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The Show must go on

For Bronson Arroyo, the Boston Red Sox pitcher and budding rocker from Brooksville, what happens when everything he ever wanted comes with challenges he never expected?

By MICHAEL KRUSE
Published July 25, 2005

	Audio: Hear Bronson Arroyo sing 'I never want to be anywhere else'

BOSTON - He was on the screen on the stage now, walking across the outfield grass at Fenway Park, out onto Lansdowne Street and toward the Avalon nightclub here, and as Brooksville's Bronson Arroyo kept getting closer the crowd kept getting louder.

Aimee Arroyo was inside, up above almost 2,000 hot, sweaty, screaming people, past the men with big necks and black clothes, in a corner booth with leather couches and tiny tables. She had on a shiny gold top and was drinking Cristal champagne.

She yelled at the image of her husband.

"You look so hot!"

She turned toward the rest of the people crammed in behind her: her dad, her brother, her sister, her personal trainer, Bronson's mom, family and friends from Brooksville, Red Sox centerfielder Johnny Damon.

"Here we goooooo, guuuuuuys!"

But now, up on the stage, under flashing pink and blue lights, Bronson had blond, blown-back hair and was wearing tight jeans and a black T-shirt, and he was jumping up and down while singing the Foo Fighters' Everlong, one of the dozen mostly '90s-grunge cover songs on his just-released CD called Covering the Bases.

Slow how, you wanted it to be, I'm over my head, out of her head she sang

And I wonder when I sing along with you if everything could ever feel this real forever

If anything could ever be this good again

The Red Sox have never been bigger. Last fall, for the first time since 1918, the team won the World Series. Ever since, in this small-town sort of city, the ballplayers are celebrities.

For the 28-year-old, a 1995 graduate of Hernando High and now a starting pitcher, that means he has a baseball agent in Arizona, a music producer in Los Angeles and first-name-basis fame here in New England, and now this new album that debuted last week at No. 123 on the Billboard Top 200 chart.

His Sox salary pays him $1.85-million; next season, he'll almost certainly get bumped to at least $3-million. He makes about four bucks for every CD that sells and $10,000 for two hours of signing autographs. He drives a blue-gray Hummer and Aimee drives a red Mercedes with Hernando plates.

They live in a $3,400-a-month apartment in a stone building called the Marlborough, a couple blocks over from ritzy, trendy Newbury Street.

They have free cell phones from Verizon and free furniture from a store where he has signed autographs.

They don't wait for tables at restaurants, but they can hardly go anywhere, anyway.

"I pull my hat down," Bronson says.

Here, though, was the craziest week yet. Monday and Tuesday: interviews in a station-to-station publicity blitz in Manhattan; Wednesday: the release-party concert at the Avalon; Thursday: pitch against the Yankees; Friday: a local in-studio performance, then an in-store signing appearance; Saturday: another concert - this one on the field at Fenway - after another signing at another music store.

On Wednesday night, after the show, he left through a back door, into a limo.

Out on Lansdowne, Aimee quick-stepped down the sidewalk, and family and friends followed. She smoked a cigarette, something she does, she said, when she gets stressed.

They got to the Game On Sports Cafe and were taken to a long booth in the back. Over by the bar, two women asked for her autograph. "Because you're just as important," one of them told her.

Aimee sat back down and flipped open her phone and punched in a number.

"Hey, baby," she said.

It was almost midnight.

"Where you at?"

Pause.

"Okay. I just wanted to make sure."

Pause.

"You happy?"

Bronson Arroyo is the son of a Cuban-born construction worker and a Pasco County nurse. The family moved to Brooksville when Bronson was 9. He grew up in a one-story house with a tin roof set off from a road with tall oaks and heavy Spanish moss.

He "lived" with his buddies "out in the trees," he says, between Griffin and Emerson roads. Baseball meant having the names of banks on your back. In the Hernando Youth League, Bronson played for the Sun Trust team.

Bronson and Aimee had their first date at Wendy's. Aimee was 14 and a cheerleader. Bronson was 16 and already a baseball star.

The Pittsburgh Pirates picked him in the third round of the draft in June 1995, and for the next five years he played in the minor leagues: Augusta, Ga.; Lynchburg, Va.; Zebulon, N.C.; Altoona, Pa.

