Class A

by Lucas Mann

  Hank balances a bag of frozen green beans on his knee and asks for someone to remind him when it’s been twenty minutes. He closes his eyes. He will play through the knee injury. I will stand with him after every game, BJ pushing down and asking where it hurts, him nodding at almost every spot. It will feel heroic. I will be proud to stand over him, asking, like everybody, if he’ll be okay.

  Yes, he will say. I’m fine.

  He will say things that I think even he knows are hyperbolic, that he got out of a movie. Just tell me I can walk and I’ll play, that kind of line. But, damn, it works.

  BJ will look severe and say, with more pathos than I’ve ever heard from him, That’s a man right there.

  Teammates will walk in. Hank, you all right, brother?

  He will say, Sí, sí, sí. Or, You know me, too dumb to quit.

  Everybody will tell him, We need you, and what is better than that?

  I ask him if this is some homage to his father, and he says, come on, stop reaching, he just wants to play. But it’s hard not to inject a parallel into his set-jawed stoicism. Hank here, playing on a knee that makes noises when he moves, his father, whose knee is shattered, lying on a couch outside L.A. in a full-on metal leg brace. No matter what happens with this season, Hank, limping less than his father, will be climbing trees in Pasadena with a chain saw, doing his part with the kind of resilience that the un-resilient like me inflate toward godliness. And it’s not just me. We all lean out at him from the stands, try to think to ourselves that if faced with similar pain, we too would conquer it. That’s what he’s doing, conquering. And conquer is a nice word, full of options, full of power. Hank feels powerful, even as he limps.

  In a week when a foul ball cracks his thumb, reaggravating an injury from last year, never properly treated, Hank will again refuse to come out. He will be told that consistent pressure on the thumb means it might never heal right, but then he’ll be asked, what’s the point of full thumb mobility when you’re retired? And he’ll shrug, say he wants to play.

  I’m not sure what it takes to throw out the first pitch at a LumberKings game. I think you’re supposed to pay for the privilege but some are given a break. I’ve seen children do it for their birthdays, bouncing the ball over the plate as Brad calls out, “Curveball, steee-rike on the outside corner!” I’ve seen the employees of a local insurance company all get a turn, and old men just retired, and the mayor, and eighteen-year-old newly enlisted marines paraded around their hometown before shipping out, while recruiters challenge fresh teenagers to pull-up contests in the parking lot.

  Tim is throwing out the first pitch before the final home game of the year. I know he didn’t have to pay. His pitch will be in Tom Bigwood’s memory, a cause deserving a free pass. Tom Bigwood never got to throw out a first pitch. When he finally got up the courage to ask, he looked in the mirror and decided that he didn’t want to be seen unable to get ball to glove, standing ashamed and greenish and ghostly in the place he loved most in the world.

  “Why?” I asked his sister-in-law as she showed me pictures from the little shrine in her kitchen. “Why never ask until …?”

  “It was one of those things he always wanted to do,” she said. “But time kept passing and he’d get nervous and he wouldn’t ask and then it was too late.”

  He wanted to see a major-league game, preferably the Cubs, but by the end he would have accepted the Cardinals. And he didn’t. He wanted to travel somewhere, sometime. The last nights before he died, he was yelling in pain for a while, but in those minutes when he could say real words, he told his family that he never sat in the Lumber Lounge. He just realized that. He sat in the same seat he always sat in, by third base, looked out at the people sitting above the right-field wall, thought, I bet it’s nice out there. But he never went. And he couldn’t remember why.

  She said when the season started again, he’d sit out there.

  He looked at her and shook his head and said no.

  Tim has been drinking all day, first to dull the magnitude of the occasion, then at a certain point, I think, to heighten it. I find him wandering between the concession stands and his seat, high-fiving people he knows and people he doesn’t. He’s wearing his old Roadkill Crew tank top and the 1991 Clinton Giants championship cap the same age as his shirt. We hug, and then my shirt is wet because he’s crying. He says he’s sorry for the crying, and then he thinks about it and says, “No I’m not.”

