no matter what or who you've been
so, um, that happened.
you guys! it was amazing. beautiful is what it was! car horns honking on every block, people coming out of bars and spilling drinks, giants hats and black-marker beards everywhere. that thing about dancing in the streets, like election night and how everybody's story ends up in the same place, "and then we went down and danced in the streets for awhile," that's what winning the pennant reminded me of, except also with fireworks.
baseball baseball baseball. coit tower and the great baroque dome of city hall are lit up bright orange at night now, and the fire trucks have giants flags flying behind them, snapping in the wind. it was supposed to rain all week, but the world series is coming and i believe with all my heart that the sun will be shining tomorrow.
still undecided on whether this type of thing is good luck or bad, but anyway, it will surprise no one to learn that i've written a classic barry-zito type of story in advance of the world series in which he will not play. i mean, really. the hand of fate is still way more angsty to these dudes than any of us could possibly hope to be.
i started this story the night they won the division, and i tried not to let it get too colored by subsequent happenings, but, well. that was likely a fail. foreshadowing for the win?
14557 words, rated R.
Other Team
By Candle Beck
This has happened to you before.
Here you are in the final weekend of the season with the division on the line, and your team has come on strong and late, excellent pitching, incredible rookies, a specific type of chemistry in the clubhouse, and yeah, you know all about it. You are basically living in a perpetual state of déjà vu.
The Padres need to sweep the series on the road to even force a one-game playoff, and they win the first two, because baseball is a vicious game and nothing can ever be easy. You take the loss in the opener, which was expected by most sensible people (and even you, bizarrely, sickeningly), and then Matty implodes a little bit in the second, which is a shock to all.
Everybody is jacked up before the third game, snappish nervy feeling in the clubhouse, tensely brief arguments over the remote control and food table. Freddy Sanchez borrows Mike Fontenot's iPod without asking when he goes to the weight room, and Fontenot almost takes a swing at him when he comes back, only barely held back by Pablo and Cody.
Even this stuff, it's so familiar. Teammates are just co-workers until it looks like you're going somewhere, and then they become more important than family, and the fights you have with them feel exactly the same as fifteen years old again, apocalyptic like that, life-stopping.
You're avoiding most interactions, anyway, still working through the guilt of the first game, and your miserable past two months, and whatever else. You can't imagine that anyone wants to talk to you.
Half the bullpen and a few of the others say a prayer in a cluster, heads bowed and hands linked. Aubrey Huff, who has never before played for a reason in October, stands to make a little speech just before the guys go up for batting practice, a perfect little knife twisted in everyone's heart:
"You only ever end up where you're meant to be, and here we are. Good enough to get this far means good enough to keep going. So let's keep fuckin' going."
It used to be Huddy, you think absently, staring at your feet instead of your first baseman because it has always embarrassed you in a secondhand way, big emotional speeches and all that. Huddy gives a fantastic win-this-fucking-game speech.
And then, the game. Everything is easier once you're in the dugout. Everybody is in it together, sitting too close and hollering through cupped palms. Friends on all sides, guys who have sworn to protect you because you wear the right uniform.
It's taut all the way through, airless even though the Giants score the only runs. Jonathan Sanchez dances in and out of trouble, pitching with a torturous lack of precision. The Padres run into walls and fight off ten pitches every other at-bat, snarling and shouting and urging each other on with the intensity of hostages staging an uprising. San Diego has led the division for most of the year, and they look like they can hardly believe what's happening to them.
You keep a baseball pressed between your palms, which is a luck thing from a long time ago.
In the top of the fifth, Tim Lincecum comes to perch on the back of the bench, his hip against your shoulder. "Barry, fuck," he says.
"What's up dude."
"This shit is crazy right here. Fuckin'. Ridiculous."
Lincecum is handling the pressure with something less than total aplomb. He's been clumsier than normal, sunflower seeds cracking underfoot from the bag he spilled earlier, his cap fumbling in and out of his hands. He can't sit still longer than three minutes at a stretch.
"And it gets worse, you're telling me. It--it gets worse?"
You give him a side-eye. "When?"
"Later, if we--the next series, it gets even crazier than this, right?"
"Don't think about that yet," you tell him, putting a lot of stupid kid in your voice.
"I'm not, fuck. I'm just saying. Maybe I need to get some like heart-slowing medication or some shit, if it's gonna get much worse than this."
"See, Timmy, that's thinking about it. And talking about it, which makes me think about it. Not so cool, man."
Lincecum exhales roughly. You're not looking at him because you're looking at the field, and nothing short of a bomb going off is going to take your eyes away.
"Sorry. Nervous," Lincecum says unnecessarily.
"You're gonna wanna learn how to get over that," you say, but not in a mean way. It has sorta become your job on this team, little nuggets of wisdom for the younger guys on how not to turn out like you did.
Tim kinda leans into you for a second, resting his arm on your head, and you allow it, because it helps him sometimes. Your cap is skewed now, slanting sharply across your eye-line.
The inning ends, and Lincecum pushes off the bench to go pester someone else. You haven't held his attention so well, these past few weeks. The crowd rushes and builds like a storm, a compact blizzard penned in by the walls of the stadium, orange rally towels instead of snow. You have chewed your thumbnail almost to bleeding.
This feeling, you thought you'd forgotten but really it was like dropping acid, a state of mind impossible to recall with sober reflection. You have to be in the moment to recognize it.
The Giants are up 2-0 until the eighth inning, when Buster Posey slashes a home run into the left field stands, and the team leaps as one to the rail, crashing into each other and clutching at shoulders, hooking onto belts. You have Andres Torres on your back, and Lincecum's bony elbow dug into your stomach, wonderfully pressed from all sides.
Buster is attacked when he gets back to the dugout, joyfully swallowed up by his team. The kid emerges beaming, his face bright red and his hands visibly shaking with adrenaline. There is a crazed look in Posey's eyes today, a kind of disbelieving glee that makes a person want to jump off rooftops because it has to be a dream.
You're on the rail when Wilson comes in in the top of the ninth, three outs away, you and everyone else. Lincecum is shoved up next to you, a hand wrenched in your jersey although he doesn't seem to fully register that it's you beside him; it could be any man wearing white. Tim is spitting curses and prayers, "Come on motherfucker, please please Jesus."
Everyone is on their feet. Forty-four thousand people with their throats wide open. The daytime sky torn with clouds overhead, the sun in patches across the outfield. Electricity fills your mouth, buzzing in the roots of your teeth.
Wilson is a tightrope walk most of the time, painstaking and inconsistent and plagued by baserunners, but you've all had enough drama in this series. A groundout to short, a groundout to second, and then a swinging strikeout just like something written in Hollywood, and Wilson crosses his arms, points to the sky, opens his mouth in a scream that is lost in the explosion of the crowd. Elation erupts inside your chest, tearing you up like shrapnel except good, and Lincecum is wrapped around your middle, jerking up and down and maybe breaking some ribs but you don't care, it's beautiful.
Posey bounds out from behind the plate and into Wilson's arms, Wilson lifting him clear off the ground. Posey is howling, raising his arm up, his glove with the ball still trapped inside.
