Hi, this is Frank Flaherty. Welcome to Park Slope, Brooklyn, for this week’s episode of “Dad, Interrupted.”
“Dad, Interrupted” is a lighthearted, mildly embroidered podcast about my misadventures as a family man. The cast includes my wife, my kids, my friends, my in-laws and the assorted chuckleheads that I’ve bumped into over the years.
Willie Mays, probably my biggest childhood hero, died in June at the age of 93. His passing reminded me of the death of another baseball great, also a Giant, several years ago. I wrote an essay on the day it happened and just let it sit in the innards of my laptop.
Here it is. Baseball is definitely a big part of this post, but it turned out to also be about something else entirely. I call it, “Up in Smoke.”
Nov. 1, 2018
Willie McCovey, the lanky San Francisco Giants slugger, died today. Four days ago the 2018 baseball season ended. No baseball till spring. So, deep in the baseball blues, I go to Foley’s.
Foley’s, which sits across 33rd Street from the Empire State Building, bills itself as “An Irish Bar With a Baseball Attitude.” It brims with baseball memorabilia: a seat from Fenway Park, 3,000 autographed baseballs, and a name that honors the late Red Foley, the longtime sportswriter and official scorer for both the Yankees and the Mets.
Just a month ago, David Wright, the Mets tragic hero, bought everyone drinks here after the last game of his career. Wright’s retirement, forced on him by spinal stenosis, is another reason to get the baseball blues.
Raul, my bartender friend at Foley’s, has served me the second of my customary pair of Goose Island IPAs. He also gives me my second large glass of ice. I have a method for beer-drinking. I gradually pour my beer into the glass of ice and drink it that way. I follow this odd ritual for several reasons: I love beer very cold, I love to chew ice, and although I love the hoppiness of IPA’s, their alcohol level is a bit too much for me, so I need to water them down a bit.
Most of the time, the serving of my second beer is also the signal for me to take my seventh-inning stretch. So after Raul puts the two glasses down I detach from my barstool and visit the men’s room. Its door handle is a baseball bat.
The Foley’s bathroom is very cramped. One reason is that its three urinals are heroically sized. Phil Rizzuto, the fabled shortstop and broadcaster, who was 5’6”, could have easily stood inside one of those massive things and done nine innings of play-by-play without ever being seen. According to Raul, the urinals were salvaged from the old Waldorf-Astoria Hotel. The hotel presided over 33rd Street until it was demolished in 1929 to make room for the Empire State.
Naturally, these colossal pissoirs can make you feel puny. Standing astride one of them, waiting for things to rev up so I can do my business, I remembered another time I felt like that.
It happens to all boys. For me it happened in the men’s locker room at the pool at Bear Mountain State Park. It was the late 1950s, maybe the early 60s. That’s where I first saw grown men’s penises en masse. They were terrifying. It looked like a flock of baby pterodactyls had clenched down on the men’s groins. As all these naked, hairy men walked around, their penises swung back and forth. But the baby pterodactyls’ grip was so tight they did not come loose.
When I saw these leathery, pendulous things, I quickly checked out my own pink hairless little nubbin. It wasn’t terrifying. And no matter how energetically I rotated my hips back and forth, I could not make it swing like the men could. Anyway, I recommend not trying to do this if your father is an FBI agent and a former bomber pilot and happens to be sitting next to you on the locker room bench.
“What is wrong with you?” he said. My experiment was short-lived.
But here’s the thing that I and other boys don’t know: Our wee bits pack far more propulsive power than the one-pounders affixed to grownup men. That’s because as males age the flow of their urine gradually ebbs, until, one day at their yearly checkup, they finally have to swallow their pride and reluctantly say “yes” when the doctor asks, “Mr. Smith, do you have a weak stream?” They’ve always indignantly answered “No!” to the doctor’s question before, but the years go by and take their toll.
On a Saturday night a decade or so after that visit to Bear Mountain, my teenage friends and I are ensconced at Potter’s Pub. Potter’s was our go-to bar; it sat on Hempstead Turnpike right across from Dunkin’ Donuts in our hometown of East Meadow, N.Y. We are drinking our usuals — Heineken and a shot of Jagermeister, repeat every 25 minutes.
I don’t have any transcripts of our many visits to Potter’s, of course, but this scene should capture their spirit:
Ethan, the bartender: “Hi, guys. So you couldn’t pay any girls to go out with you tonight?”
My friend Claude: “They’re on their way, Ethan. By the way, when’s the dress rehearsal for the Shakespeare play?”
We were friends with Ethan, but maybe these days we’d use the word “frenemies.” There were a couple of asterisks to our relationship with him. We would mercilessly mock his name, for one thing. We told him that “Ethan” is a name for guys who read “Siddhartha” multiple times and wear rope belts. Ethan’s success with women also annoyed us — we were often girlfriendless — and then there was his parted-in-the-middle haircut, which to us made him look like Hamlet. This is what Claude meant about dress rehearsal.
As Claude and Ethan are talking, my friend Bob returns from the bathroom. He takes a swig of beer, looks at me, and says, “Five.” He is telling me his score in an ongoing competition we had. I don’t think we had a name for it, but let’s call it The Tobacco Game.
In the early 70s, when you could smoke anywhere, every urinal had an ashtray’s-worth of cigarette butts clustered at the bottom, next to one of those giant pink deodorizer tablets. The goal of our game was to pulverize as many of those butts as possible in one urinal visitation. To count, the tobacco in the butt had to burst out. To accomplish this, and to do it several times in one visit, required a flow that was long-lasting and high-pressure and well-aimed. These qualities — endurance, propulsive power, and accuracy — are the three pillars of the male urinary ego.
Of course, one problem with The Tobacco Game was that no one would ever want to verify these self-reported scores. Did Bob actually demolish five cigarette butts, which was a pretty good number? Filtered cigarettes didn’t count unless they had a good wad of tobacco left. Did Bob include some ineligible butts in his body count?
Of course, the answers don’t matter now. The Tobacco Game is gone, just like David Wright. And even if you could still smoke in bathrooms, we’d probably never again score as high as five. Our plumbing is now too worn out.
Speaking of old plumbing, back at Foley’s 45 years later, I’m still standing at one of the massive Waldorf-Astoria urinals, waiting for my waterworks to engage. I spent the time thinking about Willie McCovey, who was tied for 20th on the all-time home run list, and No. 8 among lefties, among other achievements. But he probably didn’t get the attention he deserved because he was overshadowed by his famous teammate, the other Willie.
Finally, I’m done. I zip up and reclaim my barstool. Raul says, “I thought you fell in!” I smile, and pour some of my second beer into my second glass of ice cubes. The 20something on the next stool does a double-take.
I think to myself, “Laugh at my diluted beer, if you want, buddy. But you’ll never get to play The Tobacco Game.”
Update: Foley’s closed a year and a half after I wrote this essay. It was a victim of the pandemic. Where the massive urinals or the 3,000 autographed baseballs have wandered, I don’t know. More importantly: Thanks, Raul! I don’t know where you’re tapping kegs now either, but I enjoyed our time together!
Up in Smoke