The Unnatural Natural

I checked my watch and peered into the distance. i was starting to think he’d never show. I was starting to think he didn’t exist.

In a way I was right.

It was a warm summer night, two months ago, a slow dusk coming on. I was sitting beside a well-groomed baseball field in St. Louis, surrounded by a dozen well-groomed men in their 60s, members of a softball team called U.S. Pallet, which competes in an intensely serious league for senior citizens. The first game of a doubleheader against archrival Bud Light was set to begin, but there was no sign of U.S. Pallet’s best player, one of the best players in the league--the man I’d come to see. His name was John Meeden, but most just called him Homeless John.

While waiting for Meeden, we talked about him, or tried to, though each attempt at a definitive statement went trailing off, because nobody knew anything. His teammates had told me the stories, the legends, “the myths,” as one called them. Meeden had been homeless, they said, but no one knew why. Vietnam? Drugs? Alcohol? Every teammate had a theory, but no theory felt more plausible than the rest.

Meeden was a rare and gifted ballplayer, they all agreed, but how he got to be so good, no one could say. A few teammates believed Meeden had played organized ball as a young man. One said Meeden had signed with a major league club when he was just a kid and the pressure of going pro caused some kind of breakdown. What evidence was there for this? None. Just as there was no evidence that Meeden would ever show up tonight.

Again I checked my watch.

“Here he comes!” someone shouted.

At last, walking slowly toward us from the parking lot, was a man built very differently from the men gathered around me. He had none of their Midwestern roundness, none of their low-slung solidity. He was tall, lean, somewhat frail, and instead of clomping along on big feet, as the others tended to do, he picked his way forward delicately, as if someone had told him to watch out for broken glass.

He was dressed differently too. Rather than the dapper uniform worn by his teammates, Meeden wore baggy street clothes--he preferred to play in his everyday duds, his teammates insisted--and he carried a sad little Kansas City Chiefs tote bag. Also, while every other man looked as if he’d been to the same Supercuts that morning, Meeden wore his white hair rakishly, almost foppishly, long. The wispy strands fell well below his shoulders.

Like all but two of his teeth, Meeden’s youth was long gone. His 64-year-old face showed the lines and leathering effects of age and hunger and hard times. Still, his eyes retained a gleam, just a glimmer, of boyishness. This became even truer as his teammates hollered their hellos. Meeden smiled and waved, and for a second he could’ve been that straggly kid who always shows up last for Little League.

I’d been warned that Meeden was shy. He won’t talk to you, everyone said. But now he sat down next to me in the stands, so close that our knees nearly touched. I didn’t know if he was being friendly or if he simply didn’t see me. He began tugging an elastic brace onto his leg, fastening it around his thigh. Someone asked how the hamstring was feeling. Meeden had strained it during a recent game. He mumbled an inaudible answer while rubbing the hamstring and staring at some indistinct point in space.

I introduced myself and Meeden stopped fussing with his leg long enough to look at me. I told him I was hoping for a chance to speak with him later, privately, that I wanted to write a story about him.

His eyes widened.

Then he just giggled and trotted onto the field.

*

The hobo Roy Hobbs. the unnatural natural.

A homeless guy who clouts homers in a softball league somewhere in the heartland.

It sounded too good to be true, at first, but baseball is full of things that are too good to be true--baseball itself is too good to be true--and that’s one of the things we love about it. Like no other sport, baseball caters to our need for mythology. For pretend.

Only now, looking back, do I recognize the internal pretending that propelled me to St. Louis in the first place. I told myself I wanted a good story, but in truth I wanted a simple story, one that was laid out before me, neatly arranged between two clean white lines. No trapdoors, no surprises. As I usually do when the world seems unusually crazy, I wanted to focus on something easy, just for a few hours. And I figured: What’s easier than baseball? What could be more therapeutic for a flagging spirit than a nice, one-dimensional hero with a bat in his hand?

Simple.

My plan was simple, too. Rather than bother with major league baseball and all the egos and press credentials that would involve, I decided to write about baseball in its blue-collar form--softball. Better yet, “senior softball,” a fast-growing, slow-pitch sport in which nearly 2 million baby boomers now take part. The largest nationwide league is Senior Softball USA, based in Sacramento. I phoned league officials to ask if there might be one standout team or player on whom I could hang a story, and Terry Hennessy, the league CEO, told me about a St. Louis squad whose best slugger had been homeless when they “drafted” him.

I made a few more calls, and soon I was talking to Len Suess, manager of U.S. Pallet--an outfit that, like countless American softball teams, bears the ungainly name of its corporate sponsor. Suess swore it was true. Meeden, a.k.a. Homeless John, had been living in a broken-down van and roaming St. Louis in rags when he began playing for U.S. Pallet 12 years ago.