The team floods the field. Stampeding, tripping over each other, shouting and delirious. You remember this moment clearer than any other, this single irreplaceable moment when you've won, you've won. Baseball is so black and white sometimes.
You get confused for a minute, crashing together with your teammates on the infield, expecting to see different faces in the crush, a different color scheme. Wild sense of discombobulation, wrong side of the bay, wrong shape of the ballpark around you, but that doesn't last. You center yourself: San Francisco and the tenth year, Matt Cain hollering in your ear, Tim Lincecum across the scrum climbing your rookie catcher like he's a public statue and Tim is drunk on the streets at night. Only this moment, and no other.
This moment, pouring down to the clubhouse with your teammates, plastic sheets up over the lockers and the champagne bottles shining in the ice, and you are living it on several different levels. Some part of you is a decade younger. You get hugged thirty times in five minutes, and your body aches gloriously from the pressure. Your throat is sore from shouting already. The whole world is drenched in beer and champagne.
It's the sixth time you've made the playoffs in your major league career, and the first time with this second team of yours. You get to keep playing. It's like Huff said, just keep going.
Wilson has procured a Viking helmet from somewhere, and he cries, "Intergalactic champions!" even though it is just the western division, just the first step of the next month of your life. You crow approval, lifting your two beers high in sticky hands.
Lincecum ricochets into your side. "Barry!"
"Tim!" you ape right back. He latches on to your brand-new and newly ruined division champs shirt, a wide ravenous look in his eyes.
"Come here, come, come with me," and he's dragging you away from the growing crowd of people in the clubhouse, all those microphones and cameras. You go willingly enough, draining one beer and dropping it with a clatter behind you, leaving the other half-full on a passing table.
Down the hallway and past the trainer's rooms and offices, Lincecum's hand around your wrist and you staring at the dark hair stuck to his neck. He shoots you a grin, flushed-face and promising, and you remember this part too.
(Eric Chavez in the equipment room at the Coliseum with the busted light, glass crunching under your spikes and his dusty hands closing in your hair, snickering against your face. Eric Chavez murmuring into your mouth, "We did it we did it," and nothing could have stopped you touching him, not $126 million or a pennant, nothing from this planet or any of the far-flung others.)
Your pulse kicks up, your skin going warm. Lincecum takes you into a video room, and these places look the same in every ballpark, this league or the other. The monitors are stuck on the start screen and glowing blue, and that's the only light.
Lincecum pushes you up against the door, pushes himself up flush against you. You suck in a hard breath, close your hands around his hips.
"This is amazing," he reports, mouth hot on the edge of your jaw in a way that makes your thoughts go fuzzy.
"Yeah, that," you agree distractedly.
"It's the adrenaline?" Questions, always questions, Lincecum's voice ever-uplifting at the end, but only half the time he actually expects an answer. "Except that I can deal with adrenaline, I have a million times. This, this is something else. Here, you stay," and he pins you in place, slides down your body to his knees.
You drop your head back and breathe out raggedly. Your hand slips into his sticky-damp hair because he likes it there, he's told you so. Lincecum presses his face to your stomach, his wide grin.
"You never told me it was gonna be like this," Lincecum mumbles. His hands are at work on your belt, the weightless white of your uniform pants peeling back.
"I, I forgot," you say, which is not quite true but close enough for where you are.
Tim snorts a laugh and shakes his head, one hand working you hard and his other flat on the lowest part of your stomach, hidden in your jersey and undershirt. You breathe in little pants, gasps, kneading at his hair. Good at this, Tim always has been unfairly good at this.
"How the hell could you forget?" he asks, guileless and looking up at you.
You don't have an answer for that, you're confused and dizzy and you want his mouth on you with an intensity so single-minded it's like your blood isn't even moving anymore. You give him the slightest tug forward, his lips parting so expectantly, and as he takes you down you hold back a groan only because you've had a decade of practice, all these little underground rooms, these doors without locks.
Odd divergent kind of thoughts, as your head tips back and your body flushes, your fingers careful in Tim's hair because it gets tangled so easily. You think about the last time, maybe ten days ago before you both got irreversibly distracted by the end of the season. The hotel in Denver and so drunk, dumb hands, Tim shivering and hot and bent under you, all hipbones and legs over your shoulders, skinny tight arms. Times before that, ballparks and big cities all over this country. It's been years with this kid, and that ends up being the strangest thing to think.
Lincecum is so good you kinda feel like you should be paying him, or maybe that's only the adrenaline, whatever this feeling is that you're calling adrenaline because you can't think of a better word. You have both hands in his hair, your lip sucked in hard between your teeth, and you press forward into his mouth at the last moment, the floor falling away and the room tilting sharply on its side as you gasp and come and come.
Your legs give out a little bit. You slump back against the door. Lincecum stands up into you, bracing you with his body and taking your hand, pushing it into his pants. You're numb with receding pleasure, uncoordinated, your fingers not working right. Lincecum moans in frustration against your throat, licking the champagne off your skin, and eventually you get around to jerking him off properly. He lasts all of two minutes, which you're thankful for if only because the angle is hell on your wrist. Lincecum bites down on your new shirt and jersey as he finishes, a groan trapped in his throat. Then you're supporting him as much as the door is supporting you, left arm solid around his back.
A quiet moment--one of those quiet moments. Lincecum's weight is nothing for you, like a particularly thick down comforter, overly warm but bearable, certainly bearable. It's still very dark, your eyes hardly adjusted at all in the nightlike blue monitor light, and in your foggy suggestible state of mind you think that this could be anywhere and anytime, anybody you want it to be.
Tim smacks a kiss on your neck, and pulls away. "Hoo. Good times."
He's grinning like an idiot; you don't need to be able to see him to know that.
"Game face, Timmy," you tell him as you fix your pants and belt. Your hands are shaking slightly. "All kindsa cameras out there."
"I'm fine, what. I'm awesome."
Lincecum rustles around, and you want to put your hands on his face, something weird and childish like that, just because it's dark. You want to know what that idiot grin feels like.
He goes out first and you have to wait a few minutes so it doesn't look suspicious, a precaution that is probably stupid and laughable, but makes you feel better all the same. Ten years screwing around with one teammate or another, and Deadspin still hasn't figured out that you're gay. You see no reason to mess with success.
Coming down the hallway, you can hear the celebration spilling out of the clubhouse, raucous unintelligible party noise, vague fuzz of static. Your hands won't stop shaking.
The clubhouse is packed. The front brass is here now, and the scouts and ticket agents and grounds crew and everybody even tangentially involved with the team, a whole whack of reporters. Silver and blue beer cans are scattered everywhere.
Lincecum is across the room, attached to his catcher's back as Posey attempts to give an interview to the Fox Sports lady. You only get a glimpse of him, and then you are waylaid by Matt Cain who wants you to shotgun a beer with him.
You're starting to feel it now, encroaching drunk at the edges of your vision, snaking in like a vine twisting around your backbone. Reporters everywhere, camera eyes, and no one is trying to talk to you, which is good, just how you'd prefer it if anyone bothered to ask. You dig your phone out of your locker to find it groaning under the weight of messages and missed calls.
Your family's texts are all exclamation points and emoticons and less-than-three hearts. They are proud of you and they love you. Your friends employ more profanity but the general message is the same.
