Sting-Ray Afternoons

By 1974, the Bloomington Athletic Association can claim to be the largest all-volunteer sports organization in the United States. It is our version of Little League, our outlet for football, hockey, basketball, and baseball, so well subscribed—we don’t sign up so much as get conscripted—that the city is subdivided into five color-coded precincts: Northwest (with green uniforms), Southwest (purple), East (red), South (yellow), and North (blue). These stoke intracity rivalries where there otherwise would be none.

Every boy my age in South Brook is grateful beyond words to be in BAA North, because it means Craig Newell might be on our team instead of someone else’s. Newell is eight going on thirty-five and North’s wild, flame-throwing pitcher with an incipient mustache. One afternoon I watch from left field as he hits the first four batters of the game, each batter more terrified than the last. The children must be forced from the on-deck circle by their coach, then coaxed into the batter’s box by the umpire. By walking in the first run, Newell secures a win for North, since the East coach—after a brief but animated argument with our coach—forfeits the game.

My baseball uniform is a pair of plaid Farah slacks and a blue BAA T-shirt. I usually forget my blue cap at home.

“You’d forget your head if it wasn’t screwed on,” Mom says.

That might be true. I’m riding my bike no-handed home from Kevin Sundem’s one afternoon, lost in thought, my palms pressing down on my thighs to help pedal, when I crash into the back of a car parked on West 96th Street. I never see it coming, perhaps because it isn’t—it never moved—but after I pick myself up and check myself for injuries, I wonder if I’m not destined to walk off a cliff absentmindedly, then fall for a full minute in the manner of Wile E. Coyote.

One evening our team is taking infield practice and I’m playing first base, daydreaming as Coach Landrus lays down a bunt. The catcher—a kid I know only as Corey—picks up the baseball and fires it to first. Corey appears to me only as a silhouette, backlit by the blazing nimbus of the setting sun. I again have forgotten my cap, and in the split-second interval between the ball leaving the catcher’s hand and it smashing into my mouth, I hear Mom saying, “You’d forget your head if it wasn’t screwed on.”

My mouth explodes. Blood and exposed nerves. Bits of teeth on my shirt like chipped china. A crowd of teammates standing over me. It hurts to breathe in. There’s a hole where I used to have my front teeth, my grown-up teeth—the first grown-up things I’ve ever had—already gone. We’re as far from home as it is possible to be in BAA, all the way over on the east side of Bloomington at Running Park. It’s surrounded by houses, and Coach Landrus bundles me into the kitchen of the nearest homeowner who answers the frantic knocks on her door only to find a child bleeding on the front stoop.

I’m in the kitchen of an old woman, older than my Grandma Boyle.

She presses a dishrag full of ice to my mouth, if only to stop me from bleeding onto her linoleum. Coach calls my mom from a phone tethered to the kitchen wall because I can’t speak, except to recite my phone number. My lips are swollen to twice their size, which is saying something.

At Mom’s instruction, Coach drives me straight to the dentist’s office, where our South Brook neighbor Dr. Popovich opens his practice at eight o’clock on a Wednesday night to build up my front teeth with some kind of quick-hardening enamel-like substance. In doing so, he robs me of my only possible reward: playing Parks and Rec box hockey tomorrow with a Bobby Clarke smile to rival any we had scissored out of Goal magazine.

And though I’ll never have removable front choppers like Porky Pikala’s, I am grateful for my baseball coach and my neighbor-dentist and the old lady who answered her door by Running Park and the kindness of an entire community that became a sort of dental bucket brigade the second my teeth were smashed out.

It isn’t the first time I’ve had an emergency in a park and been rescued by a kindly stranger answering a frantic knock. Skating on the outdoor rink at Brookside Park in the winter, my bowels once began to collapse in a way that recalled very tall buildings imploding on the news. The warming house didn’t have a bathroom.

So I pulled off my skates, slipped my snowmobile boots on over my bread bags, sprinted across Xerxes Avenue, and pounded on the door of the nearest house. To my profound relief, a woman answered.

“May I please use your bathroom?” I said, mentally calculating the sixteen buttons and zippers and the half dozen layers I would have to undo or remove before I could even sit down on her toilet.

“Of course,” she said, eyeing my hockey stick, which was held over my shoulder like a hobo’s bindlestick, the skates tied together and dangling from either side. “Just down the hall. First door on your left.”

But before I could make it past her, my clenched bowels cried uncle. I froze. The woman and I never broke eye contact throughout the volcanic exertions that followed. We both knew what was happening, and we both pretended it wasn’t.

Mercifully, I was wearing snow pants that cinched at the bottom. I walked like Frankenstein to the bathroom, a slow and stiff-legged gait, so that whatever was in my pants wouldn’t escape into the hall. Locking the bathroom door behind me, I shook my left leg as if I were trying to dislodge a small dog that had attached itself to my ankle. But it wasn’t a small dog that fell onto the bathroom floor.

After mummifying both hands with a roll of toilet paper, I cleaned the once-pristine tiles as best I could and divested myself of the mess in a series of flushes, each time giving the tank several seconds to refill. “Is everything all right in there?” the woman asked, not unreasonably, after the seventh or eighth flush.

When I finally emerged from the bathroom five minutes later, in a cloud of Glade—I’d sprayed half an aerosol can in the air and the other half down my pants—the lady looked at me and said, “Is your mother home, dear?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Want me to call her?”

“No, thank you.”

“Perhaps I should.”

“No, thank you.”

“What’s your number?”

I didn’t want to say. But I caved beneath her skeptical gaze.

“Ay-day-date, two-weight-seven-two,” I said.

“I’ll be right back,” she said, eyeing her upholstered chairs and sofa. “If you want, you can wait out on the front stoop.”

I went outside to the stoop, sprinted across the front yard, serpentined across Xerxes Avenue, and sat in a snowbank by the Brookside Park parking lot to hide my shame and my snow pants.

The curtains parted across the street. In the window was the woman, peering out at me. Ten minutes later, Mom pulled into the parking lot, leaned across the shotgun seat, and cranked down the window. “You poor thing,” she said, beckoning me to get in.

“But my pants…”

“Get in, sweetheart,” she said.

I couldn’t set a glass of water down without her whisking a coaster beneath it, but when I did a BM in my snow pants at Brookside Park, she rushed to my rescue without so much as a towel on the seat. “You poor thing” was all she said. “You poor thing.”

Steve Rushin's books