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Roger the Coach
Beyond the bondage of Hebrew School and Mrs. Grinstein's chopped liver was Roger - Roger the Coach - By Jay Teitel
One day in late spring when I was 12 years old - three years before I read J.D. Salinger's story The Laughing Man - I was on my way to Hebrew school when my friend Howie Cohen came up from behind me, breathless, and asked me if I wanted to go to a baseball tryout. At the time I was probably one of the more tight-assed, conservative children in the Western Hemisphere, but I was also straining against the inhuman bondage that was my Hebrew school, especially with my bar mitzvah and freedom only a few months away, and I was infected by the spring, and I loved baseball - so in a moment of wildness I said yes.
"Whose team is it?" I asked Howie.
"Roger's" he said simply.
We walked up the corner where Roger was going to pick him up. This was in Bathurst Manor, at the time the northern-most Jewish ghetto in the city. In the squat little shopping centre to our left you could get, at the Deluxe Bakery, the best rye buns in the world, although the chocolate cake invariably tasted like applesauce. In the ugly mirror-image shopping centre across the street, Mrs. Grinstein made chopped liver that scores of Manor matrons passed off as their own on Friday nights. I think I was trying to concentrate on her chopped liver - as a way to distract myself from the monumental cloud of guilt waiting to swallow me - when a battered green Volkswagen bus whipped around in a tight screeching U-turn and slammed to a halt in from of us. The driver was obscured by the boy sitting in the passenger seat beside him, but he appeared to be hunched over the wheel while he looked at us, his arms cradling it with absent-minded weary naturalness, as if he'd been born in that position and would spend the rest of his life there. He sniffed, dabbed at his nose with a piece of Kleenex, lolled his head vaguely toward us, and said in mildly raucous, not unkind, mainly phlegmy, stuffed-nose voice "Let's go, let's go, we're late."
We climbed into the van, no small feat itself because it was moving before we were half in. Inside, every inch of upholstery had been stripped away, leaving a green metal floor and walls - a space filled with 35 boys of various shapes and sizes. I can say that 35 with accuracy because a tall, languid black boy sitting on the floor leaning against the door started to count just after Howie and I arrived. The boy's name, I found out later, was George Livingston. Just as George reached 29, the van heeled over to the right and the door behind him flew open and he fell out backward. Or would have fallen out backward if Howie and I hadn't grabbed his legs. As it was, George went around the corner like a flag, wailing a strange, high-pitched wail with very little breath, the essence of wispy terror. And the van shuddered to a halt. And Roger turned around, alert, and I got my first look at his face.
It was - and you'll have to bear with me here - an ancient boy's face. That is, it was seasoned, it was experienced, but it would always be a boy's face in the best sense of the term, the kind of face Papillon, the indefatigable French convict, probably had. Roger's hair was cut to brush-cut length, but not enough to disguise the nap. His eyes were blue crow's-footed and obviously used to squinting out over great distances. His nose was impressive and red with the redness of a permanent cold. The rest of him looked wiry - the wrist flung up on the seat beside him seemed a little lost inside his loose, wine-coloured sweatshirt, but perfectly capable of dealing with its predicament.
"George - George, you okay?" he said.
George managed a nod. Roger shook his head wearily, then smiled. Perfectly, he was missing his two front teeth.
We got to the ball park with no further incident. Roger parked precariously close to the edge of a little cliff over the diamond and we all piled out, carrying bat bags and bases. It was heady, professional stuff to me: the equipment, the big-league order everywhere, the freedom to play free and enthusiastic inside that order. First we ran bases to a stopwatch. Then we learned how to slide, regular slide and hook slide, both sides. Up to this point Roger had mainly directed and watched. But now he threw batting practice and I can only say that it was joyous. He threw the way he drove, rhythmic, efficient, ancient, holding seven balls at a time in an old borrowed glove, never really stopping his motion, cranking up and throwing, waiting for the crack of the bat, not turning to follow the ball, but starting his studied wind-up again. And the pitches, they came in perfect: waist-high everyone of them, hard enough to test you, but not so hard that they would overpower you. I hit one, and then another, and then I found myself praying that the dream would not end. Nothing can describe the rapture of a 12-year-old who loves baseball at finding someone who will throw him perfect pitches to hit until his arms droop from exhaustion. Roger did. When he was finished, he trotted carefully, hunched a bit, and I thought I detected a limp - something left over, maybe from the last escape.
