Paradise Bronx, page 49
As we talked, some kids came up and asked for a basketball, and he gave them one from a big wire container full of basketballs and soccer balls that was behind a gate to a backyard garden where he has an office. He took the apartment key of one of the kids as a deposit. Then he led me over to show me the basketball courts, making special note of the backboards, which are professional quality and of shatterproof plexiglass. Ralph Salamanca, the local city councilperson, got the Parks Department to install those backboards, he said. Some preschoolers in a group on recess from school were playing just on the other side of a fence nearby. I barely noticed them, but Vasquez stopped and looked more closely at three or four girls and a boy. “Why are you pushing him?” he asked the girls. They looked up guiltily and said the boy had done something or other to them. “If he did something to you, tell the teacher. Don’t push him,” Vasquez said. How he had even happened to observe this tiny struggle was beyond me.
The fires burned all around this place, back in the seventies, he said. He showed me where piles of junk cars used to be. Now at that spot was an outdoor amphitheater that could seat 350. The theater’s bleachers-style seating of bent-iron slatted benches had attracted skateboarders, who liked to skate down the incline and grind on the bench edges. The wax the skaters put on their boards to reduce friction got on the seating, and then the audiences got wax on their clothes. Vasquez and James Melendez, the president of 52 People for Progress, explained the problem to the Parks Department, and to Ralph Salamanca. Eventually the city built a skateboard mini park with steps and ramps in a vacant space next to the theater. The sound of fast-rolling skate wheels now fills that area, and sometimes there’s the thud of a kid falling and the clatter of a runaway board.
He showed me a new garden at a corner of the park, with recently planted flowers and vegetables in raised beds, and pots for allium and Japanese pomegranate trees, and walkways made of cement slabs salvaged from the Brooklyn Navy Yard. He said that Iris Rodriguez-Rosa, the Parks Department’s first deputy commissioner, had taken an interest in this garden project and had provided the tall black chain-link fence around it. A group called Green Thumb had donated garden hoses with special attachments that hooked to the hydrant at the curb. As we talked, a Parks Department workman went by, and Vasquez reminded him to fix the bolt on the door to the playground’s men’s room.
Vasquez and I exchanged phone numbers. He said he would keep me up-to-date on events in the park, and I was pleased to get text message greetings from him over the holidays. The next spring, I began stopping by regularly, and sitting in the park in good weather. The drinking fountain worked, and the bathroom was always clean. On hot summer afternoons, kids rode their bikes through the sprinklers or ran through them with their arms in the air. There were salsa performances on the amphitheater stage on Wednesday evenings starting at about seven o’clock. I met James Melendez, who showed me photos of the park’s several renovations. He and Vasquez also provided commentaries on the people who came and went. Of a woman panhandler to whom I had given a dollar (against their silent headshaking no), they said who the woman’s mother was, and the woman’s grandmother, and where the family used to live; they seemed to know her whole biography right up to now.
On some evenings, I took the train into the city from New Jersey to see the salsa performances. One afternoon I got off at the Moynihan Train Hall, where the train had stopped instead of at its usual endpoint in Penn Station. The change disoriented me, and as I crossed Eighth Avenue between the two, I tripped over a traffic divider, fell, and broke my left elbow. I figured it was broken but it didn’t hurt much yet, so I kept going, because I had told Vasquez and Melendez I would be there. As usual, Vasquez saw me the minute I arrived. He told me who tonight’s bands were and gave me a program. He was glad I came. The sun set during the concert and the stage lights brightened on the performers. Their costumes’ spangles, which had been invisible in daylight, glittered in the dark. The lyrics and the musicians’ banter between songs were all in Spanish. A wide age range of dancers from the audience salsa-danced in the open space before the stage. One young woman was so energetic she exhausted her partners one after another and new ones kept replacing them.
Just at last light a flight of pigeons made a quick swoop above the park, and Vasquez knew the pigeons, too. They belonged to a local pigeon fancier like himself. Vasquez had kept pigeons in the neighborhood since he was a boy and his mother would not let him keep them. When she found out he had them in cages hidden under his bed, she relented. He raised thousands of pigeons through the years and still had about two hundred on his building’s roof. During the evening, my elbow got stiff. Later X-rays showed the break. Doctors had me wear a sling but said I didn’t need a cast, and the arm healed slightly crooked on its own.