For the four seasons after that, he went from the minor leagues to the big leagues, back and forth. In 2003, after the Pirates had released him, he threw a perfect game in Pawtucket, R.I., for Boston's Triple-A team. He finished the year with the Red Sox.

The 2004 season was his first full year in the majors.

The Red Sox won the World Series.

And everything changed.

In November, at a concert at the FleetCenter here, arena security had to ask Bronson and Aimee to go to a luxury box. He was creating too much of a scene. "Like I was the damn show," he would say later.

As he was driving back to Florida, he got a call from Loren Harriet, the music producer in L.A., who had heard about a jam session in a bar in the fall and asked him if he'd ever thought about doing a CD. No, Bronson said. According to his mother, Julie, "he never even sang in the shower."

Over the winter, though, he spent time in recording studios in California and Florida.

And in late March, near the end of spring training in Fort Myers, someone posted on eBay a half-drunk protein shake the seller said Bronson's lips had touched.

It's not like this in Brooksville, where he shops at the Publix, gases up at the Circle K and might see some people who say hey, and he'll say hey back: "Hey, boss."

But up here?

On Thursday night, less than 20 hours after he left the Avalon, people were in their seats - in the very last row, a full hour before the beginning of the game - waiting to see him pitch against Derek Jeter and Alex Rodriguez and the rest of the rival Yankees.

After the game - a no-decision for Bronson, a loss for the Red Sox - he was back at his apartment. Some of his friends from Brooksville who were here for the week had bought $513 worth of shirts and jerseys and hats at the official Red Sox souvenir store. And that was after Aimee had gotten them a half-price discount.

Bronson was signing the stuff for people back in Hernando.

"To Bryan," one of the friends read off a note on a piece of paper.

"B-R-Y-A-N."

Next, next, next.

Bronson doesn't say no to much.

"Strike while the iron's hot," Jeff Stevenson, Bronson's Warner Music New England marketing guy, was saying one afternoon in his sport utility vehicle. "Right now, being a ballplayer in Boston, it's like winning the lottery."

In the apartment, David Letterman was on the flat-screen TV, next to the picture of Bronson getting his World Series ring on opening day at Fenway, across the room from Aimee's framed diploma from the University of South Florida.

"Want to turn on NESN?" Aimee said.

The New England Sports Network.

"Postgame's already over," Bronson said, "and I already heard what (they) said: "Bronson Arroyo didn't have his good stuff tonight. He wasn't sharp.'

"Well, s---," he said, standing in the middle of the living room, next to his dog, a pug named Bizkit, "I've been running around for the last three days like a chicken with its head cut off."

His phone was vibrating: Terry Bross, his agent, calling to tell him the CD was just behind the Black Eyed Peas and Green Day on Amazon.com. And to ask about the game against the Yankees.

"S---, man, I battled," Bronson said into the phone. "When I started warming up in the bullpen, the ball felt like a f---ing shot put. Literally."

Over on the other side of the room, Aimee was with friends from home.

"How's Brooksville?" she said.

"Good," one of them said.

"Same old."

Bronson's like his mother. He's a Pisces. Always on an even keel.

When he's not in his baseball uniform, he wears T-shirts and Nikes and baggy cargo-pocket pants on his taut, long-limbed frame - a surfer, skater-style.

"I tend not to worry about things," he had said one day in the dugout on the first-base side of Fenway. "I come to the park, I play ball. It's just that cut-and-dry with me, man."

In Brooksville, in the yard behind the tin-roof home, there's a chain-link batting cage his father, Gus, built when they moved there, and a pitcher's mound, and a musty gym in a shed. Bronson worked out there starting when he was 6. He still works out there.

At Parrott Middle School, he used to practice his autograph on folders in class. Aimee?

She has a soft face and girl-next-door good looks, but she's mouthy and quick-witted, a double-major USF grad. She's working online on a criminal justice administration master's degree at Boston University. "But school," she said one afternoon, "has kind of fallen by the wayside now."

Bronson and baseball was the plan all along - well before they got married almost five years ago.

But the music?

"I had no idea," she said.

