Remembering Mickey
As his birthday approaches, I recall this former classmate in my struggle to understand his life. My recollections are imperfect, weathered by time and distance, but they’re written with respect and fondness for everyone mentioned, including those whose names I’ve changed for privacy.
I’d been wondering what happened to Mickey Meister, a former grade-school classmate picked by the Boston Red Sox in his senior year of high school. Whenever I asked about him, the story was different: he had kidnapped his teenage girlfriend, he was pitching in the major league, he was pitching in the minor league, he had drifted to Texas, he was alcoholic and homeless, he had died.
If the stories were true, how did it all go so sickeningly sideways? Where was the wrong turn?
The summer I graduated high school, I wasn’t surprised to hear that the Red Sox had drafted Mickey. He was already an athletic powerhouse: All-American through high school, number one baseball player in California, second in the nation, national athlete of the year, MVP of the California All-Star team, and ace of a team voted “mythical national champions of prep baseball” by Collegiate Baseball magazine and the Easton Bat Co. The L.A. Times referred to him as “the enigma.”
Later, I found out Mickey had turned down the Red Sox and instead accepted a full scholarship to University of Southern California (USC), where he pitched for the Trojans under coaching legend Rod Dedeaux. After graduating USC, he signed with the Seattle Mariners. By every measure in sports, Mickey was destined for stardom. I expected to find him on a major league team playing in the World Series. But over the years as other former classmates popped up on social media and got together for dinners and informal reunions, Mickey — the one most likely to succeed, the one destined for fame and celebrity — vanished.
In 5th grade, Mickey, Leo, and Steven were the tallest boys in our grade, taller than our teachers. I learned quickly not to play tetherball with them; their height and power would end a game before I could return the ball, and a tetherball to the face left a stinging red mark.
The following year, Mickey and Leo dominated in soccer and baseball for our grade as well as the 7th and 8th grades. I would hear Mickey’s raspy commands to teammates during recess, lunch, and after-school games, whether he was playing or on the sideline. Mickey’s hoarse yell became a background constant at school. Thinking about his voice now, it seems to me a peculiar indulgence, a lack of reasonable restraint. Perhaps Mickey’s husky whisper didn’t signal an alarm because his overconsumption in those days involved only sports and winning. He was a nice kid, a talented athlete, and the most popular boy in our grade.
In the 6th grade, I watched Mickey and Leo and the other boys playing tackle football on the upper field during recess. In my polyester dress and white knee socks and with no understanding of football, I decided to join the game. I ran fast in soccer. I went to ballet lessons and knew how to leap. In gymnastics, I could fly on the parallel bars and stick a round off on the mat. I was delighted when Mickey picked me for his team. As soon as I caught the ball, I ran with intent and speed toward a sure touchdown (in my mind) until the hard field slammed up against me. One of the boys had caught me by the legs. For a moment I couldn’t breathe. The speed and impact of the tackle shocked me. I ached as I lay on my stomach, blinking at Mickey’s’ legs through the blades of grass in my face. I was sore getting up and limping off the field. I wouldn’t look at Mickey, but I could hear his hoarse shouting as the game continued.
During another recess, l noticed the boys in odd clusters and the girls in similar groups. One of the popular girls, probably Jane or Alana, walked back and forth between us, saying something to people one at a time. Eventually she asked me who I liked so I told her, “I like Mickey.” As she spoke to Mickey, he looked at me. On her return she said, “He likes you too.” I jumped and started giggling until she said, “but not as much you like him.”
Another day, as I waited for my mother to pick me up after school, Mickey’s mother stood in front of her station wagon, towering over another mom, both ladies waving cigarettes, chatting in rusty voices, tossing their heads back when they laughed. When Mrs. Meister saw me, she smiled and walked over, then bent forward, giving me a close-up of her spray-stiff hair and poolside tan. She told me I looked cute and said Mick wanted a picture of me. It was a time when film and the cost to develop photos were expensive enough that most of the families I knew took pictures only on special occasions like birthdays and holidays. I didn’t have pictures of my friends and they didn’t have any of me. Mrs. Meister straightened up, stepped back, and aimed her camera at me. She touched her hair with the palm of her hand and said Mick was going to love my picture, so in front of the cafeteria as my classmates talked to each other and bounced balls and moms called out from their cars and teachers chatted with parents, I smiled and couldn’t stop smiling. Mickey wanted my picture? And he told his mother? I imagined what his bedroom might look like and wondered where he would keep my photo, maybe on a dresser or thumbtacked to a corkboard. Then I watched Mickey’s mom walk up to every girl in our class and one by one snap a photo of all of them.