Suess, a 64-year-old financial advisor, was fuzzy on some details, but he recalled that U.S. Pallet was short a man at the start of that season, and several players suggested Meeden, who had been spotted subbing now and then for another team on a nearby field. No one knew why Meeden was homeless, or why he bothered to play softball when his life was on the skids. And Suess didn’t care. He approached Meeden about playing full time for U.S. Pallet, and Meeden agreed, and thus was launched an improbably superb softball career.

I asked Suess if Meeden was as good as all that.

“Buddy,” Suess said, “he can play.”

Despite his frail frame, notwithstanding his training diet of leftovers scrounged from dumpsters, Meeden hit for power, showed wild speed on the bases and played a gorgeous shortstop, Suess promised. People were still talking, he said, about the tournament three years ago when, over the course of several days, opponents simply could not get Meeden out at the plate--and in the field Meeden was even better, catching every ball in sight. He also caught the eye of another team. Chicago Classics manager Joe Yacono “recruited” Meeden on the spot, inviting him to divide his playing time between the Classics and U.S. Pallet. (This meant, essentially, that Meeden would travel with the Classics to bigger national tournaments in which U.S. Pallet didn’t participate.) Soon, Meeden led the Classics to their first-ever title at the Senior Softball World Series in Iowa. Later the same year he helped them win the Senior Softball World Championship in Mobile, Ala.

“He’s one of the most fantastic softball players in the nation,” said Pat Herod, U.S. Pallet’s 61-year-old right fielder. “Anybody who has seen him play, they know about him. Some guys have it, some guys don’t. He has it.”

Suess and the other players with whom I spoke didn’t know where Meeden learned to play ball. It wasn’t that they lacked curiosity--like good Midwesterners, they merely didn’t want to pry. So Meeden’s skills were as inexplicable as they were remarkable. But the real story, Suess said, was what Meeden had done off the field.

While making both his teams better, Meeden had also quietly bettered himself. Through softball he’d managed to restore his health, reclaim his dignity and make a fresh start. He’d found an apartment. He’d begun eating right. He might even have filed for assistance--though some teammates believe he’s been collecting some form of government assistance for longer than he’s been playing softball. Again, no one was quite sure. Only one thing was clear: “All of a sudden John started getting his act together,” Suess said.

“Softball has given him a different feeling about himself,” said Jim Welch, a retired 64-year-old salesman who plays second base for U.S. Pallet. “He’s got a sparkle in his eyes. And that smile! He seems to be more at ease in the community and when we travel.”

Just recently Meeden received an old jalopy as a gift from a teammate, but for years he had no transportation, so Welch would drive him to games. Welch didn’t mind. It was a little out of his way, he said, but he was happy to do what he could for Meeden, as were most men on U.S. Pallet and the Classics.

Whenever Meeden goes on the road, for instance, his teammates gladly shell out for his airfare, lodging, food and tournament entrance fees. In fact, Yacono found a Chicago company willing to sponsor just Meeden. In addition, Meeden’s teammates give him advice about nutrition, buy him shoes and warm clothes in the winter and sometimes help him with the complex government forms he must fill out. They help because Meeden’s their teammate, and they like him, but also, it seems, Meeden’s air of mystery has lent an aura to their games.

I had no reason to doubt Suess or Yacono or any of Meeden’s teammates. They all sounded like sober, upstanding, straight-shooters. But I didn’t really begin to fall under the spell of the legend, I didn’t believe in Homeless John, until I was there, watching Meeden smack a vicious double his first time up, knocking in two runs. He stood on second base, blase, as if waiting for a bus. He looked neither happy nor proud as his teammates clapped and cheered him.

Suess’ wife, Judy, was keeping score, as she’s done at nearly every one of her husband’s softball games for the past 40 years. White-haired, green-eyed, quick to smile, she sat on a folding chair, I sat at her feet, and we watched in the bottom of the first as Meeden darted left, gloved a hard grounder up the middle, then buggy-whipped the ball across the diamond, nailing his man by a step. Judy shook her head. “He covers more ground than any shortstop I’ve ever seen,” she said, penciling a 6-3 on her scorecard.

Expressionless, Meeden trotted off the field. Again he sat next to me. “Nice play,” I said. He giggled.

I mentioned to Meeden that I couldn’t help noticing his unorthodox batting style. A lefty, he cringed as the rainbow pitch wafted toward the plate, then lifted his right knee high, uncoiled his body and lashed at the ball. Meeden said he’d developed this style back when he first started playing with U.S. Pallet. He was so hungry and weak that he needed to wind his body as tightly as he could, like a top, to get maximum recoil on the swing.

