Feeds
by Scott Palmieri
Our mantra was “Hope for the best, but know the worst is coming.” Deep down, we knew “the worst” wasn’t real suffering. At least, it wasn’t the suffering I read about in my English classes: Sylvia Plath’s despair, Flannery O’Connor always killing someone, and Shakespeare killing more. The first hour of my baseball first fall practice, we started our season of suffering in the form of groundballs. I know it was an hour because Coach was pacing back and forth behind the infielders, updating the minutes, one grounder after another after another.
That morning, I thought embarrassment would be the worst of my first day as I ran across campus, ten minutes late to my first class, Intro to Literature, an English major who couldn’t read a campus map, relieved to be received by a merciful professor. In a full sweat, I sat, panted, and nodded, trying to pick up, midstream, the discussion of the syllabus. But the morning mishap and everything in my life up to that point, especially the halcyon days of recruiting, were charming distant memories, replaced by the suffering of baseball basic training, which started with relentless groundballs. Field and scoot to the end of the line, a short rest in between, a stubborn September sun baring down, making every play more difficult, field and scoot again. Had there been a syllabus for our semester on the field, authored by Coach, the classroom policies would have included “Keep your head out of your ass” and “Hustle, or I will rip your fucking face off.”
Midway through the hour, a new level churned hotter in the form of “middle feeds.” A quicker torrent of groundballs began, fungo bats mercilessly slashing at the middle infielders. We fielded, shuffled, and tossed double-play flips, swirling from shortstop to second base. One line fielded, the other received, dropping the balls in a milk crate on the bordering outfield grass, our quads and hamstrings searing, our mouths gasping, as the crate filled, urged on by our diminutive, derisive young Coach with his bursts of encouragement such as “You’ll never play here!” every bobble or toss gone amiss feeding his insatiable rage.
These were the first grueling minutes of a grueling fall, our northeast college team on the heels of a disappointing season the spring before, after a conference championship the spring before that, with most of the stars and starters now graduated. At shortstop, my roommate Mike, whom I had known from our Long Island high school careers occasionally crisscrossing, endured, along with the same ceaseless onslaught, the full wrath of Coach, who, throughout the entire fall, tried to break him to bits, replacing the best player in school history and the best shortstop in the region. Our other roommate, Pete, a slugging catcher being converted to an outfielder, suffered his own long day of drills.
Every day thereafter, practices loomed like ominous New England clouds, which never opened for the rain we prayed for. We trudged to our morning classes, which served as hours killed until practice- Intro to Psychology, Western Civilization, Introduction to Literature. But no brain schematics, no history of suffering, no illuminating texts could ease the gloom of Coach’s body and mind gauntlet ever pressing upon us, like the soreness of my massive stress pimple, his teethy snarl and throat-scraping growl balled up, festering on my chin.
The only break in our routine came thanks to the field hockey team. In fall, our outfield was their field, our left and center converted into a gridded rectangle, so their home games pushed us out. Instead of a day off, though, we piled into vans and traveled across the city to a park to play intersquads, chances for the pitchers to show their stuff and for the coaches to better assess what they had to work with, as the vision of a final roster had to come soon.
After our scrimmages, topped off by sprints around the bases to drain excess energy, we loaded back into the vans, our cleats exchanged for sneakers, our bodies and minds at rest, having survived another day. One afternoon, as we exited the park, Mike and I sitting shoulder to shoulder in the packed cabin of the van, our mood lightened from avoiding the worst of Coach that day, we turned our heads to His voice: “Middle infielders, on the field when we get back!”
A protective cup for the soul might have lessened the blow, the order from the front seat a clean kick to the spiritual groin. The long day had reopened, the worst of the physical and mental exhaustion still ahead. Middle feeds. Asses down, glove out, reading the hops to cradle the ball into our leather pockets, lifting it back out to sweep a firm toss to the waiting glove aimed over the base. Over and over. “Double plays are hit, they’re not made!” Coach would yell, an occasional Zen-like exclamation, “Be quick but don’t rush,” roaring the word “awful,” more “aw” than “ful,” minced with physical threats. Once I escaped for a few minutes when, leaning for a backhander, both my calf muscles cramped, dropping me to the ground, knotting up as if two baseballs were pressed against the skin.
The unexpected missive from Coach would delay our cherished daily exit from the locker room. This included our rookie duty, a drop-off to the laundry room, when each day, my assigned senior gleefully handed me his dirty gear, his jockstrap dangling from a large nickel safety pin. The most memorable exchange was when he reassured me that his recent case of “the clap” had cleared. Mike, Pete, and I, in a pilgrimage of the team’s underclassmen, would then make our way across the small campus to the cafeteria, run by the tall, broad shouldered Uncle Lou, as he was called, whose silver pompadour and gold rimmed glasses, with the top couple buttons of his white dress shirt unbuttoned, said casino pit boss more than cafeteria general manager. Most nights, he greeted us at the door as we ambled in toward the end of dinner hours.
