little ‘lude script. How 'bout it, lively and lovely guy? And the way da Birds’ Eddie Murray choked up, it made you feel the same way ya did when Earl Morrall didn’t see Jimmy Orr in the end zone and the Colts lost to the goddamned Jets. The Jets, for Chrissakes, a teama lames. You gotta see how it is. Doc. night after night, .watching those turkeys, and all the time because you are from the Little Town you have this sense of impending doom. Even when they were up three to one you can still hear your old man, still hear him yelling at you and saying, “Bawlamer don’t ever win nothing. Shit, the big guys in New York, ’ey got alia money and ’ey jest buy up everything. Little man ain’t got no chance.” But you see Wild Bill Hagy, a good old Bawlamer smoke I met this summer and whose girlfriend tole me Bawlamer is Best. And I look at her, all the hope in her face, a broad, friendly, provincial face that ain’t understood yet how bad things are gonna be for her working in deep middle age in some joint in Dundalk called the Bu De Saloon, giving Perma Presses to the “girls” froma Point (working inna slag heap at Beflehem Steel), and how she is gonna balloon up with three kids and you wanna see the damned team win for her, too, win for her and your dead pals, Mike dead of smack, and Jesse dead of moving cars, a coal truck taking the top of his car clean off, jes’ like he was executed, ’cause when you live in Bawlamer it’s not so much living as it is a life sentence: Not ever knowing quite how the game works but always knowing you’re gonna come up on the short end of it. The city had been trying like hell to turn that around, sinking money into urban rehab, fixing up thousands of buildings, revamping the Inner Harbor and getting neighborhood ethnic pride cooking, and a good, tough mayor, Donald Schaeffer. But the Orioles were the key, the Pride of Baltimore. I remember going down there this summer, watching them play, and hearing my friends with the New Baltimore Attitude talking to me while the Birds were down in the bottom of the seventh to Cleveland. “Hey, don’t worry. Bobby, it’s going to be all right. The Birds always win.” And, by God, that night they did, onna Eddie Murray homerun, and Wild Bill Hagy’s girl, Babe, poured a beer over my head and said, “Ain’t Bawlamer wonderful?” and I said, “By God, it is,” real tentative like, because even when Baltimore wins, the attitude of the city is, “Well, they are eventually gonna lose it.” (Cause the big guys, the BIG BIG GUYS out ’ere, are gonna come and take it away from you.) So the new Orioles, the team that didn’t know what it meant to choke, to give up, who one week this summer won four straight games on pinch-hit home runs, two of them grand slams, this team was the very spirit of the New Turned Around Bawlamer is Best town, and to see them sink back into the morass, to fall into the miasma, to fucking flake out, choke up, meltdown, give it away, on lame fielding.. . . How bad is Kiko Garcia at short? When you 'refrom Baltimore, baseball is revenge. He makes you long for Jimincio Garcia, an Oriole who played in three games in 1957 and was deported as an illegal alien. How hopeless was Bumbry at the plate? He made you wanna see the Orioles old center fielder Chuck Diering, who never got a clutch hit in his life, the difference being nobody expected Chuck to. Double amputee hitting, weird managing. (Since when did Earl Weaver eschew the sacrifice bunt? Since he got a large dose of mediaitis. Since he started believing that ozoned Howard Cosell, who was the kinda kid who couldn’t play touch football ’cause he had to run home, and listen to opera!) What else could explain Weaver allowing Lowenstein to hit away and into a rally-killing double play in game two? And in the game the Os lost in Pittsburgh, what was Weaver thinking about when he pitched to Bill Madlock with two on? Christ, he had Steve Nicosia up next, a guy so musclebound that when he swings the bat the ballpark turns into woods and Bambis sticking their ersatz innocent eyes through the wilted vegetation. Earl Weaver acted, as they say down in my hometown, like a loooooon-a-tiiicccck . . . ) And DeCinces. Fill that brokennosed palooka with anymore dreams he’s Brooks Robinson and he’ll be back playing at Rochester for the next 10 years. He was so overhyped that he was afraid of bunts. But I don’t blame the media. I blame the players. And I don’t forgive them. I don’t think the Baltimore fans shoulda had the parade for them after they lost. I think rheumy-eyed, Polish-. hotdog-eating Bawlamer hustlers shoulda gone over to their houses and taunted their children, maybe even pummel them with wiffle balls! I think fans pughtta raced over to Earl Weaver’s house, and made fun of how short and squat he is, thousands of little guys who look just like 'him, working on him night and day calling, “Earl. Earl, little chunky Earl!” My friend Eddie Livingstone feels the same way. “Fuck this new spirit of tolerance. Ward,” he says. “They did the best they can.’ I couda been out snorting coke but no, no, I was home watching those turkeys, and they toyed with us. They gave us hope that Baltimore had made the leap, and then they jerked us back into remembering that we were losers. There ain't nothing bad enough for those turkeys.” Eddie, an out-of-work used-car salesman, famous for the amount of crank he ingested and for once hitting exOriole Chuck Estrada for losing a crucial game in the ninth, Eddie is a real Bawlamer fan. He feels pain, horrible pain. We sat in my Village apartment and he kept saying, “ It's in the bag. Ward. This team ain’t going to choke.” He said it as Roenicke popped up, as Murray hit into the hundredth double play, as Weaver made one lame move after another. (Speaking of which, in the last game, he’s got a wimp pitching for the Pirates, a wimp named Romo, but Weaver sends up Lee May to bat for Garcia. What the hell is wrong with Garcia? As a hitter; as a fielder he’s on a par with Merv Griffin. This causes Chuck Tanner to bring in Kent Tekulve. Is there anybody in the world you would rather not see than Kent Tekulve? Weaver then counters with Terry Crowley, who manages to get a walk, but so what? Is Weaver thinking the Birds are gonna get lucky against Tekulve two times in a row? If so, there is only one explanation for it. He has been hit by Elaine's Consciousness. He thinks he is at the Front Table and can put the whole game on plastic. Wrong, Earl, you can’t charge the World Series. You gotta play and pay cash! After the loss, the most humiliating and pathetic loss I've ever witnessed, I simply turned to Eddie Livingstone, who had schlepped all the way up here from Bawlamer, and I said, “That’s it. That's it pal. Never again am I gonna root for the fucking Orioles or Colts. They suck. Bawlamer is a losers’ town, and it always will be. I don’t even wanna talk about it.” Eddie looked numbed, shellshocked He started on a TV-kicking long march across my living room, and I had to hold him down. “Lemme. Ward," he said, "lemme. the sons of bitches. The sons of bitches.” I had to wrestle wif him. Doc. I had to hold him back. Finally. I stuffed enough 'Ludes down his throat to cool him out. and I tied him to my bed with old Oriole pennants. But it ain't right. It just ain’t right. I tried to think it through. Imagine how bad the players must feel. I told myself. It really isn’t you. It’s all just foolishness. But I kept thinking three to one. I kept seeing Benny Ayalya running toward the fence on a routine flyball, and waving his glove at it, like he was chasing away a gnat. If I ever find out where he lives I'm going to set a swarm of bees loose on him. He’s bald, and their little stingers are gonna hurt terrible bad. Around midnight, I had just about calmed down when I got a call from another old Baltimore friend, a pal of Doug DeCinces. He sounded shell- shocked, like he'd lost his shoulders. I said, “Well, I guess Doug is really depressed," and he said, “No, as a matter of fact, he was smiling and laughing in the clubhouse. All the players seemed to think it was okay. They’d given it their best shot, and as Doug said. “What the hell, we just got beat. It's only a game." “That set me off again. Doc. That’s why I broke into that candy store and took all the baseball cards, and began chewing up the Oriole ones. That's why I grabbed the kid's Birds pennant and poured the lighter fluid on it. I didn't really mean to set fire to little Ralphie. Honest. Doc. I’m not that kinda guy. I’ve always been a pala kids. But they done us wrong. Doc, they done us wrong. They shouldn'ta fucked with us. We’re Bawlamer fans. We been eating shit all our lives and we deserve better. When I get out. I’m going to see those players one by one. I got a score to settle. Eddie's going wif me. . . . Meanwhile. I'd like that Thorazine. You write me a script. Doc? Reprinted by permission of Village Voice and Robert Ward (C News Group Publications, Inc., 1979. DeNICOLA RESTAURANT Mrs. DeNicola and her family invite you to the DeNicola's Restaurant. 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