Bennington's Place

by Gabriel Garçonnière

  I always did. When I was nine my father forced me away from my comic books and into our upstate backyard so he could throw a few balls and help me work on my swing. He wanted me to try out for Little League that summer. Throw after throw, I could not hit the ball, even if he tossed it underhanded. He became so frustrated after our third attempt at this game, but by then I had given up even trying. He would throw his glove at me in frustration, calling me a “sissy” as he walked away. I’d swallow hard, dodging the glove and dropping the bat to my feet, trying hard not to shed a tear until he was out of sight. My father knew what I was even before I did.

  But Jake loved baseball. He always had. He told me his father got him started with the same charade my father had tried with me right around the same age. Jake made the Little League team and was team captain in junior high and high school. A scholarship even afforded him the chance to play all through college, but a leg injury his senior year kept the scouts away, and kept Jake away from his dream to go pro after he graduated. Jake’s brother took him to his first Dodger’s game back in the early eighties. Jake took me to my first game on our second date. I still hated baseball, but I was falling in love with Jake so I attempted to learn the game for his sake.

  We met in college, shortly after Jake had broken his leg. He was hobbling around the library on crutches searching for books on the history of baseball for a research paper. I was a library aid at the time and immediately noticed him when he fumbled through the door. He was a sporty-intellect type with short sandy brown hair and big blue eyes accented by wire reading glasses. His crisp blue jeans and neatly pressed polo contoured to the shape of his lean athletic body quite beautifully. And despite his struggle with his bad leg, I found him to be quite charming. I knew that both girls and teachers alike probably crooned at him in the classroom, and his buddies in the locker room probably greeted him with cheers of envy. I was wrong.

  I grabbed a cart of books that needed to be shelved and guided it through the stacks spying on Jake at his clumsy research. I could tell he was tired of having to balance himself against the bookshelves on one leg while trying to get books from the upper rows. After awhile, I had talked myself into approaching him and offering my assistance. I would like to say that when he glimpsed up at me from his work that everything went silent when our eyes met. However, we were in a library where the typical sounds were only a pencil rolling across the floor, an unseen student clearing their throat, or even that constant hum of a utility unit behind a vent in the wall. But even those sounds couldn’t be heard now. Only the quick sound of my beating heart echoed in my ears as I swallowed hard and looked down at Jake’s desk at all the books on baseball. I thought of my father and wanted to roll my eyes, but they were too transfixed looking deep into Jake’s. My father had long since gone to that baseball diamond in the sky, but I could feel him looking down on me and probably saying, “I told you so.” Damn it, I knew I should have played Little League.

  Like I said, Jake didn’t mind so much that I hated baseball when we first met. He took a chance on me, even though I half expected him to say, “I could never date someone who didn’t like baseball,” but Jake wasn’t like that. Our first kiss was something out of a movie, under the lights of Broadway. With the roar of the subway below, the traffic on the streets, the blinking signs, the people, the noise, it’s as if fireworks had lit the sky when we were walking side by side and out of no where, Jake pulls me to him under a theater canopy and meets my lips with his. It was not the heavy tongued kiss that leads to your neck and ears when you are in bed with a man, but instead it was just a long passionate kiss shared between our warm lips. It was very New York, and it reminded me of why I love this city.

  Six months after graduation, Jake and I celebrated our first year anniversary by moving into a small one bedroom apartment off 54th. Although it wasn’t the first time we had made love, that night we found ourselves rolling around in sweaty sheets of passion. Jake pinned me to the bed under that gorgeous tan body of his. I massaged his taunt muscles as he explored my body with his tongue. At night, we were each other’s perfect lover. By day, Jake was student teaching at a local city high school, hoping to get into coaching, and I had taken a full time librarian job across town at the junior high.

  “Do you believe in the afterlife,” Jake asked me one night in bed. He was watching television and I was deep in a book.

  “There’s got to be something after life,” I joked, never lifting my eyes from the pages, “anything’s better than this hell on earth.”

  “No, I’m serious. Do you believe…in something?” He asked again with that handsome and solemn look on his face that always let me know he was being very serious. I put my book down and looked at him.

  “Yeah, I do,” I said, “I believe.” I was perfectly content on going to a Dodger’s game with him whenever he wanted me to, but I secretly hoped I wasn’t setting myself up for a trip to church.

  “What do you believe in?” Jake asked with a grin. After a long pause and some serious mind searching, I answered him.

  “I believe that even in the afterlife, love will find a way,” I reply.

  “No, seriously. I want to know,” Jake says with persistence.

  “I believe that we make our own heaven. Wherever you and I go after all of this is done and gone, there will be plenty of books for me…” Jake interrupted me.

  “…And plenty of innings for me!” He said. We both broke into laughter.

  I adored Jake when he made me laugh. He always knew when the mood was getting too serious; and although sometimes I wished it would stay that way just a bit longer, he always offered up an ice breaker to cut the tension he had created. Our love making that night was hard and fervent. He pulled my reading glasses off and tossed them on the nightstand. We fumbled under the sheets to strip each other of our briefs. The bed sheets were flung back and onto the floor. After an hour of sex, we lay exhausted and not even holding each other because our bodies were so wet and sticky. A New York City breeze, filled with the all too familiar sounds of car horns, blew in from the open window and glided over the bed to cool our bodies as we drifted into sleep immune to the city sounds.