"You have to keep your elbow up level with your shoulder." He picked up a bat, for some reason a fungo, to demonstrate. "That's so you don't have a hitch in your swing. And stride toward the pitcher, not third base. You keep stepping down the line like that and all you'll hit'll be banjos to right field - and that's a chafe eh?" ("Chafe," pronounced with a short a, was his favourite word. To this day I have no hitch)
I was big for my age, and my birthday fell in September, giving me two years of peewee eligibility, so at the end of the practice Roger called me over and asked me if I'd like to sign with the team. By this time I'd completely forgotten about Howie and chopped liver and the fact that I have a home to return to at all. But I said sure, captivated, and the next thing I knew we were standing in my kitchen, my mother and father and Roger in his sweatshirt and sneakers beside our pastel cupboards, and he was wiping his nose with his kleenex and excusing himself and explaining, polite but straightforward, like any adult, where I'd been and who he was and how much time I'd need off from Hebrew school to play for the team. The kitchen was dark and cool; I buzzed with excitement, full of fear and premonition. And then, amazingly, I was listening to my parents say, "Of course." And even more amazing, when he was gone, their smiles were indulgent and fond with not a trace of recrimination. I see now that they were as captivated by his candid and humble authority, by the summer lure of the boy in him, as I was.
That summer, and the following two summers, I could easily call the days of Roger. We played ball two, sometimes three, times a week, and practiced almost as much. The practices were more fun than the games because there was no pressure and Roger controlled them. We played a batting-practice game where you got an extra out every two runs your team scored. The pitches came from him the way they had that first day, straight and perfect. And Roger dressed the same way, his sweatshirts - usually of that curious wine colour - hanging loosely on him, his old black dress pants, never jeans, dragging over his cleats. In three summers I don't think I ever saw him wear a pair of shorts. It was a mystery, like the limp that he may or may not have had, and there was a myth to go with it. Roger had been a prime hockey prospect, went the story, a goalie with dazzling potential, but then one night, running through the park in a moment of wildness - your could hear the rustling of the wind, the universe's abandonment - he'd stumbled, tripped, fallen from a great height, and broken both legs. And failing to recover completely, with something gone out of him, had become, instead, the Coach.
He spoke easily to us, treating us like adults, but there was a hint of raucous irony in it that he elaborated on only with a group of much older players who were, I guess, his friends. This was the inner circle, and we - at least I - ached to be admitted to it, only briefly, of course, to avoid swooning in the rarefied air of celebrity. My first chance came when my parents were away. Roger took me with one other peewee and four of five of the usual group to Jackson's Point. I remember how ridiculous we seemed, like a barnstorming minor-league team pulling into Atlantic City. But it was on this trip that I started to find out other things about Roger. Ours wasn't his only universe. Not only did he coach two other baseball teams during the summer and three hockey teams during the winter, but he was a junior high school teacher as well. And he happened to have a paper route of some 1,000 papers that he delivered every morning in the heart of Forest Hill. (It was a high fantastical detail, but true. Two days after Jackson's Point I helped him with the route, watching his method with amazement as we drove through the sleepy, dew-rich, arbored streets. He drove with the van door tied back, reaching into the back for papers and lobbing them onto porches with uncanny accuracy. Like everything else, he has taken the art of being a boy and coached himself to perfect competence in it.
But probably the time I remember best was the day I went with Roger and the group to Detroit to watch a Tiger ball game. In a dark, bar-like diner, I had a chocolate sundae with chocolate ice cream. Later that night the stadium was impossibly big and green and well lit and Gates Brown hit a home run to win the game for the home team in the bottom of the 10th. In the car on the way home a boy named Dick Todd drove and Roger slept. I watched him: his elbow was propped on the armrest, his chin on his fist. His head lolled easily with the rhythm of the car. He was natural in cars, I thought - they were where he belonged. I think I watched him all the way to Toronto.
Two years later my friends stopped playing baseball and started going to camp, and so did I. It was at camp that I read J.D. Salinger's The Laughing Man. In it a group of boys entertained one summer by a counselor they call simply the Chief. The Chief drives them around in a battered bus and plays ball with them and tells them stories about the Laughing Man, a hero who wears a mask to hide his horribly disfigured face.
In Salinger's story there is also a beautiful girl named Mary Hudson who takes up with the Chief and then ditches him, essentially causing him to finish off the Laughing Man in a grisly final episode that leaves half of his charges crying. As far as I could tell, nothing quite so literary happened to Roger. He kept coaching, and winning, and inventing; gradually I stopped hearing about him from friends and started reading about him in newspapers. He was concentrating on hockey now. Two rules had to be changed because of loopholes he found in them. A picture appeared, showing him with stylish long hair and front teeth. He looked younger, less seasoned, especially with the teeth; he didn't look like Roger at all. And then one day late this spring, carrying with it the little eroding shock that always comes when you realize that someone your know has become famous - the shock that he isn't a god because you know him, and therefore they, all the famous people, may not be gods, but as naked as you, so one more layer of the Olympian protection is removed between you and the infinite - one day late this spring Roger Neilson was named coach of the Toronto Maple Leafs.
But for three summers of my life he was our Laughing Man, and nothing can change that. Too seldom does a radiant memory touch the grey celebrity of the present with the coincidence called love. Maybe this was once.
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