18
In the Press Box
I got to the ballpark an hour early for the Sunday game so I’d have time to write some possible leads—The resurgent Lake Wobegon Whippets, coming off a nifty win last week against Bowlus, nearly made it two in a row Sunday but alas fell short against the Bards of Avon—and strolled up the battered wood stairs and into the grandstand and stopped, struck by the beauty of a diamond on a summer day. So green, and the infield dirt raked smooth and watered to a deeper shade of brown. And at the top of the stands, the seat of privilege and royalty, the press box, fifteen feet long, with four big windows behind the foul net that swooped up from the top of the backstop to the press-box roof.
“I don’t have the key to that up there,” said Mike the groundskeeper. He was rolling and raking the third-base line so that bunts would roll foul. “I wash my hands of it. That’s Jim Dandy’s bailiwick. He installed the locks on the door. Those aren’t my locks.”
“When does he arrive?”
“Who knows? They bring in this two-bit skirt-chaser in tight pants and a duck butt hairdo to handle the PA announcing, who by the way doesn’t know a sacrifice bunt from his sacroiliac—he mispronounces names, gets the score wrong, you name it; meanwhile, he and his dipshit friends are having a party up there and getting high on snake smoke from their funny cigarettes—all I can say is, don’t come to me about it, okay?”
“I have to get into the press box.”
“Climb in the window.”
So I stood on the seats below and raised the window and crawled inside.
Inside was a splintered plywood table with thousands of cigarette-butt burns and numerous dark rings from old beer bottles. An old silver microphone and amplifier and a child’s phonograph sat on it with Prop. of J. Dandy written on them, on strips of masking tape. On the back wall were scrawled hundreds of insults and salacious messages and desperate dirty thoughts, phone numbers for Donna and Tina and LaVerne and Dolores, some with a word or two about each one’s specialty. There were two chairs, an easy chair covered with an Army blanket and an old busted folding chair. I figured that one was for me.
 
 
As one-thirty approached, the fans filed in, like men taking their places at a urinal, nobody getting too close to his neighbors. The gloomy old diehards in the plaid shirts and feed caps camped behind the home dugout; the teenagers sat behind the visitors’ dugout, where they could rag on them; the fathers and sons were directly back of home plate; and the gamblers sat at the very top of the stands along with the drunks. I busied myself making descriptive notes on the pre-game spectacle—The crowd trickled in like rivulets of muddy water on a hillside of seats—The crowd fluttered in like birds of many feathers settling down on a bank of phone wires—The little white spheroids made expressive arcs in the air, higher or lower, as if the throwers were speaking a geometrical language. I made a list of words to work into the story, to give it tone—auspicious, harry, thwart, drowse, entreaty, pliant, incipient, plaintive, sortie—and then I heard the key in the padlocks, and the bolt opened, and there stood Mr. Jim Dandy, in a seersucker suit and straw boater and white bucks, mirror shades, his curly black hair slicked back on the sides. He was carrying two brown paper sacks that clinked when he set them down.
Mr. Dandy took off the shades and gave me the hairy eyeball. “What in the hell are you doing in here?” he said. “There better not be anything missing.”
“I’m writing up the game for the Herald Star.” My voice came out a little squeakier than I was hoping for. What I wanted to say was, I listen to the Doo Dads almost every night on Wonderful Weegee and you are my favorite group.
“Next time ask permission before you go barging in.”
 
 
It was already one-thirty when Mr. Dandy appeared. Game time. The ump behind home plate turned and looked up toward us and waved. Jim Dandy eased down in his easy chair and switched on the microphone and blew into it—people jumped as if a bomb had gone off—and he said in his six-foot-deep voice, “Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Wally (Old Hard Hands) Bunsen Memorial Ballpark, home of your Lake Wobegon WHIPPETS! Let’s honor America and rise and salute the Stars and Stripes and join together in our national anthem,” and he held the mike up to the phonograph and put the needle down and a scratchy version of “The Star-Spangled Banner” blasted out. I wondered how many of the fans were aware of his eminence, a man whose records were heard in thousands of homes and cars across the Upper Midwest every night on the radio. Meanwhile, he fetched from his sack a bottle of vodka and a bottle of tomato juice and sploshed equal parts of each into a paper cup and tossed it down before the home of the brave and shouted into the mike, “Let’s play ball!” and the crowd below let out a sickly cheer as the Whippets trotted onto the field and Roger Guppy strode to the mound and picked up the resin bag and threw his warm-ups.
“That’s my brother pitching,” said Jim Dandy. “You be sure to treat him right. I don’t want to be reading snide comments just because he throws a gopher ball or two.”
