The Essential W. P. Kinsella

by W. P. Kinsella

  “You disapprove of the management, but do you hate the players?”

  “Hate is a word that has no place in sports. I’ve never cheered for Thurman Munson, except in all-star games, but I don’t hang over railings with a red face and hair in my eyes screaming insults either.”

  “And you stay until the last out, even if one team is winning 12–0.” I nod. But the question remains: What will I do if he chooses me? I feel like the thirteenth at table. A chance to be either a god or a devil.

  The crowd suddenly breaks into a chant: “Manny! Manny! Manny!” Rhythmic, ritualistic, the voice of the crowd rises like a monstrous choir as the leather-faced veteran Manny Mota appears from the dugout to swing his bat in the on-deck circle.

  Manny Mota has 143 pinch hits in his career and needs one to tie and two to break the record held by Smoky Burgess.

  “Manny! Manny! Manny!” the crowd rhapsodizes as he approaches the plate.

  The largest of the Buffalo Brigade, built to resemble a chest of drawers with an encyclopaedia set on top of it, stunned by copious amounts of beer, remains standing even after Mota has stepped into the batter’s box, completely blocking my view. Shouts of “Down in front,” come from other people whose view is also obstructed. She ignores the shouts, if she hears them. She stands sturdy and dark as a pillar, a container of beer raised in her cupcake hand.

  On a two-strike count Mota slashes a hard grounder to the right side. Landestoy, the Houston second baseman, gets in front of it, but the force of the ball turns him around. He regains his balance and fires to first but the split-second delay was all Mota needed: he is safe on a very close play. The fans roar their approval. Mota tips his hat to the crowd. When he is replaced by a pinch runner the crowd stands again to cheer him back to the dugout.

  Mr. Revere, apparently through with his interrogation, folds the legal-size pages of questions and, unzipping his leather binder, places them carefully in the bottom between what look like sheets of cardboard or black plastic that may have been blinking golden like a night sky.

  The briefcase seems to be making a whirring sound as if thousands and thousands of tiny impulses are perhaps processing the information just fed to it.

  I look around at the ecstatic crowd. I look at the fat lady, still standing.

  “I’ve decided to do it,” I say to Mr. Revere.

  “I know,” and he smiles in his most kindly manner and I somehow picture a sweet-pea- and petunia-scented evening on the veranda of a square, white, two-storey house somewhere in Middle America where a grandfather and a child sit in the luminous dusk and talk of baseball and love and living. A feeling of comfort surrounds and calms me and I feel an all-encompassing love for my fellow man, so strong that I must be experiencing what others who have found religious faith have experienced. I love all mankind. I love the fat lady.

  Mr. Revere reopens his zippered case and takes out the questionnaire. He studies it closely. I recognize that it is subtly different but I cannot say how. Perhaps only my perceptions are different.

  Mr. Revere smiles again, a smile of infinite sadness, and patience and love. “I’m sorry,” he says. “You’re not the one.”

  “But I’ve decided,” I say.

  “I’m aware of that. I appreciate . . . we appreciate that you want to help. I’m afraid I may have spoiled a very good ball game for you . . .”

  “But I want to . . .” my voice rises like a whining child’s.

  “I’m sorry.” Mr. Revere is extending his hand to me.

  “I’m not good enough,” I flare. People are staring at me. The ballpark is very quiet. Houston is batting in the ninth, going out with a whimper. “I warn you, I’m a writer. I intend to write about this.”

  “Suit yourself,” says Mr. Revere calmly. “In fact, feel free. If we find the right party in the next few days, everything that transpired tonight will be obliterated from every memory. But if we don’t . . .” he smiles again. “Why, who would believe you? If someone actually tracked me down, I’d plead innocence or senility or both. I’m just a retired gentleman from Iowa who came to Los Angeles for a few baseball games and sat beside a strange and rather disturbed young man. You’d end up looking rather foolish, I suspect. Anyway, no one should believe a silly old man who goes around baseball stadiums talking about resurrecting the dead,” and he chuckles.

