Benchwarmer

by Josh Wilker

  “What do we do?” my wife said.

  “He’ll be okay,” I said.

  “But what do we do?”

  I went to the bathroom. I didn’t really have to go. I just sat in there with the door closed. I had a fantasy baseball preview magazine in there. It was filled with future projections, predictions, lists. It overflowed with the intended reassurance and solidity of numerical tools—BABIP, WHIP, OPS+. I’d played fantasy baseball for years, and for decades before that I’d leaned on sports and the numbers of sports to give some kind of a shape to life, but as I leafed through the fantasy preview with my son’s wailing leaking through the door, I couldn’t imagine how or why anyone could care about any of it.

  The next day Jack once again had a brief spell when he seemed to be getting better. Like the day before, I reached for some sunny version of the future. As he played on the rug I went online and ordered tickets to a baseball game at Wrigley Field in June. It would be Jack’s first game. I needed to see something in the future that I could predict, something good.

  I’d never felt that need as strongly before, but it had always been with me in some way or another, as it is in all aspects of human life, this tendency to reach forward to something you can control or at least anticipate or, better yet, hope for. In baseball this tendency is crystallized most succinctly in the scouting metric called OFP, which is short for Overall Future Potential. OFP is generated by dividing the total ratings of a player’s five tools—hitting, power, speed, throwing, and fielding—by five. In terms of guaranteeing the success or failure of a given prospect, the number is powerless. Bo Jackson, for example, had one of the highest OFP scores ever recorded. He still had to hit major league pitching, which he did with uneven levels of success—strikeout-glutted slumps broken by spectacular, legendary bursts of power—before the hip dislocation ended any chance that his overall potential could ever be realized. OFP is designed to hold power over the future and, as such, is inherently flawed, a term understood to include the sense of its own failure. No number can diagnose what will be, and anything pretending to is a fiction to hang onto in the face of there being nothing to hang onto.

  The next morning, before the sun came up, we checked Jack’s temperature, as we had been doing incessantly, measuring and measuring and measuring with this one thin tool at our disposal. We found that his temperature had suddenly plunged way down. An on-call doctor told us that our thermometer was probably broken.

  “If that’s actually his temperature,” the doctor said, “he needs to go to the ER right now.”

  We found another thermometer. Same number.

  In the car my wife sat in back, hugging Jack to her chest. I drove through red lights toward the ER. We’d been dressing Jack lightly the past few days, trying to keep him cool, but now he was wrapped in blankets and had his winter hat on. The hat was in the shape of a baseball, white with two arcs of red stitching. That’s all I could see of him in glimpses in the rearview mirror. My wife’s arms and the blankets and the stitches of a baseball. My world.

  At the ER we were told to remove Jack’s footie pajamas in exchange for a hospital gown. They didn’t have a gown small enough for him, so he wore one made for a small child. Inside it he looked even smaller. They needed more blood. When the nurse saw all the wounds already on his arms and hands she had us remove his socks so she could probe for a vein in his foot. But he kept his baseball-shaped hat on. He kept it on even when he was getting punctured again for more blood, even when he was screaming. When he was screaming, a wild-haired woman in a hospital gown pulled back the curtain on our examination room. She was connected to an IV drip.

  “I’ll rip this thing out of my arm if you don’t stop hurting that baby!” she said. The nurse had finally found Jack’s vein, and his blood was flowing into the receptacle, so I knew the worst of this latest mutilation was over.

  “He’s okay, he’s okay,” I assured the wild-haired lady.

  A resident appeared, a kid-sized Indian guy. This doctor was younger than the 1986 Fishbone “Bone in the USA” tour T-shirt I was wearing. He jabbed a thermometer at my son’s tiny mouth, unable to get it in there.

  “You’ve never done this with a baby,” my wife said.

  “Um,” the resident said.

