The Bullpen Gospels (20 page)

I stood with my glove on my hip. If you haven’t noticed by now, things are
way
more mature up here in Double-A…

The game started at 7:05 in the evening, and the Missions’ relief core rambled out to the pen seconds before the anthem was sung. The visiting bullpen was indeed a pen; two mounds caged by chain-link fencing. Fans could poke us through its links or stare down at us from the seats above, pointing as if we were zoo animals on display. Composed partially of the right field fence, if the right fielder went back on a ball, he would only be inches from running into the relievers languishing just beyond the links.

Next to the pen was a swimming pool. So close was the pool, spray from cannonballs could splash warming pitchers. Cutting across the skyline was a towering bridge, under which freighters the size of the stadium passed carrying cargo. The stadium was a gem displayed majestically on the shore of the gulf. Playing on it reminded me how cool my job could be.

The relief core dragged the pen’s chairs across the grass and up the fencing. We sat, kicking our feet up and catching our cleats in the fence’s links. We watched the first couple of innings roll by, fans splashing next to us, ships passing by in the distance. The sun set and bright lights beaming out of a deep, Texas-sized sky illuminated the field.

Aside from a few new faces, the bullpen had mugs I’d come to know as friends through previous seasons. We’d been through a lot of battles together. Surviving the minors is a war of attrition, and we’d braved the odds at each other’s side, something that, in a game of production or extinction, is worth honoring. There was a feeling of belonging by suiting up with these guys again.

Beyond our individual histories, the Missions’ bullpen was a simple matter of ones and threes. One finger for the hard-sinking fastballs and three for nasty sliders. Everyone in the pen threw them, almost as if it were a fraternity requirement. If you had asked any of the boys about the suspicious absence of a changeup, they would have replied that changeups are for pussies.

I threw a changeup, incidentally.

We didn’t talk much that night. I was new and so I kept quiet, which was fine because I had a lot to think about. I tried to remind myself I was on the track to being a prospect again, even though I didn’t feel like one since talking to my folks. I told myself that their reaction was okay and that they didn’t have to be stunned by a promotion to Double-A right now. If I put up good numbers, they will be impressed. Besides, I could still walk up to anyone in this stadium with my uniform on and make his day. Baseball had power, and I was its wielder.

When the last out of the game was made, I picked up the stray catch balls littering the pen. It was my job, as the latest addition to the Missions’ bullpen staff, to wrangle up leftover equipment and cart it back to the locker room come game’s end. While I herded balls back into their bag, fans predictably called down to me in hopes of receiving leftovers.

I put each ball back into the catch bag except one, a chewed-up fifty-five footer, the victim of a slider that ate dirt before it found a mitt. I placed that ball in my back pocket, earmarking it to give away. I finished equipment duties, grabbed the pen bag and zipped it shut, picked up my glove, and started walking the stretch of warning track toward the lockers.

The entire trip back to the pen, fans begged—leaning over the rails, calling to me for the ball, any ball, including the one in my back pocket. I walked by them, disciplined eyes straight ahead, ignoring. Their anticipation turned to letdown and then their letdown to anger. They told me I sucked for ignoring them, which incidentally I also ignored. I’ve spent enough time in this game to develop insult immunity when I don’t meet fan expectations.

I was going to give the ball in my pocket out to someone; that’s the whole reason I kept it separate. I didn’t know who yet; I was waiting for someone to catch my eye. Passing out a free ball is tricky business. It can make one person happy and a whole bunch of others angry, like these fickle folks chewing me out. Everyone will say he or she deserves it, everyone has a kid at his first game, it’s everyone’s birthday, and everyone is a lifelong fan.

When I went into the underbelly of the stadium, onto the concourse running beneath the seats, I walked past a fenced section that exposed some of the stadium’s innards to the fans. The fencing came together to form a gate where carts and supplies could enter. A security guard manned the gate from my side, keeping fans who lined the links of the section in check on the other. They, too, called to me as I went past.

On the far side of the gate, I noticed a boy in a wheelchair. When I saw him, I stopped. I can’t read minds and I can’t search souls, but I wanted to give this kid the ball in my pocket. It just felt like the right thing to do. Moreover it felt like something I needed to do. I pulled the ball free and walked to the gate.

I asked the security guard to let me through. He obliged, opening it for me. I stepped tentatively across the threshold. Immediately, programs and ticket stubs were pressed in front of my face. Parents called for their children, and whispers of urgency for something autographable and an implement with which to sign spread through the mass. They didn’t want my autograph. They wanted the autograph of a baseball player, any player. I, however, wanted something more personal. I ignored them, walking through the spear tips of their pens to the boy in the wheelchair.

