Being a headstrong young son of a gun, Stan was not a shrinking violet. The feelings he felt for his father, the seething hatred mixed at the same time with intense love, made for strong confrontations. Sometimes one side would back down from the other. Stan could act horribly towards his parents. He was a spoiled, churlish, arrogant kid who answered his parents when he felt like it, and routinely treated them like dirt under his feet. He did it because of the way they trampled on him. The kid was filled with inner, raw emotions, and resentment over the slights of his parents. His childish slights were the only revenge he had at his command.
Shirley was a loving parent, but impatient. She sided with her husband on all things, and unconsciously ganged up on her son when Dan had it in for him. Sometimes, in private, she would extend her sympathy to Stan for the way the old man treated him, and for a while, Stan felt he had an ally. However, when Shirley and Dan were together, it was always two parents vs. one child. Shirley’s private expressions of understanding became treachery from a purported ally.
Her lack of patience was difficult for Stan to take. Stan would ask her to help with his homework, but she would get confused, read too fast, and in no time get mad at Stan for not understanding her poor directions. Why she was so lame in trying to help her son was a mystery. She was a college-educated woman with a worldly view of things, but for some reason she seemed to develop a severe case of Dumbellionitis when she tried to work with her son. Perhaps life with the imperious Dan Taylor had stricken her of her natural liveliness. She had become sloppy and slap-dash, and sometimes her inability to handle even simple directions or instructions was confounding.
She read books about British royalty, biographies of Churchill and Benjamin Disraeli, and developed into quite the Brit-ophile. She did things separate from her husband, and always competently. She traveled and handled itineraries, baggage pick-up, and other complicated procedures. However, when she was under Dan’s shadow, she routinely screwed up phone messages and simple details. She was not learning disabled, it just seemed that way.
When Stan was in the first grade, he came home and asked her to help him with an assignment, which was to learn how to tell time. Stan had problems with the work. The harder he tried, the more he kept screwing it up. Within a short time, Shirley became furious with him. She screamed at him. She called him stupid. She stomped about, infuriated that her son was unable to absorb the knowledge quickly and easily.
Stan finally just walked out, got on his bike, and rode around the neighborhood in tears. When he got home, he tackled the assignment on his own. Without his mother breathing fire on him when he got it wrong, he figured out the clocks, and correctly completed the work.
Stan especially had trouble in math, which was not unusual since neither of his parents was very good at it. Shirley was of no help, which did not stop her from trying to help, only making it even worse. Dan had better skills, but instead of helping his son, he mainly just complained about the “new math” that was being taught in schools, and how the liberals had screwed up the education system.
In the mean time, Stan developed a phobia about math that would last his entire life. He would always associate math formulas with the sound of his mother calling him stupid. At least she just called him stupid, instead of stue-pidd.
One day, Dan tried to strike up a conversation with Stan.
“How about the Dodgers?” he asked, an innocuous enough question. “Do you think Sutton’ll win 20 this year?”
Stan felt nothing but contempt for his father at that moment. Probably because the old man had called him a stupidkid, or told him he was stue-pidd. Or had embarrassed him publicly, or had blamed him for something he had not done, or a million other possibilities, only a day earlier.
The Taylor’s were dysfunctional, and their coping mechanism was to ignore and forget these incidents. Dan and Shirley never, ever acknowledged their wrongs. They never asked for forgiveness. They never had the slightest inkling that the way they treated their son was unhealthy. Dan could be a beast, and then decide to be a nice guy. He did not understand why Stan still remembered that he had acted like a beast.
So, when Dan would ask him about the Dodgers, it was because he had forgotten he had treated him like crap. He harbored no guilt, and was just moving on. Stan usually operated under the same procedures. But he got dumped on and was an only child with all the insecurities inherent within that frame of reference. He could not always stay calm and on an even keel. Occasionally, he had to “fight back.” The only way he had to do this was to be rude to his elders.
So he just gave his father a dirty look and said nothing. He “treated him like dirt.”
Dan Taylor just stood there, in the kitchen. He needed a haircut. His hair was somewhat disheveled. He looked forlorn at that moment. The ball of rolling thunder could also be vulnerable as hell. This was one of those moments. His chin dropped to his chest. The man looked like a poor lost dog.
“I’m sorry,” he muttered, “I just wanted to ask about the Dodgers.”
Oh, he was pitiful. The pain, the agonizing regret, the terrible guilty conscience of Stan Taylor welled up within him. Stan looked at his old man, and he did not see the guy who called him stupidkid, or accused him of being stue-pidd, or made fun of him in front of other kids. This was the generous, gentle soul who never, ever, turned him down when he asked to practice baseball. This was the guy who was there for him every time. This man loved him more than anybody on Earth. Stan instinctively knew that in his entire life, this old guy was the one rock in his existence. Others - friends, wives, acquaintances - would come and drift off, but Dan was always going to be there for him.
So, the disheveled hair, the puppy-dog expression, left Stan helplessly unable to avoid his grip of guilt.
The thing was - the unbalanced side of the whole relationship - was that as far as Stan could tell, neither of his parents ever felt those pangs of guilt for him. Stan died for his father. The hangdog look and unkempt hair stirred in Stan the essence of sorrow and shame.