I asked Meeden if he’d played organized baseball as a young man. He answered by telling me about the awful paper route he’d had as a kid. “It was slavery,” he said. “But I didn’t know you could quit. I didn’t know you could say no.”

A short while later I tried a follow-up. Meeden’s response was to reach into his tote bag and produce a can of shaving cream, then squirt a softball-sized dollop of foam onto his palm. Seeing my perplexed look, he explained that he always rubs shaving cream into his mitt during games. “Lanoline,” he said, rubbing, rubbing. “Keeps the leather soft.”

His voice, I thought, was lanoline soft, which made it hard to hear. I started to say something else, but he ran away, onto the field, leaving in his wake a lovely fragrance of soap and limes.

When Meeden first joined U.S. Pallet, Judy Suess told me, he was painfully shy. He would sit in the back seat of the car and say nothing during four-hour rides to tournaments. The men coaxed him out of his shell, Judy said, by always treating him with respect, but also kidding him now and then, ever so gently, about how little he spoke.

A few innings later, Meeden gunned down a runner at the plate, and Judy remarked how healthy he appeared. A far cry from those first days, she said, when he was virtually starving. “He was rail thin,” she recalled. “He looked ill. And now . . . .” She gestured to the field where Meeden was crouched, awaiting the next pitch, looking indeed quite spry.

Occasionally the men of U.S. Pallet had trouble persuading Meeden to accept their help. “One time,” said Herod, the right fielder, “we stopped at some little restaurant and he didn’t have any money. I said, ‘What do you want to eat?’ He said, ‘I’m not hungry.’ And I knew he was hungry. So I bought him dinner. Then I offered him a big piece of pie. Pie was extra. He said, ‘No.’ Then he walked across the street and bought a Snickers bar at a gas station.”

After a few innings, U.S. Pallet had built a comfortable nine-run lead. But in the final frame, Bud Light rallied and pushed across 10 runs, winning 19-18. U.S. Pallet stomped off the field, heads down, fuming. Meeden, meanwhile, looked as calm as a Buddhist monk.

In the nightcap, Bud Light took the early lead, and it was U.S. Pallet’s turn to play catch-up. Meeden smacked a triple, clearing the bases and pulling U.S. Pallet to within two runs. The hit was one of the most impressive of the night. It soared over the right fielder’s head and clanged off the chain-link fence, missing a homer by a foot or two.

U.S. Pallet won. Again Meeden looked unfazed.

I looked up. He was standing over me, smiling, toweling the sweat from his arms and neck. By now he radiated the scent of shaving cream like an old barber shop. I asked if he’d like to have lunch together the next day. Sure, he said.

He lived in Alton, Ill. His hometown. He suggested a particular McDonald’s. “It’s just over the bridge on your way into town,” he said. “You can’t miss it.”

*

About 25 miles north of St. Louis, at the confluence of three big rivers--the Mississippi, the Missouri and the Illinois--Alton lays grim claim to being one of the most paranormal places in America, rife with ghosts and haunted houses, a reputation that makes its downtown seem that much gloomier as you cross the bridge.

Looking somewhat ghostly himself, his white hair translucent in the light of day, Meeden was waiting for me at a table for two. I reminded him that lunch was my treat. He looked glad but embarrassed. He ordered a cheeseburger, small fries and a small Coke. I asked if he didn’t want more than that, but he shook his head.

Over lunch I questioned him about his life, and he answered slowly, albeit eagerly, between small bites. He wasn’t good with logical signposts like chronology and cause-and-effect, but he became disarmingly linear, almost lucid, as he described the nervous breakdown he’d suffered in his 20s. He blamed it on a strict religious upbringing. His father and uncles were fire-and-brimstone preachers, he said, and he grew up afraid he was “letting them down.” Letting God down. Eventually he fell apart. He couldn’t get out of bed. Soon he was receiving painful and frightening electroshock treatments in a hospital. “It’s a shame,” he said, “because I was a pretty nice kid, I think.”

After the hospital released him, Meeden said, he had only the shakiest sense of his place in the world. He worked odd jobs--foundry work mostly--and married a woman who “had her own problems.” They took off for Vegas in a beat-up Ford, which gave out halfway there. They returned to Alton and had a son and a daughter before divorcing. Both children, now grown, lived in other states. It wasn’t clear what had become of his ex-wife. “I don’t understand myself,” Meeden said. “I’d like somebody that don’t know me to tell me what I’m like, because--” He didn’t complete the thought.

I tried repeatedly to bring the conversation back to softball. He responded to nearly every softball question with a vague non-answer, or else a story about something wholly unrelated. Sometimes he would answer by eating a French fry.