Joe Blanton and Ramon Hernandez of the Phillies and Reds, respectively, have left practically identical messages about kicking your ass in the championship series. The unconscious coordination makes you smirk; ballplayers are the same all over.
Your phone rings in your hand. It's Tim Hudson, and without thought you answer, lifting your voice over the crush of noise around you.
"Holy shit kid!" Hudson yells in your ear.
"Huddy," and you ride a sharp edge over into gleeful, something fluttering fast and brief in your chest. "How'd you like that, baby?"
"Fuckin' gorgeous! Got that motherfucker done, I seen ya."
"Yeah, and you're gonna see it right up close, you fuckin' ready for this?"
"Bring it, son, bring it. Lookin' forward to that shit."
Hudson sounds delighted. He's the presumptive ace of the Braves team that will come to San Francisco to start the playoffs on Friday. A number of years ago, he was the best friend you'd ever had.
You lean against your locker with your free palm flat to your ear, hunched down a little bit. All around you guys are cheering and laughing.
"It's crazy right now. Just insane," you say in a weird breath-filled tone.
Hudson pauses, a hitch like he's trying to remember his line. "Better or worse?"
There's the rub. You put your fingers against your eye, pressing down so that you are blind on one side. The celebration blurs around you, everyone soaked and now they look kinda melted. You try to call up what it was like in Oakland, those four first seasons of your career when you went to the playoffs every year like it was a birthright, just one more thing you'd earned through your lifetime of hard work and prayer. A noticeably different kind of joy back then, the treacherous twenty-two-year-old version of it, and you remember the blanking thrum of bass over everything, the glittery sting of champagne sprayed directly into your eyes, the weight of a middle infielder hitching a piggyback ride across the room and almost strangling you. You remember standing with a weary arm around Eric Chavez's shoulders, Tim Hudson in the middle of some ridiculous story and Mark Mulder sneaking up from behind to pour a beer over his head. You remember being very aware of that moment as one of the best in your life, and then correcting yourself sharply, so far.
Better or worse? Terrible question, really.
"Older and wiser, Timmy," you say, and the name catches in your throat but you don't think anyone notices. "It's a different kind of thing now."
"Don't be gettin' mature on me, boy," Hudson warns, half-serious and you want to get the laugh back in his voice. You feel like you're wrecking the mood.
"Wouldn't hear of it," you say, scraping up some brag and bravado from watching Brian Wilson hold court across the room. "Gonna kick your ass when you come to town, by the way. Consider yourselves fuckin' warned."
"Yeah, you think so. Listen, my ride is leaving--Billy! Hold the fuck up, man--I'll call you when we get in if it's not real late, all right?"
You nod even though Hudson can't see you. "Yeah, all right."
Hudson says, "Love ya kid," off-hand and casual, and you mumble, "Yeah you too," and get off the phone quick.
The party rages around you. Lincecum is drinking shots out of Dixie cups with Madison Bumgarner and Sergio Romo. You want to leave, and you kinda want to take Lincecum with you.
But then a reporter waylays you, a schlubby-looking sort in a crumpled brown sports coat. You recognize him vaguely; he's from one of those cable sports shows that no one watches. There is a digital recorder held up before your face, a demanding look trained on you like a tiger in a zoo cage waiting for its meal.
"Barry, you're one of the few Giants who've been in this position before," the reporter says in that over-familiar way of the media everywhere. "Talk about how this experience is different from the times you made the playoffs with the A's."
That's rather on the nose, and you hate that reporter-speak 'talk about this'--your unvoiced kneejerk response every single time is 'don't tell me what to do.'
You shrug. "I just feel really lucky. All these guys have worked so hard for this. It's a great fuh--great team. Really great."
You haven't exactly answered his question, but they usually don't care about that. The reporter nods his head, reminding you uncharitably of a brainless dog.
"And have you heard anything yet about what role you'll play in the series with Atlanta? Assuming you make the postseason roster, I mean."
Only half-paying attention, trying to catch Lincecum's eye from across the room, you take a second to register that, and then you look at the reporter, mortification flaring in the pit of your stomach.
"The fuck?" you say with heat, and watch the reporter's face scrunch in displeasure as he thumbs the recorder off.
"Don't curse on the mike, are you a fucking rookie or something?"
He's pissed off. You kinda gape at him for a second, not sure how the two of you can come from the same species.
"Get the hell away from me," you say, and you don't shove him only because there are cameras all over the place.
The reporter sneers, "Always been an asshole, haven't you," and turns away, bulling his way through the crowd in search of his next victim.
You suddenly feel like everyone is watching you (though no one is, no one notices), and you latch on to Pablo Sandoval, who is conveniently nearby and way more drunk than you feel is reasonable considering the game only ended a half-hour ago. Elation has a multiplying effect on on any extant intoxication, you remember, and you cut him a break.
Pablo is excellent cover. You make the rounds with him, pouncing on your teammates and poor Dave Flemming, who has had more beer poured on him than any three players. It's astonishing his microphone still works.
Flem is media like that fucker back there, but he's safe, he's one of yours. He would never ask you out loud about your chances of making the postseason roster. You swallow uneasily, the question recurring in your mind like a thrown dart piercing your defenses.
It's not the first time the thought has crossed your mind, of course. With every start you made in the past month, every man you put on base, every gut-wrenching loss the team took on your behalf, the forces against you gained strength. The hole you're in kept getting deeper, and meanwhile Madison Bumgarner has been pitching with the unconscious brilliance that is only possible at twenty-one years old, and nobody in the bullpen ever allows any runs anymore, and there are still just eleven spots for pitchers on the playoff roster. The internet has written you off unanimously, you know, but you stopped listening to them years ago.
If you don't make the postseason roster, you're not going to want to know about it. You'd rather be hit by a bus and stay in a coma for the whole fall and winter. You don't think you could live through sitting on the bench in October.
You lean heavily on Sandoval's back, accepting another beer from one of the clubhouse kids scrambling through the packed room trying to keep everybody nice and lit. You banish the darker edge; this is no time for that kind of negativity.
Your phone buzzes in your back pocket as Sandoval and Edgar Renteria chatter giddily back and forth in Spanish. It's a text message from Rich Harden, c u in the series, muthafucka, and you grin sharp like a slap, unbidden. You call him quickly, letting your fingers go without time to overthink.
It rings once, and then Richie himself, sardonic and caught someplace loud, probably the Ballpark at Arlington with his own team. The Rangers had their own division sewn up weeks ago.
"Dude, what the fuck," Harden says jubilantly. "Took you guys long enough."
"Got that motherfucker done," copying Hudson but you've been doing that for a decade, it's okay.
"Yeah it's a scene right about now, huh? Sounds crazy there."
"Seriously. And hey, um, good job for you guys too." You realize belatedly that you have not spoken to Harden in a couple of months, not since the Rangers were in town to play the A's (all of you are entirely in agreement about the unending weirdness of that endeavor) and the two of you and Eric Chavez got drunk in Hayward just like old times. "How you been, man?"
"Oh I'm fantastic," Harden says, and he's lying, or joking, you're not sure. "They're never gonna let me pitch again, but yeah, fucking spectacular other than that."