  Six years passed and we still felt young and were still passionate without a blink of trouble in our relationship. Jake never missed a Dodger’s game. I joined him at a game occasionally still attempting to take interest in the things that made him happy, and sometimes at home he would even pick up a book to read for me. Things seemed more perfect that way; we had always made the relationship work. Until one night Jake was walking home late from practice at school. I had rushed home with plans of a nice romantic dinner and a hot bath waiting for him when he walked in followed by a long weekend of love making. But two angry students who were mad at the coach were waiting to surprise him in an alley. He had cut them from the team earlier that week due to random drug tests that came back positive. They beat him to death with a pipe.

  Again, I thought of my father’s spirit probably standing over my shoulder in the cemetery. “I told you so,” he whispered, but I ignored him. I was the black sheep as I stood separate from Jake’s family. Like my own, they had never accepted us or him for what we were, who we were. Our efforts at loving one another so avidly had gone unnoticed by everyone except for ourselves. I recalled all the birthdays and holidays we missed out on with our families, but instead we had our own at home and with our close friends that really mattered, our real family. It would have been nice to be recognized as one by our own blood, but our love still grew even without the recognition. Still, it seemed that I was a ghost that someone had chosen not to believe in. Jake and I had believed though, and although he wasn’t standing there with me that day, I knew he soon would be. Our love would find a way.

  About a year later, six skin heads in orange jump suits led me to my own final resting place. I would like to think I died of a broken heart, but it was a stray gunshot instead that I was unable to dodge. That seems to be everyone’s destiny i
n this city. After a busy life of subway rides, sky scrapers towering over you, and nights of dancing on concrete; the city swallows you up and you become part of it. Swept away in an underlying emotion of chaos that overwhelms you, like a rat caught in the water rushing through a sewer drain, the city has consumed you and you drown in it. It has its way with you, and life is hard when you are growing older and lost in New York without your very first love. I had never even stepped foot on Broadway again, much less even dreamed of kissing another man. It was too late for me to start over in this city. I told you so.

  On a humid day like today, the only eulogy those men delivered was the sound of beads of sweat dripping from their forehead onto the wooden box they carried in between them. It’s odd that six men usually known for hating fags would now be burying one. These men had no idea who I was though, and didn’t care. I was just another John Doe to them, just like all the others they had planted the days and weeks before. My family did know me though; they just chose not to know me for who I really was. They, too, did not care. But with all my family long gone, and Jake, I wrote in my very last words that this island of the dead was the place I needed to be. That, and Jake and I had made a promise long ago on that night we made love after talking about what we believed in after life.

  Everyday a ferry called the Michael Crosgrove brings prisoners to Hart’s Island to bury New York’s unknown in a place called Potter’s Field. They are paid 25 cents an hour to bury lost souls three deep in this mass grave across the middle of the island. In the past, this island has been many things: a POW camp, a women’s hospital, a reform school for delinquents, an old man’s home, a cemetery, and now it is mine and Jake’s final meeting place. When the last bit of dirt is packed over my coffin, my physical body is now laid to rest under ground just a few yards away, and the prisoners are done for the day. They finished early and while waiting for the departing ferry to pick them up and carry them back to the mainland, back to their four by four foot cells, they begin to toss a baseball around. I know that Jake is near.

  The first home of the Dodger’s, Ebbets Field, was demolished in 1960, three years after it closed. For some odd reason, some of the old bleachers were dumped on this island as well. They lie in a heap of twisted and tarnished metal, torn apart by weather and baseball collectors. Some of them have been turned upright to offer a place to rest for whoever might be visiting the island, besides the prisoners. It is here that I sit, a soul on this old baseball relic, watching the parade of skin and orange headed back to the boat. They left their baseball on the ground nearby, and I turn back to look for it but it is gone. Suddenly, I hear the crack of a bat in the distance and turn to see the glimpse of the baseball flying high above this catacomb and headed in my direction. I see a jersey running in the distance. It is Jake. I leap from the bleachers to catch the highflying ball. A perfect catch! My father would be so proud. Jake waves at me as he passes by headed for home base. He is safe.

  I run toward him waving the ball above my head for him to see. We embrace and greet each other at home base with that Broadway kiss I’ve missed so much. I hear a roar of a crowd behind us and car horns call out. We’re part of this city whether we like it or not, and we fade away together. We are a part of each other again now and forever. I told you so.

  Glory Days

  “Why do they call it Busch Stadium?” I asked.

  “Because if it was Cock Stadium, they’d have to change the shape of the field,” my buddy Randy said with a laugh.

  This round of one-liners and punch lines between us was as rehearsed as a Laurel and Hardy routine by now. They were jokes we shared with one another at the open of every baseball season.

  “You’re right. It’s V shaped!”

  “Dude, it’s a diamond, or a square, however you look at it. The old stadium was a circle though.”

