A Writer's Life Read Online Free PDF

at Elaine’s restaurant uptown, a few of the diners who had gone to the concert were ridiculing it in voices loud enough to be heard across the room by the restaurant’s ample-figured proprietress, Elaine Kaufman, who had also been to Town Hall.
    â€œThat show tonight was a goddamned disaster,” said one of the men at the table.
    â€œShields can’t sing a lick.” another man agreed, adding, “Steinbrenner was a damned fool to get himself mixed up in this thing.…”
    â€œWill you guys knock it off?” Elaine Kaufman shouted from her bar stool. “Patrick at least had the balls to get up there and give it a shot. That’s a lot more than any of you guys would have done.”
    A framed photograph of Patrick Shields, wearing his Yankee uniform, hung on the wall near the front of her restaurant, and she and he were close friends at this time, often going to the games and sitting together in Steinbrenner’s box—except on those occasions when the Red Sox were in town and Shields preferred watching alone (as Steinbrenner had arranged) in a single seat behind the Boston dugout. Shields sometimes flew up to Boston to see the Red Sox in Fenway Park when his work schedule permitted, but he was too ill with the flu to watch the September 1978 play-off game in which the visiting Yankees triumphed over the Red Sox primarily because a New York shortstop named Bucky Dent (a .243 hitter who in 1978 had only five home runs) managed to hit one of these during the late innings of this important game, a “fluky little denty poke,” as Shields would describe it while watching it on television at Le Club, that nevertheless rose loftily along the left-field foul line and landed beyond the playing area to ultimately decide the contest in the Yankees’ favor and terminate the season for Boston.
    â€œOh, George,” said Shields to Steinbrenner after the latter had returned from Boston, “how could you have done this to me? You have all those sluggers, all that high-priced talent! And you break my heart with
Bucky Dent
!”
    These Yankees of 1978 would move on to play in the World Series and defeat the Los Angeles Dodgers, as they had the year before. But when the two teams next met in the World Series of 1981 (the Yankees failed to qualify in 1979 and 1980), the Dodgers would retaliate, winning four of six games. After that, the Yankees would flounder through many years of ineptitude and vanishing managers and Steinbrenner’s ranting and raving, which would not cease until the Yankee team of 1996, managed by Joe Torre, finally produced another world champion.
    During these many years, I continued to go to the Stadium with Elaine Kaufman but often without Patrick Shields, who during the latter 1980s began to complain of his diminished energy and enthusiasm for the game. But what he did not tell us was that he was slowly dying. He was dying of what we did not know about his private life,
his
nighttime life as he had lived it after he had closed Le Club at 4:00 a.m. and welcomed into his apartment the young men with whom he shared his cocaine and affections.
    A woman who was Patrick Shields’s longtime secretary and confidante, and who knew for more than two years that he was suffering from AIDS, said that he seemed to be very pleased by the fact that he had so long and convincingly presented himself as “straight” to all the people he associated with in Steinbrenner’s box and Le Club and to the women whom he escorted back to their homes at night before his dawn life began. In his final will and testament, Patrick Shields left all of his possessions, including his Red Sox cap, to the last of his lovers, a young fashion model who had been born in Puerto Rico and was known in the New York garment industry and the discos as “Romeo.”

2
    T HE Y ANKEES THAT I HAD BEEN WATCHING PLAY THE M ETS ON television on this July afternoon in 1999 were not