In later years, Stan would discern the meaning of guilt, shame and judgment as being the cornerstones of morality. Guilt was a good thing. It kept you honest and made you do what was right because you could not live with yourself if you did otherwise. But back in the days of his youth, the kid did not think like that. He was like the Lawrence Harvey character, Raymond, in the classic film, “The Manchurian Candidate”. Raymond never could “beat” his mom, played by Angela Lansbury. Stan could never “beat” his parents, either, because he felt guilt and, as far as he could tell, they did not.
Dan and Shirley Taylor were not psychopaths. They felt guilt. They were filled with compassion. However, they lacked some inner mechanism for recognizing in their own actions, especially as it pertained to the raising of Stan, that they could be wrong. This was the only way they could continue to yell, swear and blame their son for all things big and small. Had they somehow, magically, been able to see what was so obvious, they would have been horrified at how they treated him. If it could have been put on film for them to see, or acted out depicting other characters, maybe they could have seen it. Perhaps the mechanism that prevented them from seeing this glaring fault was what kept them sane.
Stan was a good kid. Parents dream of having children like Stan. Yes, he could be surly and petulant, full of himself. Selfish and egotistical. But he loved his parents and loved doing things for them, with them, pleasing them, living up to their expectations. He loved the same things his father loved: Sports, fishing and good, clean, wholesome activities.
What did he get for that? He got love. He got their time, their attention, and their devotion. He also got blame and invective. He got criticism, strident and deadly. The result was that he had to contend with a very large part of his personality telling him that he was a stue-pidd stupidkid. A stupidkid who was responsible for his dad being miserable and his parents always ganging up on him to unload all their baggage.
H
e was a kid and he was too young to know they were wrong. So he just lived with himself being the go-to guy who accepted the blame. There came a point in which their ways were affecting him with his peers. This was decidedly not cool. Shirley and Dan started to develop a “bunker mentality” in which the world was divided between “us and them.” “Them” were all the other kids and especially their parents in the Palos Verdes Little League.
Dan started coaching when his son was 11, and Shirley was ever-present, exhorting her Stan-leee to “beat those kids.” The other kids and parents quickly became enflamed by the passions of the Taylor’s. The Taylor’s wanted to win too much. Dan, the ex-player, treated his players the way he had remembered being treated when he was a college star and a minor league pitcher. That meant taking it seriously, practicing long hours, playing to win, and yelling a lot. He swore, sometimes at his players, sometimes even calling the kids “bastards,” “sons of bitches,” “pissants,” and other lovely, descriptive terms.
He meant well, and had his supporters, mainly from the harder core of the league. Those who also took winning seriously and saw baseball not just as a fun, benign activity, but also as something to excel at. But he and his supporters were in the minority. Palos Verdes was a pretty conservative place, a Republican bastion, but it was still California, and this was the post-‘60s 1970s. Taylor was seen as a dinosaur, and the sniping and cat-calling of his enemies increased as he and his son charged from victory to dominant victory, all cheered much too loudly by the less-than-genteel Shirley.
One day, Stan pitched a beautiful shutout and hit a couple of home runs. The family repaired home, alone but together, for some early evening Summer barbeque. Stan was in high spirits, the top jock, a stud. Dan hit the beer hard, because he deserved it, and Shirley had a few Martinis followed by wine with the barbequed chicken.
It was all quite idyllic. Then the conversation came around to how everybody hated them. Oh, the Taylor’s were proud to be hated. They wore it on their sleeves like a badge of honor.
“Did you hear what that fat Lodeen woman said?” remarked Shirley. “She called Stan a little faggot. That just started the others off.”
“That’s rich coming from her,” said Dan. “Her oldest is a Goddamn fairy. I wouldn’t let him within five feet of Stan. Those Lodeens are trash.”
“What about Wayne Fingers’ father?” said Shirley. “Stanley, did you hear what he called you?”
“No,” remarked Stan, smiling. He couldn’t wait to hear. He knocked back his coke.
“Finger’s said you were an asshole kid,” said Dan. “An asshole kid. His kid’s in juvenile hall and he’s a car mechanic, fer chrissake. They’re just jealous of you, Stanley. Everybody’s jealous of you. They all hate you. Every one of them. They all hate you because of what we have, and because we’re better than any of ‘em.”
It went on like that for 45 minutes. Almost everybody in the league, parents, coaches, players, was singled out and identified for the rotten things they had been heard saying about Stanley Taylor and the Taylor Family. Stan just loved it, smiling, and he repeated the stories he knew, giving them inside information from schoolyard taunt sessions and razzing episodes that had escaped his parent’s ear.
The old man seemed to know everything, anyway. He asked his son every question under the sun and expected straight, detailed answers. If Stan did not give it to him the way he wanted it he just called him stupidkid, or worse.
It began to dawn on Stan that night. A nagging little voice in the back of his head, telling him that something was not right. The smiling faces of his parents, gloriously telling stories out loud about how hated their son was. A little drunken chortling thrown in for good measure.
Suddenly, Stan’s smile disappeared and he just blurted, “Stop it.” He yelled it. He screeched it.
“You’re just so full of shit,” he said to his parents.
That brought the heat down on him. The rest of the night was ruined. Full of bad mood and sour stomachs. But it was a revelation for 11-year old Stan Taylor. He was hated. Part of it was his fault. He hit homers and rounded the bases with an imperial gait, the slow trot of a racehorse champion making a victory lap. He laughed at other kids after striking them out, thumbing his nose at jeering spectators. He made an ass out of himself. He did all that. But he was caught up in something beyond his control. That was the whole bunker mentality of his parents, particularly his father. He had bought into it, and now it occurred to him that he was in a bad place. He was an unpopular kid. There are few things worse in the mundane world than to be an unpopular child.
