5

Houston, We Have a Problem

Maybe I don’t show my anger when things aren’t going right, but that’s part of Gary Pettis. I try to appear that nothing is bothering me.

—Gary Pettis

Leaving behind my beloved California, I steer the Accord through the dusty brambles of Arizona and New Mexico, surrounded by the Southwest’s stark topography and muted palette of reds, browns, and olive greens. I break up the trek over three arid days, the 689-mile haul from Phoenix to Fort Stockton, Texas, a particularly long slog made tolerable only by the compulsively addictive podcast Serial. Long stretches of empty freeway, save for the occasional billboard for gun shops and cheap gas (down to $2.29!), lull me into semihypnosis, the thirteen-year-old air-conditioning straining to keep up with the pounding heat. While I guzzle murky gas station coffee, history is made as the Supreme Court legalizes gay marriage in all fifty states. In less encouraging news, my mom (always being a mom!) texts me to be careful because she saw on the news that two prisoners escaped from a maximum security facility in New York. I remind her that I’m thousands of miles away from New York, and she replies (always being a mom!), “I know, but you never know!”

5. Gary Pettis

I also get the bad news that Gary Pettis does not, in fact, have time for me. Pettis is an enigma. While the first three Wax Packers were all relatively easy to find through public records searches (thank you, baby boomers, for keeping the land line alive), Pettis stymied me at all turns in my pretrip prep. My options exhausted, I had turned to THE LAST RESORT: public relations people. PR people have an agenda, and that’s to make their client look good no matter what. It’s their job to retain as much control as possible, to stay on message. Nothing personal—they’re just doing their job—but most great stories in journalism are not born through PR.

And so I had emailed Steve Grande, the Astros’ PR guy, asking if I could interview Gary when I came to Houston. We had agreed that the June 29 game against the Kansas City Royals would be a good opportunity (no promises, though!), but now the chime of a text message from Steve turns dirge: “Gary declined the interview. He wants to keep a low profile,” it reads.

Low profile?? I can’t imagine hordes of reporters are clamoring for time with the third-base coach, and Pettis has never been one to seek the spotlight. This, of course, is only a setback. You don’t put your life on hold for two months to chase the muse of stale cardboard and then give up at the first sign of trouble.

No, no, no. Pettis may have quit me, but I’ve got a plan B.

*

Up to this point, I’ve concealed the fact that when it comes to anything remotely mechanical, I am completely, hopelessly, utterly useless. I break into hives every time I walk into a Home Depot, its cavernous aisles, wide enough for buses, taunting me with tools I don’t even know how to hold, let alone use. Approaching Fort Stockton, both the Accord and I are hurting, the former gasping for oil. Having never changed a tire, let alone my own oil, I rank any type of breakdown among my biggest fears on this journey.

On the outskirts of town, I come across a cluster of buildings—a muffler shop, an RV appliance repair store, and Mingo’s Burritos, along with a garage with a glint of hope. A stack of tires, three chairs lifted out of an airport lounge, and a plastic bucket of stagnant, muddy water guard the garage, whose front window reads RL Auto Service in big yellow block letters. No one is at the front desk, but a few customers stand around while two men wheel tires back and forth, calling to each other in Spanish.

“Do you do oil changes here?” I ask one of them.

He looks at his partner and says something in Spanish. They exchange several lines before the younger one returns, asking, “Do you have oil?”

Is it bring your own? I wonder to myself.

Although oil changes are clearly not part of their standard service, they study my notebook, polo shirt, and California license plates and realize this could be their good deed for the day.

I’m dispatched to pick up the oil and filter (so that’s what an oil filter is!) at an O’Reilly Auto Parts down the road. Thirty-five minutes later I return, ready to apprentice. I pop the hood and watch while the younger mechanic jacks up the Accord (what a device!) and then brings over some flattened cardboard boxes to lie on. I stand in front of the car, notebook and pencil poised, slightly bent at the knees, leaning forward like a coach too nervous to stand up straight to observe the next play. From there it’s all a blur of wrenches and bolts and that filter, way beyond my feeble reach. I need diagrams, YouTube videos, and lots of practice. This is not the crash course I was hoping for.

