how to play jenga
This was a request from middlerelief. She said, I'll take AJ Burnett/Roy Halladay, post-Towers release, in which they're trying to deal with being just the two of them now that Towers is gone. I think she wanted a story that was more about Towers; this ended up being a story more about Halladay. Sorry.
There's also a bit of a timeline hiccup in the short scene where Halladay and Burnett meet Towers; IRL, Halladay would have known Towers before Burnett. So technically you can call it an AU, although other than that it's not very AU-ish.
Roy Halladay/AJ Burnett; Roy Halladay/AJ Burnett/Josh Towers
rated R
13,820 words
Disclaimer: This is a work of fiction. It is in no way a reflection on the actual life, behavior, or character of any of the people featured, and there is no connection or affiliation between this fictional story and the people or organizations it mentions. It was not written with any intent to slander or defame any of the people featured. No profit has been or ever will be made as a result of this story: it is solely for entertainment. And again, it is entirely fictional, i.e. not true.
how to play jenga
The CN Tower is the symbol of the city. Halladay has even heard it called the symbol of the country. It tapers upwards from its massive foundation, a vast upside-down exclamation mark rising out of Toronto. It is, without a doubt, the single most recognizable feature on the Toronto skyline, the silhouette that shows up on tourist brochures and film festival logos and in crayon-vague elementary school drawings.
At its foot is the Rogers Centre, née SkyDome. Halladay has always gotten a kick out of this. Not a day goes by without someone telling him that Toronto is a hockey city first, second, last. Nobody gives a shit about baseball when there's a puck on the ice, can't be a real professional athlete in Toronto unless you're wearing skates, and his personal favorite: can't get laid in this city unless you're missing a tooth or three.
They laugh about it in the clubhouse sometimes. For all that, what do they choose to put at the base of their most famous structure? Why, only the baseball field.
It isn't as if the arena where the hockey team plays is terribly far away. But it is baseball that hugs the pale concrete skirts of that Canadian desire to reach into the big, icy, vaulted blue, and despite all the protestations of the Canadians, Halladay's sure there is meaning in that, somewhere.
----
The truth is that Halladay doesn't really expect anything to change. This departure won't ruin the rotation, corrupt the team any more than it's already been corrupted. Towers had been mostly great in 2005 and has been mostly terrible ever since, and the Blue Jays, ha, the Blue Jays have all kinds of options when it comes to ways to fuck themselves up. It's never just one thing.
Halladay’s greatest lost season, that 2005; his best start in years put on indefinite hold by the swift merciless trajectory of a line drive. Towers was fantastic while Halladay was injured, pitching to expectation and then far beyond it, but all his command vanished when Halladay's bones knit and he came back to the team. It confused the hell out of everyone, seeing Towers go from studiously mediocre to team-carrying and then back to worse than he was before, none of it with any warning at all. It was almost like his talent belonged to some alternate universe, a very slightly surreal place with its own set of rules, a plane of existence that simply could not maintain its hold on this reality while Halladay was playing.
Halladay sometimes thinks that maybe he imagined it, Towers being that good. Maybe it was some feverish reaction to the stupendous amounts of pain medication he had been taking at the time. But then there's the fact of Towers' contract with the team, which was obviously influenced by some amount of good pitching, because it's not a contract that makes a goddamn bit of sense otherwise.
It's kind of amazing, actually, because the truth is that Josh Towers idolizes Roy Halladay. He speaks about Halladay's cutter in the kinds of awed tones that most people reserve for hundred-foot-tall waterfalls and sacred burial grounds. AJ Burnett gives him a Roy Halladay bobblehead mostly as a joke and Towers keep it in his locker, not caring who sees it. Josh Towers can control the location of a baseball to within inches, but only if Roy Halladay isn't looking.
----
He isn't really Towers' mentor, although Towers keeps telling the newspaper guys that he is. Halladay certainly isn't trying to be anybody's teacher. He does what careful injury avoidance rituals he can; he pays his stoic obeisance to luck. He gives first-rate pitching to a third-rate team and he doesn't give a shit, because middle of the pack is the best he's ever known. It's kinda nice, in a way, that relative lack of a certain type of stress. Whatever Towers gets out of all that is his own business.
In 2005, Josh Towers does not need any guidance. All he needs to do is keep on doing whatever it is that he's been doing. This suits Halladay just fine, because he's stumping around on crutches, left leg in a heavy cast all the way up to his knee, in no kind of mood to give advice to anyone. Burnett is still a Marlin in 2005, busy violently burning bridges with every single member of the front office and coaching staff there. Come September Burnett will be asked to leave the team-- not traded, not sent to the minors, but asked to leave the team. This just doesn't happen in Major League Baseball, and it won't be until December that the Blue Jays declare themselves the only team willing to take a risk on his oft-injured body and his quick-cracking attitude. But none of them know any of that yet.
In 2005 Halladay is cadging extra pills off of Corey Koskie, who never uses his entire prescription because he believes that on some level he deserves the pain. This is obviously psychotic, but Halladay is not in any hurry to disabuse him of the notion. Koskie doesn't have anything as bad as a shattered leg anyways.
Halladay doesn't sit in the dugout very much when he's injured. Some guys like to be there no matter what. Rah rah, team spirit, whatever; Halladay has never seen the point of lounging around where the cameras can see him like some kind of noble suffering totem. The stairs up from the clubhouse tunnel are a fucking nightmare for a tall man on tall crutches anyways. Ballplayers are almost by definition strong, healthy people; there's absolutely no incentive to make the dugout handicapped-accessible.
Sometimes on game days he does show up at the ballpark, makes it as far as the clubhouse. Gibbons always asks him to come in, saying it's good for team morale, which Halladay thinks is a load of crap. He comes in because he's making twice as much money as anyone else on the roster to sit unhelpfully on his ass and the least he can do is put in an appearance. He hangs around with the guys while they get ready, then watches the game on the big clubhouse TV by himself, crowd noises filtered through the broadcast a second after he hears them muffled through the walls. He sits in one of the big fake-leather chairs with his legs stretched straight out, playing little games with himself, trying to see how long he can stand to only move his eyes, flicking them back and forth over the action on the screen. When he holds perfectly still he can almost feel the chemicals mulching through his bloodstream, numbing him bit by bit.
Occasionally, when he's not pitching, Towers comes down to keep him company. Towers sits in the chair next to him and just about overflows with the energy of a pitcher in the middle of the best season of his life. He shuffles his feet across the carpet and bounces his hands on his knees. This huge, amazing thing is happening to him when he's on the mound, and he keeps trying to explain it to Halladay.
"I look in to see what Z's calling for, right--" Gregg Zaun, their long-haired, pouchy-cheeked catcher-- "and there's... it's like there's a box hanging in the air. Like, glowing white lines and shit. Right where the strikezone is, and there's this bright red crosshairs that I can move around the box by looking at where I want it to go-- the pitch, I mean, where I want the pitch to go. And because I can see that so clear, I can throw the ball right there, no trouble. I mean there isn't a box, of course, I don't mean I actually see lines up there, but it's like I do. You know what I mean?"
Halladay jogs his head to the side very slightly, noncommittal. He doesn't really have any fucking idea what Towers is talking about. Pitching is nothing like that for him. But that's not so strange. Pitching is a different specific thing for every player in the game. Always has been, and always will be.
-----
Roy Halladay has never been on a team that's not the Blue Jays, and he's lost a certain amount of interchangeability because of it. It shows in funny ways.
The ballpark itself, oddly, has never been the thing that gives him trouble. It's a retractable roof, only a true enclosed dome some of the time. The surface doesn't give him problems anymore either; they've made great advances in artificial turf technology (and oh, but it is a technology, as any longtime dome-dweller can attest) since he's been in the Majors.
Instead it's stuff like the knowledge that no matter how much money they spend, it will never be enough. The extra time that it takes to come home from every road trip because they're the only team in the league that always, always, always has to go through passport control to get back to their own stadium. The fact that he was born at high elevations, grew up among mountains, and never quite got used to living in low places, although this is a problem he would have on any team that's not the Rockies.
He came up a Blue Jay, and no matter what the coaches say, if he's calling Toronto home for long enough a guy gets kind of used to thinking of third place as the goal. There's no such thing as being better than the Red Sox, better than the Yankees; there's only not as bad as the Orioles and more of an actual team than the Devil Rays. Nobody says that, of course. Nobody even thinks it in those clear terms; it's a kind of baseball suicide, deliberately thinking like that. It gets in their heads anyways, sub-and-unconscious, working its way into the little spaces that nobody ever bothers to guard. Halladay's been in one place longer than most, and it's not like he's some kind of exception.
It's not the healthiest attitude for a professional ballplayer, but Halladay has always had a checkered kind of relationship with health anyways.
----
Burnett knows injuries just as intimately as Halladay does: the usual pitching injuries, and the weird, are-you-kidding random ones that it seems only guys with a particular variety of anti-luck ever get. Turns out Burnett has almost the same kind of anti-luck that Halladay does, when it comes to injuries, and that's a comfort, because Halladay had been starting to get used to the idea that he was the only one.
When Halladay runs out of Percosets now, he knows he can go to Burnett for more. When Burnett burns through his Tylenol-plus-codeine too fast, Halladay's ready with a bottleful of extras. They both know all about trying to sleep sitting upright in a chair to avoid aggravating a tweaked shoulder.
It isn't just the injuries. Halladay won't talk to anyone before a start, not even his teammates, not even to say hi if one of them waves at him. Burnett wore two little rings in his nipples before the postgame ice wrapping, stretching across his chest every fifth day, irritated them so much that he had to take them out. They both tower over their teammates and know that the door to the manager's office is a little lower than the other doors in the clubhouse. If they get called in to talk, they both have to duck their heads when they're going through the door.
From the moment Burnett showed up in Spring Training with his skinny tattooed arms and his suspicious walleyed glare, they had been kind of orbiting one another, making slow deliberate circuits. So there's a certain inevitability to the whole thing: to Halladay-and-Burnett, Doc-and-AJ. He doesn't even remember the first time Burnett came to him. Or maybe it was the other way around and he went to Burnett; he doesn't even remember that much. He knows that this thing with Burnett hasn't been going on forever, he's not fucking delusional. He'd never even had occasion to shake AJ Burnett's hand before 2006, but it's the kind of thing that feels like it's always been there, just part of the landscape. Anyways, even mountains have to get their start somewhere, somewhen.
They're both starting pitchers and they both have these injury problems, so everyone already expects them to be bent at slightly weird angles, their personalities gently skewed. Halladay has a kind of filing cabinet in his head, and he has an entire drawer full of stuff like this: his hair color, his right-handedness, third place max, the thing with Burnett, the size of his shoes, the fact that he's terrible at converting Celsius to Fahrenheit and back again. It's just another one of those things, a little fact of life: oh, there it is. Nothing to make a fuss over. No big deal.
----
Once upon a time Roy Halladay completely reinvented himself. True story. He first made it to the big leagues as a fastball guy, a power pitcher. Anything slower than 95 was not worth throwing: that was 153 kilometers per hour, the one conversion that was always right at his fingertips. He was six feet and six inches of intimidation and knew how to use it, wasn't afraid to do just that, back then. He had the ability to sear paint off a backstop just by looking at it. Minor leagues, they didn’t just strike out against him; they were scared shitless (hitless), knees quaking at the plate. He got called up to the majors, tore it up some, just as easy as he’d imagined. He got sent back down the following season for a little more development, a little more age on his arm, and when he got to Toronto the second time he sucked.
To this day he does not know why he fell apart so quickly and so completely. Nobody does. Big league hitters are better than the guys in triple-A, of course, and they learn from their mistakes much more quickly, but that doesn't really account for it. Whatever. He doesn't waste any time thinking about it now, because there is no sense in dwelling, and if he was going to learn something from the whole experience, well, he surely already has.