He was not just unpopular. Many kids are unpopular. But in his case it was even worse. He was singled out. Most unpopular kids are able to fade into the woodwork. He was in the spotlight, on the stage of derision.
His saving grace was sports. Years later, when the Columbine killings shocked a nation, Stan understood what those two tortured kids had gone through. While Stan never had it in him to carry out fantasies of murderous revenge, he did know that if he had not had sports, it would have been even worse. This was the place he derived success, bragging rights and identity. However, it was turning out to be a double-edged sword. The very success he enjoyed was what was causing jealousy and making him hated and miserable.
Stan went to school with a Dumbellionite named Barry Azz. Azz was a dim-witted cluck who never learned how to read properly. All through elementary school, the kids would be called on to read passages from books. Stan would read his like a guy on National Public Radio. Azz would stumble over every word. Watching him in these situations was painful. In the black-is-white-white-is-black world of childhood, Stan was made fun of because he read well, while Azz was somehow a cool kid because he disdained intelligence.
Azz played little league with him. He was a mediocre athlete but he was part of the “in crowd.” One day, the teacher was holding a group discussion. It was one of those 1970s “rap sessions” meant to get things out in the open instead of keeping them bottled up inside.
“I know this one kid, his father coaches him in little league,” said Azz, looking at Stan.
It still did not strike Stan that Azz was talking about him. In the back of his mind, Stan felt it, but he had a switching mechanism that allowed him to convince himself that what was obvious was something else.
“This guy’s father’s an ass,” said Azz. “He thinks he’s better than everybody else, and so does his kid. He teaches his son to think that way. The whole family just treats people like crap and think they can get away with it. They yell at kids, and take everything way too seriously. They think winning baseball games is the most important thing in life. This guy just favors his son over everybody.”
Azz just stared at Stan.
“I think we all know who I’m talking about,” said Azz, looking at Stan. “I’m talking about you.”
Stan just looked at Azz, then averted his gaze. He felt his skin tingle, hot and red, as if he was exposed to the whole world. He could have just lashed out at Azz. He could have fought him. He could have defended himself. Instead, he just said nothing, hoping that the whole thing would fade away.
One kid, Chuck Berber, started hassling him. What was really galling was that Berber was very popular. He was a good-looking kid, a decent athlete, and the girls all liked him. He was well liked by the guys, as well. Chuck’s mother was a young, attractive divorcee. Chuck had the panache of being hip.
Berber was one of those guys who would smile and be nice to Stan when it was convenient. If it was around baseball and Stan’s parents were there, Chuck was smart enough be to a decent guy. But at school, when he was in his element, he killed Stan. Stan had no comeback.
Chuck and his friends used to call Stan a pussy and a “mama’s boy,” and would whistle at him, “Stan-leee,” mocking Shirley.
One day, Shirley was giving Stan a ride home from school. Normally, Stan would race from his last class to the parking lot so he could get out of there before t
he other kids gathered. The parking lot was a round one, with a flagpole in the middle. If one tried to drive out with all the kids walking around, they had to drive very slowly so as to not hit anybody. This was what Stan always hoped to avoid. He did not want the other kids seeing him in the car with Shirley. He knew they would whistle Stan-leee at him, and make fun of him. It burnt Stan’s ears knowing his mother or father could hear the derision.
He would squirm as Shirley fiddled around, taking her sweet time, going through her purse. The other kids would start milling about past the car. Sure enough, here it would come.
“There’s Taylor. Hey Stan-leee. Hootie hoo Stan-leee!”
One day Chuck Berber was talking to Stan when Shirley arrived. Chuck flashed the charm on her, and naturally Shirley offered to give him a ride. In the car, driving Chuck home, Shirley could not keep her mouth shut. She brought up the subject of Stan getting jeered by the other kids.
Oh, no, thought Stan. Please shut up. Please, please, please, pleeeaaassse shut up.
Shirley just kept yakking about it.
“You have to stand up for yourself,” she told her son, with Chuck holding back laughter in the back seat. “Box those kids on the ear if they make fun of you. Don’t let them get away with it.”
At school the next day, Chuck and his group of pals, about five of them, made fun of Stan and what Shirley had said.
“Hey Stanley,” Chuck said. “Why don’t you box some of us? Start right now.”
Stan tried to slither his way out of there.
Stan took crap at school without standing up for himself. Kids are humans. Some times they are devils. They can be filled with hate. Politicians like to talk about “the children.” Athletes are always endorsing some charity that “helps kids.”
Children are just as often little snipers, hyenas gnawing at the wounds of the dispossessed, the unpopular, and the weak. Baying at the chance to belittle, to make fun of, and to put down. A kid’s whole world is the playground, the classroom, the courtyard, and the parking lot. Adult commentary takes on a mundane quality.
“Kids are so cruel,” Shirley would say to Dan. Stan would hear them talking upstairs. He would stand at the bottom of the stairs, hiding behind the corner, listening to them talk about him. It would burn his ears.
“He doesn’t have a girlfriend yet,” she would say.
“Do you think there’s something wrong with him?” Dan would ask.
My God, Stan would wonder in horror, they think I’m a fucking queer.
“The other kids just hate him,” Dan would go on.
