To Paris, With Glove

Moose began assembling his team. He first approached George Yee, a wily in-fielder who is a bartender at the Square. Yee wordlessly peeled off $200 as a down payment, a gesture his employer viewed with a mixture of gratitude and bemusement. Could the Square be overpaying its help? Others were not so quick to come forward with cash, but they willingly agreed to join the fold. "No one said no," said Moose. "Everyone thought the idea was just silly enough to try." Silly? It would be a dream game: San Francisco, as represented by the Washington Square Bar & Grill, vs. Paris, championed by Le Moulin du Village, for the Softball Championship of Western Europe. Two great cities. Two great saloons. Two lousy teams.

My own involvement was assured, for I had been trying to get back to Paris for 26 years. To return, even as a third baseman, would gratify an old wish to settle a score. I first visited the city when I was an Army private fighting the Korean War in Stuttgart, Germany. I entertained youthful visions of bringing Gay Paree to her knees, conceding, to be sure, that my uniform and my college sophomore French might prove encumbering. Still, I saw myself promenading on the Champs-Elys�es with a Danielle Darrieux look-alike at my elbow and a flagon of Mumm's in my fist. Soon enough I wangled a three-day pass, crossed the border into France and made my way to Paris. Within minutes of my arrival, however, I swallowed my pivot tooth while chewing a slice of French bread outside some street stand on Place Pigalle. Hideously disfigured in my own view—the tooth was a front upper—I returned to a life of unsmiling seclusion, regarding myself as a latter-day Phantom of the Opera, doomed to skulk in the shadows of the City of Light. Visiting the Cathedral of Notre Dame, I felt instant compassion for the repulsive bell ringer, Quasimodo. In my wounded vanity, I, too, knew what it was like to be shunned by women as something less than human. I spoke little, walked the streets endlessly, and in the evenings, when I had expected to shine, I retreated to my room in a small hotel on the Rue de Navarin in Montmartre. Altogether, a tragic figure.

The errant chopper was eventually restored, but I was never again able to return to Paris during my overseas hitch. And yet, in the generation's gap between visits, I never lost my affection for this most fascinating of cities. To hear me years later speaking of its wonders, a listener might think that I did, in fact, have Mile. Darrieux or her twin in tow, so diligent was I in suppressing the humiliating actuality. Beautiful cities, like beautiful women, will linger in the memory. Paris, in mine, remained alluring for 26 years. How good it would be to return as a presumably more mature man who, though somewhat longer in the tooth, at least had a full mouthful.

I am an unabashed city lover, and I love none so much as my own. I have been away from San Francisco twice in my adult life for periods of up to 3� years, but I have never truly been away. My city has been much misunderstood in recent months, I fear, and, as happens so often to New York, it has been taking its lumps for only one aspect of its personality. Its legendary tolerance of the unusual is now seen as a fault, obviously the result of the Jonestown tragedy and the totally unrelated political assassinations that followed with such dreadful suddenness.

These were body blows felt by every San Franciscan, but the city has recovered from them, just as it recovered from the holocaust of 1906 that supposedly transformed it into an American Pompeii. Resilience is among the city's enduring qualities.

How nonsensical, anyway, to make sweeping generalizations about a place so complex and vital. What may prompt outsiders to hasty judgment is the sheer visibility of the city. San Francisco can be seen, almost in its entirety, from so many vantage points—42 hills, alone—that the onlooker may be forgiven if he thinks he has it in the palm of his hand. In fact, much of its charm is in its elusiveness, it ineffability. It is even possible to watch San Francisco's weather come to town—the white fog crawling through the Golden Gate like some phantasmal sea serpent whose cold breath can alter temperatures by 20� or 30�. In a mere 47 square land miles, San Francisco contains a bewildering assortment of groups and individuals with differing ethnic, racial, economic and sexual orientations. With such diversity, tolerance is not so much a virtue as an obligation. San Francisco is far from "laid back," as the least perceptive of its delineators would have it. It defies the easy categorization Easterners, particularly, seem so fond of making—"Take away the hills and the bridges and you get Cleveland." There are too many conflicting forces at work for such facile classification. Like any city worth its name, it is stubbornly itself. And damned exciting.

The Washington Square Bar & Grill is certainly a representative San Francisco saloon. Its wide windows look out upon Washington Square, a park where old Italian men lose their days in conversation. During the day, the bar is as bright as a solarium, but at night, even with the merciless overhead lighting, the dark wood bar and "smoky grape" walls give a somewhat more subdued tone. Jazz piano is played there every night. The pianists—five alternate through the week—sit facing an enormous mirror on the back wall, so that the customers see the musicians' faces and the musicians see the customers only in reflection. This arrangement seems somehow to protect the pianists from the usual harassment. Norma Teagarden, Jack's sister, is rarely asked to play Melancholy Baby, for example. The Square attracts a disparate clientele—writers, journalists, musicians, cops, actors, lawyers, longshoremen, politicians, society types and the usual young men and women in quest of romance. It is an extraordinarily noisy place. Writer Susan McCabe once characterized the Square's noise as "happy. It sounds as if everyone has something to say. There is no mumbling."

The best time to be there is between the end of lunch hour and the beginning of cocktail hour. It is quieter then, and a person can contemplate the true meaning of existence. At such times, we ballplayers plotted our road trip. Sixteen of us—including travel agent Seligman and Trans World Airlines representative Diane Murphy—would leave from San Francisco. Nine others—including Jarman and his wife, Maryann, who were en route to the Cannes Film Festival—would join us in Paris from other parts of Europe. Of the 16 on the plane from San Francisco, half were unmarried women; there were, curiously, no wives at all in this advance party. Our total squad included four journalists, three real-estate women, three local businessmen, two lawyers, two publicists, an art gallery manager, a Wall Street financier, the former child movie star, the bar owner, the bartender and a cop—Chris Sullivan, a large, bright and jolly man who is an inspector on the sex crimes detail of the San Francisco Police Department and the first winner of the Washington Square Bar & Grill's International Penny Pitching Contest.

It was only after the advance party had departed that Moose realized the team had no nickname. What was needed, we all agreed, was something with Continental flavor, and so, after some lighthearted debate, we decided, somewhere over Michigan, on "Les Lapins Sauvages," in the mistaken impression—advanced by me—that it translated to "The Wild Hares." It was not until we were actually situated in the Royal Monceau that we learned from French-speaking friends that we were, in fact, "The Wild Rabbits." Subsequent events would prove this the more apt sobriquet.

I should pause here to define my own attitude toward softball. I do not play it for amusement. It remains for me what it has always been: a way of proving myself. When I was a boy, my father worked as a manager for a large department store chain, and each time he was promoted—too often, in my selfish view—he was required to transfer to a different store, which was always in a different Northern California town. Because of this peripatetic existence, I had to change my schools, from kindergarten through high school, on the average of about once a year. I was the perennial "new kid" in the classroom, an object, therefore, of derision. My already unpromising prospects for acceptance were additionally damaged by the fact that in elementary school, where conditions were the worst, I was forced to wear glasses to correct far-sightedness. Spectacles in those days—the '30s and '40s—were equated with sissiness, and sissiness, if confirmed, was a crime punishable by eternal damnation. The life of a four-eyed new kid was hardly a bed of roses.