A weird little hiccup in your mind--you hadn't realized they were talking about Harden like they talked about you, like somebody expendable, a risk that had stopped being worth it. You have this out-of-date impression of him, Rich Harden when he was first called up and still too young to shave and he pitched better than anybody for those first few months.
You sorta laugh, wanting to keep it light. "Don't assume the worst, man. Everybody needs a deep staff in October."
"Yeah, Z, you and me are both kinda banking on that. Fuck it, though, congratulations."
"You too," you say with your throat abruptly constricted.
"It's gonna be a tight one, I think. Good match-ups."
"You guys feeling pretty good about the Rays?"
"Hell yeah, fuck the Rays. Nobody's giving us much of a chance over here, but fuck that shit too. We're going deep into this thing, like, all the way."
"Then I guess I'll see you there," you say.
"Yeah you better. Fuck. This is some seriously wild shit, Barry."
You don't know what he means--the postseason, the possibilities, the weight of the many years behind you now, something.
"What, you forgot?" you ask, careless and doubting. Richie made it to the playoffs with the Cubs year before last; it can't mean the same to him as it does to you.
"No, it's just different. Every time it's different, like, not what I'm expecting."
"What're you expecting?"
He pauses, a considering hitch of breath. "Who the fuck knows, really? It's probably only 'cause I get really drunk at that kinda party."
It's a plain obfuscation. You know exactly what Harden is missing on every subsequent team he plays for, no matter how well he does or how far they get. You know exactly why Wrigley Field and the Ballpark at Arlington have never quite felt like home to him. You don't call him on it, because what good has glorifying the Oakland teams of the new millennium ever done for either of you?
Searching for more stable footing, you call up the picture of Rich Harden as he was a couple of months ago, laughing on the curb at you and Chavvy on opposite sides of the street, dueling to be the first to hail a cab. Harden's eyes were a paler color blue than you remembered, everything about him kinda dimmed but not necessarily in a bad way, just like growing up, calming down. No more lightning bolts or hundred mile an hour fastballs, but that was only to be expected. This far down the road, everyone has lost a step or two.
You and Richie had a grand total of three sexual encounters, all over the course of the same month six years ago, the season after Eric Chavez got married. Only ever on the road, random hotel rooms with hallways long enough for a plane to take off, and Harden bent over the sink in the bathroom, straddling your body and gripping the headboard with both hands. You were pretty messed up back then. You got drunk and stuck your hand down his pants, and for a couple of minutes you thought it might actually work, that you might have actually found the cure, but then your mouth slid over the declination of Harden's hip, the place where Eric Chavez's body had a scar, a rough whitened place from when he'd wiped out practicing ollies in a San Diego parking lot fifteen years ago. You love that scar, slick under your tongue, tasteless and clean. Harden's hip was flawless, the skin unbroken, and the difference, the distance, shot through you like guilt made pure and silverine. There was no cure. There never would be.
The other two times were just because Harden thought it was cool and jumped you, and he was still really hot, so you went with it (spirit wasn't willing, flesh was very strong). The fourth time, you pushed his hands away from your face and said, "Actually we're not doing that anymore," and he looked like he'd been slapped but only for a second.
But that's old stuff. You've moved past it. You shake off the bitter fugue of nostalgia, and refocus. San Francisco. The tenth year.
"It's been a ridiculous series, anyway. Fuckin' nerve-wracking," you tell Harden. "I think I'ma sleep straight through to Monday."
"Not going out ragin' tonight?" Harden asks, a certain tipped undertone to his voice.
"Nah, I'm an old man now, haven't you heard?"
"Well, no worries, your mental age is still like twelve years old. Think young and shit."
"Yeah Richie, what you said."
Harden exhales against the receiver, rustling sound like wind from far away. "All right, well. I'll let you get back to it."
"That's, I mean, that's cool, I can talk for a minute."
You've taken up a spot against the wall, blocked away in your little phone-call world, pressing your palm flat to your free ear. Everyone leaves you alone, which is the good thing about talking on the phone in the middle of a party.
"Go mingle, you antisocial bastard," Richie tells you. He knows you pretty well. "How many more times is this gonna happen to you, honestly?"
He doesn't mean it cruelly; the nice thing about Harden is that he is never cruel no matter how flagrant the provocation. Your personality induces a lot of people to be mean to you, or maybe you're just exceptionally thin-skinned. It's never been entirely clear.
"Okay," you say, capitulating. "I'll see you soon, yeah?"
"Goddamn right you will," Harden says, that so-cool tone that has always been a poison arrow into your undefended heel. "Good luck, man."
"Yeah you too, good luck," you mumble inanely, and end the call. Your heart is pounding for some reason, pressure from all sides.
Around you, your team is cheering and crowing and even singing over there, singing that ringing matador's theme, olé, olé olé olé, the infield gathered together with arms slung heavy around each other's shoulders to form a chain. Madison Bumgarner is traveling around on Brian Wilson's back, lanky kid-pitcher arms wrapped around his closer's chest in a backwards bear hug. Lincecum is over with the unrelated Sanchez brothers, laughing a lot and drunk, plainly drunk even from across the room where you are, his face flushed and scrunched up around the eyes, flickering in the traffic.
At once, you are lost in an especially severe onrush of déjà vu. Suddenly it's ten years ago and the first time this happened to you, back in the other league, your other team. When you were just a punk kid pitcher yourself, slotted into the playoff rotation with Mulder and Hudson like you actually belonged there (and you did, way the hell back when, you absolutely did), and you remember another clubhouse overcrowded to a dangerous degree, packed and slippery and reeking of beer, your hair plastered down and your sinuses on fire, and then Chavez.
Chavez all the way across the room, in the center of a cluster of teammates and reporters because he was a golden boy back then too, and you caught his eye as you are trying to catch Lincecum's now, through the shifting morass of soaked ballplayers and the detritus of victory.
You caught Chavez's eye, Chavez who you didn't know particularly well at that point, only a few months on the team and still pretty damn infatuated with Tim Hudson (in your defense, almost everybody else was too), but in that moment Chavez shot you a grin through the crowd, black hair and dark eyes and perfect baseball face, and the elements crashed together, collided like a ten-car pileup. Maybe it never would have happened at all if Chavez hadn't grinned at you with such impeccable timing, right in the middle of the best day of your life, surrounded by all those guys you newly loved.
But he did grin at you like that. And you did love those guys. You always remember the start of things as clear as a bell, and that was the start for you and Chavez, the first time you thought, hey look at him with that particular slant in your mind.
Not a week later, after you walked into Yankee Stadium wearing enemy colors and lived to tell the tale, you locked the door of a hotel bathroom in New York City and got on your knees for him. Chavez was laughing, breathless and drunk, fingers dug into your hair with none of his native grace, all those things he could do on a baseball field. His stomach trembled under your hands, his shirt pushed up and his jeans pulled open. You were shaking with eagerness, messy and off your form, probably a little drunk. Chavez laughing, clutching at you, stammering over your name. It was juvenile and clumsy and wonderful. Everything else that happened between the two of you happened after that.