Stan’s soul would fill with fury. He hated everything except sports. Stan despised his feelings. Stan Taylor was close to slipping into a funk of depression that he never would have crawled out of.
One day during seventh grade, Dan and Stan drove to Palos Verdes High School to practice baseball. It was the early fall, and baseball season was over for them, but as he always had, dedicated Stan practiced year round.
Palos Verdes High had a parking lot, but the baseball field was out back. Since it was a weekend, Dan would drive the car all the way to the field, past the basketball gym, on a concrete walkway that really was not supposed to be a “road,” but he used it as one anyway.
Around a corner they turned, and there they were. The Pop Warner kids, in full dress and pads, looking tough and mean. Football players, for God’s sake.
Immediately, the car was surrounded. Stan stared in terror at the kids, his claustrophobic head swimming in fear. He made eye contact with Chuck Berber, and a few other kids he knew from school, or little league. He saw no friendly faces. Next to Chuck was a kid named Rico. A little pissant. Some kind of Mexican kid or something. He hated Stan the way the peasants hate the elites.
Rico was a have-not. He always had been and always would be. He was from a family of have-nots. His drunken father was beating him at home. His crazy uncle was always trying to suck him off. His mother was not married to his father and his father was not the only man she spread her legs for. His old man could not keep it up when he tried to give it her anally, but there were men scattered from Santa Monica to San Pedro who did have what it took to take care of her “special needs.” Rico had walked in on his mom taking it up the butt from strangers on more than one occasion. He was swelled with anger at the world.
He was low class and knew it. He saw Stan, tall and blonde, the lawyer’s kid, a better athlete than he could ever dream of becoming. He saw him and knew that now was the time. His own miserable little life would not amount to a pile of crap. A kid like that had to heap some misery and get in his licks. Right now, he was a decent enough athlete. He was street smart, not stupid. He realized that within a few short years, the awkward, gangly white boys like Stan Taylor would be going to college, gaining the skills to ascend to a ruling class that he could not aspire to. By that time, his hateful words towards the likes of Stan would carry no meaning, for him or the intended victim. By that time, Stan would be a frat boy, a law student, and a professional man. If he saw him in a bar, the tables would be turned, and Stan would laugh him down because by then, Rico would have lost life’s war of attrition. He had to get it in now, and make it count. Right now, the cards were in his favor, and Stan had no aces up his sleeve. He just sat in the car and listened to Rico.
“Fuck you, Taylor,” Rico spewed. “And fuck your old man. Go suck his dick, motherfucker. Faggot.” It went on like that.
Looking back, Stan would wonder how in the hell kids like Rico lived on the peninsula. His dad collected garbage or something. Maybe he was an electrician. He was a pissant, too, of course. Money and race have nothing to do with class. What a man does for a living is not relevant to the question of class. He had taught his son to hate, as much by what he had left undone as by anything he had done. That was why he had no class. Many rich people were classless, too, for the same reasons.
The realization came to Stan later on down the road that electricians make good money. So do garbage men. The young Stan saw his father wearing a suit and tie with cuff links and a tie clasp. He associated that with money and class. In the 1970s, housing was still attainable, even to a “working man,” and there were families who had lived in Palos Verdes for generations.
Rico was everything that Stan resented. The have-nots, the haters, the tough little bastards. Worse yet, the Rico’s of the world got chicks. The dirty girls who scurried about the stands during games. The girls who were hot and made Stan jealous. They were the “Melissa’s,” the “Cathy’s,” the “Nicole’s” of bathroom wall fame.
“Call Nicole at 379-1105. She gives good head.”
Stan was not yet sure what “head” was, but he knew he was not the one getting any of it. Rico and Chuck, and their ilk - dear God, they were the ones getting head. At least in his imagination they were.
So there was Rico and Chuck, and their crew. There was Stan with Dan, sitting mute in the car, dressed for baseball practice during football season. This alone was reason enough for ridicule. There was a sense that in this socialistic little world of “fairness” and “equality,” the idea that a kid and his dad would engage in extra off-season practice to get a leg up on the competition, was wrong. A lot of guys might have gotten away with it, but not the uncool Taylors.
The cat calling started with Rico, built up momentum, and kept on for interminable minutes. Stan was trapped in the car, staring straight ahead, mortified.
“Faggot.”
“Asshole.”
“Fuck you, Taylor.”
His head was spinning, his back burning, his skin tingling from the very sensation of it.
There was one saving grace. Dan was taking even more heat than Stan.
“Fuck you, Dan.”
Stan was looking for some kind of silver lining. It was horrible, but he found it in the confirmation that the hate Stan was taking emanated from his father. It was his father who stirred up much of the animosity. But Dan could go off to Adams, Duque & Hazeltin
e everyday, while his son was left to fend off the tender schoolyard mercies.
The Pop Warner football players surrounded the car for a minute or two. It seemed like an hour to Stan. Finally, they moved on their way. Stan and Dan drove to the baseball field, and went about their usual practice session. Stretching, playing catch, bull pen session, grounders at short and at first base, shag some flies, batting practice, and wind sprints. The Pop Warner kids were on the football field nearby, and an occasional shout of hate would come from then.
“Faggot.”
“Fuck you, Taylor.”
“Taylor sucks his kid’s dick.”
“Faggot” was the worst thing a kid could call another kid. Stan was not a faggot. The actual connotation of the word was not what was behind its meaning in this context. It was used, instead, as the worst kind of putdown for anything that needed to be put down.
