Honoring a Fellow Fan, One Ballpark Bathroom at a Time

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/01/nyregion/remains-flushed-in-ballpark-bathrooms.html

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The New York Mets were leading the Philadelphia Phillies, 2-1, after two innings when Tom McDonald stood up from his upper-deck seat at Citi Field.

Nature was calling, and so was his obligation to his childhood friend and fellow Mets fan Roy Riegel, whose death nine years ago left Mr. McDonald, 56, vowing to honor their baseball bonds in an unconventional way: by disposing of Mr. Riegel’s ashes in ballparks across the country.

Even more unusual was his chosen method: flushing them down public restroom toilets in the ballparks between innings.

“The game has to be in progress — that’s a rule of mine,” Mr. McDonald said one recent weeknight before entering a Citi Field bathroom, holding a little plastic bottle containing a scoopful of Mr. Riegel’s cremains.

He stepped into a bathroom stall and sprinkled the ashes into the toilet with as much decorum as the setting allowed. A couple of flushes later and Mr. Riegel’s remains were presumably on a journey through Citi Field’s plumbing.

“I took care of Roy, and I had to use the facilities myself,” Mr. McDonald said, emerging from the stall with the empty container. “So I figure, you know, kill two birds.”

“I always flush in between, though,” he added. “That’s another rule of mine.”

The key here is that Mr. Riegel was a plumber, so how better to honor him than by pumping his essence into the plumbing, Mr. McDonald said, adding that he has flushed Mr. Riegel’s ashes at 16 stadiums so far while keeping journals of his trips.

“I know people might think it’s weird, and if it were anyone else’s ashes, I’d agree,” he said. “But for Roy, this is the perfect tribute to a plumber and a baseball fan and just a brilliant, wild guy.”

Mr. McDonald, who also goes by Porky, is a recently retired New York City Transit Authority office worker who has written about 3,000 poems, most of them about baseball, often traveling to ballparks across the country for inspiration.

With no college education or formal instruction as a writer, he has cultivated an accessible, regular-fan style that owes much to his knockaround childhood in Astoria, Queens, not far from where the Mets play — which, it should be said, is in Flushing.

Mr. McDonald and Mr. Riegel grew up a block apart and attended countless games together at Shea Stadium, which closed in 2008. As adolescents, they raced jubilantly onto the field when the Mets beat the Cincinnati Reds in Game 5 to win the National League pennant in 1973. They also suffered through many losing seasons.

A watery send-off had not occurred to Mr. McDonald when he asked Mr. Riegel’s family for a portion of his ashes shortly after his 2008 death. He originally had planned only to scatter them in ballparks and other poignant spots.

He rubbed the ashes tenderly into the asphalt of the schoolyard at Public School 70 in Astoria, where the two had played pickup baseball, football and roller hockey. He smudged them proudly onto a marker on Lower Broadway commemorating the city’s ticker-tape parade for the Mets after their 1969 World Series victory. He dusted them onto Shea’s original home plate location, which is designated by a marker in Citi Field’s parking lot.

But scattering the ashes at some stadiums posed problems. Mr. McDonald’s first attempt, at a Pittsburgh Pirates game in 2009 at PNC Park, was met with a gust of wind, recalled Adam Boneker, 46, a friend who has accompanied Mr. McDonald on many of his trips to ballparks to dump the ashes.

“It was awkward,” Mr. Boneker recalled, adding that they resolved to try it at a Minnesota Twins game at the Metrodome in Minneapolis but, once there, realized that an indoor stadium was not an appropriate setting.

Afterward, at a nearby Irish pub, a frustrated Mr. McDonald excused himself to use the bathroom. He returned smiling and declared triumphantly, “‘I just took care of Roy,’” Mr. Boneker recalled.

Mr. McDonald had flushed the ashes in the bathroom.

“Right there, it hit me,” Mr. McDonald said. “After that, it just took on a life of its own.”

In the years that followed, he — often with Mr. Boneker — flushed ashes in stadiums in Arizona, Atlanta, St. Louis, Kansas City, Mo., Toronto, Detroit, Cincinnati, Baltimore and elsewhere.

In Cleveland, Mr. Riegel’s ashes were flushed at both Progressive Field and at the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, because Mr. Riegel was a devout rocker. In Chicago, Mr. McDonald flushed them at a White Sox game but not at a game of the Cubs, the Mets’ old National League nemesis.

“It’s funny — not in a joke way — but funny that it was exactly like Roy would have wanted it,’’ Mr. McDonald said.

Over the years, a wide circle of Mr. McDonald’s friends have gotten updates on the latest disposals.

“It became kind of an inside joke: What’s the best place for Roy’s ashes?” said Mr. McDonald, whose friendship with Mr. Riegel stretched back to Pack 65 of the Cub Scouts and through adulthood as the fun moved into local bars.

Mr. Riegel was “a major partyer,” Mr. McDonald said, and “walked that tightrope between genius and insanity.”

The fast life caught up with him, and he died at age 48 on April 8, 2008, the day of the home opener of the Mets’ final season at Shea. Mr. McDonald attended the game without Mr. Riegel and returned home to find out his friend had died.

He sat down and wrote “A Final Opener, Indeed,” a poem about how the start of each baseball season would renew their childhood friendship.

“Each April, we were once again, boys in constant, cool connection,” wrote Mr. McDonald, who will read his poems next month at a symposium at the National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, N.Y.

In Mr. McDonald’s Astoria studio apartment, filled with baseball and other memorabilia, he keeps Mr. Riegel’s remaining ashes in a Planters peanuts can next to a set of World Series highlight videos and Mr. McDonald’s collection of 149 autographs of baseball Hall of Famers.

For each trip, Mr. McDonald spoons some ashes into an empty Advil bottle from the can, whose exterior is wrapped in old Mets ticket stubs. He said he had enough left for one more tribute, which he plans on doing at Durham Athletic Park, the former minor league ballpark in North Carolina where the 1988 movie “Bull Durham” was filmed.

Mr. Riegel’s youngest brother, Hank Riegel, of Waterloo, N.Y., called Mr. McDonald’s method of ash scattering appropriate, given his brother’s offbeat outlook on life.

“He’d be like, ‘Oh, yeah, do that,’” Hank Riegel said. “He would definitely approve of it. Never once did Roy follow the rules.”

For years, Mr. McDonald consoled himself that at least Mr. Riegel never had to see his beloved Shea Stadium torn down. Only recently did he decide that Citi Field was worthy of Mr. Riegel’s ashes.

And so it was with a poignant smile that he tossed the empty Advil bottle in the bathroom trash can at Citi Field the other night and returned to his upper-deck seat.

“I know he’s roaring at all this,” Mr. McDonald said.