and you hold on to whatever's in reach
I forgot to mention, so, okay, for my birthday back in October, my little bro sent me a tape, vhs, right, that was real old and used to have, like, 'Alice in Wonderland' taped off PBS or something on it, but now it's got his illiterate drawn handwriting on it saying 'first fifteen minutes are for you,' in red pen. This bro of mine, he is pretty much savant when it comes to giving presents. Once I got a quart sized Ziploc full of Lucky Charms marshmallows, like, two boxes worth, and I was all, duuuuude. Check fuckin' mate, that will never be topped.
So I'm excited, obviously, but dilemma! Because I don't have a VCR. And I can't for the life of me scare up anyone who does, either. Fuckin' digital age. I know a kid with a freaking Laserdisc player, but everybody else has got their computers and burned DVDs and they sneer at this neo-Luddite VCR shit, what next, you want a beta player, huh, huh? Yeah, you're a laugh riot. Bite me.
Anyway, I had no way to play the tape, and I'm all antsy cos see, the bro knows of my many obsessions and I was pretty sure that the tape had something to do with my boys or possibly a bunch of Tom Waits videos I'd never seen, I was pretty sure it was something good.
So I get home last week, first thing I do is pop the tape in, and my god people, my sweet merciful christ. I don't know if any of y'all saw the 'Head to Head with Jim Brown,' about the sport photography guy and Zito being the feature, but yeah. The crazy faces of Zito in that SI article are from this guy, but more important, the video of him. Pitching. Shirtless. I swear to God. Uniform pants, high socks, no jersey. I, like, short-circuited. And then hanging upside down grinning shirtless! And then and then. hrrrrrmmm.
And I'm yelling at my brother, "If you'd TOLD ME he wasn't wearing a shirt, I woulda BOUGHT A VCR." Anyway, it was excellent. On like, a totally geekified level, but man. My love for him is vast and endless and he does not have a bit of hair on his chest and if we were in high school in the eighties together, I would totally rig a game of Seven Minutes in Heaven and then get my friends on the outside to jam the closet door so that we would never have to stop.
ahahahahah. i can't even see the line i crossed anymore.
Table of Contents
Pictures courtesy bradausmus12
The Rest of Your Life
By Candle Beck
Part the Fourth: Temporary Life
(unconcealed weapons)
Munson does well in college. He made the right decision, there’s no doubt about it.
A week after Chavez reports to the A’s instructional league in Phoenix, Munson finds out he’s got Hepatitis A, which seems incredibly appropriate, all things considered. It’s a kind of terrible disease, like the worst of every flu he’s ever had, dragging him down all the time, making him hurt, making everything harder for him, but he can deal.
He’s having a good time. His roommates are chill and the guys on the team seem stand-up all the way. There are a lot of parties and a lot of girls with slender sculpted legs and keyed turquoise eyes, and he’s entranced by the casual attitude of academic life, the way the professors don’t take roll or know his name, the way he can slip himself between the cracks without any effort at all.
Eric Chavez, in Phoenix, is scared to death but won’t admit it.
He’s been playing quietly, keeping his head down, trying to be as grown-up as he can. He does his job and tries not to draw any undue attention, but it doesn’t work, and three days in, his penitentiary-faced coach calls him into the office and tells him flatly that the other players think he’s a punk.
They’ve read his caution as arrogance, the casual flash of his play at short as that of a cocky motherfucker. Chavez is the Oakland A’s million-dollar bonus baby, a risk taken by a team that can’t afford to believe in risk, and everybody’s already questioning whether he’s worth it.
Eric is stunned, bleakly humiliated. He protests the charge of arrogance, an eighteen year old kid at the beginning of something huge, and he can’t say it out loud, but he’s not cocky, he’s fucking terrified, and there’s a big goddamn difference.
His coach acts like he believes Chavvy, gruffly sends him back out onto the field. But now it’s even worse, his eyes rabbitting around trying to figure out which of his new teammates think that about him, think he’s a punk.
He’s not a punk. He gave up everything for this, can’t they see that?
He talks to Munson on the phone, but Munce is always in the middle of something, on his way out the door, only half paying attention, humming vague responses that don’t match up to what Chavez said to him. The best conversation they’ve had since Munce left him at his parents’ house in San Diego is the one that starts with Munson telling him, after getting back from the health clinic chockfull of information about his illness, “Dude, I might have given you the hep. So, watch out for that.”
But Chavez doesn’t get sick.
He does all right in Phoenix, brief-run league though it is, all raw prospects young enough to still fight brutally and without morals for their futures. They’re mismatched and playing a lot of dirty baseball, unnecessary brushbacks and cruel spikes-up slides into second to bust up the double play.
He gets lonely. His teammates still don’t like him. There’s so much time out here, there’s so much space. He’s living in a fucking motel, and he’s totally unnerved when he walks into a gas station convenience store one night and sees a man with a cowboy’s holster tucked full of a greasy anachronistic Colt .45.
Eric cowers behind the chips rack, expecting the holdup to begin any minute now, but the cowboy just pays for his six-pack and ambles out, cool as cool. When Chavvy asks the counter clerk, what the fuck, the rat-faced kid leers at him, tells him it’s legal to carry a firearm in Arizona as long as it’s not concealed.
That doesn’t make Eric Chavez feel better about his situation.
Phoenix, quickly developed, is still quite clearly only a decade or two removed from main street duels, wagon trains dying of thirst, incomplete and savage. Chavvy, who’s never lived anywhere except San Diego, is so lost out here, it’s awful.
But instrux doesn’t last forever, and he goes home in November, a couple of weeks before his nineteenth birthday.
He’s a rich man, now, a teenaged millionaire, and he buys stuff because he can, because he’s never been able to before. A new car for Chris, and one for each of his parents, who won’t accept a house from him yet. He sends Brandy to prom; he sends Casey to Florida. He buys himself a car too, flashing silver like a coin rolling down the sidewalk, thinking giddily about the miles between Rancho Penasquitos and Los Angeles.
His first month back, he spends probably half the time up at USC with Munson, getting to know the place like he would have if he’d never signed. They don’t get a chance to fuck around, really, because of those six roommates (Chavez’s top bunk is still empty, waiting for him to come back), and for the first week or two Chavez almost forgets that he’s really pretty much obsessed with his best friend, feels like they’re fourteen years old again and nothing’s gotten weird yet.
Munce’s new friends get to know him, get to expect him, and then one night after a string of power hours, both of them astonishingly drunk, they get into a fight on the back street, the shortcut.
It’s hard to remember, the next day, but it’s something about Chavvy playing big shot and picking up tabs and smirking at everything like he’s better than all this, and Munson’s hands are in tight fists at his sides and Chavez keeps thinking about the uneven plane of the concrete under his feet, thinking that he’ll have to be careful not to trip and fall when Munson hits him, and Chavez’s throat hurts, and he can’t get anything straight, and Munson yells at him, “Why don’t you just go home, you don’t fucking belong here!”
So Eric goes, and they don’t talk for awhile after that, the longest they’ve ever not talked.
Everybody thinks he’s a punk, motherfucking everybody, and he wonders if he should start believing them.
He misses Munson, a lot. It was bad in Phoenix; it’s worse now. In Phoenix he had somewhere to go every day, a job even if it wasn’t a real job, working towards the place where he’s going, but now he’s just waiting for spring training to start, killing time.
Munson’s got a whole life at USC, a sarcastic dark-eyed sorta-girlfriend, a crowd of guys who think he’s awesome, a team that Chavez isn’t a part of, the first time that’s been the case since they were eight years old.
Chavvy knows it’ll get better, come March, come spring training, once his world comes into focus again, it’s just this dead time, this in-between time, this fucking temporary life, making it so hard, that’s all.
Christ, he misses his friend.
And then at eight in the morning on New Year’s Eve, Eric Chavez is awakened by a finger steadily flicking his forehead, his eyes scrunching against it and then coming open slowly, sees Munson sitting on the edge of his bed, grinning down at him.
For a second, Chavez thinks he’s dreaming, then Munce flicks him again and Chavvy yanks his head, hooks an arm around Munson’s waist and buries his face in Munson’s side, all soft cotton and warm.
“Loser,” he muffles into Munce’s body, impossibly grateful, and feels the spur of Munson’s laugh.
Munce palms his head, twisting his fingers in Chavez’s hair and pulling him away so Munce can see his face.
“You need to get ready, man,” Munson tells him, fingertips tiptoeing across Chavez’s face, over his forehead, down his nose. “We’re leaving, like, ten minutes ago.”
Chavvy grins helplessly, Munce’s thumb at the corner of his mouth. “Where are we going?”
Munson gives him an exasperated look. “It’s New Year’s Eve, dude, where do you think we’re going?”
Chavez’s mouth drops open a fraction, and he blinks fast, his throat moving as he swallows. Munce’s smile softens, tracing his knuckles across Chavvy’s cheekbone before getting up to unearth clean-smelling clothes and toss them to his friend.
They go back to the desert. They talk like nothing’s happened, about USC and Phoenix and San Diego. They catch each other up on family gossip, no way is Munce’s cousin Jessica pregnant again, that’s like the fourth time in three years. Chavvy teases Munson about still not being able to figure out the tent and Munce calls the tent’s mother dirty names like he always does, and they sit on the ground, drinking whiskey from plastic cups in their big winter coats, a wool cap pulled down over Chavez’s ears, Munson wearing his beggar gloves with the fingers cut off.
