Johnny

While spending a few days at my parent’s house this week, I had a bout of insominia and decided to do some “digging”.  I use the word in the way that DJ’s will go to stores that still sell vinyl and “dig” through the stacks to find break beats and hooks to use during their sessions.  Every time I go digging at my parent’s house I find old pictures, books, drawings, etc. that bring back memories that have been long stored somewhere in the “you are not going to remember this stuff without some help because you have killed so many cells of mine of ther the years” part of the brain.  They have shelves full of albums and slides chronicling every year of my youth.  I usually spend the next couple of hours smiling and laughing at the stuff I find.   This particular session I found some news clippings of my old summer baseball team’s championship season.  The articles had pictures of all of the players and our old coaches.  One particular face on that page suddenly made my blood run a bit cold.

It was a picture of my friend Johnny M.  We went to different schools, but the league we played in overlapped school districts and we had played  together for several years leading up to that summer .  Johnny’s parents had been killed in a car crash when he was 3 or 4 and his grandparent’s had brought him up.  He was a very talented player and my best friend on the team.  Always flashing a toothy grin and sporting big glasses, his blonde hair and bucky teeth just seemed to liven up the dugout, even when we were losing.   He was one of those kids who played shortstop because he had absolutely no fear of the ball hitting a rock and, subsequently, his face which balls often did on the park diamonds we played on.  He was a great hitter too.  His constant chatter in the infield could easily be heard from my position in center.

We didn’t see each other much during the school year, but we would invite one another to our respective birthday parties and every summer I would be excited to play baseball again with my good friend.   I remembered one particular night after practice when just about everybody else had gone and we were sitting on the bench waiting for our parent’s to pick us up (Johhny called his grandparents mom and dad) when I heard a big sigh come out of his lungs and he kind of kicked the dirt underneath the bench and he asked me if I thought he was any good at baseball.  I told him I thought he was the best player on the team.  He said “really? I don’t think I’m very good at anything.”  Being 13, I simply said “John don’t be stupid”.  We both laughed like boys do at the end of a too-short summer and ran over to the concession stand to get a couple of Cokes.  We sat there in the humid night air with the moths buzzing around the bright lights that lit up the field and wondered aloud how big our trophies would be if we won the championship.  We won that game 15-1.

My parents moved right after that glorius championship season to a town far enough away that John and I lost touch with each other.  We did not have facebook, email, or cell phones in those days, so communication over long distances was expensive.  A long-distance call was the only way to stay in touch, other than writing a letter, which high school boys are only prone to write to girls, and then, only in secret.   I remember seeing his name in the paper once (my parents still took delivery of our old town’s paper for a few years after we moved) because he had a great game in high school against a main rival where he hit two homers and stole 3 bases.  I thought to myself  “you’re still the best player on the team aren’t you buddy?”  I put the paper down and hoped that our teams might play each other sometime in Legion ball the next year.

   The summer before my senior  year in high school I came home from an American Legion game and my father was in the kitchen having a beer with a rather grim look on his face.  He offered me a sip and told me he had some bad news.  Johnny had been killed in a car crash on his way home from baseball practice.

I didn’t really feel anything  for a few minutes and headed oustide to our yard, still in my uniform.  We had a bench outside under this massive pin oak tree that dominated that side of the house and I just sat down and stared for a while in silence.  I looked down, sighed deeply, and kicked the dirt under the bench, just like John had done that summer night after practice.  I sat there and sobbed for quite some time.

I hadn’t thought about that day for almost 20 years until I saw that picture.  He was staring out from the paper with those big glasses and exposing all those huge teeth in the kind of smile only a boy can flash when he is getting his picture in the paper for doing something special.  You died too damn young my friend.  I’ll be thinking of you.

 -maxhate