The truth is that that time of reinvention is a clear line of demarcation across the path of Halladay's life. Not in the sense that it took a single day, with a simple before and after, of course, because it took him much longer than that: most of a minor league season, all together. It is a line in the sense that he was one way before, and another way afterwards. Halladay is very sure of this difference of self, as sure as he is of the difference between live grass and unchanging turf. He could never put a name to it, though. There isn't one word for the kind of person he was before or the kind of person he is now. Well, he was a fastball pitcher before and he's a more complete pitcher now, but that barely scratches the surface.
One thing he does know for sure is that he would not have been with Burnett if he had never had to make that change. The kind of person he was as a pure fastball pitcher simply would not have been compatible with the kind of person who could exist all mixed up with AJ Burnett. It wasn't that he was homophobic (if he had had to describe his attitude at the time, he probably would have said 'apathetic'); more that his basic personality could not have existed in such close proximity to a personality like Burnett's.
It isn't good one way or bad the other. It's just a fact that losing his reliance on the fastball, honing his feel for offspeed pitches, pitches with motion and break and spin, splintered off into other shards of his personality, changed him in some deeply fundamental and unexpected way.
Halladay might have at some point thought that there was no way baseball could alter him at his core, that who he was in the most essential sense would always be pristinely him, but that's rookie thinking. Kid stuff. He's known better for a while now, worked so tightly into the warp and weft of the game. He has been for so long that it no longer even feels weird to think that he has no idea where baseball ends and he begins.
----
At night they light up the Tower: usually long, thin strips of color running up and down its sides, with the observation area bulging out a horizontal strap, the remaining spire above that all one solid color. From far off across the city it looks like a fat UFO with an ignition trail underneath it, frozen in sci-fi time.
When the Rogers Centre roof is closed, they light it up as well. The tall thin tower and the low gentle arch of the dome sitting next to it remind Halladay of nothing so much as a bat balanced on its end, a baseball resting by its side. It doesn't look like anything that ought to be in the middle of a city, but by now it's come to look like home.
----
Towers sits next to him in the dugout and asks questions. Halladay likes this, because he always has a response. It's something he can enjoy, always knowing just what to say, the easy comforting force of his conviction behind the words. Cut your fingernails straight across so you can grip with them, he says, you should replace your spikes a month before the manufacturer says you should, and it ain't cheating if you scuff the ball so the umpire can't tell. Towers asks about concrete things, the stuff he doesn't know anchored firmly in the realm of the tangible and real.
Burnett asks him questions that he has no idea how to answer, and Burnett likes to ask them real quiet out of the side of his mouth while they're both watching the game with the rest of the team swirling around them, oblivious. Why d'you think it's you'n me Burnett asks, how'd you ever figure out you wanted this, and how long is this gonna last? Halladay is left hamstrung by both the presence of his teammates and his lack of any satisfactory explanations.
Actually, he does know the answer to that last one. It's until one of us leaves this team.
----
So Halladay spends a lot of time around Burnett, and Towers is madly in love with the idea of Halladay as a pitcher. Transitive property: Burnett and Towers end up jumbled together like dice in a cupped palm, where proximity will push Burnett and Towers up against one another. Literally push: Burnett likes to palm Towers' head and shove it into couch cushions or batting cages or the sides of mostly unsuspecting teammates, holding him there while Towers squirms and flails and says, "AJ, AJ, AJ," on an increasing scale until his voice is somewhere up around a falsetto.
Towers has a small, sensitive mouth and delicate features, and Burnett is the kind of guy who likes to manhandle people who are smaller than him. There's nothing particularly mean behind it, it's just the way he's able to relate. Halladay doesn't interfere, steadfastly refuses to mediate, because Towers has to learn how to deal with this stuff on his own.
He's pretty sure that they talk about him sometimes, Burnett and Towers, when Towers is in one of his demoted-to-the-bullpen phases and Burnett goes out to keep him company during a game, the two of them together with their heads close and Burnett's arm sticking way out over the line of Towers' shoulders, long bony fingers dangling in the air. He has no idea what they would have to say to each other, but he likes to imagine that they're talking on parallel tracks, neither one really listening to the other, Towers saying,
"Did you see his curveball today? Seventy-seven flat on the gun, every single time he threw it, you can't get a pitching machine that regular!" at the same time that Burnett is saying,
"And he does this thing where he kinda clamps his teeth down 'round one of my nipples, 'cause he knows I got extra sensitive where the piercings grew over, and he doesn't bite down but he kinda grinds his jaw around 'til I'm leaking so much it's a miracle I got anything left to come with."
And they would nod seriously and grin at one another, yup, that's our Doc.
----
All three of them are exactly the same age, born in '77, although their birthdays are staggered: Burnett at the very beginning of January, Towers in February, Halladay in May. So the truth is that he's the youngest, the technical baby of their little baseball family, which is pretty fucked up, because there isn't a day that goes by when he doesn't feel so much older than the both of them.
----
His arm hurts. His arm hurts, fuck, and nothing is staying down in the zone. Every time he turns his forearm over to throw the ball, the bunched muscles there scream at him; it feels like they're separating, ripping away from the places where they attach to bone, like he's deliberately shredding his arm with infinitely small coils of razorwire. After every pitch he looks down in surprise, shocked that everything can still look so normal. It seems weird that the skin isn't ripping and tearing and flecked with blood, but all that must be on the inside.
He bounces a pitch, trying to bring it down in the zone. Zaun comes up to his knees to block it, then holds out a hand to the umpire and trots out to the mound. His kneepads lock and unlock like the jointed armor of a blue crab. Halladay grits his teeth and looks at the sky. He knows that he's fucking up, that it's Zaun's responsibility to come out and see what's going on, but Zaun is just about the last person he wants to see right now.
"You hurting?" Zaun asks. He puts his glove up on Halladay's shoulder to keep him from turning away or making a scene. Halladay hates him a little for the question; he hasn't been hurt, there's no reason for Zaun to ask, except he's him, injuries are what he does, so really Zaun has every reason to ask.
And he's right, of course, because Halladay is hurting. It doesn't make him any less resentful.
"Talk t'me, Doc," Zaun says, a low warning tone creeping into his voice.
Halladay toys with the idea of telling Zaun he's fine, everything feels great, but common sense prevails. The odds of this going away on its own are slim, and he'll be found out eventually, get in worse trouble with the team for hiding an injury. He blows out a sharp breath, not bothering to hide his annoyance. "Yeah, my arm, it's. Whatever, pretty fucking sore."
"Usual sore or strain sore?" Zaun asks. Halladay sucks in a deep breath just so that he can blow it contemptuously out again. "Look," Zaun hisses, "you don't want to talk to me right now, fuck it, fine, but I can't bring your little pitcher groupie-friends out here to talk to you instead, so you better suck it up 'cause it's me you got to deal with. Usual sore or strain sore?"
"Fuck you, you--" Halladay has no words for exactly what Zaun is. "Fuck you, and fuck whatever you're implyin'."
Zaun gets closer, right up in his face. On TV it must look like he's giving Halladay an intense pep talk, full of Buck Up Nows and Catcher's Wisdom. "Neither one'a us has time for your bullshit right now, Doc. Usual sore, or strain sore? You got three seconds to answer, or I call Gibbons up."
Halladay looks down. Zaun's cleats are toe-to-toe with his own, almost overlapping. "Strain sore. Fuck, OK, fuck it, fuck you, muscle tear sore. Maybe. Not usual sore, that's for fucking sure."
"You weren't gonna say anything?" Zaun sounds faintly disgusted.
Halladay shrugs irritably; it's the kind of question that doesn't really need a response. No pitcher lasts long in the league if he tells the coaches and trainers about every time he feels a twinge. Everyone understands that, even Zaun.
But Zaun still has that angry, sick look on his face, shaking his head. “Pitchers. Do you all try to send yourselves down the shitcan? Must be hard work bein’ this set on ruining yourself.”
“Just get back behind the plate and do your damn job,” Halladay says. He has nothing else to say to Zaun. He just needs to not be standing here any longer.
“This is me, doing my job,” Zaun says. He raises a hand and signals for the trainer.
----
That was 2006, near the end of the season. Halladay was pissed off, because they were fighting tooth and nail and blue jay claw for that second place spot, and with the trainers making dire noises over his arm he couldn’t do a damn thing to help.
Burnett offered him a blowjob and a couple blister-packs of Oxycontin, acquired God-knows-where. Halladay took the latter before accepting the former. Intense but at a remove, an out-of-body dead man’s orgasm, which suited his mood. Good for distraction in the short term, but in the long term, not that helpful.
It was Towers who was willing to sit down and talk about it, or let Halladay talk about it, anyways. A beer and a half, plus the oxies, and Halladay was gone, leaning hard on Towers’ shitty little kitchen table in Towers’ shitty little apartment, the only kind of place that would rent to a ballplayer who lived under the constant threat of minor league reassignment, the necessity of breaking a lease on short notice.
Halladay’s not sure exactly what he said that night. Some stuff about Zaun, some stuff about the trainers, some stuff about pitching. Stuff about Burnett; lots of stuff about Burnett. If Towers hadn’t known before then, he certainly would have known after.
He has just one distinct memory from that night, startling in its clarity: a snapshot of Towers backlit by a weak yellow kitchen overhead, chin in hand, elbow in the stopmotion process of inching across the table surface towards its edge. Towers’ little mouth a thoughtful moue. Towers saying, “Should be me injured, Doc. You can help the team. Should be me.”
Halladay wishes like hell he could remember how he replied to that.
----
It’s Burnett’s first year out of Florida, that 2006, and the Blue Jays finish second in the division. The first time they have finished better than third since 1993, when they won it all and Halladay was still two years away from being drafted. They're ten games behind the Yankees and not even close to making the playoffs (everyone who's anyone knows that the wildcard is coming from the Central this year) but second place in the East has been unattainable for thirteen years, and now it's theirs.
Kind of funny that this should be the year they break away from third place. Half the team is convinced that management is sabotaging them. John Gibbons is fighting with everyone: the fistfight with Shea Hillenbrand in July, the almost-fistfight with Ted Lilly in August. Behavior unbecoming of a manager, for sure, but what sort of pro turns on his own coach like that? Their GM is publicly accusing Troy Glaus of not trying, the kind of accusation that shouldn’t ever be thrown around lightly in baseball. Towers can't get back to his happy pitching universe and Burnett is already growing adept at curling a finger into one of Halladay's beltloops, making him think that really bad ideas are, maybe, OK after all. People talk about clubhouse cancers all the time in baseball, but Halladay can't think of a team more overtly poisoned than this one.
They're in New York for the last game of the year. The Yankees give each other sedate pats on the butt across the field, having known the division was theirs weeks in advance. It's a kind of complacent security that Halladay can't even imagine. He can think the words, sure, security, complacent, but they are basically without meaning. The game is basically meaningless too; still, it is nice that Towers gets the win. It's only his second win of the entire season.
Halladay has been riding the bench for weeks, making impatient huffing noises, just waiting for the season to end. What he has is a forearm strain and an injunction forbidding him to take the field, necessarily forcing him to miss his last few scheduled starts of the year. He isn't allowed to hide out in the clubhouse, either: it's not an injury that keeps him from climbing the stairs, and they're on a road trip, Gibbons peaceably but implacably demanding that their fucked-up team present a cardboard-flimsy united front to the world, so Halladay's right up there in the dugout, watching Towers struggle with his control and somehow stumble into that win anyways. It's the first day of October.
There's a kind of collective sigh from the team in the clubhouse afterwards as they watch the out-of-town scores scroll across the bottom of the TV screen, realizing that they have managed to stay that single game up on Boston, and they have second. Second place, the most pitiful of miracles. Alex Rios and Reed Johnson high five each other, whooping and bouncing around, knocking into guys who widen their stances and roll their eyes tolerantly. Vernon Wells shakes up a plastic bottle of Coke and sprays it around, lightly staining the walls and getting them all sticky. Nobody objects; it's not their clubhouse anyways.