Chavez keeps shifting closer to him, breath falling in thick clouds from his mouth and nose. He’s furnace-hot on the inside from the whiskey, the exposed skin on his face feeling stiff and iced. He gets close enough to lean his shoulder against Munson’s when he’s laughing, their feet scuffling.
He’s so happy.
Munce knocks him a refill, then raps his cup lightly with the bottle. “Resolutions, Ricky,” he says, probably drunker than he’s letting on, holding his liquor much more respectably after his first semester of college life.
Chavez is pretty drunk himself, though, so he tilts into Munson and rests his face against Munson’s scratchy coat, his mouth pressed down and his nose peeking over Munson’s shoulder. He thinks for awhile, watching Munson watching the falling stars.
He lifts his head, propping his chin on Munce’s shoulder instead, answers with the fog of his breath breaking on Munson’s face, “Triple-A by the end of the summer,” he promises, sees Munson’s lips curve up slightly. “Learn how to play third base.” He pauses, snakes an arm around Munson’s back. “Did I tell you they want me to play third?”
Munce nods, still looking up at the sky. “Only about six times.”
Chavez grins. Munson’s so funny. He leans forward, brushing his lips across Munce’s ear, Munce twitching, and then pulls back again. Munson smells like whiskey and lime, but they’re not using limes, so that’s kind of weird. Chavvy’s hand finds its way around Munson’s hip, fits itself neatly into Munson’s coat pocket, his arm a chain to hold them together.
“Anything else?” Munce asks, his hand on Chavez’s leg (when did that get there? Chavez wonders blurrily), fingers playing the seam of his jeans like a piano.
Chavez leans forward again, kissing Munson’s neck, the wind-color high on his cheek. He presses his cold nose to Munson’s face and Munce doesn’t even flinch.
“Not fuck things up with you,” Chavez whispers, closing his eyes and wishing they could cut their hands open again, wishing they could add another vow.
Munce turns his head then, finally, and his hand on Chavez’s leg moves up to grip the collar of his coat. He nods carefully. “That’s a good one,” he says, then kisses Chavez, and Munson tastes, unsurprisingly, like everything flammable in the world
Eric Chavez is three months away from his first spring training, but they don’t talk about that. There’s a baseball season coming for the two of them that will see them truly separate for the first time, the longest time, a baseball season that won’t be easy and won’t be the same, but they don’t talk about that either.
They’re drunk-they make promises. They crawl into one sleeping bag and do everything as slow as possible, stars falling unnoticed in the sky above them, and there’s a new distance between them that they won’t recognize until they wake up wrapped around each other with the year’s first light streaming down around them.
*
(shadow valley)
Minor league baseball is hard.
Visalia’s in the middle of the Central Valley fields, the middle of nowhere, the wasteland. Devastatingly flat all the way until the horizon runs into the faraway mountains, swallowed up by the endless rows of crops. It’s hotter than the desert in the depth of the summer, the desolate landscape baking and chipping off like bits of char.
The Visalia Oaks ballpark, Recreation Field with its ridiculous 1,700 seating capacity, has had most of the green paint scraped off the wooden benches, and Chavez learns real quick not to casually lean on the metal rail at three o’clock in the afternoon, after one day when he sears a diagonal line on the soft unprepared flesh of the underside of his forearm. Three weeks later, he can still see the burn, and he wears it proudly, hopes that it will scar.
Class A, man.
He’s good, he’s hitting over .300, three months into the season. He’s already got fans, he knows them by their first names and they linger around the clubhouse door, give him gifts of oranges. He gets pretty good at signing his name, practicing his autographs in the back of the team bus after everyone else is asleep so they won’t catch him and start ragging on him.
His family makes it out to a couple of games a month, and one night at dinner, Chavez hears his voice break as he says, “I spend my whole life in buses and motel rooms,” and he was trying to make a joke of it.
Ruby’s worried about him, her little boy alone in the wide valley, and the first thing she does when she comes out to Visalia to see his new place is clean it for him.
He’s sleeping on the couch in his small two-bedroom apartment. He’s rooming with two teammates and one of their fiancées, and he gives up his room willingly when the couple moves in, because this is just a step, this isn’t permanent. He lives out of a suitcase.
Eric Chavez is lying on the couch, watching the moon move across the sky in the same path as a lazy fly ball. Eric Chavez is doing push-ups on the living room floor at three in the morning. Eric Chavez is sitting two feet away from the television, the volume turned down to murmur so as not to wake up anybody else, his eyes roaring with static, his face jiggered with light.
Eric Chavez is not sleeping that much these days.
He grows a goatee, mainly so he’ll stop getting carded trying to buy liquor. He thinks about Eric Munson all the fucking time.
They talk on the phone. California’s a bigger place than Eric Chavez realized. They’re in the same state but he could drive his big silver car for hours and still be a half a day away from his best friend.
At nineteen years old, he’s an infant in his clubhouse, and he’s having trouble making friends. Kevin Gregg, his first roommate, is a good guy, quiet and shy, and Chavvy’s feeling pretty quiet and shy too, pretty much the opposite of how he’s spent his life, so they get along.
But the rest of the team, farther along than him, grown men with wives and children and burgeoning cases of alcoholism, he’s got nothing in common with them except the game. He’s easily dismissed, because he’s just a fucking kid, number ten draft pick or not, he’s nothing anybody cares about, not yet.
His life is no longer strange or unpredictable. It’s clear where he’s going, the path he’ll take. Suddenly everything is simple, laid out. All he has to do is play baseball every day and soon he’ll be in the bigs. All he has to do is play.
No excuse for him to feel this lost. No excuse for the voice in the back of his mind that’s screaming, louder every day, ‘no, fucking no, I take it back, take me back, I didn’t mean it, get me the fuck out of here.’
Eric Munson is having an excellent time at USC. Everybody likes him, he’s got packs of friends and there are an incredible amount of girls who find baseball players and catchers in particular to be just the hottest. Every night there’s a party, and he gets used to waking up in odd places without a shirt on. L.A. is the place to be, half of Mt. Carmel’s graduating class ended up within an hour’s drive, and Munson learns the faithless sprawl of the city, dreams about the curves of Mulholland Drive.
He has a straight-out-the-gate star-making year for the Trojans, and baseball’s still a game to him. He hits .336 his freshman year and leads the team in home runs. He’s gotten good behind the plate, better than he’s ever been before. His throws to second are clotheslines, difficult blocks are becoming instinct. He tastes the slippery vinyl of his mask’s padding against his lips, his hair pressed in flat stripes from the straps, and when he’s off the field, his left hand feels too light, not weighed down by his mitt.
He goes everywhere with the team, sparkling deluxe buses and jet planes, all over the country and Hawaii, too, gold beaches and mid-ocean blue water. He goes to Japan and they cheer for him like he’s a native son. In June, the Sporting News names him the National Freshman of the Year and he is selected for the USA National Team, he’s gonna go to Italy this summer and the hotel the team stays in will be three times as old as anything in his country and he’ll want to chisel off pieces of stone to take home with him, but he won’t.
He misses Chavez, sure, natural, but there’s a lot of other stuff going on. It’s hard to remember that he’s got a best friend out in the Central Valley, scrapping and still breaking into tears when an error of his loses the game for his team.
Munce isn’t really good on the phone, he’s not used to just chattering about random stuff for hours on end. As far as anything important goes, they’re a million miles away from each other.
When Chavez asks him to meet in Modesto early in August, an off-day between San Jose and Fresno for the Oaks, Munson hmmms and tries to gracefully weasel out of it, but when Chavez has to ask a second time, he sounds like he’s about to cry, and Munce quickly agrees, already figuring how to break the date he’s got for that weekend.
Munson drives up to Modesto through the pale yellow fields, and somewhere in the back of his mind he thinks that he shouldn’t sleep with Chavez, should put their whatever on hold, maybe for good, because that’s surely the smart thing to do, maybe even the right thing, who knows?
But then Chavez opens the motel room door, looking drawn and weary, his arms braced with new muscle but the lines of his face narrow, thinned, and just the sight of him makes something break down inside Munson, a lump in his throat and a shredded pain in his heart, and he kisses Chavez before Chavez has a chance to kiss him, before he even gets all the way into the room.
Munson’s a fucking idiot. He forgot, between everything else that has been going on, he forgot that the two of them are not good if they’re not together. Somehow, he forgot.
After they fuck themselves out, boxers back on to restore their modesty, Munce takes in the well-traveled duffel bag tossed into a corner, Chavez’s glove on the dresser, the water stains spreading like cancer on the wall, the door ill-fit into its frame, long splinters broken off by the chain-lock where it was once kicked in.
This motel room is the kind of place where truckers buy crystal meth from bikers, adulterous couples meet at two in the afternoon with the shades tightly drawn, bounty hunters crash in with shotguns and black sunglasses.
For a college boy, it’s almost unbearably cool, secretive and forbidden, tints of danger.
“So what’s it like?” he asks Chavez. Chavez’s fingers are curled against Munson’s side, just below his rib cage, and that’s the only way the two of them are touching.
Shallow lines appear on Chavez’s forehead, looking at his friend in incomprehension. “What?”
Munce flits his hand through the air, encompassing everything. “Pro ball.”