You jerk your head roughly, like trying to shake off a hangover in the shower, and consciously pick the past up, jam it down as deep as you can.
continues without interruption
you guys! it was amazing. beautiful is what it was! car horns honking on every block, people coming out of bars and spilling drinks, giants hats and black-marker beards everywhere. that thing about dancing in the streets, like election night and how everybody's story ends up in the same place, "and then we went down and danced in the streets for awhile," that's what winning the pennant reminded me of, except also with fireworks.
baseball baseball baseball. coit tower and the great baroque dome of city hall are lit up bright orange at night now, and the fire trucks have giants flags flying behind them, snapping in the wind. it was supposed to rain all week, but the world series is coming and i believe with all my heart that the sun will be shining tomorrow.
still undecided on whether this type of thing is good luck or bad, but anyway, it will surprise no one to learn that i've written a classic barry-zito type of story in advance of the world series in which he will not play. i mean, really. the hand of fate is still way more angsty to these dudes than any of us could possibly hope to be.
i started this story the night they won the division, and i tried not to let it get too colored by subsequent happenings, but, well. that was likely a fail. foreshadowing for the win?
14557 words, rated R.
Other Team
By Candle Beck
This has happened to you before.
Here you are in the final weekend of the season with the division on the line, and your team has come on strong and late, excellent pitching, incredible rookies, a specific type of chemistry in the clubhouse, and yeah, you know all about it. You are basically living in a perpetual state of déjà vu.
The Padres need to sweep the series on the road to even force a one-game playoff, and they win the first two, because baseball is a vicious game and nothing can ever be easy. You take the loss in the opener, which was expected by most sensible people (and even you, bizarrely, sickeningly), and then Matty implodes a little bit in the second, which is a shock to all.
Everybody is jacked up before the third game, snappish nervy feeling in the clubhouse, tensely brief arguments over the remote control and food table. Freddy Sanchez borrows Mike Fontenot's iPod without asking when he goes to the weight room, and Fontenot almost takes a swing at him when he comes back, only barely held back by Pablo and Cody.
Even this stuff, it's so familiar. Teammates are just co-workers until it looks like you're going somewhere, and then they become more important than family, and the fights you have with them feel exactly the same as fifteen years old again, apocalyptic like that, life-stopping.
You're avoiding most interactions, anyway, still working through the guilt of the first game, and your miserable past two months, and whatever else. You can't imagine that anyone wants to talk to you.
Half the bullpen and a few of the others say a prayer in a cluster, heads bowed and hands linked. Aubrey Huff, who has never before played for a reason in October, stands to make a little speech just before the guys go up for batting practice, a perfect little knife twisted in everyone's heart:
"You only ever end up where you're meant to be, and here we are. Good enough to get this far means good enough to keep going. So let's keep fuckin' going."
It used to be Huddy, you think absently, staring at your feet instead of your first baseman because it has always embarrassed you in a secondhand way, big emotional speeches and all that. Huddy gives a fantastic win-this-fucking-game speech.
And then, the game. Everything is easier once you're in the dugout. Everybody is in it together, sitting too close and hollering through cupped palms. Friends on all sides, guys who have sworn to protect you because you wear the right uniform.
It's taut all the way through, airless even though the Giants score the only runs. Jonathan Sanchez dances in and out of trouble, pitching with a torturous lack of precision. The Padres run into walls and fight off ten pitches every other at-bat, snarling and shouting and urging each other on with the intensity of hostages staging an uprising. San Diego has led the division for most of the year, and they look like they can hardly believe what's happening to them.
You keep a baseball pressed between your palms, which is a luck thing from a long time ago.
In the top of the fifth, Tim Lincecum comes to perch on the back of the bench, his hip against your shoulder. "Barry, fuck," he says.
"What's up dude."
"This shit is crazy right here. Fuckin'. Ridiculous."
Lincecum is handling the pressure with something less than total aplomb. He's been clumsier than normal, sunflower seeds cracking underfoot from the bag he spilled earlier, his cap fumbling in and out of his hands. He can't sit still longer than three minutes at a stretch.
"And it gets worse, you're telling me. It--it gets worse?"
You give him a side-eye. "When?"
"Later, if we--the next series, it gets even crazier than this, right?"
"Don't think about that yet," you tell him, putting a lot of stupid kid in your voice.
"I'm not, fuck. I'm just saying. Maybe I need to get some like heart-slowing medication or some shit, if it's gonna get much worse than this."
"See, Timmy, that's thinking about it. And talking about it, which makes me think about it. Not so cool, man."
Lincecum exhales roughly. You're not looking at him because you're looking at the field, and nothing short of a bomb going off is going to take your eyes away.
"Sorry. Nervous," Lincecum says unnecessarily.
"You're gonna wanna learn how to get over that," you say, but not in a mean way. It has sorta become your job on this team, little nuggets of wisdom for the younger guys on how not to turn out like you did.
Tim kinda leans into you for a second, resting his arm on your head, and you allow it, because it helps him sometimes. Your cap is skewed now, slanting sharply across your eye-line.
The inning ends, and Lincecum pushes off the bench to go pester someone else. You haven't held his attention so well, these past few weeks. The crowd rushes and builds like a storm, a compact blizzard penned in by the walls of the stadium, orange rally towels instead of snow. You have chewed your thumbnail almost to bleeding.
This feeling, you thought you'd forgotten but really it was like dropping acid, a state of mind impossible to recall with sober reflection. You have to be in the moment to recognize it.
The Giants are up 2-0 until the eighth inning, when Buster Posey slashes a home run into the left field stands, and the team leaps as one to the rail, crashing into each other and clutching at shoulders, hooking onto belts. You have Andres Torres on your back, and Lincecum's bony elbow dug into your stomach, wonderfully pressed from all sides.
Buster is attacked when he gets back to the dugout, joyfully swallowed up by his team. The kid emerges beaming, his face bright red and his hands visibly shaking with adrenaline. There is a crazed look in Posey's eyes today, a kind of disbelieving glee that makes a person want to jump off rooftops because it has to be a dream.
You're on the rail when Wilson comes in in the top of the ninth, three outs away, you and everyone else. Lincecum is shoved up next to you, a hand wrenched in your jersey although he doesn't seem to fully register that it's you beside him; it could be any man wearing white. Tim is spitting curses and prayers, "Come on motherfucker, please please Jesus."
Everyone is on their feet. Forty-four thousand people with their throats wide open. The daytime sky torn with clouds overhead, the sun in patches across the outfield. Electricity fills your mouth, buzzing in the roots of your teeth.
Wilson is a tightrope walk most of the time, painstaking and inconsistent and plagued by baserunners, but you've all had enough drama in this series. A groundout to short, a groundout to second, and then a swinging strikeout just like something written in Hollywood, and Wilson crosses his arms, points to the sky, opens his mouth in a scream that is lost in the explosion of the crowd. Elation erupts inside your chest, tearing you up like shrapnel except good, and Lincecum is wrapped around your middle, jerking up and down and maybe breaking some ribs but you don't care, it's beautiful.
Posey bounds out from behind the plate and into Wilson's arms, Wilson lifting him clear off the ground. Posey is howling, raising his arm up, his glove with the ball still trapped inside.
