Winter Park, 1978

 Every man dies twice, Hemingway wrote. Once when he stops breathing. And again, the last time someone speaks his name.

We left Amherst Wednesday after the two o’clock class. Nobody said anything about Thursday or Friday. Meatball had already packed the Vega. It had a crack in the dash and the heater worked on one side. We had forty dollars each and a week. My father had given me an extra twenty that I kept folded in my wallet. Just in case. Dave said forty was plenty. Nobody argued.

Meatball had a box of eight-tracks behind the seat. He played Aerosmith through Connecticut and Foreigner through New Jersey and nobody said much about the music or anything else.

I drove from somewhere in Virginia through the Carolinas. The road was flat and straight and the pines came right to the edge of the shoulder. Dave slept in the back with his jacket over his face. Meatball watched the road.

“You think forty bucks is enough,” he said.

“For what.”

“The week.”

“It’ll have to be,” I said.

He nodded and looked out the window. We didn’t talk about it again.

The sun came up outside Valdosta. Dave woke up and Meatball put in a Stones tape and we rode that way for a while with the windows cracked and the palms going by. None of us had ever seen a palm tree.

Dave’s cousin was at Rollins College in Winter Park on a golf scholarship. He had a single room and we put our bags against the wall and slept on the floor. In the morning I walked the campus. The buildings were Spanish tile and stucco and the trees were old and there was a lake with water ski boats tied to a dock. The boats were nice. I stood there a while looking at them and then I walked back.

We ate McDonald’s when we had to and walked into the Rollins cafeteria when we could. Nobody stopped us. The food was good and there was a lot of it. Before we left I went to the campus store and bought a Rollins t-shirt. It cost four dollars. I figured we were even.

We drove out to Winter Haven for the game. The Red Sox trained there and the park was small and the grass was very green. We sat on the grass in left field behind the wall. There were maybe a dozen other people out there. You could see the whole field from low down like that and the players were close.

When the Yankees took the field Reggie Jackson trotted out to left. He was maybe thirty feet away.

Dave waited until it was quiet. “Hey Reggie.”

Reggie watched the infield.

“Hey Reggie. You’re a bum.”

Nothing.

“Reggie. Bum. You’re a bum, Reggie.”

Meatball looked at me. I watched the field.

Dave got up on one knee. “Hey Reggie. You hear me? Bum.”

Reggie turned. He didn’t say anything. He looked at Dave the way you look through something that isn’t there. Dave stopped.

Reggie hit two home runs that day. I don’t think Dave crossed his mind again.

Dave sat back down.

We didn’t say anything about it. Meatball got three beers and we sat in the sun and watched the rest of the game. It was warm and the sky was very blue and it was a good day.

Dave and I lost touch after college. We ran into each other occasionally over the years but not often. I didn’t know him the way I once did.

David J. Hoey aka Hooker. He played baseball, basketball, soccer and rugby. After UMass he worked U.S. Customs in Boston and then fire jumped in Colorado. Later he sold plumbing supplies. He loved the Patriots and the Red Sox. The most important thing in his life was his son Alex. They went to ComiCon together in New York and Boston. He was fifty-nine when he died. He was the strongest and most athletic person I ever knew.

My mother was his elementary school teacher.