“Little something your coach said you might need,” my mother told me.
“What is it?”
“An athletic cup.”
“A what?”
“You wear it for protection.”
I was starting to get it. What I was getting was horrifying. “I’m going to be hit in the balls? Is that what you’re telling me?”
“Of course not.”
“Then why am I wearing this?”
“So you don’t have to worry even for a minute about it.” Which of course I wasn’t until this cup appeared. “I can show you how to wear it,” my mom said. “On my hand.”
“No!” I slammed the door. I couldn’t get it comfortable, and I didn’t know if this was because I wasn’t wearing it right, or because it was just uncomfortable. In a million years I wouldn’t ask my mother. I took it off and stowed it under the mattress.
Victor drove us to the game since we still didn’t have a car. “It looks to me like your distributor got a bit wet,” the mechanic had told my mom. “We could just dry it out, if that was all it was. But it looks to me like somebody just kept trying to start it and trying to start it until the starter burned out. Now your starter is shot and you’re going to need a new battery too since it looks to me as if somebody tried to charge up the battery and thought they could just attach those jumper cables any which way. I wish you’d called us first thing when we could just have dried it out.” He’d made my mom so mad she told him not to touch the car, but he’d let her leave it anyway, since we all knew she’d have to back down eventually.
So Victor drove us, and I tried to appeal to him. No way, I thought, could he have played baseball any better than I did. But he betrayed me, he was a scrappy little player, or so he chose to pretend. I’ve never yet met a grown man who’ll admit he couldn’t play ball. And then he added a second betrayal. “You watch too much television, Nathan.” He had his arm stretched out comfortably across the seat back, driving with one hand. Nothing on his conscience at all. “This’ll be good for you.”
Tamara met us, since they all insisted on being in the stands for my debut. Because I was on the bench, I was practically sitting with them. I could hear them having a good time behind me, heading for the snack bar every couple of minutes, and I could have been having a good time too, except that I knew I had to go on the field eventually. Everyone plays, those were the stupid rules.
Ryan took the mound. A guy from the college was umping, a big, good-looking, long-armed cowboy of a guy named Chad. I heard my mom telling Tamara and Victor she thought he was cute and I was suddenly afraid she was going to like Little League way too much. Ryan warmed up and then the first batter stepped into the box. Ryan threw. “Strike!” Chad said.
“Good call, blue,” my mother told him from the stands.
The other coach, a man with a red face, gray hair, and his ears sticking out on the outside of his baseball cap, called for a time-out. He spoke with Chad. “They’re using an ineligible pitcher,” he said. “We’re filing a protest.”
“You can talk to me,” Dusty told him. “I’m right here. What the hell do you mean?”
“You pitched him Monday. All game. You can’t use him again for four days.”
Dusty counted on his fingers. “Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday.”
“You can’t count Monday. You pitched him Monday.”
“Did he pitch Monday?” Chad asked.
“Yes,” Dusty said.
“Oh, you bet he did.” The other coached pushed his hat back from his puffy, red face. “Thought I wouldn’t notice?”
“I thought it was four days.”
“Game goes to the Senators,” Chad said.
“Wait. I’ll pitch someone else,” Dusty offered. “It was an honest mistake. Come on, he’s only thrown a single pitch. The kids are all here to play. We’ll start over.”
“Not a chance.” The other coach told the Senators to line up. “Shake their hands,” he told them. “Give the Tigers a cheer. Let’s show a little sportsmanship.”
Back in the stands I could hear Victor saying how much better Little League would be if the kids made up the rules and didn’t tell them to the parents. Whenever the parents started to figure them out, Victor suggested, the kids could change them.
But I thought this had worked out perfectly. Chad was already picking up the bases. My mom called to him that he umped one hell of a game. “Don’t give me such a hard time, lady,” he said, but he was all smiling when he said it; he came over to talk to her. Dusty took the team out for ice cream. There was a white owl in the air and a cloud of moths around the streetlights. A breeze came in from the almond orchards. I was one happy ballplayer.
Of course they wouldn’t all be like that. Sooner or later I could see I was going to be out in right field with the ball headed for my un-cupped crotch, the game on the line, and Jeremy Campbell watching me from third.
On Friday my mother called and told the garage to go ahead and fix the car. This was a defeat and she took it as such. I didn’t have another game until Monday, but I did have practice on Friday so I was not as happy as I could have been either. The practice field was on the way home from the garage so Mom drove by later after she’d picked up the car. The weather was hot and the team was just assembling. She stopped for a moment to watch and then the car wouldn’t start. “Jesus Christ!” she said. She banged the horn once in frustration; it gave a startled caw.
Jeremy came biking in beside her. He started to pedal past, then swung around. “Pop the hood,” he told her.
“I picked this car up from the garage about two minutes ago. I won’t even tell you what I just paid that crook.”
Jeremy lifted the hood. “Your ground strap came off.” He did something I couldn’t see; when my mom turned the key, it started right up.
“What a wonderful boy,” she said to me. To him, “You’re a wonderful boy.”
“Forget it.” Jeremy was all gracious modesty.
She took off then, engine churning like butter, and we’d just barely started passing the ball around when Dusty got called away on a 911. The assistant coach hadn’t arrived yet, so Dusty told us all to go straight on home again. After Dusty left, Jeremy chased me into Putah Creek Park, where my bicycle skidded out from under me when I tried to make a fast, evasive turn. He threw my bike down into the creek gully. He left me lying on the ground, hating myself for being afraid to even stand up, thinking of ways I could kill him. I could run him through with a magic sword. I could hang him from a meathook. I could smother him with his own athletic cup. If I bashed his skull with a baseball bat, no one would ever suspect it was me.
The bank of the creek was steep. I slid all the way down it. Then I slipped in the mud trying to get myself and the bicycle out again. The creek was already covered with summer slime and I got slick, green, fish-smelling streaks of it on my pants. My shoes were ruined. The front wheel of the bike was bent and I had to carry it home, rolling it on the back tire.
This was a long, hard, hot walk. I loved my bicycle, but there were many, many moments when I considered just walking off and leaving it. I’d hit my knees and my hands on the pavement when I fell, and my injuries stung and throbbed while I was walking. I told my mother I’d fallen off the bike, which was certainly true, and she bought it, even though I’d never fallen off my bike before, and certainly not into the creek.
Tamara was singing at Cafe Roma that evening and my mother had mentioned it to Chad, so she was thinking he might show. It had her distracted and she didn’t make the fuss over my injuries that I expected. She was busy borrowing clothes from Tamara and moussing up her hair. This was a good thing, I thought, fewer questions to deal with and it probably meant I was growing up. But the lack of attention made me even more miserable than I already was. It would have all been worthwhile if my injuries had kept me out of Monday’s game, but they didn’t.
When everyone had left the house I took a hammer to the athletic cup. I meant to prove the cup wasn’t up
to much, but I found out otherwise. The blows bounced off it without leaving a mark. To make sure the hammer wasn’t defective I tested it on the floor in my room. I left a ding like a crescent in the linoleum inside my closet. I smashed up a bunch of old crayons and put a hole in the bedroom wall behind the bed. I took an apple I hadn’t eaten at lunch outside and crushed it like an egg. I was more and more impressed with the cup. I just needed a whole suit of the stuff.
This was all about the same time Boston third baseman Wade Boggs went on national TV and told the world he was addicted to sex.
We had a game Monday against the Royals and, like a nightmare, suddenly, there we were, down by one run, two outs, sixth and final inning, with Bjorn Benson on first base and me at bat. So far I’d only connected with the ball once and that was a feeble foul. Jeremy came out to the box to give me a little pep talk. “This used to be a good team before you joined,” he said. “But you suck. If you cost us this game you’ll pay in ways you can’t even imagine, faggot.” He smelled of cigarettes, though no one in my town smoked; it was like a town ordinance. Jeremy spit into the dust beside my cleats. I turned to look at the stands and I saw my mother watching us.
Dusty came and took the bat out of my hand. He went to the umpire, who wasn’t Chad. “Ryan batting for Nathan,” he said. He sent me back to the bench. It took Ryan seven pitches to strike out, which is surely four more pitches than it would have taken me.
Our car wasn’t working again and Victor had dropped us off, but he couldn’t stay for the whole game, so my mom asked Dusty’s wife, Linda, a pretty woman who wore lipstick even to the ballpark, for a ride home.
When we got in the car we were all quiet for awhile. Dusty finally spoke. “You played a good game, Nathan. You too, Ryan.”
Linda agreed. “It was a good game. Nothing to be ashamed of.”
“Usually you can hit off Alex,” Dusty said to Ryan. “I wonder what happened tonight.”
“He didn’t get to bed until late,” Linda suggested. “Were you tired, honey?”
“I don’t think Alex was pitching as fast as he usually does. I thought he was tiring. I thought you’d hit off him.”
“That was a lot of pressure, putting him in then,” Linda observed. “But usually he would have gotten a hit. Were you tired, honey?”
“One more pitch, we would have had him, right, Tigers?”
Ryan looked out the window and didn’t say much. There was a song on the radio, “Believe It or Not,” and his lips were moving as if he was singing along, but I couldn’t hear him.
They let us off and we went inside. Like Ryan, my mom had been quiet the whole way home. I went to clean up and then she called me into the kitchen. “Couple of things,” she said. “First of all, you’re scared of that boy. The one who fixed our car. Why?”
“Because he’s scary?” I offered. “Because he’s a huge, mean, cretinous freak who hates me?” I was relieved, but mortified that she knew. I was also surprised. It was too much to feel all at once. I made things worse by starting to cry, loudly, and with my shoulders shaking.
My mom put her arms around me and held me until I stopped. “I love you,” she said. She kissed the top of my head.
“I love you, too.”
“I loved you first.” Her arms tightened on me. “So there’s a rumor on the street that you don’t want to play baseball anymore.”
I pushed away to look at her face. She stuck out her tongue and crossed her eyes.
“You mean it?” I asked. “I can quit?”
“I’ll call Dusty tonight and tell him he’s short one little Tiger.”
It turned out to be a little more complicated. My mom called Dusty, but Dusty said he needed to see me, said he needed to hear it from me. He’d made representations to Mr. Bertilucci, he reminded us. He didn’t want those to have been false representations. He thought we owed it to him to listen to what he had to say. He asked us to come to the house.
My mom agreed. By now we had the car back again. My mother drove and on the way over she warned me about the good cop/bad cop routine she thought Dusty and Linda might be planning to pull. She promised she wouldn’t leave me alone with Dusty and she was as good as her word even when Linda tried to entice her outside to show her where the new deck was going to go. Ryan had obviously made himself scarce.
We sat in the living room, which was done country style, white ruffles and blue-and-white checks. Someone, I’m guessing Linda, collected ceramic ducks. She stood at the kitchen door smiling nervously at us. The TV was on in the background, the local news with the affable local anchor. Dusty muted her to talk to me. “You haven’t really given the team or yourself a chance,” Dusty said. His face had a ruddy, healthy glow.
“I just don’t like baseball.”
“You don’t like it because you think you’re no good at it. Give yourself time to get better.” He turned to my mother. “You shouldn’t let him give up on himself.”
“He’s not giving up on himself. He’s being himself.”
“He was improving every game,” Linda said.
“He never wanted to play. I made him.”
Dusty leaned forward. “And I remember why you made him. You want that to happen again?”
“That’s a separate issue.”
“I don’t think so,” Dusty turned to me again. “Don’t let yourself become one of the quitters, Nathan. Don’t walk out on your team. The values you learn on the playing field, those are the values that make you a success in everything you do later in life.”
“I never played on a team,” my mom observed. “How ever do I manage to get through the day?”
It was a snotty comment. Really, she was the one who started it. Dusty was the one to go for the throat. “I’m sure his father wouldn’t want him taught to be a quitter.”
There was a long, slow, loud silence in the room. Then my mom was talking without moving her mouth again. “His father is none of your damn business.”