The team floods the field. Stampeding, tripping over each other, shouting and delirious. You remember this moment clearer than any other, this single irreplaceable moment when you've won, you've won. Baseball is so black and white sometimes.
You get confused for a minute, crashing together with your teammates on the infield, expecting to see different faces in the crush, a different color scheme. Wild sense of discombobulation, wrong side of the bay, wrong shape of the ballpark around you, but that doesn't last. You center yourself: San Francisco and the tenth year, Matt Cain hollering in your ear, Tim Lincecum across the scrum climbing your rookie catcher like he's a public statue and Tim is drunk on the streets at night. Only this moment, and no other.
This moment, pouring down to the clubhouse with your teammates, plastic sheets up over the lockers and the champagne bottles shining in the ice, and you are living it on several different levels. Some part of you is a decade younger. You get hugged thirty times in five minutes, and your body aches gloriously from the pressure. Your throat is sore from shouting already. The whole world is drenched in beer and champagne.
It's the sixth time you've made the playoffs in your major league career, and the first time with this second team of yours. You get to keep playing. It's like Huff said, just keep going.
Wilson has procured a Viking helmet from somewhere, and he cries, "Intergalactic champions!" even though it is just the western division, just the first step of the next month of your life. You crow approval, lifting your two beers high in sticky hands.
Lincecum ricochets into your side. "Barry!"
"Tim!" you ape right back. He latches on to your brand-new and newly ruined division champs shirt, a wide ravenous look in his eyes.
"Come here, come, come with me," and he's dragging you away from the growing crowd of people in the clubhouse, all those microphones and cameras. You go willingly enough, draining one beer and dropping it with a clatter behind you, leaving the other half-full on a passing table.
Down the hallway and past the trainer's rooms and offices, Lincecum's hand around your wrist and you staring at the dark hair stuck to his neck. He shoots you a grin, flushed-face and promising, and you remember this part too.
(Eric Chavez in the equipment room at the Coliseum with the busted light, glass crunching under your spikes and his dusty hands closing in your hair, snickering against your face. Eric Chavez murmuring into your mouth, "We did it we did it," and nothing could have stopped you touching him, not $126 million or a pennant, nothing from this planet or any of the far-flung others.)
Your pulse kicks up, your skin going warm. Lincecum takes you into a video room, and these places look the same in every ballpark, this league or the other. The monitors are stuck on the start screen and glowing blue, and that's the only light.
Lincecum pushes you up against the door, pushes himself up flush against you. You suck in a hard breath, close your hands around his hips.
"This is amazing," he reports, mouth hot on the edge of your jaw in a way that makes your thoughts go fuzzy.
"Yeah, that," you agree distractedly.
"It's the adrenaline?" Questions, always questions, Lincecum's voice ever-uplifting at the end, but only half the time he actually expects an answer. "Except that I can deal with adrenaline, I have a million times. This, this is something else. Here, you stay," and he pins you in place, slides down your body to his knees.
You drop your head back and breathe out raggedly. Your hand slips into his sticky-damp hair because he likes it there, he's told you so. Lincecum presses his face to your stomach, his wide grin.
"You never told me it was gonna be like this," Lincecum mumbles. His hands are at work on your belt, the weightless white of your uniform pants peeling back.
"I, I forgot," you say, which is not quite true but close enough for where you are.
Tim snorts a laugh and shakes his head, one hand working you hard and his other flat on the lowest part of your stomach, hidden in your jersey and undershirt. You breathe in little pants, gasps, kneading at his hair. Good at this, Tim always has been unfairly good at this.
"How the hell could you forget?" he asks, guileless and looking up at you.
You don't have an answer for that, you're confused and dizzy and you want his mouth on you with an intensity so single-minded it's like your blood isn't even moving anymore. You give him the slightest tug forward, his lips parting so expectantly, and as he takes you down you hold back a groan only because you've had a decade of practice, all these little underground rooms, these doors without locks.
Odd divergent kind of thoughts, as your head tips back and your body flushes, your fingers careful in Tim's hair because it gets tangled so easily. You think about the last time, maybe ten days ago before you both got irreversibly distracted by the end of the season. The hotel in Denver and so drunk, dumb hands, Tim shivering and hot and bent under you, all hipbones and legs over your shoulders, skinny tight arms. Times before that, ballparks and big cities all over this country. It's been years with this kid, and that ends up being the strangest thing to think.
Lincecum is so good you kinda feel like you should be paying him, or maybe that's only the adrenaline, whatever this feeling is that you're calling adrenaline because you can't think of a better word. You have both hands in his hair, your lip sucked in hard between your teeth, and you press forward into his mouth at the last moment, the floor falling away and the room tilting sharply on its side as you gasp and come and come.
Your legs give out a little bit. You slump back against the door. Lincecum stands up into you, bracing you with his body and taking your hand, pushing it into his pants. You're numb with receding pleasure, uncoordinated, your fingers not working right. Lincecum moans in frustration against your throat, licking the champagne off your skin, and eventually you get around to jerking him off properly. He lasts all of two minutes, which you're thankful for if only because the angle is hell on your wrist. Lincecum bites down on your new shirt and jersey as he finishes, a groan trapped in his throat. Then you're supporting him as much as the door is supporting you, left arm solid around his back.
A quiet moment--one of those quiet moments. Lincecum's weight is nothing for you, like a particularly thick down comforter, overly warm but bearable, certainly bearable. It's still very dark, your eyes hardly adjusted at all in the nightlike blue monitor light, and in your foggy suggestible state of mind you think that this could be anywhere and anytime, anybody you want it to be.
Tim smacks a kiss on your neck, and pulls away. "Hoo. Good times."
He's grinning like an idiot; you don't need to be able to see him to know that.
"Game face, Timmy," you tell him as you fix your pants and belt. Your hands are shaking slightly. "All kindsa cameras out there."
"I'm fine, what. I'm awesome."
Lincecum rustles around, and you want to put your hands on his face, something weird and childish like that, just because it's dark. You want to know what that idiot grin feels like.
He goes out first and you have to wait a few minutes so it doesn't look suspicious, a precaution that is probably stupid and laughable, but makes you feel better all the same. Ten years screwing around with one teammate or another, and Deadspin still hasn't figured out that you're gay. You see no reason to mess with success.
Coming down the hallway, you can hear the celebration spilling out of the clubhouse, raucous unintelligible party noise, vague fuzz of static. Your hands won't stop shaking.
The clubhouse is packed. The front brass is here now, and the scouts and ticket agents and grounds crew and everybody even tangentially involved with the team, a whole whack of reporters. Silver and blue beer cans are scattered everywhere.
Lincecum is across the room, attached to his catcher's back as Posey attempts to give an interview to the Fox Sports lady. You only get a glimpse of him, and then you are waylaid by Matt Cain who wants you to shotgun a beer with him.
You're starting to feel it now, encroaching drunk at the edges of your vision, snaking in like a vine twisting around your backbone. Reporters everywhere, camera eyes, and no one is trying to talk to you, which is good, just how you'd prefer it if anyone bothered to ask. You dig your phone out of your locker to find it groaning under the weight of messages and missed calls.
Your family's texts are all exclamation points and emoticons and less-than-three hearts. They are proud of you and they love you. Your friends employ more profanity but the general message is the same.