  I realize I’ve never seen him throw. I’ve never seen him run. I’ve never seen him swing, not even kidding around with one of those toy bats in the gift shop. And I’ve never heard him talk swinging, either, unlike so many others, Matt and Derek and Ryan and all the guys at away games whose faces blend into one guy who was once great and has since let himself go.

  “I’m gonna throw the ball up,” he says. “Like I’m throwing at heaven.”

  I say nothing.

  He says, “I’m gonna throw it up so Tom can reach down and grab it.”

  We stand for a while. He sways and I think about how hot it is, how the air has stopped for the last part of the summer, no current on the river, no drift to the smoke. I look to Tim and try to see if he’s kidding. He’s not a God guy normally. He believes in fate, I think, karma, trying to be good, but this place is the closest thing he has to a church on Sundays. I’ve never heard him say “heaven.” I’ve never heard him speculate about the future, only inflate the past. He cannot actually think that a cancer-ravaged hand will reach down and grab an official Midwest League ball, a call of “Thanks!” echoing from the clouds. If it were me, I would be mortified at the thought of thousands of eyes casually on me, throwing a ball so strangely high that it makes people look at their feet and wait for it to be over.

  “He’ll get himself one last ball,” Tim says. He hugs me again, weaves away.

  I can feel the nerves in the stands with the Baseball Family, watching him. Is he at the point of good drunken openness or the point past it? Is he embarrassing to watch alone, standing, without the support of the voices of the group? And will people know what this is for? Will the players? Danny remembers Tom Bigwood, and maybe Hank, too. They were here when Tom was. Or maybe they don’t remember. But he was so memorable. Still, has anybody reminded them of the man who used to sit in my seat?

  From the PA booth, Brad announces Tim as a “great fan,” and those who know him say, “Woo.” He says that Tim is here to honor the memory of Tom, another great fan. I see some people nodding. There is a scattered clap. It is so quiet. Tim waves like he’s the queen of England and toes the rubber of the mound. He winds up, long and slow, like a grainy film clip of a greatest-generation star. And then he keeps his word.

  It’s an awkward, halting toss, throwing his body forward as hard as he can but angling his arm up toward the sky and the idea of Tom. I want the ball to hang longer than it does. At least it makes it up over the stadium lights for a moment, feels like something out of a bad movie, a guilty pleasure. But it falls fast and hard. Hank is waiting at the plate as the honorary catcher. He’s in his crouch but isn’t sure what to do. He follows the ball as it lands a good fifteen feet in front of him on the grass. He watches it bounce once, then roll, then stop. He walks to pick it up.

  The two meet for a moment, a photo op for Betty and anyone else who cares about this. I imagine that Hank can smell the booze on Tim, in the tears and the sweat that he is not bothering to hide. They shake hands, and Tim steps forward, puts his arm gingerly on Hank’s shoulder. Hank lets him. Tim is ushered away.

  “Win for us,” he slurs over his shoulder.

  Hank looks unsure. “Okay,” he says.

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  What Is Left Behind

  BOYHOOD IS FOR SAVING THINGS. That’s the way I always understood it. Give everything meaning, reach out to touch all objects you pass, then pile, then hoard. Eventually, somebody will tell you that it’s time to cull what you have saved, make the tough decisions: If the words have fa
ded off the front, then it’s no longer identifiable and should be disposed of. If two parts must be re-glued, then the sum of those parts is null. There is only so much space.

  It was cars with me at first. I was a nonverbal, barely mobile toddler, one who inspired worry, was brought to developmental psychologists, where I remained disappointing on the office floor. That is until Matchbox cars were brought out. I pointed at the cars—Toyota, Mitsubishi, Honda Civic—animated by what I knew. Cars had faded for me by the time I was five, I think because I grasped that they were fundamentally ordinary, a new one parked across the street every day, something that any fool could know, own, drive. I watched my father watch games, and I dedicated myself to faithful knowledge of baseball, not so much how to play, but how to understand it holistically. The peculiar language, the ever-present past, most of all the way it could be quantified, the sheer amount of information generated in any given inning that somebody bothered to mention. On the 1991 New York Yankees, a terrible team twenty games out of first place, I knew that Steve Howe, former coke addict, rehabilitated his career and his teammates claimed in interviews he drank eight cups of coffee in the clubhouse before each game, more than anyone they’d ever seen. He was, thus, a “real character.” Scott Sanderson won sixteen games, but he lost ten. He was an all-star that year, for the first and last time. Matt Nokes had twenty-four home runs, and I had one Matt Nokes rookie card.

