Part 3: Wally World Whoa
As to my blog (this advice to writers), the question is how can I drive 7,000 miles, carryout about a dozen crucial baseball interviews, stories that can make or break my first contract for a non-fiction book with a big time publisher, and not make this blog, When Harry (and a bunch of ballplayers) met Bob?
Well, for the sake of this writer’s blog, I’ll just let the reader assume (and since you must be reading and have figured that out) that this---taking a grandmother, wife and two antsy kids along for the ride, in fact, was no way to write a book. Maybe put me in line for bus driver, father, porter, money machine, referee and Family Man of the Year. But trust me, no way to write a book dependant on interviews from major league--we really don’t give a crap about your little project--- baseball players.
So, again, should anyone still be reading at this point with an interest in the baseball piece of this story, then I’d highly recommend Pen Men “Baseball’s Greatest Bullpen Stories Told by the Men Who Brought the Game Relief,” St. Martin’s press. You can have your very own copy from Amazon for (either hardback or paper, used for pennies)
Now, back to the blogging/heads up to any parent/writer who might be presented with an “opportunity” like the one that I’ve set up here.
As the years have passed, and the book (which eventually did get excellent reviews from the New York Times and the Chicago Tribune to USA TODAY and Booklist, thank you very much) my favorite memories aren’t of the one-on-ones with the games’ great players. The recollections of this project are from the Keroucian On The Road, Chevy Chase Wally World, and Steinbeck Travels With Charlie, moments that took place along America’s highways: Kerouac had drugs and poetry, Chevy had Christie Brinkley, Steinbeck had a poodle, and I had baseball and family.
As I fall to sleep at night now, it’s rare when one of these moments doesn’t bring a smile to my drooling face. Where a normal man might find himself counting left handed relief pitchers jumping bullpen fences, I drift off to netherland, in the “arms” of my loving family.
I like beer, and after 8-15 hours on the road a six pack of Bud Lights can be a welcome bed fellow, unless your 80-year-old mother and daughter are right next to you snuggled in to their Embassy Suites bed, with the elder of the twosome reciting a family history of alcoholism and retelling the story for the 100th time about how my Grandfather Cairns didn’t have a drink until he was fifty and died and alcoholic!
Young then, in my 40s, it was my habit to run at least three miles every morning while my family chowed down at the Embassy Suites breakfast buffets. One would think that after I’d run and showered that they’d be pleasantly packed full of bagels and cereal, perched there in the van as I bungeed down their last suitcase---waiting for the next exciting USA moment. Actually no! I’d typically find them lounging around the room, watching TV, complaining to Alyce about how many miles it would be until we saw their cousin Kristin at the University of Colorado in Colorado Springs. Then I’d hear their mother or my mother say something like, “Well, if you’re father doesn’t have to stop every ten minutes to interview some old baseball pitcher, then we should be there in about ten hours!”
Oh, and speaking of stopping every ten minutes. Writers, try this one on for size. Take your family/kids across the country (forget that you have interviews to conduct) and see how many times (think big here) you are badgered from the back seat to stop and see The World’s Biggest Ball of String; The Caves of Curious Creatures; The Wax Museum of the West; Barney Smith’s Toilet Seat Art Museum; Leila's Hair Museum; the UFO Watch Tower and (my mother’s request) the Salt and Pepper Shaker Museum! Final thought here: Had I made a really wrong turn and ended up in Cooperstown, New York, would I have had one request for a quick look-see at the National Baseball Hall of Fame? Probably not!
Oh, staggering into an EARLY BIRD DINNER SPECIAL at a Winnemucca, Nevada Embassy Suites, following a neat little nine hours behind the wheel, I decided that instead of having the “traditional” evening meal with the family that I would opt for a couple of beers and go play the slot machines in the hotel’s bar. I tossed my credit card to Alyce to cover the “eager eaters” and as I turned to make my escape for some peace, quiet and entertainment, I heard my mother say, “Alyce, you might want to keep an eye on him. You know his great uncle had a horrible gambling addiction, brought his entire family down!”
San Francisco is a beautiful city---no news flash there. Beautiful unless A.) you are trying during your jog to sort out your early morning thoughts, preparing for an interview with Steve Bedrosian, the Giant’s closer, a Cy Young Award winner and a guy who had a back story involving his son, that I knew would make a unique contribution to my stories from the pen.
