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looky, here, i ain’t trying to prematurely convict nobody (my man ralph wiley already taught me a thing or two about the grace bank — you should be hesitant to deny it because sooner or later you gon’ be in need of some grace your damn self.)
Extreme Makeover?
still, things ain’t looking good for your boy barry b. just read that AP piece about his former mistress diming on him about steroids and a whole rack of other stuff that might make for some actual, prosecutable crime charges. that’s neither here nor there, but i do have to point out a curious coincidence.
damn-near everyone whose name has even come up in that balco scandal has subsequently taken a career nosedive. sosa? so-so. giambi? please. marion jones? didn’t she used to run past people on the track? circumstantial evidence, admittedly (and yes, i also remember that old social science adage that “correlation does not establish causality) but dang… it is real curious. barry looked to be the exception to that trend until he turned up lame and starting talking about taking an entire season off.
so we all know that steroids are dangerous, cancer-causing drugs that can make you hot-tempered and cause your testicles to turn into raisins. but my concern for this, truth told, has less to do with that and more to do with my own issues about history and the icons of my youth.
records are made to be broken, but i can’t see watching hank aaron’s record of 755 be smashed by chemically-altered super-athletes — who won’t even merit a maris-like asterisk. back when aaron, mays, et al were playing the game, training techniques were not nearly as advanced as they are now. plus, aaron had to deal with the daily death threats he received as he approached babe ruth’s record of 714 homers. that took all kinds of psychological strength and powers of concentration. his record will fall one day — as well it should — but not by someone who has taken artificial means to boost his performance.
in some ways, though, that might be an even more ironic compliment to aaron — that 30 plus years after his record-setting homerun, the nearest competitors needed an army of trainers and a chemical regimen to even come close to what he did by eating his veggies and keeping his eye on the ball.
read below and weep:
Updated: 05:05 PM ESTBonds’ Accuser Speaks, Putting Him in Peril By MURRAY CHASS, The New York TimesThe scene was typical of spring nights in Arizona. Their work for the day done, baseball people gather in various night spots and restaurants in the Phoenix-Scottsdale area: Diamond Charlie’s, Capital Grill, Marco Polo, Pink Pony, Axis, Radius, Suede.One night in the spring of 2000, Sanctuary was a place to be, and Barry Bonds and Jason Giambi were there. So was Kimberly Bell, Bonds’s girlfriend at the time.”Jason and Barry put their arms together, rolled up their sleeves, flexed their muscles and joked about who was bigger,” Bell recalled. “About 50 people were standing around.”Who was bigger?”They were both huge,” Bell said.According to reports of Giambi’s testimony to a federal grand jury, he was using steroids at the time. According to Bell, Bonds had told her that he was using them, too.Bell said her nine-year relationship with Bonds ended in May 2003. Now she is again a major figure in his life. Bell testified recently before a federal grand jury in San Francisco investigating steroids distribution and, presumably, Bonds, and one of her lawyers said she would be called to testify a second time. Giambi and Bonds appeared before the grand jury in December 2003.Bell’s testimony and the evidence she presents to the grand jury, which subpoenaed her, could trigger an investigation into other charges against Bonds, like income-tax evasion, money laundering, evasion of bank reporting laws and perjury. These issues could lead to far greater consequences than any penalty for steroids use.In a second and third telephone interview with The New York Times on Tuesday and yesterday, Bell talked about various aspects of her relationship with Bonds. She would not talk about what she said Bonds had told her about other players’ use of steroids.”He did make references to other players,” Bell said.Did she believe what he told her? “I believed it to the extent that I knew he would have that type of knowledge because of his own knowledge of what he was doing,” she said. But she declined to name names.”That is the type of material that will be in the book,” she said. “We have to leave a few things for the book.”Bell, who has worked as a graphic artist, and a co-author are preparing a proposal for a book in which Bell plans to write about her relationship with Bonds. The prospect of selling the proposal to a publisher raises questions about Bell’s motives in talking about her relationship with Bonds and about her credibility. Whatever one can tell from telephone conversations, she sounds credible.”I think, all in due time, people will realize that I am, once they see the proof I have,” she said. What type of proof?”I have quite a bit of it,” she said, “including telephone answering machine messages that show the relationship.” There is also a legal fight over a house, she said, adding, “He tried to deny that he knew me at all, that I was just a girl who showed up in several cities.”Martin Garbus, Bell’s lawyer, who monitored the interviews, said yesterday that before he agreed to represent her, he listened to the tapes from her answering machine, heard Bonds’s voice on them and was satisfied they were legitimate.Bell said she met Bonds on July 3, 1994, after a Giants home game she attended with a friend. The next day, she said, the friend took her to a barbecue where Bonds was and later learned that Bonds had asked the friend to bring her. At the time, Bonds was in the process of a divorce from his first wife.The relationship lasted until May 2003, more than five years after he married his second wife, Bell said, ending shortly after an incident in a hotel room in which she felt threatened.Bonds’s lawyer, Michael Rains, did not respond yesterday to the latest of daily telephone messages asking him to comment on Bonds generally and Bell specifically.Bell said she heard from Bonds only one more time after the hotel incident. On the day the Giants were leaving Phoenix, where they had played a three-game series, he called her, she related. “He told me to disappear and change my numbers,” she said. “He said I might have to move.”The