(Not that You Asked)

by Steve Almond

  I woke with a swollen tongue and October in my heart. This was a Monday in Somerville and my apartment smelled of bachelor. The novel upon which I had diddled away the past two years of my life lay rotting inside my computer. I was supposed to visit a class of college students that night, to speak to them about how to survive as a writer without actually selling your plasma, and I couldn’t quite bring myself to cancel, despite the fact that half the class (the Sox fans) ditched anyway.

  At precisely nine, I sprinted back to my car, intending to lunge for the radio. My cell phone rang. This would be one of my friends calling to inform me that the A’s were down by nine runs and that Eric Byrnes had been placed on dialysis. But no, it was a woman. A very jiggly woman, as it should happen, who, I suspected, would let me smell her neck. She wanted to see a movie.

  I thought: Yes, this is fate. This is fate instructing me to go see a movie and smell this woman’s neck. Fuck the A’s. Fuck my whole messianic fan complex. The game was going to happen, no matter what I did. The Lord God of Sport would carry out His merciless will. There was no reason for me to suffer a third straight loss. So it was settled. I was off to the movies.

  But I couldn’t bring myself to call this woman back. Instead, I sat gazing at the shitty little radio in my shitty little car and imagining I could hear the dull roar of the crowd, as I had on those many afternoons of my youth. And then (somehow) that roar was filling my ears and it was a sweeter sound—more human and comforting—than any I had ever known. Zito and Pedro were locked in a scoreless tie through three.

  I knew then that I would listen to the game, all the way to the bitter end, because rooting simply doesn’t work in retrospect. It requires an instantaneous response, the building of hope, strike by strike, hit by hit, the gradual release of anxiety as your pitcher works his way out of a jam, the adrenal surge at the sight of a drive to deep left, the delicious horrible whiplash of a screamer snagged at the hot corner. The true fan, in other words, does not merely sit back and receive the game. He or she is working every moment, crafting fantasies, second-guessing, storing up regrets, tempering the unwanted equity of pain. This is the essential experience, the reward and punishment rolled into one, the sad duty of our sad disease.

  So yes (of course) I blew off the tootsie and joined my friend Tim, who was at yet another bar with our pal Young Bull, a good-natured Texan stoner whose unseen darker regions had drawn him to the Sox long ago. In the sixth, Zito began to tire. His curve bit into the dirt while his heater, as if to compensate, rose slowly into the fatal latitudes. He gave up a dinger to The Brute Varitek, walked Damon the Apostate, then plunked Todd Walker. Zito was unraveling (as my students might put it) like a tortured ball of yarn. With the game tied and two on, Manny Ramirez stepped to the plate.

  Since his arrival in 2001, the citizens of Red Sox Nation have enjoyed no greater pleasure than treating their dreamy left fielder as a communal chewtoy. His performance against the A’s was not helping matters. He had gone 3-for-18 without an RBI. His last confrontation with Zito, in the fourth, had ended with Manny waving nostalgically at a fastball on the outside corner.

  This was cause for hope, of course, which, if you have been paying any sort of attention so far, is cause for dread. Zito delivered a strike, then a ball, then a strike, then another ball. His fifth pitch was a fastball dispatched, unwisely, to the same spot he had tried last time. Manny was waiting.14 A gruesome and unmistakable crack rang out. The ball soared high into the air, did a couple of loops around the moon, and landed twenty rows into the bleachers. Young Bull jumped from his barstool and performed a tribal dance involving anointing his shirtfront with beer.

  Here, down 4–1, I should have tipped my cap to the LGS and gone off to find a cat I might quietly torture. But I didn’t want to be alone, so I hung around just long enough to witness Sox second baseman Damien Jackson and Johnny Damon engage in a vicious collision that knocked The Apostate cold for several minutes. What secret pleasure I took at the sight of his unmoving body! It was probably time to leave the bar.