The practice session went on. The nightmare was not over. The session was conducted in silence, for the most part. Normally, father and son would engage in friendly chatter, but the incident with the football kids had curbed their enthusiasm on this day. Tensely, they went through the motions. There was something solid about how they did it, though. They refused to be brought down, neither one of them. Their spirit could not be broken.
These two were a team. Father and son exasperated each other, but against the world they were united. They did not let the shots taken at them by lesser lights break their personal loyalty, even when they blamed each other. They were stuck with each other and had a bond that was too strong for Rico, Chuck Berber or anybody else to tear down.
There always seemed to be an ironic sense of timing that, in Stan’s mind, worked against him. The whole practice, he had his eye out for the footballers, wondering when they would break their session, and what the fall-out would be.
Would some of them wander over to the baseball field to dispense vitriol? Stan wanted to make sure that he and Dan had an “exit strategy,” that they could make a clean break from the field, drive the narrow “road” that wound past the gym, and be gone before the football kids came back to clog up the road with sweat and hate.
Stan saw everything unfold before him, as if in slow motion, when he heard the Pop Warner coach call out, “Gather up, fellas.”
Oh, God, thought Stan, practice is over.
He finished his wind sprint. Normally he ran 15. This time he jogged in - fast - after his eighth.
“Let’s go,” he said to Dan.
Dan began to move at the speed of a slug. Stan packed his stuff, and stared out to the football field. The football team was packing it in.
Oh, no, he said under his breath.
Dan saw what was going on, and moved even slower. He did not make any indication that he knew the situation, but he knew. Had he moved with normal, decent deliberation, they could have had the stuff put in the car, and been off, with time to spare, before the Pop Warner’s clogged the road.
Instead, he dawdled. What he did was torture his son. Stan Taylor said nothing. He was between a rock and a hard place. He wanted out so bad it was killing him. Either get out now, or wait until the road was clear and the kids were in the showers. Instead, Dan seemed to time every slow, tedious action, so that the car would be stuck among the walking Pop Warner team. If Stan could have chosen to die instead of endure the agony of another stall in the middle of his enemies, he would have chosen death.
All of it seemed to be orchestrated by Dan Taylor. Whether Dan took some perverse pleasure in his son’s pain, or hated his son for not being part of the “in” crowd, or perhaps realized he was the reason the boy he loved was so hated; for whatever reason, he worked it just so that the car did, in fact, stall in the middle of those kids.
It was unbelievable. They moved into the car ever so slowly, then inched along. Stan saw the football team in their white practice uniforms, hauling their gear - the shoulder pads, the tools of boyish manhood. He saw some of the dirty girls, those lousy, rotten little bitches who went for these bastards and not for him. Some of then had gathered like Goddamn groupies here at P.V. High.
The final kicker, the last, incredible moment of agony occurred when Dan turned the corner. He was ahead of the football kids. He had a straight shot to get out. It did not require speeding up or driving dangerously. All he had to do was just drift the car, at regular speed, and they would be just ahead of these guys, just past their radar, and out of the parking lot unscathed.
Dan Taylor, instead, moved an inch at a time. He did not actually stop. He just inched. Waiting for the football players to gather around the car. To Stan, it was a terrible act of unkindness.
“What are you doing?” asked Stan. He tried to stay calm, unruffled. He did not want to appear to be sweating, but he was going out of his mind.
“What do you mean?” asked Dan.
“Let’s get out of here,” said Stan.
“What’s the matter with you?” asked Dan, as if he did not know.
“Nothing,” said Stan, dying. If the car had been perched on a cliff and he could have just opened the door and tumbled to his death on the rocks below, he would have given that serious consideration.
Then it happened.
“There’s Taylor.”
“Fuck you, Taylor. You sucking tour old man’s cock?”
“No, he sucks his.”
“Faggot.”
Stan’s head felt like a vise had gripped it, and he was spinning. Everything seemed fuzzy. The words hit, his mind ached, the scene was out of this world. The white uniforms, the faces peering in at the car, the fingers pointed up in the “fuck you” sign.
The car eventually started up again, only after the last Pop Warner football players had filed into the locker room. Stan could hear the laughter, surely directed at him, from inside. He was the subject of their hate and the source of their amusement.
Kids. Stan Taylor would never really like kids. He knew too well what they were, what they were capable of. The German philosopher, Nietzsche, once said, “What does not kill me, makes me stronger.” When adulthood finally, mercifully came to him, opening the gates of freedom after years in purgatory, he would embrace their meaning.
Stan went to a public school. To the extent that the Taylor’s had a religion, it was Episcopalian, but they never went to church. Stan had been baptized, but that was about it. The Catholics on the peninsula sent their kids to St. Cecilia’s School, gathered there for worship on Sundays, and raised their sons in the Catholic Youth Organization.
The CYO was home to a pretty fast basketball league. The public schools played basketball, but the CYO did it better. The CYO also invited non-Catholics to play. One did not have to attend St. Cecilia’s to play for them. Stan was tall and a good athlete, so he was invited in the sixth grade to play for St. Cecilia’s. Dan Taylor was asked to coach the team.
Stan thought this was a bad idea. He just knew that he was going to get in trouble, that his dad would muck it up for him with a whole new group of people. A lot of these people, close-knit Irish- and Italian-American Catholics, did not really know him. A lot of them came from San Pedro or Redondo, and were not privy to Dan’s yelling, screaming, and swearing tantrums with little league boys. They knew he had been a good athlete, and that he was a coach. That was good enough for them. Dan had approached St. Cecilia’s. He had to be up close in his son’s life. He could not back away.
