Nonfiction piece for my seminar class.
He was a loser and I stayed because I’m a rubber necker. Not Nadir. I’ve switched men without letting you know, and it’ll happen a lot, because sometimes I wonder if all the men in my life, that have ever been in my life, are just extensions of Adam. Adam in various states. Aaron was evaporated Adam. Caleb was frozen Adam. Nadir was liquid Adam.
But back to the point: he, Caleb, was a loser. What does that say about me, I don’t know, that I continued to pour my heart into a broken relationship with a man that didn’t appreciate me as far as he could throw me, simply because he was such a disaster that I couldn’t look away. I don’t mean a disaster in, like, the meth-addiction way, or the stack-of-felonies way.
What I mean is, you sit there across from him in the living room of his fairly nice apartment that he shares with his sister, eating his store-brand Wheaties, and wonder what lies he tells himself in the morning in order to get out of bed. The scrape of his spoon at the bottom of the bowl is painful, the nails of his ambition scraping desperately at the walls of the box it was shoved into before sinking to the bottom of the sea.
Starbucks barista had never been my person ambition, and I’ll be the first to admit that “Travel Photojournalist for National Geographic” or “award-winning freelance writer” were a little . . . well, but I was working on it. Paying my way through an expensive private liberal arts school in New England with student loans, banking on the marketability of creative work I hoped to produce with skills refined from my education. I had spent a semester in Europe and traveled whenever I could, and I still had four semesters to go -three if I really wanted to finish early, which I didn’t. I wasn’t at my goals, no, but I was on my way. There was, as of yet, no decisive reason why my goals couldn’t be reached.
That, and that reason alone, made him hate me, I think. At least a little bit. Envy isn’t really the right word; I think it must be hate. I’d had my sneaking suspicions, and it wasn’t such a foreign idea to me that someone could hate you because of their jealousy. Believe you me, I had hated plenty of leggy blonds in my time, plenty of star athletes, plenty of those stupid little pigs that get published in their teenage years. Child prodigy I was not, though I liked to pretend it was because I hadn’t actually submitted anything to be published. You can’t succeed if you don’t try, but neither can you fail.
Anyways, regardless, train wrecks are by nature captivating. Something about a machine with so much kinetic energy, so much potential, racing along and then BAM! Such a beautiful piece of industrialization, crippled and bent, lying as helplessly on its side as the most insignificant of roaches. It’s the size and speed of the train that makes the wreck fantastic; same with car wrecks. The bigger the wreck, the more bodies, the greater the amount of crumpled sheet metal, the more interested we are.
Which is where I supposed my analogy of comparing Caleb to a train-wreck fails. Because he never was that magnificent train. He had potential, don’t get me wrong. His mother, who he had no kind words to speak of except that she was supposedly the best cook to ever live, had told me as much no less than three times, despite his absolute insistence that she never said anything kind to or about him. He was the most talented of her children, definitely the most intelligent, and yet in practice almost entirely incapable of achieving anything. Time after time he had voiced his wants and desires, followed shortly by all the supposedly insurmountable odds stacked against him by a world that owed him reparations. Life was unfair and owed him damages. Workers’ comp. Someone owed him big for all the bad luck he attracted. It was that chip on his shoulder that made me hate him. It was my lack of that chip that made him hate me.
Clearly a match made in heaven.
One day I’m lying on the floor of his apartment. I had done that a lot when we first began dating, and then had not in the longest time. I’m not sure why, but I sure wouldn’t put too much stock into any meaning why. I just hadn’t. But so there I am, lying on the dog-hair-saturated carpet in his apartment while he’s kind of walking circles around me, tossing a grapefruit into the air while describing the pitches to me from the Rangers game the night before. You watch the pitcher for a few throws to see what their speeds are. Whatever the pitchers name was . . . Feldman? Or am I thinking of Cory from the ‘80s. I don’t know what the guy’s name was; unimportant. The guy is throwing mostly 94 miles per hour, which is unreal because my little car won’t even go that fast without shaking like it’s about to puke its guts out and die. Next most often, he throws a 90, occasionally an 84ish. Which means the 94 is his fastball, the most common pitch. It’s going to go straight; from the right angle, it’ll hardly look like it’s moving at all. The 90 mile one is going to be his slider, and it’ll go straight but then slightly curve to the right, so you don’t want to be using that on a left-handed batter. The mid-80s one is most likely his curve ball, which apparently has a curve that I just can’t see on the flat television screen. A knuckle ball will be even slower. Now in there you’ve also got a dozen different fastballs, and a change up, and all other kinds of crap, but I’m not a pitcher and my only use for identifying pitches is to be able to shout them at the television screen and then glance at Caleb for him to either shake his head and explain it all again or beam and elaborate further. Because clearly that will mean I’ve passed onto the next level of skill.
Caleb once tried to make the argument that I don’t listen to him. Utter bullshit.
So he’s walking in a circle around me, tossing this grapefruit up in the air while he explains baseball because that’s what he has to do when he’s talking baseball. I’ve listened to the talks a dozen times, even on our first date when I sat shotgun in his pickup while he showed me the difference between a two-seam and four-seam fastball. That’s not an innuendo; it’s what actually happened. It just is how you hold the ball.