I will not be changing my own oil in the future.

*

I’m about to see Kay, my ex-girlfriend, the only girl I’ve ever lived with, for the first time in almost ten years.

In an alternate universe, we are married with an eight-year-old daughter. We live in Santa Barbara; she’s got her own bakery, where she goes every morning at 5:00 a.m. following a run in the dark, coming in to kiss me on the forehead before leaving for work. I am a postdoc at UC Santa Barbara, its proximity to the Channel Islands providing the perfect opportunity to continue my island biogeography research. We still send each other letters through the mail even though we live together, still call each other by the same mutual pet name.

Kay was supposed to be the One, the same way I’m sure Rance and Boomer thought their first wives were their Ones. They learned to accept change and have found joy in their second (or third) chances; now it’s time to accept mine.

Kay and I didn’t speak for a long time after the breakup, but gradually the ice thawed—we became Facebook friends, then started texting each other on our birthdays. But I still haven’t heard her voice, seen those soulful brown eyes, since the day I walked out in early 2006, ashamed but still certain that I was doing the right thing. The relationship had ended, and it was my fault.

My battle with OCD took a remarkable turn for the better in mid-2005. My therapist, Tom, introduced me to a form of cognitive-behavioral therapy called exposure and response prevention in which you overcome your fears by learning to coexist with them. How do you do this? Lots and lots of homework. In my support group, I learned of other people’s suffering and their tickets out: people who had the irrational fear of stabbing their own baby had to work themselves up to holding a knife in front of their baby; those who were afraid of being gay had to watch gay porn. While these treatments may seem radical, they work because they desensitize your brain to its own bullshit. Since my compulsions were mostly mental, I had to listen for hours to a tape on a loop in which I spelled out the worst-case scenario of my irrational fears (“I contract HIV from kissing someone, give it to Kay, who leaves me, and I end up homeless and covered in sores on Skid Row dying of AIDS . . .”). That, coupled with antidepressants and a dash of metacognitive Buddhist philosophy (accept uncertainty, learn to let go) is the gold-standard treatment for the disorder. You learn that it’s not your thoughts and feelings that matter, it’s how you respond to them.

During the depths of my OCD, the romance in my relationship with Kay withered. We stopped having sex altogether. But her commitment never wavered, even when depression and panic attacks layered onto my OCD like an anxiety casserole. When I turned the corner, it was like stepping back into color—my humor returned, my eyes brightened, and with my wits back, I came to the horrific realization that Kay had been right all along when she had initially balked at the prospect of our relationship. You’re too young, she had said. We’re too far apart in age. I had insisted that I was more mature than most, that I was different, that I knew that we would last where others had failed.

She was right.

Sadly, this epiphany was not one that I reached responsibly. I was in too deep a state of denial for that. Instead, I acted out, doing the one thing that I found most reprehensible: I cheated.

Growing up in a conservative, traditional family, the kind that holds hands and says grace at the dinner table, I considered cheating to be a cardinal sin. My parents set the example, taking us to church, showing their love for each other, certainly not coveting their neighbors’ wives or husbands. There was no way I would ever cheat.

Yet there I was, at a conference in Chicago, absconding to the hotel room of a comely brunette from the Bahamas I would never see again. I couldn’t blame it on alcohol, couldn’t excuse it in any way; as it was happening I knew it was wrong, yet I wanted it anyway. And I didn’t just want it, I craved it.

I flew home the next day, racked with guilt, not recognizing my own reflection. How could I have done that to someone who had done nothing but love me even when I was all shell and no meat, damaged and lost? But I knew the answer. She had been right. I wasn’t ready.