  My wife glared at him, but I had to look away. I dropped my gaze to the floor and saw his shitty sneakers. They were no brand at all, the kind you see selling for $15.99 on a rack at K-Mart, except on the rack they’re white. His were dirty and gray. The soles were worn down, lopsided. The rest of his visible clothing was hospital-issued, crisp and spotless, able to support the illusion of capability and authority. The sneakers said something else altogether.

  I couldn’t shake the message from those sneakers even after the hospital pediatrician appeared. She projected a much more reassuring sense of expertise, but while she was in the examination room with us the subject of Jack’s white blood cell count came up. The pediatrician was explaining that we needed to wait for further results that would help explain the elevated white blood cell count. My wife, whose thoughts always spiral toward the worst horrors imaginable, said the word leukemia.

  “No no no,” I said before she was done saying the word. “Let’s please not even.”

  “It’s okay to talk about it and get it out there,” the doctor said. She said more, but I wasn’t able to take it in beyond that it was generally reassuring. The gist was that there would probably be other indicators if the word my wife said was involved.

  “Probably?” my wife said.

  “Let’s just wait and see what these latest tests say,” the doctor said.

  “What kind of word is that?” my wife said after the doctor had left. “Probably.”

  “He’s okay, he’s okay,” I said, but in my mind I kept seeing the resident’s shitty pair of sneakers. You live for a long time under the assumption that bridges won’t collapse, that manhole covers in the sidewalk won’t give way. But in the end these things are all made by people: like Scott Norwood, like Wes Welker, like me. We’re all wearing shitty sneakers.

  “Everything’s okay, sweet baby,” I said to my son, gently stroking the baseball he was wearing on his head.

  We waited. Twenty minutes, thirty minutes, forty minutes. I tried to move time forward somehow. My mind ricocheted with worry. There was a poster on a wall outside the exam room of a smiling hospital-gowned child with no hair. Our curtained room was right next to the nurses’ station that had a speaker broadcasting static-laced reports from approaching ambulances. “Patient having difficulty breathing,” one report squalled. “All limbs swollen,” another said. “Patient unresponsive. Eyes rolling back into the head,” said another. The wild-haired woman who had opened our curtain earlier kept yowling that she was being mistreated. A call for security went out over the loudspeaker.

  “No, no, no!” she wailed while being subdued.

  We wanted to be told we could leave this place. As we waited and hoped, I kept touching the baseball hat covering my son’s head. I focused on that baseball, clung to it, as if by hanging on to the baseball I had the power to hold on to a world in which my son was okay.

  Finally the pediatrician entered and told us the number from the blood pulled from his foot. It was a low number. I wasn’t sure what that meant.

  “He’s going to be okay,” the pediatrician said.

  My wife started crying.

  “You’re going to make me cry too,” the pediatrician said.

  I felt a weight that had been pressing down on my chest rise up into my throat and stop. I wanted to cry, but I couldn’t, as if a long time ago something inside me had been dislocated. To feel anything deeply I need lunch-break documentaries on my cell phone. I need things that have nothing whatsoever to do with me. I need stories of wondrous strangers. I need sports.

  I was directed to the front desk to finish filling out some paperwork that
we’d skipped when we’d first arrived. The front desk was near the double doors that led out into the parking lot. The sun had come up and was shining. It was going to be a warm day. There were small gray snowbanks at the corners of the parking lot, long patches of brown grass visible beyond. Winter was in retreat. When I was done filling out the paperwork I went back to the examination room to wait with Abby and Jack for our discharge papers. Abby had gotten Jack out of the oversized gown and back into his pajamas. She stood with him at the front of the exam room, the curtain open, and was murmuring to him and pointing at the many shiny machines. I took my place beside them and looked at the machines too.

  I started thinking about the tickets I’d bought for the baseball game in June. The weight that had risen from my chest was still stuck in my throat. How can you know what will happen? How can you know that Bo Jackson will perform miracles on the baseball field? How can you know that, far short of reaching his overall future potential, he’ll be stopped?