"This is fucking sad," Burnett mutters. He's got his shirt off and his jeans on, halfway between his postgame shower and the real world. Halladay can see the muscles running long lines on either side of Burnett's spine, the pretty points where his pelvis makes itself known at his narrow hips. There is a large, recent-looking bruise on the back of Burnett's left leg, right where his thigh meets his ass, now hidden by the jeans. Nobody had commented on it in the showers. It's just a bruise. They all have them. It's not shaped like anything in particular. Halladay is in one of his nebulously paranoid phases, though, and is watching him pretty closely, the only reason he hears.
He doesn't think it's so sad, himself, but he doesn't say anything. Burnett was out with a wrecked arm the year the Marlins went to and won the World Series. He has his own fucked-up relationship with the postseason. Halladay is not in any position to comment on it.
----
“Nice hair,” Burnett says, the first time they meet. “Tell me, does the carpet match the drapes?”
“Pay attention in the locker room and find out,” Halladay shoots back. “And, y’know, real original, I never heard that one before.” Burnett gives him a cocky, shit-eating grin. He knows it; he's just being annoying to get Halladay's attention. Halladay knows what he's doing and it still works, so, whatever, chalk one up for the new kid.
----
“That’s some red hair,” Towers says, the first time they meet. Burnett, standing next to Halladay, grins in anticipation. Halladay braces himself. “Good thing you didn’t get drafted by the Cardinals, huh?”
Halladay stares. “I… what?”
Towers looks sheepish. “Red hats. With your hair. It would’ve looked…”
“OK. Yeah, I gotcha. Just. Haven’t heard that one before,” Halladay says, because, huh, he hasn’t.
“Show-off,” Burnett grumbles. Towers looks at him, eyebrows crumpling in confusion, and Halladay has to laugh.
----
The breakdown holds off that winter, before the '07 season, waiting for Opening Day same as the rest of them. Towers goes to Vegas with Reed Johnson, not because they're best friends or anything-- Johnson is an outfielder; Towers has made himself such a fixture with Halladay and Burnett that he doesn't have many other close friends on the team-- but because Johnson's gym is out there. Johnson is one of those guys who trains obsessively all throughout the offseason, and Towers is just starting to get that desperate, willing to do pretty much whatever it takes to get back to 2005. He hasn't talked about seeing crosshairs over the plate in a long time.
Burnett has a house in south Florida, the perfect kind of place to ride out the months between October and February. He doesn't even invite Halladay down, just starts saying things like, "So we'll hit the links in a couple weeks, I can get us into the private club down the road 'cause, you know, we're talkin' real hot shit, here."
"I'm so impressed," Halladay says. Deadpan. Burnett isn't even any good at golf. He plays because it's one of the few sports they are contractually allowed to play. Except for baseball, of course, but baseball, from the point of view of their contracts, is hardly a sport.
He flies into Miami International, disembarking to long, long corridors, aggressively air conditioned, every announcement in equally incomprehensible English and Spanish. Burnett does not meet him at the airport, which is to be expected; they don't have that kind of a thing between them.
Halladay takes a cab and doesn't bother to call ahead. When he rings the bell, Burnett opens the door wearing nothing but a pair of expensive-looking blue silk boxers, exposing the dark blonde fuzz on his skinny thighs. His hair is wrecked and his eyes are bleary. It's not actually all that early, just about nine in the morning.
"Come back to bed," he mumbles, turning and shuffling back down the hallway, like Halladay hasn't just arrived, has always been there. Halladay shuts the front door and drops his bags in front of it. He follows the pale beacon of Burnett's back, already thinking about the possibilities inherent in a big bed, the sheets with thread counts too high to enumerate, as early-morning-wrecked as Burnett's hair.
----
When he pitches at home and the roof is open, Halladay can glance towards first base and see the Tower there. The banked rows of seats obscure much of its base and the curved and latticed roof that's present even when they're bared to the sky obscures yet more, but the Tower is so much taller than the ballpark that it's easily visible regardless. It means Toronto; it means home field advantage; it means a place that he knows and a place where the fielders behind him are more comfortable than the guys they're playing against, so he's come to see it as a kind of comforting presence.
Quick glance, the slightest twitch of his eyes, enough to reassure himself that it's still there, watching over them all. And of course it always is.
He constantly has to check himself in Florida, because every tall shape he sees over his shoulder is just another palm tree or weirdly-shaped condo high-rise, and it is unsettling in some basic way that he doesn't think about too closely and doesn't really question.
----
It isn't healthy for him to spend so much time alone with Burnett. They don't get out of bed except to pee, some days. They fuck, of course, but it's not even always that; sometimes they just sit up in the middle of Burnett's oversized expanse of sheets, talking in circular ways about postseasons, pitching, off-brand prescription painkillers. Every so often Halladay finds himself stroking Burnett's cock without any clear intentions in that direction, just giving his hand something to do while they talk. Burnett's cock is as long and skinny as the rest of him. Halladay is very familiar with the shape and feel of it by now.
When they do get out of the house it's usually just to go to that exclusive golf club, skating into whatever tee time they want on the strength of Burnett's Marlins tenure. Standing on the immaculate greens with Burnett in his neat polo shirts and starch-stiff khakis, bright Florida sunlight glinting off of his precision weighted golf clubs, never quite feels right to Halladay. There's something distinctly unreal about the whole thing, a kind of absent immediacy, like he's reading a book about some other guys golfing in some other country.
He has little fantasies about unzipping Burnett's fly right there on the green, drawing him out, not even jacking him off-- just getting his hand on that part of Burnett, feeling it firm up against his palm. He thinks that he might be able to regain a measure of reality that way, but it is not, for a variety of obvious and less-obvious reasons, going to happen.
Towers calls from Vegas at least three times a week. He alternates phones, calling Halladay one day, Burnett the next. They put him on speakerphone and laugh at the warbled distortion of his voice, Towers making fun of the way they talk over one another in retaliation. He tells them about the exercises he's doing, the things he's been thinking about trying, and they give him competing advice about what he should be doing instead. It isn't much of a competition; all three of them know that Towers will listen to whatever Halladay says, over Burnett and the trainers and his own inclinations.
He must be spending a lot of time with Reed Johnson, but he never mentions him, not once. Halladay and Burnett talk about that, wondering why, but they never bring it up with Towers. If he wants to talk about it, he'll talk about it himself.
Halladay is comfortable with Burnett in ways that go far beyond usual teammate comfort, but it's somehow better when Towers is there, with his simple honest respect for Halladay and his puppyish willingness to put up with Burnett. It works, so Halladay is not inclined to think too hard about it, but there’s something about him and Burnett, crazed waveforms amplifying exponentially where they overlap. Towers is like a grounding wire, channeling all that jacked-up intensity and weirdness down into the earth, leaving behind something normal enough to keep everyone involved sane. Mostly.
"He's our good luck charm," Burnett says, when Halladay mentions this over lunch. Halladay rolls his eyes. Burnett is using a butter knife to separate the crusts from his sandwich with medical precision, but he pauses to look up thoughtfully. "Maybe we could take his feet off? Put 'em on keychains, you know. Luck."
"He's not a good luck charm, AJ." For one thing, a good luck charm is something small and tokenistic and... well, it's a rabbit's foot, a horseshoe on the wall, it's a little thing, and Towers is his own autonomous being, out there doing whatever it is he's doing under that Vegasian tangle of neon.
Halladay is also pretty certain that luck has very little to do with him and Burnett, but he's not entirely sure that that's what Burnett is talking about, like maybe he means Towers is good luck for the Blue Jays in general, so he doesn't do anything but roll his eyes again when Burnett shakes his head and says, "'Course he is, man, 'course he is."
----
By the middle of the 2007 season it is clear that Towers is not going to be the Josh Towers of two years ago anytime soon. He is trying to get too careful with his pitches, aiming them instead of pitching them, something Halladay can see even from the far end of the dugout. Towers has never been a power pitcher, his fastball usually not even hitting 90; without control, Towers is nothing. And he does not have his control. He hasn't had it since '05.
He retreats farther and farther into the weight room, bribing the backup catchers with money and food and booze so that he can practice at odd hours, a warm body there to catch him. Zaun won't catch him off the field anymore because he claims that Towers is turning into an unstable asshole. Halladay is surprised by the white-hot burst of anger he feels when he hears this, head down in front of his locker, but Zaun is talking to Wells, and Wells nods in solemn agreement. Halladay bites down on his lower lip, feeling like he's planting a permanent dent there.
"You heard what they're saying 'bout Josh?" he asks, sidling up to Burnett a little later, after Wells has headed out to his car and Zaun has disappeared into the manager's office. Towers is nowhere to be seen.
Burnett nods, lips thin. "Everyone's saying it. 'Course I heard."
"But he's not--"
"Ain't he, though?" Burnett, for whatever reason, won’t quite look Halladay in the eye. "He hasn't been the same, Doc, he hasn't been normal lately."
Halladay shakes his head. He's under no obligations to defend Towers, but he feels like he should, feels like it's something for which he is somehow responsible. Towers hasn't been the same, no, but who's to say what's normal, right? Anyways, this new Towers, nerve endings raw and jangling in the open air, he must've always been in there somewhere, under some thin veneer of sub-5 ERAs and hopefulness.
He says this to Burnett, in not so many words. Burnett shrugs, balls up a towel, rainbows it into the nearest hamper for the clubhouse attendants to deal with later.
Halladay is pissed off. They're in this together, aren't they? Burnett shoved Towers around and sat with him in the bullpen and told him horror stories about tattoos that probably put Towers off of needles for life, and now, fuck, he isn't willing to... to defend the guy when he's struggling most, or whatever?
"You know what happens when word gets around that a guy's unstable," Halladay says-- hisses, almost, he's that mad. "You know how that kinda thing sticks."
Burnett's mouth angles down, an angry slash. He turns away so that all Halladay can see is the spiked mess of his dirty blonde hair, still wet from the showers, darkened almost to brown. "Guess I sure do know," and he's retreating into angry sarcasm, which is, shit, not what Halladay wants. He wasn't trying to say anything about Burnett, but of course Burnett knows quite a bit about labels like that getting stuck to a guy, how hard they are to peel back off.
Stupid, stupid. Halladay should know better-- does know better. "Sorry," he mutters, bringing a hand up before remembering that he can't smooth it down Burnett's back here, no matter how empty the locker room may be. "I. AJ. Didn't mean..."
"Yeah, I know." Burnett half-turns back, folds his arms across his chest, pointed elbows in his palms, shoulders up a little. He looks younger like that; it's not something you'd expect from a jaded veteran, a rookie gesture. "Just. What the fuck d'you want from me? OK? What're we supposed to do, Doc? We can't act like he's doing fine, 'cause he ain't..."
And that's the problem, right there. The truth is that it's not about normal, it's about functional, it's about OK at its most basic level. Towers is not OK, on the mound or off of it. He talks to himself all the time now, darkly mumbling, and that would be fine if it was Halladay or Burnett-- they’re the weird ones, the pitchers who’ve been fucked up and fucked over (and plain old fucked, although nobody else has to know that). Towers is supposed to be the stable one. He’s the normal pitcher, skimming mediocre under the radar, the one who doesn’t know how many pills it takes to make his lips go numb and hasn’t had his mind warped by someone else’s idea of greatness.
It isn’t Halladay that drove Towers to this. It isn’t Burnett. It’s pitching, simple pitching, the most complex simple thing there is. And it’s not as though it was Halladay’s job to shield Towers from the deranging glare or something, but he should have done something, something, anything, because he’s been through this, he and Burnett both. He knows-- they know-- how it goes from here on out. The slide down, that vertiginous drop.
And if Towers survives that, he’ll have to fight his way back up on his own; like Burnett did; like Halladay did. Like so many other guys Halladay has known never did, burnt-out shells of baseball players littering the dusty roads of small-town mid-America. All those has-beens and almost-quites and never-weres.
