Adios, Mi Fernando

Ever since the Dodgers bounced Fernando Valenzuela, I have been overwhelmed by people saying I ought to go to bat, so to speak, for my fellow countryman.

Letters demand I take a stand and telephone callers challenge me to be heard. Not all of them are Mexicans.

One caller was a man named Gottlieb who said if a Jew had been as unceremoniously canned as Fernando, he would certainly do something about it.

“What would you do?” I asked.

“I’d never go to another Dodgers game,” he said righteously.

“I don’t go to Dodgers games anyhow,” I said. “I don’t have time to watch grown men hit a ball with a stick.”

“Well,” Gottlieb replied, “you at least ought to have compassion for a fellow . . . er . . .”

He paused, uncertain whether to refer to me as Latino, Hispanic, Mexican-American, Chicano or Chorizo.

“For a fellow what?” I said, pressing.

“For a fellow brown person!” he said. Then he hung up.

“He called me a brown person,” I said to my wife, who had been listening.

“I see you more as burnt umber,” she said.

Though a nonprotester, she was also upset when Fernando got el booto.

“Another Mexican bites the dust,” was the way she put it.

“He bit the dust with several million pesos in his pocket,” I said.

“I could use a Mexican with that kind of earning power,” she said. “You don’t get rich taking up with a drive-by poet.”

Members of the brown community are enraged over Fernando’s un-mounding. They see it as a de-canonization.

Leaders of the Mexican-American Political Assn. and the League of United Latin American Citizens, who know a high-profile protest when they see one, are calling for a boycott of Dodgers games.

They accuse the team’s management of not liking Mexicans, or at least of liking Puerto Ricans better. I don’t see how that’s possible, but to each his own minority.

I spoke with one of the baseball activists who said that firing Fernando was a slap in the face of L.A.’s entire Mexican population.

She’s a gringa with time on her hands who has taken us brown people to her wrinkled bosom.

“How would blacks like it if the Lakers fired Magic Johnson?” she demanded.

“If he had lost his ability to slam-dunk,” I said, “I think they’d understand.”

“The Dodgers haven’t heard the last of this,” she said. “Adios!”

Click.

I don’t know a lot of Mexicans, except for the woman who cleans our house once a week. She’s never heard of Fernando and doesn’t comprendo baseball.

However, I did talk to a half-dozen people outside a restaurant on the Eastside. Not one felt as though the Dodgers had toppled a saint.

“He can’t pitch anymore,” one man said. “What’s the team supposed to do, stuff and mount him?”

A woman named Ventura Sedana said she would light a candle for him.

“He isn’t dead,” I said.

“That’s a blessing,” she replied.

There are some ethnic causes I have supported wholeheartedly.

I didn’t eat table grapes when Cesar Chavez said not to. I’m not sure why I wasn’t supposed to eat them. There are some things you accept on faith.

Also, I boycotted Fritos until they got rid of the stereotypical Frito Bandito. That’s not exactly the moral equivalent of putting my life on the line for la raza, but you get the idea.

So maybe I’m not as ethnic as I ought to be, but I’m not going to fall to my knees sobbing over the unfrocking of a baseball pitcher who happens to be Mexican.

Sure, I understand the need for role models.

I speak occasionally to schools in brown-skinned areas so the kids may see to what heights an umber person can rise in a nation run by white-breads.

I try to show up on time, sober and with my fly zippered in order to present as decent a picture as possible of a man who has made it out of the lettuce fields.

I doubt that I am perceived as a hero, but if they want to follow my example, vaya con dios, baby. Just don’t go to pieces if I’m replaced someday by a Lithuanian.

There are many things worth protesting. Spitting in school. Swearing in church. Showing up naked at a funeral. But marching into hell for a pitcher who can’t pitch anymore just ain’t worth the bloodshed.

The protest proves this much, however. You don’t fire a Mexican in this town and get away with it. I sleep better just knowing that.