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Back in the day when ballplayers could afford only one house at a time, and barely that, Gimmie bought a nice split-level ranch in a ritzy part of Massapequa. We warned each other about buying nice houses because supposedly you got yourself traded before you got the couch moved in, but Gimmie had just made the All-Star team two years running and was a fan favorite besides so he had as much security as you could have back before no-trade contracts and players owning houses like most people own shoes.
The fans loved Gim for the same reason we did: he was nuts. He showed almost zero impulse control. When he wanted something, which was always, he either demanded it or just took it. His real name is Alvin Theodore Starkwell, but he’s been called Gimmie because those are the first two words he ever said. Actually, the real story was kept out of the papers by the team’s owner, a vindictive, pompous, deeply Christian hypocrite named B. Ormand Gaar, whom Gim called either “O My God” or just “B.O.” depending on how irritating he found Gaar at the moment. When Gim was a baby, he would scream “Gimmie Tit,” to his mother any time the urge to nurse possessed him, a funny and typical Gim anecdote that Gaar bleached all the color out of. If you want to get technical, I suppose “Gimmie” were his first two words, but it was that killer third word which so enflamed his mother’s cheeks in the supermarket that she kept him at home until long after he’d switched to solid food. The story goes that Gim didn’t even answer to “Alvin Theodore” in kindergarten, insisting that his name was “Gimmie Tit.”
Gim had pissed Gaar off many a time, starting with having simultaneous affairs with two teammates’ wives and smoking weed with another, but he was our only lefthanded power threat and the only guy with real speed in our lineup, so Gaar was talked down by his management team whenever he insisted on trading Gim. Since Gaar owned the team, he was free to disregard his employees’ advice but they had created a winning lineup that had won two pennants in three years, so Gim felt plenty safe to buy his split-level paradise in Massapequa with the winners’ share from the second pennant.
Naturally, the next spring we started off badly, and got worse as the year went on. Mostly we were hurt—I missed two months with what was described as a “groin injury,” sustained in an off-the-field incident that I would rather not detail, and Gim missed about that much time with three separate minor injuries and wasn’t much good when he was playing. Several other guys missed huge chunks of time, but Gim’s absence from the lineup, and his helplessness when he was in it, was the single most conspicuous cause of our being under .500 in late August.
Gaar had expressed critical comments about Gimmie all season long, for his nightclubbing, for his inability on the field, for his frank assessment of the team and of himself to the papers, so it was rumored that he’d find some chance to trade Gimmie before the season was out. Gaar took to flying with the team the worse we played, and about once per road trip, he’d call “the boys” together to give a rousing locker-room pep talk that threatened to cause more injuries from our restraining our laughter. The hardcore veterans, me and Gim and our roommates, would sit in the extreme back of the locker room, practically sitting in the sauna, to keep our snorting and whispered remarks from reaching Gaar’s ears. We really hoped Gimmie’s job could be salvaged, but I wasn’t optimistic, and Gimmie accepted that he’d soon be gone.
Anyway, the Giants had beaten us three straight games in late August, really kicked our balls in and up and sideways, when Gaar called for a pre-game meeting. This was about his sixth that year, and you can normally tolerate one or two bullshit-fests a season before they’re totally ineffective—even the religious guys on the team, sitting way up front, had started to roll their eyes when he called us to assemble. “Fellows,” Gaar shouted, “fellows, fellows, fellows. Can you hear me in the back?”
His most annoying mannerism, apart from his whole upper-class twit way of speaking, was he asked all these rhetorical questions for which he would wait for answers. “Can you? Can everybody hear?” We would, of course, say nothing to this, but someone a few rows up would say “Yes” just to get it over with. “Good. Good, good.” He also repeated himself for no discernable reason. “Good.
“I don’t understand how we lost these last few games,” he began. Gimmie began his running counter-commentary: “Try ‘Because I’m a dumb fuck,’ O. My God,’ with the imagination of a retarded clam’.”
“But I’ll tell you this: you’re a lot better than you’re playing right now.” [Gimmie: “Or any time this season”] “And you’re only eight games out of first place.” [Gimmie: “With four teams ahead of us.”] “Whenever you go out there,” Gaar went on, “you’re capable of starting a winning streak that can go on for the rest of the year. You might never lose another game, and no man knows the day or hour that such a streak might start.” [Gimmie: “And rhesus monkeys might fly in formation out my butt any minute now”] “There’s only one thing that you need that you don’t have right now—and what is that? I ask you, what do you need? Can anyone tell me what you need?” [At this point, Gimmie muttered “Jesus H. Christ,” while Gaar’s faithful in the front row were offering that answer seriously, minus the middle initial. Gim also rolled his eyes so far they completely disappeared under his upper eyelid—he stood up, totally eyeless now, and stuck his long, purpley-red tongue out the corner of his mouth. Gaar had neither heard his whispering nor spotted him yet, and we begged him to sit down.] “No, no, no, no, no, the only thing you need is this—Faith in yourself. Faith in yourself. Can you boys say it with me? Come on, now, say it with me!”
It was here that Gimmie sprang into the air, still doing his zombie-face. As the choirboys were striving to mouth Gaar’s silly phrase, Gimmie bumped past me, spun around, and did a perfect backflip, in his jock and sanitaries, up the main aisle to the podium Gaar spoke from. He did four perfect back flips in a row, and on every one he screamed “Faith in yaself!”, ending up face-to-face with Gaar himself. Gimmie’s hair was totally messed up, and his goofy grin was as broad as I ever saw it, as he stood there panting with his nose six inches from Gaar’s.
