Joe, You Coulda Made Us Proud Read online

  This book is a facsimile reprint of the original, first published in 1975. Outdated or inappropriate language herein does not reflect the beliefs, values, or opinions of the publisher. We have made the book available as part of our mission to protect, preserve, and share the world’s literature in affordable, modern editions that are true to the original work.

  Copyright © 1975, 2015 by Joe Pepitone and Berry Stainback

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  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

  Cover photo credit Associated Press

  ISBN: 978-1-61321-770-2

  Ebook ISBN: 978-1-61321-796-2

  Printed in the United States of America

  In memory of Willie Pepitone, who left too soon, And for Ann Pepitone, who endured.

  A special thanks to Gus, a true friend. He always provided help and words of support when I needed it most, especially after Superstorm Sandy.

  Contents

  Introduction

  I To Willie: “Bless you, damn you. Love, Joe.”

  II “You give? You give up?”

  III “What comes out is your essence.”

  IV “He’s not playing any more goddamn baseball!”

  V “Mom—I wish he’d die!”

  VI When fucking couldn’t compare with playing baseball.

  VII “One of your goddamn ballplayers stole my elevator!”

  VIII “Joey, you gotta make us Italians proud!”

  IX “I’ll have your job next year, Moose.”

  X “Ok, KO.”

  XI “Daddy, don’t leave me.”

  XII “Please get over here right away. . . . I’m coming apart.”

  XIII “Get your clothes on and get out of here.”

  XIV “I think I’m old enough to handle it now.”

  XV “Cheer up, Slick.”

  XVI “Okay, Frank, if you’re God like they say you are—let’s see you make that shot.”

  XVII “Everybody likes to give his mother something, and I can’t give mine anything except trouble.”

  XVIII “The last and most controversial of the old imperial New York Yankees was traded today.”

  XIX “We want Pepi!”

  XX “Did she say I was good?”

  XXI “Look, the Chicago Zoo is three blocks away.”

  XXII “Why are you doing this to me, Whitey?”

  XXIII “Joe no play: shitty in pantsy.”

  XXIV Finally . . . a little perspective.

  XXV Epilogue

  Introduction

  When an editor at Playboy Press called me in July 1974 and asked if I would be interested in writing a book with Joe Pepitone, I was intrigued. I had written a long article about Pepi for Sport magazine in 1963. That was his first full season in the majors, and during it Joe earned the starting job at first base for the American League All-Star team, was a key man in bringing the New York Yankees another pennant, and revealed that he had all the talent to become the new Mickey Mantle. It didn’t work out that way. When I next saw Joe, eleven years later, he had suffered through two divorces, had lost three children, and had blown his baseball career. Why?

  That, Joe said, was what he wanted to find out. After all these years, he felt he finally had some perspective on his bizarre behavior, some insights into why he had followed a crazed muse toward self-destruction. But he still had some heavy questions, and he thought that in laying out his entire story, examining it in sequence, he might uncover those missing answers.

  It wasn’t easy for Joe Pepitone to thrash through his past, relive old pain. In doing so, as he digs deeper and deeper into his head and heart, he offers a rare look at the human condition, at a very talented young man to whom too much came too soon—too much praise that told him he was special, and too much guilt over the sudden death of a larger-than-life father. It is a measure of just how far Joe Pepitone has come that he holds nothing back, because his entire existence had been an act devoted to not revealing what lay beneath his mask of perpetual wackiness and fun. Joe Pep, he’d always announced to the world, was having an unrelieved ball.

  There was fun, a lot of fun. And Joe Pepitone is as honest in relating some of the funniest, most startling inside baseball stories that anyone ever admitted participating in, as he is in baring the most personal kind of truths. He is a genuinely funny man who can laugh at himself. Many of his early problems stemmed from his willingness to break rules if he thought he’d get a laugh. Often he would get caught. He is still paying for certain indiscretions. One afternoon in the mid-Sixties when he was with the Yankees, Joe was late leaving for the stadium. A cop pulled him over for speeding through the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel.

  “Officer, I’m Joe Pepitone of the Yankees,” he said. “Maybe you’d like a couple of tickets to a game?”

  “I’m not a Yankee fan,” said the policeman. “I don’t even like baseball.”

  “Oh, you don’t like baseball.”

  “No. But I love the football Giants.”

  “Hey! Well, I’ll get you a couple of Giant tickets. Give me your name and address and I’ll mail them to you.”

  The policeman did so, closing his traffic violation book. Joe drove on, throwing the policeman’s name and address out the window. Recently Joe got stopped for speeding on the West Side Highway in Manhattan.

  “Officer, I’m Joe Pepitone,” he said. “I used to play with the Yankees. Maybe you’d like a couple of tickets to a Yankee game or a Met game?”

  “Never mind that shit, Pepitone. I’m still waiting for those Giant tickets you promised me eight years ago. Here, I’ve got a ticket for you.”

  BERRY STAINBACK

  North Tarrytown, N. Y.