I clung to that truth, knowing that if I stayed, the relationship would end even worse than it would now. The stakes would be higher, the damage greater. I had to go. And so I did.

*

What do you say to your ex-girlfriend after leaving her and not having seen her for nine years? What do you say to the person to whom you once promised the stars and the moon and truly meant it, only to realize too late that they’re not yours to promise?

You start by letting go. You recognize that if you say anything out of a sense of obligation, it’s not coming from the right place. As Tempy told me, the past is the past. Live in the present.

I exit 290 East in Austin, a detour from my I-10 path toward Gary Pettis and Houston, and pull into a park where food trucks have gathered in the late afternoon. I think about all the things one thinks about in this situation, the petty insecurities and curiosities: How will she look? How do I look? Will she still be attracted to me? I to her? Will her husband want to kick my ass?

And there she is, instantly recognizable, her car pulling in at the same time as mine, blowing my chance to have a few minutes to prepare. She hasn’t aged a day. She still has that radiant glow, those big brown eyes alive with kindness, her short hair framing a small and beautiful face. She’s wearing a purple top with an ankle-length white skirt, dangly silver earrings, and a big silver bracelet, classy as always. I walk over and give her a big hug and a tight squeeze that say I’m sorry, how are you, and thank you all in one. I turn to her husband, Dan, who it turns out is also a half Filipino ice hockey goalie, and shake his hand, introducing myself. This can’t be easy for him, but he is game, just the right amount of friendly. I look away, feeling it hard to hold eye contact with Kay for too long for fear that my eyes will betray me in some way even though I no longer have anything to hide.

We small-talk, hitting all the surface notes of the past nine years. She tells me she moved back to Texas in October 2006, about ten months after we broke up, and met Dan at the school they worked at. Kay had always wanted kids, and after getting married, they adopted two, PJ and Serafina, an adorable brother and sister, following a stint with them as foster kids. Dan chases them around the park, giving Kay and me a chance to chat one-on-one.

I tell her about the beginning of the trip in Visalia, and we share a laugh about Jesse and the Kid, whom she knew well when we all lived in Santa Barbara and ate at their family restaurant every Friday night. She has continued in the food industry, putting her culinary training to good use as the chef at her kids’ day care center. We talk about my road trip and this book, about the trials and tribulations I endured in grad school. She opens up about the challenges of being foster parents and adopting, as well as the ups and downs of her marriage. I’m surprised by how much she reveals so quickly until I remember that yes, this is Kay, always out in the open and willing to be vulnerable, to be real, which makes her one of the most beautiful people I have ever known. I feel more proud than wistful, proud of the life she has constructed and of the person she continues to be. Just like Tempy dissecting Matt Kemp’s swing, in romance as in baseball, timing is everything, and ours had simply been off.

We don’t delve into our own backstory or dredge up specifics. Those unspoken words pass between us in the hour-and-a-half window between spells of rain, the sticky air clinging to our skin. Our conversation is fluid and pedestrian, easy—catching up on life—the way people who have shared true intimacy can always do even if that intimacy is long gone.

On the way out, tears well from my eyes as the sky darkens and the late afternoon rain commences again, sapping the humidity from the air. The roots of what we had are still there and always will be there, even if we’re not together. She isn’t the One, but maybe there’s no such thing.

Unclenching, I exhale, grateful for the present.

*

The Houston Astros are often considered a small-market team even though they play in the fourth most populous city in the country, a center of aeronautical innovation and the energy industry. They’re one of those teams, like the Milwaukee Brewers and the Seattle Mariners, that rarely elicit a strong reaction. Wear a Yankees hat and prepare to be instantly judged; wear an Astros hat and witness tabula rasa firsthand. Maybe it’s because the team hasn’t had a ton of success in its fifty-one-year history (zero World Series titles), or maybe Houstonians are just not ones to be pushy, content to guard their home turf (albeit fiercely) but not proselytizing in others’ backyards. The franchise has had bursts of greatness as gaudy as its 1970s rainbow uniforms: the 1980 run, squelched by the possessed Phillies; the 1986 squad, led by Mike Scott and slain by the Mets; and the Killer B’s era of the 1990s and 2000s, which culminated in a World Series loss in 2005 to the White Sox. They bottomed out in 2013 with a 51-111 record, leading Sports Illustrated to boldly predict the following year that there was a method to the madness and that the Astros would win the World Series in 2017.1

