Suicide Curve. And Game 3.

Friday, October 7, 1927: New York City

Myles Thomas

Published in

The Diary of Myles Thomas

14 min readNov 22, 2016

As s we pull out of Pittsburgh’s Union Station, Schoolboy and I grab a table in the dining car. Since Pittsburgh’s not a town anyone on our team knows real well — hell, even Ruth slept in the hotel last night — it’s a dry ride home.

Without strong speakeasy or gangster connections, there’s no beer, scotch or gin aboard the train.

Schoolboy sits down in the dining car and starts crushing one of his codeine pills into a glass of coca cola.

“Do those work without gin?” I ask him.

“Only as pain killers,” he says with disappointment in his voice.

Benny and Gallico come into the car and join us at our table. Earlier today, Bingo flawlessly guided Pipgras from behind the plate, through a complete game, 6–2 victory. He also had the thrill of scoring his first World Series run.

“We’re gonna sweep these chumps,” says Benny, still vibrating with excitement. “Four straight games in four straight days. Too bad we can’t play a doubleheader tomorrow and beat the bastards twice in one day.”

“Shhhhhhhhh-it,” says Schoolboy, taking about ten seconds to pronounce the word.

“What’s with him?” Gallico asks me.

“He wanted to beat them twice.”

“Really?” Gallico asks.

“Really,” I say.

“Shhhhhhhhh-it,” says Schoolboy, as he starts crushing another pill.

We’re traveling on a Yankee special: just us, the press and our owner, Colonel Ruppert, who has his own private train car. That means there are no late night stops in towns clamoring for a glimpse of the Babe. We all should get a good night’s sleep.

But I don’t. Normally the train rocks me quickly to sleep, but tonight I’m on edge. I lie in my berth wondering where this train is really taking me. What awaits me back in New York. And after that. How much longer will I be with the Yankees, after my disappointing summer.

It’s too cold to pull a Bix and ride up on top of the train, so I close my eyes and try to imagine the stars.

Something about trains, they always make you think of things that are off in the distance or in your past. I fall asleep thinking of Stanwyck.

Our train pulls into New York at 4:45 and rolls to a stop with a gentle hiss. The sun is not yet up, and my guess is I’m the only Yankee not sleeping.

All is quiet until a few minutes later when I hear the Pirates’ train enter the station and come to rest on the track beside us. The two trains now lie slumbering side by side — one a glimmering procession of Pullman cars carrying the ballclub everyone is calling the greatest team of all time, the other a funeral procession carrying our final victims.

Whenever we roll into New York this early in the morning almost everyone prefers to stay sleeping on the train until 7:30, then have breakfast aboard, before catching a cab up to the Stadium. My guess is that’s what will happen this morning, but I don’t stick around to find out. I’m too edgy to stay in my berth, so I quietly get dressed, and leave a note for Benny asking him to please make sure that my suitcase makes it up to the Stadium.

I disembark into an empty Pennsylvania Station.

I walk along the platform and make my way up the stairs. Of all the train stations we come in and out of, Pennsylvania Station is the most magnificent. As I get to the top of the stairs I take a slow look around to soak it all in.

“It’s the Eiffel Tower of stations,” I hear Schoolboy say.

“When did you get off the train?” I ask him.

“A couple of minutes ago. Just thought I’d have a smoke and enjoy the building before the ants come crawling in.”

He tosses me his pack and his lighter.

“I’m heading over to Bill Powers’s Plaza suites for a shower and a quick bite before going up to the Stadium,” I tell him. “Want to join me?”

“Join you in the shower? No thanks. You know how hard I’ve been struggling all year to keep our relationship platonic.”

“At least it’s been a struggle. That makes me feel better.”

“Anyway,” he says, “I’ve got a sunrise performance at 969 Park Avenue.” He looks at his watch and smiles his bad boy smile. “Her banker husband leaves the apartment for work at 6:30.”

“Anyone I know?”

“No. But you’d like her.”

“Why?” I ask.

Schoolboy just starts to laugh. It echoes through the empty station.

I take a cab up to the Plaza, just beating the dawn.

When I get inside I see Bix, with his horn by his side, sleeping out on a couch we hauled onto the balcony. Actually, it’s a couch we’ve hauled onto the balcony seven times. The Plaza staff kept putting it back in the living room, until they finally realized that they were dealing with seriously competitive couch haulers. Final score: Squatters 7 — Plaza 6.

There’s a young man who I’ve never seen before sleeping on another couch inside the room; must be a friend of Bix’s.

I take a shower while the porter brings up my breakfast and sets it up outside. As I sit down, Bix stirs.

“What time did you get in?” he asks.

“Just now. You?”

“Me? Jesus, I stopped trying to tell time after I got kicked out of high school in ‘22.”

“Girl in the room?”