  January 1975

  I

  To Willie: “Bless you, damn you. Love, Joe”

  My father was a god in my eyes when I was growing up. His name was William Pepitone, and he was called Willie Pep after the fighter, but my father was bigger and a helluva lot tougher than the former featherweight champion of the world. My father was six feet, one inch tall, he weighed about 190 pounds, and his muscular shoulders and chest sloped down to a thirty-inch waist from working construction all his life. He had been a Golden Gloves fighter, not a boxer, as a kid. He was a puncher who kept coming, and he did that all his life, too. He was the toughest guy in my neighborhood. I saw him fight, in the street, at least fifty times. He never lost. Never. And this was in a very tough neighborhood, the Park Slope section of Brooklyn, a semislum that was populated almost entirely by Italian and Irish hard-noses. He had a furious temper and, when he wasn’t spoiling the shit out of me, he was beating the shit out of me.

  Willie’s main thing was family, the Pepitones and Caiazzos. Nobody could mess with any of them without having to deal with my father. He took care of the physical problems in this very physical neighborhood, and my grandfather, Vincent Caiazzo, took care of the housing probl
ems. Vincent Caiazzo was a shoemaker who did very well for all of us, even though he so disbelieved in banks that he saved his money in a water pipe in his shop. At the close of business every day, he rolled up his bills and with a long pole rammed them into a forty-foot pipe. To make a withdrawal, he rammed farther until cash flowed out the other end. “Who ever think anyone putta their money in a water pipe?” he would say, and he was right.

  When I was very young, Vincent owned two three-story apartment buildings that he filled with members of the Caiazzo and Pepitone families. Later he sold them to buy two bigger, five-story apartment buildings that housed more of the family. The older Italians were all heavily into family togetherness, all looking out for one another, genuinely caring for one another—a particularly warm and lovely thing it seems to me these days. My family, the Pepitones and Caiazzos, has had Sunday dinner en masse at Vincent’s for as long as I can remember. A couple of dozen Italians sitting around eating, talking loudly, throwing bread at one another, and laughing. My father, who enjoyed kidding, would lead the laughter. But it ended abruptly if I got out of line.

  I remember one Sunday when I was eight years old going to my grandfather’s with Willie. My mother had gone over earlier with my younger brothers and my dog. My grandfather kept telling me every time I’d go there that he was going to kill my dog because it peed on his tomato plants out back and damaged them. “One day I kill that dog, Joe,” he’d say. “I cook him.” This day my dog wasn’t there when I arrived. I got scared and went right to the oven. I opened the door and inside, staring at me, was a head, with two shining eyes and a tongue hanging out like a dog . . . cooking.

  “My dog!” I screamed, bursting into tears. “Look what Grandpa did to my dog!” I grabbed the head and yanked it out of the oven, but it burned my hands and I dropped it on the floor.

  My grandfather came running in from the living room. “That’s my capozell on the floor!” he yelled.

  I started punching him and kicking him. “You killed my dog!”

  “That’s my capozell! Sheep head!”

  My father rushed in, saw me kicking my grandfather, and knocked me to the floor, yanked me up, and knocked me down again. It was a sheep head, one of my grandfather’s favorite meals, eyes and all. Just then my mother, Angelina, who is called Ann, came in with my dog on a leash. She’d been walking it.

  “Willie, that’s enough!” she yelled at my father, who was still beating me. But she didn’t step in to stop him. She was as afraid of Willie as anyone, fearing he’d turn his terrible temper on her. He never pulled his punches, left me black-and-blue and bloody, particularly as I got older. My mother, who never raised a hand to me, could do nothing about it. Some of the blood that was spilled out of me by Willie was her fault. She was always a very nervous person, and she had a hysterectomy when I was ten, had to live on tranquilizers after that. If I was two minutes late getting home at night, she would put a pillow on the windowsill and lean out, looking for me, worrying. Anything could happen on the streets in that neighborhood. If you stepped out of your area into another neighborhood you’d get beaten up. So she had reason to worry. But the more she worried, the angrier my father got. I’d come home five minutes late, and Willie would punch the shit out of me.

  When I look back, I don’t know how my mother was able to get through it with my father and me, all the crap we brought down on her. My father was such a jealous person that my mother could never really relax, be comfortable, enjoy herself in any kind of social situation. Even with her sisters’ husbands she had to avert her eyes if Willie was present. She’d just glance at a guy at a party, and if that guy’s eyes paused on her, Willie would jump up and scream at him, challenge him, embarrass him . . . and Ann.

  My mother worked most of her life in a clothing factory in Brooklyn. Willie always picked her up after work because his construction job ended earlier. One evening he was about thirty minutes late. My mother’s boss was nice enough to give her a ride home. When he dropped her off, Willie pulled up, leaped out of his car, and screamed at this man, threatened to punch him out if he ever drove my mother home again. My mother ran into the house crying.

  I don’t see how she was able to push aside all the pain, all the fears through all those years. She is truly an amazing human being, with a great, all-giving heart and super strengths, resources. She loved my father because he worked hard and was a good family man, because he would do anything, as she would, for anyone in our family. Like me, she had to be proud of a guy who would physically stand up to anyone, anyone, if his family had been threatened, had reason to be afraid.

