Angry White Male

Angry White Male

  By STEVEN TRAVERS

  PROLOGUE

  MVP

  “Oh! Come on you people now

  Smile on your brother

  Everybody get together

  Try to love one another right now

  Yes! Come on you people now

  Smile on your brother

  Everybody get together

  Try to love one another right now

  “Come on you people now

  Smile on your brother

  Everybody get together

  Try to love one another right now”

  --“EVERYBODY GET TOGETHER”

  By The Dave Clark Five

  It was hot that day in Williamsport, Pennsylvania. Hot in the way the late Summer sun hangs heavy, oppressive and sticky. Hot the way it gets back East, and Stan Taylor felt it on this, the most glorious day of his life.

  It was hot when he had gone to bed the night before at the Travelodge. He had turned the air conditioning on all the way, and woke up in the middle of the night briefly paralyzed with fear that his valuable right arm had caught a cold. He had a touch of sore throat from the flowing freeon coursing through the room, and when he got up early it was still hanging on. He was paranoid that something would stop him in his tracks on this day. If it were not the air conditioning causing his arm to be stiff or his throat to be sore, it would be something else. He was nervous about something happening that would sabotage his dreams, everything he had worked for.

  As soon as he dressed and walked outside, however, he felt good Karma. It was 85 degrees at eight o’clock in the morning and threatening to get hotter. Stan loved hot weather. What made him nervous was cold, fog, and wind. He was comfortable under a hot sun. He liked the Summer when the days were long and he could wear a short-sleeved shirt at night.

  Dressed in shorts with white athletic socks and sneakers, with a stylishly preppy Banlon sport shirt, Stan entered the sunlight and immediately his arm loosened up. His throat was no longer sore.

  His skin, dry as a bone after spending the night with the air conditioner at full blast, immediately began to sweat. Within minutes he was covered in perspiration, large stains under his armpits. By the time he returned from breakfast, he needed a shower, so he jumped in and allowed the cool water to cover his body.

  Afterward he toweled off, Stan got ready to go to work.

  Now, five hours later, his work was almost done. 12-year old Stan Taylor was one out away from wrapping up the 1976 Little League World Series for his hometown team from Palos Verdes Estates, California. Stan stood ramrod straight on the mound and soaked it all in. He was a tall kid, almost six feet tall already, but thin. Still, he felt like he filled out his uniform. He perceived himself differently from the way others perceived him. He was a good-looking kid, a tow-headed blonde with blue eyes, and he fantasized that girls liked him. They did not like him at school. They thought he was handsome, but this was unknown by Stan. It was only when playing baseball that Stan felt sexy and cool. Once the game ended, he reverted to being “uncool.”

  Not that he ever had the courage to talk to them. He knew from the way they flirted at school that some girls dug him. However, they had been flirting less over the past year or so. He had now finished the sixth grade and was moving to the seventh, only a few days away. Junior high school. He felt that his age of innocence was rapidly ending. He was entering a new, perilous period of life that would not be good. So, this was his “last hurrah,” in a sense. A final chance at childhood glory before moving on to something…ugly. There had been signs that things were changing for him, and not for the better, but he had put off facing that.

  Others his age were already “going steady,” but Stan was not there yet. Sports were his outlet. He was a natural athlete, good at everything he tried. He tried to convince himself that girls swooned over him when they saw him.

  There were girls here at Williamsport. Ann Louis was here. Her brother, Chris road the bench, but his family had made the trip. She was blonde and fetching, and looking at him right now. So were dozens of other girls his age, sisters and friends of his teammates, his opponents, and others associated with this annual rite of Summer.

  They were all watching him. Stan was just hitting puberty and his hormones were in overdrive. He did not quite know what he was thinking, but he knew damn well that it felt good. He had pornographic visions involving Ann Louis in his hotel room after the game. Somehow she had morphed into Brigitte Bardot in his vision.

