ball went through Bill Buckner’s legs. That is Game Six of the ‘86 Series, the famous game that is emblematic of the whole Mets post-season, and the one that everyone remembers. Winning Game Six allows the Mets to get to Game Seven, which we are watching now.

Boston scores three runs off Ron Darling (a great baseball name) in the top of the second inning. Normally, that might be cause some worry, but I remember a near certainty we’ll win the game, despite being down three runs in the final game of a seven-game series. I know we’ll win, and my friends are equally optimistic.

Is it our shared fandom that makes us so sure of victory? The arrogance of youth and the illusion of invincibility? Or is it simply chemical, the beer and cocaine convincing us of the certainty of a win?

Keith Hernandez hits a two-run single in the bottom of the sixth inning, and Gary Carter slams a home run to tie the game. In the bottom of the seventh, they score three more runs, and never look back. Our optimism about the game, it turns out, is warranted. They win the game, eight to five.

You don’t have to be watching to know they’ve won. You can hear it in the air: cheers, screams, car horns, gunshots, fireworks. The entire city erupts as one. The Mets have won the World Series.

One of the two now-dead guys in that room died a few years ago. His name was Clif, and he died relatively young, in his early sixties. He was a talented man, an excellent writer and actor, but he drank too much, and alcohol kept short circuiting the gains he’d make in the creative world.

One of those short-circuited gains involved Richie (of Richie-dome fame) and me. Richie played the bass. Over a period of many rehearsals in a cheap rehearsal room in Times Square, Clif and I put together a one-man show called Generations, which involved Clif playing several characters, all of them relating back to the theme of family (as an aside, I just texted my friend John to ask for the name of the rehearsal room, and all he could remember was that it always smelled like cat piss). Clif would write, and bring the new writing into the rehearsal. I’d direct and edit and arrange the sections of the piece (at the time I called myself a director and dramaturge, though that second title seems a little pretentious now). We’d done this a few times, with some success. We worked well as a team together. He could be kind of a dick, but he was a friend and a colleague, and I miss him.

For Generations, we added a new element: Richie. We sat him down on the side of the rehearsal room, and he started playing along to the work we were creating. At the start, we used him only to provide a bassline as a bridge between the characters’ scenes. But as we rehearsed, he began to felt free enough to play the bass as Clif acted, and we laid in a musical element over the words. It was a cool effect, and it worked well.

We performed it once at a bar in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, as a work-in-progress. It went really well; the piece worked great in a bar. The bass helped drown out bar noise and focus the bar’s attention to the makeshift stage. The monologues spoke to the people in attendance. A drinking audience makes for a receptive crowd.

We took the show back into the rehearsal room with notes we’d gathered from the performance at the bar. The show expanded and improved, and the three of us were pretty proud of it.

The next performance of the work—a work still in progress—was to be in front of Michael Moriarty’s acting class. Clif was a member of the class, and I showed up from time to time, not so much to act (I’m a terrible actor) as to find directing work; the class generated a number of one-person shows, and they all needed directors. Mr. Moriarty ran a good class, and I enjoyed my time there.

The show was to be performed on a Saturday afternoon at 1 p.m., in a space rented out by Mr. Moriarty. The crowd was larger than expected. Most of the acting class showed up, as well as friends of mine, friends of Richie and Clif, and folks who had discovered the play that night in Brooklyn.

Richie and I were there before noon, setting up the space, pounding down coffee. Clif hadn’t show yet. Richie and I waited, and watched the audience assemble. I talked with Michael Moriarty for a bit. He was really excited about the piece.

Noon: no Clif. Twelve thirty: no Clif. A friend of mine—John, the same one who’d been at the Richie-dome during Game Seven—said he’d gone out drinking with him the night before. They’d been out pretty late. My stomach began to sink, predicting the inevitable. Still, John showed up. Maybe Clif would too.

I’m guessing you know where this is going. I probably called Clif five times. John called him, Richie called him, Michael called him. No one picked up.