Chavez’s hand pulls away from Munson’s side, scratching nervously at his own stomach as he moves his shoulders. “It’s . . . different. It’s cool,” he hurries to assure. “I mean, it’s great. It’s, like, real. You know? But it’s also . . .”
“Real?” Munson suggests.
Chavez nods, his face clearing. Good to know that he doesn’t always have to finish every sentence. “Yeah. I gotta take everything so seriously, now. Which kind of sucks.”
“But it’s worth it,” Munson says, not even making it into a question. “You’ll be in the majors so soon, man, the way you’re going.”
Chavvy sighs. “I guess.”
Munce pushes up on an elbow, looking down at his friend, Chavvy lying there dark and sad, the mouth-burned places on his chest, the scratch of Munce’s five o’clock shadow on Chavvy’s face and throat, the new width in Chavez’s shoulders, the tense power of his arms. For the life of him, Eric Munson cannot figure out how he ever thought he was ready to end this.
“You sound, like, less than thrilled.”
Chavez half-smiles. The sheets, spotted in the light, glow whitely with the room as dim as it is now, pallid reflections on Chavez’s skin. “I’m just wiped out, you know? And I keep . . . I keep thinking about . . . well. Stupid stuff.”
Munson watches the dust in the air swarm over the two of them, new specks with every movement, and thinks about flocks of birds flying in insane, swirling patterns in the hours before a big storm hits, driven crazy by the weather.
“But you’re playing pro ball,” Munson tells Chavez pedantically, maybe Chavez forgot.
Chavvy slides closer to him, humming lightly and head-butting Munson’s shoulder. “Pro ball’s not everything, man.”
Munce twines his arm under Chavez’s neck, reaching down Chavez’s back, Chavez all twisted around and idly gnawing on Munson’s shoulder. The air conditioner’s broken, or maybe was never installed, either way it’s flat-land hot in their dark little cube of a room, and there are thin scrims of sweat between Chavez’s shoulder blades, under his chin, at the small of his back.
“Don’t talk crazy, dude,” Munson says, only joking a little bit. “What’s more important than pro ball?”
Chavez stops moving, his mouth open on the knob of Munson’s shoulder. He lifts his head, sighs, “Well,” and rests a hand on Munson’s collarbone, tells him quietly, “I’m in love with you. You know that, right?”
Munson blinks, dust in his eyes, and shakes his head without thinking. Chavez knows better than to say something like that, it’s not fair. Even if they haven’t seen each other in months, that’s still no reason to say something like that. And that quiet tone in his voice, like it’s obvious, like Chavvy thinks that this is how it is for both of them and they just weren’t saying it out loud.
It’s not like that. Munson’s pretty sure.
“You are not. You’re just being dumb.”
Chavez screws his knuckles against Munson’s arm, kisses him on the line of his jaw. “Nah, it’s true. I’ve been in love with you since we were probably fifteen years old. It’s possible that I’ll never be in love with anyone else ever again. So.”
Munson sits up, knocking Chavez off him. He’s still shaking his head, he doesn’t believe this, no way. Chavez is perfect, doesn’t he know that? Chavez is a year away from the big leagues, and nothing’s as important as that.
“You can’t be in love with me. You love me like I love you, like a brother,” he explains, his hand closing anxiously in the sheets.
Chavez scoffs, looking hurt and scared and not much like himself at all. “Yeah, brothers who fuck.”
Munce pushes his fist into the mattress, digging in. “Shut up. We’re gonna be major league ballplayers, you’re not allowed to be in love with me.”
Chavvy sits up too, his eyebrows pulled down, glaring blackly at his friend. “Not allowed?” he echoes. “Not allowed by who? You? Because just try and stop me, man, I fucking dare you.”
Munce is about to lash back, but then the absurdity of the argument strikes him, and he breathes out an unsteady laugh, pulls a hand across his face. If they’re gonna fuck up, they’re not gonna do it like this.
He slips his hand around Chavez’s arm, rolls his eyes and says, “C’mere.”
He sits back against the headboard and tugs Chavez to him again, Chavez briefly tense but then acquiescing, folding against his friend. Munson pushes a hand through Chavez’s hair, exhaling.
“All right, go ahead and be in love with me,” he says, smoothing the hair behind Chavez’s ear with intricate attention. “Your funeral. But, I mean . . . it’s not like we live five minutes away from each other anymore.”
Chavez nods, his unshaven cheek rasping on Munson’s chest. Munce continues, “And pretty soon we’ll both be in the majors and not playing for the same team and, and . . . and it’ll have to be even more of a secret.”
Chavez turns his head, his chin on Munson’s sternum. His eyes are sleepily hooded and very dark, his hair casting charcoal-colored shadows on his forehead and temples. “We’ve been keeping it a secret for three years now. Why can’t we just . . .” he trails off, and Munson sardonically finishes for him:
“Keep it a secret for another twenty years? That doesn’t seem like the most realistic of plans, man.”
Chavez scowls at him, his hand on Munson’s hip, fisted in the material of Munce’s shorts. “Wasn’t gonna say that,” he argues. “I was gonna say, like, if people are gonna be dumb, then we’ll just have to be smart. If we could sneak it past our parents, how hard can it be to sneak it past major league baseball?”
Munce hikes his eyebrows and angles Chavez a dubious look, swiping the back of his arm across his forehead. It’s so hot in here, he can barely breathe. He shakes his head. “Even if we could keep it a secret, what, we’re just not gonna see each other for six months of the year? You really think you’d be able to handle that?”
Chavez’s eyes narrow. “Maybe you wouldn’t be able to handle it,” he huffs.
Munson rolls his eyes again and flips Chavez onto his back, pinning his shoulders down and leaning over him.
“Look,” he says, brooking no argument. “You gotta not be everything’s-gonna-work-out about this, man. You gotta see it right, okay. You think this past year’s been hard, not seeing each other hardly ever, wait until it’s only a couple of games a season. And what if I end up on the East Coast? Or in the National League? It’s . . . it’ll be impossible, dude.”
Chavez’s mouth pulls tense, jet colors streaking through his eyes. “Are you getting rid of me?”
Munce blows out an irritated breath, not even remembering that maybe that’s why he came to Modesto, and drops his head down to nose against Eric’s throat. “No, goddamn it,” he murmurs, tasting sweat and soap. “I’m asking you to think about this. Seriously. Not little-Ricky-Chavez-says-it’s-gonna-be-fine, but honestly, think about it, all the stuff that’ll be between us. And figure out whether you really think we could . . . hold on. How bad it’d be if we couldn’t.”
Chavez’s face is shuttered, his eyes unreadable. “We’d be fine,” he whispers.
Munson sighs impatiently, glaring at him and thumping Chavvy’s shoulder. “You didn’t even fucking think about it!”
Chavez pushes him hard, shoving him off. He sits up and tears his hands through his hair, short-tempered and inarticulate. “I’ve never needed to think about it,” he answers. “Maybe we’d only see each other a couple times a season and maybe we’d fuck around on our own time with other people, but fuck, man . . . we could do it.”
Munson swings his legs out, his feet on the floor and his elbows on his knees. The room is rustling, the heat wracking on the window glass, and Munce thinks about a tile floor, checkerboard cool and hands leeched of their color by the chill.
“Hard as it’s gonna be to make it in the bigs, and to have this happening on top of it . . . just seems like we’d be asking to get hurt.”
There’s a long moment, then Chavez says tonelessly, “You are getting rid of me.”
Munce twists around, catching Chavez’s eyes angrily. “I’m not fucking getting rid of you! Jesus. I’m just saying, don’t think this is gonna be easy.”
Chavez crawls over to him on his hands and knees, sitting on the edge of the bed and their legs press together from knee to hip, shoulders bumping. He leans into Munson, too warm and his good weight resting briefly against his friend. “I don’t think it’s gonna be easy,” he says. “I just think we could do it.”
Munson looks at him, lifts his hand and touches his fingers to Chavez’s ear, his cheekbone, the slant of his nose. Chavez rumbles and turns his face into Munson’s palm. Munson cards his fingers into Chavez’s hair, bending his hand around, and taps his thumb thoughtfully on Chavez’s jaw. He thinks that some things are never gonna change.
“I guess I’m probably in love with you too,” Munson admits reluctantly, because really, how could he not be? It still might be a lie, but it’s a good one, at least. It’s a lie he’s willing to believe. His other hand is drifting on Chavez’s back, his forearm a solid bar of heat across the small of Chavez’s back.
Chavez nods, his eyes paling slightly, patting him on the knee. “Of course you are, Munce.”
Munson lowers his head down onto Chavez’s shoulder, laughing gently with little hooks of air blowing across Chavez’s skin. “We’re both really, really dumb.”
Chavez chuckles, his body thrumming slightly, and kisses Munson on the forehead, warmly held together, for now, at least, for now.
Two months later, it ends for the first time.
*
(dive boy dive)
The minor league season is over in September, and Eric Chavez goes home to San Diego.
He rides back with Jeff DaVanon, a teammate of his who grew up on the east side of town, and they make the six-hour trip in four and a half, pulling into Rancho Penasquitos at three in the morning.
Eric shakes DaVanon’s hand, and thanks him for the ride. They probably won’t be teammates again, because Chavvy is looking to start next season at Double-A Huntsville (the Deep fucking South), and DaVanon’s got a year or two more of scuffling before he’ll go that far.