  The final game of the Little League World Series is a major American sporting event, played before a packed house of thousands on a well-manicured field of dreams ringed by a stadium that could pass for a good college or minor league facility. Only, it is miniaturized to fit its youthful competitors.

  The event had started in 1948. Joey Jay of the Cincinnati Reds was the first kid to go from the Series to the Major Leagues, but a number would follow him. Stan knew he would be one of them.

  Every year different teams compete for the championship. By the 1960s, it had become an international festival. The way it works is that every community in the United States has a little league. It is as American as apple pie. There is midget league, for kids age eight and nine, followed by the minors, which is for the 10-year olds, and then majors, which is reserved for 11- and 12-year olds.

  The league consists of six or eight teams, each team composed of 15 or 16 players. Each team is sponsored by a local business or community organization. Home Market. Taco Bell. Rotary Club. American Legion. Every player on every team has to play in every game if he is suited up. Nobody could pitch more than six innings in a week.

  Stan played for Police. They had gone undefeated during the regular season, and Stan won 10 of those games.

  The regular season, however, is just prelude for the real season, which is “all-stars.” The coaches and managers, usually parents but sometimes a high school kid, or just a guy who likes baseball, then select all-stars. Some of those “guys who like baseball” were men-children with “little Napoleon” complexes. Rob Lateucci, for instance, stood five feet ye high to a grasshopper. He had been turned down by the police academy and worked as a security guard. In his mid-20s he still lived with his mother and always would. He equated his strategy decisions as manager of Rotary to those of John McGraw when he skippered the Giants in the first 30 years of the 20th Century. He also admired Ben Chapman, a racist with the Philadelphia Phillies. Lateuci did not admire Chapman’s racial views, but rather the way he had taunted Jackie Robinson when Robinson broke the color barrier.

  To the extent that there is any white trash on the Palos Verdes Peninsula, Lateucci, who lived in San Pedro, had found them and stocked his roster with these types. The sons of garbage men, auto mechanics, toll takers at the Vincent Thomas Bridge. Kids who carried knives, who had records and done time at juvie. Kids who hung out with dirty girls who put out, the kinds of girls who repulsed and turned on Stan The fact that these losers had chicks like that while he was a novice in that department was nothing less than a travesty.

  Lateucci taught them, like Chapman had done to Robinson, to taunt Stan, a single child with a sensitive side. The previous year he had stood on the edge of the dugout and said things to Stan that should have gotten him arrested, and in a scene more appropriate to “Lord of the Flies” encouraged his jackals to do the same. In tears, Stan pitched every inning of a losing rout, and the dirty girls heckled him, too.

  “Rich kid.” “Mama’s boy.” “Faggot.” “Stanleeee.”

  But this year he had come back to toss a perfect game at Lateucci’s team, shutting them up with pure excellence, and that night he thought about the dirty girls. If he had learned h
ow to masturbate yet, those girls would have been the objects of his fantasy, but instead he just lay in bed wallowing in repressed sexuality. One thing, however, he knew for damn sure. He was no faggot!

  Then there was Mike Lodeen. His younger brother, Rickie, pitched in the league, and Mike had been the “big brother” of the P.V. Little League for several years. Everybody liked him. He was a cool hepcat, with long hair and hippy clothes. He also was a heroin addict and child molester, information that would come out a few years later.

  The all-stars of Palos Verdes had moved through the obstacle course that is the road to Williamsport on the strength of Stan Taylor’s right arm. They won the regionals in Torrance, then the sectionals in West Covina, the state in Bakersfield, and the Western States’ in Colorado.

  Now they had been given a new set of uniforms. For the first five tournaments they wore uniforms that said “Palos Verdes” on the front. Now they wore a uniform that said “WEST” on it. The eight teams in the Series all represented a different region of the world. There were two U.S. teams, the other coming from New Haven, Connecticut. Over the years, many U.S. towns, big and small, had been represented at the Series. California, especially Southern California, because of the weather, the population and the fact that more great athletes come from there than any place in the world, was represented more than other regions.

