A Personal History of Shea Stadium, part one
Dwight Gooden comes to Queens and delivers a stellar rookie season; I settle in Brooklyn, find a minimum wage job and a roommate straight out of central casting; a gift of friendship is given to me.
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.
part 1 | part 2 | part 3 | part 4 | part 5 | part 6 | part 7 | part 8 | part 9 | part 10 | part 11
Dwight Gooden and I came to New York City in the same year, and very nearly the same month: April, 1984. He was 19 years old, and the new rookie phenom for the New York Mets. I was a 21-year-old kid, dreaming of being a director and writer.
Dwight had come from Spring Training in Port St. Lucie, Florida, probably by bus. I had hitchhiked from Iowa, through Canada no less, following the rocky northern shores of Lake Superior.
He had two pitches: a fastball and a curveball. The fastball flirted with 100 mph on the radar gun, and had so much movement and life it was continually referred to by batters as a rising fastball, even though it’s impossible for the ball to actually rise in its path from the rubber to the plate (this was a topic endlessly debated during sportscasts). Dwight’s other pitch was a 12-to-6 curveball. 12 to 6 refers to the direction of the break: nearly vertical, from the 12 on a clock face to the 6. He threw it with so much break it was routinely referred to as “the hammer,” particularly when at the top of the strike zone, for the way it dropped down into the strike zone after reaching the apex of its curve.
You couldn’t NOT watch when he was pitching; you had this feeling that every hurl of the ball toward home plate could be historic, and often it was. In bars or parties with the game on, conversations would pause as he rocked back to fire the ball at the batter. Watching his curveball—the hammer—drop impossibly down into the strike zone for the third strike could make an entire room erupt into cheers.
By the end of the year 1984, Dwight Gooden had posted an excellent rookie season. He won 17 games, and lost 9, with an ERA of 2.60, which means he gave up an average of a little over two and half runs per game.
One year later, in 1985, he delivered one of the best seasons of any pitcher, ever. He won 24 games, lost 4, and had an ERA of 1.53. He gave up an average of less than two runs a game.
#
Dwight was in Flushing, Queens, but I was in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, depressed and broke and hungry and homesick. I’d lived in New York City for a few months. I had a minimum wage job at a polling firm. Even though I was in one of the most expensive cities in the world, I saved up enough money to move from my friend Toby’s couch in Crown Heights to my own apartment. I shared it with a roommate—a friendly if dim-witted Italian guy named Tony, straight from central casting—out in the weeds of Bensonhurst, Brooklyn. His favorite show was Dallas, he never missed it, and he was proud of never missing it, every Friday night. He also had an encyclopedic knowledge of the old TV show The Honeymooners.
I’d come to New York City with nothing more than a ridiculously large backpack on my back. My bedroom setup in my first bedroom in NYC was this: I slept in the same sleeping bag I’d used while hitchhiking to NYC. To the side of the sleeping bag lay three milk cartons I’d gotten from the bodega down the street (I didn’t steal them, I actually asked the store owner if I could have them and he charged me a dollar per milk crate. He seemed charmed that I would bother to ask first).
Inside the milk crates were a few paperbacks stacked on edge--the beginnings of a library—and a few personal belongings. My tape player and tapes. My wallet. My one key. On top of the milk carton was a digital clock radio, purchased on sale at the Walgreen’s down the street.
That was it: a sleeping bag, three milk cartons laid end to end next to it, some books and some music and a few personal items stashed inside them, and a clock radio.
In my spare time, when I wasn’t working or taking the hour plus-long subway ride to and from work or hanging out in bars, I wrote scripts, using pens and typing paper I took from my job (as with the milk cartons, I asked first). I would also, when my roommate was gone, play air guitar and sing like a rock star, to Dylan and Springsteen and Waits and the Who. I bring this up primarily because I remember being in the middle of belting out some rock standard along with the radio—something from Springsteen’s The River, I’m pretty sure—and looking out my bedroom window to see our landlord watching me air guitar and play the part of Rock God. It was intensely embarrassing. It’s even a little embarrassing to describe, forty years later.
With my next paycheck I went out and bought a set of drapes.
#
Depressed and broke, hungry and homesick. I’d just done laundry, using the laundromat down the street, and noticed that my jeans were still damp. I folded my jeans and put them on top of the radiator, wondering if it would help dry them. I didn’t have the energy or the spare quarters to take them all the way back to the laundromat.