Beyond their on-field performance, the Astros will always be credited with revolutionizing the sport in the 1960s, when they opened the Astrodome, then hailed, with apologies to André the Giant, as the Eighth Wonder of the World. During the Space Race, technological advancement was prioritized above all else, aesthetics be damned. If we can play baseball inside of a dome, we will never have to worry about the weather! they said. Grass can’t grow inside? No problem! We’ll just invent AstroTurf!, synthetic grass laid over concrete that gave ground balls an extra charge and caused an epidemic of rug burns. By the time the 1990s rolled around, the masses had tired of these charmless comforts and were willing to brave the elements for a return to the game’s roots, namely, outdoor stadiums with grass, located downtown. In 2000 the Astros flirted with disaster again, naming their new downtown stadium Enron Field; when the company collapsed two years later, the name was switched to Minute Maid Park, whose orange-flavored soda perfectly fit the garish color of the team’s uniforms during its 1970s heyday. Then in 2013 an action that most teams would consider pure heresy occurred: Major League Baseball moved the Astros from the National League to the American League. They switched leagues! Suggest something so subversive to the Dodgers and expect to get punched. But the Astros? Ehhhh, sure, why not.

This season, the Astros are already exceeding expectations, soaring to a 44-34 first-place start. Gary Pettis is in his first season as third-base coach and is already under fire for being a bit too aggressive in sending runners home as they approach third base (writers joked of him tearing a rotator cuff with all of the windmill motion of his arms). I haven’t heard any more from Steve, the team’s PR guy, and assume that unless I resort to drastic action, I’m going to experience my first loss of the trip.

So here’s the plan, hatched somewhere around Lordsburg, New Mexico, with a mouthful of McDonald’s hash browns and scalding hot coffee. On game days, the team offers fifteen-dollar, behind-the-scenes tours of the stadium, including a chance to watch batting practice, where Pettis will undoubtedly be. If I can get close enough, within shouting distance, I have a chance to circumvent the official channels and try to convince him to chat. I might also get thrown out, just like one of the Astros’ runners at home plate, the victim of Pettis’s overzealous arm flapping.

I walk into the lobby of Minute Maid Park, located downtown just off the freeway among one of Houston’s many skylines, and am instantly cooled by a blast of air-conditioning. A midday downpour has provided some relief, but the lingering humidity of this subtropical climate coats everything in a thin layer of moisture. Stadium officials have already decided to keep the 242-foot retractable roof closed for tonight’s game, with the temperature expected to stay above eighty-five, the cutoff for opening it up.

The high vaulted ceilings of the lobby, connected to the old Union Station, which once spurred Houston’s rail industry, hold banners of the Astros’ current crop of studs—Carlos Correa, George Springer, and José Altuve. There’s also a banner commemorating the upcoming Hall of Fame induction of lifetime Astro (and Killer B) Craig Biggio, a ceremony I plan to attend in several weeks in Cooperstown, New York.

I join the few dozen fans assembled for the tour, herded by a young intern named Joe with a midwestern twang that seems out of place in the Deep South. The Kansas City Royals, the Astros’ opponent tonight, are well represented in the flock, with at least a dozen midwesterners clad in XXL royal blue, their pale sweaty skin slightly blushing from the deep summer heat. As we follow Joe through the lobby they don’t walk so much as totter, struggling to balance their gift shop purchases.

We walk through a set of doors into the stadium itself, a cavernous greenhouse accented with local quirks and flair.

