i don't wanna stay young
Yes I was at that game last night, and it was honestly one of the single most painful baseball experiences of my whole life. They score three in the ninth to pad the lead, we score four in the bottom half to tie it up, obviously magic team will win another game in magic fashion and then: Buster. Face-down in the dirt.
So this was written swiftly and shoddily as a palliative for my broken heart. It's worked before.
bumgarner/posey, 2153 words, rated r. gettin' over that awkward name issue in the classic manner.
The Bloodiest Single Day
By Candle Beck
Cousins crashes into Buster Posey as hard as he can. The ball trickles loose at the plate and the go-ahead run scores for the Marlins and the crowd tears out the sky with screaming, leaves this great gaping black space above. You clutch the padded rail to your chest as Sanchez and Lincecum cry out in dismay at your sides, stifled pain blossoming in your chest, and then Buster is on his stomach on the dirt, and he's not getting up.
Everyone sees it at the same time. A wave of silence slams down over the ballpark, breath caught up in however many thousands of throats are still here. Buster writhes and claws at the ground, and terror thrums through the dugout air because it's bad, it's immediately clear that it's bad. He's kinda trying to drag himself along, but where or why, you don't know.
"What, Buster, fuck, no," Lincecum babbles, eyes wide inside the dark frame of his hood. Sanchez mutters like a rosary, "He's okay, he's okay, he's okay," and your fingers crush the vinyl padding of the rail, knuckles turning white.
Scott Cousins has his hand on Buster's back, bending over him, but he looks up as the Giants trainers run out there, and gets to his feet, stumbling back to the visitor's dugout to a brief ferocious barrage of hateful boos from the crowd. You watch Cousins slap high-fives with his team and you want to go over there and kill him with a baseball bat.
Buster is still on the ground. His mouth scrapes open against the dirt, mindless with agony, and your heart squeezes tight as you look away, not wanting to see him like that.
*
A year ago in Fresno, your wife had gone back to North Carolina to visit the family because you were going to be on the road most of the month, so you went over to the little cookie-cutter pre-fab that Posey was renting with Tom Neal and Darren Ford, found Posey's legs sticking out from underneath an old Dodge that was parked on the dead lawn.
You kicked at Posey's foot and said, "Hey grease monkey," and his legs swung akimbo as if trying to wave hello with his knee.
Hidden under the car, he told you to go get a couple of beers, and you obliged, going in through the garage into the kitchen, quick poke of your head into the living room to see Ford asleep like a four year old on the couch with an orange snuggie draped half across him, and then you went back out to the yard.
You sat on the prickly brown grass, the ground sun-warmed and soft, and cracked his beer for him. Posey squirmed out from under the Dodge, smudgy around his fingers and the line of his jaw, squinting at you against the sun. He pushed up on an elbow to take a long drink, and then lay back down with a happy sigh, tucking his arm under his head.
You stared and stared. You were distantly aware that you weren't supposed to, but you did anyway, dozy in the heat and not interested in anybody on this side of the country but him. Posey said something about how the car was named the General Lee, and scratched his heel over disintegrating grass. He smiled at you with his eyes still screwed shut.
You said, "Awesome," pretty excited about the whole thing, and spent a couple hours with him out there, digging yourself in deeper.
*
Maybe three or four days after that, Posey got hit in the head with a pitch in Tucson.
It was a fastball, and a good one, exploding out of the pitcher's hand and rising and rising and then crack, that broken-bone sound, and Posey dropped like he'd been shot.
He lay there perfectly still, and you mirrored it yourself, frozen on the inside, a stopped clock. The Tucson catcher put his hand on Posey's shoulder and looked over to your dugout, sweaty hair plastered high to his forehead, and called in a loud anxious voice, "Hey he needs help," and then the trainers were hustling out there and time sped up.
Concussion. Posey was unconscious for probably about twelve seconds all told, but they still took him to the hospital and everything.
Later, you went over to Posey's hotel room, where some of the guys were already hanging out keeping him company. Posey was lying on the floor because he said being on the bed or even just sitting up made him dizzy, but other than that he looked pretty much the same.
You sat on the floor, wanting to keep him close. The other guys peeled off one at a time, yawning and cracking their knuckles, saying goodnight. Eventually it was just the two of you.