“Boy in Chicago.”

I’ve never seen Bix with a girl, so it doesn’t surprise me. And now there’s the young man on the couch inside. I ask him, as sensitively as I can.

“Who was the boy in Chicago, if you don’t mind my asking?”

Bix smiles.

“Me. I got caught sneaking out of the dorm to head into the Loop at night. My folks shipped me off to a military academy in Lake Forest, just outside of Chicago, not realizing they were sending me to the devil’s suburb. It was just a 30-minute ride into the Loop.

“I used to hang out at the Friar’s Inn. They’d let musicians in for free to watch the sets, then sometimes I could sit in with the band.”

He must have been 17 or 18 at the time. I can’t imagine they let a lot of kids hang around a jazz club like the Friar’s. Or sit in with the band.

There’s no false modesty with Bix. He really doesn’t seem to understand how good he is, no matter how many times people tell him. He’s a lot like Gehrig that way — without the social anxiety or the mother issues. But then, Gehrig doesn’t drink. Maybe it all evens out in the end.

“It was a big hangout for hoods. Capone used to come in a couple of times a week. Big tipper.”

“Good to know.” I haven’t told him anything about my run-ins with Scarface.

“So who’s the sleeping beauty inside?”

“His name’s Benny. He’s a clarinetist from Chicago. I first met him at the Friar’s. He was a prodigy — he started sittin’ in with the bands when he was just 14. Now the kid’s something like 18, and playing in Pollack’s band at the Central Park Hotel. I took him up to Harlem with me last night to jam with the coloreds for a couple of hours.”

“Who was there?”

“Fats, your pal Benny Morton, and some guys from Ellington’s band. You know Ellington’s taking over the Cotton Club this week as the new house band, right?”

“Yeah. We should go.”

I reach into my pocket and hand him my two tickets to the game this afternoon.

“Here. The guy who’s paying for all this,” I toss my thumb over my shoulder, “was supposed to use these. But when I came in just now, the front desk handed me a telegram saying he couldn’t make it back from L.A.

“Why don’t you come up to the Stadium, and bring the kid? Just don’t give the tickets away or sell them. The last thing I need is a couple of strangers causing a scene in the middle of the team’s guest section.”

“But it’s okay if someone you know causes a scene?”

I take the tickets back.

Bix rolls over and goes back to sleep.

Before I leave the Plaza, I curl up the tickets and leave them in the bell of his horn.

I head out a little after eight. Already, Manhattan is a madhouse of people, cars and carriages. I walk crosstown on 59th street and climb aboard the Ninth Avenue Elevated train.

Until recently, when I was living in Steven’s Townhouse, I took the Ninth Avenue El up to the Stadium at least once a week. If the Babe offered me a ride in his custom-made Nash Sedan . . . that was always my first choice of conveyance, of course. I could always take one of Steven’s cars, but I like taking the Elevated. It frees me up to hitchhike home with Schoolboy.

The Ninth Avenue El starts all the way down at the tip of Manhattan Island and crawls up through Greenwich Village and Hell’s Kitchen, before taking two harrowing turns at Suicide Curve on 110th Street and then rolling past the Polo Grounds and across the Harlem River before coming to rest a block away from the Stadium.

The train runs about four stories off the ground, and most of the time it’s less than a sidewalk’s width from the tenement apartments it’s passing. If you ride the train from start to finish, as you pass through one neighborhood to another, you get a tour of the tribes of New York.

If you’re on a slow train it’s even better, as you can get a remarkable view into people’s lives — or, at least, their apartments. In my two years of taking the train up to the Stadium, I’ve seen everything but a murder and a birth — everything. Riding the Ninth Avenue El is like going to the cinema of real life.

There’s a young couple at Ninth Avenue and 105th Street who enjoy having sex in front of their windows most mornings around 9:30. This has caused minor traffic jams on the Elevated line, as the motormen always slow down. When there’s serious action going on, they’ll stop the train completely. Impressively, the motormen and the conductors are all experts at not calling the attention of the passengers to their voyeuristic activities.

Outside of watching the 105th Street couple, the next biggest thrill on the Ninth Avenue El, or any train line in the city, is Suicide Curve.

After having travelled on a straight line for a good five miles, at 110th Street the train suddenly lurches 90-degrees to the right, straightens out for a block, and then lurches 90-degrees back the other way, as it careens between the corners of Central Park and Morningside Park.

It’s a shorter thrill, but Suicide Curve is right up there with the Coney Island Cyclone, as the scariest attraction in New York.

After Suicide Curve, the train heads past the Yankees’ old rental home, the Polo Grounds. Once a rider is past that bastard John McGraw’s playground, you see it, looming across the Harlem River: Yankee Stadium.

This season, on my pitching days, I always loved taking the Ninth Avenue El.

Maybe that was my problem this year?