Jim Dandy had a little black mustache that suffered from a hair shortage. It was raggedy in a couple of places and he kept fussing with it. He had doused himself in a syrup-sweet cologne, but his breath smelled like he’d been eating dead raccoons. It was rank. He removed his jacket and hung it on a nail. “When my buddies come, we’re going to have to ask you to make room,” he said. He freshened up his drink with more vodka. He asked, “What’s your name?” and I told him, hoping he wouldn’t associate me with the man from the bank who repossessed his car.
“I gotta keep the place locked up because we store product up here.” He nodded toward a stack of cardboard boxes in the corner, marked DANGEROUS/DO NOT OPEN/THIS MEANS YOU!
“You’ve heard of my singing group. right? The Doo Dads?” I nodded. “Yes, sir,” I said. I was about to say more about this, but he wasn’t looking at me, he was scanning the crowd for hot babes. And then he picked up a pair of binoculars for a closer look. “Nice set of maracas over behind first base,” he said. “Boy, I wouldn’t mind doing the cha-cha with those bazoongies! And look at that honey in the blue cap. Oh, baby. Mr. Jim Dandy would sure like to spend a few hours doing some bed dancing with you, darling.”
Roger set the Bards down in order, and when the first Whippet came up to bat, Mr. Dandy cried out his name—“RIGHT FIELDER—WAYNE TOMMERDAHL!”—and let out a wolf howl as if to arouse fan fervor, but it was like trying to make whipped cream from skim milk. The fans made no more noise than if they were at a plowing contest.
“Norwegians,” said Mr. Dandy. “I’ll tell you, when God created Norwegians, he was still learning. He used what he knew about sheep and gave them hands to drive a tractor and jerk off, and there you have it. The dumbest of the dumb. Men who go fishing for fun. Imagine it! Sitting in boats and staring at the water! You want to know what’s fun, kid? Walking across the parking lot with a 19-year-old babe to get in your car and take her to the beach. That is what makes for a happy man.
“Norwegians!
“Kid, if Elvis Presley had grown up among Norwegians, he’d still be driving a truck for a living. These people cannot be entertained in any way, shape, or form! I’d rather do a show for a herd of Holsteins! I’d rather sing for a bunch of brook trout!”
 
 
He got friendlier and more confidential as he got deeper into the vodka. He told me the story of his career. How the Doo Dads started out as the Coral Kings—him and Mitch and Donnie and Dutch—the first rock ’n’ roll group in the Midwest—1954! before Elvis!—and they got an offer to go to New York and work for Alan Freed—Moondog!—and Dutch wouldn’t go on account of his dad needed him at the linoleum store. The Coral Kings stayed up all night pleading with Dutch and plying him with strong drink. It was their big chance, man. Give us two months! Give us two weeks! If we don’t hit big in two weeks, we’ll come home, no hard feelings. But Dutch wouldn’t budge, so they gave him the ax and found Richie and taught him the ropes, and now they were called the Hot Rods, and they came out with “Mama Mama” on the Band Box label—he sang a little for me—
Two and two is four,
And two and three is five.
My little mama mama gonna smile when I arrive.
Three and two is five,
And three and three is six.
There ain’t no kind of blues that a woman cannot fix.
Three and four is seven,
And four and five is nine.
I’m ridin up to heaven on the Mama Mama Line.
The song shot to No. 6 in the Midwest with no publicity or anything, and they went on a six-week package tour headlined by Carl Perkins and Roy Orbison, both of whom said the Hot Rods were the real thing, but now it was Donnie’s turn to chicken out—his girlfriend wanted him back home or else—so they came back home, Donnie being the high tenor, not easily replaced, and the Hot Rods pleaded with Bonnie to marry Donnie and move to Memphis and in two years’ time we’ll all have fourteen-room mansions with white pillars and fifty-foot swimming pools and be driving pink Cadillacs, and Bonnie said she could never leave her family and if Donnie wanted to go, fine, he could go by his own self and have his ring back too. There was no pleasing Bonnie. (Two years later, she broke up with him anyway.) So they wasted six months shopping around for a high tenor. Got Earl the Girl. Got him from the Cowlicks when that group broke up. He could go high and keep going higher. But he and Mitch didn’t get along. Fought like dogs from day one. Mitch quit. He was the lead singer, not so hard to replace. They stole Stevie John from the Diddlybops. Then he wanted to change the name from the Hot Rods to the Blue Jays. Jim Dandy begged and pleaded—man, they had four hot records as the Hot Rods, “Mama Mama” and “Please, Baby, Let It Be Tonight” and “Home Base Man” and “Out in the Cornfield,” let’s not give away the franchise—but the three new guys outvoted him, thinking that the Hot Rods’ name was holding them back. So they did a record for Band Box, “It’s Summer, It’s Midnight, and It’s You,” but as the Blue Jays they were lost in the confusion of bird groups—the Robins, the Lovebirds, the Flamingoes, the Flickers, the Swallows, the Thrashers, the Starlings, the Warblers, the Woodcocks—and “It’s Summer” languished on the charts, so did “I Don’t Need the World If I Have You” and “Zsa Zsa Zsa,” so in April they became the Doo Dads, and now Band Box is talking about doing a long-play album of car songs with their “Hot Rod Alley” as side 1, band 1.