* * *
On an August weekend afternoon, a group sponsored by the New York Yankees put on a program in the playground amphitheater featuring former Yankee batboys. The Bronx has supplied the team with a lot of batboys—kids of fourteen and older who handle equipment on the field and off, pick up dropped bats and shin guards and wrist guards and get them out of the way, bring baseballs to the umpires, supply the dugouts with chewing gum and sunflower seeds, etc. The former batboys at this event were now grown men. Before it began, one of them, Ray Negron, happened to sit next to me, in the last row at the top of the amphitheater where the seating has a back to lean against. Vasquez had already introduced us. I asked Negron how he had become a batboy.
“When I was a teenager, I got involved in writing graffiti,” he said. “I was kind of a wild graffiti-writing kid. One day some friends and I were doing graffiti on Yankee Stadium, and we didn’t see this limousine roll up beside us. My friends took off, I tripped over my feet, and a guy jumped out from the limo and grabbed me by the back of the neck. Then he threw me in the back seat and got in after me, and a couple guys with him held on to me, and the limo drove through a gate to the stadium. I took another look at the guy who grabbed me and saw that it was the owner of the team, George Steinbrenner.
“So the limo goes down into the bowels of the stadium, where most people never go,” Negron continued. “Most people don’t know that there used to be a jail, like a holding pen, down in the stadium basement. (This was in the old stadium.) Mr. Steinbrenner gets out, his guys pull me from the limo, and they put me in this jail. The guy from stadium security who’s in charge of the jail, he says, ‘One look at this kid, and I can tell he’ll never be anything but the punk he is today.’ Mr. Steinbrenner stops, looks at the guy, and says, ‘Fuck you. Gimme back the kid.’
“So they take me out of the jail, Mr. Steinbrenner puts me back in the limo, and he asks me my name. I tell him, and he says, ‘Ray, you and I are gonna prove that man wrong. You are gonna turn your life around.’ He asks me if I play baseball, I said, ‘Yeah, of course’—I love baseball, played it all my life—and he says, ‘Good. I’m gonna make you a batboy, starting today. You’re gonna get a salary, you’re gonna do your schoolwork, you’re gonna graduate high school, and from now on you’re working for me.’ Then he says, ‘Ray, I will be counting on you. And the one thing you have to remember above all—do not fuck with me.’ So I was a Yankee batboy for six years, and then I got other jobs in the organization, and then I became Mr. Steinbrenner’s personal assistant, and I had that job until the day Mr. Steinbrenner died.”
This story is the basis of a play called The Batboy, which Negron wrote and from which he and other performers planned to do some scenes that afternoon. Negron has also written bestselling children’s books and produced movies on baseball themes. His position with the Yankees is community consultant. Today he was doing this event with other former batboys, including Luis Castillo, who grew up nearby, on Kelly Street, and who has known the playground master, Vasquez, for years. Luis Castillo’s nickname is Squeegee. He joined us in the last row of bleachers, introduced himself, and said he would tell me the story of his nickname; but at that moment, another former batboy, Raymond Avila, sat down on the other side of Ray Negron, and they started joking around. Avila works for the Hispanic Heritage Baseball Museum Hall of Fame, in San Francisco. He and Negron were batboys during the Yankees’ explosive clubhouse years, back in the seventies, when Billy Martin managed the team and Reggie Jackson described himself as “the straw that stirs the drink.”
“Thurman Munson never liked you,” Negron said to Avila, by way of openers.
The men sat with their arms extended along the bench back—enjoying the summer sunshine, talking just-for-fun. The subject of Thurman Munson, the starting catcher on that team, returned to present memory. Munson often projected a general sense of disapproval, with his dour, walrus-like mustache, and he had taken exception to the line about the drink and the straw, because he was a star on the team well before Reggie Jackson arrived.
“Munson liked me fine,” Avila said. “Munson told me he didn’t like you.”