After Wednesday's concert, she talked about what life was like when Bronson was pitching for the Double-A Altoona Curve and they were living in Claysburg, Pa., in a one-room basement apartment on top of a hill.

"There are days," she said, "when I wish it was still like that."

Bronson's life now plays like a frenetic collection of snapshots.

Friday morning, in the studio at WBCN, "The Rock of Boston":

"Okay," the DJ said, "would you rather be in the baseball Hall of Fame or the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame?"

"No contest, man," Bronson said. "Baseball's No. 1. Music is a hobby. But I'm starting to figure out this is a little more of a grind than going to the ballpark and warming my arm up."

Then he played the guitar and sang Fuel's Shimmer:

We're here and now, but will we ever be again

'cause I have found

All that shimmers in this world is sure to fade

Away again

Then the DJ asked him for some autographs.

"If you don't mind," he said.

Friday afternoon, in a Strawberries music store, at a CD signing:

Little boys in ball caps, big women with pink lipstick and '80s stretch pants, older men with Rockports, younger men in pinstriped suits. The UPS guy. And girls: girls with dreads and FuBu jeans, girls with denim miniskirts, girls with tight, "B"-logo crop tops.

"I like your hair," one of them said.

She took a picture with shaking hands.

Bronson checked his cell: 62 new voice mails.

Saturday night, on the field at Fenway, at a concert called Hot Stove, Cool Music:

A woman in the crowd bought an autographed Arroyo jersey for $3,000.

Two teenage girls in the front row of seats had on short shorts. They hung their butts over the edge of the wall. On one of them, written in shiny block letters: B-R-O-N-S-O-N; on the other: A-R-R-O-Y-O.

"I would soooooo die for you," one of them shrieked.

Now, finally, nearly midnight, it was just Bronson and Aimee back at the apartment.

No more 2,000 sweaty fans at the Avalon. No more soldout Fenway. No more autographs.

The apartment was quiet - but only for a second.

"It used to feel like me and Bronson," Aimee began. "But it's not just us anymore. It's like Bronson belongs to the rest of the world. It's like I'm competing with everyone else."

"In my mind," Bronson said, "I make s--- simple."

"But is there ever a time for you," Aimee said to him, "when personal time comes first? When you can go from 90 to zero?"

"I go 90 now because the album just came out," Bronson said.

"That doesn't matter. It was like this before it came out. It's never enough. I don't understand how you don't say: "I need some down time.' Why don't you want that?"

"You think I want to be in a car for 12 hours in New York?"

"But you are in charge of things, babe!

"For you," Aimee said to him, "it's like it's time to make an extra $10,000 signing. There's nothing sacred."

"Right," Bronson said.

"There's no: "This is my time. Or time for my wife.' "

"Right."

"You're saying this is right. No! It's not right! You've got to take time for the s--- that matters, Bronson. I don't want to sit here and think you'd rather go sign autographs than spend time with me.

"Most people," she said, "on their off days, they take the day off."

"Maybe," Bronson said, "I'd do that if I signed for three years for $30-million."

The apartment got quiet again.

"The reason it's harder for me," Aimee said, "is I never wanted to be famous. I married Bronson. I knew he played baseball, but I never stopped to think about this. It's not something I ever envisioned. I love Bronson, Bronson plays baseball, let's live our happy life.

"Nothing bothers him.

"But it bothers me."

"You like it when you go to the Cheesecake Factory and don't wait in line for an hour, don't you?" Bronson said.

Aimee scrunched up her nose and stuck her tongue out at him.

Time to walk Bizkit.

On the way to the elevator, Aimee said Bronson had forgotten her college graduation, and her 22nd birthday, too. "I've never forgotten a start," she said.

"Bizkit," Bronson said, looking down at the pug, "what a bad daddy you got."

They walked out of the elevator, out the door and onto the sidewalk. Aimee rubbed her right shoulder up against Bronson's left. Her hand searched for his, and she touched him near the waist.

"Oh, Bronson," she said.

It was after 1 a.m. in Boston. Brooksville's Bronson and Aimee Arroyo headed down the dark sidewalk.

- Michael Kruse can be reached at mkruse@sptimes.com or 352 848-1434.

[Last modified July 23, 2005, 09:38:02]