  There’s a ball in my parents’ house, never used, bought at Macy’s right before a Pat Kelly and Andy Stankiewicz autograph session that, to my great surprise, was sparsely attended on a freezing November morning. The ink from both utility infielders faded off that ball because we kept it near the kitchen window. It is a pointless trinket now, just a baseball with no dirt on it. Which doesn’t really matter, because who are Pat Kelly and Andy Stankiewicz? Pat Kelly coaches a team in Australia, which almost sounds like a joke. Stankiewicz is a roving instructor for the Mariners. He came through Clinton, and when I said to him, “You’re Andy Stankiewicz,” he looked way too shocked.

  My father had a Mickey Mantle rookie card as a boy in Brooklyn, and his mother threw it out, a piece of maybe false family trivia that used to enrage me on behalf of both my father and Mickey Mantle. At my grandmother’s apartment in Bay Ridge, I stared at her, wary, unable to comprehend how someone I was supposed to love could be so heartless toward the most important piece of cardboard ever in existence. Only when she fed me did the suspicion evaporate, and I remembered to love her.

  This is a benign anecdote, one consistently proved so by the slew of people I’ve met whose fathers had a similar prized possession, whose clean-happy immigrant grandmothers also failed to recognize their significance. These stories take on a natural progression, moving from childhood pain into something funny, an adorable revelation bolstered by an adult self-awareness that suggests the appropriate order of a boy’s life. To care so much is a phase, one that men are supposed to look back on after women change them into something more sensible.

  It is why adjectives like cute, at best, and quirky, and even sad sometimes feel most appropriate in thinking about Joyce. There is wonder, reverence even, in her saving, not family heirlooms, but objects related to memories of a game. That wonder is necessarily pathetic, powerless, especially because she is a woman remembering the exploits of boys and I have absorbed the idea that such remembering needs to have a penis attached to it. But I love her reverence, too. I love it more now that the season is almost over and mourning for something I didn’t know I cared about has begun to sting my throat and spread hot through my torso. And yet I feel as if I’m supposed to pity her still. She is embodying boyhood, and that doesn’t make sense.

  · · ·

  “Do you hold on to things?” she asks me when she meets me at the door to her home, one story, four rooms, a few blocks away from the stadium. It is a heavy question. I begin to stammer. She assures me it’s not a big deal, she just wants me to be ready to understand when I walk into her place for the first time. She invites people in sometimes, like her father, and they, well. She goes silent.

  She looks down. She rubs her hands together in small circles and says, “It’s cluttered in here, that’s all I mean.”

  I walk into her TV room, and it is not cluttered. It is packed, yes. A fire hazard, probably. It smells of yellowed paper and cat piss, or something generally catty and sour. But clutter implies a randomness that Joyce will not allow. She smiles. She tells me she has a system. She snatches a box of index cards from an end table right by the front door. The cards are stiff, well stored. They’re color coded, each written on. She tells me it helps to have a guide to her things, her home.

  I didn’t want to come here, perhaps because everybody I ever told about Joyce said, “Get in that house; the place must be a gold mine.” I knew that she would be open and she would be proud, and no reaction that I might have to her collection could come close to approximating what she thinks it deserves. She will present it as more than it is. That’s the reason to go. It’s not like I haven’t heard the term “cognitive dissonance.” I don’t find Joyce sad. I don’t think I do.

  Her cat is matted, of course, nearly dreadlocked. Obese and almost twenty years old.

  The light is dim all through the house, of course.

  And there is one recliner, of course, angled at the TV, her shape permanently outlined in the cushion. There’s a couch to the side where I will sit. It feels un-sat-on.

  There’s a LumberKings cozy. A LumberKings ashtray. There is a channel on the TV in the background that you have to pay extra for, all baseball, all the time. The volume is loud, a man with a voice like Dave’s but deeper is announcing the next hour of programming, a countdown of the nine best left fielders of all time, certain to cause some argument, certain to be a whole lot of fun.