My roommate wasn’t home. I was all alone.
The phone rang. I answered. It was my college friend Ross, one of the few people I knew in this city of millions. He was an actor who lived in Upper Manhattan, way upper, even farther north than Harlem. I don’t remember if I volunteered that I felt down, or if he inferred that from our conversation.
“Come on up!” Ross volunteered. “I’ll feed you. We can hang out. Do you like stir-fry? I’ll feed you and we can hang out and watch TV.”
How could anyone say no to that?
I threw on a jacket and fast-walked to the Bay Parkway subway stop for the G train. From there’d I’d transfer to the A train at the Atlantic-Pacific subway station, and ride that train under the East river and then straight up the West side of Manhattan, to the 168th St. stop, the very top of Manhattan (within a handful of subway stops you are at the end of the line).
The trip was two hours long. Hunger tickled my stomach the entire time. At the 168th stop I got out of the subway, walked the sidewalk next to the park (I’m trying to find that park on Google Maps, with no success thus far), politely ignoring the drug dealers in the park, who had recently switched from selling dime bags of weed to selling a relatively new drug on the streets known as “crack.”
Later, when I lived in this very apartment myself for a six-month stint, as one roommate moved out an another moved in, those same drug dealers would eventually recognize me as someone from the neighborhood and quit trying to sell me crack; instead we’d share a look and an almost imperceptible nod, indicating the recognition. I was part of the neighborhood.
I crossed the street, walked up to the buzzer, pushed the button, and said, “Open the pod bay doors, Hal.”
I knew Ross would understand and appreciate the gesture, and he did. Ross and I had both majored in Theater Arts, back in Iowa. He had an encyclopedic knowledge of movies, television and theater (as well as a more generalized encyclopedic knowledge). This was well before the internet, and I suspected (though never asked for confirmation) he memorized bits of trivia from a set of reference books in his room, out of nothing more than a love for performance, plus maybe boredom. For years, even after I’d moved out of NYC, I’d call him with trivia questions about actors and directors and playwrights.
I stepped inside his apartment. The TV was on. The TV was always on. While I’m sure remote controls existed at the time, this was before they were in wide use. “How hard is it to get up and change the channel yourself?” was a common reaction. As a result, Ross sat in chair next to the TV, with his hand right there on the dial, and he’d flip from channel to channel as fast as the most seasoned, modern-day remote-control user. Ross was a human remote control.
That evening, after my arrival, I watched hungrily as he left his perch next to the TV to stir-fry a huge meal of brown rice and veggies and chicken.
I still remember the mountain of food piled on that simple white plate, liberally doused with soy sauce. It remains one of the most memorable meals I’ve ever eaten. We sat in the living room and had a few beers and ate and talked about movies and TV and theater and college. I had more than one plate of food, and I stayed for hours, even knowing I had a two-hour subway ride back home at the end of the night.
Four decades later, and that simple gesture of friendship and good will still holds the power to move me.
Thanks, Ross, for giving your college buddy a willing ear, a warm couch to sit on, TV to watch, and a hot meal. It meant a lot then, and it means a lot now.
#
I just got off the phone with Ross, to clear up a few missing details. I had the subway stop way wrong—we were even farther up north, on 175th St.. The park with all the crack dealers would have been J. Hood Wright Park. And that book that he used to memorize all that film, TV and theater trivia was Halliwell’s Film Guide.
He also told me a few bits of random trivia about the area, from that more generalized cache of encyclopedic knowledge. Just down the street at New York-Presbyterian lay Sunny von Bulow, in a permanent vegetative state, already at the center of a celebrated trial, where her children accused her husband, Claus von Bulow, of murder. I won’t go into detail, but feel free to find a copy of Reversal of Fortune to watch. It’s a good movie.
Alan Dershowitz: You’re a strange man.
Claus von Bulow: You have no idea.
- Nicholas Kazan, Reversal of Fortune
Jeremy Irons delivering that last line alone is worth the price of admission.
Ross also told me that George Washington stationed his troops in our neighborhood during the Revolutionary War, because the neighborhood marks the highest point in Manhattan, and so was strategically valuable in surveilling the location of the enemy. The neighborhood takes its name from that history: Washington Heights.
Finally, I should also point out that I began that conversation in a terrible mood, and by the time I hung up I was in good spirits. That speaks to the power of friendship, forty years ago, and again today.
Peace.
To be continued …
That was a trip down memory lane... Thanks for a great read!