Chavez is so tired. He got sick of baseball about a week after seeing Munson in Modesto, though the two events were unrelated. It’s just such a long season. Not twenty-six games, but one hundred and fifty-four. Not three months, but six. Every part of Eric Chavez’s body hurts; all he wants to do is sleep.
Casey comes out the front door, grinning in his wide cockeyed way and careening into his big brother’s arms on the stone walk, Eric’s dog Cheech snapping at his heels. Chavvy hugs him tight, Casey punching him on the back exuberantly, the younger boy having stayed up waiting for his brother to come home, burning through a Costco-sized box of Pixie Stix and now kited, sugar-high to his eyeballs.
“Ricky Ricky Ricky, dude!” Casey yells, and Chavez laughs, sets him back down on his feet. Cheech bounds around them ecstatically, barking and pawing up Chavez’s back, big pink tongue lapping at Chavez’s shirt.
“Shh, bro, working neighborhood, remember?” Chavez tells him with an affectionate smile, the street cool and restful.
Casey pokes at Chavez’s still-novel goatee, and bounces over to get his bags, hunching under the weight of the big duffel, staggering towards the house.
Eric stands in the front yard for a little while, flexing his shoulders against the stiffness of the car ride, craning back to see the stars. Cheech circles him, rubbing against his legs and giving him a devotedly joyful dog-grin. He thinks, ‘home,’ and is so happy he could cry.
He’s not going to think about his career or baseball in those terms, not until the spring. He’s going to remove it from his physical life, be a fan again, and see the world like everybody else does.
Chavez rents a two-bedroom house in Manhattan Beach, draped on the edge of a cliff. It’s twenty minutes from USC, and he can watch the dolphins leaping in shiny gray arcs like machinery in the ocean from every room that faces west.
Munson basically moves in, four or five nights a week in Manhattan Beach, and they sleep on the living room floor like little kids who couldn’t make it to midnight on New Year’s Eve. They sleep on the couch on long Sundays, the Padres at one o’clock, an East Coast game at four, and then the Dodgers or the Angels at seven, half-waking groggily to roll their heads on each other’s shoulders and protest in cottony voices, “no, I’m up, who’s winning?” They sleep on Chavez’s big new mattress, which he never bothered to set up the box spring for, so that when Munce rolls off the edge, he just rolls right onto the floor and doesn’t even wake up, not until he gets cold an hour or two later and fumbles his way back, still asleep, knotting himself around Chavez’s warm body.
Eric Chavez gets to know Munson’s schedule, knows when Munson has time to come over in the middle of the day between classes and wake him up by pulling his hair, knows when Munson will be around to the watch the Simpsons and go out for beers afterwards. He meets Munson on campus and they play pick-up basketball, they mess around with Aerobes on the quad. They get back to Manhattan Beach and fuck until they fall asleep. Munson’s parents start calling Eric Chavez’s number before they call Munson’s dorm.
Chavez tackles his best friend onto the couch and kisses him with crumpling magazines under Munson’s back. They go out to Dodger Stadium and Chavez buys a big foam finger for the purposes of whapping Munson upside the head, and Munson gets him a white and blue pennant that says Chavez Ravine on it, which immediately gets hammered into the place of honor on the wall above Chavez’s mattress.
It’s amazing. Eric Chavez hasn’t touched a baseball in three weeks, and he can’t remember anything as good as this.
Steve Scogin, their second-best friend from high school, is at nearby Long Beach State and hangs out a lot too, surfing with Munson and whipping perfect football spirals down the length of the shore to Chavez, both of them barefoot and sprinting past the tanned families, the intricate moated castles made of sand.
Chavvy leaves the door unlocked, more out of principle than anything else, because he’s so safe all the time, he can’t imagine anything changing that, and that’s how Scogin walks in on them one afternoon a few days before the World Series starts.
He doesn’t see much. He doesn’t really see anything. Chavez and Munson are in the kitchen, trying to make brownies from scratch because store-bought mixes are for geeks, and the whole thing is generally a fiasco from the start.
Chavez has got sugar in his hair and there’s flour all over the counter, handprinted, finger-written to read, ‘Eric C = dork,’ and the answering ‘Eric M = dork-lover,’ both of them giggling and yelping, jumping away from the blistering corners of the stove. The stereo’s on loud, pushing a good beat through the house, a rattled flood of words that they can’t keep up with.
Munce brushes the back of his hand across his face without thinking and leaves a smear of chocolate batter, dark like war paint on his cheek, and Chavez is laughing as he backs Munson up against the refrigerator, his hands in fists on Munson’s stomach, their knees bumping. He noses in, hiccupping with laughter, feeling the music pulse in his head and Munson’s body rumbling, hitching breaths and high loose tricks of laughter coming from him too.
Chavez closes his eyes, grinning, and swipes his tongue on Munson’s cheek, chocolate in his mouth and Scogin’s shocked voice from the doorway, above the bass and the rhythm, “What the fuck?”
Munce shoves Chavez away so hard, Chavez trips over one of the chairs and goes sprawling on his back on the stony tile floor.
He feels something crack like a twig in his elbow where it hits the floor, a killing pain that radiates out, and he hears Munson saying frantically, “We were just messing around, Steve, it’s nothing, nothing.”
Chavez shuts his eyes, the jarred pain like an explosion, and he can’t breathe.
“What the fuck do you mean, it’s nothing!” Scogin shouts, and Chavez, without opening his eyes, knows how he looks, an expression of dumb surprise, his blue eyes round, jerking his hands through his hair the way he does when he’s upset, making his helix blonde curls stick up crazily.
Chavez sits up, his bent arm clutched to his chest, still blind and his head down, clenching his teeth so hard his jaw aches, and he hears himself whispering, “Nothing, Steve.”
He forces his eyes open, forces his head up. “Just messing around, dude,” looking at just Scogin, like it’s just the two of them and Munce is somewhere else, somewhere far away, his dorm room at USC or his parents’ house down south or the bottom of the fucking ocean.
Scogin gives him a baffled look of disbelief. “Then why are you on the floor, Eric, you fucking liar,” Scogin asks him, his hands closed in fists. Steve’s angry and stunned and their second-best friend, and Chavvy can only shake his head, sugar dusting like snow onto his face.
“We were just being dumb,” Chavez tells him numbly, having to speak stupidly loud to be heard over the pulse of the music. “Because it’s nothing.” His arm hurts so bad. He can taste sugar in his mouth, he can taste chocolate. He feels like he might be about to burst into tears.
Scogin stares at him for a moment longer, burning, and then yanks his head in a tight refusal. “Whatever. Just . . . fucking whatever,” he says, more confused than anything else, and walks out, the song ending just as the door bangs shut behind him.
Eric, on the floor, studies the pattern of the tile intently, pushing his thumb around the linked octagon shapes. There’s a spoon under the table.
“Chavvy,” Munson attempts hoarsely, and Chavez can see his feet, his favorite pair of Rainbow flip-flops, his hairy legs with streaks of white, flour and sugar.
“Get the fuck out of here,” Chavez tells him for the second time in their life, his voice slivered and strong. He looks up then, his eyes black, and his lungs feel crushed, Munce staring down at him with mute remorse, but it’s too late.
There’s a moment when Chaves hates him, as much as he’s ever hated anyone, and in that moment his upper lip sneers and he says, “Don’t come back.”
He won’t let himself look away until Munson makes a choked noise and leaves as quickly as he can, and Chavez is alone, shaking on the kitchen floor.
*
(black-and-white movie)
Before the sun goes down that day, Eric Munson has left nine messages on Chavez’s voicemail, all of them saying pretty much the same thing, skirting an apology, telling Chavez not to be dumb, call me back, please, dude, don’t be a punk, call me back.
Chavez goes down to the liquor store on the corner and buys a bottle of Johnnie Walker Red, feeling very film-noir about the whole thing as he drinks himself into a stupor on the deck overlooking the cliff, passing out on the wooden planks, tacky with salt and fire.
He stays that way for about a week, Munson’s messages crowded on his phone unheard, sleeping for as much as he can and being drunk for the rest of the time.
Munce wakes him up, a week later, Chavez having left the front door unlocked again, though he’s not safe anymore. He’s out on the deck and it’s still dark, the seabirds splashing white against the sky, the moon bending on the ocean.
Munson is smoothing the hair back from his forehead, over and over again, murmuring his name. Chavez smiles, still mostly unconscious, and turns his face into Munson’s hand. He swims upward, his mind coming into focus, and when he remembers, his eyes flick open and he pushes away off the deck, splinters in the palm of his hand. He pulls himself into a sitting position and Munson is on his knees, new lines on his face.
“I told you not to come back,” he rasps, his mouth fuzzy and his vocal chords scoured.
Munce looks like he wants to reach out again, but he holds himself back. “You really expected me to stay away?” he asks, his eyes sorrowful.
“Yeah,” Chavvy answers, glaring at him, and then his stomach rears up, his face blanching, and he barely gets out, “Fuck,” as he scrambles for the edge of the deck, thrusting his head between the rails and vomiting into the brush, lying on his stomach with his hands clutching the wood.
He feels Munson’s hand on his back, and wrenches away, banging his neck against the rail. “Don’t . . . don’t fucking touch me,” and then he’s throwing up again, his eyes wet and acid in his throat. Munson’s hand is gone, and Chavez keeps vomiting until it’s just wracking dry heaves, empty inside.