Stan wanted none of it. He liked hoops. That was not the problem. But he wanted to fit in on his own, not as “Taylor’s kid.”
Early in the sixth grade season, October, 1975, Dan called for a practice. It was on a Wednesday night. The World Series was going on between Cincinnati and Boston, and it was one of the greatest Fall Classics ever. Stan Taylor decided to make a stand.
“I’m not going to practice,” he calmly told his father.
“You most certainly are,” said Dan.
“Dad, it’s the Series,” said Stan. “Please don’t schedule for when the
Series is on. There’s only one or two more games.”
“If you don’t practice, you don’t play on the team,” said Dan.
Dan had miscalculated.
“Dad, that’s fine,” replied his son. “I really don’t want to play CYO. It’s your idea, not mine. So, thanks, I’ll just watch the Series, and you coach the team if you want.”
Stan Taylor was as serious as a heart attack. He had no desire to play CYO with his dad at the helm, and live through more hell trying to be the old man’s son. He was not comfortable being the tall, Protestant outsider with all those cloistered, close-knit Catholics. But Dan Taylor’s face clinched, his teeth bared, and he went to into that rage that could not be defended against by an 11-year old boy.
“Now you listen to me Goddamn it,” said Dan. “You’re gonna practice and you’re gonna play CYO, and that’s all there’s gonna be, Goddamn it. Goddamn it. Goddamn you all to lousy hell.”
“No,” said Stan defiantly.
“You listen to me,” said Dan. “You’re playing. I don’t care about coaching a lousy CYO team. I’m doing it for you. I’ve done everything for you, and you are ungrateful. Goddamn it all to lousy rotten hell. Goddamn you.”
Stan tried to tell his father, gently, that he did not want his help. He just wanted to be left alone to play sports for fun. Not to glorify his father. Not to make him proud. Not to live up to something, and certainly not to feel pressure, pressure, pressure.
Stan liked basketball just fine, but his dad being there took all the joy out of it. Going to CYO practice was a job. He looked forward to it the way a guy looks forward to digging ditches.
Stan was powerless to actually do as he pleased. He went to that basketball practice, and when it was over, he got in the car and turned on the radio. The game was in extra innings, and the announcer was telling millions of baseball fans that this was one of the greatest games ever played.
“Millions of fans will remember where they were when these two teams played Game Six of the ’75 World Series,” the announcer said. Dan hated Stan because Stan would remember where he was, and who had forced him to be there.
Carlton Fisk would hit a home run to win it for Boston, using “body English” to direct his game-winning line drive to hit the foul pole. Pete Rose would tell the writers that it was an honor just to have played in a game like that, even in defeat.
Stan Taylor had missed all of it because his father insisted that he be a part of something he wanted no part of. Stan felt resentment towards him for making him miss that game. He complained about it. Baseball was not a game to him. It was religion. Missing Carlton Fisk’s game six home run game was too much to bear. The old man just dismissed him, saying it was not an important game, who cares about the World Series?
The quintessential answer to that question was STAN TAYLOR. Bastard.
Then the old feelings of guilt would creep back. Hating one’s father is serious business, especially when one loves his father. The rationalizations set in. Yes, Dan did sacrifice for his son. Yes, coaching CYO was an act of kindness by Dan towards Stan. Yes, Dan was always there for Stan. He gave of himself, his time and his love. Stan was only being a spoiled little brat if he wanted out of this “contract.”
When Stan was 12, he played for the Police team in the P.V. Little League. Dan managed the team. They had a good ball club.
The previous year, they had a second baseman named Greg Grillo. Greg was a little kid, but good looking. His mother was a foxy 29-year old Latino beauty with long black hair. She was unmarried. Nobody was really sure who Greg’s dad was. Grillo was his mom’s maiden name. She had never actually married any of the men who moved through her life. She had been a hippy in the 1960s, routinely sleeping with men of all shape and stripe. She had gotten pregnant and Grillo was her love child. He had been raised in a series of “homes.” Communes, apartments, campsites, and the like. He had long, curly hair. He was totally cool. Of course he was. His parents had not brought him up. His “parents” were The Who, Jim Morrison, Credence Clearwater Revival, the Stones, and the Jackson Five.
The dirty girls loved Greg. Greg lost his virginity at the age of 11. He was as comfortable around girls, and with the subject of sex, as Frank Sinatra. Why not? He had grown up around orgies, love-ins, and the whole “tune in, turn on, drop out” culture.
By 1976, however, times had changed. His mother was now living with one man, trying to raise her son in some semblance of normalcy. Part of that was to sign him up to play little league baseball. They lived in a trailer park on the San Pedro/Palos Verdes border, and Greg should have played in San Pedro, but his mom did not know any better and signed him up in P.V. He had ended up on Stan’s team, playing for Dan.
Greg’s mother loved Dan’s yelling, screaming approach. After years of being a hippy, she somehow got it in her mind that this was what her son needed. In fact, she was right. The kid took to it. He had talent for baseball and a love of the game. He never talked back, and absorbed the teachings of the game imparted by Dan. After all his bluster, Dan knew the fundamentals.