  All those shiny machines. The world is beyond measuring, idiotic, aglow. An orderly was walking by our examination room. He noticed Jack in my wife’s arms, noticed on his head the white hat with the two arcs of red stitching.

  “Someone’s ready for baseball,” he said to Jack. On the word baseball I lost it.

  P

  Paterno, Joe

  See Asterisk.

  Pawtucket

  At one point when I was in the middle of puberty I let slip the information that it is not possible for one to perform fellatio on oneself. I was in the company of a couple of fellow ninth graders, after junior varsity basketball practice, waiting for the Late Bus. We’d been disagreeing about a geographical detail in a limerick of—in terms of the ninth-grade male demographic—unsurpassed renown. The other guys stated that Nantucket was the homeland of the man there once was. I disagreed.

  “There once was a man from Pawtucket,” I recited, proof that even at that early age sports was already distorting my memory.

  “Pawtucket?” said one of the guys, Larry.

  “You 10A,” concluded the other, Malcolm.

  This ubiquitous local insult was a reference to the room at our school in which kids with learning disabilities were quarantined. The door was always shut, a poster covering the Plexiglas window in the door. Some kids, the ones who could barely speak sentences, had been there for years and seemed destined to be there forever. Others had been more recently subtracted, inexplicably, from the general population, which added an element of demotion to the concept of 10A. If it was determined that you weren’t cutting it in the normal world, down you went.

  “You’re a 10A,” I replied. But I began to doubt myself about Pawtucket. Larry and Malcolm moved on to a discussion of the key element in the literary work in question. I saw an opening, a way to reclaim some face, and offered my critique of this element’s plausibility.

  “Yeah?” Malcolm replied, grinning. “How do you know you can’t suck your own dick?”

  I realized with a queasy jolt what I had just publicly admitted. Worse, my authoritative tone had strongly implied that I was not letting slip evidence merely of a single instance of curious semi-accidental anatomical exploration but rather that batteries of rigorous laboratory-style testing had been performed to reach an empirically imperturbable conclusion.

  I regret this. How could I not? What life lesson could possibly be learned by blurting out such an admission? Did I “grow”? No, I just became a little more crumpled with the shame that there was something wrong with me. Not that this stopped me from trying to emulate the anatomically gifted man from, as I alone believed him to be, Pawtucket. I may have cut down a bit on these attempts, both because of the clear evidence that what I was attempting was impossible and because this inadvertent public airing now solidified the perversion that the attempt implied; nonetheless, every once in a while I would give it another go, alone in the room I’d shared with my brother for years that now felt empty with him away at boarding school. I’d get upside-down in a clumsy shoulder-stand and lean my back on the wall and bend my pelvis downward as far as it could possibly go. My erection would always remain beyond reach of my—and, for the time being and into infinity, it seemed, anyone’s—mouth.

  Pawtucket, as it happens, is best known not as the land of the self-fellating but as the home to the Boston Red Sox’s affiliated triple-A minor league team. If you are in the majors and failing, Pawtucket is where you are sent; if you are in Pawtucket and succeeding, you might find yourself sent to Boston. Throughout my childhood Pawtucket had signified hope, disappointment, inertia—some at Pawtucket rising, others falling, still others going nowhere at all. But in the early eighties hope and disappointment were not in balance. When once Pawtucket had been deeply stocked with young talent, such as future stars Fred Lynn and Jim Rice, now the cupboards were comparatively bare. By the time I publicly admitted to trying and failing to blow myself, the element of hope had distilled down to almost nothing.

  But that almost nothing was a tiny diamond of childhood joy. Mark Fidrych, signed that year by the Red Sox to a minor league contract, was already several years removed from being a rookie superstar: he hadn’t even played in the majors since 1980. As he toiled just out of sight in Pawtucket, a moribund version of the Red Sox stumbled onward in Boston, Jim Rice diminished and grounding into double plays, Yaz creaky and fading, and everyone else from the good old days now gone. It all seemed dismal to me, those Red Sox of my puberty, and so I had to believe that the Bird’s return to the Show was a possibility. The occasional newspaper reports from the minors gave strong indications to the contrary: childhood was over; Fidrych wasn’t coming back. Even so, there were times, alone in my room, when I aimed a prayer toward Pawtucket.