----
The truth is that Roy Halladay, major league pitcher, is a statistical oddity in almost every way. The odds against his injuries occurring just as they did are high; the odds against him developing the ability to systematically destroy his right arm in a specialized, useful way are higher. The odds against him finding and falling in step with Burnett-- a statistical freak in his own right-- are so high that they don’t bear thinking about. Even his hair is minority population red.
Every player at the big league level is a freakish phenomenon in at least one way. Normal people don’t play in the Majors. Statistically speaking.
Halladay has never had to worry about what it's like to be normal at this level; it is maybe the only kind of pitching strain he has never experienced. It is maybe the one question he could never answer for Towers.
----
He's reading a scouting report on the Royals, sitting up on top of the covers, paging slowly through the thin packet. He doesn't really need this kind of prep work, of course, not for Kansas City, but he is pitching in two days and it is part of his routine.
Burnett is over on his own side of the hotel room, doing something to the spikes on all his cleats; Halladay has not asked, and Burnett has not offered an explanation. When Halladay glances up he can see the back of Burnett's head and the tops of his shoulders over the edge of Burnett's bed. The TV is off; the only sounds in the room are the rustling of the scouting report pages, the staggered susurration of their unsynchronized breathing, and the small miscellaneous noises of whatever it is that Burnett is doing.
They always room together on the road. Halladay has heard that other clubs give guys their own rooms, every trip, but that sounds like a Yankee-ish rumor to him. The Blue Jays certainly can’t (or won’t) shell out the cash for that kind of expense. Roadtrip roommates are Baseball Tradition anyways.
There’s a pause in the sounds from the floor, followed by a shushing noise as Burnett drags someone’s nylon team duffle over to where he’s sitting. Unzipping, and Halladay flips ahead to the last page where all the shortened batter summaries are, because if Burnett is putting his cleats away he’ll probably be wanting to turn the lights out soon, get in their six or seven hours before they have to get up again.
He is therefore surprised when Burnett heaves himself up onto the foot of Halladay’s bed, even more surprised that Burnett is wearing a jersey. A jersey? As Burnett crawls up the bed Halladay can see that it’s his jersey, the gray away jersey with number 32 in blue on the back, a little too baggy in the shoulders for Burnett.
“Don’t think I want you digging around in my bag,” he mutters. He pushes a hand under the jersey at Burnett’s side as Burnett straddles his lap. Burnett doesn’t have a shirt on underneath, his skin running hot.
“Little late for that.” Burnett braces himself on the bed with one hand, wraps the other around Halladay’s wrist (Halladay immediately releasing the scouting report, which falls to the bed), tugs it down to his own waist. Sweatpants in the hotel room, of course; these worn thin with age and dark grey, probably another Florida holdover. There’s not much left in the way of elastic, and Halladay only has to push at them a little bit to get them to slide backwards over the small incline of Burnett’s ass.
No boxers either. It’s all he can do to keep himself from calling Burnett a scheming slut. He goes to unbutton the jersey, but Burnett grabs his wrist again. Halladay squints at him.
“Fuck me with the jersey on,” Burnett says, without even so much as a blush. Unbelievable. Untucked, the jersey comes down to the tops of his thighs, just barely covering his ass, micro-mini length if he was a groupie and this was a dress.
Yeah. “Yeah,” Halladay says, hands automatically going to Burnett’s ass, a cheek in each palm as Burnett sits up a little on his knees. Halladay curls his fingers around to open Burnett up a little, the wiry hairs there damp, wetter and slicker as he circles a single finger farther in. “Tell me you didn’t get this outta my bag too.” Halladay does not have any lube with him on this trip; only oil for his glove. The kind of oil they make out of cow leg parts.
Burnett puts his hands on Halladay’s shoulders, leaning forward to put a little arch in his back, his ass pushing out into Halladay’s hands. “My bag for that,” he mumbles. “C’mon, cmon.”
“In a hurry?” Halladay asks. He pushes a finger into Burnett, all the way up to the knuckle in one smooth slide. Burnett opens his mouth on the side of Halladay’s neck, hot breath and just the tips of his teeth scraping skin. Impatient but not willing to do whatever Halladay needs him to do to actually speed things along, which is typical for Burnett.
Eventually Halladay manages to coax Burnett around onto his hands and knees, freeing himself up long enough to get off the bed, strip, and find a condom (Burnett’s bag, again). Burnett puts his face down on the pillow when Halladay works his cock into him, and he leaves it there while Halladay fucks him, making low muffled noises and probably having at least a little bit of trouble breathing, but if that’s what he wants, who is Halladay to tell him otherwise?
Halladay holds onto Burnett’s waist, soft gray jersey fabric bunching, seams between his fingers rubbing so that he worries, for a single rational moment, about blisters. Practically everything he does on a bed with AJ Burnett is obscene in one way or another, but this-- Burnett tight around the shaft of his cock, loose jersey ends flapping softly against his thighs as he thrusts, the fact that Burnett wanted, demanded to be fucked wearing Halladay's jersey-- this is some new, uncharted region of spectacular obscenity.
"You're a kinky little freak," he says to the surface of Burnett's back; Burnett's face not, at the moment, being available. With his own name right there blaring at him, though, it's not so much an accusation as some kind of, well, some kind of shared acknowledgment.
----
The next day at the ballpark Halladay dresses for the bench-- no cup, normal boxer briefs instead of a jockstrap, a normal t-shirt instead of a sweat-wicking compression athletic undershirt. He checks to make sure that he has those things lying around, just in case, and reaches into his bag for his road jersey. He is sitting down, which turns out to be a good thing, because when his eyes hit those blue letters, HALLADAY in capital-bricked arch across the shoulders, suddenly all he can see is the way they moved the night before with Burnett twisting underneath them, begging with the torque of his body for more, harder, harder.
When he can breathe again, he becomes aware of Burnett halfway across the clubhouse, watching him out of the corner of his eye.
Putting the jersey on is somehow oppressive, like the fabric has been soaked in plaster of paris, extra weight in its every fiber. He’s cloaking himself in the vaguely fucked-up miasma of whatever kind of game Burnett is playing, but of course there is no alternative; he can’t very well decide to not wear his jersey today. Burnett will have known that.
Halladay is hot and itchy all game long, scratching under the back of his collar. If only Towers would come over and put an innocent hand on his shoulder, maybe that would clear the air around him, but Towers is up on the rail watching Gustavo Chacin pitch with a kind of furious obsessive attention. He rips chunks out of a Gatorade cup for every strike, gouges furrows in its side with his fingernails for every ball.
If only Halladay could drag Burnett down into the tunnel, fuck him up against the wall, reddened imprint of unfinished concrete block on Burnett’s belly, maybe that would get all this shit out of his head. But Burnett is delicately dismantling sunflower seeds with his teeth and spitting them out onto the ground, three feet down the bench and untouchable.
They've been wallowing in this kind of between-space for a while now, Burnett and Halladay, the unstable seesaw between bad ideas and barely-staved-off disaster, and Towers is all mixed up in it somewhere in the middle. Or something-- Halladay is not exactly clear, this is the kind of shit a ballplayer's no good at dealing with, thinking through. Whatever is going on, though, the part played by Towers is crumbling away as Towers himself crumbles, piece after tiny piece breaking off with every pitch that fails to break, straight and true in a game where that is almost never, ever a good thing.
----
In May, Halladay has to have an appendectomy. For fucking serious.
In June, Burnett goes on the DL with a sore shoulder.
In August, Towers finally snaps.
----
So this is where it breaks down.
They’re in the dome, roof closed, and maybe this is part of the problem, because Halladay has always been comfortable with it, and Burnett doesn’t give a shit, but Towers has never been entirely at home, pitching indoors. Even in happier times he would say things like, “Sure hope they keep us open today,” a joking smile on his face, but with something a little claustrophobic behind his eyes, no joke at all.
They’re playing the Yankees, and this is probably part of the problem, because there is already bad blood this season, left over from the last series, where Alex Rodriguez shouted while rounding the bases. It was not a high-spirited exclamation; he did it purposefully, to distract the infielders, and the entire Blue Jays team has been lightly stewing over this ever since. It is a kind of amazingly cheap bush league move.
They’ve all been cracking, slow and invisible, all season long, Towers more deeply than most, and this is definitely part of the problem.
In the top of the third inning, Towers pitches inside to Rodriguez and hits him on the leg. It may or may not be intentional. Halladay does not even see it; Jesse Litsch is balancing a baseball on the brim of his hat in the dugout, and Halladay is watching him to see how long he can keep it up. A fastball makes a particular sound when it hits flesh, though, even a not-so-fast fastball, and Halladay would know that sound anywhere. He looks up when he hears it.
People are already starting to run out of the dugout. Round little Matt Stairs launches himself over the rail with what sounds disturbingly like a war cry. Halladay’s first thought is, I better not get hurt again if we’re gonna brawl. His second thought is, fuck, Josh.
There is a lot of yelling, a lot of posturing, but no punches are being thrown by the time he gets out onto the field. Stairs is screaming bloody murder and trying to lunge at Rodriguez, but some kid on the Yankees is holding him back, nervously bewildered. Halladay looks for Towers, finds him behind the mound, feet shifting in the short plastic grass like he wants to be pacing. He isn’t because Gibbons has a hand hooked in the front of Towers’ belt while he explains things to the closest umpire. Halladay’s not sure if Gibbons is trying to hold Towers back or if he’s trying to keep Towers from running away.
“Lookit where his hand is,” Burnett mutters, coming up right behind Halladay. “You think they’re fucking?”
Halladay closes his eyes. “AJ. You’re disgusting. Knock it off.”
Burnett snickers in his ear and lopes off to see what has got Stairs so mad. Halladay heads back towards the dugout. He still doesn’t realize-- none of them realize-- that this is where it falls apart. The thing is, these are the Yankees, and this is the AL East; they’re tense, all of them. Shit happens. The benches don’t clear every day, but this wasn't even a proper fight. Rodriguez will eventually take first base. He’ll have a bruise, but nothing more; the Yankees aren't even calling for a pinch runner. Towers is still on the mound. It’s not a big deal.
Halladay gets one cleat onto the top dugout step before the shouting starts again, something it shouldn't do, because hasn't everyone calmed down? Aren't they done here? He turns around and there on the turf between first base and the mound is Towers, screaming at Rodriguez and-- a coach? Yes, Tony Pena, the Yankees first base coach, holding Rodriguez back and yelling back at Towers, who is hollering things like,
“Just some lame old damn quitter, who’re you to talk, you can’t even hack this, this league, fucking little loser--“ and he’s talking about Tony Pena, that’s personal. Oh. Oh, this is bad.
Back out onto the field, Halladay runs towards the mound. Burnett gets there first, immediately positioning himself between Towers and the Yankees. Drape a cloth cover over a parrot’s cage and the bird will stop squawking, that’s the idea, but Towers won’t stop, yelling and straining against Burnett’s grasp. Halladay comes up to help, an arm around Towers’ chest to hold him in place while Burnett grabs his agitated, flailing arms.
“Fuckin’ psycho, just went nuts,” he hears. "Can't believe... no control at all... crazy out there..." It’s not Yankees saying this. It’s Lyle Overbay at first, Wells coming in from the outfield, Zaun behind the plate with the umpire there, eyes wide. “Did you see… just went after him like a mad dog… kid’s unstable…”
“Don’t call him that,” Burnett says, “don’t call him that, don’t call him that,” but his voice is low and he’s talking more to himself. He might not even realize that he’s saying anything out loud.
Halladay puts both of his hands Towers’ shoulders. “Look at me, buddy,” he says. “Hey. Hey. Settle down just a sec and look at me.” Towers hears him, his head twitching slightly in Halladay’s direction, but he won’t look at Halladay. He is not even really looking at the Yankees; his eyes are wild but unfocused, off somewhere else. He does not pause in his yelling, even though his voice is starting to crack and weaken, static of the throat breaking through the stream of invective.
