Wild Pitch

1The kid was eleven or twelve, somewhere in there, big round glasses taking up about half his face, bangs all the way down to the glasses. Charlie thought the little bastard looked like Harry Potter from hell. Little Sparky. Probably the coolest kid in his class at SUV Country Day. As soon as he opened his mouth, Charlie wanted to shoot him out of a cannon. "You really used to be somebody, right, dude?" the kid said. Dude. Charlie looked at his watch. Ten minutes to five. That meant ten minutes left in the card show at the Meadowlands Hilton. He was already thinking about which one of his teammates from the '88 Mets wanted to walk out of the tacky ballroom with him and right into the bar on the other side of the lobby and have about nine thousand cocktails before the dinner they were supposed to attend in an upstairs ballroom later, part of the sweetheart deal-or so it seemed at the time, anyway-they'd all signed with the promoter. Meyer Somebody. After finally meeting the guy the night before, a bridge troll in a pinstriped suit, Charlie thought his last name ought to be Lansky. That'd been at the reunion party that some highrollers had been allowed to attend, to mingle with Charlie and some of the other colorful bad boys from the team who weren't either missing or still in rehab. How they'd managed to win a hundred games around the parties that year still shocked the shit out of Charlie, all this time later. So they'd had another party to discuss all that, which is why Charlie was so hung over now he felt like something that should have been stuffed and mounted in the Museum of Natural Dead Things. In the old days, the line on Charlie Stoddard had been that he never missed two things, a start or a party. That's when he'd been Showtime Charlie Stoddard, because he was supposed to have been the only thing in sports faster than Magic Johnson's Showtime Lakers. When he'd won twenty the first time, on his way to what everybody was sure were going to be three hundred wins before he was through, a sportswriter from the Daily News had said to him one day, "You're on your way to Cooperstown, kid." "Great," Charlie said to the guy. "They got girls there?" He was always such a clever bastard. He didn't feel clever now. Just tired. Tired of signing his name, tired of smiling, tired of bullshitting with these people who'd paid whatever they'd paid and waited patiently in the lines so that Charlie and everybody else at the tables would keep signing and smiling and bullshitting. Only now here was the little ball-buster with his autograph book and his blue Sharpie and his program and his blue shirt with the L.L. Bean logo on the pocket and his pressed khaki slacks, squinting at CHARLIE STODDARD on the nameplate facing him. Charlie thought: I'd rather be behind in the count to Sammy Fucking Sosa. "My dad says he remembers you and the rest of these guys," the kid said. "I wasn't born." "Wish I hadn't been," Charlie said under his breath, turning his head as he did, toward where Kurt Taveras, the old Mets third baseman, had been sitting before he'd gone out for a cigarette about half an hour ago and never come back. "What?" the kid said. "Nothing." "So, like, how big were you? In the old days." Charlie said, "What?" "Well, the program says you were 20-3 in 1988. So you must have been pretty good. And you were only twenty-five years old according to the program. But you were gone by the time I started following baseball. So I was sort of wondering what happened to you. You know, after." Charlie had been sitting here all day between Taveras and Lenny Dykstra, signing what they put in front of him to sign, listening while the grownups in the line told them where they were sitting the night Dwight Gooden gave up that home run to Mike Scioscia of the Dodgers in Game 4 of the championship series, theLupica, Mike is the author of 'Wild Pitch' with ISBN 9780399149276 and ISBN 0399149279.