From the ages of nine to twelve baseball played an increasingly important role in my life. I was certainly not great at it, but I spent many hours playing catch, three-flies-up, and throwing a tennis ball against the back steps to hustle for the rebound. I adored my mitt like a favorite pet. I would oil it carefully, massage it, and rub it against my face to revel in the leathery smell. I loved the sound of a baseball smacking into the pocket. The game of baseball is very structural: the time and space relationships, the way the various positions must coordinate to move the ball around the diamond, the partition of blocks of time into innings, the count of balls, strikes, and outs. I was fascinated by the relatively narrow space between pitcher and catcher, standing ready to intercept the ball with my bat if only I could read the speed and trajectory correctly. I loved the uniforms. I spent many hours attempting to draw pictures of myself in major league uniform. My art skills were limited, but I used pastel crayons to try to get the colors just right. I was obsessed with the Oakland A’s professional baseball team, who were heading towards three consecutive wins in the World Series.

My dad was not really into sports at that time and I only remember playing catch with him on a few occasions. But my mom’s new boyfriend and his son were very avid about baseball. Walt coached a little league team in the nearby town where they lived, and I think they won their league. Blaine, his nine-year-old son, was a gifted player. As we began to spend more time together, he and I (a year older) became inseparable. We played baseball, rode bikes, and got into the various kinds of trouble together to which boys that age are prone. We were buddies, and I ended up spending a lot more time with him than my two brothers. If I was ten, then my mom would have been forty, and Walt was in his fifties.

Here’s what I came to know about Walt’s biography. My mom met him in Al-Anon, as his second wife was an alcoholic. I’m not sure if she died or was just institutionalized, but it was unusual in 1971 for a man to be a single father. Actually, Walt had several children from his first marriage, which ended in divorce when he “took up with the town barfly,” according to my mom. He had been the pastor of a small Methodist church in a mountain town, and the scandal led to his “defrocking.” Everything I am telling you is what I heard from my mother, so I don’t know any other facts. Anyway, he was now teaching sixth grade P.E. at yet another small town to the west of us. Originally from rural Pennsylvania, Walt grew up on a farm in a large family, abandoned by his alcoholic father for the most part, except when he would swing by the farm and cause a ruckus. My mom said Walt’s dad was physically brutal, but Walt was very attached to him. Walt’s “glory days” were during the Second World War, where he served as a corporal in Patton’s Third Army. General Patton was his hero. And everything I am telling you is sprinkled with “red flags,” isn’t it?

Walt and Mom dated through my fifth-grade year, and things were actually really nice. He was teaching me baseball. One of the greatest things I ever experienced was piling into the car and going down to Oakland to see the A’s play in real life. We also took a trip to Disneyland! I was really looking forward to their wedding in the summer of 1972. But he and Blaine had their little quirks. Blaine seemed to have no conscience or empathy of any kind. Whenever he got in trouble he lied his way out of it with ease. Adults were like cartoon characters to him: if they got mad about something, he just laughed at them. He never seemed to feel guilty about anything! I was the opposite. One time we were visiting them at their small apartment and Walt was sitting at the table playing solitaire as Blaine and I watched. Walt smoked a pipe regularly and had chronic post-nasal drip that caused him to sniff frequently. He wore dentures, so he made frequent mouth noises whenever he was thinking, as if he were trying to get them into the right position. His balding head was glistening with sweat and he adjusted his horn-rimmed glasses repeatedly as he concentrated on the game, which Blaine and I were following closely. With nervous little flutters of his fingers, he would surreptitiously re-order the hidden cards whenever he ran out of moves. “You’re cheating!” Blaine chided. We both laughed as he did it again. “I’m not cheating!” he replied, bristling at the accusation. He did it again. Blaine and I were giggling, because his cheating was so obvious yet the way he went about it was so sneaky it seemed he actually thought he was getting away with something. He refused to cop to it and seemed to resent us trying to call him out.

So 1972 was a bit of a magical summer. As the wedding approached I felt euphoric at the prospect of being his step-son, and Blaine and I were going to be step-brothers! The wedding was held at the Protestant church we had been attending for the past year. A note about that: my little sister Jenny cried one Sunday morning, saying, “I don’t want to go the laughing church!” her voice trailing off into a whining sob. She cried and whined a lot in those days, and we teased her for it. But she had a point. We had grown up going to the Catholic Church for Mass every Sunday morning. To us it was The Church. Every non-Catholic church was a fake church. Real priests never married. At the Protestant church the minister had a wife and children. Fake priest! Fake Communion! Fake church! And whereas at the Catholic Church the congregation maintained the proper decorum of somber penitence, when the UCC minister would tell a funny story in his sermon, the people would laugh out loud like it was a comedy club. We kids were mortified by the sacrilege of it all. But we eventually got used to it, and even learned to enjoy the more relaxed and friendly atmosphere. The people there were really nice, actually. After the joyous nuptials, my mother and her fancy new hair-do headed off with Walt for a three-night honeymoon at a tacky motel a few miles away.

While they were gone my sister Karen, sixteen, was in charge. We did fine, although the house got a little untidy, as you might expect with six kids unsupervised for four days. What happened next is something none of us expected. The front door opened and my mom called out, “We’re home!” Footsteps were coming down the main hallway. Walt appeared, at least I thought it must be Walt, but he was unrecognizable. His eyes were rolling back in his head, his tongue was pressed against the backs of his teeth, curling to punctuate the snarl on his face. He began yelling obscenities and tossing things about, excoriating us for having trashed the house and shouting orders at us to clean up this and that. I was numb with terror as I attempted to comply. My mom stood there in shocked horror but said nothing. I guess the honeymoon was over.

There will be more threads detailing the next two years, but this is how it started. Many years later I asked my little sister Jenny what she recalled of those times, and she told me, “Nothing. I just remember feeling sick to my stomach for two years.” Unfortunately, I remember far too much.

My Mom, Walt, my brother Dan to the left and Blaine to the right. I am between them in age, but am not pictured.