We all lost it, of course, even the soberest of Gaar’s suckasses were laughing helplessly, and Gaar took in the scene for a few seconds, grimacing like he had a mouthful of piss, and marched out of the locker room, never looking back. The second he left, Gimmie stood behind the podium and gave the goddamnedest imitation of Gaar’s speech, still in his socks and jock—he asked rhetorical questions, he repeated himself endlessly, he mimicked Gaar’s prissy Long Island lockjaw accent, he raised both hands high above his head for emphasis, just as Gaar had done –but instead of displaying the seams of Gaar’s hand-stitched herringbone London-tailored suit, Gimmie showed two manly tufts of underarm hair that buzzards could have made their nest of out of, if they could have stood the smell. When a coach came into the room to tell us to suit up and get on the field, you would have thought we had just won three straight and were in first place.
Gaar’s speech was right about one point: The division was pretty sad that year, with every team doing its best to play worse than each other. As sorry a squad as we had been, we were far from eliminated, and if not for Gimmie’s retort that we had four teams to climb over, we might not have felt so down as we had. In a giddy mood that afternoon, however, we kicked ourselves a little Giant butt, as Gimmie got three hits, including two doubles and four RBIs, whooping “Faith in Yaself!” when he came around to score, fists high over his head, cracking us up all over again. The Giants had no idea why he was yelling, or what he was yelling, or why we were laughing so hard, so his final at-bat they plunked him right between the numbers and a little fight broke out that lasted twenty-five minutes and got three players, including me, thrown out of the game. When play resumed, Gimmie stood on first screaming “Faith in Yaself!” at the puzzled Giants’ pitcher, and he kept screaming “Faith in Yaself!” as he came around to score his fourth and final run of the game a minute later.
We swept the Dodgers next, and took three of four from San Diego, and when we came back to our home field, we were only three games back with four weeks to go. Gaar had flown back immediately after his locker-room face-off with Gimmie, and the story was that by the time his plane had landed he had plotted out six separate trades involving Gim. He was just waiting for Gim’s bat to cool off a bit, as it had to eventually, and he’d bundle him off in a deal. The newspaper guys told me the trade was already done, it was just a question of where Gimmie would go and for who and when.
Meanwhile, Gimmie kept swinging a hot bat, but we got no closer than two-and-a-half games out, sometime four, sometimes three, but never two. We wedged some ugly wins out, sometimes in the fourteenth inning, sometimes staying focused in a 0-0 tie until we found a break to take advantage of. “Faith in Yaself” stayed our tension-breaker. When we repeated it, we felt like a team, enjoying a joke that only we understood. Sometimes it didn’t feel like a joke, either, not completely anyway. It was becoming a mantra, a thing we said that didn’t mean what the words meant but just expressed an emotion we all felt without knowing the words for the precise emotion.
“Faith in Yaself” was still a problem, though, with Gaar: Pincus Mann, our manager, came up to us after a loss to Pittsburgh that had us four games out again, saying “I need a word, Gimmie. You come too, Chet,” to me. Gimmie had kept hitting the ball, but the results the last few games weren’t too good—he’d gone 1-for-11, with a lot of hard line drives and 400-foot flies to right-field. To Gaar, this was the chance he was waiting for, and we thought Pinky was giving us the news.
“You’re not gone yet,” Pinky told him, “but you’ve got to apologize, Gimmie. Tonight. And sincerely.”
“He’s a fucktard, Pinky,” Gim explained, “but he’s not stupid. He’ll never buy it. Can’t you just explain how we’re playing well, and I’m playing well, and we’re all pulling together and his dopey bullshit speech actually worked, though not exactly the way he figured?”
“I just don’t think that’s going to work,” Pinky said. “The man is pissed. He’s vicious and hateful and proud. He thinks you made terrible fun of him, Gim, the way he talks, the way he thinks, the way his whole family practices their religion.. Which you did, by the way. You got to find a way to make the ‘Sorry’ stick. Chester?”
“How about—“
“Yeah? How about what?”
“I’m thinking. How about—you convince Gaar he got it wrong? That Gimmie was sincere, that his backflips and crazy faces were, I don’t know, holy rolling or some shit like that? That Gimmie was possessed of the spirit, and was just so goddamned full of enthusiasm and piss and vinegar, and so inspired by Gaar’s speechifyin’ that he just started speaking in tongues.”
“I’m not telling Gaar that.” Pinky frowned. “He’d fire my ass, right after he swapped Gimmie out.”
“You don’t tell Gaar,” I went on. “You tell some columnist. The cockeyed pudtugger from the News, he has no idea what we’ve been laughing about the last few weeks, but he laughs with us every time he hears ‘Faith in Yaself’ –you can give him an exclusive, explain that Gimmie was sincere but Gaar’s blaming him because he doesn’t want Gimmie to get the credit for inspiring the team. The guys from the papers know that Gaar wants all the credit for us winning, and they want to keep Gimmie around.”
“It’s worth a try,” Pinky admitted, and it was. The papers did a beauty job on that story, all about Gimmie’s serious side, and his religious upbringing, and his inspirational leadership and all that crap. When the hits fell in again for Gimmie, and we finally broke through the two-and-a-half game barrier, and passed the Phillies and the Cards in late September, Gaar abandoned his plans for dumping Gimmie completely and started taking credit for inspiring Gimmie’s inspiration.
We won the pennant on the last game of the year, and there was nothing Gaar could say, the pompous prick, even if he’d wanted to. And that’s how Gimmie got to keep the Massapequa house.
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