  My Uncle Red, Louie Caiazzo, is my mother’s younger brother, and he was also like a kid brother to Willie. My parents took him every place they went. One day when I was about eight and Louie was about eighteen, he walked into our apartment all beat up. There was dried blood under his nose, a bruise on his cheek, a mouse under one eye. Willie’s jaw got very tight, like the skin on a drum, and his eyes kind of clenched, as they always did when he got mad. “What in the hell happened to you?” Willie said. Louie’s eyes filled up, he was so ashamed of having Willie see him in that condition. But he was more ashamed of going home like that, so he’d come to Willie. I guess he also came to Willie because he knew my father would straighten out whoever had beaten him. Willie always took care of such things promptly. Louie sucked in the tears and told Willie he’d gotten into an argument with the guy who owned the hardware store in the area, a big guy who’d just beaten the shit out of him over nothing.

  “Come on,” Willie said, and stormed out of the apartment, followed by Louie, who could barely keep up. I knew my father wouldn’t allow me to go along, but I didn’t want to miss the action. I waited a couple of minutes, then ran to the hardware store. Willie and Louie were standing outside the window, Louie was pointing through the glass, and then Willie nodded. “Okay. Wait here,” I heard Willie say; then he went inside. I walked right up beside Louie by the doorway, knowing he wouldn’t care if I was there.

  “Listen, I need a piece of copper pipe,” Willie was saying to the guy. “One-inch pipe about five inches long.”

  The guy turned to a bin behind the counter and handed him a length of pipe. “How’s this?”

  Willie hefted it in his hand, staring at it, then closed his fingers around it. “Yeah,” he said, “that’s just right.” Then bing! he hit the guy in the jaw and, as the guy went down, Willie yelled, “You beat up my brother-in-law? Get up, you bastard!” Stupidly, the guy got up; Willie hit him again and busted his nose. He was lying on the floor bleeding, half conscious, when Willie tossed the piece of pipe on his chest. “You’re not worth a shit, but your pipe does the job.”

  He came outside and said, “Let’s go, Louie. That guy ever messes with you again, it’ll be the last—” Then he noticed me. “What the hell are you doing here?”

  “I was just walking by, looking for a stickball game, Dad.”

  “You little wise-ass!” He raised his hand to me, then lowered it with a smile. “Come on, we’re all going home.”

  Willie took on everyone, even racket guys who could and did lay very heavy beatings or worse on people who gave them trouble. It wasn’t long after the hardware store problem had been corrected that my father heard that this guy I’ll call Valonni was badmouthing someone in our family all over the neighborhood. Valonni owned a clothing store, but he was also large in the rackets. Willie went to see him at his store and got there just as the guy was rolling up his awning, closing for the day. “What’s this shit I hear you’re saying about my family?”

  “Get lost,” the guy said, pulling out the awning rod.

  Willie hit him on the point of the chin, and Valonni lifted off his feet and did a back dive right through his plate-glass window. “Don’t ever badmouth my family again, you bastard!” He left the guy lying among the broken glass in the window, trying to shake some light back into his head.

  Within hours, bad guys all over Brooklyn were out looking for m
y father. Luckily the word got to Jimmy the Bug right away. Jimmy the Bug lived in our building and was a good friend of our family. He was in the numbers business. As soon as he heard what had happened, he came right in to see my father. “Look, Willie,” he said, “stay in this apartment. Don’t go out until I talk to some people. I’ll straighten this thing out.” He did. It only took him a month of steady negotiations to keep Willie alive. But after the first couple of days at home, Willie said, “Fuck them.” My mother ran and got Jimmy the Bug, who told Willie to be patient, that he’d work it out. But that Willie had to think of his family, and if he cared about them at all he wouldn’t leave the apartment. Every day or so he had to come and convince Willie again. But he kept at it, with Willie and the racket guys, and finally negotiated a pardon. When it was over, Willie said, “They still better not badmouth my family unless they like sleeping in windows.” Jimmy the Bug threw his hands up in the air.

  Jimmy the Bug had solid juice with both sides of the law. He saved my father from getting arrested for assault one day—after the police had started writing the report. My friend Lemon was the cause of it. We called him Lemon because he was shaped like one: short and round, very fat. He was two years older than I, and Willie had appointed him as my protector against the big guys. “Lemon, anyone hits Joe, you hit them—or I hit you,” my father had told him. Anyway, on this day Lemon, who was about thirteen, and I went to the movie across the street from our apartment: The National Theater, which we called The Itch, because that’s what you did the moment you sat in the place. We were sitting way down front and there was some kind of collection between shows, March of Dimes or something. While the cardboard collection cups were being passed, we saw this little boy, five or six years old, wandering around by us, crying. He was lost. So we got up and walked up the aisle with him, yelling, “Anybody lose a kid? We’ve got a lost kid here!”

  The movie came on and we were still yelling, which brought the manager running down to us. He took us in back and threw us out. “We were just trying to help this kid!” I yelled.