"Nice hard head," you told him, and Posey rolled his eyes, sent a smile your way from a lowering angle.
"Takes a lickin' and keeps on tickin'," Posey recited, tapping at his temple, just charming as hell, and maybe you had some kind of sympathetic head injury, maybe it was like contagious, because a few minutes later you leaned over with your hand flat on his chest and kissed him on the mouth.
Head injury was going to be Posey's excuse, anyway.
He kissed you back, pushed up on an elbow to get into it, mumbled against your lips, "Madison, yeah," like he'd been waiting for it or something. Seemed unlikely, but then, so did most of this, the both of you with your darling wives far away and your tongues in each other's mouths on a hotel room floor in Tucson.
The two of you had clumsy sex, and you should have been drunk for it but you weren't. Posey was so sturdy and hot beneath you, fuzzy blue eyes gazing up, pink mouth gasping. You kissed him over and over again, and jerked him off with your hand down his pants and his hand clutching at the back of your neck. You had liked him from the first day you met him, the first moment. It was senseless and wholly amoral, but you could forgive yourself because it seemed like you'd felt this way about him forever, for years and years before you'd even met, as if there was a whole book of possibilities between you and it had always read just like this.
*
And then, after you rubbed yourself off on Buster's hip while mouthing gracelessly at his throat, his arm around your shoulders, rough fingers slid up into your hair, after you kinda collapsed against his side panting and shaking and amazed, and dozed off for a little bit, he woke you up into the dark room.
"You gotta get out of here, man, c'mon," Posey said, and you sat up, reached for him blearily but he pushed your hands down. "It's too late, you, you gotta go."
You muttered, "Yeah yeah," shaking your head to try and clear it and pulling yourself to your feet using the side of the bed.
Posey hovered close to you, stood up when you did. The grayish slant of light picked out a shard of Posey's face, one solemn blue eye, and you smiled. You set your hand on his neck, meaning to kiss him goodbye, but he dodged neatly away from you, faded back to a place where you couldn't see him so well.
*
The next day, Buster cornered you in the hotel lobby, in the little gift shop where you were idly spinning a rack of postcards, waiting for the rest of the guys to come down so you could get on the bus. Posey was kinda wild around the eyes as he came up to you, sleeplessly pale. His hands were shaking just a little bit, just because you were looking closely.
"Look, that was fucked up last night," was what Posey said to you. "I was all fucked up, with, with my head. So. We're not gonna do that again."
These were clearly things that he'd rehearsed, planned out ahead of time, and you were not so prepared. It wounded you first, deep and sudden and scarring, and then you got angry, which was a default response, a defense. Buster was a fucking coward. You glared at him, a mulish stubborn thing taking shape in the back of your mind that would still be there months later. You knew him; you could recognize him in dark rooms. He was an idiot if he couldn't see the significance of that.
"Whatever," you said with a sneer, knocking your shoulder into his as you walked out of the gift shop. You weren't going to stand there and argue with him. Obviously he wasn't even fucking worth it.
*
In Fresno, you came up out of the tunnel to see Buster lying flat on his back on the dugout bench, the dusty leather nest of his catcher's mitt resting on top of his face.
You stopped short, spikes scraping on the cement, looking down at him. Posey's heavy thighs and solid chest and his fingers woven together on his stomach, the sweet line of his throat, the way you couldn't see his face, nor that pretty mouth that had kissed you back. You wanted to smack him, kick him until he woke up and started fighting back.
Instead you grabbed a ball from the bucket and grabbed someone else to play catch with, flicking the ball away and pounding your fist into your glove as if there was something in there you needed to kill. You determined that there was nothing about Posey that you couldn't get from someone else, which wasn't at all true, but you were still young enough to manufacture some faith in it.
*
Later that year you and Posey made the major league club, and then promptly won the World Series.
There were several bizarre trains of thought that you entertained back then, throughout the hysterical fugue that was September and then the blinding light and roar of October. It was like a reward, like positive reinforcement: good job not fucking around with your catcher, here's a ring. Your wife had come with you to San Francisco and so your life looked just like you had always planned. It felt as if you had a camera on you all the time, even when you were brushing your teeth or buying milk and Lucky Charms at the bodega, like somebody was recording your every move.