  Back at Tim’s, I started smoking pot. I don’t know why I thought this would make things better. (Drugs almost never make things better.) Young Bull ran inside and turned on the radio. But I was feigning indifference. I stood on Tim’s porch and smoked and feigned and occasionally glanced through the window, where Young Bull was perched before the radio, clutching his head. He came outside a few minutes later to announce that the A’s had knocked Pedro out of the game and put the tying run on first with no outs in the eighth. In I went, fuckheadedly, and listened to the heart of the lineup squelch the rally. Durazo: pop out. Chavez: lazy fly ball. Tejada: grounder.

  I returned to the porch, pipe in hand, intending to scrub my short-term memory clean. Soon Young Bull would burst outside, wearing the grin of a miracle winner. It would be terrible for a few seconds. Then it would be over and I could return to the proper miseries of my life—the losing struggle with words, the quest for a woman stronger than my self-hatred.

  As it happened, Young Bull did appear before me. But he looked stricken.

  “What?” I said.

  “You should come,” he said.

  “A homer? What. What?”

  Young Bull went back inside.

  A homer, of course, would have been far too definitive. You can’t blow a homer. No, the A’s had runners on second and third with one out in the bottom of the ninth. A base hit of any sort would win the game. They didn’t even need a base hit to tie the game. A bunt would do it. Or a sac fly. Or a feeble little bleeder to the right side. These did not seem like unreasonable hopes.

  The Sox manager, Grady Little, brought in his volatile sinker-baller, Derek Lowe. Due up was Dye, the A’s best fly-ball hitter. But the A’s manager, Ken Macha, called Dye back from the on-deck circle and pinch-hit Adam Melhuse, the backup catcher, who had collected three hits in Game Four. It was one of those moves guaranteed to make Macha seem like a genius, by which I mean it made absolutely no sense. Melhuse struck out.

  Lowe now did the obvious thing—given that his true intent wasn’t just to win the game, but to do so in a manner that would inflict maximum pain on me. He walked the bases full. Ellis, the second baseman, was due up. But he’d been pulled from the game in favor of Billy McMillon, who’d been pulled in favor of Frank Menenchino, who had exactly zero at-bats in the series. Eric Byrnes was the logical choice to pinch-hit, as he was batting nearly .500. But Macha had just inserted him as a pinch runner. So Macha stared down his bench—I like to think he did so with a funereal air—and came up with Terrence Long.

  A reserve outfielder, Long had perhaps the most graceful swing of all the A’s. The problem was that his bat never actually hit the ball. At least, I had not seen it hit the ball. He was being asked to rescue the A’s and, by extension, to rescue me. To say that I smelled trouble would be like saying that Custer, upon reaching the Little Big Horn, smelled Indians.

  Nonetheless.

  Nonetheless, the Series had funneled down to a single batter. He reaches base safely, we win. He makes an out, we lose. The crowd out in Oakland was agape, athrum, ahowl, as was every member of Red Sox Nation. I myself spent the endless interludes between pitches pacing around the room, yelling out a series of increasingly demented bets—twenty bucks says Long knocks himself unconscious with his own bat!—none of which Young Bull would accept. No, he was busy hyperventilating, bent in the posture of a man waiting to be examined by prison guards.

  To call this at-bat “a dramatic showdown” somewhat overstates actual events. Lowe made short work of Long, finishing him—if memory serves—in four pitches, the last a nasty sinker that dropped onto the inside corner.

  In the moment that followed, Young Bull rose up and bounded over to shake my hand. Then he closed his eyes and smiled. I was working furiously to minimize the impact, telling myself this was just so much silliness, a juvenile attachment, setting over my burred raiment the flimsy and unconvincing robes of a New Testament fan. “Nice co
meback,” I said.

  Young Bull’s phone rang and he gazed into the tiny blue screen. “It’s my dad!” He flipped open the phone and began speaking as if he were five years old. “Wasn’t it beautiful, Dad? I know! Gosh! I’m so happy!” Down the porch steps he wandered, out onto the sidewalk to receive his dose of fatherlove. I followed him, merely to eavesdrop on his joy. The sky was a chalky purple and horns were blaring everywhere.

  TIM HAD SHUT off the radio, in the interest of sparing me the postgame interviews. I would only read about what happened next, how Derek Lowe strutted off the mound and made an obscene gesture toward the A’s. And how, in the A’s locker room, Miguel Tejada raged against Lowe and vowed revenge to the assembled reporters. At a certain point, he was led away from the jackals to a private alcove where he broke down altogether, for this was the ninth straight playoff clincher he had lost, and the weight of futility had finally crushed his athlete’s pride. Tejada wept.