Down the lines, the foul poles are sponsored by Chick-fil-A; if an Astro hits one of the poles, you can bring in your game ticket for a free sandwich. And perhaps kitschiest of all, a train over the left-field wall (harking back to the city’s rail roots) drives back and forth whenever an Astro hits a home run or the team wins the game (driven by a real human!).

We ride an elevator up to the suite level and shuffle into suite 28, largest and plushest and belonging to team owner Jim Crane, an energy and air freight magnate who bought the team in 2011. It’s palatial, with a spread of food and drink that taunts our oversize pack.

One of the Royals’ fans, his scraggly blond locks spilling onto a Straight Outta Kauffman T-shirt (the Royals play in Kauffman Stadium), says, “Maybe we can stay here for the game,” and a wild idea pops into my head: given how big our tour group is and that to get back out of here and downstairs to field level we need to pass through a narrow doorway one at a time, there’s a good chance I could easily get “lost” and hide out here among baseball’s bourgeois. As people start filing out of the room and tour guide Joe sprints to the front, I seriously consider this half-baked idea. I may be able to remain undetected until game time, but then what? Do I hold Jim Crane hostage with my pencil until he grants me an audience with Gary Pettis? Try to charm him with the premise of the book until he can’t help but do everything in his power to get Pettis to come around?

No, no, this is most definitely a very bad idea.

I head downstairs and catch up with the rest of the group. We walk through the premium seats behind home plate (the closest I’ll ever get to them) and gather to watch the Astros take their hacks. Players are spread around the field, some lying down to stretch tight hips and hamstrings, others whipping balls back and forth with minimal strain, the last group gathered around the batting cage like they’re having a picnic. Rookie manager A. J. Hinch leans against the cage, his body’s slack perfected, watching slugger Chris Carter launch prolific bombs into the outfield, several clearing the fence with ease. Plucky José Altuve, the diminutive phenom who weathered the bad years here to become one of baseball’s best, spots a group of kids out of the corner of his eye and walks over to sign autographs, greeting them with “Hey, how are you today?”

There are coaches everywhere: hitting coach Dave Hudgens joins Hinch behind the cage to scrutinize swings, first-base coach Rich Dauer plays catch with one of the players. But no Gary. Starting to panic, I scan the crowd and spot a man with a tall, lanky build several rows in front of me wearing a fuchsia button-down shirt and khakis. I have a sneaking suspicion that this is Steve Grande, Mr. Astros PR. My rogue tactics having failed, I crawl back to the PR machine.

“Steve!” I yell, hoping that I’m right about who he is.

His head turns, and he walks up toward me. I introduce myself, and we chat about Pettis. Steve is about my age, maybe even younger, relaxed but ambitious.

“At the start of the year the team decided they weren’t going to have the coaches talk to the media at all,” he says apologetically.

“So the manager kind of speaks for all of them?” I ask.

“Yeah.”

On to plan C. Or M.

I hastily scribble a note to Pettis explaining the gist of why I am stalking him so hard and include my phone number, asking if there’s any chance we can chat, even on the phone, after the game or tomorrow.

I fish out the 1986 Topps card that brought me here.

“Do you think you could pass this to Gary and see if he will sign the card?” I ask Steve.

“Sure, I can do that,” he says. He asks for my cell number so he can text me when it’s done, we part ways, and I find my seat in section 113 for the game.

Half an hour later, as I watch the Royals take their swings, my phone chimes, and Steve comes over to deliver the card, now autographed.

“He took the note, but he didn’t open it in front of me,” Steve says. He seems disappointed that he can’t help me more and says, “If the guys aren’t interested or if they decline, we can’t push them.”

I’ve chosen a seat behind third base so I can watch Gary flail all game and luck out with seats next to two fun people around my age—Jenna, a cute and sassy Homeland Security lawyer originally from Vermont, and Rob, a fit jock whose father, Bob, pitched in the Major Leagues for the Tigers. We watch Gary mark his territory behind third base, stomping around, flashing signs to runners, and spitting out sunflower seeds. He’s only sixty yards away, so close, but I’m all out of ideas on how to get to him, resigned to the hope that he will read my note and give me a call.

