Fear Strikes Out Read Online Free Page B

kids. The switch from Sacred Heart to Leavenworth was my idea, and my father enthusiastically endorsed it.
    Bernie is still the best friend I have. Outside of a few neighbors and family friends he was the only boy my age who knew about my mother. When I realized that she suffered from mental illness, I was careful to hide it from most people, but I told Bernie all about it. I was in the eighth grade by this time, and I was desperately anxious for Bernie to understand me. At that point, I needed a lot of understanding.
    I couldn’t stay still longer than a few minutes at a time. I didn’t know how to pace myself. I had to be on the go all the time. It was impossible for me to read a book because that meant being in one place too long. I couldn’t sit through a movie. I was unable to concentrate on anything except when I was actually playing baseball or basketball. I had to have constant action, and my worst hours came when I had nothing to do. I was a perpetual-motion machine, always wound up like a spring and never able to uncoil completely. No matter what I did or how exhausted I became doing it, I had to keep going. I might run dry physically, but my nerves kept pushing me to do more. I drew on every ounce of my reserve every day. All of my blood, my guts, my flesh and my physical and mental capacities were poured indiscriminately into everything. I couldn’t stop the mad merry-go-round of activity. Worse, I couldn’t figure out what it was that kept driving me.
    “Take it easy, Jim,” Bernie said. “There’s plenty of time.”
    “I know. But I have to get things done,” I answered.
    “Why?”
    “I just do, that’s all.”
    “So you’ll have more time to loaf?” he asked.
    “No. So I can get to the next thing I have to do.”
    “Relax. Nothing’s that important.”
    But everything was that important. Bernie didn’t agree with me and he didn’t know what made me tick, but he did understand that I couldn’t help myself. More than once, he had to defend me when the other kids objected to the way I talked and acted.
    No matter what I was doing, I couldn’t keep from yelling instructions to the other guys. During baseball games, especially, I was always shrieking at the top of my lungs, telling everyone else what to do. I not only worried about myself, but I worried about the whole team. I played center field, and I tried to run everything from out there. I yelled to the other fielders where to play opposing hitters, and I yelled to the pitcher what to throw, and I yelled to the umpire what to call. When we were at bat, I yelled to our own hitters, and when I was up myself, I yelled to the base runners, if any, or the coaches.
    When I played basketball, I yelled instructions from the minute the game started until the minute it ended. In huddles, when there was time out, I was always the one who did the talking. During the football season I yelled from the sidelines. My father flatly refused to let me play football, which I loved, but I held the first-down stakes during the games, and that brought me close to the action. I yelled as much from there as I did from my positions in the other sports.
    Every night I came home hoarse and exhausted. From my sophomore year in high school on, I couldn’t even unwind at night. I had to replay every move of every game, whether I had taken part in it or not. I did it over and over. It took hours for me to fall asleep, but when I succeeded, I slept soundly enough. Every morning I bounced out of bed, eager to get back on the merry-go-round. No matter how much of myself I had squeezed out one day, I always seemed to have a rich new supply to squeeze out the next.
    One morning when I was about fifteen years old, I woke up with a terrific headache. It was the day after a tough basketball game which had left me in a turmoil. I had tossed and turned most of the night and had slept only a few hours. I felt as if a steel band was drawn tightly across my forehead, which throbbed