relationship between Bell and Bonds had become strained, Bell said, over his refusal to give her money beyond $80,000 for the down payment on a $207,000 house she bought in February 2002 in Scottsdale, Ariz., the Giants’ spring-training home. She said she moved there at his request from the Bay Area, where she has returned.”I shouldn’t feel responsible for keeping his secrets if he can’t keep his promise to pay for the house,” she said. “I gave up a great job and family and support system.”One of those secrets was what she said was Bonds’s use of steroids. She never saw him take anything, but he told her about it, she said.”Before he used them,” she recalled, “I would consider him as being difficult. He went from difficult to downright mean and cruel. He became impatient, intolerant, quick-tempered, quick to snap.”She said she was unimpressed by Bonds’s comments and attitude during a news conference last week in which he said he might not play this season because of a knee operation.”My impression is he still can’t take responsibility for his own actions,” Bell said. “It was a plea for sympathy. I saw a newspaper photo of him at a media event the night before, without crutches and smiling. He was happy.”Bonds, she added, was not happy that she had kept answering machine tapes.”After he got married,” she recalled, “he told me I had to destroy them. He said they can’t exist. I felt there wasn’t something right about that, so I kept the tapes.”03-31-05 08:52 ESTCopyright © 2005 The New York Times Company
Not long ago someone who follows my writing sent me a blunt email. There was no subject line and the single line read: "damn, don't you like anything?" and I sent a four-word reply: "butter-pecan ice cream." even more recently a friend told me that my essays sometimes seem jaded and world-weary. I had to plead guilty to the jaded charge. I look at the plotlines in current events -- needless war, exploited poor, municipal callousness, moments of great possibility that seem to slip out of the brackets and shatter before we get a chance to truly enjoy them -- and it often seems like the world is one of those long-running sitcoms whose writers have run out of new ideas.
I've consciously started writing about people/moments/ideas that I really think highly of. It happens to be the case that things that piss me off are more likely to get me to the computer. But sometimes there are bittersweet moments that I take pleasure in describing too.
For instance, the other day my car got towed for being parked in the wrong place. I had to go to this lot that is waaaay out in the cut. It is literally next to a city garbage dump and on this long, winding road that is surrounded by overgrown woods on either side. The kind of place where people dump evidence of things they hope god didn't see. Then on top of that you had to go up this long, steep blind alley to get into the tow yard.
My ride fell through so I thought it would be a smart idea to ride my bike there -- at close to 1:00 a.m. (mind you I didn't have a clue as to where I was going.) Atlanta is full of hills and I alternated between cursing myself slipping out of my exercise routine every time I hit a steep incline and being grateful for the exertion because it was an uncharacteristically chilly night for Atlanta in October.
When I got to the top of the alley and entered the yard I saw a run down bungalow and a tow truck idling with no one in it. I knocked on the door and no one answered. Then I looked inside and saw a big man, easily my size, watching a football game. He had a beard worthy of an imam. I knocked on the window and he held his finger to his lips and pointed downward. I looked down and saw a newborn asleep in a carriage. When I came in I saw a little girl in a pink jumper with a ski cap that was way to big for her on her head. It was rolled up so it would shield her eyes from the fluorescent light overhead.
Her father was manning the desk for the midnight shift. He was a dark-skinned brother covered with tats and about 23 years old. I asked how old she was and he told me she would be two months old in a week. We made small talk while he was processing my paperwork. Turns out he had been a semi-pro quarterback until he got cut. He had a serious demeanor, but wasn't grim or bitter. He said it kind of matter-of-factly. Every so often he looked down at the girl and adjusted the cap or tucked the blanket over her. At some point his girlfriend came out of the adjoining room. She was about his age with a kind of gold hue to her skin tone and baby locks. I realized that this whole young family was working the midnight shift together in a yard that was located in the most forgotten corner of Atlanta.
Before we went out to get my car I pulled the ski cap off his daughter's head and put it on his own, which made his girlfriend laugh. The hat completed an improbable outfit consisting of a white long-sleeve thermal t-shirt, black and red nylon basketball shorts and timberland boots. When I got back outside I realized that because it was way up on a hill on the outskirts of the city, this desolate little corner had the absolute most stunning view of the Atlanta skyline that I've ever seen. We wound up having to put the car in front of me into neutral and push it out of the way because the keys were missing. When I got to my car I saw a copy of The Devil and Dave Chappelle in the backseat and I asked him what kind of stuff he liked to read. He said a little of everything. I gave him the copy and said "I used to work the midnight shift back in the day and I was always glad to have something to read to make the time go by." he said thanks and went back inside.
For whatever reason that experience made me happy. I tried to figure out why, thinking maybe it was because they were young and had years in front of them and were too idealistic for worry to have given them furrowed brows, or because they were obviously struggling but hanging in there together, even in the dead of a chilly night in an abandoned precinct of the city. Or maybe because the thought of a brother working a midnight shift while reading my book gave me a new understanding of the term "target audience."
What I did know is that it I "liked" that experience for complex reasons -- which is why when people ask me open ended questions like that I take the simple route and say things like "butter-pecan ice cream."
Maybe I'm not so jaded after all.
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