“Every Day I’m Getting Better and Better.”
Wednesday, August 24, 1927: Detroit
“Every day, in every way, I’m getting better and better.”
I woke up this morning from a restless night filled with thoughts of Al Capone, Arnold Rothstein and Steven to hear those words being chanted in my room at the Book Cadillac Hotel in Detroit. Benny Bengough was in our bathroom, standing and looking into the mirror and repeating the mantra of Doctor Émile Coué.
“Every day, in every way, I’m getting better and better.”
Benny and three of the other Yankees who sit on the bench — Little Julie Wera, Mike Gazella and Cedric Durst — have all fallen under the spell of Dr. Coué and his philosophy of the “Science of Autosuggestion.” Just before this road trip the four of them bought his book, Self-Mastery Through Conscious Autosuggestion. I’m pretty sure it’s the first book Little Julie and Cedric have read since they left school — and in Little Julie’s case, we’re talking elementary school.
Dr. Coué was a pharmacist in France who noticed that his patients got better quicker if he said good things about their medication, even if the drug they had been prescribed wasn’t known to be particularly effective. How they felt about their medication, Coué concluded, was often more important than the prescription itself. Coué also studied hypnosis, and came to the conclusion that while no one can hypnotize himself, you can convince yourself to feel a certain way if you keep repeating it out loud.
While Sigmund Freud remains the guest of honor in Greenwich Village and on Fifth Avenue, elsewhere in New York and the rest of the country Dr. Coué is winning the battle between the conscious and the unconscious.
According to Coué, the key to the mind controlling the body is to chant positive thoughts while looking at yourself in the mirror. That way, he says, the conscious takes control of the unconscious. The good doctor’s prescription is simple:
Look into a mirror and tell yourself, “Every day, in every way, I’m getting better and better.” His recommended dosage is twenty times when you first wake up, twenty times before you go to bed, and twenty times at least twice more during the day.
Following doctor’s orders, Benny, Little Julie, Gazook and Cedric are gazing into their mirrors first thing each morning, last thing at night, and a couple of times in between, and talking to themselves. For about a week they were like a private book club, but then their roommates started telling the rest of the team about what was going on; so the four of them just gave up the ghost, and now they take their medicine out in the open, especially in the locker room.
The other day Gazook was in the locker room bathroom, telling himself how much better he was getting, when Ruth popped out of the toilet stall — without flushing or washing his hands, as is always the case — and the Bambino raised his arms like he had just won the heavyweight championship of the world, and growled: “I’m getting better and better every day, at that!” and pointed towards the mess he’d just left in the toilet.
Benny’s batting .172, but he’s convinced that Dr. Coué is the batting coach for him.
“This is going to turn me around, Rooms,” he said to me last night.
“Why?”
“Because every day, in every way, I’m getting better and better.”
And with that he got up, walked back into the bathroom and started talking to himself, again. When he came back out he said to me, “Rooms, you should try it. God knows, it couldn’t hurt you.”
“I can’t make myself believe in that stuff.”
“That’s just your postwar negative attitude, Rooms,” Benny said to me with a ridiculously positive smile on his face.
“No, Rooms,” I tell him. “It’s the same negative attitude I’ve had since well before the war.”
My negativity aside, the Great War did change a lot of things about the way most of us look at the world. And not just for those who fought in it. It’s funny how the war seems so long ago. It’s been less than a decade since the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month of 1918, but the world has changed so much since then it seems like a century ago.
Many of the older players still in the league had their careers interrupted by the Great War, but only a few, like Sailor Bob, saw any real action. The war shut down most of the minor leagues in 1917, but the major leagues operated normally through most of 1918. Well, fairly normally; they did make ballplayers take part in military drills before each game.
Then in 1918 the Secretary of War issued the “work or fight” order, declaring that everyone had to have a war related job, or they’d be subject to the military draft.
The “work or fight” order sent ballplayers scurrying to avoid conscription, to jobs that were deemed to be war related by the government, mostly in factories — where almost all of them ended up playing on factory baseball teams. As for those dumb enough to enlist, or unlucky enough to be drafted, most of them ended up playing on Army and Navy baseball teams.
Ultimately, baseball’s major contribution to the patriotic cause was to start playing The Star Spangled Banner before our games. I’m pretty sure that’s what won the war for our side.
I was lucky to miss the Great War — I didn’t get out of Penn State until 1922 — though I did experience it secondhand.
