Seventeen In '88 - A story of teen angst, long walks, dirty jokes, haunted rooms, haunted psyches, records as refuge, roads like mazes, young love, bonding and unbonding, deep foreboding, senseless death, and innocence peeled away slowly, layer by layer.
A Howlin' Wind Runs Through Here, Or How I Missed The Single Greatest Moment In The Recent History Of My Favorite Sports Team
October is my favorite month. (I mean, c'mon, who doesn't have a favorite month?) I decided on the tenth month of the calendar year pretty early on in life. After all, when you’re a kid, Halloween is second only to
Christmas when it comes to the levels of excitement and giddy anticipation. There’s also the vivid
atmosphere of October, what with the arrival of autumn and its colors and
cool air and dying things. Scary movies, pumpkins, caramel apples. And then there's the baseball playoffs, and the World
Series.
Baseball has a history in which superstition figures pretty heavily. Players have their rituals, like Wade Boggs eating chicken before games, or Mark Fidrych talking to the ball, and fans have any number of weird little things they do in the hopes that it will help their team. In the mid-eighties, whenever the Dodgers were televised, I would often leave the room while the opposing team was batting, thinking that they wouldn't score if I wasn’t watching. Don’t ask me where this logic came from, but it seemed to work often enough that I kept doing it. So yeah, all those great games pitched by Valenzuela, Hershiser, Welch, Reuss? That was actually my doing.
As the Dodgers moved through
September and on through the postseason in 1988 I had a good luck charm in the
form of a record – Graham Parker’s Howlin’ Wind. Don’t ask why it was
that particular record, it just came to be, pretty much arbitrarily. Though the
title track does certainly hint at the kind of mysterious voodoo the Dodgers
seemed to be using in making everything go
right for them.
It was also kind of a good luck
charm in reverse, in that I would only listen to the record after the games
instead of before. Which of course makes no sense, how can a charm work its
magic after the fact? But seriously, man, logic is overrated. I mean, baseball
is hardly ever logical. If it was, the Yankees would win every year. Oh yeah,
the Yankees do win every year. So
they’re the exception that proves the rule, yeah? No? Whatever.
Anyway, I don’t know why I
chose this album of hard-edged, fiery British pub-rock to soundtrack the
Dodgers postseason adventures. Upbeat as they were, all those exercises in r & b-inflected roots rock couldn't have been much further removed from the sports world, or even anything going on in the music world in 1988. Maybe the song titles tell some of the story;
“Soul Shoes” exemplifying the verve and grit that the Dodgers brought to
their play, “Gypsy Blood” the never-say-die spirit, “Not If It Pleases Me” the
boundless confidence bordering on arrogance.
Nah, it isn’t any of that. I
just happened to listen to it the night the Dodgers clinched a playoff birth.
Being a creature of habit, or possibly a slave to weird self-imposed OCD-like
order, I carried the new tradition over to listening after each game during
Orel Hershiser’s pursuit of Don Drysdale’s consecutive scoreless innings record, then kept
it going through the Championship Series against the Mets. Next stop, World
Series.
Game One of the Series took
place on a Saturday, and I had to attend a Speech & Drama tournament that
day, which meant that I would miss the first few innings, possibly the whole
game. So I set the VCR, and set off for the tournament that day safe in the
knowledge that I would be able to watch the whole game after the fact as if I
was watching in real time, an activity that would depend on not finding out
the final score beforehand.
Turns out we got home that
night around nine-ish and of course I couldn’t resist turning on the TV at
Max’s house to see what was happening. I turned it on just in time to see the
Dodgers rallying. Mike Scioscia had singled to cut the score to a 4-3 Oakland
A’s lead in the sixth inning. Just as I had my hopes up, the very next batter,
Dodgers third baseman Jeff Hamilton, grounded into a double play, killing the
rally. I blamed myself for watching.
Like everybody else in the
group, I was still filled with the nervous energy and adrenaline of that day’s
competition. Yes, theatre geeks get hyped up about competition, too. Sometimes.
So everybody wanted to get out of the house. “C’mon, let’s go do something.” As always, it was an open question as to what we
might actually do. Small town. Limited options.
One of the things we liked to
do, strangely, was hang out at the Holiday Inn. I think being there amid the
bustle and energy of travelers, with the smell of room service food and
swimming pool chlorine in the air made us feel like we were out on the road,
elsewhere. It was an oddly invigorating, if only vicarious, sensation.
