Ticket to America (III): Baseball Blues

Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1972-1976.

Within a few weeks of starting in Westheimer’s lab at Harvard, I had a baseball crisis. It had all begun several years earlier at Rensselaer Poly in upstate New York.

Barely a month had passed since I’d gotten off the Greyhound bus in Troy, when my roommate Darrell said, “George, an American needs to have a good team to root for.” (In my first years here I was George, so as to better fit in.) Darrell seemed to be dead serious.

“Sure,” I said, “but there’s no soccer here, so, more than a team I need to choose a sport. It’s always been soccer for me, nothing else. Not basketball, not ice hockey, not football, and certainly not that strange game, baseball.”

“Baseball!” said Darrell, sounding more animated. “Now . . . that’s a good American sport.”

“That’s a sport?” I asked. “A bunch of grown-ups trying to hit a small ball with a stick?”

“Yup . . . and around here you better choose a New York team, like the Mets or the Yankees.”

“Do I have to?”

“Of course, that way you can join in the conversation on Monday mornings. . . If not, you’ll sit at your desk while the rest of the guys talk about changeups, triple plays, and the rest of it.” My face must have shown concern, because he quickly added, “I’ll explain all about the rules, the RBIs and ERAs, don’t worry . . . But if you don’t have a team, you won’t belong . . .”

“Triple plays?” I asked, wanting to belong.

“Yes . . .  and a New York team, George . . . you must choose a New York team.”

I ignored him for about a year. But in 1969, the Mets were in the World Series, and the campus was abuzz with excitement. So, I chose the Mets. And the Mets beat the Orioles, so my team was a winner! I was in sports heaven.

Of course, the Mets did not win another Series until years later, so my delight was short-lived. In fact, my loyalty to the Mets ended when I got into Westheimer’s lab at Harvard. That’s when the crisis hit.

“You’re kidding me, Jorge,” asked Richard, one of my lab mates. (After three years in America I was Jorge again, no matter that it was hard to pronounce. . . Don’t ask.) Richard was from some place in Massachusetts. “You’re a Mets fan?,” he continued in a tone that was equal parts shock, pity, and contempt. “Around here you need to root for the Red Sox!”

“The Red Sox?” I asked with more than a hint of curiosity. It was 1973, and my team, the Mets, had just lost the World Series to Oakland. I was in the market for a new winner.

“Greatest team,” replied Richard, “you’ll see.”

So, fair weather fan that I was, I became a Red Sox follower. Richard, bless his heart, did not tell me about the Curse of the Bambino and that the Sox had not won a Series since 1918. I found out pretty quickly though.

Two years after I abandoned the Mets, the Sox, my new team, lost the World Series to Cincinnati in 1975. It turns out with hindsight that I chose to be a Sox fan during one of the longest World Series droughts in the history of American baseball. Boston did not win a Series until 2004, by which time I had been living in Washington, D.C. for twenty-five years.

Other than the baseball blues, I was feeling just fine during my years at Harvard. I didn't worry much that I had no home in Buenos Aires to go back to. I was surrounded by people who had already moved away from their own homes and had gone far into the world seeking their fame. I was no longer worried about being “an other,” as Kristeva defined us exiles. My neighbors George's or Arvind's rooms in the grad student dorms were as much a home to them as mine was to me. They were not thinking about going back anywhere, only moving on with their dreams. Hugo, a new friend who had come to the Harvard Chem Department from the highlands of Córdoba, Argentina to get his PhD, wasn’t thinking of returning either. (Indeed, he ended up a professor of chemistry in Italy.) We were all far away from our origins, whether Delhi, the Bronx, or Córdoba, thrown together for a few years of passage through Cambridge.

Armed with a newfound peace, I applied to be a resident tutor in chemistry at South House, which was then a Radcliffe College residence. When the previous chem tutor graduated, Mary Bunting, the president of Radcliffe, had called the Chem Department asking for a replacement, and they had recommended me. It could have been my Zen-like tranquility, but more likely it was a call from Westheimer. He knew Bunting well, his call did the trick, and I got the job.

Radcliffe and its residences were in the middle of a major change. For the first time in history, the residences were going coed and men came to live at the Radcliffe Quad. I moved into South House in the summer of '72, about a week or so before the undergrads started arriving. Much to my surprise, I became the immediate concern of several parents of freshwomen who were aghast to find a young man living next door to their daughters and sharing a bathroom. I poured out all the diplomacy I could muster to convince these horrified mothers and fathers that their girls could be trusted; that we would all behave ourselves and not to worry so much.

A sort of incest taboo quickly arose on a floor-by-floor basis. I was talking to a sophomore one day about his longing to date a girl who lived down the hall. I asked why he didn’t simply invite her to go to the movies or something.

