Happy Birthday, Tonfisk

Happy 63rd birthday, Carlton Fisk! He was a huge part of my childhood. In our neighborhood baseball games, when we would re-enact Red Sox games, everyone fought to be Carlton Fisk. You know. In THIS moment. We would have to take turns re-enacting that one, just to be fair. My sister Jean was a baby at the time and she loved Carlton Fisk and knew all about him. My father would prompt her. It was one of their games that they loved. She never got sick of the repetition. It went like this:

“Carl ….” my dad would say.
“Yastrzemski!” Jean would cry gleefully.
“Carl …” my dad would continue.
“TONfisk!” Jean would shout, out. of. control with happiness.

She never got sick of the game. Never got sick of the joke.

Therefore, we, as a family, never called him Pudge. We called him “TONfisk.”

I came across this poem a couple of years ago in my giant anthology of baseball writing, and was so happy to discover that it existed, and I think it is appropriate to post it today.

Yes, Bernadette. We loved him too.

CARLTON FISK IS MY IDEAL
by Bernadette Mayer

He wears a beautiful necklace
next to the beautiful skin of his neck
unlike the Worthington butcher
Bradford T. Fisk (butchers always
have a crush on me), who cannot even order veal
except in whole legs of it.
Oh the legs of a catcher!
Catchers squat in a posture
that is of course inward denying orgasm
but Carlton Fisk, I could
model a whole attitude to spring
on him. And he is a leaper!
Like Walt Frazier or, better,
like the only white leaper,
I forget his name, in the ABA’€™s
All-Star game half-time slam-dunk contest
this year. I think about Carlton Fisk in his
modest home in New Hampshire
all the time, I love the sound of his name
denying orgasm. Carlton & I
look out the window at spring’s first
northeaster. He carries a big hero
across the porch of his home to me.
(He has no year-round Xmas tree
like Clifford Ray who handles the ball
like a banana). We eat & watch the storm
batter the buds balking on the trees
& cover the green of the grass
that my sister thinks is new grass.
It’€™s last year’€™s grass still!
And still there is no spring training
as I write this, March 16, 1976,
the year of the blizzard that sealed our love
up in a great mound of orgasmic earth.
The pitcher’s mound is a lighting mound.
Pudge will see fastballs in the wind,
his mescaline arm extends to the field.
He wears a necklace.
He catches the ball in his teeth!
Balls fall with a neat thunk
in the upholstery of the leather glove he puts on
to caress me, as told to, in the off-season.
All of a sudden he leaps from the couch,
a real ball has come thru the window
& is heading for the penguins on his sweater,
one of whom has lost his balloon
which is floating up into the sky!