Joe Blanton and Ramon Hernandez of the Phillies and Reds, respectively, have left practically identical messages about kicking your ass in the championship series. The unconscious coordination makes you smirk; ballplayers are the same all over.
Your phone rings in your hand. It's Tim Hudson, and without thought you answer, lifting your voice over the crush of noise around you.
"Holy shit kid!" Hudson yells in your ear.
"Huddy," and you ride a sharp edge over into gleeful, something fluttering fast and brief in your chest. "How'd you like that, baby?"
"Fuckin' gorgeous! Got that motherfucker done, I seen ya."
"Yeah, and you're gonna see it right up close, you fuckin' ready for this?"
"Bring it, son, bring it. Lookin' forward to that shit."
Hudson sounds delighted. He's the presumptive ace of the Braves team that will come to San Francisco to start the playoffs on Friday. A number of years ago, he was the best friend you'd ever had.
You lean against your locker with your free palm flat to your ear, hunched down a little bit. All around you guys are cheering and laughing.
"It's crazy right now. Just insane," you say in a weird breath-filled tone.
Hudson pauses, a hitch like he's trying to remember his line. "Better or worse?"
There's the rub. You put your fingers against your eye, pressing down so that you are blind on one side. The celebration blurs around you, everyone soaked and now they look kinda melted. You try to call up what it was like in Oakland, those four first seasons of your career when you went to the playoffs every year like it was a birthright, just one more thing you'd earned through your lifetime of hard work and prayer. A noticeably different kind of joy back then, the treacherous twenty-two-year-old version of it, and you remember the blanking thrum of bass over everything, the glittery sting of champagne sprayed directly into your eyes, the weight of a middle infielder hitching a piggyback ride across the room and almost strangling you. You remember standing with a weary arm around Eric Chavez's shoulders, Tim Hudson in the middle of some ridiculous story and Mark Mulder sneaking up from behind to pour a beer over his head. You remember being very aware of that moment as one of the best in your life, and then correcting yourself sharply, so far.
Better or worse? Terrible question, really.
"Older and wiser, Timmy," you say, and the name catches in your throat but you don't think anyone notices. "It's a different kind of thing now."
"Don't be gettin' mature on me, boy," Hudson warns, half-serious and you want to get the laugh back in his voice. You feel like you're wrecking the mood.
"Wouldn't hear of it," you say, scraping up some brag and bravado from watching Brian Wilson hold court across the room. "Gonna kick your ass when you come to town, by the way. Consider yourselves fuckin' warned."
"Yeah, you think so. Listen, my ride is leaving--Billy! Hold the fuck up, man--I'll call you when we get in if it's not real late, all right?"
You nod even though Hudson can't see you. "Yeah, all right."
Hudson says, "Love ya kid," off-hand and casual, and you mumble, "Yeah you too," and get off the phone quick.
The party rages around you. Lincecum is drinking shots out of Dixie cups with Madison Bumgarner and Sergio Romo. You want to leave, and you kinda want to take Lincecum with you.
But then a reporter waylays you, a schlubby-looking sort in a crumpled brown sports coat. You recognize him vaguely; he's from one of those cable sports shows that no one watches. There is a digital recorder held up before your face, a demanding look trained on you like a tiger in a zoo cage waiting for its meal.
"Barry, you're one of the few Giants who've been in this position before," the reporter says in that over-familiar way of the media everywhere. "Talk about how this experience is different from the times you made the playoffs with the A's."
That's rather on the nose, and you hate that reporter-speak 'talk about this'--your unvoiced kneejerk response every single time is 'don't tell me what to do.'
You shrug. "I just feel really lucky. All these guys have worked so hard for this. It's a great fuh--great team. Really great."
You haven't exactly answered his question, but they usually don't care about that. The reporter nods his head, reminding you uncharitably of a brainless dog.
"And have you heard anything yet about what role you'll play in the series with Atlanta? Assuming you make the postseason roster, I mean."
Only half-paying attention, trying to catch Lincecum's eye from across the room, you take a second to register that, and then you look at the reporter, mortification flaring in the pit of your stomach.
"The fuck?" you say with heat, and watch the reporter's face scrunch in displeasure as he thumbs the recorder off.
"Don't curse on the mike, are you a fucking rookie or something?"
He's pissed off. You kinda gape at him for a second, not sure how the two of you can come from the same species.
"Get the hell away from me," you say, and you don't shove him only because there are cameras all over the place.
The reporter sneers, "Always been an asshole, haven't you," and turns away, bulling his way through the crowd in search of his next victim.
You suddenly feel like everyone is watching you (though no one is, no one notices), and you latch on to Pablo Sandoval, who is conveniently nearby and way more drunk than you feel is reasonable considering the game only ended a half-hour ago. Elation has a multiplying effect on on any extant intoxication, you remember, and you cut him a break.
Pablo is excellent cover. You make the rounds with him, pouncing on your teammates and poor Dave Flemming, who has had more beer poured on him than any three players. It's astonishing his microphone still works.
Flem is media like that fucker back there, but he's safe, he's one of yours. He would never ask you out loud about your chances of making the postseason roster. You swallow uneasily, the question recurring in your mind like a thrown dart piercing your defenses.
It's not the first time the thought has crossed your mind, of course. With every start you made in the past month, every man you put on base, every gut-wrenching loss the team took on your behalf, the forces against you gained strength. The hole you're in kept getting deeper, and meanwhile Madison Bumgarner has been pitching with the unconscious brilliance that is only possible at twenty-one years old, and nobody in the bullpen ever allows any runs anymore, and there are still just eleven spots for pitchers on the playoff roster. The internet has written you off unanimously, you know, but you stopped listening to them years ago.
If you don't make the postseason roster, you're not going to want to know about it. You'd rather be hit by a bus and stay in a coma for the whole fall and winter. You don't think you could live through sitting on the bench in October.
You lean heavily on Sandoval's back, accepting another beer from one of the clubhouse kids scrambling through the packed room trying to keep everybody nice and lit. You banish the darker edge; this is no time for that kind of negativity.
Your phone buzzes in your back pocket as Sandoval and Edgar Renteria chatter giddily back and forth in Spanish. It's a text message from Rich Harden, c u in the series, muthafucka, and you grin sharp like a slap, unbidden. You call him quickly, letting your fingers go without time to overthink.
It rings once, and then Richie himself, sardonic and caught someplace loud, probably the Ballpark at Arlington with his own team. The Rangers had their own division sewn up weeks ago.
"Dude, what the fuck," Harden says jubilantly. "Took you guys long enough."
"Got that motherfucker done," copying Hudson but you've been doing that for a decade, it's okay.
"Yeah it's a scene right about now, huh? Sounds crazy there."
"Seriously. And hey, um, good job for you guys too." You realize belatedly that you have not spoken to Harden in a couple of months, not since the Rangers were in town to play the A's (all of you are entirely in agreement about the unending weirdness of that endeavor) and the two of you and Eric Chavez got drunk in Hayward just like old times. "How you been, man?"
"Oh I'm fantastic," Harden says, and he's lying, or joking, you're not sure. "They're never gonna let me pitch again, but yeah, fucking spectacular other than that."