  As for me, I was stoned and depressed, mired in a classic sports hangover, the period after a harsh loss during which you revisit all the ways your team chunked it while simultaneously feeling like a fool for revisiting all the ways your team chunked it. Psychologically speaking, the A’s hadn’t lost. They had refused to allow themselves to win. And this struck me as my own crisis, the white-hot shame at the center of my fandom. I kept holding myself back in matters of love and literature, swinging through the fat pitches, forgetting to touch home plate, choking. How is it, I wondered, that I might rid myself of this hex? Was there some sort of operation? Or maybe a blood transfusion. I even called my father, hoping to swear off the A’s out loud, like they teach addicts to do. But he wasn’t around.

  I had reached the stretch of the Mass Pike that runs beneath the Monster, and as I passed into the shadow of that great green wall a terrible shame seized me. The Lord God of Sport had led me into exile, led me into battle against my sworn enemies, led me to the brink of victory a dozen times—and each time forsaken me. Or, more accurately, He had allowed me to forsake myself. What if there was no lesson here, merely an exercise in pain?

  THOSE HOPING FOR a recitation of the ensuing Sox/Yankees series can pretty much fuck off. I did everything I could to ignore the affair, by which I mean I caught only five of the seven games. I am trying to think of the most appropriate metaphor for what it was like to watch. The best I can do is to say that it was like having to choose between Bush and Cheney.15 The rivals bashed each other around for six games, taking three apiece, to set up the expected showdown: Pedro versus Roger Clemens.

  I watched the game in a bar called Rocco’s, on the shores of Lake Erie, the western extremis of New York State. The crowd was split down the middle, the Sox fans loud with pilsner and anguish, while the Yankee partisans remained quiet, churning inwardly. Clemens lacked his fastball, and exited after four. Pedro pitched superbly. He entered the seventh with a three-run lead, at which point Fox flashed a graphic onscreen, noting that he was 84–3 in such situations. The balloon of hope within Red Sox Nation swelled almost painfully.

  Everyone assumed Grady Little would yank Pedro before the eighth inning, and allow his bulletproof bullpen to finish the matter. But this he did not do. No, Pedro remained in the game for another five batters, suffering what probably ranks as the most notorious meltdown in the history of baseball.

  I should have considered this pleasure enough. But I was (and am), after all, the Red Sox Antichrist, and thus in this, my shining moment, I made what would turn out to be a momentous decision: I wrote a seven-thousand-word letter to my friends in which I broke down Grady’s refusal to pull Pedro, and the ensuing disaster, in excruciating (and psychologically tawdry) detail. It was a florid glop of prose, bristling with the sort of false empathy that Iagos like me conjure at the drop of a ballcap. I knew my friends would read every word and that they would suffer deeply in doing so, while I, an alleged friend, an alleged sympathizer, derived some demonstrably sick pleasure at the thought of their deep suffering.

  SO MY FRIENDS were in a shambles. The callers to WEEI had descended into sociopathic ideation. It was, in this sense, a return to the known world of glorious victimhood—for Sox fans are never happier than when they are pursuing despair.

  As the 2004 season opened, my own expectations were humble: I wanted a final confrontation between the A’s and Red Sox, with a culminating contest at Fenway Park, during which my Oak-town heroes would decimate the Old Towne Team, and, if necessary, I would be torn limb from limb on the infield grass by a raging mob. The key to happiness resides in such compromises.

  But the A’s missed the playoffs by one game. And the Sox, after losing three straight against the Yanks in the AL Championship, came roaring back to take four straight, then four more against the lethargic Cards. Damon the Apostate smashed the winning run in the Series finale and their new closer, Keith Foulke, recorded the final out, while I cowered beneath my blanket, waiting for my birthday to be over.