So I relented to the urge to
get out, figuring I could listen to the game on the radio. Max, who had only recently
become a baseball fan, and therefore hadn’t yet acquired the jittery, jangled
nerves of the fan who’d watched his team repeatedly come close only to fall
short, stayed behind to watch.
I drove. We pulled into the
parking lot at Holiday Inn and Roger, Regina and Emily went in. I told ‘em I’d
be in momentarily. It was the top of the ninth, and Alejandro Pena was setting
the A’s down with relative ease. Oakland still led by a run, though. The Dodgers would have one last chance in the bottom of the inning.
I debated. I wanted to go in
and hang out with my friends. Fun was beckoning. I didn’t want to suffer the
disappointment of listening to the Dodgers lose.
I’d already endured 1982, when
Joe Morgan hit a home run on the last day of the season to dash the Dodgers
playoff hopes, and 1983, when the Phillies' Gary Matthews could do no wrong
against the Dodgers in the NLCS, and 1985, when first Ozzie Smith and then Jack
F***ing Clark may as well have just come over to the house of fourteen year-old
rabid Dodger fan JB Bennett and stabbed him in the guts repeatedly with a sharp
knife.
Look, I figured, I’m taping the
game, so if anything interesting happens, which it probably won't, I’ll be able to see it later. Besides, nothing really good ever
happens in Game One anyway.
I don’t even remember what my
friends and I did. All I remember is a frantic, breathless Max, barely able to
collect and contain himself as he recounted what had happened upon our return
to his house.
What happened, of course, has
passed on into the realm of baseball legend and American myth. The details have
been hashed over so often that it's redundant to do so here, yet the moment
retains enough sheer wonder that I can’t help but indulge a bit. Kirk Gibson,
the Dodgers unquestioned on-field leader and all-around tough guy, who was not
expected to play in this game if at all in the series, simply pulled off the
clutchiest of clutch at-bats in a year and career that had already seen more than his fair share. With legs so banged up that he quite literally could barely walk, Gibson
hobbled to the plate to pinch hit against Dennis Eckersly, the future Hall Of
Fame reliever who had enjoyed one of his most untouchable seasons that year.
Flailing and grimacing his way to a 3-2 count, Gibson finally launched one of
Eck’s back-door sliders in a gorgeous arc to the right field stands for an
I-don’t-believe-what-I-just-saw game-winning two-run home run. The stuff of Hollywood, the stuff of childhood fantasy, all that.
And I missed it. Sure, I watched it
on tape later (I still have the tape, 1988 commercials and all – I watch it
after the season every year to remind myself that the Dodgers once tasted
genuine glory), but somehow all these years I’ve felt like I missed out on the
real magic of the moment. I’ve also suspected that had I been watching, it
might not have happened. Such is the weird psychology of baseball superstition.
The impact of the moment didn’t
really hit me that night. I thought of it as just another game that the Dodgers
were lucky to get away with winning. They still had to win three more against a
formidable A’s team that was probably way better than the Dodgers, at least on
paper. I didn’t like the odds, and couldn’t allow myself to let one great
moment get my hopes up.
Still, I had a tradition to
uphold, so after watching the tape I went up to my room and as usual after a
Dodgers win put on the Graham Parker album. “White Honey” (a song about cocaine,
fitting for ‘80’s baseball) never sounded so lively, “Nothing’s Gonna Pull Us
Apart” so determined, “Don’t Ask Me Questions” so defiant. And those ominous organ build-ups in “Howlin’ Wind” sounded extra eerie, spurring Parker on as
he growls a warning that an ill wind is blowing, taking his breathe away. That
song, so redolent of autumn’s chill, always brings to mind the image of Kirk
Gibson limping around the bases pumping his fist whenever I listen to it now.
Gibson’s home run, of course,
set the tone, and Orel Hershiser did much of the rest of the heavy lifting as
the Dodgers brushed the newly-punchless A’s aside in five games. As a Dodgers fan,
I’ve been coasting on that elation for twenty-four years now. A guy has to hold
onto something in a world that sometimes seems so desperate, so thin on inspiration. After all, like Graham Parker sang, a howling wind runs through here, so we gotta rock
before the fever is upon us all.
