Baseball glove George “Spike” Washington returned to me at the hospital after spiking me in a collision at second base in 1974.
Set out runnin’ but I take my timeFriend of the devil is a friend of mineI get home before daylightJust might get some sleep tonight
– “Friend of the Devil,” Robert Hunter and Jerry Garcia
I met George Washington on a baseball diamond in 1974–met him at second base, to be precise, when he came at me in a hard slide with cleats up as I tried to turn a double play. I went down. The ball went sailing over the first baseman’s head. And George took off for third. I tried to get up, then crumpled in pain onto the infield dirt behind the bag, blood streaming from my leg. George’s cleats had shredded my calf.
“You alright, man?”
I looked up at George’s face, smiling and crying at the same time. Instead of scoring, to the frustration of his own teammates and coaches, he’d run back across the field to second to check on me. “I didn’t mean to lay you out. I really didn’t.”
George tried to help me up but was shoved aside by a couple of my teammates, who shouldered me off the field. George was the only black player on the diamond that day in this all-white suburban side of Indianapolis.
One of the coaches drove me to St Francis Hospital in his Camero, my leg tightly wrapped in a towel. The coach fretted that the blood from my sliced leg might stain the interior of his new sportscar. He had a date that night.
Two hours and 24 stitches later, George, who had taken a bus across town, showed up at the hospital with my glove, which none of my teammates had remembered to pick up.
“They told me I’d find you here. Thought you might need this.”
“Probably not for the rest of the summer. But thanks, man. It’s just getting broken in.”
“You okay?”
“They shot me up with something. I’m flying.”
“Okay, then. See you.”
“Wait a minute, what’s your name?”
“My dad named me George. George Washington. But I don’t go by that.”
“What do you go by?”
“GW, mostly.”
“Okay, if I call you Spike?”
He laughed. “I’ll answer to that. But only to you.”
It was the beginning of an unlikely friendship that has endured for five decades.
Spike was my age, meaning he was born in 1959. Breaking stereotypes, he and his two sisters had been raised by their dad, who worked in the vast railyards of Beech Grove. Their mother had been killed when Spike was six, run over by a delivery truck as she was crossing Meridian Street on her way to work as a seamstress.
The Washingtons lived in a small but immaculately kept house off Raymond Street, about six miles north of ours in Southport. Spike and his sisters, Vanessa and Lizzy, attended a Catholic high school, where Spike played baseball, sang in the choir, and excelled at drafting. He wanted to be an architect.
Spike and I hung out at least once a week for the next three years. I had a car; he didn’t. So I’d drive, and he’d slide 8-tracks into the tape deck as we cruised around the city, smoking Mexican weed and looking for girls, none of whom showed us the vaguest interest. Tapes of…the Grateful Dead, mainly. Spike was a Deadhead. The first Deadhead I’d met and the only Black Deadhead I’d encountered in five decades. Spike’s musical tastes were eclectic and wide-ranging. He also loved Archie Shepp, Black Sabbath, and the Soul Stirrers and introduced me to free jazz and gospel.
We got jobs together: washing dishes at a cafeteria, mowing the fairways at a county golf course, painting crosswalks. Awful jobs that were somehow made bearable by talking shit to each other for hours about the merits of the Pacers, Star Trek, KISS, and the Lord of the Rings, which he’d read five times. I dated his sister, Vanessa, for a couple of months, to the astonishment and dismay of our friends and family.
We played baseball against each other in high school and together in summer leagues. In 1976, when I volunteered for Eugene McCarthy’s independent campaign and ended up “running” what little of it there was in Indianapolis, Spike helped me stuff envelopes, write op-eds, and pass out literature, stickers, and buttons on college campuses (Butler, Indiana Central, IUPUI, Franklin, and Earlham). All to little avail, but then neither of us was old enough to vote in 1976.
The following fall, I went off to college in DC, and Spike, the pacifist, enlisted in the Army, seduced by promises that after his tour of duty, he’d be able to go to college on the GI Bill and study architecture. I begged him not to, but he replied, indisputably, that I had choices he didn’t have.