“Just settle down, OK, buddy, it’ll be all right,” Halladay says, but he no longer knows if he’s talking to Towers or Burnett or himself. He could be talking to the other Jays, the umpires, the baseball field itself, or to nobody at all.
On to part two.
There's also a bit of a timeline hiccup in the short scene where Halladay and Burnett meet Towers; IRL, Halladay would have known Towers before Burnett. So technically you can call it an AU, although other than that it's not very AU-ish.
Roy Halladay/AJ Burnett; Roy Halladay/AJ Burnett/Josh Towers
rated R
13,820 words
Disclaimer: This is a work of fiction. It is in no way a reflection on the actual life, behavior, or character of any of the people featured, and there is no connection or affiliation between this fictional story and the people or organizations it mentions. It was not written with any intent to slander or defame any of the people featured. No profit has been or ever will be made as a result of this story: it is solely for entertainment. And again, it is entirely fictional, i.e. not true.
how to play jenga
The CN Tower is the symbol of the city. Halladay has even heard it called the symbol of the country. It tapers upwards from its massive foundation, a vast upside-down exclamation mark rising out of Toronto. It is, without a doubt, the single most recognizable feature on the Toronto skyline, the silhouette that shows up on tourist brochures and film festival logos and in crayon-vague elementary school drawings.
At its foot is the Rogers Centre, née SkyDome. Halladay has always gotten a kick out of this. Not a day goes by without someone telling him that Toronto is a hockey city first, second, last. Nobody gives a shit about baseball when there's a puck on the ice, can't be a real professional athlete in Toronto unless you're wearing skates, and his personal favorite: can't get laid in this city unless you're missing a tooth or three.
They laugh about it in the clubhouse sometimes. For all that, what do they choose to put at the base of their most famous structure? Why, only the baseball field.
It isn't as if the arena where the hockey team plays is terribly far away. But it is baseball that hugs the pale concrete skirts of that Canadian desire to reach into the big, icy, vaulted blue, and despite all the protestations of the Canadians, Halladay's sure there is meaning in that, somewhere.
----
The truth is that Halladay doesn't really expect anything to change. This departure won't ruin the rotation, corrupt the team any more than it's already been corrupted. Towers had been mostly great in 2005 and has been mostly terrible ever since, and the Blue Jays, ha, the Blue Jays have all kinds of options when it comes to ways to fuck themselves up. It's never just one thing.
Halladay’s greatest lost season, that 2005; his best start in years put on indefinite hold by the swift merciless trajectory of a line drive. Towers was fantastic while Halladay was injured, pitching to expectation and then far beyond it, but all his command vanished when Halladay's bones knit and he came back to the team. It confused the hell out of everyone, seeing Towers go from studiously mediocre to team-carrying and then back to worse than he was before, none of it with any warning at all. It was almost like his talent belonged to some alternate universe, a very slightly surreal place with its own set of rules, a plane of existence that simply could not maintain its hold on this reality while Halladay was playing.
Halladay sometimes thinks that maybe he imagined it, Towers being that good. Maybe it was some feverish reaction to the stupendous amounts of pain medication he had been taking at the time. But then there's the fact of Towers' contract with the team, which was obviously influenced by some amount of good pitching, because it's not a contract that makes a goddamn bit of sense otherwise.
It's kind of amazing, actually, because the truth is that Josh Towers idolizes Roy Halladay. He speaks about Halladay's cutter in the kinds of awed tones that most people reserve for hundred-foot-tall waterfalls and sacred burial grounds. AJ Burnett gives him a Roy Halladay bobblehead mostly as a joke and Towers keep it in his locker, not caring who sees it. Josh Towers can control the location of a baseball to within inches, but only if Roy Halladay isn't looking.
----
He isn't really Towers' mentor, although Towers keeps telling the newspaper guys that he is. Halladay certainly isn't trying to be anybody's teacher. He does what careful injury avoidance rituals he can; he pays his stoic obeisance to luck. He gives first-rate pitching to a third-rate team and he doesn't give a shit, because middle of the pack is the best he's ever known. It's kinda nice, in a way, that relative lack of a certain type of stress. Whatever Towers gets out of all that is his own business.
In 2005, Josh Towers does not need any guidance. All he needs to do is keep on doing whatever it is that he's been doing. This suits Halladay just fine, because he's stumping around on crutches, left leg in a heavy cast all the way up to his knee, in no kind of mood to give advice to anyone. Burnett is still a Marlin in 2005, busy violently burning bridges with every single member of the front office and coaching staff there. Come September Burnett will be asked to leave the team-- not traded, not sent to the minors, but asked to leave the team. This just doesn't happen in Major League Baseball, and it won't be until December that the Blue Jays declare themselves the only team willing to take a risk on his oft-injured body and his quick-cracking attitude. But none of them know any of that yet.
In 2005 Halladay is cadging extra pills off of Corey Koskie, who never uses his entire prescription because he believes that on some level he deserves the pain. This is obviously psychotic, but Halladay is not in any hurry to disabuse him of the notion. Koskie doesn't have anything as bad as a shattered leg anyways.
Halladay doesn't sit in the dugout very much when he's injured. Some guys like to be there no matter what. Rah rah, team spirit, whatever; Halladay has never seen the point of lounging around where the cameras can see him like some kind of noble suffering totem. The stairs up from the clubhouse tunnel are a fucking nightmare for a tall man on tall crutches anyways. Ballplayers are almost by definition strong, healthy people; there's absolutely no incentive to make the dugout handicapped-accessible.
Sometimes on game days he does show up at the ballpark, makes it as far as the clubhouse. Gibbons always asks him to come in, saying it's good for team morale, which Halladay thinks is a load of crap. He comes in because he's making twice as much money as anyone else on the roster to sit unhelpfully on his ass and the least he can do is put in an appearance. He hangs around with the guys while they get ready, then watches the game on the big clubhouse TV by himself, crowd noises filtered through the broadcast a second after he hears them muffled through the walls. He sits in one of the big fake-leather chairs with his legs stretched straight out, playing little games with himself, trying to see how long he can stand to only move his eyes, flicking them back and forth over the action on the screen. When he holds perfectly still he can almost feel the chemicals mulching through his bloodstream, numbing him bit by bit.
Occasionally, when he's not pitching, Towers comes down to keep him company. Towers sits in the chair next to him and just about overflows with the energy of a pitcher in the middle of the best season of his life. He shuffles his feet across the carpet and bounces his hands on his knees. This huge, amazing thing is happening to him when he's on the mound, and he keeps trying to explain it to Halladay.
"I look in to see what Z's calling for, right--" Gregg Zaun, their long-haired, pouchy-cheeked catcher-- "and there's... it's like there's a box hanging in the air. Like, glowing white lines and shit. Right where the strikezone is, and there's this bright red crosshairs that I can move around the box by looking at where I want it to go-- the pitch, I mean, where I want the pitch to go. And because I can see that so clear, I can throw the ball right there, no trouble. I mean there isn't a box, of course, I don't mean I actually see lines up there, but it's like I do. You know what I mean?"
Halladay jogs his head to the side very slightly, noncommittal. He doesn't really have any fucking idea what Towers is talking about. Pitching is nothing like that for him. But that's not so strange. Pitching is a different specific thing for every player in the game. Always has been, and always will be.
-----
Roy Halladay has never been on a team that's not the Blue Jays, and he's lost a certain amount of interchangeability because of it. It shows in funny ways.
The ballpark itself, oddly, has never been the thing that gives him trouble. It's a retractable roof, only a true enclosed dome some of the time. The surface doesn't give him problems anymore either; they've made great advances in artificial turf technology (and oh, but it is a technology, as any longtime dome-dweller can attest) since he's been in the Majors.
Instead it's stuff like the knowledge that no matter how much money they spend, it will never be enough. The extra time that it takes to come home from every road trip because they're the only team in the league that always, always, always has to go through passport control to get back to their own stadium. The fact that he was born at high elevations, grew up among mountains, and never quite got used to living in low places, although this is a problem he would have on any team that's not the Rockies.
He came up a Blue Jay, and no matter what the coaches say, if he's calling Toronto home for long enough a guy gets kind of used to thinking of third place as the goal. There's no such thing as being better than the Red Sox, better than the Yankees; there's only not as bad as the Orioles and more of an actual team than the Devil Rays. Nobody says that, of course. Nobody even thinks it in those clear terms; it's a kind of baseball suicide, deliberately thinking like that. It gets in their heads anyways, sub-and-unconscious, working its way into the little spaces that nobody ever bothers to guard. Halladay's been in one place longer than most, and it's not like he's some kind of exception.
It's not the healthiest attitude for a professional ballplayer, but Halladay has always had a checkered kind of relationship with health anyways.
----
Burnett knows injuries just as intimately as Halladay does: the usual pitching injuries, and the weird, are-you-kidding random ones that it seems only guys with a particular variety of anti-luck ever get. Turns out Burnett has almost the same kind of anti-luck that Halladay does, when it comes to injuries, and that's a comfort, because Halladay had been starting to get used to the idea that he was the only one.
When Halladay runs out of Percosets now, he knows he can go to Burnett for more. When Burnett burns through his Tylenol-plus-codeine too fast, Halladay's ready with a bottleful of extras. They both know all about trying to sleep sitting upright in a chair to avoid aggravating a tweaked shoulder.
It isn't just the injuries. Halladay won't talk to anyone before a start, not even his teammates, not even to say hi if one of them waves at him. Burnett wore two little rings in his nipples before the postgame ice wrapping, stretching across his chest every fifth day, irritated them so much that he had to take them out. They both tower over their teammates and know that the door to the manager's office is a little lower than the other doors in the clubhouse. If they get called in to talk, they both have to duck their heads when they're going through the door.
From the moment Burnett showed up in Spring Training with his skinny tattooed arms and his suspicious walleyed glare, they had been kind of orbiting one another, making slow deliberate circuits. So there's a certain inevitability to the whole thing: to Halladay-and-Burnett, Doc-and-AJ. He doesn't even remember the first time Burnett came to him. Or maybe it was the other way around and he went to Burnett; he doesn't even remember that much. He knows that this thing with Burnett hasn't been going on forever, he's not fucking delusional. He'd never even had occasion to shake AJ Burnett's hand before 2006, but it's the kind of thing that feels like it's always been there, just part of the landscape. Anyways, even mountains have to get their start somewhere, somewhen.
They're both starting pitchers and they both have these injury problems, so everyone already expects them to be bent at slightly weird angles, their personalities gently skewed. Halladay has a kind of filing cabinet in his head, and he has an entire drawer full of stuff like this: his hair color, his right-handedness, third place max, the thing with Burnett, the size of his shoes, the fact that he's terrible at converting Celsius to Fahrenheit and back again. It's just another one of those things, a little fact of life: oh, there it is. Nothing to make a fuss over. No big deal.
----
Once upon a time Roy Halladay completely reinvented himself. True story. He first made it to the big leagues as a fastball guy, a power pitcher. Anything slower than 95 was not worth throwing: that was 153 kilometers per hour, the one conversion that was always right at his fingertips. He was six feet and six inches of intimidation and knew how to use it, wasn't afraid to do just that, back then. He had the ability to sear paint off a backstop just by looking at it. Minor leagues, they didn’t just strike out against him; they were scared shitless (hitless), knees quaking at the plate. He got called up to the majors, tore it up some, just as easy as he’d imagined. He got sent back down the following season for a little more development, a little more age on his arm, and when he got to Toronto the second time he sucked.
To this day he does not know why he fell apart so quickly and so completely. Nobody does. Big league hitters are better than the guys in triple-A, of course, and they learn from their mistakes much more quickly, but that doesn't really account for it. Whatever. He doesn't waste any time thinking about it now, because there is no sense in dwelling, and if he was going to learn something from the whole experience, well, he surely already has.