After lunch we drove up the hill to a block of passable old Victorians and bunker-like apartment buildings. Meeden’s apartment, for which he said he paid $190 a month, sat at the end of the street. He unlocked the door and led me inside. The front room was dark and cluttered with laundry baskets or boxes, it was hard to tell, each stuffed with clothes or random household items Meeden had salvaged from dumpsters. An enormous air mattress slouched against the far wall, and a table in the near corner held an old stereo. A kitchenette overflowed with economy-sized soda bottles and canned foods, and just down a short hall was Meeden’s bedroom, with barely enough space for a bed and a hand-held TV.

Proudly, he showed me his new stereo. He’d found it recently, he said, along with stacks of vinyl records. Many were wet or warped, but some were in mint condition. He set one on the turntable. Booming crackles and pops filled the apartment, followed by the silken baritone of Tony Bennett.

Take my haaand, I’m a stranger in par-a-diiise!

“I like that song,” Meeden said.

I suggested we talk outside, on the narrow square of cement that served as Meeden’s porch. We sat on chairs facing the street, watching an off-and-on breeze fluff the trees. Again I tried to steer the conversation around to softball. I pitched him softball questions--literally. I all but pleaded with Meeden to say he loved the game, to say the game had saved him, to wax rhapsodic. Instead he complained about the injuries, the mosquitoes, the way his teammates scolded him when he made an error. I asked again if he’d played ball in his youth. I couldn’t understand his answer. I asked about the upcoming tournament in Iowa, where the Classics would vie for their second World Series championship. Meeden said he didn’t much care for that long drive to and from Des Moines.

We sat in silence, listening to Bennett.

I ventured a comment about a fine play that Meeden had made the night before. Meeden frowned. It was that frown that did the trick. Finally it hit me. I looked up--a plane was sailing through the clouds--and felt like a fool. I capped my pen, closed my notebook, and turned to Meeden. “John,” I said, “you don’t like softball, do you?”

He whipped his head toward me, shocked.

“In fact,” I said, “you hate softball, don’t you? If you had your way, you’d never play softball again. It’s like that paper route, isn’t it? You don’t know how to quit. You don’t know how to say no. You’re playing because the guys have been good to you, and because you know they need you to win, but if you never played softball again, that’d be fine by you--isn’t that true?”

He giggled. “I guess so,” he said. “But I’m not sure I’d want everyone to know that.”

At least, I think that’s what he said. He had dropped his lanoline soft voice even lower, as if Tony Bennett were eavesdropping on us. But I could see in his face, and in his sly smile, that I’d guessed it, that I’d been the first to guess it, and so I started to laugh. Then I laughed harder. I laughed and laughed, and now Meeden was laughing along with me. I was laughing at the exquisite irony of the situation, the perfect silliness of an indentured senior softball player, but I didn’t know what Meeden was laughing at. Did he see the irony? Did he understand that he was caught up in a softball version of “Gift of the Magi,” the famous story in which a wife sells her hair to buy a fob for her husband’s watch at the same time the husband sells his watch to buy a set of combs for her hair? The men of U.S. Pallet thought they were saving Meeden by letting him play, and Meeden thought he was saving them by playing, and nobody was right.

Then again, nobody was wrong. When I stopped laughing and took a long look at Meeden, I realized he was helping them win, and they were helping him live. They were giving him fresh air, exercise, good food, warm clothes, fellowship and social contact--and he was better off, whether he liked it or not.

But maybe I was wrong. Maybe I’d merely guessed what Meeden’s mood was in that one gossamer moment. If I were to ask Meeden again tomorrow, I thought, he might tell me how much he loved softball. As if reading my mind, he whispered to himself, or to me, or to the breeze: “I say stuff that I don’t even understand.”

The only thing certain about Meeden was that nothing could be said for certain, not even by Meeden. Except that he was a very good ballplayer. As for how good, even that couldn’t be described with anything like objective truth, because people saw what they wanted to see whenever Meeden took the field. Baseball--even when it’s just senior softball--almost begs us to pretend.

I stood and thanked Meeden. He peered at me, not sure why I was thanking him. I wasn’t sure either. Partly I was thanking him for the laugh. But also I’d come to St. Louis for a simple story, and I’d gotten a bracing and necessary reminder that there is no such thing.

When I returned home I meant to phone all kinds of people. Meeden’s kids. His teammates. The courthouse in Alton. In the end, however, I decided that I knew enough, even though I knew less than when I started.

Still, I couldn’t help myself from making one last phone call.

Yacono, the manager of the Classics, told me Meeden had himself a solid World Series in Iowa, batting nearly .600. I gripped the phone tighter, waiting for Yacono to say it, shout it, exclaim that his Classics had won the whole thing.

“We took third place,” he said solemnly, sounding almost as disappointed as I.

Almost.