In short, the hills were murder on my cramping (ten hour cooped up in a car) legs and those famous and lovely streets so crowded that I must have run into, or dodged about 200 angry vendors. All the while---back at the downtown hotel---my entourage was planning my bus, boat/tour of the Golden Gate City---everything from Telegraph Hill to Alcatraz!
With the day behind me and the ladies off to shop and then dine, Matt and I cabbed to Candlestick so daddy could conduct three important interviews, Bedrosian, Norm Sherry (bullpen catcher and brother of Larry Sherry, the Dodgers MVP for the ’59 World Series.) Norm’s claim to fame and story was that he’d caught Sandy Koufax in the Spring Training game that Koufax overcame a control problem that changed his career. And, if I was in luck, I’d pick off a few comments from Larry Anderson, a classic Pen Man, who had set a Guinness World Record for, while sitting in the Astros bullpen, attaching Sunflower seeds to his face.
Thanks to a family matter, I went two for three that day---got the Sherry, Koufax story, talked to the great Sunflower seed record holder. But when Steve Brodsian came out of the locker room for our scheduled talk where was I? Well, I was in a panic, racing around the ballpark looking for Matt who was told to stay in his seat behind the Giant’s dugout and not budge until I came back. And where did I find him? Well, he noted that a lot of home run balls were being delivered down the leftfield line to the bleachers during batting practice and, “Just thought I’d cruise out there to see if I could bag myself a couple!” he said.
So no Brodosian---but Sherry and Anderson. And then there was the little spot of family bother when Matt and I returned to the hotel from Candlestick late that night---having to pay a limo driver in the dark of night for the trip as there were no cabs in site. Matt runs into the hotel room and shouts at the top of his lungs that we came home in limo.
Daughter, his little sister, goes silent on me for three full days!
But wait there’s more---bad directions from Alyce Magellan Cairns and I, an hour late, race into the hotel lobby in St. Louie Obispo just as the hero of the ’59 series, Larry Sherry is bagging the interview---heading to the parking lot.
Bullpen luck is with me. Evidently he had talked to his brother, who I’d interviewed two days before. And Norm liked the idea for the attention to the bullpen and hadn’t found ME as his brother quoted, “…all that bad!”
Oh, a few more lowlights, reasons to never mix family with a writing project, and then I’ll give you my blog bye-bye. Promise!
On the day I was supposed to meet a mid-level retired left-handed reliever near the grand canyon, where he and his wife had RV’d in for a bit of vacation, I, running late as usual revved out of our Las Vegas Hotel, (two days of R&R there where the exhausted “alcoholic/gambler” had stayed in the room and watched old movies). So, I’d finally load up the passengers, take off ---well mapped with directions to The Hoover Dam and Grand Canyon and suddenly find myself in the damndest traffic jam of the trip. We make bad turns on top of bad turns and forty five minutes later I find myself sitting back in front of our hotel. I storm in to get “better”directions from the front desk, and as I pass my mother’s mini-van window she offers, “Robin, if the breakfast buffet is still open I could use a banana or two and maybe some packets of Sweet and Low, just for the road!”
I will spare you the story of the air conditioner blowing up in Oklahoma; the call from our neighbors in Raleigh saying that Augie, our Weimerheimer, is at the Vets with some kind of stomach problem from something she ate; the no show in New Orleans, by a former pen catcher; and the fact that my eighty year old mother---a candidate for sainthood---who had been sleeping with our daughter and in the bed next to our son for the past 16 nights, came into our adjoining room about midnight and said, “I love them both, but that’s it. I’ve had it. You’ve got them both with you two for the rest of the trip!”
As to the Florida piece of this horror story---Disney vs. Pen Men---the following spring, with the same cast of characters?
Don’t ask!
So, in summary, my fellow writers, you have several choices in regard to the writing of books that are interview dependant when your family is, oh, I don’t know, within 50,000 miles of you. In retrospect, my thoughts are, after the excitement of the positive reviews from all those major newspapers and magazines, the ego kick of being flown to Hollywood to ESPN’s Up Close With Roy Firestone, the radio, TV, bookstore readings, the way your fellow writers look at you---Don’t do it!
Unless of course you, like me, have a bit of Chevy Chase in you. And in the end, come to the realization that maybe, just maybe, you’re a better parent than you are a writer!