The truth is that that time of reinvention is a clear line of demarcation across the path of Halladay's life. Not in the sense that it took a single day, with a simple before and after, of course, because it took him much longer than that: most of a minor league season, all together. It is a line in the sense that he was one way before, and another way afterwards. Halladay is very sure of this difference of self, as sure as he is of the difference between live grass and unchanging turf. He could never put a name to it, though. There isn't one word for the kind of person he was before or the kind of person he is now. Well, he was a fastball pitcher before and he's a more complete pitcher now, but that barely scratches the surface.
One thing he does know for sure is that he would not have been with Burnett if he had never had to make that change. The kind of person he was as a pure fastball pitcher simply would not have been compatible with the kind of person who could exist all mixed up with AJ Burnett. It wasn't that he was homophobic (if he had had to describe his attitude at the time, he probably would have said 'apathetic'); more that his basic personality could not have existed in such close proximity to a personality like Burnett's.
It isn't good one way or bad the other. It's just a fact that losing his reliance on the fastball, honing his feel for offspeed pitches, pitches with motion and break and spin, splintered off into other shards of his personality, changed him in some deeply fundamental and unexpected way.
Halladay might have at some point thought that there was no way baseball could alter him at his core, that who he was in the most essential sense would always be pristinely him, but that's rookie thinking. Kid stuff. He's known better for a while now, worked so tightly into the warp and weft of the game. He has been for so long that it no longer even feels weird to think that he has no idea where baseball ends and he begins.
----
At night they light up the Tower: usually long, thin strips of color running up and down its sides, with the observation area bulging out a horizontal strap, the remaining spire above that all one solid color. From far off across the city it looks like a fat UFO with an ignition trail underneath it, frozen in sci-fi time.
When the Rogers Centre roof is closed, they light it up as well. The tall thin tower and the low gentle arch of the dome sitting next to it remind Halladay of nothing so much as a bat balanced on its end, a baseball resting by its side. It doesn't look like anything that ought to be in the middle of a city, but by now it's come to look like home.
----
Towers sits next to him in the dugout and asks questions. Halladay likes this, because he always has a response. It's something he can enjoy, always knowing just what to say, the easy comforting force of his conviction behind the words. Cut your fingernails straight across so you can grip with them, he says, you should replace your spikes a month before the manufacturer says you should, and it ain't cheating if you scuff the ball so the umpire can't tell. Towers asks about concrete things, the stuff he doesn't know anchored firmly in the realm of the tangible and real.
Burnett asks him questions that he has no idea how to answer, and Burnett likes to ask them real quiet out of the side of his mouth while they're both watching the game with the rest of the team swirling around them, oblivious. Why d'you think it's you'n me Burnett asks, how'd you ever figure out you wanted this, and how long is this gonna last? Halladay is left hamstrung by both the presence of his teammates and his lack of any satisfactory explanations.
Actually, he does know the answer to that last one. It's until one of us leaves this team.
----
So Halladay spends a lot of time around Burnett, and Towers is madly in love with the idea of Halladay as a pitcher. Transitive property: Burnett and Towers end up jumbled together like dice in a cupped palm, where proximity will push Burnett and Towers up against one another. Literally push: Burnett likes to palm Towers' head and shove it into couch cushions or batting cages or the sides of mostly unsuspecting teammates, holding him there while Towers squirms and flails and says, "AJ, AJ, AJ," on an increasing scale until his voice is somewhere up around a falsetto.
Towers has a small, sensitive mouth and delicate features, and Burnett is the kind of guy who likes to manhandle people who are smaller than him. There's nothing particularly mean behind it, it's just the way he's able to relate. Halladay doesn't interfere, steadfastly refuses to mediate, because Towers has to learn how to deal with this stuff on his own.
He's pretty sure that they talk about him sometimes, Burnett and Towers, when Towers is in one of his demoted-to-the-bullpen phases and Burnett goes out to keep him company during a game, the two of them together with their heads close and Burnett's arm sticking way out over the line of Towers' shoulders, long bony fingers dangling in the air. He has no idea what they would have to say to each other, but he likes to imagine that they're talking on parallel tracks, neither one really listening to the other, Towers saying,
"Did you see his curveball today? Seventy-seven flat on the gun, every single time he threw it, you can't get a pitching machine that regular!" at the same time that Burnett is saying,
"And he does this thing where he kinda clamps his teeth down 'round one of my nipples, 'cause he knows I got extra sensitive where the piercings grew over, and he doesn't bite down but he kinda grinds his jaw around 'til I'm leaking so much it's a miracle I got anything left to come with."
And they would nod seriously and grin at one another, yup, that's our Doc.
----
All three of them are exactly the same age, born in '77, although their birthdays are staggered: Burnett at the very beginning of January, Towers in February, Halladay in May. So the truth is that he's the youngest, the technical baby of their little baseball family, which is pretty fucked up, because there isn't a day that goes by when he doesn't feel so much older than the both of them.
----
His arm hurts. His arm hurts, fuck, and nothing is staying down in the zone. Every time he turns his forearm over to throw the ball, the bunched muscles there scream at him; it feels like they're separating, ripping away from the places where they attach to bone, like he's deliberately shredding his arm with infinitely small coils of razorwire. After every pitch he looks down in surprise, shocked that everything can still look so normal. It seems weird that the skin isn't ripping and tearing and flecked with blood, but all that must be on the inside.
He bounces a pitch, trying to bring it down in the zone. Zaun comes up to his knees to block it, then holds out a hand to the umpire and trots out to the mound. His kneepads lock and unlock like the jointed armor of a blue crab. Halladay grits his teeth and looks at the sky. He knows that he's fucking up, that it's Zaun's responsibility to come out and see what's going on, but Zaun is just about the last person he wants to see right now.
"You hurting?" Zaun asks. He puts his glove up on Halladay's shoulder to keep him from turning away or making a scene. Halladay hates him a little for the question; he hasn't been hurt, there's no reason for Zaun to ask, except he's him, injuries are what he does, so really Zaun has every reason to ask.
And he's right, of course, because Halladay is hurting. It doesn't make him any less resentful.
"Talk t'me, Doc," Zaun says, a low warning tone creeping into his voice.
Halladay toys with the idea of telling Zaun he's fine, everything feels great, but common sense prevails. The odds of this going away on its own are slim, and he'll be found out eventually, get in worse trouble with the team for hiding an injury. He blows out a sharp breath, not bothering to hide his annoyance. "Yeah, my arm, it's. Whatever, pretty fucking sore."
"Usual sore or strain sore?" Zaun asks. Halladay sucks in a deep breath just so that he can blow it contemptuously out again. "Look," Zaun hisses, "you don't want to talk to me right now, fuck it, fine, but I can't bring your little pitcher groupie-friends out here to talk to you instead, so you better suck it up 'cause it's me you got to deal with. Usual sore or strain sore?"
"Fuck you, you--" Halladay has no words for exactly what Zaun is. "Fuck you, and fuck whatever you're implyin'."
Zaun gets closer, right up in his face. On TV it must look like he's giving Halladay an intense pep talk, full of Buck Up Nows and Catcher's Wisdom. "Neither one'a us has time for your bullshit right now, Doc. Usual sore, or strain sore? You got three seconds to answer, or I call Gibbons up."
Halladay looks down. Zaun's cleats are toe-to-toe with his own, almost overlapping. "Strain sore. Fuck, OK, fuck it, fuck you, muscle tear sore. Maybe. Not usual sore, that's for fucking sure."
"You weren't gonna say anything?" Zaun sounds faintly disgusted.
Halladay shrugs irritably; it's the kind of question that doesn't really need a response. No pitcher lasts long in the league if he tells the coaches and trainers about every time he feels a twinge. Everyone understands that, even Zaun.
But Zaun still has that angry, sick look on his face, shaking his head. “Pitchers. Do you all try to send yourselves down the shitcan? Must be hard work bein’ this set on ruining yourself.”
“Just get back behind the plate and do your damn job,” Halladay says. He has nothing else to say to Zaun. He just needs to not be standing here any longer.
“This is me, doing my job,” Zaun says. He raises a hand and signals for the trainer.
----
That was 2006, near the end of the season. Halladay was pissed off, because they were fighting tooth and nail and blue jay claw for that second place spot, and with the trainers making dire noises over his arm he couldn’t do a damn thing to help.
Burnett offered him a blowjob and a couple blister-packs of Oxycontin, acquired God-knows-where. Halladay took the latter before accepting the former. Intense but at a remove, an out-of-body dead man’s orgasm, which suited his mood. Good for distraction in the short term, but in the long term, not that helpful.
It was Towers who was willing to sit down and talk about it, or let Halladay talk about it, anyways. A beer and a half, plus the oxies, and Halladay was gone, leaning hard on Towers’ shitty little kitchen table in Towers’ shitty little apartment, the only kind of place that would rent to a ballplayer who lived under the constant threat of minor league reassignment, the necessity of breaking a lease on short notice.
Halladay’s not sure exactly what he said that night. Some stuff about Zaun, some stuff about the trainers, some stuff about pitching. Stuff about Burnett; lots of stuff about Burnett. If Towers hadn’t known before then, he certainly would have known after.
He has just one distinct memory from that night, startling in its clarity: a snapshot of Towers backlit by a weak yellow kitchen overhead, chin in hand, elbow in the stopmotion process of inching across the table surface towards its edge. Towers’ little mouth a thoughtful moue. Towers saying, “Should be me injured, Doc. You can help the team. Should be me.”
Halladay wishes like hell he could remember how he replied to that.
----
It’s Burnett’s first year out of Florida, that 2006, and the Blue Jays finish second in the division. The first time they have finished better than third since 1993, when they won it all and Halladay was still two years away from being drafted. They're ten games behind the Yankees and not even close to making the playoffs (everyone who's anyone knows that the wildcard is coming from the Central this year) but second place in the East has been unattainable for thirteen years, and now it's theirs.
Kind of funny that this should be the year they break away from third place. Half the team is convinced that management is sabotaging them. John Gibbons is fighting with everyone: the fistfight with Shea Hillenbrand in July, the almost-fistfight with Ted Lilly in August. Behavior unbecoming of a manager, for sure, but what sort of pro turns on his own coach like that? Their GM is publicly accusing Troy Glaus of not trying, the kind of accusation that shouldn’t ever be thrown around lightly in baseball. Towers can't get back to his happy pitching universe and Burnett is already growing adept at curling a finger into one of Halladay's beltloops, making him think that really bad ideas are, maybe, OK after all. People talk about clubhouse cancers all the time in baseball, but Halladay can't think of a team more overtly poisoned than this one.
They're in New York for the last game of the year. The Yankees give each other sedate pats on the butt across the field, having known the division was theirs weeks in advance. It's a kind of complacent security that Halladay can't even imagine. He can think the words, sure, security, complacent, but they are basically without meaning. The game is basically meaningless too; still, it is nice that Towers gets the win. It's only his second win of the entire season.
Halladay has been riding the bench for weeks, making impatient huffing noises, just waiting for the season to end. What he has is a forearm strain and an injunction forbidding him to take the field, necessarily forcing him to miss his last few scheduled starts of the year. He isn't allowed to hide out in the clubhouse, either: it's not an injury that keeps him from climbing the stairs, and they're on a road trip, Gibbons peaceably but implacably demanding that their fucked-up team present a cardboard-flimsy united front to the world, so Halladay's right up there in the dugout, watching Towers struggle with his control and somehow stumble into that win anyways. It's the first day of October.
There's a kind of collective sigh from the team in the clubhouse afterwards as they watch the out-of-town scores scroll across the bottom of the TV screen, realizing that they have managed to stay that single game up on Boston, and they have second. Second place, the most pitiful of miracles. Alex Rios and Reed Johnson high five each other, whooping and bouncing around, knocking into guys who widen their stances and roll their eyes tolerantly. Vernon Wells shakes up a plastic bottle of Coke and sprays it around, lightly staining the walls and getting them all sticky. Nobody objects; it's not their clubhouse anyways.