  There was a team from Germany, but they were not Germans. They were the sons of American airmen stationed at an air force base, and they represented Europe. There was a team from Puerto Rico, all kids hoping to be the next Roberto Clemente. There was a team from Saudi Arabia. Again, these were American kids whose parents worked in the “oil bidness” in Riyadh.

  For years American teams dominated at Williamsport because baseball is the American game, but by the 1960s the Japanese had become a power. However, by the early 1970s, the Far East was no longer represented by the Japanese, but rather kids from Taipei, Taiwan.

  Once the island of Formosa, Taiwan had become a major flashpoint of the Cold War when Mao Tse-tung had taken over Mainland China in the Communist Revolution of 1949. America’s friend, General Chiang Kai-shek, had fled to Formosa, re-named it Taiwan, and declared it to be the legitimate government of China.

  The United States backed him and sent warplanes to the region as an exclamation point. Despite the political controversy, Taiwan had over the years become, if not a true democracy, a bastion of capitalist success and little league dominance.

  Somebody had come up with the bright idea of pouring money into little league baseball in Taiwan. The best coaches were brought in, and the kids, in the inscrutable way that Orientals go about things, had become baseball automatons who practiced for hours a day and played like robots. Every year the Taiwanese came to Williamsport, and every year they dominated. It also did not hurt that their birth certificates were fabricated. For years, the Taiwanese’ 12-year olds were actually 13- and 14-year olds.

  It had gotten to the point where distressed American moms and dads wanted the Taiwanese banned because their own kids could not compete with them. Accusations of cheating and fudging of birth certificates ran rampant. Some U.S. team would run the gauntlet of regionals and sectionals, make it to the finals, only to be wiped out by the superior Taiwanese, 18-0. It was not fair. The kids would cry, all the success of their magical summers wiped out by those horrid Asians.

  That was the situation that Stan Taylor and his Palos Verdes teammates faced in 1976. Stan pitched and hit his team to victory over Mannheim, West Germany in the opener, and Santurce, Puerto Rico fell in game two. Taiwan, of course, beat Riyadh, 25-0 and Westport, Connecticut, 17-0, and was heavily favored against the Californians.

  Las Vegas posted odds on the Series that year for the first time, and rated Taiwan 50-1 favorites. Stan was asked to stop the Yellow Menace.

  Stan defied the odds that day, and now with two outs in the sixth and last inning, he led 4-0 with nobody on base. Taiwan’s big man, Lin Te-tsung, their ace pitcher and power hitter, taller even than Stan, stood at the plate with fear in his eyes.

  For Lin Te-tsung, defeat in Williamsport was not an option. Unlike the Americans, who would say it is “just a game,” this was about national honor, and to lose the game meant losing face. He might not have to kill himself, but he would face a country turning its collective back away from him.

  Stan toed the rubber. He was sweating like a stuck pig in the afternoon heat, just the way he liked it. The hotter the better.

  He glanced into the stands. There was Brigitte Bardot, er, Ann Louis.

  “Man, she looks good,” he said to himself.

  A few other 12- and 13-year old chicks dotted the stands. Tanned skin. Long silky hair wearing shorts and tube tops. A pubescent fantasy.

  Then he looked at his mother. Shirley Taylor, a pretty blonde woman in her mid-40s, looked proud.

  “C’mon Stanley,” she yelled. Stan winced, but he was not quite sure why.

  His father, Dan, was another story. He was not in the stands. He was standing on the edge of the dugout. His face resembled that of Emil Zatopek heading down the stretch in the 10,000. He did not enjoy his son’s games. He endured them. He had coached Stan in every sport he participated in, and he lived his life completely, totally and vicariously through his 12-year old son.

  Briefly, Stan contemplated his self worth, and considered that because he was about to become America’s most famous 12-year old, his father would value him. Certainly he was thrilled and happy, but deep in the recesses of his mind he knew that if he had given up a few key hits today, and his team had not scored four runs, he would be walking off the field a loser instead. His father would not be very happy about it.