"You don’t understand," he answered. "I would never date a girl on my floor. Few of us would. Imagine kissing her good night and then finding her brushing her teeth five minutes later. It's like dating your sister!"

He solved the problem by moving to a different floor.

I remained a resident tutor at South House for most of my years of grad school. It was free room and board of course, but that was not all. The world of undergrads was different than that of grad students. Professors came to dine with us monthly, the House was a place for parties and lectures and, much to my relief, the conversations around dinner table were not all chemistry all the time, as they were back at the labs. I didn’t mind talking chemistry, but I wanted some balance, and we grad students, obsessed with our theses, were particularly single-minded. On the other hand, I met many a liberal arts undergrad who, much to my surprise, took pride in not knowing anything about science, as though understanding DNA or black holes was not part of being an educated man or woman in the 20th century.

A table of South House regulars had formed and we dined together every night. Among them were Michael, who, after his PhD in history would go on to run for Prime Minister of Canada; Ed, who went on to Hollywood fame as an Oscar-winning director; Jacques, who ended up as a poli sci professor in Paris; and David, who became a professor of medicine at a university not far from South House. At other times I ran into Yo-Yo Ma practicing his cello in the common room and one day I found Leonard Bernstein, who was working on his Norton Lectures, improvising at the piano surrounded by mesmerized students. He asked us if we could tell a major from a minor key and I raised my hand and said, No, I can’t. Incredulous, Bernstein almost fell off his stool. He tried a few modulations and asked me again – and then I said, Yes, of course.  It was a lie, but it got me off the hook and seemed to make him happy.

It was all a fantasyland of fame, some real, some still incubating. Of course, neither I nor anyone in Westheimer’s labs or at South House knew what the future had in store. Yet it would be snobbish to say that all of that was no big deal, because it was. Whether the stars were musical or molecular, the atmosphere was lively. We got to work next to or share meals with prominent people. This, in turn, humanized them and made us feel that there was no mystery to becoming prominent.

Events outside of our Cambridge bubble were not as rosy. It was the time of Watergate, with Sam Ervin cross-examining Haldeman at the Senate hearings. The daily parade of fools testifying before Ervin's committee gave me a feeling that I had arrived in an America that was past her golden years. An America that, after the assassinations of the sixties and the swamps of Vietnam and Watergate, was no longer the shining place of my late mother’s dreams.

And things in South America were even worse. In 1973 Allende was overthrown by Pinochet and killed during the coup. The Chilean Junta turned into a murderous regime the likes of which Chile had never seen. The same year saw the return to Argentina of the 77-year-old Juan Perón. El Viejo, they called him. This means the Old Man, but it also means Father. Just to remind us that the passions of the past were still present, the Old Man’s arrival at the BA Airport from Madrid caused a bloody gunfight among his own followers that left thirteen dead. Perón died a year later and was succeeded by his wife Isabel until 1976. That year, she was overthrown in a coup that ultimately led to the Argentine Dirty War. And which, in turn, led to 30,000 desaparecidos and the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, who marched weekly demanding the whereabouts of their disappeared sons and daughters.

Yet, the Harvard cocoon steadied me. I started feeling not only that I belonged there, but that I belonged in the world, period. It didn’t matter where I had come from, or who in my family was still alive or not, or if I had a home to go back to in BA. None of that mattered. What mattered was that I was there, next to other people who were also there for the same reason: To prepare for and conquer worlds that we had all imagined, whether as physicians or musicians. The place allowed me to think big and imagine a future where I, too, could leave my mark. I, who felt abandoned a few years earlier when my parents died, had found a home.

And baseball became my American sport – well sort of. The Red Sox remained my team, at least until I found the next one, when the Washington Nationals started playing in DC in 2005. To my great delight, the Nats, my new club, won the World Series in 2019 against the Houston Astros.

That was a hell of an exciting Series. After six games, the teams were tied 3 games to 3. By the sixth inning in the seventh and final game, the Nats were behind 2-0. But they scored three runs in the 7th inning, two of which were homers by Kendrick and Rendon. Eaton scored in the 8th, and, to clinch it, Gomes and Robles scored in the 9th. The Nats won 6-2. Max Scherzer pitched five innings, allowed two earned runs, and ended with an ERA of 3.6. Scherzer, however was not the MVP for the Series; that honor fell to Stephen Strasburg, who helped the Nats win critical game 6 (8 1/3 innings, two runs, seven strikeouts, five hits, two walks). And he did that while on the road. Without game 6 the Nats would have been eliminated.  

I held my own at the law firm on Thursday morning after the game.

***

It doesn’t matter whether the Nats win another World Series. I don’t cheer for the Mets or the Red Sox anymore. It’s the Nats all the way. You know. . . root, root, root for the home team? I’ve become an American.

Here’s Scherzer in 2019: