by Lucas Mann
Clinton Corn was first unionized in 1937, the same year Riverview Stadium was built, a twin birth, or rebirth, of the idea of a proud and contented American blue-collar town. This fact, that world, should feel totally removed now, so many years later, unrelated to what I see every day. It should feel like what it is: history. Can something be a myth if it once really existed, this functional town, gritty and prosperous, the nation’s game plunked happily in the middle of it? Or did it ever really exist the way it is remembered?
I don’t know if the things Tim tells me are true, but I don’t think they’re lies. Tim is a fantastic rememberer, in the creative sense. The whole Family is. Baseball stories mix into town stories mix into stories about love, about shenanigans, about specific moments when everybody in a neighborhood that doesn’t really exist anymore would go from house to house, stopping to sit on lawn chairs out by the street, every door open, the nights endless. Tim tells me of himself as a boy, heavy but fit, slow but powerful. He was a boy in these bleachers, almost where we are right now, a boy, too, in the summer on the farm where his mother grew up, a boy on his paper route—of course he had one—biking through Clinton smelling something sweeter coming out of the smokestacks. Because Clinton made candy then (and then booze), delicious and relatable items for parents to boast to children about.
What a great, true claim to make: We’re the town that gave the first Twinkie its flavor!
Yes, better than: We’re testing chemical reactions to create pioneering corn-based plastics products!
Clinton does not have control over what is produced within its boundaries, but that is not unusual. When Tim or Betty or Tammy speaks wistfully to me about what the town once was, the various things that have befallen it, that qualifier is always there. “It’s not especially bad,” or “It’s like most places, I guess,” or “It’s the kind of story you hear a million times. And we’re luckier than most.” All of this carries a mixture of pride and humility that I find, in my all-powerful East Coast judgmental capacity, to be charmingly midwestern. It’s also true.
Clinton is in the middle of everything still, used for production and transportation, then overlooked. But it is still used. It is a factory town that has a factory that turns a seventy-million-dollar profit. No matter how much of that profit is tangibly bestowed on the city, that’s still truth. It is a corn town in a country that subsidizes corn. That must be a good thing. When I speak to local politicians, they tell me it’s a good thing. When I speak to people with money or influence, they tell me it’s a good thing. I sat down in the editorial offices of the Clinton Herald, a newspaper over a century old, stubbornly located in the bare heart of downtown, and the editor told me Archer Daniels Midland is a good thing. She began to look at me quizzically and then finally with spite as I pushed forward with my questions: But what about the air? And what jobs, new jobs, have really been created? What about those houses down there that are gone, the few people left living among the nothingness?
Those houses were an eyesore. And where would anyone be if the factory picked up and left?
In the middle of things now, I start to feel as if I’m asking the wrong questions. Maybe I get turned shoulders, one-word answers, because I want there to be something sinister to the newest master of this town, to the calculated capitulation toward corporate control, and the erosion of a generic blue-collar Eden that I never lived in but love to read about, love to put in writing—erosion and blue-collar in the same sentence, a campaign slogan for every bright-smiled politician born in a small place. And when I speak to council members who, for decades, have never been voted out of office, or to the mayor, or to the editor, baseball is always tossed in as part of the assurance that the town has been allowed to keep its roots while moving boldly into what will be a prosperous twenty-first century.
Just look at that field out there. Retouched, clean and clipped, and still a time warp to something beautiful. People ask if I felt how special it was when I first stepped out on the infield. I did. Me and Dave, all that unsullied snow. And then it’s a deluge of talk about beer and brats and corn and fishing and work ethic and hard hats and home runs and good memories and progress.
To call something unfair is weak, so is saying unfortunate over and over in interviews, leading subjects with Isn’t it unfortunate to lose your history?
Maybe a neighborhood like south Clinton needs to be lost, the way most players need to lose because too many people want to win, and if they all did, then success would be nothing. Maybe it is a neighborhood not supposed to exist now. There were houses built a century ago in between the river and the industry. Packs of men walked just a few blocks to mills that were dangerous and volatile but always hiring, just down the hill from the mansions where their bosses lived. It was a complete ecosystem, and now it isn’t and that’s that. And you have to be a bleeding-heart fool or the kind of person who bemoans the loss of everything quaint to argue with the logic.
“South Clinton, everything down there, that’s not a town that we want to be anymore,” I am told by one councilman. “There is no place for it.”
But what is there a place for? There is no place for a downtown. Or, rather, the place is there, the facade, but nothing fills it. And so there’s no place for local grocers who offered credit to union members on strike. There’s no place for the activists who were bred here, the churches that doubled as meeting halls, the radical ministers and labor leaders, almost all of them now dead or moved or, worse, just silent. I listen to their voices on old tapes at the State Historical Library in Iowa City, charming relics waiting for inclusion in a dissertation.
Erasmo is pitching tonight, and we’re watching, as always.
Tim and Tammy are talking to me, saying something different.
“I don’t want you to think we’re stupid because we’re here,” Tammy says.
“What do you mean?” I say. “I’m here, too.”
“No, because we’re still living here,” Tim says. “It’s not like we couldn’t go somewhere else. But family is here. The things we love are here. Somebody has got to stay.”
It is the first conversational allusion I’ve heard to the “brain drain,” though when I speak to historians, sociologists, and over-compassionate easterners about this place, it’s a common theme. And months before I ever met the Baseball Family, I had an idea of them in mind, a single word to sum them up: stayers. It’s a judgmental word, stark and nearly religious. A population defined by devout inaction, not diggers or movers or players or doers, but instead the opposite of all those things.
I’ve been reading Hollowing Out the Middle, a book dedicated to looking at the struggling midwestern town. Perhaps the most succinct point in it, one that didn’t seem cruel until I came here, was that the towns were killing themselves, pouring resources into their best performers—the smartest, the best athletes, those pushed toward achievement from a very young age. Those people respond to the care and attention by succeeding elsewhere, becoming “a boon for someplace else.” But then that posits, implicitly, that the dwindling number of people living whole lives in Clinton do so because they weren’t tapped for something better.
I interviewed a man who’d done well in finance out east and had returned to his native Clinton after retiring. We spoke in his loft in the Van Allen Building, a landmark, a reference to its builder, a man I should have heard of. He showed me pictures of the old lumber mills, the old churches, the old tugboats, his grandfather in his factory team baseball uniform. He told me that ADM cannot be blamed for not hiring Clinton natives for newly created jobs. This is a new industrial world. Gone are the days when the underskilled could wander down to the factory and punch the clock that same day. The people today are unqualified for the industry that defines their town, one now geared less toward bodies and more toward expertise.
Tim once worked part-time security for Clinton Corn, hated it. Then he worked the line at a smaller factory for seventeen years and didn’t like that much either. He didn’t like
the facelessness of product assembly, didn’t like the twisted roots that his hands had become. Finally, he quit. That would have been a moment to leave Clinton, but he kept going to baseball games, kept dropping by his mother’s for dinner, kept telling Tom Bigwood that things were going to be fine when they weren’t. He got a job as a school custodian, the same job his father got after that errant steel beam knocked him out of factory work when Tim was a little boy.
Tim has been to more LumberKings games, has sat in this stadium more, has yelled himself hoarse more, has made the players feel holy more, than maybe anyone. In the past he would have driven to see Nick and Erasmo as all-stars. In the past there would have been his Crew, a caravan of we going to support their own. But people die. Most lose interest. Tim won’t be driving to Fort Wayne for the all-star game this year, two states to the east, just to be lost in a stadium built to hold eight thousand, in a city with a quarter of a million, a place with no tradition, just gourmet concession stands.
Instead, free from the responsibility of watching, he’ll spend some time on Beaver Island with friends whom he’s known since he can remember. I will imagine them. I will imagine them wandering through the ghost town. They will rest in the shadows of wooden houses, empty and rotting but still standing, on patches of dirt still fertile, growing weeds. They might cobble together a fire with sticks, smoke lingering in the thick trees around them, not even a half mile away from ADM. They will be peaceful and validated and ghostly.
Tonight Tim wolf-whistles for Erasmo, his new ace pitcher. He claps along with his mother and father and sister, for their all-star whom Betty calls E-rissimo. For his part, Erasmo is playing up to his new title, surrendering one run in the first, then seeming personally insulted by that surprise and bearing down. He looks older, and this is the first time I’ve noticed it. It doesn’t seem right that he can change over the course of half a season. But he’s twenty. His jaw isn’t so round anymore as he sets it, takes a sign, fires for a strike. We are watching him change, and it only reinforces, I think, how nothing else is changing around him. He gets the ball back from the catcher. He sets, stares, throws again. Strike. I am watching, chewing sunflower seeds, terrified of his forward momentum.
I don’t travel to the all-star game either. I take a break, go home to sleep in my childhood bed, read my childhood books, sit in the backseat of my father’s car on the way to the cemetery for the tenth anniversary of my brother’s death. People lay pebbles and tell stories from when he was my age, all potential. My father says that he’d never seen somebody want so much, but I keep my head bowed toward the grass, manicured into a sterile beauty, and how can I not think of an infield? What was it that George Carlin said? Two biggest wastes of space, cemeteries and golf courses. You could add baseball fields to that, just as falsely pastoral and dated and futile. I feel my throat close as I lay a pebble on a headstone that has no titles, just a Beatles lyric. It is not a crying throat close, instead a panic attack. The kind that has been sneaking up on me as I drive to the games, drive from them, as I sleep and prepare to return to the field the next day, all the moments when I’m not actually watching.
I don’t think my brother’s death means anything to me anymore in terms of grief. All gentle feelings of loss have faded and were ambiguous even at the time. What has lasted is the disappointment. Somebody who wanted things furiously as a young man and never got any of what he wanted. A reach and then a failure, an end, ashes. A reminder of reality juxtaposed with the books that my father read to me at too old an age, those about a game.
I close my eyes during the car ride home through Long Island. Then I flee into my bedroom with the door closed, lie under Thomas the Tank Engine sheets, black-and-white photographs of Mantle and Mays on the walls around me, plastic trophies on the windowsill, where they will always be. I leave home the next day, drive with college friends to Atlantic City. We dress up in the fanciest clothes we own. I wear cuff links for the first time in my life. We look for coke and fail. We take drinks off the trays that waitresses bring around in the casinos, tip with rumpled one-dollar bills. We say, “I love you, bro,” dangling ourselves on one another’s shoulders at a rooftop club, and we watch men’s hands far older than ours tickling the hems of short skirts that we call trashy and pretend we don’t want to fondle, too. We are all somewhere between twenty-three and twenty-five, somewhere in between college and everything else. We are children born into varying privilege who have been told that we deserve something from the world. There is the Goldman Sachs friend who buys us shots as we pretend not to resent the power of his chosen adulthood or at least pretend that the resentment is based on principle, not jealousy. There’s the rest of us, unmoored.
We walk to a twenty-four-hour diner, past the whores who make everything feel like a movie set, who call out to me with my scared eyes and round face, “Wanna learn something?” We boys laugh to each other and can’t meet their eyes. We ask each other, what if we did it? What if we tried on that type of guy for a persona, the one who high-fives as he fucks a stranger for money, doesn’t care if she appreciates all the things that make him him?
I am no good at playing adult.
One of the whores looks like Chelsea, I think. Or a false and deteriorating version of her. She has the wide-open eyes, the youth, the teasingly pious dress, though less pious, more teasing. In my drunken moralizing, she is sacrilegious. She is an affront to the real Chelsea, the ideal, so unlike anybody I ever met before her. I want to fuck this stranger to feel like a monster or help her to feel wholesome. I do neither and walk by, giggling. I go to eat a burger at a window table, chewing and pointing as one friend vomits in the gutter. The rest of us say, “That seals it; this is the best night ever.” I want to go back to watching.
The all-star game is played, time passes, then some more, and not much has changed. The team is getting a little better. Things are moving forward, but Danny is stuck. He isn’t playing poorly. He isn’t playing great. He isn’t benched, but he only starts half the games. He is alone, though, that is the main difference. After games it’s just him and his host family, old folks in bed by ten, long before he gets home. Chelsea is back in California looking for off-season jobs. She has an interview to be a breakfast monitor at a Days Inn.
Danny and I were going to go see The Expendables, which looks epic, but we’re late because I was at Manning’s Whistle Stop, hiding from the rain, drinking Old Style, and scarfing down frozen pizza. He was at a fan’s house having a steak dinner and missing home. They played pool and said grace. He called Chelsea and put her on speakerphone, and she talked to everyone for a while.
She reminded Danny that he needs to start being proactive, making calls for part-time winter work. He was a salesman at Staples last off-season, red T-shirt, pleated slacks, a name tag saying, “Hi, I’m Daniel.” In five months he sold more than anyone else on staff, set a new branch record, commemorated with a plaque bearing both his photograph and his name.
We’re too late for all the epicness of Sly Stallone and “Stone Cold” Steve Austin sharing the screen, and Danny refuses to pick up the movie in the middle. We see the next available show, Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, a semi-animated hipster opus about a drifting Canadian boy a little older than Danny, a little younger than me. The theater is nearly empty, just us, an elderly couple who may have remained in their seats from the last movie, and two teenage girls who clearly don’t like high school.
We watch Michael Cera’s impossibly narrow shoulders.
We listen to him kick at his sheets and say things like “I just want to lie here.”
We watch two pale men awake next to each other, kiss on the lips, and go for coffee.
We watch a mass of freaks vie for a purple-haired girl’s affections—a skater, a vegan, a chubby lesbian who only wears black.
Danny is writhing at the weirdness. He whispers questions to me, the first time he’s seen me as somebody who might be able to answer something: Why would a straight guy lie down next to two
gay guys? What makes a bass guitar different from a guitar guitar? What are these people’s jobs? Is that what your house looks like?
He wants to know if I, too, have the kinds of knickknacks, band posters, instruments, and books that we see on-screen. He wants to know if I understand these people in glasses identical to my glasses, strewn about on beanbags, talking constantly, never doing. Maybe he has never known anybody who fits the role of lovable white male movie protagonist, outside a war movie, a church movie, or a sports movie. I like to think that there’s a yearning in him for such aimlessness, but how can I know that? His type of hero is better, doesn’t need irony or music trivia proficiency. I come to games for that.
He misses Chelsea. He texts her. I smell his cologne and hair gel, more pungent from the rain outside. He bolts right after the credits, calls Chelsea from the parking lot. When he hangs up, he says, with a touch of true sadness, “Man, this might be the last time I’m ever at this theater.” Then he catches himself, smiles, says, “I said that last year.” He looks back at the Clinton eight-plex, and so I do, too. It’s a movie theater. The names on the marquee are misspelled in places. A kid is taking a cigarette break outside.
“You should take a picture of it,” I say, not sure if I’m kidding.
He shrugs and I drive him to Walmart to buy toilet paper.
He stands in front of the Walmart sign, the shimmering red, almost extraterrestrial, hovering above the stretch of black parking lots around us. He looks up, turns his palms to the sky, gives a high-pitched, holy hum, and then breaks into a soft giggle.
“This is the place,” he says.
And it is. Most of my greatest intimacies in the baseball season have occurred here. Clinton’s Walmart is a super one, complete with clothing, groceries, home and garden, an eye doctor, a Subway, a gas station, a Tire and Lube, and a bank, where you can deposit checks directly for store credit.
Danny even recognizes some employees, says hello, says thanks when they tell him they heard he’s doing well. He doesn’t know that a year ago a ten-year lawsuit was finally settled, begun by Clinton Walmart employees, extending throughout the entire state, becoming the collective action of ninety-seven thousand current and former Iowa Walmart workers who all were victims of a “uniform scheme of wage abuse.” Some of these people saying hi to Danny were probably part of the group that took a stand over being screwed out of minimum wage, and when the victorious dust settled, Walmart paid out $11 million total, or an average of $113 per employee.