The problem was that her “old man” had no job, no income and no money. The “family” had to leave their trailer park to live in a commune of displaced people out in the desert. This meant that the Police team had no second baseman. They needed a good, sure-handed middle infielder to back up 12-year old Stan Taylor, who was expected to attain great glory in this, his final little league season.
The solution was that Greg Grillo would live with the Taylor’s. He would visit his mom on weekends. Nobody ever asked Stan how he felt about it. He was okay with it at first. He liked Greg. He was impossible not to like. He was handsome and smiled all the time. Greg was nice to everybody.
Greg opened Stan up to a whole new world. His first weekend at the house, he found a radio and tuned it in to KRTH, the local rock station. It was their “countdown 100” weekend of the best songs ever. The two kids hung out, playing catch, shooting hoops, playing board games, and listening to rock ’n’ roll.
Stan had never heard of any of this stuff. His whole life he had never been exposed to rock music. His parents hated it. They liked classical music and the opera. Maybe Frank Sinatra. Elvis Presley was too heavy for them. They did not appreciate the British Rock Invasion. The Beatles were “evil” acid droppers and potheads.
To their way of thinking, and to millions like them, rock music represented something terrible and foreboding. It was synonymous with hippies, drugs, anti-war protest, and un-Americanism. But out on the Taylor’s sun splashed porch, overlooking the Pacific Ocean, Stan heard for the first time “Jeremiah was a bullfrog,” and “Papa was a rolling stone” and “Break on through to the other side.” He was still not hooked, but he could see that there was something sexy to this sound. Greg knew every word in every song. He knew the meaning behind the songs. He knew the names of the lead singers, the drummers, guitarists, and the bass players. Heck, he knew the keyboard players (“Ray Manzarek is so cool”). He knew stories.
“Morrison didn’t really, die, man,” he said.
“Morrison’s, uh, the Irish guy?” Stan asked.
“That’s Van Morrison,” corrected Greg. “I’m talking about Jim Morrison.”
“And he’s the guy who OD’d on drugs?” Stan inquired.
“No, man, that’s what I’m tryin’ a tell ya,” replied Greg. “He didn’t die. Janis and Jimi, they died. Jim Morrison just moved to Africa and will return using the name Mr. Mojo Risin, which is Jim Morrison with the letters scrambled.”
It went okay for a while, but after a week or two, Greg started to get on Stan’s nerves. Basically, he did it by being nice, polite, and helpful. He helped with the dishes. He picked up his room. He offered to help Shirley bring in groceries. These were things that Stan did, too, but he had to be dragged into these activities, kicking and screaming.
Both Dan and Shirley loudly verbalized the contrast. They put down Stan, in front of Greg. They talked about Stan, in front of
Greg. They aired dirty laundry about Stan, in front of Greg.
None of this was Greg’s fault, of course, but slowly Stan came to hate Greg just for being so damn perfect. However, the bad-mouthing was nothing compared to the phone calls that started coming in to the house.
The phone would ring. Shirley would usually answer, and a puzzled look would come over her face. She would be confused and stammer and not know what the hell was going on. Then, after half a minute, she would come to some realization and hand the phone to Greg.
“It’s for you,” she would say. “Some girl.”
Stan, lying on his back watching a game on the tube, would feel the stinking green slime of envy.
“Some girl.” No girls ever called for him. This was the unspoken knowledge permeating the room. Although it was not verbalized, it was what Shirley, Dan and Stan thought.
The dirty girls. The little 12-year old tramps walking around showing their tanned arms and bare midriffs. They flocked to Greg like groupies to a rock star. He gave out the Taylor’s phone number, and in no time they were calling all the time. Not just one girl. Different girls.
Christy. Jo Anna. Lana. Girls whose names made Stan fantasize. They sounded exotic and sexual. Stan desperately wanted to have sex with a girl, but he had no shot. He was a gangling, peeved, repressed kid. He had no outlet for his frustrations. He had not learned about masturbation yet. He had no access to pornography or nudie magazines. Cable TV had not been invented.
A few years earlier, playing at his friend Carlton Gaston’s house, Carlton had shown him his father’s hidden collection of Playboy magazines.
“They’re prettier when they’re naked,” remarked Stan. Bright kid.
The Taylor’s next-door neighbors, the Halstead Family, included a teenage girl and a boy, who was a couple of years older than Stan. Stan was brutal in math, and the Halstead boy was great with numbers. Shortly after Greg left at the end of the Summer, the Taylor’s paid the Halstead boy to tutor Stan. He was a nice, easy-going guy, and Stan enjoyed going over there, even if it was to study math.
He especially liked it when the Halstead boy showed him his Playboy collection. Stan almost had a heart attack when he got a full dose of these girls. He was able to appreciate them more than he had when he was a little boy hanging out at Carlton’s.
In particular, Stan went gaga for Carol O’Neal, a 1972 centerfold who was super-tanned, with the tightest body imaginable. She did not have huge breasts, but her face was breathtaking. She was a fantasy. Carol had been a bunny at the Chicago Playboy Club, who dated Bears’ quarterback Bobby Douglas.
Douglas was mediocre, at best, so Stan figured if a second-rate guy like that could get Carol O’Neal, sports definitely had a future for him. He would go home at night, after his math lessons, and dream about Carol. He was still a couple of years away from masturbation and his first orgasm, but he knew he had to have Carol.
One night after the sun went down, Stan went to the Halstead’s. The downstairs door leading to the boy’s room was open. Stan walked in. Technically, he was not breaking and entering. He walked silently into the kid’s bedroom, opening the drawer where he knew the Playboys were, but they were not there!