For the next year or so, we corresponded regularly. He came to see me in DC while on his first leave, and we had a wild weekend hitting the punk and funk clubs in the city. But inevitably, we drifted apart. He got married. Had a kid. Reupped in the Army. Got divorced. Got remarried. Had another kid. Was stationed in Germany, then Okinawa, then Georgia. Got divorced. Then, in 1989, he took part in Bush’s invasion of Panama, which he described as “Operation Just Because.”
After pulling a 20-year stint in the Army, he retired in 1997 and moved back to Indianapolis. There, he got a job driving forklifts for FedEx at the airport for the next ten years. He lived in an apartment near the Speedway, took drawing classes at night, and sang in a gospel group on the weekends, even though he was a militant atheist by then.
By 2010, things started to unravel. He hurt his back, lost his job, was diagnosed with diabetes and eventually had his lower left leg amputated. He got behind on his alimony and child support payments, which had chewed up most of his Army pension and disability checks. For the past decade, he’s been in and out of VA hospitals, worked at call centers and for collection agencies (“Can you imagine? I hate that shit, but what the fuck can I do?”)
I make a point of seeing Spike every couple of years when I return to Indy. I want to talk music and baseball, he invariably wants to talk politics. He told me he’d voted for Jesse Jackson twice in the 84 and 88 primaries and for Nader in 2000. But he didn’t vote again for a Democrat until Obama in 2008. (“What a motherfucking waste. That’s the whitest N-r I ever saw. In his head, I mean, white in his damn head.”) He told me he voted for Gary Johnson in 2016 (“The man climbed Mt. Everest, which is a helluva lot more impressive than anything Trump or Clinton ever did.”) and wrote in Barbara Lee in 2020. He’s still living on the margins, barely scraping by.
A couple of days after the election, he called. We hadn’t talked in months.
“Hey, Saint. I need to talk to you about Trump.”
“What about him?”
“I voted for him.”
“You what?”
“I voted for the asshole.”
“You did not.”
“I sure as fuck did.”
“Why?”
“To shake shit up.”
“You might not like the way it falls.”
“Probably won’t. But shit has been falling on me most of my life.”
“You’re really going stand up and watch him deport thousands of people?”
“I can’t stand up at all, no more.”
“You know what I mean.”
“I know what you mean, and hell no. I’ll hide people in my bedroom closet if it comes to that and block those bastards from ICE at my door. I learned a few things in the damn Army, man.”
“So what’s it all about?”
“I’m tired of nothing happening. I’m tired of being fed bullshit.”
“Trump doesn’t peddle bullshit?”
“He’s the best at it. But his BS is about doing something. Even if it’s something fucked up.”
“So you’re an agent of chaos now?”
“Maybe I always have been. I knocked you on your ass and looked what happened.”
“Is chaos going to make shit better?”
“Look, I don’t know how many votes I’ve got left, and I was tired of wasting it. Jill Stein? Cornel? C’mon, man. What the hell is that kind of vote worth, even if they were on the ballot here in God’s Country, which they sure as shit weren’t. A Black vote for Trump. Now that counts for something, especially from someone who is viscerally opposed to almost everything that jackass stands for.”
“Not sure I’m grasping the logic here, Spike.”
“I wanted to send those other bastards a message. We’re off their plantation, the one your buddy Kevin Gray used to warn about, and we ain’t’ coming back.”
“I hear you, but do you think they got it?”
“Fuck, no. But maybe people will wake up this time.”
“They didn’t last time.”
“Yeah, as Bobby and Jerry sang, ‘Ain’t it a shame?’ Come see a brother, will you?”
I wish like hell now I’d caught the next plane to Indy. His daughter Sascha called to tell me that Spike had died on Monday. Now, he’ll never know whether George Washington’s shock vote helped to wake the woke out of their trance. Salut, pal.
