KEN CAMINITI'S GHOST Plowing through Bushwick in an orange 1978 Mercedes, a guest passenger of some German Bundesliga tippers, we were in search of Ken Caminiti's ghost. But we ended up watching a former dancer for Mötley Crüe gyrating on Bogart St. inside a superb street-level bunker called Kings County. It's a bar surrounded by renovated loft warehouses and owned by a guy named Chops. And yes, he has tattoos and knows his way around a metal-fabrication shop.
We found no traces of the former National League MVP who succumbed to drugs in the Bronx a few weeks back. According to ESPN.com, Caminiti spent a good deal of his final hours in the ultra-trendy, yet still scary neighborhood called "the 'shwick" by the cool kids. No actual street addresses appeared in the reports, and knowing the suburban makeup of ESPN.com's workforce, they probably got the neighborhood wrong: Caminiti was actually hanging out in Ridgewood or Jackson Heights before his appointment with the Grim Reaper in Hunts Point, which might have actually been Mott Haven.
As the night wore on and the DJ played more metal, the Mötley Crüe dancer altered her costumes. It was hard not to recall Mom, of Mom's, the trailer-type strip club that a decade ago serviced an irregular phalanx of truck drivers parked overnight along 2nd Ave. in Sunset Park. As first reported in Selwyn Harris' Happyland zine and later witnessed in person, Mom touted her own dancers as better than those at Wild, Wild West down the block because hers "make their own cos-TOOMS." In Mom's case, her girls looked like they made their own cos-TOMBS. Anywhore, in this era of wardrobe malfunction, I digress.
The posthumous tea leaves for Caminiti, then, rest inside my home-office version of The Baseball Encyclopedia. Call this an undertaker's version of Bill James: Caminiti can be found on page 856. His entry lies between that of Louis Steven Camilli, a Cleveland Indians infielder born in El Paso in 1946, still living (no relation to Dolph), and a former Yankee named Howie Camp. Howard Lee "Red" Camp, to be exact, played five games for the pinstripers in their woeful season of 1917. He was born in Munford, AL, in 1893; died in Eastaboga, AL, in 1960. Red Camp's life odometer, therefore, aside from his cup-of-coffee travels with Colonel Ruppert's pre-Yankee Stadium squad, spanned a mere 12.4 miles of Alabama real estate.
Caminiti, on the other hand, came into this world in Hanford, CA, in April of 1963 and officially departed it on Oct. 10 at Lincoln Hospital—a distance of roughly 2916 miles. To him we say: Blunt ashes to blunt ashes, angel dust to angel dust…never make the first or third out at third base. o
