The Yazmobile
Chapter 3
(continued from Carl Yastrzemski, 1977)
A couple years after the dud peyote in Truckee I moved in with my brother, who was living in a tiny railroad apartment on 2nd Avenue and 9th Street in Manhattan. I'd just finished my aimless post-college trip around Europe and I needed money. I got a job as a UPS driver’s helper for the holidays, then when the holidays ended I switched to loading trucks at the UPS warehouse on 10th Avenue and 42nd Street. My shift started in the middle of the night, but for some reason instead of taking the 3rd Avenue bus uptown from 9th Street and then transferring to the crosstown 42nd Street bus I walked the whole way. I set out at around 2 in the morning. Nothing ever happened to me on all but one of the nights, even though for most of the way I walked out of earshot and sight of any witnesses. But one night I got hit by a car. The driver had been blazing up 3rd avenue and made a left-hand turn onto the west-bound street I was crossing. He hit the brakes, but I still got scooped up onto the hood and then tossed back down onto the street. The guy got out, his eyes wide. I struggled quickly to my feet. The two of us stood there, staring at each other.
"I’m OK," I said. I said it a few times, trying to convince the both of us. "I'm OK. I'm OK."
I banged up my knee pretty bad and ripped my jeans and the elbow of my shirt, but nothing was broken. I walked the rest of the way to work and punched in and worked my shift, my knee hurting more and more as the shift went on.
My job was to grab packages coming down a long groaning conveyer belt and sort them into one of four trucks parked behind me. Four other guys also worked the conveyer belt, each with four trucks to load. Five guys facing us worked a second conveyer belt. A cheap boombox played Everybody Dance Now over and over. The guy to my right shadow-boxed during the occasional lulls in packages coming down the line. The guy to my left had an African name and made an anti-Israel comment one night. I was the only white loader, but the supervisor was a harried white guy with a receding hairline and a mustache. He wore a tie and white short-sleeve button-down shirt and was always in a rush.
It was tiring, monotonous work. The boxes turned my hands black and all my clothes gray. During the daily 10-minute break, I sat in one of my trucks and read Dante, hell then purgatory then paradise as the months went by. At quitting time I walked home down the west side and cut across 29th Street past towering early morning prostitutes, spent condoms strewn all over the sidewalk like kelp left behind by the receding tide. Near home I yanked a newspaper out of the trash and read it back at the apartment while eating generic three-for-a-dollar mac and cheese and drinking cans of beer, the blinds shut against the morning light.
One day near the end of my walk home from that job I stopped at a light and looked across 3rd Avenue and saw my brother standing there, staring back at me. He was on his way to work. He had a heavy duffel bag weighing him down. I had my newspaper from the garbage. We both started laughing. Why not? One minute you're a kid and the next you're chained all night long to a conveyor belt. And your brother, your hero, is lugging a duffel bag full of undone work to an office job where his biggest thrill in many months has been finding and correcting a misspelling of the proper noun Yastrzemski.
(to be continued)
I probably should've waited until tomorrow, when you'll likely post that 1979 Yaz, but what can I say? I'm not a patient person. I did want to remark on the similarity between the 1978 and 1979 Yaz cards, though: In each, he has the same length hair, the same wide, blocky sideburns, the same headshot tilted and staring off through the top and right border of the card. The angle is slightly different, as if the photographer is orbiting Carl as his career soldiers on, entering its twilight.
I'd like to think that in the early episode of The Simpsons in which Milhouse pines for a $30 card of Carl Yastrzemski with the big sideburns, the card in question is one of these two. Research indicates that it was specified as his 1973 card, but let's be honest: if you're looking for Yaz sideburns, the 1978 and 1979 issues are each about 30% sideburns.
Good thing you didn't wait: I don't have a 1979 Yaz. My whole 11th year on earth came and went with no Yaz card, and then YOU! An Orioles fan! Get a 1979 Yaz on your first try!
Anyway, I'd forgotten about that Milhouse reference to the Yaz card. Thanks for reminding me, and for filling in the blanks about the '79 card.
http://www.baseballcardproject.com/showCard.asp?Card=Topps~R~1979~320
And sorry to snap up that Yaz card. The gods work in mysterious ways, as I'm assuming Clarks Summit, PA in 2003 would have been the last place you'd have been looking for your 1979 Topps fix.
I had the voice of the narrator of The Wonder Years going through my mind reading the last couple of sentences.