Mostly you just threw the pitches Posey called for. You saw the beaten pocket of his catcher's mitt every time you closed your eyes. And you thought about him sometimes, trying to remember what you'd seen in him: those destroyer blue eyes of his, that old Dodge he'd named the General Lee, his affinity for your curveball. The interval of temporary insanity the two of you had shared in Tucson, a contagious head injury and a poorly thought-out idea that seemed plausible if only because you both came up with it at the same time. Buster Posey, lying on the grass and hotel room floors, smiling at you from down below, smiling with his eyes closed.
You remembered wanting something more from Posey at one point, but by the new year the feeling was long gone.
And it all seems so unlikely now, that those things happened. That those two people actually existed.
*
Now.
Posey gets functionally carried off the field with a trainer under each arm, a crippled five-legged creature moving in fits and starts for the dugout. The crowd chants his name, spiraling and strident with ferocious devotion, and then quickly it tapers off; you can hear a kid in the stands behind you calling out, "Don't worry, Buster, don't worry," as the trainers lift him down the steps.
You turn your back to the field to watch Posey going past, Lincecum still mumbling disordered curses at your elbow. Posey is breathing rough and shallow through his mouth, his eyes glassy with pain, unfocused. Your stomach has become a dense sinking mass of knots. It has to be a broken bone or a torn ligament, because Posey would never show it otherwise, never would have lain prostrate in front of everybody if it weren't serious, so so bad.
Returning your attention to the game, you can't make sense of it for a long second. Mota is still pitching. The Marlins are still batting. The umpire has swept the spray of brown dirt off home plate and it's like nothing ever happened, Posey clipped out just that neatly.
"Jesus Christ, what the fuck are we supposed to do now?" Lincecum asks, skittering panic climbing in his voice.
You shake your head, your throat pinched shut. You've never had the first clue how to answer that question, which is one of the many reasons why you've always needed a good catcher.
THE END
Endnotes: As you can probably tell, the image that won't shake loose today is Buster Posey, face-down in the dirt. In my head is that quote from Antietam, when they asked General Hood where his division was and he replied, "Dead on the field." That'd be justification for the title.
So this was written swiftly and shoddily as a palliative for my broken heart. It's worked before.
bumgarner/posey, 2153 words, rated r. gettin' over that awkward name issue in the classic manner.
The Bloodiest Single Day
By Candle Beck
Cousins crashes into Buster Posey as hard as he can. The ball trickles loose at the plate and the go-ahead run scores for the Marlins and the crowd tears out the sky with screaming, leaves this great gaping black space above. You clutch the padded rail to your chest as Sanchez and Lincecum cry out in dismay at your sides, stifled pain blossoming in your chest, and then Buster is on his stomach on the dirt, and he's not getting up.
Everyone sees it at the same time. A wave of silence slams down over the ballpark, breath caught up in however many thousands of throats are still here. Buster writhes and claws at the ground, and terror thrums through the dugout air because it's bad, it's immediately clear that it's bad. He's kinda trying to drag himself along, but where or why, you don't know.
"What, Buster, fuck, no," Lincecum babbles, eyes wide inside the dark frame of his hood. Sanchez mutters like a rosary, "He's okay, he's okay, he's okay," and your fingers crush the vinyl padding of the rail, knuckles turning white.
Scott Cousins has his hand on Buster's back, bending over him, but he looks up as the Giants trainers run out there, and gets to his feet, stumbling back to the visitor's dugout to a brief ferocious barrage of hateful boos from the crowd. You watch Cousins slap high-fives with his team and you want to go over there and kill him with a baseball bat.
Buster is still on the ground. His mouth scrapes open against the dirt, mindless with agony, and your heart squeezes tight as you look away, not wanting to see him like that.
*
A year ago in Fresno, your wife had gone back to North Carolina to visit the family because you were going to be on the road most of the month, so you went over to the little cookie-cutter pre-fab that Posey was renting with Tom Neal and Darren Ford, found Posey's legs sticking out from underneath an old Dodge that was parked on the dead lawn.