Still in the days of college mess halls, most nights we braced ourselves for what floated in the murky Salisbury steak gravy or the yellowish pool of the baked scrod. Only chicken patty sandwich night could lift our spirits. But no matter the entrée, practice was over. We teetered our trays, rattling them onto a long table, as we climbed into the space between bench and tabletop, a feast celebrating our survival. Our small glasses filled with soda, we savored our sips, clinking the ice at the bottom, crunching and laughing in the fading autumn light. Between scanning the room for girls, we conducted a post-mortem of each practice. Pete f-bombed the coaching staff, and Mike denounced the merciless daily regiment, declaring, “That’s it. I’m going to say something to Coach,” both empty protests tilting me over with laughter.
After dinner, we retreated to our dilapidated dorm, a convent decades before, befitting our austerity: high ceilings and gritty faucet water, hard tiled floors, and rumors of a mysterious tunnel behind a basement door we opened once but never entered. Our legs spent, we swung open the rusty scissor-gate elevator doors, clattering to the top third floor for a shower and an evening respite. Mike flipped on our small television and climbed to the top bunk, while I fell into the bottom. Pete, sitting on his single, rubbed his wood bat with a cow femur, the streaking sound soothing him while he hardened the grain.
Later, leaving the room for a study hall, Pete popped on his Walkman headphones, clicking on what we learned later was Christmas music, the yuletide songs, along with his bat treatment, his coping method, even in the mild air of fall, yearning for home and the distant semester break. One day, I noticed Frank Sinatra in the teeth of the cassette player, our first non-baseball bond when I revealed my healthy CD selection of Ol’ Blue Eyes. Mike, rightfully concerned, felt relieved that my father also raised me on John F. Kennedy. Studying to be a high school history teacher, Mike led our charge to a conspiracy theorist who visited campus. With our worn down, psyches, we embraced the wholesale government plot. Many nights, as a strange lullaby, Mike’s copy of the Oliver Stone movie played in our VCR, the comfort of “back and to the left” somehow easing the prospect of the grassy knoll that awaited us each afternoon.
But on that van ride of despair, upon hearing our Coach’s command to return to the field, those nightly solaces stretched far from us. It was the horror of finding an unexpected set of calculus questions on the back of a test’s last page, a failure to remember our “worst is coming” philosophy. Soon, Mike and I would be suffering, winding around the infield dirt in our two lines, fielding and tossing, above the soundtrack of Coach demanding perfection. One grounder after another.
We rattled in the van in silence. I could only mutter to myself, from my recent reading of Bartleby the Scrivener, “I prefer not to” or contemplate the carnage from Western Civ: Roman prisoners ushered to the Coliseum lions. But then a small yet predictable miracle, as we merged onto the modest stretch of highway we needed to cross. Traffic. Visibly perturbed, Coach watched each ebb of movement, leaning to the windshield, as if he could will away the congestion, peering through the modest spaces between cars, with the frustration of watching his pitcher walk the bases loaded.
As we crawled deeper into the six o’clock hour, bumper-to-bumper, there was a mention from the front seats of “cafeteria,” confirmed by an upperclassman, who whispered something about the meal plan, that Coach would have to give us enough time to make dinner. Without saying a word, we shared the surprise that this man, whose looming presence followed us through every hour of our waking days and some of our sleeping ones, could be brought to his knees by the dining hours of Raymond Hall Cafeteria.
As the van trudged on, we stared hard at the dashboard clock and did the math that Coach was surely doing, too. The Goddess of Rush Hour answered our prayers, and the Saint of Fender Benders threw in rubbernecking for good measure. The green digits neared and then crested 6:30, and by the time we ramped off the highway, the imminent 7 o’clock closing of Raymond Hall made middle feeds impossible. Still, Coach waited, as we turned street corners, which, with each trip, were becoming more and more familiar, as were the backs of the campus buildings that bordered the grounds. We pulled into the fieldhouse parking lot, the vans clunking into Park. Defeated, he uttered, “OK, guys. You’re all set. Go catch dinner.”
Exultation.
We hurried into and out of the locker room, down the stairs to the laundry chute to push through the soiled pins, then out of the building, darting away from the vacant infield and the white lined outfield emptied of field hockey players, one of whom I would meet just months later and marry years after that. But there was so much ahead of that: the rest of the fall season, the winter break, four baseball springs, until suddenly, graduation. Then there were weddings and all the bests we could hope for and the inevitable, terrible worsts that were much harder to see coming. Before all of this, we had to make dinner.
Through the dusk shadows crossing between the dorms and classroom halls, we quickened our pace, relief overtaken by the dread of losing the meal. From the distance, we could see, leaning on an open door, the large figure of Uncle Lou. What a sight we must have been, how beautiful, right then and there, running, lucky with our sufferings, at the start of our civilization- the eventual school superintendent, the Major League Baseball bat maker, and the college professor. We entered the cafeteria, one after another, inhaling the redemptive smell of chicken patty.
Scott Palmieri is a professor of English at Johnson & Wales University in Providence, Rhode Island. His writing has been published in Sport Literate, Aethlon, Hobart, The Leaflet, The Alembic, and The Result Is What You See Today: Poems About Running. He played baseball at Providence College and continues his love of the sport through writing, coaching Little League, and playing, as long as his legs will allow, in a senior men’s league. He lives in Wakefield, Rhode Island, with his wife and three children, his biggest fans.