He slowly pulls himself back, coughing weakly and crying a little bit. Munce is crouched in front of him, holding out a glass of water. Chavez wants to knock it out of his hand, broken glass on the deck, but all he can taste is rotted and disgusting, so he grudgingly takes it and washes out his mouth, spitting water over the side, until his mouth is clean, his throat burning.
Munson’s sitting cross-legged, watching him with a disorienting scared look on his face, looking uncertain and guilty. “You okay?”
Chavez snarls and hurls the empty glass into the black. Even without his legs into the throw, it’s still a long time before they hear the shatter.
“I want you gone.”
Munson hardens his face, shakes his head. “I’m not going anywhere.”
Chavez moves to stand, go into the house and lock his best friend out, let him break a window if he wants to stick around, but Munson grabs his wrist before he can rise, Munson’s eyes bright, saying desperately, “Look, what the fuck was I supposed to do? I panicked, okay? I just . . . when I heard him, it was, like . . . instinct.”
Chavez rips his hand out of Munce’s grip. “Oh, thanks a fucking bunch, Munson, good to know that you pushing me away is an instinct,” he says with tearing sarcasm.
Munson sweeps his hands violently through his hair, scraping his nails on his scalp. His control starts to go, shuddering. “Goddamn it, it wasn’t . . . I didn’t . . . I, I’m sorry.”
“You should be, motherfucker,” Chavvy says, the wind off the ocean raising goosebumps on the skin of his arms, creeping around his stomach.
Munson’s eyes get thin and bitterly angry. “Classy, Chavez, really, way to accept an apology.”
“Shut the fuck up, dude, you don’t get to be an asshole right now.”
Munce blows out a breath, looking out towards the water, the silver-black pull of the tide. He doesn’t want to be four feet away from Chavez anymore. He doesn’t want to be out here on this fucking deck.
Eric Munson knows that this doesn’t mean anything, no matter what he says or what he does, this isn’t gonna make anything different. If he convinces Chavvy to take him back, and Steve or anybody walks in on them again, he’ll push Eric away just as hard, just as fast. Munson does not doubt this, and he won’t fight it. He can’t fix this for them, because it’s not really broken, this is just the way it is.
Munce speaks slow and careful, measuring out each word and hiding the parts that are lies, “Look, I’m trying . . . I’m trying . . . to tell you that I was an idiot. And I got no excuse, all right? But, fuck, man. I don’t . . . I don’t know how to deal with this. I’ve never known how to deal with this.”
Chavvy rubs his hand quickly across his face. His hollow stomach is still uneasy, that nauseated dizzy feeling in his head and his sinuses clogged. He doesn’t look at his best friend, tells him low, “Yeah, well, maybe I’m tired of waiting for you to figure it out.”
Munson stares at him, shakes his head automatically, his chest tight. “You don’t mean that.”
The rails are digging into Chavvy’s back, and he wants to be angrier than he is. If he could be angrier, he wouldn’t be so fucking miserable. He makes his voice hard and sharp, “You know what, I do. I do mean it. It’s no tougher for you than it is for me, and I’ve made my fucking peace.”
Munson’s eyes flare, and he retorts, “The hell you have. How many people have you told about you and me? Your parents? Chris and Casey? Your teammates?”
Chavez rolls his eyes impatiently, coughs out a humorless laugh. “Oh, that’s such bullshit, man. The second I breathed word fucking one to anybody, you would have cut me off so quick, don’t even pretend like you wouldn’t have. You would have acted like you don’t even know me.”
Munson goes still, staring at him, and Munce is surprised by the deep fall in his chest to hear Eric say that to him. He shakes his head slowly, wrapping his arms around his stomach, elbows in his hands, and says, “I . . . no, I wouldn’t. I never would. Act like I don’t . . . dude, I don’t know how to breathe without you. How’m I supposed to act like I don’t know you?”
“Did a pretty fucking good job of it with Steve,” Chavez says, feeling mean and trying not to see too far into his friend.
Munce flinches, and snaps in response, “Well, excuse me for not being ready to pin a rainbow flag on my chest and then go back out with my fucking team.”
Chavez shakes his head, his heart beating out of its rhythm. “Don’t bring baseball into this. Baseball’s got nothing to do with it.”
Munson’s eyes widen, and he half-shouts in frustration, “Baseball’s got everything to do with it! If we weren’t ballplayers, it wouldn’t matter!”
Chavvy matches him, staying on the same level, the same side, “It shouldn’t matter anyway, jackass!”
Munce feels the dim salt spray on his face, matting his hair. It’s cold, what passes for cold in the Los Angeles autumn, and velvet black beyond the reach of the hanging orange deck lights. He finds himself wondering if this was bound to happen, if this was the place they’ve been moving towards their whole life. When he pulls a hand across his face, it’s the exact same as wiping away tears, though he’s not crying.
“But it does,” Munson tells him. “Yeah, perfect world, it wouldn’t matter, but it’s far from a perfect world, I don’t know if you’ve noticed.”
“Believe me, man, that’s been made clear,” Chavez says, blinking fast against the wind.
Getting so tired of this, slamming his head against the wall, doing his best and not getting anywhere, Munson glares at him and asks, “Dude, what do you want? I told you I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have pushed you away, that was a dick thing to do. Since turning back time isn’t really an option, can we just forget about it and move the fuck on, already?”
The orange light on his face, Chavez takes a long long time, picking the splinters out of the palm of his hand, before answering with his voice soft, “No.”
Munson blinks. “What?” He must have heard wrong. Or misinterpreted. Something.
Chavvy swallows, grimaces at the taste. He wonders if he’s gonna throw up again. He feels like he might, though there’s nothing left to go. He presses his thumb against his eye, until it hurts so bad he can’t stand it.
Chavez says without looking at Munson, “I . . . I think you were right. In Modesto. This is gonna be . . . it’s already too hard.”
Munson stares at him in disbelief. Yeah, he fucked up, he did something stupid, but he’s done a million stupid things, and Chavez has never gotten rid of him, never even tried to. They forgive each other, forgive each other everything, because they’re best friends and that’s what best friends do.
“You’re . . . quitting? Just like that?”
Chavez moves his head carefully, mouthing ‘no.’ He takes his hand down from his eyes, figuring he owes it to Munson to at least look at him, at least that. “Not just like that. I can’t . . . I’m not asking you to take out a fucking ad about it, and I get that you freaked out when Steve came in, but. I think me still being in love with you would be a really bad idea right now.”
“What are you talking about?” Munson asks helplessly, a vertigo sense of tailspin unraveling in his stomach. “You’re . . . not, anymore?”
Chavez shrugs, drops his eyes, because that look on Munson’s face, that look . . . “Not as much as I was,” he whispers. “And less every day.”
If that’s a lie, Chavez doesn’t want to know about it. If it’s a lie, it’s something that should be true.
“Jesus, Eric,” Munson manages, feeling struck dumb, struck down.
Chavez rushes ahead, looking for something to hold on to. He threads an arm between the rails, stretches to clench his hand around the skinny square strut, feeling the give of the wood under his strong fingers. He tries to sound like he doesn’t care, and mostly succeeds:
“Look, you’re the one who’s always been fucked up about this. So, here’s your way out, dude. Take it while you can.”
“Fuck you!” Munson cries out, suddenly furious. “I never asked for a way out!”
Chavez flaps his free hand through the air, exhausted and maybe still a little bit drunk, still sick, still off his game. “Well, whatever. You’re getting one. So am I.”
Hands in fists, Munson feels the power in his chest and shoulders, the soar of blood pounding in his head. Yeah, better to be angry, definitely better. “You fucker, you can’t just . . . that’s, it’s . . . that’s not fair, man!” and he breaks a little bit, falls back on a kid’s argument, something that holds no water.
Chavez makes a sound like a moan, clutching the rail so tight he keeps waiting for it to snap. “Just . . . go back to school, all right?” he says, a near-plea. “Maybe not seeing each other for awhile would be a good thing. Healthy. Or whatever.”
Munce forces his body to relax, because he’s not going to hit Chavez, not tonight. He focuses on breathing, oxygen in, carbon dioxide out, full-lunged inhales. He asks, feeling weightless, “You don’t want to see me anymore? Like, not even as friends?”
Chavvy shakes his head, staring off at the strip of white beach, the edges frayed. “No. Not right now.”
Munson swallows hard, and he thinks, ‘you’ve never been able to stay away from me, why do you want to start now.’
He asks, cringing at the plaintive nature of it, “But . . . someday, you will again, right?”
Chavvy sighs, the angle of his shoulders resigned. “I guess.”
Munson scans Chavez’s face, and Chavez looks the same as he always does, just solemn and afraid, his drunk eyes puffy, his lower lip chewed almost raw. There’s something spiked and thick stuck in Munson’s throat, and he whispers, “Eric . . .”
Chavez’s face warps, a slam of pain, and he covers up his face with his hands, begging, “Oh, Christ, please, Munce, get out of here, please.”
So Munson goes, knowing all the while that if he’d stayed, even just a minute longer, even just a second or two, Chavvy would have lost his strength and his ability to break them apart. Munson knows, as he drives back to USC and does his very best not to aim his headlights over the guardrail, that if he’d just refused to leave one more time, Chavez would have stopped wishing him gone.
The sun is coming up over Receda and Eric Munson is laughing himself to hysterical tears on the southern California highway, laughing so hard it sounds like a scream.