  The game ends. Mr. Revere makes his way briskly to the aisle and disappears in the crowd. I eventually edge my way to the aisle and down the steps for ten or fifteen rows. The Buffalo Brigade are now behind me. I turn to look at them. I scrunch myself against the railing and wait for them to catch up with me. There is something I have to know.

  The fat lady huffs down the stairs towards me. I turn and face her in all her grossness. Her forehead and cheeks are blotched and somewhat out of focus, as though her face is covered by an inch or two of water.

  “It was you I was going to do it for,” I say. The fat lady stops in mid-waddle, puffs her cheeks like a child, and belches. “It was you that Manny Mota made the hit for. If you’d only realize it. Why don’t you realize it?” I stand in the middle of the aisle facing up towards her. She is close enough for her sweetish odours of beer and perspiration to envelop me.

  “Are you all right, fella?” a man behind her directs the words my way.

  “Move along,” somebody else shouts.

  “Thurman Munson died for you,” I say to the fat lady, who, three steps above me, glares down in bloodshot indignation.

  “Oh, Jesus,” says a voice behind her, a voice that is somewhere between an oath and a prayer.

  First Names

  and Empty Pockets

  A doll is a witness

  who cannot die

  with a doll you are never alone.

  —Margaret Atwood

  Fact, fiction, fantasy, folklore, swirl in a haze of colour, like a hammer-thrower tossing a rainbow. And always, I am haunted by images of broken dolls. Old dolls, lying, arms and legs askew, as if dropped from a great height; dolls with painted, staring eyes, faces full of eggshell cracks, powdered with dust, smelling of abandonment.

  JOPLIN TOPS CHARTS!

  SPLASHERS MAKES A SPLASH!

  The headlines are from Billboard and Cashbox, publications which have become my main reading fare over the past two decades. We’ve been married for nearly fifteen years, Janis and I. Splashers is her seventeenth album.

  The idea for the album cover was mine: Janis seated sidesaddle on a chromed Harley. Two views: one, she is facing the camera, her carrot-coloured hair below her shoulders, less frizzed, but wild and windblown as always; she is wearing jeans, pale-blue platform shoes, rhinestones embedded in the criss-cross straps that disappear under her cuffs, a denim jacket, open, showing a white T-shirt with SPLASHERS! in bold red capitals. She looks scarcely a day older than when I met her. The cosmetics of the years, the lines around the corners of her mouth, eyes, and at the bridge of her nose, have been airbrushed away and she grins, eyes flashing. She is smoking a cigarette, looking tough and sexy.

  The flip side of the album features Janis’ back and spotlights the cycle-gang colours: a golden patch on the faded denim in the shape of a guitar, again with the word Splashers only this time in black script.

  Before I discovered Janis my life was peopled by antiseptic women with short hair and cool dresses, sexless as dolls. Always they lurk like ghosts just out of my vision. I smell their coolness, hear their measured voices, see their shapes when I close my eyes. I shudder them away and think of Janis crooning her love for me alone, our bodies tangled and wet. I think of her and of our mouths overflowing with the taste of each other, and I recall the San Francisco street where I first told her my name. My whole name.

  “Man, you got something nobody else on the street has.”

  “Huh?”

  “A last name, man. Around here it’s all first names and empty pockets. Beer and hard times. Watching the streets turn blue at 4 A.M. while you cadge quarters at a bus stop or outsi
de a bar. Do they have freaky chicks like me where you come from?”

  Also, on the back of the album, there is an inset photo of the band, Saturday Night Swindle. Splashers is their sixth album with us. It was my idea to change bands—Big Brother and the Holding Company were never much—but Janis started with them and we stuck with them for eleven albums.

  “This is what I do instead of having kids,” Janis jokes. And it is true that she has averaged an album every nine months for nearly ten years.

  I know little about music, even after all these years. Janis is my job, my life. “Like holding a lid on a pressure cooker with bare hands,” is how I described my life with Janis to Time magazine, the last time they did a cover story. Generally, I trust the judgement of record producers when it comes to music, though recording the Tanya Tucker song, “What’s Your Mama’s Name?” was my idea. The album, our unlucky thirteenth, has sold nearly two million. I chose the musicians for Saturday Night Swindle. I had an agent I trusted send me résumés of five musicians for each position. Musically there was little to choose, but I had their backgrounds investigated and chose with endurance in mind. There are no heavy drinkers and no hard drug users in this band. The less temptation available the better.