In the 7th grade, our ecology class went to Aravaipa Canyon to backpack and study the desert ecosystem for a week. I was in the same group as Mickey. A new girl, Tanya, had joined our class and we sat together on the plane to Tucson. Mickey sat directly behind me, tossing candies one at a time in my lap. I shared them with Tanya. Every time a candy flew over the seats, we squealed and giggled. Mickey began tossing candies in Tanya’s lap, alternating between the two of us. It was a fun game. Then the candies landed only in Tanya’s lap. I peeked between the seats and there on Mickey’s long thighs sat an enormous bag of candy, something I’d only seen carried by a much older kid at Halloween. Along with the rest of my classmates, I had brought a small bag of gorp as instructed on our trip list. Candy and gum were not allowed so my mom made sure I didn’t have any. I looked back at Mickey again; he had so much candy. I struggled to understand this first awareness of excess. As I wondered where he got the candy and how his parents hadn’t found out, I saw that Mickey had traded places; he was sitting behind the new girl.
From the airport to the mouth of the canyon, we rode standing up in a truck bed and leaning against the rough weathered boards walling us in. Our teacher, Mr. Smith, sat in the cab with the driver and the candy he had confiscated from Mickey. During our 4-hour drive, the wind whipped my long hair until the splintered wood snagged a mass of it and nothing I did would free it. As we tumbled over bumps and potholes in the road, my hair would pull and hurt. I howled and dramatized my predicament. In the midst of the screaming and laughing and jokes from my classmates about having to live in the truck for the rest of my life, one of the boys opened a large Swiss Army knife, revealing tiny scissors. Some of the kids gasped and shrieked. My memory of who had the knife is not clear, but Mickey had the best and biggest and most of everything. If it was Mickey, he silenced the chaos immediately by producing the only obvious solution and the fanciest knife I had ever seen. I wailed something like, “Cut my hair! Please just cut it!” Mickey asked me if I was sure I wanted him to cut my hair as I laughed and carried on. Without smiling, he asked again and again until I stopped laughing and faced him and said something like, “Yes. I mean it. I really want you to cut my hair.” At the time, I thought he was being careful, perhaps overly cautious, but in a nice way. In retrospect, with knowledge of Mickey’s endless womanizing, I wonder if he wanted to prolong this new experience: holding a girl’s hair in his hands for the first time, pulling the caught hair taught, the strange sensation of total control over a part of someone else’s body, then marking her with a jagged, feral chop, unmistakable evidence that Mickey was here.
Over the course of a week, we hiked through the creek each day to a new location, climbed up the canyon rim, and saw wild boar running across miles of sun-baked Sonoran desert. Each of us identified insects, reptiles, and various cacti like sajuaro, cholla, barrel, and prickly pear. We cooked and ate dinner at a campfire we built each night. I vaguely remember helping to dig or bury a pit latrine with Tanya and both of us complaining bitterly about it.
One evening, as shadows filled up around us, swallowing the last jigsaw pieces of purple sky, bats appeared, darting overhead. Some of the boys separated from the campfire and we could see them standing together in the distance, whispering and laughing and doing something. Minutes later, our teacher was shouting. Tanya and I dropped our stick crafts. We watched with our classmates as Mr. Smith said something about throwing rocks at animals and how would Mickey like it if someone many times his size threw rocks at him. With one wiry arm, he held Mickey by the hair, suspending him in a strange semi-seated position above the ground. Mickey’s eyes opened wide. He cried out. Our teacher lectured us about respecting the environment, including bats. He reminded us of our purpose to study and appreciate Aravaipa, not injure or kill wildlife. He called out this and other behaviors he’d observed on our trip for what they were: spoiled, selfish, disrespectful, shameful. Mickey began to cry and his face glowed red with what I thought were embers of shame and remorse. Or was he molten with indignation? Mickey was, after all, a good kid with every potential, the golden child marching toward certain greatness and celebrated every day by his fawning parents. Tanya and I were crying along with Mickey and most of our classmates.
It was a strange incident disconnected from anything I’d experienced before. It felt like ages had passed since we first entered this rugged environment nearly a thousand miles from home, but it was only a few days. Hour after hour, whether we were carrying our packs through knee-deep water or clambering over boulders in the beating sun, we had to maintain our roles as students, tolerate dislikes and unpleasant relationships every waking minute, and maintain responsibility for ourselves for seven days without the possibility of contacting our parents, we were so remote. Only Mickey had gone too far. I’d never seen him restrained and confronted before. His untouchable force field of charm, ego, and success had powered down to zero. For the first time in the four or five years I’d known him, I saw Mickey exposed, fallible, even small.
As suddenly as Mr. Smith had grabbed Mickey, he let go of him. In shock, Mickey stumbled back to his friends, who circled him like disciples.