By twelve forty-five I’d resigned myself to Clif being a no-show. We waited until one, the time we were set to begin, and then waited another half hour before cancelling the performance. Clif never showed, never even picked up the phone. Richie and I watched the audience leave, in groups of two and three and four. Most were annoyed, and those who knew Clif and could guess at the reason for the canceled performance were genuinely pissed. It was a Saturday afternoon, and they’d willingly left their homes and braved the subway for this.

I don’t remember how I spent the rest of the day—other than being really angry—but I do remember coming home to a message from Clif on the answering machine. He sounded pretty drunk on the recording. I’m cringing even remembering the message. Clif at his best was perceptive and funny and quick-witted. This was Clif at his worst, fawning and needy and self-pitying. It was difficult to listen to, and went on for quite some time. My memory emphasizes these long drunken ooh’s and aah’s between the words, where I guess he was trying to think of the next thing to say. His voice changed a couple times during the message, as if moving in an out of various accents, and it occurred to me at the time he was so drunk and felt so guilty he was desperately trying to assume a personality, any personality, to continue. I thought of the T. S. Eliot line about “I must borrow every changing shape to find expression.” I also thought of the monster in the remake of The Thing, and how when cornered with a flame thrower all the shapes it had taken since coming to Earth showed themselves. I had roommates in that Brooklyn house with the answering machine, including John, the man who had gone out drinking with Clif. They replayed the message for laughs, and while those laughs may have been deserved, the message made me so sad I left the room.

Richie and I shelved the show. We were too angry, and Clif was just too hard to work with. We talked about replacing the actor and keeping the material, but the Clif-the-actor and the Clif-the-writer were too closely intertwined. In retrospect, we left a lot of material unused, never performed, never even revisited.

I’d love to read it again, after all these years. As an older man, I’m curious as to how good the material was. No one will never know what we created. At the time, the arrogance of youth convinced me that the show was not worth the effort it involved.

Now, it feels like loss. A waste of time and talent and friendship.

Neither Richie or I ever worked with Clif again.

After the Mets won the World Series, on a Monday night, New York City threw them a ticker tape parade on Tuesday morning. 2.2 million New Yorkers jammed the streets of Lower Manhattan. Many of them, knowing New Yorkers (and knowing Mets fans) stayed up all night, partying, waiting for the parade.

The group of friends I was with on the night the Mets won the series all said they were going to stay up all night as well. None of them did, though they partied well into the morning. I didn’t stay up either, and I left the party at the Richie-dome relatively early, as the cocaine use was making me uncomfortable. No one was out of control, but that cocaine-adjacent trauma I’d inherited from my sister had taken up residence in my chest, and my heart was beating hard. I still had the horrible muscle memory of lying in bed at 10 a.m., grinding my teeth, unable to sleep until the cocaine had coursed its way through my body and mind. I was unwilling to experience that again. I took the subway home.

Dwight Gooden, the talented pitcher who had led them to the promised land of a World Series victory, also missed the parade. He, like many Mets fans, partied all night and missed the parade. He was in his drug dealers apartment, too high and paranoid to attend.

"Then when the party started winding down, for myself a lot of times I get to a certain point of using drugs, the paranoia sticks in. So I end up leaving the party with the team, going to these projects, of all places in Long Island. Hang out there. Then you know what time you have to be at the ballpark to go into the city for the parade, but I'm thinking, 'OK, I got time.' And the clocks, I mean the rooms are spinning. I said, 'OK, I'll leave in another hour.' Then the next thing you know the parade's on and I'm watching the parade on TV. Here I am in the projects in a drug dealer's apartment with guys I don't even know, with drugs in the house, watching it. It's a horrible feeling."

The above quote didn’t appear until years later, in an interview for ESPN. Back in 1986, upon learning of Gooden’s absence, we all laughed. He was partying, just like we were. He partied too hard and missed work! He was one of us!

Dwight Gooden was arrested in December of that year in Florida, in an arrest that turned into a physical fight with police. Excessive force was almost certainly used by the police (the police contended that Gooden was resisting arrest). After the arrest, as rumors of drug use reached a fever pitch in the media, Gooden entered a rehab facility on the Upper East Side of Manhattan.

He returned to Shea Stadium, and baseball, the next year, during Spiderman’s wedding.

Peace.

To be continued…

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