Standing there, looking down at him, I realized he was strapped into his chair. The expression on his face was not one of joy or expectation, but unintelligible emotion, continuously shifting while his head lulled side to side, sometimes gently, sometimes in thrashing spasms. His eyes focused on me as much as they did anything else, as if I were not there at all. He spoke no words, merely sounds and labored breaths.

I knelt and did the only thing I knew how to do in my uniform. They only thing I’ve ever been expected to do in it. I smiled and acted cheerful, like some fifties comic book hero talking to a Boy Scout. I produced the ball and held it out to him, as if it were words enough.

I expected him to take it from me, to snatch it up like every other child, yet his bent hands and crooked fingers continued to trace spastic patterns in the air. To him, I was not there and there was no ball—no souvenir, no magical bauble of white leather, no chance for a lasting memory. Spittle dribbled down the boy’s chin and collected on a napkin tucked in the collar of his shirt.

His sister stepped in. She smiled graciously and requested the ball. I handed it to her. “Look!” she said to her brother in a singsong voice. “It’s a real baseball player and he’s brought you a ball! Way cool, huh?” She rubbed his arm and placed the ball at his fingertips, but they did not grab hold. The ball fell to the ground.

The boy’s face did not react to her excitement, nor did it cringe at the dropping of the ball. Rather, it contorted in a series of expressions, the ambiguous shifting of a face that could not cooperate with its owner. His sister picked up the ball, and in her hands it remained.

I looked at the both of them, then to the fans, and then to them again. Suddenly I was not there but standing in front of my father in his kitchen chair—his head in his hands while I stood awkwardly in front of him in uniform. I held out to him my accomplishment; I pressed it into his hands. Out it slipped, tumbling to the floor, where it shattered. Unconcerned, my father looked on, ever inward into a world none of us could understand, none of us could penetrate.

Fans, parents, and kids alike, stared at me. All of them were more than capable of receiving that ball, all willing to react with the excitement I’d come to expect. I felt their gazes crush me, as if I should be doing something I couldn’t do.

I was imploding now, falling to pieces from the inside, until the uniform I wore was a hollow shell moving on its own. I didn’t want to give the ball anymore. I wanted to give a part of me. I wanted to tear my uniform off and wring out every last ounce of magic it had within it. I wanted everyone to know how powerless I felt in a costume that people believed could fix everything, yet fixed nothing.

If I could have broken my dreams into pieces and sold them for deliverance, I swear I would have. All I had was a baseball. And while so many people would have fallen over themselves to get it, and would have pushed, argued, and cussed me for not choosing them to bestow it upon, I chose that boy, the one person in the stadium who couldn’t take it. The one person I could offer nothing to no matter how hard I squeezed the fabric of my outfit. It wasn’t fair, it wasn’t right, and it wasn’t going to change. His sister smiled on, her patient face still watching me, ball in hand. I looked at her but couldn’t find any words. Then she spoke, saying, “I’m sorry.”

She must have known her brother couldn’t take the ball. She must have grown immune to the broken joys. She knew the game, and its most revered artifact were rendered meaningless by his disability. She knew it because circumstances didn’t change his personality. She knew the hardship of trying to share something close to her heart with a brother who could never relate. She knew in some small way what it must be like to stand by and watch events you could never change as they play out completely beyond your control no matter how many times you shook your fists at the sky above. Why on earth was she apologizing to me?

She was like my mother—apologizing to me for my own delusion. She was making the best of something she did nothing to deserve but couldn’t fix. And no one, no matter what they wore or what they did, was going to step in and solve it.

I did not sign any autographs after I left that boy. Why should I? My name was as useless as my jersey, a scribble, a stretch of ink, and nothing more.

I was operating under the assumption that after the game we’d head back to the hotel and go to sleep. You know what happens when you assume. It turned out, instead of catching some much-needed
Z
s on a nearby hotel pillow, I was riding another five hours on a bus as we made our way to the next town: Midland, Texas.

I had been awake for twenty-four hours by this point. All I wanted to do was sleep. My mind was so heavy with thoughts and my body with fatigue that even the notoriously uncomfortable seats of a minor league bus would be like clouds beneath my ass. However, this was no Lake Elsinore where I had bus-seating dominion. All the seats had been decided on, and I would be the guy standing in the aisle while everyone pretended to be sleeping, deaf, or dead.

I had to beg players to let me sit with them. Unlike the tour bus in Lake Elsinore, the bus here was older and smaller. Most of the guys I could pull the time card on were already doubled up. I sat with Cesar Ramos, another of the team’s starters, and though he did not outright tell me he hated me for ruining his seating arrangements, it was clear he did not enjoy the company.