After Mickey and I started freshman year, he started calling me. We talked and laughed about silly stuff on land lines with long spiral cords until one of our moms needed the phone. One night, he invited me to a movie. His father picked me up in a Cadillac with Mickey in the backseat. As we stood in line at the Sequoia Theater in downtown Mill Valley, I could see that he’d grown even taller, nearly his eventual height of 6'4", and he was handsome. I don’t recall what we went to see; shortly after the movie started Mickey put his arm around me, leaned over and kissed me. I knew people made out at the movies, but I had always imagined more of a balance between kissing and viewing. It was suffocating. After our date, Mickey called only one more time. The next call was from his friend inviting me to a movie at the Sequoia.
Before high school ended, I heard that Mickey kidnapped his girlfriend and kept her in his parents’ mansion in Ross, a lush suburb on the backside of scenic Mt. Tamalpais, just north of the Golden Gate Bridge. Even my mother had participated in this rumor, but I can’t confirm it. Unlike Mickey’s extant record-breaking baseball stats, other life events drift on his name like smoke and haze.
Recently, at a dinner with former classmates, I learned that Mickey had died just a few months shy of his 45th birthday. He was the one most likely to succeed, yet he had predeceased nearly all of us. Only Jim, a talented ceramicist in high school, had died earlier, having taken his own life.
In a tribute to his friend’s athletic talent and nationally recognized performance in baseball, a sportswriter recalled Mickey’s desirable qualities that made their friendship worthwhile, but he also remembered the character flaws and excesses, describing Mickey’s life as a cautionary tale that included bank theft, cheating on girlfriends, stealing from friends, conning women out of money, homeless drifting, and alcohol abuse so formidable, he was unrecognizable even to once close friends by the age of 42.
I thought about Mickey for weeks as I refinished the wood paneling in my bedroom and hallway. We hadn’t been close and apart from the intermittent crush, I wasn’t especially fond of him, but year after year he had figured squarely in my childhood and formative experiences. I wished only the best for him, as I did for all my classmates. I was sad for him, but also disoriented, unable to connect the dots of Mickey’s life that ascended like a shooting star when I still knew him. As I cleaned and conditioned long neglected, damaged mahogany and restored its original luster, my thoughts constantly wandered back to Mickey: how and when, precisely, did he become an alcoholic? Was it high school? College? Or after the arm injury that ejected him forever from the major league? Could his parents have given him alcohol as a child? I imagined scenarios of a disturbing and inappropriate home life as Mickey’s drunk parents and their loud cocktail-hour friends stumbled in a bleary, chaotic orbit around homework, meals, baths, and bedtime. Home, the one place that should have been stable instead tipped like a rudderless and sinking boat.
As I finished oiling a wood panel, the hideous parable of the boiling frog came to mind. A frog placed in boiling water immediately senses the extreme temperature difference and jumps out, but when a frog is placed in cool water that’s slowly brought to a boil, he can’t detect the incremental temperature changes, makes no effort to escape, and dies.
I started to see Mickey as doomed from birth, placed in slow-boiling peril. He was born to alcoholic parents and he grew up in an alcoholic home. He couldn’t see the danger because he was surrounded by it. Like the frog, he couldn’t feel the increasing abuse and excess because they progressed slowly enough at first. Sure, it’s possible a different child might have escaped this dysfunction, but realistically what is the likelihood?
Until they both died young of alcohol abuse, Mickey’s parents gave their only child everything they could: a large, beautifully furnished house in one of the most desirable counties in California, a sparkling swimming pool, $100 a week for allowance, after-school sports programs, the best private school, the most expensive uniforms and equipment, and every indulgence they and Mickey could imagine. His parents provided everything, except security, responsibility, and love. They dedicated their time and attention to liquor. To hide the drinking or make up for it, Mickey’s parents distracted him by creating a constant smokescreen of material and ephemeral stuff, the more expensive, the better they must have felt. Perhaps their parents had done the same.
Day after day Mickey’s parents diverted love and affection away from their only child while he watched, as if locked outside, as his mother and father turned their backs on him to endlessly, zealously, hopelessly pour and drink and pursue inebriation. As parents often are to their kids, Mickey’s parents must have been his North Star in life and he dutifully followed their beguiling light. Mickey Meister, the wunderkind, the enigma, didn’t fail or lose his way. He diligently fulfilled an empty fate, voraciously consuming his own blinding bright star of excess to the end.
REFERENCES
“Mickey Meister, athletic hall of fame bio” (Marin IJ, Sports)
“Mickey Meister, athletic hall of fame bio” (Marin IJ, Sports)