"This is fucking sad," Burnett mutters. He's got his shirt off and his jeans on, halfway between his postgame shower and the real world. Halladay can see the muscles running long lines on either side of Burnett's spine, the pretty points where his pelvis makes itself known at his narrow hips. There is a large, recent-looking bruise on the back of Burnett's left leg, right where his thigh meets his ass, now hidden by the jeans. Nobody had commented on it in the showers. It's just a bruise. They all have them. It's not shaped like anything in particular. Halladay is in one of his nebulously paranoid phases, though, and is watching him pretty closely, the only reason he hears.
He doesn't think it's so sad, himself, but he doesn't say anything. Burnett was out with a wrecked arm the year the Marlins went to and won the World Series. He has his own fucked-up relationship with the postseason. Halladay is not in any position to comment on it.
----
“Nice hair,” Burnett says, the first time they meet. “Tell me, does the carpet match the drapes?”
“Pay attention in the locker room and find out,” Halladay shoots back. “And, y’know, real original, I never heard that one before.” Burnett gives him a cocky, shit-eating grin. He knows it; he's just being annoying to get Halladay's attention. Halladay knows what he's doing and it still works, so, whatever, chalk one up for the new kid.
----
“That’s some red hair,” Towers says, the first time they meet. Burnett, standing next to Halladay, grins in anticipation. Halladay braces himself. “Good thing you didn’t get drafted by the Cardinals, huh?”
Halladay stares. “I… what?”
Towers looks sheepish. “Red hats. With your hair. It would’ve looked…”
“OK. Yeah, I gotcha. Just. Haven’t heard that one before,” Halladay says, because, huh, he hasn’t.
“Show-off,” Burnett grumbles. Towers looks at him, eyebrows crumpling in confusion, and Halladay has to laugh.
----
The breakdown holds off that winter, before the '07 season, waiting for Opening Day same as the rest of them. Towers goes to Vegas with Reed Johnson, not because they're best friends or anything-- Johnson is an outfielder; Towers has made himself such a fixture with Halladay and Burnett that he doesn't have many other close friends on the team-- but because Johnson's gym is out there. Johnson is one of those guys who trains obsessively all throughout the offseason, and Towers is just starting to get that desperate, willing to do pretty much whatever it takes to get back to 2005. He hasn't talked about seeing crosshairs over the plate in a long time.
Burnett has a house in south Florida, the perfect kind of place to ride out the months between October and February. He doesn't even invite Halladay down, just starts saying things like, "So we'll hit the links in a couple weeks, I can get us into the private club down the road 'cause, you know, we're talkin' real hot shit, here."
"I'm so impressed," Halladay says. Deadpan. Burnett isn't even any good at golf. He plays because it's one of the few sports they are contractually allowed to play. Except for baseball, of course, but baseball, from the point of view of their contracts, is hardly a sport.
He flies into Miami International, disembarking to long, long corridors, aggressively air conditioned, every announcement in equally incomprehensible English and Spanish. Burnett does not meet him at the airport, which is to be expected; they don't have that kind of a thing between them.
Halladay takes a cab and doesn't bother to call ahead. When he rings the bell, Burnett opens the door wearing nothing but a pair of expensive-looking blue silk boxers, exposing the dark blonde fuzz on his skinny thighs. His hair is wrecked and his eyes are bleary. It's not actually all that early, just about nine in the morning.
"Come back to bed," he mumbles, turning and shuffling back down the hallway, like Halladay hasn't just arrived, has always been there. Halladay shuts the front door and drops his bags in front of it. He follows the pale beacon of Burnett's back, already thinking about the possibilities inherent in a big bed, the sheets with thread counts too high to enumerate, as early-morning-wrecked as Burnett's hair.
----
When he pitches at home and the roof is open, Halladay can glance towards first base and see the Tower there. The banked rows of seats obscure much of its base and the curved and latticed roof that's present even when they're bared to the sky obscures yet more, but the Tower is so much taller than the ballpark that it's easily visible regardless. It means Toronto; it means home field advantage; it means a place that he knows and a place where the fielders behind him are more comfortable than the guys they're playing against, so he's come to see it as a kind of comforting presence.
Quick glance, the slightest twitch of his eyes, enough to reassure himself that it's still there, watching over them all. And of course it always is.
He constantly has to check himself in Florida, because every tall shape he sees over his shoulder is just another palm tree or weirdly-shaped condo high-rise, and it is unsettling in some basic way that he doesn't think about too closely and doesn't really question.
----
It isn't healthy for him to spend so much time alone with Burnett. They don't get out of bed except to pee, some days. They fuck, of course, but it's not even always that; sometimes they just sit up in the middle of Burnett's oversized expanse of sheets, talking in circular ways about postseasons, pitching, off-brand prescription painkillers. Every so often Halladay finds himself stroking Burnett's cock without any clear intentions in that direction, just giving his hand something to do while they talk. Burnett's cock is as long and skinny as the rest of him. Halladay is very familiar with the shape and feel of it by now.
When they do get out of the house it's usually just to go to that exclusive golf club, skating into whatever tee time they want on the strength of Burnett's Marlins tenure. Standing on the immaculate greens with Burnett in his neat polo shirts and starch-stiff khakis, bright Florida sunlight glinting off of his precision weighted golf clubs, never quite feels right to Halladay. There's something distinctly unreal about the whole thing, a kind of absent immediacy, like he's reading a book about some other guys golfing in some other country.
He has little fantasies about unzipping Burnett's fly right there on the green, drawing him out, not even jacking him off-- just getting his hand on that part of Burnett, feeling it firm up against his palm. He thinks that he might be able to regain a measure of reality that way, but it is not, for a variety of obvious and less-obvious reasons, going to happen.
Towers calls from Vegas at least three times a week. He alternates phones, calling Halladay one day, Burnett the next. They put him on speakerphone and laugh at the warbled distortion of his voice, Towers making fun of the way they talk over one another in retaliation. He tells them about the exercises he's doing, the things he's been thinking about trying, and they give him competing advice about what he should be doing instead. It isn't much of a competition; all three of them know that Towers will listen to whatever Halladay says, over Burnett and the trainers and his own inclinations.
He must be spending a lot of time with Reed Johnson, but he never mentions him, not once. Halladay and Burnett talk about that, wondering why, but they never bring it up with Towers. If he wants to talk about it, he'll talk about it himself.
Halladay is comfortable with Burnett in ways that go far beyond usual teammate comfort, but it's somehow better when Towers is there, with his simple honest respect for Halladay and his puppyish willingness to put up with Burnett. It works, so Halladay is not inclined to think too hard about it, but there’s something about him and Burnett, crazed waveforms amplifying exponentially where they overlap. Towers is like a grounding wire, channeling all that jacked-up intensity and weirdness down into the earth, leaving behind something normal enough to keep everyone involved sane. Mostly.
"He's our good luck charm," Burnett says, when Halladay mentions this over lunch. Halladay rolls his eyes. Burnett is using a butter knife to separate the crusts from his sandwich with medical precision, but he pauses to look up thoughtfully. "Maybe we could take his feet off? Put 'em on keychains, you know. Luck."
"He's not a good luck charm, AJ." For one thing, a good luck charm is something small and tokenistic and... well, it's a rabbit's foot, a horseshoe on the wall, it's a little thing, and Towers is his own autonomous being, out there doing whatever it is he's doing under that Vegasian tangle of neon.
Halladay is also pretty certain that luck has very little to do with him and Burnett, but he's not entirely sure that that's what Burnett is talking about, like maybe he means Towers is good luck for the Blue Jays in general, so he doesn't do anything but roll his eyes again when Burnett shakes his head and says, "'Course he is, man, 'course he is."
----
By the middle of the 2007 season it is clear that Towers is not going to be the Josh Towers of two years ago anytime soon. He is trying to get too careful with his pitches, aiming them instead of pitching them, something Halladay can see even from the far end of the dugout. Towers has never been a power pitcher, his fastball usually not even hitting 90; without control, Towers is nothing. And he does not have his control. He hasn't had it since '05.
He retreats farther and farther into the weight room, bribing the backup catchers with money and food and booze so that he can practice at odd hours, a warm body there to catch him. Zaun won't catch him off the field anymore because he claims that Towers is turning into an unstable asshole. Halladay is surprised by the white-hot burst of anger he feels when he hears this, head down in front of his locker, but Zaun is talking to Wells, and Wells nods in solemn agreement. Halladay bites down on his lower lip, feeling like he's planting a permanent dent there.
"You heard what they're saying 'bout Josh?" he asks, sidling up to Burnett a little later, after Wells has headed out to his car and Zaun has disappeared into the manager's office. Towers is nowhere to be seen.
Burnett nods, lips thin. "Everyone's saying it. 'Course I heard."
"But he's not--"
"Ain't he, though?" Burnett, for whatever reason, won’t quite look Halladay in the eye. "He hasn't been the same, Doc, he hasn't been normal lately."
Halladay shakes his head. He's under no obligations to defend Towers, but he feels like he should, feels like it's something for which he is somehow responsible. Towers hasn't been the same, no, but who's to say what's normal, right? Anyways, this new Towers, nerve endings raw and jangling in the open air, he must've always been in there somewhere, under some thin veneer of sub-5 ERAs and hopefulness.
He says this to Burnett, in not so many words. Burnett shrugs, balls up a towel, rainbows it into the nearest hamper for the clubhouse attendants to deal with later.
Halladay is pissed off. They're in this together, aren't they? Burnett shoved Towers around and sat with him in the bullpen and told him horror stories about tattoos that probably put Towers off of needles for life, and now, fuck, he isn't willing to... to defend the guy when he's struggling most, or whatever?
"You know what happens when word gets around that a guy's unstable," Halladay says-- hisses, almost, he's that mad. "You know how that kinda thing sticks."
Burnett's mouth angles down, an angry slash. He turns away so that all Halladay can see is the spiked mess of his dirty blonde hair, still wet from the showers, darkened almost to brown. "Guess I sure do know," and he's retreating into angry sarcasm, which is, shit, not what Halladay wants. He wasn't trying to say anything about Burnett, but of course Burnett knows quite a bit about labels like that getting stuck to a guy, how hard they are to peel back off.
Stupid, stupid. Halladay should know better-- does know better. "Sorry," he mutters, bringing a hand up before remembering that he can't smooth it down Burnett's back here, no matter how empty the locker room may be. "I. AJ. Didn't mean..."
"Yeah, I know." Burnett half-turns back, folds his arms across his chest, pointed elbows in his palms, shoulders up a little. He looks younger like that; it's not something you'd expect from a jaded veteran, a rookie gesture. "Just. What the fuck d'you want from me? OK? What're we supposed to do, Doc? We can't act like he's doing fine, 'cause he ain't..."
And that's the problem, right there. The truth is that it's not about normal, it's about functional, it's about OK at its most basic level. Towers is not OK, on the mound or off of it. He talks to himself all the time now, darkly mumbling, and that would be fine if it was Halladay or Burnett-- they’re the weird ones, the pitchers who’ve been fucked up and fucked over (and plain old fucked, although nobody else has to know that). Towers is supposed to be the stable one. He’s the normal pitcher, skimming mediocre under the radar, the one who doesn’t know how many pills it takes to make his lips go numb and hasn’t had his mind warped by someone else’s idea of greatness.
It isn’t Halladay that drove Towers to this. It isn’t Burnett. It’s pitching, simple pitching, the most complex simple thing there is. And it’s not as though it was Halladay’s job to shield Towers from the deranging glare or something, but he should have done something, something, anything, because he’s been through this, he and Burnett both. He knows-- they know-- how it goes from here on out. The slide down, that vertiginous drop.
And if Towers survives that, he’ll have to fight his way back up on his own; like Burnett did; like Halladay did. Like so many other guys Halladay has known never did, burnt-out shells of baseball players littering the dusty roads of small-town mid-America. All those has-beens and almost-quites and never-weres.
----
The truth is that Roy Halladay, major league pitcher, is a statistical oddity in almost every way. The odds against his injuries occurring just as they did are high; the odds against him developing the ability to systematically destroy his right arm in a specialized, useful way are higher. The odds against him finding and falling in step with Burnett-- a statistical freak in his own right-- are so high that they don’t bear thinking about. Even his hair is minority population red.