  THE SOX FANS among you will find this summary cruel in its brevity. The rest of you need not shed too many tears. For the Red Sox, upon finally winning the Series, have launched their own cottage industry of Soxporn, a torrent of books and videos documenting the fortnight in question. My friends have watched and read and rewatched and reread all of this crap. They have wrung from the experience every precious drop of vindication, and turned ahead to disappointments yet unborn.

  I think now of the recent conversation I had with a cabbie named John, on the way to the airport. The radio was tuned to WEEI, so I had to shout to be heard.

  “You a Sox fan?”

  “Since Yaz was in short pants,” he said.

  I asked him where he’d been when the team won the Series.

  “Didn’t watch the game,” he said. “Didn’t watch any of them.”

  “Wait a second,” I said. “Not even the comeback against the Yankees?”

  John the Cabbie glanced at me in the rearview mirror and shook his head. “Would’ve jinxed them,” he said calmly. His cheeks were a deep scarlet, his white pompadour stained by a lifetime of smokes and cheap pomade. “Anyway, they won’t win again, not in my lifetime.”

  He spoke the line with proper vehemence, but there was something hollow in his delivery. Without the curse, after all, he had lost the exaltation of martyrdom. In winning the Series—a triumph he hadn’t even allowed himself to enjoy—he had suffered the ultimate loss. The secret wish nestled within his stated fear was obvious: He wanted to return to the way it had been before the Sox won, to recapture the ecstatic grievance that had defined him (and his fellow Soxchotics) as special.

  It was at this precise moment, as I stared into the bloodshot eyes of John the Cabbie, as together we were swallowed by the blackness of the Callahan Tunnel and the babbling menchildren of WEEI fell abruptly silent, that I hung up my cleats as the Red Sox Antichrist. My work, I guess you could say, was done.

  AND WHAT OF me and my Athletics? I keep meaning to quit them. Really I do. I have personal matters to attend to, and a growing list of moral qualms. I can’t help feeling that sport has become a fueling station on the road to war.

  It is also, in my view, a form of slavery. However we might seek to obscure this truth, the modern sports complex has reduced the most abject precincts of this planet to ad hoc plantations, harvested each year for specimens. The strongest and fleetest may win a few years of lucrative idolatry, but they are discarded soon enough, when their bodies break down. The peculiar sickness of the American mindset may be located in the peculiar notion that the professional athlete—rewarded all his life for a capacity to defeat and harm others—should serve as a moral exemplar. (The common parlance is role model).

  Having said all this, I am left to explain why I can’t quite quit the A’s. My fancy excuse runs something like this: In a world in which our politics, our entertainment, our very waking lives have come to feel preordained by corporate masters, sport offers a last vestige of unscripted experience. True pressure, true grace.
r />   The simple excuse is that I feel alive when I watch the A’s. This vitality often takes the form of misery. But the chance to surrender my will is not without its sacred pleasures—a language, however primitive, with which to seek the solace of other men. Maybe it makes more sense to think of sport as the dominant religion of our age, the discovery of faith within ourselves by an allegiance to gods we can see, all those lovely bodies making miracles of air.16

  I’m not suggesting that a stadium is a church. A stadium is just a place for people to gather close together, one of the last, ripe with longing, exposed to the risks of hope and its duties. I’m not naïve. Only I am. Sometimes I need to pretend. Sometimes I need a broken-down old stadium, stinking of beer and mustard, and rain falling like flour before the sodium lights.

  HOW REALITY TV ATE MY LIFE

  AKA INVASION OF THE RED BULL CONQUISTADORS

  (A Melodramatic Farce in Twelve Brief Acts)

  Act One

  In Which I Make the Acquaintance of P. Diddy’s Personal Trainer

  A couple of summers ago, a woman named Angela Bosworth sent me an e-mail asking if I would like to appear on a new “documentary style” VH1 show called Totally Obsessed. I’d just written a book called Candyfreak, which was about, among other things, my obsession with candy. Ms. Bosworth had not actually read the book. She had, rather, “read a ton of articles” about the book.

  This did not entirely surprise me. I had done a good bit of TV for Candyfreak already, so I was used to people not reading my book. I knew that TV producers came on hot and heavy but rarely followed up. And I knew they had a tendency to exaggerate the length and potential impact of any appearance.