(end part four)
*
part five
So I'm excited, obviously, but dilemma! Because I don't have a VCR. And I can't for the life of me scare up anyone who does, either. Fuckin' digital age. I know a kid with a freaking Laserdisc player, but everybody else has got their computers and burned DVDs and they sneer at this neo-Luddite VCR shit, what next, you want a beta player, huh, huh? Yeah, you're a laugh riot. Bite me.
Anyway, I had no way to play the tape, and I'm all antsy cos see, the bro knows of my many obsessions and I was pretty sure that the tape had something to do with my boys or possibly a bunch of Tom Waits videos I'd never seen, I was pretty sure it was something good.
So I get home last week, first thing I do is pop the tape in, and my god people, my sweet merciful christ. I don't know if any of y'all saw the 'Head to Head with Jim Brown,' about the sport photography guy and Zito being the feature, but yeah. The crazy faces of Zito in that SI article are from this guy, but more important, the video of him. Pitching. Shirtless. I swear to God. Uniform pants, high socks, no jersey. I, like, short-circuited. And then hanging upside down grinning shirtless! And then and then. hrrrrrmmm.
And I'm yelling at my brother, "If you'd TOLD ME he wasn't wearing a shirt, I woulda BOUGHT A VCR." Anyway, it was excellent. On like, a totally geekified level, but man. My love for him is vast and endless and he does not have a bit of hair on his chest and if we were in high school in the eighties together, I would totally rig a game of Seven Minutes in Heaven and then get my friends on the outside to jam the closet door so that we would never have to stop.
ahahahahah. i can't even see the line i crossed anymore.
Table of Contents
Pictures courtesy bradausmus12
The Rest of Your Life
By Candle Beck
Part the Fourth: Temporary Life
(unconcealed weapons)
Munson does well in college. He made the right decision, there’s no doubt about it.
A week after Chavez reports to the A’s instructional league in Phoenix, Munson finds out he’s got Hepatitis A, which seems incredibly appropriate, all things considered. It’s a kind of terrible disease, like the worst of every flu he’s ever had, dragging him down all the time, making him hurt, making everything harder for him, but he can deal.
He’s having a good time. His roommates are chill and the guys on the team seem stand-up all the way. There are a lot of parties and a lot of girls with slender sculpted legs and keyed turquoise eyes, and he’s entranced by the casual attitude of academic life, the way the professors don’t take roll or know his name, the way he can slip himself between the cracks without any effort at all.
Eric Chavez, in Phoenix, is scared to death but won’t admit it.
He’s been playing quietly, keeping his head down, trying to be as grown-up as he can. He does his job and tries not to draw any undue attention, but it doesn’t work, and three days in, his penitentiary-faced coach calls him into the office and tells him flatly that the other players think he’s a punk.
They’ve read his caution as arrogance, the casual flash of his play at short as that of a cocky motherfucker. Chavez is the Oakland A’s million-dollar bonus baby, a risk taken by a team that can’t afford to believe in risk, and everybody’s already questioning whether he’s worth it.
Eric is stunned, bleakly humiliated. He protests the charge of arrogance, an eighteen year old kid at the beginning of something huge, and he can’t say it out loud, but he’s not cocky, he’s fucking terrified, and there’s a big goddamn difference.
His coach acts like he believes Chavvy, gruffly sends him back out onto the field. But now it’s even worse, his eyes rabbitting around trying to figure out which of his new teammates think that about him, think he’s a punk.
He’s not a punk. He gave up everything for this, can’t they see that?
He talks to Munson on the phone, but Munce is always in the middle of something, on his way out the door, only half paying attention, humming vague responses that don’t match up to what Chavez said to him. The best conversation they’ve had since Munce left him at his parents’ house in San Diego is the one that starts with Munson telling him, after getting back from the health clinic chockfull of information about his illness, “Dude, I might have given you the hep. So, watch out for that.”
But Chavez doesn’t get sick.
He does all right in Phoenix, brief-run league though it is, all raw prospects young enough to still fight brutally and without morals for their futures. They’re mismatched and playing a lot of dirty baseball, unnecessary brushbacks and cruel spikes-up slides into second to bust up the double play.
He gets lonely. His teammates still don’t like him. There’s so much time out here, there’s so much space. He’s living in a fucking motel, and he’s totally unnerved when he walks into a gas station convenience store one night and sees a man with a cowboy’s holster tucked full of a greasy anachronistic Colt .45.
Eric cowers behind the chips rack, expecting the holdup to begin any minute now, but the cowboy just pays for his six-pack and ambles out, cool as cool. When Chavvy asks the counter clerk, what the fuck, the rat-faced kid leers at him, tells him it’s legal to carry a firearm in Arizona as long as it’s not concealed.
That doesn’t make Eric Chavez feel better about his situation.
Phoenix, quickly developed, is still quite clearly only a decade or two removed from main street duels, wagon trains dying of thirst, incomplete and savage. Chavvy, who’s never lived anywhere except San Diego, is so lost out here, it’s awful.
But instrux doesn’t last forever, and he goes home in November, a couple of weeks before his nineteenth birthday.
He’s a rich man, now, a teenaged millionaire, and he buys stuff because he can, because he’s never been able to before. A new car for Chris, and one for each of his parents, who won’t accept a house from him yet. He sends Brandy to prom; he sends Casey to Florida. He buys himself a car too, flashing silver like a coin rolling down the sidewalk, thinking giddily about the miles between Rancho Penasquitos and Los Angeles.
His first month back, he spends probably half the time up at USC with Munson, getting to know the place like he would have if he’d never signed. They don’t get a chance to fuck around, really, because of those six roommates (Chavez’s top bunk is still empty, waiting for him to come back), and for the first week or two Chavez almost forgets that he’s really pretty much obsessed with his best friend, feels like they’re fourteen years old again and nothing’s gotten weird yet.
Munce’s new friends get to know him, get to expect him, and then one night after a string of power hours, both of them astonishingly drunk, they get into a fight on the back street, the shortcut.
It’s hard to remember, the next day, but it’s something about Chavvy playing big shot and picking up tabs and smirking at everything like he’s better than all this, and Munson’s hands are in tight fists at his sides and Chavez keeps thinking about the uneven plane of the concrete under his feet, thinking that he’ll have to be careful not to trip and fall when Munson hits him, and Chavez’s throat hurts, and he can’t get anything straight, and Munson yells at him, “Why don’t you just go home, you don’t fucking belong here!”
So Eric goes, and they don’t talk for awhile after that, the longest they’ve ever not talked.
Everybody thinks he’s a punk, motherfucking everybody, and he wonders if he should start believing them.
He misses Munson, a lot. It was bad in Phoenix; it’s worse now. In Phoenix he had somewhere to go every day, a job even if it wasn’t a real job, working towards the place where he’s going, but now he’s just waiting for spring training to start, killing time.
Munson’s got a whole life at USC, a sarcastic dark-eyed sorta-girlfriend, a crowd of guys who think he’s awesome, a team that Chavez isn’t a part of, the first time that’s been the case since they were eight years old.
Chavvy knows it’ll get better, come March, come spring training, once his world comes into focus again, it’s just this dead time, this in-between time, this fucking temporary life, making it so hard, that’s all.
Christ, he misses his friend.
And then at eight in the morning on New Year’s Eve, Eric Chavez is awakened by a finger steadily flicking his forehead, his eyes scrunching against it and then coming open slowly, sees Munson sitting on the edge of his bed, grinning down at him.
For a second, Chavez thinks he’s dreaming, then Munce flicks him again and Chavvy yanks his head, hooks an arm around Munson’s waist and buries his face in Munson’s side, all soft cotton and warm.
“Loser,” he muffles into Munce’s body, impossibly grateful, and feels the spur of Munson’s laugh.
Munce palms his head, twisting his fingers in Chavez’s hair and pulling him away so Munce can see his face.
“You need to get ready, man,” Munson tells him, fingertips tiptoeing across Chavez’s face, over his forehead, down his nose. “We’re leaving, like, ten minutes ago.”
Chavvy grins helplessly, Munce’s thumb at the corner of his mouth. “Where are we going?”
Munson gives him an exasperated look. “It’s New Year’s Eve, dude, where do you think we’re going?”
Chavez’s mouth drops open a fraction, and he blinks fast, his throat moving as he swallows. Munce’s smile softens, tracing his knuckles across Chavvy’s cheekbone before getting up to unearth clean-smelling clothes and toss them to his friend.
They go back to the desert. They talk like nothing’s happened, about USC and Phoenix and San Diego. They catch each other up on family gossip, no way is Munce’s cousin Jessica pregnant again, that’s like the fourth time in three years. Chavvy teases Munson about still not being able to figure out the tent and Munce calls the tent’s mother dirty names like he always does, and they sit on the ground, drinking whiskey from plastic cups in their big winter coats, a wool cap pulled down over Chavez’s ears, Munson wearing his beggar gloves with the fingers cut off.
Chavez keeps shifting closer to him, breath falling in thick clouds from his mouth and nose. He’s furnace-hot on the inside from the whiskey, the exposed skin on his face feeling stiff and iced. He gets close enough to lean his shoulder against Munson’s when he’s laughing, their feet scuffling.
He’s so happy.
Munce knocks him a refill, then raps his cup lightly with the bottle. “Resolutions, Ricky,” he says, probably drunker than he’s letting on, holding his liquor much more respectably after his first semester of college life.
