Chapter 2: Bebe Merda

Favela do Pantanal in Curitiba, Brazil

  
   "Pretty fair stretch there Ace" calls an old guy hobbling past as I lean into the girder of a new building going up over my favorite running path along the Raritan River.

The late winter construction on the abandoned site of the Johns Manville factory is nearly finished. Most of the asbestos from this former Superfund site was washed away in one flood or another rushing off the south slopes of the Watchung Mountains. The rest was buried in a government cleanup, but the site is now cordoned off with the new stadium construction stirring up ghosts of sins past. I'm taking a long floodplain run from the home I'd inherited from my foster family in the lower west end of the downstream town of Bound Brook.

"Sorry, gastrocnemius and soleus" I blurt, scared that I would be arrested for trespassing and blurting out the name of the muscles that had cramped as I rounded the circular structure.

"How about a tour from the trainer for the first professional baseball team in central Jersey?" he growls, squirting a black-flecked stream of tobacco juice from a corner of his mouth. "Let's go!"

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   "Joao, let's go" whispered my big brother Jorge in front of me on the cardboard mat beside our makeshift door. "We need to be in the first match."

I  opened my eyes to the orange glow of a late summer dawn suffusing our room around an old blanket hanging in the doorway. Then I quickly rolled over to stir my little brother Javier spooning behind me, and so on down the line. Soon all five of us were trotting barefooted through trash strewn alleys between ramshackle houses until we suddenly emerged onto a lovely expanse of packed brown earth. 

     Futebol, futebol, futebol - that was what and how long we played in the dirt field wedged into a corner of our slum. We stopped only for drinking and eating, the former by leaning over the canal wall for a quick slurp of the diverted river water. When the sun erased all shadows and burned the tops of our heads, both teams marched in a ragged line to the Curitiba city dump for breakfast, lunch, and dinner all mixed into one midday fiesta. 

"Whatcha got there little brother?"

"An American with our last name" I marvelled, holding up a crumpled 1966 baseball card. "Joe Nossek of the Minnesota Twins."  

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     I follow the old trainer up concrete ramps and into a dark runway that miraculously opens onto a kelly green expanse with a chestnut brown diamond at the base. The sweet smell of newly cut grass takes me back to the pampas south of Curitiba where I had cut and baled hay one summer along with hundreds of other boys rounded up by school bus each morning from the favela soccer fields.

"Say Moe, I need an aide who knows how to stretch a player" he offers, rocking back and forth on his heels with hands jammed into back pockets as we look out over the empty baseball field. "It pays squat and you drink shit from the prima donna players, but you also get the best seat in the house."