I think he’s enjoying me flinching occasionally, anytime the grapefruit hovers over my body. It’s not that I don’t think he can catch it, or that I’m worried a grapefruit is going to bruise me. I used to not flinch because if I got hit, I figured I could just use it for hugs and kisses. He would feel bad. But then he stopped feeling bad, and what’s the point of getting hurt if the one who hurt you doesn’t offer anything more than, “Oops. Sorry.”
“One of these days,” he says, and I know I’m in for something good. He’s inarticulate and grossly uneducated when it comes to vocabulary variety, but there are times when he says the most beautiful things. “I’m going to wake up. I’m going to call that guy from work and say, ‘Hey, I’m headed out to throw, can you come catch?’ And he’ll say sure, whatever. So we’ll go out to the practice mound . . . somewhere . . . and I’ll let off a few practice throws. And then,” and of course he performs this as he says it, “I’ll pull back and throw, and it’ll be good. Real good. I’ll think that thing’s moving pretty fast. So I’ll find someone that has a radar gun,” and here I thought, how many people just have radar guns lying around? “So we’ll all go out there and I’ll let it go again. And it’s going to say 98 on there. And from there on out, I’m set.”
I waited a moment, trying to figure out what to say. He was rarely serious, rarely honest, at least not in such a romantic way as that. So I let his dream linger, and then offer, “Well, someday I’m going to wake up to my phone ringing. Maybe it’ll be my cell in Boston, or a satellite phone on safari in Africa. And it’ll be the London National Theatre saying they’d like to commission me to write a play for their upcoming season, or maybe they’ve read one I’ve already written and would for me to come help produce it. And I’ll go stay in London for six months, a year, just like I’ve dreamed, and I’ll get to see my characters, my words come to life in one of the theatre capitols of the world.”
“I don’t know which of ours is more likely to happen,” he shrugged; a punch to my gut. I wanted to kick him in the shins and insist that mine was entirely possible! His was not! Here he was, a college dropout, not even playing ball, dreaming he would wake up tomorrow and miraculously pitch over twenty miles faster than his fastest. Here I was, a college student racking up massive debt to refine a talent I possessed but wasn’t satisfied with yet in order to hopefully perfect my craft. His lack of faith in me was astounding, and I almost made some retort about it.
But then he added, “But it’s different. Mine is physically impossible. With you, you can get better. Each thing you write can get better. I will never throw ninety-eight miles per hour.”
So I kept my mouth shut. Because this wasn’t about him not supporting me or believing in me. This was about the death of his dream; this was him coming to terms with the very adult and very dark truth that his dream job was simply an impossibility. I, in my romantic and headstrong nature, in my tenacity and ambition, had been fortunate enough to pick a dream job actually obtainable, albeit not easily. But his dream job required a number on the radar gun that he simply could not throw. The optimist in me wanted to encourage him, insist that it wasn’t over until the fat lady sang. He could probably still play minor leagues, or maybe get onto a smaller team. Maybe. But the fact was, his life was a disaster, perhaps partially because he had been walking around this Podunk Texas town hoping some scout would just look at him and know he was the next best pitcher, or that he would wake up tomorrow and be able to throw that 98 miles an hour. But that wasn’t going to happen, and dreaming about it wasn’t going to fix his credit or pay his traffic violation tickets or get him a job. I was forced to witness the ugliest thing I have ever seen: the death of a dream.
He is a pitcher -was a pitcher. Started playing in the Little Leagues when he was ten, a terrible short stop. Then one day the team’s pitcher falls off the bleachers because he was trying to show his mom how she didn’t know what she was talking about, and the coach tells Caleb to step in because he sure as hell isn’t doing any good as a short stop anyways. So Caleb begins pitching, does wonderfully, and in a couple years is an excellent pitcher on his high school team.
Then Blevins comes onto the scene: Blake Blevins who now plays for the Rangers and apparently pitched himself out of his own mother’s vagina at birth. This was one of the many times Caleb got robbed; one of the many reasons the world owes him. Because Caleb was great, but Blevins was better than great, and Caleb became backup, and because of that didn’t even try for a baseball scholarship or to play at college. And because he wasn’t playing baseball he really didn’t give a shit about school; he didn’t want a big kid job, he just wanted to sit around and bemoan his lost high school baseball experience. So he drops out just before he flunks out, and once again the world owes him a college degree. And a college baseball experience. And a good job, because if he can’t be bothered to try out for the baseball team at a school that Mom and Dad are paying for, he sure can’t be bothered to get out of bed and get to work on time. Then he gets fired and struggles to find a new job, and the world owes him still more because those goddamned employers just keep shorting him. They’re all assholes who don’t realize what a valuable employee he is. He shouldn’t have to be there on time. Sure, he’s only been there a month and a half, but they should cut him some more slack. He’s got more potential than anyone in that place.
But that’s what Caleb is. The dud grenade. You pull the pin and know that it is more than capable of blowing you and everything around you to smithereens, so you chunk it as far from you as you can possible go. And nothing happens. Maybe it spins around a bit, and there’s the slow hiss of gas escaping. But no explosion. No fire. Nothing spectacular. Just one more dud grenade, one more college dropout, one more boy who thinks the world ever owed him anything.
Dear Casey:
I'm doing great. Without you.
Life is still beautiful. Without you.
And I'm going places. Without you.
Yours-no-more,
Jessa