**Fans line up overnight, waiting to buy World Series tickets at Yankee Stadium.**

Outside the Stadium at 8:45 in the morning, thousands of fans re lined up for tickets. They look like they’ve been there all night.

“The line started at 5:00 p.m., yesterday,” Skipper the guard tells me, as I walk in the players’ gate.

Inside the locker room, only the coaches are there. Normally Gehrig would be here by eight, even off of the train, but Mama Gehrig is still in the hospital recovering from her thyroid operation, which she had the day before we went down to Pittsburgh. Most importantly for our team, Lou seems to have recovered from his September slump — in Games 1 and 2, he had a triple and a double — but I still don’t have the sense he’s all the way back.

Around 9:30 the players start coming into the locker room, three and four at a time, having shared cabs up from Penn Station.

The mood in the room couldn’t be looser. It’s as if we’re playing a spring training game.

As a sign of our tribal disrespect for the Pirates and the Waner brothers, all of our players have taken to calling each other “Poison.”

“Hey, Poison, you through with that newspaper?”
“You got a nickel on you, Poison? I need to make a phone call.”
“Poison, you ready to head out to the field?”
“Excuse me, Poison, but you wanna flush the goddamn toilet!”

One of our clubhouse boys has even filled out a poisonous lineup card and taped it to the wall:

The Stadium fills up for Game 3, the first game of the Series in the Bronx, faster than I’ve seen it fill up in my two seasons in New York.

An hour before the game the stands are full and overflowing onto the houses across the street. The Stadium is radiating energy, and it’s flowing through all of our players.

Herb Pennock is on the mound for us today, and he flies through the first inning on seven pitches.

To lead off our half of the first, Earle Combs trots in from center field and heads straight to the plate to face Lee Meadows, the Pirates’ 19-game winner. Meadows brushes Combs back with the first pitch. Combs dares him to try it again, then slaps Meadows’s second pitch into center for a single.

Mark Koenig follows with a single of his own, and now Gehrig is at the plate.

“New nickname,” says Schoolboy.

“What ya’ got?”

“Seriously Big Poison.”

“Too long.”

BAM! Lou slams the ball to deep left center, and he’s off to the races.

Huggins is coaching third today — no dugout for him during the World Series — and Combs and Koenig go flying by him to score. Gehrig’s got an easy triple — but Huggins wants more (God bless him). He waves Gehrig home, and Seriously Big Poison (definitely too long a nickname) gallops past Huggins like a racehorse charging around the final turn and into the home stretch.

**Lou Gehrig thrown out at home in the bottom of the first of Game 3 of the World Series.**

On a perfect relay throw from Glenn Wright to the Pittsburgh catcher, Johnny Gooch, Gehrig is tagged out — but the fans don’t seem to care. They’re on their feet, screaming and banging on their seats. They’re not objecting to the call, they’re telling the Pirates, “We don’t care! Get ready. There’s more coming!”

The Stadium feels like it’s going to explode.

Meadows holds it together, though, and survives the inning.

Meadows and the Pirates keep us at bay until the seventh, when the W*p leads off with a single. Combs also singles, and Koenig doubles to right.

As the Babe walks up to the plate, Schoolboy cups his hands to his mouth to sound like he’s projecting through a megaphone and announces:

“Now, at bat . . . Enormous . . . Fucking . . . Poison.”

“Now, that nickname might stick,” I tell him. “Especially with the kids.”

And stick it does. The Babe clouts his first home run of the Series — the first by either team — deep into the right field stands.

“Welcome to Murderers’ Row!” hollers Benny at Meadows and the rest of the Pirates.

The Pirates don’t have much power — their whole team only hit 54 homers this year, which is 104 fewer than the Yankees, six fewer than the Babe alone, and only seven more than Gehrig — but they’re a terrific hitting ball club. Their team average is .305, second only to the Yankees:

Paul Waner had the second highest average in all of baseball, batting .380; little brother Lloyd was third in the National League, batting .355; Pie Traynor was fifth in the NL, batting .342; Joe Harris at first base hit .326; Clyde Barnhart .319; George Grantham, .305; and Kiki Cuyler, last year’s runner-up MVP, now wearing a collar in Donie Bush’s doghouse, hit .309.

But Pennock is tossing a perfect game against Pittsburgh all the way into the eighth.

Until Pie Traynor lines a single to left. Pennock then gives up a double to Barnhart that scores Pie.

But that’s it for Pittsburgh.

After the game, our locker room is positively poisonous.

Even Schoolboy is in a great mood, having accepted the reality that he probably won’t get another shot at the Pirates before he gets to cash in his World Series check, which should be close to $6,000.

Schoolboy and I are on our way out the door when Pete Sheehy, one of the locker room boys, intercepts me and says, “Mr. Huggins would like to see you in his office.”