A weird little hiccup in your mind--you hadn't realized they were talking about Harden like they talked about you, like somebody expendable, a risk that had stopped being worth it. You have this out-of-date impression of him, Rich Harden when he was first called up and still too young to shave and he pitched better than anybody for those first few months.
You sorta laugh, wanting to keep it light. "Don't assume the worst, man. Everybody needs a deep staff in October."
"Yeah, Z, you and me are both kinda banking on that. Fuck it, though, congratulations."
"You too," you say with your throat abruptly constricted.
"It's gonna be a tight one, I think. Good match-ups."
"You guys feeling pretty good about the Rays?"
"Hell yeah, fuck the Rays. Nobody's giving us much of a chance over here, but fuck that shit too. We're going deep into this thing, like, all the way."
"Then I guess I'll see you there," you say.
"Yeah you better. Fuck. This is some seriously wild shit, Barry."
You don't know what he means--the postseason, the possibilities, the weight of the many years behind you now, something.
"What, you forgot?" you ask, careless and doubting. Richie made it to the playoffs with the Cubs year before last; it can't mean the same to him as it does to you.
"No, it's just different. Every time it's different, like, not what I'm expecting."
"What're you expecting?"
He pauses, a considering hitch of breath. "Who the fuck knows, really? It's probably only 'cause I get really drunk at that kinda party."
It's a plain obfuscation. You know exactly what Harden is missing on every subsequent team he plays for, no matter how well he does or how far they get. You know exactly why Wrigley Field and the Ballpark at Arlington have never quite felt like home to him. You don't call him on it, because what good has glorifying the Oakland teams of the new millennium ever done for either of you?
Searching for more stable footing, you call up the picture of Rich Harden as he was a couple of months ago, laughing on the curb at you and Chavvy on opposite sides of the street, dueling to be the first to hail a cab. Harden's eyes were a paler color blue than you remembered, everything about him kinda dimmed but not necessarily in a bad way, just like growing up, calming down. No more lightning bolts or hundred mile an hour fastballs, but that was only to be expected. This far down the road, everyone has lost a step or two.
You and Richie had a grand total of three sexual encounters, all over the course of the same month six years ago, the season after Eric Chavez got married. Only ever on the road, random hotel rooms with hallways long enough for a plane to take off, and Harden bent over the sink in the bathroom, straddling your body and gripping the headboard with both hands. You were pretty messed up back then. You got drunk and stuck your hand down his pants, and for a couple of minutes you thought it might actually work, that you might have actually found the cure, but then your mouth slid over the declination of Harden's hip, the place where Eric Chavez's body had a scar, a rough whitened place from when he'd wiped out practicing ollies in a San Diego parking lot fifteen years ago. You love that scar, slick under your tongue, tasteless and clean. Harden's hip was flawless, the skin unbroken, and the difference, the distance, shot through you like guilt made pure and silverine. There was no cure. There never would be.
The other two times were just because Harden thought it was cool and jumped you, and he was still really hot, so you went with it (spirit wasn't willing, flesh was very strong). The fourth time, you pushed his hands away from your face and said, "Actually we're not doing that anymore," and he looked like he'd been slapped but only for a second.
But that's old stuff. You've moved past it. You shake off the bitter fugue of nostalgia, and refocus. San Francisco. The tenth year.
"It's been a ridiculous series, anyway. Fuckin' nerve-wracking," you tell Harden. "I think I'ma sleep straight through to Monday."
"Not going out ragin' tonight?" Harden asks, a certain tipped undertone to his voice.
"Nah, I'm an old man now, haven't you heard?"
"Well, no worries, your mental age is still like twelve years old. Think young and shit."
"Yeah Richie, what you said."
Harden exhales against the receiver, rustling sound like wind from far away. "All right, well. I'll let you get back to it."
"That's, I mean, that's cool, I can talk for a minute."
You've taken up a spot against the wall, blocked away in your little phone-call world, pressing your palm flat to your free ear. Everyone leaves you alone, which is the good thing about talking on the phone in the middle of a party.
"Go mingle, you antisocial bastard," Richie tells you. He knows you pretty well. "How many more times is this gonna happen to you, honestly?"
He doesn't mean it cruelly; the nice thing about Harden is that he is never cruel no matter how flagrant the provocation. Your personality induces a lot of people to be mean to you, or maybe you're just exceptionally thin-skinned. It's never been entirely clear.
"Okay," you say, capitulating. "I'll see you soon, yeah?"
"Goddamn right you will," Harden says, that so-cool tone that has always been a poison arrow into your undefended heel. "Good luck, man."
"Yeah you too, good luck," you mumble inanely, and end the call. Your heart is pounding for some reason, pressure from all sides.
Around you, your team is cheering and crowing and even singing over there, singing that ringing matador's theme, olé, olé olé olé, the infield gathered together with arms slung heavy around each other's shoulders to form a chain. Madison Bumgarner is traveling around on Brian Wilson's back, lanky kid-pitcher arms wrapped around his closer's chest in a backwards bear hug. Lincecum is over with the unrelated Sanchez brothers, laughing a lot and drunk, plainly drunk even from across the room where you are, his face flushed and scrunched up around the eyes, flickering in the traffic.
At once, you are lost in an especially severe onrush of déjà vu. Suddenly it's ten years ago and the first time this happened to you, back in the other league, your other team. When you were just a punk kid pitcher yourself, slotted into the playoff rotation with Mulder and Hudson like you actually belonged there (and you did, way the hell back when, you absolutely did), and you remember another clubhouse overcrowded to a dangerous degree, packed and slippery and reeking of beer, your hair plastered down and your sinuses on fire, and then Chavez.
Chavez all the way across the room, in the center of a cluster of teammates and reporters because he was a golden boy back then too, and you caught his eye as you are trying to catch Lincecum's now, through the shifting morass of soaked ballplayers and the detritus of victory.
You caught Chavez's eye, Chavez who you didn't know particularly well at that point, only a few months on the team and still pretty damn infatuated with Tim Hudson (in your defense, almost everybody else was too), but in that moment Chavez shot you a grin through the crowd, black hair and dark eyes and perfect baseball face, and the elements crashed together, collided like a ten-car pileup. Maybe it never would have happened at all if Chavez hadn't grinned at you with such impeccable timing, right in the middle of the best day of your life, surrounded by all those guys you newly loved.
But he did grin at you like that. And you did love those guys. You always remember the start of things as clear as a bell, and that was the start for you and Chavez, the first time you thought, hey look at him with that particular slant in your mind.
Not a week later, after you walked into Yankee Stadium wearing enemy colors and lived to tell the tale, you locked the door of a hotel bathroom in New York City and got on your knees for him. Chavez was laughing, breathless and drunk, fingers dug into your hair with none of his native grace, all those things he could do on a baseball field. His stomach trembled under your hands, his shirt pushed up and his jeans pulled open. You were shaking with eagerness, messy and off your form, probably a little drunk. Chavez laughing, clutching at you, stammering over your name. It was juvenile and clumsy and wonderful. Everything else that happened between the two of you happened after that.
You jerk your head roughly, like trying to shake off a hangover in the shower, and consciously pick the past up, jam it down as deep as you can.
continues without interruption