 
 
Meanwhile, it was the bottom of the second inning, the Whippets were down 1-0, and I couldn’t remember exactly how or why. I tried not to listen to him, but he was hard to not listen to. When he wasn’t yakking, he was singing to himself, going bip-m-bip-m-bip-a-bomp-bomp, hmmm-ba-dee-ba-dee-mmm-ba-dee, mmm-ba-dee-mmm-bomp-bomp. After the second inning, he dug into one of the cardboard boxes and got out a 45 and played it over the PA—
You got a Ford, you’re on board.
A Chevrolet, you’re okay.
I told him I heard that song on Weegee and he nodded. “It was Number One there for three weeks in a row.”
Most of the crowd took the song as a minor annoyance, no cause for alarm, but a few heads turned to gaze our way, and one of them was Leonard Larsen, sitting next to his dad. Leonard peered up at me, trying to catch my eye, his hand raised, ready to wave, a tentative smile on his face. He was hoping I’d invite him up to sit in the press box with me and Jim Dandy. No way, José. He shielded his eyes with his hand and waved with the other and I ignored him. Plead all you want, pal. I’m here, you’re down there. That’s just how things are. No hitchhikers. And if you think it’s so great up here, guess again.
Jim Dandy put the 45 back in the paper sleeve and scribbled on it and handed it to me. It said, “To Larry, All the best in life, Your friend Jim Dandy.” Jim Dandy was an illegible squiggle with a fancy scrollwork tail under it. “Someday this’ll be a keepsake. After you see us on Ed Sullivan you can tell your girlfriend, you knew that guy when he worked at the ballpark.” He grinned and shook his head at the wonderful irony of it. Then he said, “What are those words, kid?” He was looking at my word list, auspicious, entreaty, incipient, and so forth. “You don’t want to use words like that, kid. People’re gonna think you went to college, they won’t believe a thing you say.”
 
 
There was a knock on the door. It was the bratwurst man. Mr. Dandy bought four with onions and mustard and ate them fast, a brat in two bites, and chewed with his mouth wide open and chased them with vodka and tomato juice, and then reached down for a coffee can and took out his whanger and peed into the can; meanwhile, he had the binoculars trained on the maracas below. “This is the life, isn’t it, kid?”
It seemed to be the life for him all right. Up high in the press box, getting a royal perspective on things, the green field of manly combat and the motley crowd of peons below. He snorted at them. “Norwegians! They don’t even contemplate sex unless they’re too drunk to go fishing. Then they marry the ugliest woman in town so they won’t have to think about it too often. Or marry a pregnant woman to save themselves the time and trouble. A Norskie spends his life looking at the rear ends of Holsteins, shoveling the feed in one end, shoveling the shit out the other, pumping the milk out the bottom, twice a day, 365 days a year, a prisoner of lactation. Couple times a year, he nails the old lady, and a couple times he slips off to the ballpark with a roll of cash in hand, looking to make a wager, and that’s when I like to make the acquaintance of Mr. Dairy Farmer—yes, sir! When he’s ready to roll—oh yes!—you let him win a few, and then you lift that roll of fifties from his pocket like you were taking sugar from a bowl.” Then he spotted another woman in the crowd. “Oh boy, oh boy, oh boy, honey in the dish!” he cried. “Coupla mangoes on that babe! Oh, buttercups! Have mercy!” He had examined every female chest in the grandstand and had yet to see one he didn’t like. They were all good, there were no bad ones in the bunch.
“You ever hear ‘Gambling Man’ on Weegee?”
I hadn’t. So he played it after the second inning.
I’m here to tell you people
I’m doing all right.
I am a rambler and gambler,
I play cards every night.
I have a porterhouse steak
Every night for my board.
That’s more than any loafer
In this town can afford.
Got a beautiful mattress
That’s a couple feet deep.
An electric blanket
Keeps me warm when I sleep.
And I earned it with poker
And craps every night.
I tell you folks,
I’m doing all right.