You kicked at Posey's foot and said, "Hey grease monkey," and his legs swung akimbo as if trying to wave hello with his knee.
Hidden under the car, he told you to go get a couple of beers, and you obliged, going in through the garage into the kitchen, quick poke of your head into the living room to see Ford asleep like a four year old on the couch with an orange snuggie draped half across him, and then you went back out to the yard.
You sat on the prickly brown grass, the ground sun-warmed and soft, and cracked his beer for him. Posey squirmed out from under the Dodge, smudgy around his fingers and the line of his jaw, squinting at you against the sun. He pushed up on an elbow to take a long drink, and then lay back down with a happy sigh, tucking his arm under his head.
You stared and stared. You were distantly aware that you weren't supposed to, but you did anyway, dozy in the heat and not interested in anybody on this side of the country but him. Posey said something about how the car was named the General Lee, and scratched his heel over disintegrating grass. He smiled at you with his eyes still screwed shut.
You said, "Awesome," pretty excited about the whole thing, and spent a couple hours with him out there, digging yourself in deeper.
*
Maybe three or four days after that, Posey got hit in the head with a pitch in Tucson.
It was a fastball, and a good one, exploding out of the pitcher's hand and rising and rising and then crack, that broken-bone sound, and Posey dropped like he'd been shot.
He lay there perfectly still, and you mirrored it yourself, frozen on the inside, a stopped clock. The Tucson catcher put his hand on Posey's shoulder and looked over to your dugout, sweaty hair plastered high to his forehead, and called in a loud anxious voice, "Hey he needs help," and then the trainers were hustling out there and time sped up.
Concussion. Posey was unconscious for probably about twelve seconds all told, but they still took him to the hospital and everything.
Later, you went over to Posey's hotel room, where some of the guys were already hanging out keeping him company. Posey was lying on the floor because he said being on the bed or even just sitting up made him dizzy, but other than that he looked pretty much the same.
You sat on the floor, wanting to keep him close. The other guys peeled off one at a time, yawning and cracking their knuckles, saying goodnight. Eventually it was just the two of you.
"Nice hard head," you told him, and Posey rolled his eyes, sent a smile your way from a lowering angle.
"Takes a lickin' and keeps on tickin'," Posey recited, tapping at his temple, just charming as hell, and maybe you had some kind of sympathetic head injury, maybe it was like contagious, because a few minutes later you leaned over with your hand flat on his chest and kissed him on the mouth.
Head injury was going to be Posey's excuse, anyway.
He kissed you back, pushed up on an elbow to get into it, mumbled against your lips, "Madison, yeah," like he'd been waiting for it or something. Seemed unlikely, but then, so did most of this, the both of you with your darling wives far away and your tongues in each other's mouths on a hotel room floor in Tucson.
The two of you had clumsy sex, and you should have been drunk for it but you weren't. Posey was so sturdy and hot beneath you, fuzzy blue eyes gazing up, pink mouth gasping. You kissed him over and over again, and jerked him off with your hand down his pants and his hand clutching at the back of your neck. You had liked him from the first day you met him, the first moment. It was senseless and wholly amoral, but you could forgive yourself because it seemed like you'd felt this way about him forever, for years and years before you'd even met, as if there was a whole book of possibilities between you and it had always read just like this.
*
And then, after you rubbed yourself off on Buster's hip while mouthing gracelessly at his throat, his arm around your shoulders, rough fingers slid up into your hair, after you kinda collapsed against his side panting and shaking and amazed, and dozed off for a little bit, he woke you up into the dark room.
"You gotta get out of here, man, c'mon," Posey said, and you sat up, reached for him blearily but he pushed your hands down. "It's too late, you, you gotta go."
You muttered, "Yeah yeah," shaking your head to try and clear it and pulling yourself to your feet using the side of the bed.
Posey hovered close to you, stood up when you did. The grayish slant of light picked out a shard of Posey's face, one solemn blue eye, and you smiled. You set your hand on his neck, meaning to kiss him goodbye, but he dodged neatly away from you, faded back to a place where you couldn't see him so well.
*
The next day, Buster cornered you in the hotel lobby, in the little gift shop where you were idly spinning a rack of postcards, waiting for the rest of the guys to come down so you could get on the bus. Posey was kinda wild around the eyes as he came up to you, sleeplessly pale. His hands were shaking just a little bit, just because you were looking closely.