Every player at the big league level is a freakish phenomenon in at least one way. Normal people don’t play in the Majors. Statistically speaking.
Halladay has never had to worry about what it's like to be normal at this level; it is maybe the only kind of pitching strain he has never experienced. It is maybe the one question he could never answer for Towers.
----
He's reading a scouting report on the Royals, sitting up on top of the covers, paging slowly through the thin packet. He doesn't really need this kind of prep work, of course, not for Kansas City, but he is pitching in two days and it is part of his routine.
Burnett is over on his own side of the hotel room, doing something to the spikes on all his cleats; Halladay has not asked, and Burnett has not offered an explanation. When Halladay glances up he can see the back of Burnett's head and the tops of his shoulders over the edge of Burnett's bed. The TV is off; the only sounds in the room are the rustling of the scouting report pages, the staggered susurration of their unsynchronized breathing, and the small miscellaneous noises of whatever it is that Burnett is doing.
They always room together on the road. Halladay has heard that other clubs give guys their own rooms, every trip, but that sounds like a Yankee-ish rumor to him. The Blue Jays certainly can’t (or won’t) shell out the cash for that kind of expense. Roadtrip roommates are Baseball Tradition anyways.
There’s a pause in the sounds from the floor, followed by a shushing noise as Burnett drags someone’s nylon team duffle over to where he’s sitting. Unzipping, and Halladay flips ahead to the last page where all the shortened batter summaries are, because if Burnett is putting his cleats away he’ll probably be wanting to turn the lights out soon, get in their six or seven hours before they have to get up again.
He is therefore surprised when Burnett heaves himself up onto the foot of Halladay’s bed, even more surprised that Burnett is wearing a jersey. A jersey? As Burnett crawls up the bed Halladay can see that it’s his jersey, the gray away jersey with number 32 in blue on the back, a little too baggy in the shoulders for Burnett.
“Don’t think I want you digging around in my bag,” he mutters. He pushes a hand under the jersey at Burnett’s side as Burnett straddles his lap. Burnett doesn’t have a shirt on underneath, his skin running hot.
“Little late for that.” Burnett braces himself on the bed with one hand, wraps the other around Halladay’s wrist (Halladay immediately releasing the scouting report, which falls to the bed), tugs it down to his own waist. Sweatpants in the hotel room, of course; these worn thin with age and dark grey, probably another Florida holdover. There’s not much left in the way of elastic, and Halladay only has to push at them a little bit to get them to slide backwards over the small incline of Burnett’s ass.
No boxers either. It’s all he can do to keep himself from calling Burnett a scheming slut. He goes to unbutton the jersey, but Burnett grabs his wrist again. Halladay squints at him.
“Fuck me with the jersey on,” Burnett says, without even so much as a blush. Unbelievable. Untucked, the jersey comes down to the tops of his thighs, just barely covering his ass, micro-mini length if he was a groupie and this was a dress.
Yeah. “Yeah,” Halladay says, hands automatically going to Burnett’s ass, a cheek in each palm as Burnett sits up a little on his knees. Halladay curls his fingers around to open Burnett up a little, the wiry hairs there damp, wetter and slicker as he circles a single finger farther in. “Tell me you didn’t get this outta my bag too.” Halladay does not have any lube with him on this trip; only oil for his glove. The kind of oil they make out of cow leg parts.
Burnett puts his hands on Halladay’s shoulders, leaning forward to put a little arch in his back, his ass pushing out into Halladay’s hands. “My bag for that,” he mumbles. “C’mon, cmon.”
“In a hurry?” Halladay asks. He pushes a finger into Burnett, all the way up to the knuckle in one smooth slide. Burnett opens his mouth on the side of Halladay’s neck, hot breath and just the tips of his teeth scraping skin. Impatient but not willing to do whatever Halladay needs him to do to actually speed things along, which is typical for Burnett.
Eventually Halladay manages to coax Burnett around onto his hands and knees, freeing himself up long enough to get off the bed, strip, and find a condom (Burnett’s bag, again). Burnett puts his face down on the pillow when Halladay works his cock into him, and he leaves it there while Halladay fucks him, making low muffled noises and probably having at least a little bit of trouble breathing, but if that’s what he wants, who is Halladay to tell him otherwise?
Halladay holds onto Burnett’s waist, soft gray jersey fabric bunching, seams between his fingers rubbing so that he worries, for a single rational moment, about blisters. Practically everything he does on a bed with AJ Burnett is obscene in one way or another, but this-- Burnett tight around the shaft of his cock, loose jersey ends flapping softly against his thighs as he thrusts, the fact that Burnett wanted, demanded to be fucked wearing Halladay's jersey-- this is some new, uncharted region of spectacular obscenity.
"You're a kinky little freak," he says to the surface of Burnett's back; Burnett's face not, at the moment, being available. With his own name right there blaring at him, though, it's not so much an accusation as some kind of, well, some kind of shared acknowledgment.
----
The next day at the ballpark Halladay dresses for the bench-- no cup, normal boxer briefs instead of a jockstrap, a normal t-shirt instead of a sweat-wicking compression athletic undershirt. He checks to make sure that he has those things lying around, just in case, and reaches into his bag for his road jersey. He is sitting down, which turns out to be a good thing, because when his eyes hit those blue letters, HALLADAY in capital-bricked arch across the shoulders, suddenly all he can see is the way they moved the night before with Burnett twisting underneath them, begging with the torque of his body for more, harder, harder.
When he can breathe again, he becomes aware of Burnett halfway across the clubhouse, watching him out of the corner of his eye.
Putting the jersey on is somehow oppressive, like the fabric has been soaked in plaster of paris, extra weight in its every fiber. He’s cloaking himself in the vaguely fucked-up miasma of whatever kind of game Burnett is playing, but of course there is no alternative; he can’t very well decide to not wear his jersey today. Burnett will have known that.
Halladay is hot and itchy all game long, scratching under the back of his collar. If only Towers would come over and put an innocent hand on his shoulder, maybe that would clear the air around him, but Towers is up on the rail watching Gustavo Chacin pitch with a kind of furious obsessive attention. He rips chunks out of a Gatorade cup for every strike, gouges furrows in its side with his fingernails for every ball.
If only Halladay could drag Burnett down into the tunnel, fuck him up against the wall, reddened imprint of unfinished concrete block on Burnett’s belly, maybe that would get all this shit out of his head. But Burnett is delicately dismantling sunflower seeds with his teeth and spitting them out onto the ground, three feet down the bench and untouchable.
They've been wallowing in this kind of between-space for a while now, Burnett and Halladay, the unstable seesaw between bad ideas and barely-staved-off disaster, and Towers is all mixed up in it somewhere in the middle. Or something-- Halladay is not exactly clear, this is the kind of shit a ballplayer's no good at dealing with, thinking through. Whatever is going on, though, the part played by Towers is crumbling away as Towers himself crumbles, piece after tiny piece breaking off with every pitch that fails to break, straight and true in a game where that is almost never, ever a good thing.
----
In May, Halladay has to have an appendectomy. For fucking serious.
In June, Burnett goes on the DL with a sore shoulder.
In August, Towers finally snaps.
----
So this is where it breaks down.
They’re in the dome, roof closed, and maybe this is part of the problem, because Halladay has always been comfortable with it, and Burnett doesn’t give a shit, but Towers has never been entirely at home, pitching indoors. Even in happier times he would say things like, “Sure hope they keep us open today,” a joking smile on his face, but with something a little claustrophobic behind his eyes, no joke at all.
They’re playing the Yankees, and this is probably part of the problem, because there is already bad blood this season, left over from the last series, where Alex Rodriguez shouted while rounding the bases. It was not a high-spirited exclamation; he did it purposefully, to distract the infielders, and the entire Blue Jays team has been lightly stewing over this ever since. It is a kind of amazingly cheap bush league move.
They’ve all been cracking, slow and invisible, all season long, Towers more deeply than most, and this is definitely part of the problem.
In the top of the third inning, Towers pitches inside to Rodriguez and hits him on the leg. It may or may not be intentional. Halladay does not even see it; Jesse Litsch is balancing a baseball on the brim of his hat in the dugout, and Halladay is watching him to see how long he can keep it up. A fastball makes a particular sound when it hits flesh, though, even a not-so-fast fastball, and Halladay would know that sound anywhere. He looks up when he hears it.
People are already starting to run out of the dugout. Round little Matt Stairs launches himself over the rail with what sounds disturbingly like a war cry. Halladay’s first thought is, I better not get hurt again if we’re gonna brawl. His second thought is, fuck, Josh.
There is a lot of yelling, a lot of posturing, but no punches are being thrown by the time he gets out onto the field. Stairs is screaming bloody murder and trying to lunge at Rodriguez, but some kid on the Yankees is holding him back, nervously bewildered. Halladay looks for Towers, finds him behind the mound, feet shifting in the short plastic grass like he wants to be pacing. He isn’t because Gibbons has a hand hooked in the front of Towers’ belt while he explains things to the closest umpire. Halladay’s not sure if Gibbons is trying to hold Towers back or if he’s trying to keep Towers from running away.
“Lookit where his hand is,” Burnett mutters, coming up right behind Halladay. “You think they’re fucking?”
Halladay closes his eyes. “AJ. You’re disgusting. Knock it off.”
Burnett snickers in his ear and lopes off to see what has got Stairs so mad. Halladay heads back towards the dugout. He still doesn’t realize-- none of them realize-- that this is where it falls apart. The thing is, these are the Yankees, and this is the AL East; they’re tense, all of them. Shit happens. The benches don’t clear every day, but this wasn't even a proper fight. Rodriguez will eventually take first base. He’ll have a bruise, but nothing more; the Yankees aren't even calling for a pinch runner. Towers is still on the mound. It’s not a big deal.
Halladay gets one cleat onto the top dugout step before the shouting starts again, something it shouldn't do, because hasn't everyone calmed down? Aren't they done here? He turns around and there on the turf between first base and the mound is Towers, screaming at Rodriguez and-- a coach? Yes, Tony Pena, the Yankees first base coach, holding Rodriguez back and yelling back at Towers, who is hollering things like,
“Just some lame old damn quitter, who’re you to talk, you can’t even hack this, this league, fucking little loser--“ and he’s talking about Tony Pena, that’s personal. Oh. Oh, this is bad.
Back out onto the field, Halladay runs towards the mound. Burnett gets there first, immediately positioning himself between Towers and the Yankees. Drape a cloth cover over a parrot’s cage and the bird will stop squawking, that’s the idea, but Towers won’t stop, yelling and straining against Burnett’s grasp. Halladay comes up to help, an arm around Towers’ chest to hold him in place while Burnett grabs his agitated, flailing arms.
“Fuckin’ psycho, just went nuts,” he hears. "Can't believe... no control at all... crazy out there..." It’s not Yankees saying this. It’s Lyle Overbay at first, Wells coming in from the outfield, Zaun behind the plate with the umpire there, eyes wide. “Did you see… just went after him like a mad dog… kid’s unstable…”
“Don’t call him that,” Burnett says, “don’t call him that, don’t call him that,” but his voice is low and he’s talking more to himself. He might not even realize that he’s saying anything out loud.
Halladay puts both of his hands Towers’ shoulders. “Look at me, buddy,” he says. “Hey. Hey. Settle down just a sec and look at me.” Towers hears him, his head twitching slightly in Halladay’s direction, but he won’t look at Halladay. He is not even really looking at the Yankees; his eyes are wild but unfocused, off somewhere else. He does not pause in his yelling, even though his voice is starting to crack and weaken, static of the throat breaking through the stream of invective.
“Just settle down, OK, buddy, it’ll be all right,” Halladay says, but he no longer knows if he’s talking to Towers or Burnett or himself. He could be talking to the other Jays, the umpires, the baseball field itself, or to nobody at all.
On to part two.