He was halfway into the vodka now and getting more expansive by the minute and it wasn’t even the fourth inning yet. He leaned back with his feet up on the table and the microphone on his chest and I told him who was next up to bat and he switched on the mike and announced it. A couple times I had to reach over and switch off the mike because he started commenting on the mangoes and maracas.
“Some people go into music for the money. Ha! In two years, kid, I’ll have a million bucks, bet you anything, but it can’t make you happy like a woman can. No, sir. Money is something to throw off the back of a train. Women are the reason to go into rock ’n’ roll. All the babes flock to the band. Hit bands mean hot babes. You do your set and a coupla encores and you come off backstage and they’re standing there by the back door, the babe auction, holding out the paper for the autograph, and their eyes are saying, Take me, Jim Dandy. Yes, sir. And they come back next day saying, ‘Jim Dandy, do that thing again!’ I got more young honeys than I personally know how to handle. A bass singer like myself has more capacity than the average man, but five women a day is physically taxing to me, and the backlog of womanhood seeking my attention—I have to tell them, ‘Get in line. One man can only do so much!’ ”
He grabbed another 45 from the box and slapped it on the phonograph, but before he got the needle down, in came the other Doo Dads, Richie and Earl the Girl and Stevie John, all in white Bermudas and peppermint-striped shirts and sneakers and none of them happy to be here. I shoved over into the corner, squished between the boxes of product and the table, and tried to get my mind on the game, but it was hard to ignore the Doo Dads up close, they had large personalities, like Jim Dandy but not so well lubricated.
—What a bunch of pumpkin-rollers and nose-pickers we got before us today. Oh my. Rednecks as far as the eye can see.
—You on bush patrol, J.D.? Who’s yer little pal?
—Shut yer yap.
—My, somebody’s flying high.
—C’mon, you lovebirds, stop the goosing.
—Gimme some of that rope, my good man.
—You got hash?
One of them opened up a brown bag and pulled out a cigar, and when he lit it, it smelled like burning tires.
—He’s got the real shishi, the black Russian.
—Hang it on me, scout.
—Oh, Nelly, let those temple bells ring.
Thick smoke rolled out the windows.
—Don’t breathe, kid.
I was trying not to. Meanwhile, the Whippets had leaped into the lead on the strength of Roger shutting down Avon and also hitting himself a nice triple, scoring the Perfesser and Boots. Mr. Dandy shared the Doo Dads’ cigar and announced the batters—“Leading off for Avon, second-baseman Fred Lederer!”—and down below Leonard kept glancing up, trying to catch my eye, and the bratwurst man returned with four more dogs, slathered with mustard, and the vodka dwindled, and finally came the seventh-inning stretch, and Jim Dandy announced, “Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome . . . the Doo Dads!” and they gathered in close to the microphone and sang—
HOME BASE! (That’s the place!)
HOME BASE! (You win the race!)
I got to first when she gave me a kiss,
I got to second when I squeezed her like this!
I rounded second, I was going hard,
Slid into third and caught her off-guard,
I got a glimpse of nylon and lace
And I headed for HOME BASE!
And they started in growling and howling and squealing and moaning in rhythm, and Jim Dandy grunting and grinding like a slide trombone and Earl the Girl up high squeedling and whining and Stevie John singing, Here it comes here it comes here it comes closer closer, and Richie panting and sighing and then they stopped and sang two big chords with Earl going up through the ceiling, HOME ... BASE!!!!
There was not big applause at the end, but Jim Dandy hollered into the microphone, “How about a big hand for the Doo Dads, ladies and gentlemen? They came all the way over from Millet for the game and to entertain you folks today, let’s give them a big hand!” And a few more hands clapped.
And then the Avon batter came to the plate and Roger looked in for the sign.
Jim Dandy shoved the microphone down toward me. “Here, kid, have yourself a ball,” he said. And the Doo Dads piled out of the press box and loped down the stairs, waving to the crowd that sat ignoring them. There was so much I wanted to ask him—Did he ever hear from Ricky? Has the FBI talked to him about Ricky? What do FBI agents look like? Where do the Doo Dads record their music? Is it heard all over America or only in Minnesota? Has he ever met Elvis Presley?—but they were gone, disappeared into a passageway and out to the parking lot, and I heard their cars start up, one by one, four big mufflers snarling, and the rear tires kicking up gravel, and out of the lot they roared, and four pairs of rear tires caught the asphalt, one after another, four long screams of rubber, as they raced out of Lake Wobegon, heading for the HiDeHo, where they would sing that night to a crowd that really truly loved them, and afterward there would be a line of brand-new girls backstage. Nobody announced the players over the PA and the crowd did not seem perturbed at the lack of this information. Leonard sidled into the press box after the eighth and tried to make chitchat. I told him I was busy. I said, “I’m on deadline.”