I love the red Red Sox hat. Because I started following the team in '75, I thought that that was the way the hat always was.
Perhaps it was because the Dodgers had just lost the World Series for the second year in a row to the dreaded Yankees. Or maybe, objectively, the 1979 set was just lame.
I was there. That was a good catch.
1. I bet you have LOTS of 1980 Yaz cards (assuming you bought at least one pack). The 1980 Topps set was numbered to 726, so instead of having 6 sheets of 132 unique cards each, they had 4 sheets with 132 unique cards an a 5th sheet with 66 unique cards and 66 "double prints". Yaz was a 1980 double-print. I don't know if he was double printed before, but I have 18 1980 Yaz cards. Topps cured this problem with the 1982 set (792 cards and 6 sheets of 132 unique cards each).
2. I wonder what he's thinking in the picture. Is he looking at the flag during the national anthem, or is he shooting beaver ala Jim Bouton? Maybe he's wondering why Sy Berger at Topps would ever allow his card to be double printed?
3. I think that around '79 (some of you Sox fans can certainly correct me if I'm wrong), Yaz started using that "Leaning Tower of Pisa" stance. Even as a Yankees fan, I had to imitate it for awhile in PE Softball games and on the playground in the Summer. Maybe that was the name Joe Garigola gave it.
4. Finally, late in his career, I was watching the Sox and the A's on the NBC game of the week. Yaz hit a single and burst around first and stretched it into a double. Even as a lifelong Yankees fan, I had to love Yaz a little bit when I saw that. His bones were battered and bruised from playing 20 years and he probably felt like he'd been hit by a car sometimes, but he still hustled up the line and seized opportunity.
8 : Yaz, unlike the Splendid Splinter, was good (and dilligent) at everything. Unlike Williams he wasn't the best at anything.
9 : Yeah, it's great when you get to cross paths with an honest-to-god archetype. It was, in retrospect, something like what it would have been like to go to San Francisco in the late '50s and meet a bongo-playing, beret-wearing "beatnik."
God, I wish I did. It hurts that I don't. I'm pretty sure I used to have some from the TV show (as well as some Star Wars cards, plus, for some reason, some Creature from the Black Lagoon cards) but they have gone the way of all flesh. But maybe I can find a way to work some ruminations on apes and the end of the world and Heston into a profile of some unsuspecting, blameless baseballer.
Unfortunately, there's no Zaius, Zira, Ursus or Hasslein (the scientist who theorized about the time curve -- he later murders Cornelius and Zira in "Escape from the Planet of the Apes", but fails to kill their son, "Caesar").
Tom Candiotti's middle name is "Caesar". And if you really want to get obscure you could find one of the names of the mutants from the Internet Movie Data base (e.g., Mendez).
Of course, if you want the name of the actors and not their character names, then Norm Charlton would be a must.
"It's a reunion of sorts as son will pitch to father..."
Jamie Easterly played with Jim Bouton for the 1978 Atlanta Braves
Johnny Ray played with Eddie Solomon for the 1981 Pittsburgh Pirates
Eddie Solomon played with Jim Bouton for the 1978 Atlanta Braves
Bouton appeared in The Long Goodbye. It shouldn't be too hard too link Charlton Heston or Roddy McDowell to Bouton. But the Oracle of Bacon isn't working for me at the moment.
Roddy McDowall was in That Darn Cat! (1965) with Grayson Hall
Grayson Hall was in Pick-up (1975) with Jim Bouton
Perhaps Zerbe could reprise his role in "The Life and Times of COLTER Bean".
AND "Omega Man" is based on the same book -- "I am Legend" -- as Will Smith's new movie by the same name. And this is the same movie they were trumpeting during the World Series this year.
Early Wynn - Luis Aparicio '58 White Sox
Luis Aparicio - Carlton Fisk, '73 Red Sox
Carlton Fisk - Bo Jackson, '91 White Sox
Bo Jackson - Howie Long, '90 Raiders
Howie Long - Art Shell, '81 Raiders
Art Shell - George Blanda, '75 Raiders
But that's more than four degrees.
Personally, I have a two-degree separation from Deion Sanders, who links me into the NFL, MLB and IMDB. I was once a co-worker of Doug Brien, who was a teammate of Sanders on the '94 49ers.
Janowicz played for the Redskins in 1954 and 1955 and must have had common teammates with Blanda within one or two degrees.
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