Chavez is pretty drunk himself, though, so he tilts into Munson and rests his face against Munson’s scratchy coat, his mouth pressed down and his nose peeking over Munson’s shoulder. He thinks for awhile, watching Munson watching the falling stars.
He lifts his head, propping his chin on Munce’s shoulder instead, answers with the fog of his breath breaking on Munson’s face, “Triple-A by the end of the summer,” he promises, sees Munson’s lips curve up slightly. “Learn how to play third base.” He pauses, snakes an arm around Munson’s back. “Did I tell you they want me to play third?”
Munce nods, still looking up at the sky. “Only about six times.”
Chavez grins. Munson’s so funny. He leans forward, brushing his lips across Munce’s ear, Munce twitching, and then pulls back again. Munson smells like whiskey and lime, but they’re not using limes, so that’s kind of weird. Chavvy’s hand finds its way around Munson’s hip, fits itself neatly into Munson’s coat pocket, his arm a chain to hold them together.
“Anything else?” Munce asks, his hand on Chavez’s leg (when did that get there? Chavez wonders blurrily), fingers playing the seam of his jeans like a piano.
Chavez leans forward again, kissing Munson’s neck, the wind-color high on his cheek. He presses his cold nose to Munson’s face and Munce doesn’t even flinch.
“Not fuck things up with you,” Chavez whispers, closing his eyes and wishing they could cut their hands open again, wishing they could add another vow.
Munce turns his head then, finally, and his hand on Chavez’s leg moves up to grip the collar of his coat. He nods carefully. “That’s a good one,” he says, then kisses Chavez, and Munson tastes, unsurprisingly, like everything flammable in the world
Eric Chavez is three months away from his first spring training, but they don’t talk about that. There’s a baseball season coming for the two of them that will see them truly separate for the first time, the longest time, a baseball season that won’t be easy and won’t be the same, but they don’t talk about that either.
They’re drunk-they make promises. They crawl into one sleeping bag and do everything as slow as possible, stars falling unnoticed in the sky above them, and there’s a new distance between them that they won’t recognize until they wake up wrapped around each other with the year’s first light streaming down around them.
*
(shadow valley)
Minor league baseball is hard.
Visalia’s in the middle of the Central Valley fields, the middle of nowhere, the wasteland. Devastatingly flat all the way until the horizon runs into the faraway mountains, swallowed up by the endless rows of crops. It’s hotter than the desert in the depth of the summer, the desolate landscape baking and chipping off like bits of char.
The Visalia Oaks ballpark, Recreation Field with its ridiculous 1,700 seating capacity, has had most of the green paint scraped off the wooden benches, and Chavez learns real quick not to casually lean on the metal rail at three o’clock in the afternoon, after one day when he sears a diagonal line on the soft unprepared flesh of the underside of his forearm. Three weeks later, he can still see the burn, and he wears it proudly, hopes that it will scar.
Class A, man.
He’s good, he’s hitting over .300, three months into the season. He’s already got fans, he knows them by their first names and they linger around the clubhouse door, give him gifts of oranges. He gets pretty good at signing his name, practicing his autographs in the back of the team bus after everyone else is asleep so they won’t catch him and start ragging on him.
His family makes it out to a couple of games a month, and one night at dinner, Chavez hears his voice break as he says, “I spend my whole life in buses and motel rooms,” and he was trying to make a joke of it.
Ruby’s worried about him, her little boy alone in the wide valley, and the first thing she does when she comes out to Visalia to see his new place is clean it for him.
He’s sleeping on the couch in his small two-bedroom apartment. He’s rooming with two teammates and one of their fiancées, and he gives up his room willingly when the couple moves in, because this is just a step, this isn’t permanent. He lives out of a suitcase.
Eric Chavez is lying on the couch, watching the moon move across the sky in the same path as a lazy fly ball. Eric Chavez is doing push-ups on the living room floor at three in the morning. Eric Chavez is sitting two feet away from the television, the volume turned down to murmur so as not to wake up anybody else, his eyes roaring with static, his face jiggered with light.
Eric Chavez is not sleeping that much these days.
He grows a goatee, mainly so he’ll stop getting carded trying to buy liquor. He thinks about Eric Munson all the fucking time.
They talk on the phone. California’s a bigger place than Eric Chavez realized. They’re in the same state but he could drive his big silver car for hours and still be a half a day away from his best friend.
At nineteen years old, he’s an infant in his clubhouse, and he’s having trouble making friends. Kevin Gregg, his first roommate, is a good guy, quiet and shy, and Chavvy’s feeling pretty quiet and shy too, pretty much the opposite of how he’s spent his life, so they get along.
But the rest of the team, farther along than him, grown men with wives and children and burgeoning cases of alcoholism, he’s got nothing in common with them except the game. He’s easily dismissed, because he’s just a fucking kid, number ten draft pick or not, he’s nothing anybody cares about, not yet.
His life is no longer strange or unpredictable. It’s clear where he’s going, the path he’ll take. Suddenly everything is simple, laid out. All he has to do is play baseball every day and soon he’ll be in the bigs. All he has to do is play.
No excuse for him to feel this lost. No excuse for the voice in the back of his mind that’s screaming, louder every day, ‘no, fucking no, I take it back, take me back, I didn’t mean it, get me the fuck out of here.’
Eric Munson is having an excellent time at USC. Everybody likes him, he’s got packs of friends and there are an incredible amount of girls who find baseball players and catchers in particular to be just the hottest. Every night there’s a party, and he gets used to waking up in odd places without a shirt on. L.A. is the place to be, half of Mt. Carmel’s graduating class ended up within an hour’s drive, and Munson learns the faithless sprawl of the city, dreams about the curves of Mulholland Drive.
He has a straight-out-the-gate star-making year for the Trojans, and baseball’s still a game to him. He hits .336 his freshman year and leads the team in home runs. He’s gotten good behind the plate, better than he’s ever been before. His throws to second are clotheslines, difficult blocks are becoming instinct. He tastes the slippery vinyl of his mask’s padding against his lips, his hair pressed in flat stripes from the straps, and when he’s off the field, his left hand feels too light, not weighed down by his mitt.
He goes everywhere with the team, sparkling deluxe buses and jet planes, all over the country and Hawaii, too, gold beaches and mid-ocean blue water. He goes to Japan and they cheer for him like he’s a native son. In June, the Sporting News names him the National Freshman of the Year and he is selected for the USA National Team, he’s gonna go to Italy this summer and the hotel the team stays in will be three times as old as anything in his country and he’ll want to chisel off pieces of stone to take home with him, but he won’t.
He misses Chavez, sure, natural, but there’s a lot of other stuff going on. It’s hard to remember that he’s got a best friend out in the Central Valley, scrapping and still breaking into tears when an error of his loses the game for his team.
Munce isn’t really good on the phone, he’s not used to just chattering about random stuff for hours on end. As far as anything important goes, they’re a million miles away from each other.
When Chavez asks him to meet in Modesto early in August, an off-day between San Jose and Fresno for the Oaks, Munson hmmms and tries to gracefully weasel out of it, but when Chavez has to ask a second time, he sounds like he’s about to cry, and Munce quickly agrees, already figuring how to break the date he’s got for that weekend.
Munson drives up to Modesto through the pale yellow fields, and somewhere in the back of his mind he thinks that he shouldn’t sleep with Chavez, should put their whatever on hold, maybe for good, because that’s surely the smart thing to do, maybe even the right thing, who knows?
But then Chavez opens the motel room door, looking drawn and weary, his arms braced with new muscle but the lines of his face narrow, thinned, and just the sight of him makes something break down inside Munson, a lump in his throat and a shredded pain in his heart, and he kisses Chavez before Chavez has a chance to kiss him, before he even gets all the way into the room.
Munson’s a fucking idiot. He forgot, between everything else that has been going on, he forgot that the two of them are not good if they’re not together. Somehow, he forgot.
After they fuck themselves out, boxers back on to restore their modesty, Munce takes in the well-traveled duffel bag tossed into a corner, Chavez’s glove on the dresser, the water stains spreading like cancer on the wall, the door ill-fit into its frame, long splinters broken off by the chain-lock where it was once kicked in.
This motel room is the kind of place where truckers buy crystal meth from bikers, adulterous couples meet at two in the afternoon with the shades tightly drawn, bounty hunters crash in with shotguns and black sunglasses.
For a college boy, it’s almost unbearably cool, secretive and forbidden, tints of danger.
“So what’s it like?” he asks Chavez. Chavez’s fingers are curled against Munson’s side, just below his rib cage, and that’s the only way the two of them are touching.
Shallow lines appear on Chavez’s forehead, looking at his friend in incomprehension. “What?”
Munce flits his hand through the air, encompassing everything. “Pro ball.”
Chavez’s hand pulls away from Munson’s side, scratching nervously at his own stomach as he moves his shoulders. “It’s . . . different. It’s cool,” he hurries to assure. “I mean, it’s great. It’s, like, real. You know? But it’s also . . .”
“Real?” Munson suggests.
Chavez nods, his face clearing. Good to know that he doesn’t always have to finish every sentence. “Yeah. I gotta take everything so seriously, now. Which kind of sucks.”
“But it’s worth it,” Munson says, not even making it into a question. “You’ll be in the majors so soon, man, the way you’re going.”
Chavvy sighs. “I guess.”