Penn State, like most other colleges, was turned into a quasi military academy once it became clear that American lads were going to be sent to the front lines. Students were treated like soldiers. We awoke each morning to the sound of a bugler playing reveille, and when the sun went down, a bugler played taps. Along with our normal courses, we had to take classes in military tactics, our dorms were called barracks, and the dining hall was called the mess hall. We wore army uniforms and did marching drills between classes.
Marching around in circles, I remember thinking how insane it all was — so many of the boys I was marching with actually wanted to go to war, like it was going to be some great big adventure from which everyone would return unscarred.
The girls on campus were intoxicated by the war, too. Most of them wanted to be nurses. And they all wanted a soldier boy to fall in love with them.
My sophomore year in 1918, I was having sex with a girl in the back of my car when she suddenly whispered in my ear, “Tell me that you’d die for me.”
“Tell you what?”
“Tell me that you’d die for me.”
“Die for you? For Chrissakes, we just met this week.”
She’d seen me drilling on the quad. Someone had told her that I was a star pitcher on the baseball team, and the thought of a college man who was wearing both an army uniform and a baseball uniform was apparently enough for her to allow me to take her in the backseat of my car. Such were the benefits of the home front.
Now, halfway through it — maybe a third — she’d spoiled it all by bringing death into the act.
“You want me to die for you?”
“In France,” she said.
It was almost enough for me to buckle my pants. Almost.
“Look, I’m sure you’re a swell gal. And you’re wonderfully good at what we’re doing right now, so please don’t misunderstand me and get offended, but I really don’t find my death to be a romantic subject — even if it happens in France, which, by the way, I’ve heard is not all that it’s cracked up to be. At least not if you’re a soldier.”
“But aren’t you a patriot?”
“I guess,” was the best I could reply.
“Oh, my God!” she exclaimed.
“What? What now?”
“You’re one of those pacifists!”
This whole conversation was being carried on in coitus, and even though I was only 20, it was beginning to have a deleterious effect on my performance.
“I’m not a pacifist,” I protested. “Really. I just got into a fight last week.”
“Over what?”
“It doesn’t matter. The point is I resorted to using my fists, so I’m not a pacifist. I just don’t think that it’s right to be discussing my funeral arrangements while we are, you know….”
“Well, as long as you’re not a pacifist or unpatriotic.”
And with that we finished the act. And it was good. But I remember thinking how much better it might have been had I flown the flag up the pole.
For all the postwar talk about God being dead, a surprising number of people even in New York want to believe in Him.
Just before we left for this road trip, for a couple of days there was a large tent revival with over 10,000 worshipers right outside Yankee Stadium. It starred the famous child preacher Uldine Utley, a tiny, 15-year-old, angelic girl who’s also preached at Carnegie Hall and Madison Square Garden. Her followers were so emphatic that we could hear them singing and shouting while we were playing inside the Stadium.
Before one of our games that week, Schoolboy and I were running in the outfield to the strains of Uldine and her followers singing “Spirit of the Living God.” We stopped when we got to the left field foul line to listen to their song.
“Brother Myles, are you feeling His power?”
“Yes, brother Schoolboy, I believe I just may be.”
Schoolboy put his hand on my shoulder and forced me to kneel before him.
“If you believe, brother Myles, He shall heal your E.R.A.!”
“Will He, brother Schoolboy?!” I shouted, suddenly full of the holy spirit in a way that actually surprised me.
Schoolboy looked down upon me. “No, brother Myles. Probably not.”
And with that we sprinted back across the warning track and continued our laps.
Back at the hotel tonight after our game against the Tigers, I’m lying in bed wishing that I could believe in something higher than myself. Especially since I no longer believe in myself.
I can see there’s great comfort in religion. Each night Earle Combs studies his bible, and he’s probably the calmest and most content man on the ballclub.
I can also see that there’s a clarity that faith brings. And the only thing clear about my life right now is that it’s completely out of focus.
It’s not heaven or hell that I’m worried about — frankly, I don’t think I’ve done much to deserve to go either place — it’s the here and now, and the here and tomorrow.
I decide to pray for the first time since I was a little child. My mother used to have me say the Lord’s Prayer each night before she tucked me into bed. I don’t know what age I stopped saying it. It must have been before I started middle school, maybe earlier. But remarkably, as I start to pray tonight, I remember all the words.
Through my tears I say:
“Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Your kingdom — ”
I’m interrupted by Benny, back in front of the mirror.
“Every day, in every way, I’m getting better and better.”
I roll over, close my eyes, and pray that I can dream tonight about that girl in the back seat of my car in 1918.