“Bullshit,” Negron said. “Munson told me that you lost his lucky bat, and that ended his sixteen-game hitting streak. After that, he never liked you.”
A pause. Then Avila said, “You know who never liked you? Billy Martin. He told me he never liked you.”
“Aw, come on,” Negron replied. “Billy Martin. Billy Martin didn’t like anybody.”
Some local volunteers were serving hot dogs, hamburgers, and sodas at tables behind the stage. Luis Castillo, aka Squeegee, got up from the bleachers and went to talk to his friend Ralph Bracco, the actor and Billy Martin impersonator, who was standing by the tables. I followed, and when I got a chance, I reminded Squeegee about the nickname. “Oh yeah, right,” he said. “How I got to be called Squeegee—so when I was a kid, I loved the Yankees, and my moms got me tickets for every home game, and I never missed a game. I sat in the bleachers in left field, I was the youngest ‘bleacher creature.’ The tickets were only six bucks! At one game, I was sitting there with a friend, and he was yelling about something, and he began to use profanity. This woman named Tina Lewis, she is like the head of the bleachers. She heard the profanity, and she kicked us out. She called the ushers and they escorted us out.
“Next game, I was back in the bleachers, as usual, and the first thing I did, I went to Tina Lewis and apologized. She was impressed that I did that. So I got to know her, I saw her at every game, and one day she asked me if I would like to be a batboy. She introduced me to Lou Cucuzza, head of stadium personnel, and he interviewed me, and then he brought me to Brian Cashman, the manager of operations, the guy who hires the players. I guess Mr. Cashman liked me, too, because they hired me. I was fourteen years old, and four feet two inches tall. (I grew a lot since then.) They don’t tailor uniforms for batboys, they give you what they got, and all they had for me was this too-big jersey. I wore it, it was baggy on me, and Derek Jeter saw me and said I looked like one of those cloths that the squeegee guys use to wash car windows. So Jeter called me Squeegee, and that became my batboy name.”
Castillo/Squeegee got to be friends with Jeter and is still in touch with him. He says Jeter regarded him as a good-luck charm. That was even more the case with the pitcher David Cone, who got a karmic boost from the diminutive batboy during an afternoon game on Sunday, July 18, 1999. The context mattered, because it was Yogi Berra Day at the stadium, a healing event. Berra had been angry at George Steinbrenner ever since the owner fired him as manager some years before. Attempts on the Boss’s part to reconcile had been rejected; but now Berra, a kindly and enlightened man, gave up his grudge and agreed to participate in a Stadium Day held in his honor. Don Larsen, the Yankee right-hander who was the only pitcher ever to achieve a perfect game in a World Series, threw out the first ball of this game, and Berra (who had been the catcher for Larsen’s perfect game) caught it. Then they joined the crowd of about 42,000 and watched Cone pitch against the Montreal Expos. A rain delay suspended play in the third inning, by which point Cone had not allowed a base runner; but of course it was too early in the game for anybody to draw attention to that.
Cone waited out the thirty-three-minute delay in the dugout, not the bullpen, and when the rain stopped, he didn’t have a bullpen catcher to warm up with. He couldn’t find Joe Girardi, who was catching that game. Like the other Yankees, Cone was on cordial terms with Squeegee, so he asked the batboy to catch for him on the sidelines. Squeegee got a glove and a mask and caught a dozen or so warm-up pitches until Cone was ready to go back on the mound. There, the right-hander continued to baffle the Expos, setting them down in order through the remaining six innings, and thus recording the sixteenth perfect game in the history of professional baseball (there have been eight more since then). Fittingly, Don Larsen and Yogi Berra, the historic battery, were on hand to congratulate Cone after the triumph.
Luis Castillo/Squeegee is now forty-one, David Cone is sixty, and nothing as historic has happened to either of them since. As Castillo told me this story, he seemed like somebody who had been struck by fate, or maybe lightning. His eyes had a burning quality—like the Ancient Mariner’s, only happy. “David Cone and I have remained good friends to this day,” Castillo said. “He is active in my Squeegee Children’s Literacy Foundation, which promotes reading among city kids, and he participates in benefit events for us, and we talk on the phone all the time. He’s my son’s godfather. We will never either one of us forget that game.”