  Paychecki, Gene

  See von Hofmannstal, Count Manfred

  Pisarcik, Joe

  Not too long after Jack’s visit to the emergency room Abby took him to the Brookfield Zoo. Jack was around eight months old. The zoo excursion tired him out, and he fell asleep deeply in my arms long before his usual exhausted surrender in the middle of the night. I took him to the swing we had for him in the bedroom and did the quarterback kneel.

  You could argue that the most demanding job of any athlete in the world, taking into account skill level, athleticism, physical and mental toughness, analytic intelligence, quickness of thought, and fortitude to withstand in-game pressure and postgame scrutiny, is that of a professional football quarterback. And yet the moment of victory for a quarterback, the quarterback taking a knee to run out the last few seconds left on the clock, would perhaps be the easiest play in any sport for a layman to perform.

  I did the quarterback kneel in the bedroom, laying Jack down, and then came out of the bedroom and eyed the clock, 7:30. Jack usually didn’t go to sleep until much later, until long after both Abby and I were exhausted, and now we suddenly had a wide open evening. It seemed like the first quiet moment in months. We sat in the living room, stunned, as if smelling salts had just been administered to prod us awake where we sat. For a little while we didn’t have anything to say. I racked my brain for stories from my life, but my life outside our walls was a looping clip: a bus to a cubicle to a bus to home to a bus to a cubicle. Since we’d moved to Chicago I’d gone deeper and deeper into my lifelong tendency toward isolation. I relied on Abby to bring stories home.

  “How was that meet-up thing?” I asked finally. I remembered that earlier in the week, through some online group or chat room or Facebook page, Abby had invited another mother of a baby over to the house. We’d both found that parenting a newborn had an element of piercing loneliness, a feeling that the parenting was being done within a profound isolation from the rest of the world, but unlike me—and characteristic for her—she had done something about it. I’d already asked her about the meet-up the evening after it happened, but it was when Jack was awake, so the conversation only went as deep as the shallowe
st word in the English language.

  “Fine,” Abby had said. She said it again after a long pause the night Jack went to sleep early.

  “Fine,” she said. Then she burst out crying.

  “What the hell?” I said. “What happened?”

  “I don’t have any friends,” she said.

  “What? You have a shitload!” I said. I was shocked. The only thing I had that even remotely resembled a social life in Chicago was when I attached myself to gatherings of Abby and the friends she’d made here.

  “They don’t have kids,” she said. “It’s different now.”

  “What happened?”

  “Oh, nothing,” Abby said. “It was, whatever, I don’t know. She wasn’t my kind of . . . we didn’t connect.” I started to rev up one of my useless rationalizing platitudes.

  “Well, you know, who ever really knows what it is th—”

  “She was asking me about the neighborhood, this neighborhood,” Abby blurted. “‘How do you like it here?’ And I was like, ‘It’s, you know, it’s good, it’s okay,’ and she was like, ‘Really, you can tell me.’ I could tell she was pushing at something. She was from out in the suburbs somewhere, I don’t know. So I said, ‘We like it, you know, it’s good,’ and she said, ‘No, no, I know. I know what you mean. I know there’s a difference between blacks and niggers.’”

  Abby began crying again.

  “Sheezus,” I said.

  I went over and hugged her, standing and reaching down to her in the chair. Sometimes she leans into a hug, but other times she stays locked up in private misery, her shoulder muscles bunched, bracing. It’s like hugging a trembling, electrified rock. I let go. She blew her nose.

  “I’m going to have to do this alone,” she said.

  But we kept talking. Her crying had created an opening. The air felt changed, a little softer. I’ve always relied on her to create these emotional openings, just like I’ve relied on her for stories and social-life shrapnel. We were allowed to talk now. I could say things.