“What the hell’s he done with ‘em?” Stan muttered to himself. Then he heard a noise.
“Oh, shit,” he whispered.
Stan silently moved out of the room, and through the hall. A light came on the stairwell, and the sister called out, “Is anybody there?”
Stan was out the door. He could hear it open behind him just as he was turning the corner. He was not a fast runner, but he could have captured Olympic gold that night. He knew that it had been a close escape, but that he had made it undetected. He could not fathom the possibility of being caught, and he questioned his personal judgment. Stan had a reckless streak that allowed him to place himself in these kinds of potentially embarrassing situations. He did not have Carol O’Neal and her smooth, tanned skin, but the exhilaration of the close call took care of the urge to be thrilled.
What would he have said to the Halstead’s, to the police, to his parents, if he had been nabbed red-handed? He would have tried to play it off as a straight robbery of money or valuables. This was less horrid than admitting that he was stealing Playboy magazine, even though he was not yet old enough to know what to do with it.
Looking back at pictures of himself, Stan would always be amazed at how poorly he fared with girls. He had drawn some interest in the second and third grades, but somewhere along the line it became uncool for girls to want to be with him. But the pictures did not lie. He was a very good-looking boy. His mom and dad always talked about how handsome he was. His parents’ friends admired how “strapping” he was. He had blonde hair and piercing blue eyes. He was tall and thin, and this made him feel awkward and self-conscious, but he was very athletic and carried himself well. Some very tall kids are painfully uncoordinated, but not Stan.
The result was that Stan found females to be a complete mystery. In his mind, girls wanted nothing to do with boys. The reality, which is that girls are boy crazy, did not permeate his understanding. He saw other boys get girls, but this was unreal to him. To his way of thinking, boys wanted sex, and girls did not. His understanding of women would emanate from his terrible, early misunderstanding of girls. He was afraid of them, afraid of rejection, afraid of being made fun of. They were a threat to him.
His looks did him no good with girls. One mean-hearted chick even called him “ugly.” Stan replied that she was “a faggot.” She just laughed at him, as did her friends. Stan did not know what a “faggot” was. He knew it was a putdown. So he applied it to a girl because he could not think of a cleverer comeback. What a dufus he was!
The greasers and bad boys had it all over him. Greg Grillo was a banjo hitter, while Stan was the star, a fireballer who slammed homers and roamed shortstop like a spry ballet dancer. Great athletes get the girls, right? Christ, even Bobby Douglas and his 38 percent completion percentage got Carol O’Neal.
Stan Taylor was the exception to the rule. This seemed to be the story of his life, a theme that haunted him. The exception always seemed to work against him. Greg was like the Buddy Love character in “The Nutty Professor”, full of suave and charm, and girls called him. That was the ultimate in teenybopper success, getting them to call you.
Stan hated Greg Grillo for that.
There was another player on the Police team who got under Stan’s skin. His name was Rick Purdue. He was a pretty good player and a straight arrow. During pre-season practice, and in practice games, Purdue rivaled Stan on the field. He pitched, hit and fielded well. The mere mention of Purdue being as good as Stan infuriated him.
Stan started making fun of his name, Purdue. He would emphasize the due, as in Purdooo. Dan was constantly finding fault with Stan. He said he rounded the bases too slowly when hit homers.
“Stop showboating, Goddamn it,” Dan yelled while Stan would circle the bases, feeling the hate from the other kids. Afterward, Dan would go over his laundry list of Stan’s faults.
“Purdue hit a homer and just circled the bases with his head down, not drawing attention to himself,” Dan told him. “You circle the bases, looking around, showing off.”
“I dooo,” Stan replied, making fun of Purdue’s name.
The jealousy bug bit Stan. He craved the spotlight. He had low standing at school, so he felt the need to make up for this in sports, where he would shine.
An amiable Italian-American mail carrier named Andy Gamboa lived on the peninsula. His family had been there forever. Andy had a son named Mario, a pretty good left-handed pitcher. Andy volunteered to be Dan’s assistant coach with the Police team when Stan was 12. At first, there was no question that Stan was number one, and Mario was number two. However, in an early-season game, Mario was unhittable while tossing a shutout. The next day at school, Stan was conversing with some peon who was on the team Mario had vanquished. The subject was, Who is t
he hardest-throwing pitcher in the league? Naturally, Stan volunteered that he was. That was the right answer. Otherwise he would not have brought the subject up. The peon demurred.
“Forget that,” he said. “I’d rather face you than that Mario guy.”
Stan felt jealous rage. Mario was a nice kid, and seemed to like Stan, which should have made him Stan’s favorite person. Finding friends was no easy feat. But as long as he threatened his perch of baseball supremacy, Mario was the object of his silent scorn. Stan had to be careful about holding his true feelings in, but his sarcastic remarks and facial expressions gave him away.
Dan was the biggest reason why Stan was disliked, but Stan did not help his own cause. As the season wore down, Stan maintained the edge over Gamboa, who was unable to sustain his early hot start. All the statistics favored Stan by season’s end, much to his satisfaction. This gave further credence to the strong feeling that Stan already held, and would harbor the rest of his life. The cream rises to the top. He most definitely was the cream. Persistence, determination and hard work are rewarded with success.
CHAPTER SIX
SOMETIMES YOU GOTTA PITCH INSIDE
“A man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do.”
--John Wayne