  “Don’t you mean a hole?”

  “And a tight one at that!”

  I laughed so hard I choked on my beer. It was early April and Randy and I were tailgating outside the new stadium in downtown St. Louis with a crowd of fans all painted in red. We were eagerly anticipating the first game of the season tomorrow in the Cardinals’ new home.

  Most of my gay friends thought Randy was odd, but none of them liked baseball or any kind of sport for that matter. Randy did though, and I think that’s why we got along so well. Living in St. Louis gave us access to football, hockey, and baseball right in our hometown; and Randy and I had season tickets for all of it. Baseball was our favorite.

  Randy was your typical middle aged jock living his glory days. He’d played every sport in high school, but had not played anything since. His hair was now thinning from wearing a helmet or cap through all four years. His arms and legs were still large and defined from having been on the wrestling team and from running track back then. Hitting the gym four times a week these days kept the beer gut down and kept his pecs tight. I thought Randy was hot.

  He was probably heterosexual in high school or questioning. He had not yet slept with a guy but stole quick glances at his pals in the locker room, and he banged every chick they set him up with just because she’d put out. When I first met him several years ago he claimed he was bisexual but I don’t remember him ever taking a girl home. He’d let one blow him in a bathroom stall now and then when we were hanging out at a sports bar, but he had confessed to me that guys do it better. He was usually uncomfortable in gay bars so we never hung out together there. Guys coming up to him to talk or buy him a drink made him nervous.

  I liked having a gay, or bi, friend whose sex life was fairly anonymous. All of my other friends shared their bedtime stories outright, or I overheard their stories across the bar or in line at the urinal all the time. Randy didn’t gossip. He never asked me about my bed partners either, even as lacking as they were these days. I’m glad I didn’t have to make things up like I did when I was with my other friends. I didn’t want to seem like I wasn’t getting laid, but Randy didn’t care. Be it baseball or football, his mind was always on the game.

  “Where’s your girlfriend?” My friends would ask, teasing me when I met them out at a club.

  They made fun of me for hanging out with Randy all the time, so I started hanging out with them less and less these days. I just ignored their sneers. I think they were jealous because they all thought Randy was hot too. Randy never asked about them. With him, there was never any drama. Sure, I pictured him naked from time to time or admired his butt when we’d be standing in line for beer. But I never thought about wanting to sleep with him. I assumed Randy felt the same way about me too.

  “So what do you think the odds are that the Cards will get to the World Series this year?” Randy asked.

  “Man, wouldn’t that be awesome with the new stadium and all!”

  The Cardinals had not won the World Series since 1982. They’d played twice in the finals since then, losing to Minnesota in 1987 four to three and to the Red Sox just two years ago four to zero. If they won this year, it would be the perfect ending to their first year in the new stadium.

  The new stadium has more of a traditional baseball stadium-feel to it like Wrigley Field. With a mixture of red brick and steel, it is a much better fit into the downtown St. Louis scenario, reminiscence of the old warehouses nearby that would soon be knocked down to make room for a Cardinals shopping village, more parking spaces, and a baseball hall of fame.

  The kick-off game to the season tomorrow was against the Milwaukee Brewers, preceded by the grand opening of the stadium complete with tours, live music, and lots of speeches by game officials. Randy and I decided to take a tour of the stadium. It seats 47,000 fans and has a perfect view of the St. Louis Arch and downtown skyline that can be seen from every seat. The view is framed by the brand new high tech score boards on each side, one for home games and one for away games.

  “Excuse me, where’s a restroom?” I asked the tour guide.

  “We just passed it about four field entrances back. Go ahead and
just catch up with us when you’re done. We won’t be too far ahead,” the tour guide said.

  “Thanks. See you in a few,” I told Randy. He had already gone, but I can never seem to piss when everyone else is going.

  The restroom was spotless, just waiting to be tainted with paper towels and spilt beer. It was neat to think I might be the first fan using this very restroom, but I’m sure construction workers had already been in here and christened it. Like any gay man would, I checked out each stall, eager to find some bathroom graffiti and wishing I had a pen to leave some of my own. The stalls were spotless. I stopped in the last one to do my business.

  I was almost done when I heard a metal banging sound right behind my feet. I looked over my shoulder and noticed the metal tissue holder had fallen off the side of the stall and landed on the floor. It had left a perfect round hole in the wall leading to the next stall, apparently where it was supposed to line up with the tissue holder for the adjoining stall. I guess I now knew how glory holes were created.

  I knelt to pick up the metal box, hoping I could hang it back on the wall somehow and then hurry back to the tour. When I leaned back up, I got quite a surprise. There was a rock hard fat cock sticking through the hole in the wall. I laughed a bit to myself, thinking someone had just read my mind. It’d been years since I had shared in any bathroom trade. I hesitated for a moment or two, but had never been one to turn down a nice cock. I rubbed my hands together quickly to warm them up a bit and then reached for the throbbing rod, gripping it soothingly like a pitcher does his glove. I squeezed it gently filling the rush of blood beneath the silky skin layering this nice piece of meat and then knelt to take it between my lips.