As I was listening and taking notes, local fans of Squeegee hovered around him. People in the neighborhood admire him and gaze at him with awe. A woman named Cynthia Jackson, who wore her hair in long braids, beamed at him and reached out and took him by the forearm and said, “We all remember Luis when he was a little boy. I used to look after him—he was my knee-baby! And he grew up to be such a fine man. Luis has inspired the whole community.”
* * *
José Vasquez told me that they were having a street-renaming ceremony honoring Al Quiñones in the park on a Friday morning, and I did not miss it. Again, I watched from the top row of the amphitheater. Bronx politicians sat on the stage in folding chairs and stood up one by one and reminisced about Quiñones. The honoree’s ornery side was not left out. Rubén Díaz, Jr., then the Bronx borough president, said, “Al Quiñones cursed me out several times—let’s not sugarcoat this.” Previous borough presidents Rubén Díaz, Sr. (father of Rubén Jr.), and Fernando Ferrer brought their contrasting styles. The former, in a black shirt and black cowboy hat, was loud and haranguing and humorous; the latter, in L.L.Bean-style slacks and sweater, was measured and professorial and humorous. Ferrer said, “This is a good place … This is the center of the universe.” People were called onstage to be recognized for their contributions to Playground 52. When the playground manager, José Vasquez, went up, he got the most applause.
Then the whole assembly removed to the intersection of Avenue St. John and Kelly Street, by the northwest corner of the playground, where a cousin of Al Quiñones pulled on the cord that slid away the sheath from the new street sign designating that part of the avenue as Albert ‘Al’ Quinones Way. (Generally, the city does not use diacritical marks on its signage; witness Louis Nine Boulevard, named for the Bronx state assemblyman Louis Niñé. Louis Nine Boulevard sounds like a vanity-plate version of Ninth Avenue.)
This event was where I first met Vivian Vázquez. After the onstage ceremonies, but before the sign unveiling, I looked down at the attendees mixing and laughing and talking. A woman wearing a narrow-brim straw Panama hat stood amid a crowd of admirers. Some were hugging her, and she was turning her attention to each person, one by one. I have mentioned Vivian Vázquez already, in the context of the burning of the Bronx and the Blackout of ’77, and I’ve described the looting that also destroyed Paradise Furniture, on Prospect Avenue, where her father worked for seventeen years. I’ve said she went to college upstate, still mystified and grieving because of what had happened to the Bronx of her childhood. The buildings where she grew up are a short walk from Playground 52, and like the rest of the crowd she had come to honor Al Quiñones.
By then I also knew of and admired her because of Decade of Fire, the feature-length documentary that she co-produced, narrates, and stars in. The film is about the years when the Bronx burned, and it looks into the reasons for the disaster. I had watched it several times, including once at the Harlem Film Festival, where she and her co-producer Gretchen Hildebran answered questions from the audience after the screening. I asked the playground manager Vasquez if he knew Vivian Vázquez (the two are not related, as their names’ spellings indicate). He said he knew her well, she would be at the street renaming, and he would introduce me. From my vantage atop the bleachers, I saw him join the crowd around her and speak to her. Then he looked up at me and waved at me to come down. I did, he introduced me, and I asked her if I could talk to her sometime about how she happened to make Decade of Fire.
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DESPITE HER FRESHMAN roommate’s unhelpful prediction that she would fail, Vázquez graduated from SUNY Albany in 1984. She also came back to the Bronx. During her family’s hard times, with her parents’ divorce and her mother’s return to Puerto Rico, she had thought she would leave. But on summer vacations from SUNY, she worked for her city assemblyman in a program to recruit kids from the neighborhood for college, registered people to vote, and did tenant organizing. Marcy, her older sister, had joined Evelina Antonetty and others protesting Fort Apache, the Bronx, and Vázquez admired them for speaking out. She later saw the Fort Apache demonstrations as the beginning of her own activism. Working with young people gave her the most satisfaction and she decided to make it a career.
