“This is a story that had to be told. It’s a story of hope, a story of perception in how we treat one another in our darkest moments when society said ‘this is your last stop.’ ”
That’s the way St. Paulite Pat Harris describes his moving debut novel, “A Season on the Drink,” a fictional account of the St. Anthony Residence rec league softball club that won a 1986 championship against all odds. It was an astonishing win because the team was made up of chronic alcoholics who lived in the “wet house” in St. Paul’s Midway that some felt was their last stop before dying of drink.
“…the old Saint Anthony residence was not a hotel. It was not a motel, either.” Harris writes. “It was a home.”
The home was falling apart. The front door was rusty and the old plumbing in the odorous bathroom had to handle a lot of vomit. Someone occasionally passed out and had to be carried to his room; others drank on the patio where there was camaraderie but no close friendships because their primary interactions were with their bottles. They all smoked all the time.
“A Season on the Drink” is partly about baseball, with exciting chapters describing the winning game that begins and ends the story, but thanks to Harris’ evocation of life at the residence, it’s also a peek into a population we rarely notice — or don’t want to notice. It reminds us that even those whose drinking is out of control want to be acknowledged.
The very concept of a group of often-inebriated men coming together to play ball against well-financed corporate teams with uniforms and coolers of beer “struck me as something important,” says Harris, who served 12 years on the St. Paul City Council.
Harris worked hard to write respectfully of the St. Anthony residents who had multiple DUIs and were unsuccessful at countless hours in treatment programs. He describes how they spent their $45 monthly checks on booze the first week of the month. By mid-month, when their money was gone, the “alchemists” took over. They were the chronic drinkers’ magicians who made elixirs out of Lysol, Gatorade, Kool-Aid and other liquids they mixed to satisfy their cravings.
As a frame for his story, Harris cleverly juxtaposes the Residence softball team’s progress with the Minnesota Twins season the year before they won the World Series in 1987.
“I thought using the Twins and the Saint Anthony team playing simultaneously shows that on the baseball diamond we are all created equal,” Harris said.
Through pitch-perfect dialogue and some humor, the story is filled with colorful characters drawn from real life.
We meet team leaders Marty Peterson and Terry Thomas, who were used to spending their days watching the Twins on a little TV in the office of Harry, the residence manager who wants to do his job without any trouble. But things change on days The Queen comes trailing scarves and authority. She is head of housing for Catholic Charities, and she wants the St. Anthony men to have something to do. So she suggests a softball team even though there’s a good chance players might forget they were on the team if they were drinking.
“The Queen and her underlings knew… that forming a softball team at one of the nation’s only homes for chronic inebriates was a shot at the big leagues of perception,” Harris writes. “Victory on the scoreboard did not matter. If the team went the distance without vomiting or fighting, they would be in the win column.”
Marty, who was a star baseball player when he was young, was the logical person to pull a team together. A quiet, thin, 30-year alcoholic, Marty wasn’t sure he could find enough men to participate. There was also the problem of whether the would-be players were physically strong enough to even make it to first base.
Before the opening game at Raymond Field, Marty and Terry waited. Slowly, enough men appeared to play. But they were still short a player. At the last minute they were saved when Wesley crashed through the bushes riding a bike across the field until he tumbled face-first into the wiry backstop. He smelled like a distillery but he was ready to play ball.
As the team began to win, neighbors who had been skeptical of this odd bunch gathered to watch. The Little Leaguers thought the team was awesome.
Best of all, the St. Anthony residents who were used to being ignored began to have pride. The Queen was right.
Harris was a VISTA volunteer in 1989 when he spent time at the St. Anthony Residence and heard the “legend of 1986.” Working in the Catholic Charities services program, he helped Marty, who eventually gained sobriety, transition to a program at Union Gospel Mission and then helped him get a job. (Marty has since died, although Harris isn’t sure when.)
“Marty left Saint Anthony and his softball team experience had a lot to do with giving him hope,” Harris said. “He was a remarkable person of extraordinary kindness. He’d had a family, a job at the post office, but alcohol took hold of him, permeated his life. He was very literate, with a collection of first editions he’d found at garage sales.”
Marty’s poetry and thoughts are in Harris’ book in take-outs he calls “Marty Interludes.”
“I knew right away, as a 23-year-old, that the story of Marty and everybody on that team that summer was important in how we look at and treat one another,” Harris recalls. “I get emotional when I talk about it. The experience guided me personally,”
Harris, who lives in the Highland Park neighborhood, is proud to say, “I am all St. Paul, all the time:”
A graduate of Cretin High School and Marquette University in Milwaukee, Harris earned an MBA from the University of Minnesota Carlson School of Management. He is regional director-marketing for the AFL-CIO House Investment Trust. Among his wide-ranging community work is founding Serving Our Troops, a nationally recognized all-volunteer effort providing dinners to National Guard members and their families.
During Harris’ years on the city council, he worked on issues in the arts, poverty relief and homelessness. He has served on the Metropolitan Airports Commission and as commissioner and president of the St. Paul Regional Water Services. He also helped get funding for a new St. Anthony Residence near the one in which his novel takes place.
No wonder his acknowledgments reads like a Who’s-Who of people in Twin Cities politics, business and sports.
Harris and his wife, Laura, met when she was working for former Gov. Jesse Ventura and he was on the city council helping the St. Paul Public Library create a separate library agency. He began writing the book in the early 1990s, after interviewing everyone who had knowledge of the legendary Residence ball team. But with three kids at home and one in college, Harris admits, there wasn’t much time to write so he got up early for several years to work on the book, published by AdventureKEEN.
“A Season on the Drink,” set at the crossroads of sports and hope, should appeal to every kind of reader. Harris will greet the public Nov. 8 during the Twin Cities Book Festival at the St. Paul Union Depot where, he says, “I’ll be hanging around all day.”
Marty Peterson’s poetry
Marty Peterson, player/manager of the winning St. Anthony Residence softball team, was an erudite man who hand-wrote prose and poetry in his journal during his drinking years. This untitled, undated poem is in “A Season on the Drink,” used with permission of Peterson’s family.
These are the lonely ones
picking cigarette butts from the street
or out of sand ashtrays
What thoughts invade their
bowed heads
oblivious to strangers’
passing eyes
They cast their eyes
upon the ground
old clothes and worn shoes
add sadness to the body bent
Other days perhaps
found their head erect
looking skyward
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