A side effect of spending way too much time in A-ball was that getting choice bus seats had spoiled me. I could no longer sleep with a man pressed up next to me, bumping my thigh with his, jutting his elbow into mine when he adjusted his iPod. I wasn’t the trooper I was when I first signed, the player who could sleep folded in a suitcase, if necessary. Now I could not fall asleep without the luxurious space provided me by two open seats. I felt like a sardine wedged into a can. I sat there thinking about sleep, thinking about what it would feel like to get some of it, and wondering what it would feel like if I could never do it again. I began to envision hell as a place where people desperate for sleep were constantly jerked awake by a bumpy tour bus and seatmates who couldn’t pick the right song on their iPod.

Eddie gave me eighty dollars in meal money, and I ended up spending it on a seat. I bought a pair of twin open seats from the team’s strength coach, a man we called Juice. He had been in the back playing cards with Woot and Ward and had lost his meal money. He happily exchanged his seat for a chance to buy back in.

I took Juice’s seat, but despite how hard I tried, I still could not fall asleep. I tried every awkward angle, leaning my head on the glass, trying to curl up over both seats, letting my legs dangle across the aisle. Nothing. Finally, when I got remotely close to slumber, I felt the urge to pee.

Exceedingly frustrated with my life at this point, I made my way back to the bus’s bathroom. I had to climb back to it, picking my way over seat backs, trying not to step on other players’ heads as I went. The aisles were populated with obstructions such as card games using coolers for tables. It was as if the bus were a casino on wheels, and as dingy and cramped as it was, it was still better than the Lake Elsinore Hotel.

The high rollers sat in the bus’s rear, next to the bathroom door. To get in, I had to interrupt their game. They made me wait until the hand was over. Woot won on a bluff, to which he said, “I’ve been tricking people into thinking I’ve got something I don’t for years now—just ask my wife.” Woot got up and allowed me entrance into the bathroom. Before I entered, I noticed his scooter was parked in the rear of the bus as well. I had to pay eighty bucks for a seat and his scooter got one for free?

In the bathroom, I steadied myself with one hand, and relieved myself with the other. Trying to take a whizz on a tour bus is a lot like surfing. It’s a delicate blend of balance and stream control. Not that it really matters if I miss, since by trip’s end, the bathroom would be covered in pee from those less concerned than myself, but I was always taught to have pride in everything you do.

As I piddled, I heard scuffling outside the door. A thump hit the door, laughter, and then things calmed down. I tapped the last drop out, zipped up, and grabbed the door handle—it wouldn’t open. It was being held in place. “Very funny guys. Oh no, I’m locked in the bathroom and I can’t get out! Come on, this was a tired act in college.”

“Hold on buddy, we gotta finish this hand; then we’ll let you out.”

I was pissed when I heard that, no pun intended. I shouldn’t have to explain the short temper a person has when he’s not slept for days. “Seriously you guys? What the fuck,” I barked. I punched the door.

“Don’t be a dick, dude, just wait.”

I heard more commotion outside and some laughing. That didn’t sound like a card game to me.

“Okay—just watch your feet when you come out.” The bus casino allowed me to exit.

I pushed the door open cussing under my breath. I looked down at the floor as instructed. Bottles with dip spit had collected there, as well as some wadded up junk food wrappers and a scooter wheel. There was nothing to look out for, nothing that wasn’t usually there. I took a step forward, eyes scanning the dimly lit floor of the bus. Still nothing.

“What the fuck am I supposed to be watching out—” The collective gasp of the team pulled my eyes up. There, about a foot from my face, dangling from the ceiling was the spread ass cheeks and ball sack of Jon Dalton. He was hanging from the bus’s luggage racks completely naked, and I was on a collision course with his coin purse. One more step and he could have knighted me.

“Jesuscriss!” I blurted, and fell backward, tripping on the scooter wheel and falling into Woot. Everyone on the bus had scuffled back into viewing position and was now bursting with laughter. Dalton dismounted, landing in the aisle. It turned out he wasn’t naked—he had on socks.

“Spider-Man!” a patch of players shouted. Dalton was laughing as he pointed at me, “You just got Spider-Manned, bud.” He had one hand twirling his junk while he said it, as if he were thanking his sidekick for another job well done.

“I have no idea what to say to that,” I said.

Woot pushed me back to my feet. Guys were still laughing, and I started to chuckle despite myself. I made my way back to my seat, completely unconcerned with anything on the floor. As I went some of the team smacked me in the ass for being a good sport. Ox smacked me so hard my ass almost fell off. Needless to say, I didn’t get any sleep for the rest of the trip.