"Look, that was fucked up last night," was what Posey said to you. "I was all fucked up, with, with my head. So. We're not gonna do that again."
These were clearly things that he'd rehearsed, planned out ahead of time, and you were not so prepared. It wounded you first, deep and sudden and scarring, and then you got angry, which was a default response, a defense. Buster was a fucking coward. You glared at him, a mulish stubborn thing taking shape in the back of your mind that would still be there months later. You knew him; you could recognize him in dark rooms. He was an idiot if he couldn't see the significance of that.
"Whatever," you said with a sneer, knocking your shoulder into his as you walked out of the gift shop. You weren't going to stand there and argue with him. Obviously he wasn't even fucking worth it.
*
In Fresno, you came up out of the tunnel to see Buster lying flat on his back on the dugout bench, the dusty leather nest of his catcher's mitt resting on top of his face.
You stopped short, spikes scraping on the cement, looking down at him. Posey's heavy thighs and solid chest and his fingers woven together on his stomach, the sweet line of his throat, the way you couldn't see his face, nor that pretty mouth that had kissed you back. You wanted to smack him, kick him until he woke up and started fighting back.
Instead you grabbed a ball from the bucket and grabbed someone else to play catch with, flicking the ball away and pounding your fist into your glove as if there was something in there you needed to kill. You determined that there was nothing about Posey that you couldn't get from someone else, which wasn't at all true, but you were still young enough to manufacture some faith in it.
*
Later that year you and Posey made the major league club, and then promptly won the World Series.
There were several bizarre trains of thought that you entertained back then, throughout the hysterical fugue that was September and then the blinding light and roar of October. It was like a reward, like positive reinforcement: good job not fucking around with your catcher, here's a ring. Your wife had come with you to San Francisco and so your life looked just like you had always planned. It felt as if you had a camera on you all the time, even when you were brushing your teeth or buying milk and Lucky Charms at the bodega, like somebody was recording your every move.
Mostly you just threw the pitches Posey called for. You saw the beaten pocket of his catcher's mitt every time you closed your eyes. And you thought about him sometimes, trying to remember what you'd seen in him: those destroyer blue eyes of his, that old Dodge he'd named the General Lee, his affinity for your curveball. The interval of temporary insanity the two of you had shared in Tucson, a contagious head injury and a poorly thought-out idea that seemed plausible if only because you both came up with it at the same time. Buster Posey, lying on the grass and hotel room floors, smiling at you from down below, smiling with his eyes closed.
You remembered wanting something more from Posey at one point, but by the new year the feeling was long gone.
And it all seems so unlikely now, that those things happened. That those two people actually existed.
*
Now.
Posey gets functionally carried off the field with a trainer under each arm, a crippled five-legged creature moving in fits and starts for the dugout. The crowd chants his name, spiraling and strident with ferocious devotion, and then quickly it tapers off; you can hear a kid in the stands behind you calling out, "Don't worry, Buster, don't worry," as the trainers lift him down the steps.
You turn your back to the field to watch Posey going past, Lincecum still mumbling disordered curses at your elbow. Posey is breathing rough and shallow through his mouth, his eyes glassy with pain, unfocused. Your stomach has become a dense sinking mass of knots. It has to be a broken bone or a torn ligament, because Posey would never show it otherwise, never would have lain prostrate in front of everybody if it weren't serious, so so bad.
Returning your attention to the game, you can't make sense of it for a long second. Mota is still pitching. The Marlins are still batting. The umpire has swept the spray of brown dirt off home plate and it's like nothing ever happened, Posey clipped out just that neatly.
"Jesus Christ, what the fuck are we supposed to do now?" Lincecum asks, skittering panic climbing in his voice.
You shake your head, your throat pinched shut. You've never had the first clue how to answer that question, which is one of the many reasons why you've always needed a good catcher.
THE END
Endnotes: As you can probably tell, the image that won't shake loose today is Buster Posey, face-down in the dirt. In my head is that quote from Antietam, when they asked General Hood where his division was and he replied, "Dead on the field." That'd be justification for the title.