  While they were photographing Janis for the album cover, redoing the front scene for the twentieth time, I crossed the set to her, knelt down and turned up the left cuff of her jeans about three one-inch turns: the way you see it on the album cover.

  “What the fuck are you doing?” Janis demanded.

  “It’s just a touch. It’s the way you were when we first met. Do you remember?”

  “Nah. My memory don’t go that far back. That’s all ancient fucking history.”

  I raise my head and look at her. She grins and her eyes tell me that she does indeed remember.

  I straighten up. “I’d kiss you, but the makeup man would hemorrhage.”

  “Later, Sugar,” and she purses her lips in an imitation kiss. One of the photographers looks quizzically at the rolled-up denim and then at me.

  “Trust me,” I say.

  She sidled up to me, plump, wide-waisted, a sunset of hair in a frizzy rainbow around her face. Her hand hooked at the sleeve of my jacket.

  “Looking for a girl?”

  “How much?” There was a long pause as if she was genuinely surprised that I was interested. Her eyes flashed on my face, instantly retreated to the sidewalk. Then she uttered a single, almost inaudible word, like a solitary note of music that hung in the silence of the soft San Francisco night.

  “Five.”

  I almost laughed it was so pitiful. Would have if she had resembled the whores I’d seen downtown: booted, bra-less, hard as bullets, whores who asked for $30, sometimes $40, plus the room. I took a quick look at her, a husky, big-boned girl, with a wide face and squarish jaw, anything but pretty, but I found her appealing, vulnerable, in need.

  There was another long pause before I said, “Okay.” Her fingers still gripped the sleeve of my jacket. We were on a dark street a mile or more from downtown San Francisco, a street full of ghostly old houses and occasional small shops. The houses were three-storey, some with balconies, all with latticework, and cast eerie shadows over the street. It was my first of three days in San Francisco. I had never been there before.

  “Where do we go?” she said and looked around the deserted street as if hoping that a hotel might suddenly materialize.

  “I’m a stranger here,” I said. “I thought you’d know of a place.”

  “Yeah, well I’m kind of lost myself. Just got to walking. I don’t usually leave the downtown. Business hasn’t been very good tonight,” and she made an effort at a smile. She was wearing faded jeans, one cuff rolled up about four inches as if she had recently ridden a bicycle.

  The Iowa town where I come from, where I’ve lived all my life, is a white-siding and verandah town of 20,000 souls, of old but newly painted houses on tree-lined streets, lilacs, American flags, one-pump service stations, and good neighbours.

  I work framing buildings, sawing, pounding nails, bare to the waist in the humid summers, bronzed as maple, sweat blinding my eyes, my hands scarred. I will likely never leave this town except for a brief holiday to San Francisco, and possibly a honeymoon trip; later, we will take our daughters to Disneyland.

  The house where I live with my parents is square and white, so perfect it might have been built with a child’s blocks. There are marigolds, asters and bachelor buttons growing in a kaleidoscope of colour between the sidewalk and the soft, manicured lawn. On a porch pillar, just above the black metal mailbox, is a sign, black on white, about a foot square that reads: DOLL HOSPITAL.

  In my workshop I make dolls as well as repair them. I show them to no one for they are always incomplete. Broken dolls: fat pink arms that end at shredded wrists, sightless eyes, a twisted leg, a scar on a maligned cheek like an apple cut by a thumbnail. There is a balance to be kept. I make the unwhole whole, but . . .

  The dolls are my way of being different. A delicate rebellion. They are my way of handling energies that I don’t understand, electric energies which course like wine and neon through me, wailing like trains in my arms and chest.

  “There are hotels,” she said, and laughed, a stuttering sound like a bird trapped in a box. “Maybe if we walk down to . . .” She named a street unfamiliar to me. She wore a man’s blue-and-red-checkered work shirt with the cuffs open, jeans and unisex loafers worn down at the sides.