“Would anyone like a cup of coffee?” Linda asked. Her sandals tapped anxiously as she started into the kitchen, then came back out again. “I made brownies! I hope everyone likes them with nuts!”
Neither my mom nor Dusty showed any sign of hearing her. Neither would take their eyes off the other. “He didn’t quit on you, Dusty,” my mom said. “You quit on him.”
“What does that mean?”
“It was his turn to bat.”
“That was okay with me,” I pointed out. “I was really happy with that.”
“That was a team decision,” Dusty said. “That’s just what I’m talking about. If you’d ever played on a team you wouldn’t be questioning that decision.”
My mother stood, taking me by the hand. “You run your team. Let me raise my kid,” she said. And we left the house and one of us left it hopping mad. “On the planet Zandoor,” she told me, “Little League is just for adults. Dusty wouldn’t qualify. Of course it’s not like Little League here. You try to design a glove that fits on a Zandoorian.”
The other one of us was so happy he was floating. When we got home Victor, Tamara, and Chad were sitting together on our porch. “I’m not a baseball player anymore,” I told them. I couldn’t stop grinning about it.
“Way to go, champ,” Tamara said. She put her arms around me. Her body was much softer than my mom’s and her black hair fell over my face so I smelled her coconut shampoo. It was a perfect moment. I remember everything about it.
“What do you think of that?” my mom asked Chad.
Through the curtain of Tamara’s hair I watched him shrug. “If he doesn’t like to play, why should he play?”
They were staring at each other. I thought he was a little young for her, besides being a fat jerk, but no one was asking me. “Saturday night,” she told him, “there’s a Take Back the Night march downtown. Victor, Tamara and I are going. Do you want to come?”
Chad looked at Victor. “This is a test, isn’t it?” he asked.
“You already pass
ed the test,” my mother said.
The next day she spotted Jeremy while she was dropping me at school. She waved him over and he actually came. “I’m so glad to see you,” she told him. “I didn’t thank you properly for helping with the car the other day. You were great. Where did you learn to do that?”
“My dad,” Jeremy said.
“I’m going to call him up and thank him, too. Tell him what a great kid he has. And you should come to dinner. I owe you that much. Honestly, you’d be doing me a favor. I’m thinking of buying a new car, but I need someone knowledgeable advising me.” She was laying it on so thick the air was hard to breathe.
Jeremy suggested a Mustang convertible, or maybe a Trans Am. He was walking away before she’d turn and see the look I was giving her. “That’s wonderful,” I said. “Jeremy Campbell is coming to dinner. That’s a dream come true.” I gathered up my homework, slammed the car door, stormed off. Then I came back. “And it won’t work,” I told her. “You don’t know him like I do.”
“Maybe not,” my mom said. “But it’s hard to dislike someone you’ve been good to, someone who’s depending on you. It’s an old women’s trick. I think it’s worth a try.”
Let me just take a moment here to note that it did not work. Jeremy Campbell didn’t even show up for the dinner my mom cooked specially for him. He did ease off for a bit until whatever it was about me that provoked him provoked him again. Not a thing worked with Jeremy until Mr. Campbell was laid off and the whole Campbell family finally had to move three states east. The last time I saw him was June of 1991. He was sitting on top of me, pinning my shoulders down with his knees, stuffing dried leaves into my mouth. He had an unhappy look on his face as if he didn’t like it any more than I did, and that pissed me off more than anything.
Then he turned his head slightly and a beam of pure light came streaming through his ears, lighting them up, turning them into two bright red fungi at the sides of his head. It helped a little that he looked ridiculous, even though I was the only one in the right position to see. It’s the picture I keep in my heart.
So that’s the way it really was and don’t let my mother tell you differently. Saturday turned out to be the night I won at The Legend of Zelda. I was alone in the house at the time. Mom and Tamara were off at their rally, marching down Second Street, carrying signs. The Playboy Bunny logo in a red circle with a red slash across its face. On my computer the theme played and the princess kissed the hero, again and again. These words appeared on the screen: You have destroyed Ganon. Peace has returned to the country of Heryl.
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