  “Did you turn this on for me?” I ask.

  She looks at me funny. “No, I just like to keep up on who they pick. This morning it was second basemen. Can you guess who was number one?”

  And then, before I can answer, “Oh, of course you can.”

  She walks into the dining room. She says, “Look.” I do.

  Baseballs.

  They are everywhere.

  From the door frame to the wall on the left side of the room, interrupted only by windows. Then floor to ceiling on the far wall, then mixed in with photos and cards down the right side. There are no spaces. This is a room three-dimensionally wallpapered, an effect that could almost seem futuristic if it wasn’t, in fact, the opposite. Each ball is in its own clear plastic box, the kind you can buy in bulk at Walmart for three bucks a pop, which, multiplied by 889 pops, is a lot of money invested in protection and display. But she has paid for the overall effect. It works.

  “They all have names on them, the baseballs,” she says, because I’ve lingered in the doorway, too far from any one ball to discern what makes it different from the others. I walk closer.

  Danny is on the left wall under the window. Fourth row from the bottom. Big D, big C, lots of practiced squiggles in the middle. I ask her to point him out because he’s gone now, finally moved up to High-A, hanging in the purgatory of being just removed from our reality, still vivid, more vivid because he’s ours to remember how we will. That’s when she starts looking at signatures more closely, Joyce tells me. Once the signer is gone. She runs her fingers across clear plastic, moving her lips silently, the box of different-colored index cards in her left hand. Old men in libraries, scholars or grandfathers or wizards from Disney movies, come to mind. Kindly experts, all. She stops her finger on the ball she was searching for, and we both crouch to look at it closely, as if it would now reveal something new, something that had lain dormant until Danny’s departure.

  On his last night, Danny stood in the tiled, open shower room, naked and still damp after everyone had gone home. He faced the mirror on the wall and held a teammate’s hair clippers, the kind used mostly by Venezuelans to sculpt shapes along the sides of their heads. D
anny put the machine on the most extreme setting, shaved everything onto the tiles, cropping military close so that his ears stuck out more than usual and he looked four years younger, an unintended consequence of catharsis.

  It was his most obnoxious display of defiance the whole season, perhaps his only one. I wasn’t there to see it, because no one was, but I smiled at this blunt, obvious gesture the next morning. Some of the team stood in a circle around what he’d left, stuck to the floor that’s always a bit damp and soapy. Some people laughed, maybe impressed. Some called Danny a dick or a faggot or, worse, a loser. The clubhouse manager pushed forward to look, muttered, “Fuck,” went to get his broom and his mop, and proceeded to wipe.

  “I’m happy for him,” Joyce says as we look at his name. “I didn’t think he was going anywhere. He promised me a bat at the end of the season. I wish I got to say good-bye.”

  “I think Danny was a little fed up with the team,” I tell Joyce. “He cut all his hair off and left it on the floor of the clubhouse.”

  Joyce smiles, then looks serious and says, “What did they do with that hair?”

  I feel my back straighten up, flinching away from her and her implied desire, both together. The sun sneaks through the slats in her blinds, which makes me all the more aware of her efforts to keep light out. Sun fades ink; ink takes priority. Joyce, I’m pretty sure, just made a gesture toward a hair doll, moving her interest into the realm of the desperate and bodily.

  “Oh, just teasing,” she says. I laugh too quickly and too loudly, and then she does the same.

  She is funny. Do I let myself acknowledge that? How does she see the way I see her? How does she see herself?

  She did ask Danny for everything but the bodily—a hat with a note scrawled on the brim, a broken bat, a whole bat. A jersey if he could manage it. A printed picture of him, signed. His address or his parents’ address so that the give-and-take of possessions and sentiments could become potentially infinite. So where is the line? Or is there one at all? There has to be one, a defined place to separate dedicated from cartoonish. These are questions that have been lurking all season, growing louder as I have become more invested in the investment around me. Joyce is the most overt manifestation of fanhood because of all that she keeps, as if she’s been waiting for somebody to say, Prove to me that you care about the team, so she can bring the person to this place, her home, say look, make it clear.