The Astros triumph, 6–1, the train in left field with the real human blowing its horn to celebrate. But my phone never rings. Perhaps for Pettis, the past is the past, and he just wants to focus on the present.

*

Although I never heard from Pettis and don’t know if he ever read my note, here’s what I would have said if I had had the chance:

Dear Gary,

Please don’t call the police.

I know that even if you wanted to participate, you couldn’t, that the team has a gag order this season on coaches talking to the media. I get it. I also think it’s funny to think of myself as “the media.” I’m just an eight-year-old stuck in a thirty-four-year-old’s body.

I know a lot about you. We have a lot in common—I teach at Laney College, where you played baseball. In fact, before I left for this trip I visited your old coach, Tom Pearse. He’s doing well, living up in Winters with his wife, Justine. He thinks so highly of you, he’s so proud. When I asked him what you were like as a person, he said in that aw-shucks way that only the old-timers can, “He wouldn’t talk shit if he had a mouthful.” He wanted me to give you his card if I saw you. Call him—it would make his day.

I know it couldn’t have been easy growing up in East Oakland—a lot of my students went to your alma mater, Castlemont High School. I see the struggle every day written on their faces. One of my students recently missed an exam, and when she came in the next day she explained that her brother had been shot and was in the hospital. I’m sad to report that this wasn’t the first time this happened to one of my students.

I know how strong your family was, especially your mother after your dad passed away. I know how seriously you took that responsibility to be the man of the house. I know because I had a long conversation with your younger brother Stacey at a mall in Concord. He told me about how the whole family would go to church on Sundays and then straight to a Giants game at Candlestick before your dad passed (but honestly, Gary, you were an Oakland kid; the Giants??). He told me about what a tight ship your mom ran, how she instilled that preternatural work ethic that got you to the Major Leagues, the same work ethic that Stacey wishes he had had (he told me he had more talent, but you had the drive). He loves you so much, is so proud of what you have accomplished. When I asked him for an anecdote, he told me about how you guys used to run the 3.5-mile loop around Lake Merritt and how for the last hundred yards or so he would be right there behind you, saying, “C’mon Stacey, you can do it,” willing you forward. Tears filled his eyes when he told me that. I saw your brother, the king jock of Castlemont, reduced to tears because he loves you so goddamned much.

I also know how much adversity you have faced in your life, how you are the quintessential underdog, not scouted during high school, cast off by two community colleges before Laney finally gave you a chance. How you signed in 1979 for a measly $5,000 with the Angels, already older than most Minor Leaguers, and then proceeded to prove them all wrong by marching right up the Minor League ladder to break into the Majors in late 1982 and hit a home run (your first hit!) on the last game of the season in front of 62,020 fans in Anaheim (right after Reggie Jackson, on deck, told you, “Win this game, rook”).

I know how close you came to the World Series in 1986, literally one strike away, before Dave Henderson ruined everything. How the next season the team wouldn’t believe how hurt your hand was and made you play through it, leading to the humiliation of being sent down to the Minors. And I know how lightning somehow struck you twice, how you got all the way back to the Show as a coach, this time to the World Series itself, and were again one strike away from winning the World Series in 2011. You have faced a lot of adversity and not always emerged victorious.

What I don’t know is how you dealt with the failure, how you coaxed yourself through those excruciating lows. I don’t want to know what it felt like, the way so many reporters ask (we all know that it felt like shit); rather, I want to know what Gary Pettis did about it. What action, thought process, behavior propelled you forward, because you never did give up. You’re still there all these years later, waving your arms and rah-rahhing the next generation forward, just like your little brother all those years ago at Lake Merritt.

Sincerely,

Brad

P.S. Call your old coach. Really.