Jump by Mike Lupica Read Free Book Online Page A

gifts from places like Miami Beach. DiMaggio always wondered what his old man was thinking. Did he think he had a son who wanted to lead the league in plastic pink flamingos? To be able to put his collection up against anybody’s in Commack, Long Island? Tony DiMaggio, with his pompadour hair and gangster suits, would spend a couple of days at home, sleeping all day, saying he couldn’t get out of the habit. Then he would take off again, on his way to Baltimore and Washington and Atlanta. Then DiMaggio would wait some more, watching his mother hit the Four Roses, until there was the big tour through the southwest, after which Tony DiMaggio never came back.
    DiMaggio didn’t even have a sample of his father’s handwriting, just the fucking flamingos.
    Then there was all the waiting as a ballplayer, too, in the game or on the bench or in the clubhouse. Mostly on the bench, even in allthose bust-out rookie-league towns in the South, the redneck fools yelling out jokes about his last name, asking where his Uncle Joe was. “Uncle Joe
DiMaggio
, get it?” they’d yell. As if he didn’t. They were the kinds of places writers romanticized into the Vatican. It always gave DiMaggio a real thrill, reading about baseball. Every ballpark was a cathedral, and everything associated with the game was a sacrament. Even the waiting.
    The Greeks didn’t have as much bullshit mythology as baseball did.
    DiMaggio had just the one summer with the Yankees. It wasn’t even a summer, that was bullshit, he sounded like some asshole spin doctor touching up his career. DiMaggio got twelve weeks, four starts when Thurman Munson got hurt, a total of fifty innings, batting average of .202, only getting up there above .200 because of two hits off Rick Wise the last day of the regular season. DiMaggio didn’t remember much about the baseball, remembering much more clearly the phone call telling him he’d been released. He remembered more about living in New York the first time, in this apartment he found, cheap enough, on Ninety-fourth, east of Fifth. A stewardess he’d dated had it. Then she quit it all of a sudden to get married, to some rich guy she met on the red-eye from Los Angeles. DiMaggio grabbed it. The stewardess knew DiMaggio played the piano and told him some old piano player lived next door. DiMaggio did a little investigating and found out it was Vladimir Horowitz. DiMaggio smiled now, his head resting against the window on the right side of the backseat, the other window down, so he could watch the entrance to the Vertical. Some old piano player, he thought. Playing for the Yankees, all those stars, and he’d watch the street in the afternoons until it was time to go to the ballpark, waiting for a look at Horowitz. Mostly he’d just listen in the afternoons, when the old man would open the windows and play, laying the music over all the New York noise, the cabs, the whole shout of the place.
    DiMaggio started playing piano again that year, even with every no-good thing catching had done to his hands, catching and the arthritis that had gotten worse every year. After the Yankees released him at the end of October, he traveled around Europe for six months, alone, without any real itinerary, starting in London and finally endingup in Barcelona, living in a small apartment that looked out on the statue of Christopher Columbus, studying for the law boards and playing the piano nights in the little bar downstairs. He came home and passed and started going to Fordham Law the next September. He also took piano lessons from this crazy Polish woman who lived down at Sheridan Square. DiMaggio remembered how after they’d finish on Thursday afternoons she’d pour them glasses of vodka, and they’d drink it and listen to tapes of Horszowski, the woman crying sometimes as if DiMaggio wasn’t there.
    His first job, the dirty low lawyering job of the world, the rookie league of lawyering, was in New York, at Valerio and Cowen. One of the