  We walked for a couple of blocks. She scuffed one of her feet, a sound that magnified and made the late evening silence almost ominous. We both, I’m certain, felt ridiculous in the company of the other. I was wearing brown slacks, freshly cleaned and creased, a pastel shirt and a brown corduroy jacket. Nondescript, straight, I have always felt that pastels provided me with anonymity, a privacy that I craved as much as Janis feasted on spotlights and crowds. We fought about my image. Slowly I have let go. I have let my hair grow; had it styled. I wear faded jeans and a Pierre Cardin shirt, and hand-tooled boots and belt of leather, soft and warm as sundrenched moss.

  “Do you think we’re getting closer to downtown or farther away?” I asked.

  “I don’t know.” There was an ice-cream store across the street, closed of course, a pink neon cone blinked in the window.

  “I have a room.”

  “Where?”

  I named the hotel.

  “I don’t know it.” I fished the key out of my jacket pocket. We checked the address on the oxblood tag, our heads together under a streetlight. Neither of us knew where it was. It was there that we exchanged names. Close to her, I discovered about her the odour of peaches ripe in the sun. I remembered visiting my grandmother in summer, walking in a peach orchard near Wenatchee in the Willamette Valley in Washington where the peaches lay like copper coins on the grass, where the distant-engine drone of wasps filled the air as they sucked away the flesh from the fallen fruit. As they did, the peach scent thickened making the air soft and sweet as a first kiss. Walking in San Francisco that night was like stepping among peach petals.

  “Perhaps if I get a taxi,” I said, looking around. The street was dark in all directions.

  “I’ve never done this before,” Janis said, and leaned against me, taking my hand, hers rough and dry as cardboard.

  “I believe you,” I said. We both laughed then. Hers less nervous now, coarse and throaty, full of barrooms and stale beer.

  “I mean, I’ve propositioned guys before, but no one ever took me up on it. They practically walked right through me like I was fucking invisible.”

  “Everyone has to start someplace,” I said inanely.

  “When we get to the top of the hill we’ll be able to tell by the lights where downtown is,” Janis said.

  “Or we could look for moss on the north side of utility poles?”

  “You’re weird,” she said, and I could see, as the golden tines of streetlight touched her face that she had thousands of freckles.
“Gimme a cigarette.”

  “I don’t have any . . . I don’t smoke.”

  “I don’t suppose you’d have a drink on you either?”

  “No.”

  “You’re sure you want a girl?” and her mouth widened into a beautiful grin as she held my hand tighter and we both laughed. “Where you from?”

  “Iowa.”

  “They grow corn there don’t they? A state full of corn farmers. Are you a corn farmer?”

  “No. I repair dolls.” I looked quizzically at her to see how she’d react.

  “No shit? That’s weird, man. You’re funny. I don’t mean queer funny. Well, maybe I do. No, I think funny, funny. You are, aren’t you?”

  “And you,” I said, “where do you come from?”

  “About fifteen miles from Louisiana,” she said, and it was her turn to look at me with lifted eyebrows.

  “I don’t understand,” I said.

  “You don’t need to. It’s a private joke,” and she paused. “I sing a little.” We had reached the top of the hill. “Hey, we are going in the right direction. When we get down to the lights we can ask somebody how to get to that hotel of yours.”

  But before we went to the hotel she wanted to go to a bar. “There’s this joint I know. It’s downstairs and there isn’t a window in the place. I love it. It’s always the same time there . . . no night or day . . . it’s like being closed up in a bottle of water . . . time just stands still . . .”

  I looked at her, scruffy as a tomcat, but radiating the same kind of pride.

  It was a forlorn bar, a dozen stools and a few wooden tables. A place that looked as if it had endured a century of continuous Monday nights. There was a red exit sign above a bandstand where a lonely guitar leaned against a yellowed set of drums.

  Old men dozed at the tables, a woman with straight grey hair, dressed in a man’s tweed topcoat, glared angrily into a beer. A black man, looking like a failed basketball player, drunk or drugged, lolled crazily on a bar stool. A sampling of Janis’ favourite people.

  “I understand them,” she says.