  The hell with it, he thought to himself. Win this one for yourself.

  With that, Stan Taylor wound and threw a fastball right past the swinging bat of the best Taiwanese little league hitter in the world, for strike three.

  Stan stood patiently on the mound. The tall Oriental kid turned and headed disconsolately towards the dugout, convinced he had lost face forever. Stan was excited, but decided to downplay the moment. At certain times he could be very mature and this was one of them.

  “It’s only little league,” he said to himself, just before his father grabbed him and tried to throw him to the Moon. His teammates followed. Even now there was resentment. The Stan and Dan Show was not popular in Palos Verdes, which like every little league in every town in and out of America is a total soap opera of deceit, prejudice, intrigue, and parental backstabbing. The child molester Mike Lodeen was not the only dangerous adult in their midst.

  Still, Stan had put Palos Verdes on the map. Actually, it was already on the map. Anybody who knows anything knows it is the most exclusive and best place to live in Los Angeles County. Forget Beverly Hills, Malibu or San Marino. P.V.’s the place, and the announcers had made the point on more than one occasion that this team came from affluence.

  Now they had proven that they were more than a bunch of spoiled rich kids, which of most of them were. They were spoiled rich kids who were also great ball players.

  Stan soaked up all the love, unconcerned with the knowledge that it would not last. He would ride it for what it was worth. When the team returned to their dugout, the home folks gave them a standing ovation, and the glad-handing went on all around.

  At the traditional mid-field shaking hands ceremony, Stan made mental note of the long Taiwanese faces. These kids, who all looked 15 anyway, seemingly were now 30 years of age, their childhood, or what there had been of it, completely stripped away by this failure of purpose. For a split second, Stan felt sorry for them. Then an image of his father sitting stone-faced in post-defeat silence appeared to him like the Burning Bush. He knew it was either he or they. That is the way it is in war.

  The obligatory awards ceremony followed. This would be his crowning moment. He would be named the Most Valuable Player of the Little League World Series. Stan had
thought a lot about this, and he wanted it. Athletes like to downplay awards with clichés, but Stan had a selfish streak. He was a glory hog, an only child, and he wanted that trophy. He had won the first and third games. He had hit two homers and starred at shortstop when he did not pitch. The TV cameras loved him, and he deserved it.

  Then he thought about his father. He wanted it more than his son. It validated him. Stan anticipated the trophy with confidence, right up until the time it was announced. He knew he should win it, yet a tiny voice, at the last second, told him that for his sins, and for the sins of his father, he would not.

  “Billy Boswell,” came the voice on the public address system.

  Stan felt the hair stand up on the back of his neck. A streak of disappointment coursed through his body like pain, and he was unable to hide the grimace of his sweaty face.

  Then he heard it.

  “Shit.” It was Dan, muttering under his breath a yard behind him, and the other kids all heard it. Oh, that would cost him.

  “Fuck you, Taylor,” he heard.

  Then Billy Boswell emerged from the dugout. He was the only black kid on the team, a great athlete whose grand slam home run in the fifth had broken a 0-0 tie and provided all the runs in the game. He raised his arms toward the Heavens as he went out to take the hardware.

  Stan stood stone-faced. He could hear Billy’s father, Al Boswell, yelling like a crazy for his son. He picked up on his wife’s high-pitched scream, and the other members of the large Boswell contingent, all whooping it up way too much.

  Blacks, thought Billy to himself, and at that moment he hated Billy Boswell, and he was utterly and absolutely green with envy. The color of Boswell’s skin most definitely mattered to him.

  CHAPTER ONE

  THE RULING UPPER CRUST

  I know I'm free,

  ”And I won't forget the men who died

  who gave that right to me, And I gladly stand up next to you

  and defend her still today,

  'Cause there ain't no doubt I love this land

  God bless the U.S.A.”

 

  --“GOD BLESS THE USA”

  By Lee Greenwood