Munce pushes up on an elbow, looking down at his friend, Chavvy lying there dark and sad, the mouth-burned places on his chest, the scratch of Munce’s five o’clock shadow on Chavvy’s face and throat, the new width in Chavez’s shoulders, the tense power of his arms. For the life of him, Eric Munson cannot figure out how he ever thought he was ready to end this.
“You sound, like, less than thrilled.”
Chavez half-smiles. The sheets, spotted in the light, glow whitely with the room as dim as it is now, pallid reflections on Chavez’s skin. “I’m just wiped out, you know? And I keep . . . I keep thinking about . . . well. Stupid stuff.”
Munson watches the dust in the air swarm over the two of them, new specks with every movement, and thinks about flocks of birds flying in insane, swirling patterns in the hours before a big storm hits, driven crazy by the weather.
“But you’re playing pro ball,” Munson tells Chavez pedantically, maybe Chavez forgot.
Chavvy slides closer to him, humming lightly and head-butting Munson’s shoulder. “Pro ball’s not everything, man.”
Munce twines his arm under Chavez’s neck, reaching down Chavez’s back, Chavez all twisted around and idly gnawing on Munson’s shoulder. The air conditioner’s broken, or maybe was never installed, either way it’s flat-land hot in their dark little cube of a room, and there are thin scrims of sweat between Chavez’s shoulder blades, under his chin, at the small of his back.
“Don’t talk crazy, dude,” Munson says, only joking a little bit. “What’s more important than pro ball?”
Chavez stops moving, his mouth open on the knob of Munson’s shoulder. He lifts his head, sighs, “Well,” and rests a hand on Munson’s collarbone, tells him quietly, “I’m in love with you. You know that, right?”
Munson blinks, dust in his eyes, and shakes his head without thinking. Chavez knows better than to say something like that, it’s not fair. Even if they haven’t seen each other in months, that’s still no reason to say something like that. And that quiet tone in his voice, like it’s obvious, like Chavvy thinks that this is how it is for both of them and they just weren’t saying it out loud.
It’s not like that. Munson’s pretty sure.
“You are not. You’re just being dumb.”
Chavez screws his knuckles against Munson’s arm, kisses him on the line of his jaw. “Nah, it’s true. I’ve been in love with you since we were probably fifteen years old. It’s possible that I’ll never be in love with anyone else ever again. So.”
Munson sits up, knocking Chavez off him. He’s still shaking his head, he doesn’t believe this, no way. Chavez is perfect, doesn’t he know that? Chavez is a year away from the big leagues, and nothing’s as important as that.
“You can’t be in love with me. You love me like I love you, like a brother,” he explains, his hand closing anxiously in the sheets.
Chavez scoffs, looking hurt and scared and not much like himself at all. “Yeah, brothers who fuck.”
Munce pushes his fist into the mattress, digging in. “Shut up. We’re gonna be major league ballplayers, you’re not allowed to be in love with me.”
Chavvy sits up too, his eyebrows pulled down, glaring blackly at his friend. “Not allowed?” he echoes. “Not allowed by who? You? Because just try and stop me, man, I fucking dare you.”
Munce is about to lash back, but then the absurdity of the argument strikes him, and he breathes out an unsteady laugh, pulls a hand across his face. If they’re gonna fuck up, they’re not gonna do it like this.
He slips his hand around Chavez’s arm, rolls his eyes and says, “C’mere.”
He sits back against the headboard and tugs Chavez to him again, Chavez briefly tense but then acquiescing, folding against his friend. Munson pushes a hand through Chavez’s hair, exhaling.
“All right, go ahead and be in love with me,” he says, smoothing the hair behind Chavez’s ear with intricate attention. “Your funeral. But, I mean . . . it’s not like we live five minutes away from each other anymore.”
Chavez nods, his unshaven cheek rasping on Munson’s chest. Munce continues, “And pretty soon we’ll both be in the majors and not playing for the same team and, and . . . and it’ll have to be even more of a secret.”
Chavez turns his head, his chin on Munson’s sternum. His eyes are sleepily hooded and very dark, his hair casting charcoal-colored shadows on his forehead and temples. “We’ve been keeping it a secret for three years now. Why can’t we just . . .” he trails off, and Munson sardonically finishes for him:
“Keep it a secret for another twenty years? That doesn’t seem like the most realistic of plans, man.”
Chavez scowls at him, his hand on Munson’s hip, fisted in the material of Munce’s shorts. “Wasn’t gonna say that,” he argues. “I was gonna say, like, if people are gonna be dumb, then we’ll just have to be smart. If we could sneak it past our parents, how hard can it be to sneak it past major league baseball?”
Munce hikes his eyebrows and angles Chavez a dubious look, swiping the back of his arm across his forehead. It’s so hot in here, he can barely breathe. He shakes his head. “Even if we could keep it a secret, what, we’re just not gonna see each other for six months of the year? You really think you’d be able to handle that?”
Chavez’s eyes narrow. “Maybe you wouldn’t be able to handle it,” he huffs.
Munson rolls his eyes again and flips Chavez onto his back, pinning his shoulders down and leaning over him.
“Look,” he says, brooking no argument. “You gotta not be everything’s-gonna-work-out about this, man. You gotta see it right, okay. You think this past year’s been hard, not seeing each other hardly ever, wait until it’s only a couple of games a season. And what if I end up on the East Coast? Or in the National League? It’s . . . it’ll be impossible, dude.”
Chavez’s mouth pulls tense, jet colors streaking through his eyes. “Are you getting rid of me?”
Munce blows out an irritated breath, not even remembering that maybe that’s why he came to Modesto, and drops his head down to nose against Eric’s throat. “No, goddamn it,” he murmurs, tasting sweat and soap. “I’m asking you to think about this. Seriously. Not little-Ricky-Chavez-says-it’s-gonna-be-fine, but honestly, think about it, all the stuff that’ll be between us. And figure out whether you really think we could . . . hold on. How bad it’d be if we couldn’t.”
Chavez’s face is shuttered, his eyes unreadable. “We’d be fine,” he whispers.
Munson sighs impatiently, glaring at him and thumping Chavvy’s shoulder. “You didn’t even fucking think about it!”
Chavez pushes him hard, shoving him off. He sits up and tears his hands through his hair, short-tempered and inarticulate. “I’ve never needed to think about it,” he answers. “Maybe we’d only see each other a couple times a season and maybe we’d fuck around on our own time with other people, but fuck, man . . . we could do it.”
Munson swings his legs out, his feet on the floor and his elbows on his knees. The room is rustling, the heat wracking on the window glass, and Munce thinks about a tile floor, checkerboard cool and hands leeched of their color by the chill.
“Hard as it’s gonna be to make it in the bigs, and to have this happening on top of it . . . just seems like we’d be asking to get hurt.”
There’s a long moment, then Chavez says tonelessly, “You are getting rid of me.”
Munce twists around, catching Chavez’s eyes angrily. “I’m not fucking getting rid of you! Jesus. I’m just saying, don’t think this is gonna be easy.”
Chavez crawls over to him on his hands and knees, sitting on the edge of the bed and their legs press together from knee to hip, shoulders bumping. He leans into Munson, too warm and his good weight resting briefly against his friend. “I don’t think it’s gonna be easy,” he says. “I just think we could do it.”
Munson looks at him, lifts his hand and touches his fingers to Chavez’s ear, his cheekbone, the slant of his nose. Chavez rumbles and turns his face into Munson’s palm. Munson cards his fingers into Chavez’s hair, bending his hand around, and taps his thumb thoughtfully on Chavez’s jaw. He thinks that some things are never gonna change.
“I guess I’m probably in love with you too,” Munson admits reluctantly, because really, how could he not be? It still might be a lie, but it’s a good one, at least. It’s a lie he’s willing to believe. His other hand is drifting on Chavez’s back, his forearm a solid bar of heat across the small of Chavez’s back.
Chavez nods, his eyes paling slightly, patting him on the knee. “Of course you are, Munce.”
Munson lowers his head down onto Chavez’s shoulder, laughing gently with little hooks of air blowing across Chavez’s skin. “We’re both really, really dumb.”
Chavez chuckles, his body thrumming slightly, and kisses Munson on the forehead, warmly held together, for now, at least, for now.
Two months later, it ends for the first time.
*
(dive boy dive)
The minor league season is over in September, and Eric Chavez goes home to San Diego.
He rides back with Jeff DaVanon, a teammate of his who grew up on the east side of town, and they make the six-hour trip in four and a half, pulling into Rancho Penasquitos at three in the morning.
Eric shakes DaVanon’s hand, and thanks him for the ride. They probably won’t be teammates again, because Chavvy is looking to start next season at Double-A Huntsville (the Deep fucking South), and DaVanon’s got a year or two more of scuffling before he’ll go that far.
Chavez is so tired. He got sick of baseball about a week after seeing Munson in Modesto, though the two events were unrelated. It’s just such a long season. Not twenty-six games, but one hundred and fifty-four. Not three months, but six. Every part of Eric Chavez’s body hurts; all he wants to do is sleep.
Casey comes out the front door, grinning in his wide cockeyed way and careening into his big brother’s arms on the stone walk, Eric’s dog Cheech snapping at his heels. Chavvy hugs him tight, Casey punching him on the back exuberantly, the younger boy having stayed up waiting for his brother to come home, burning through a Costco-sized box of Pixie Stix and now kited, sugar-high to his eyeballs.
“Ricky Ricky Ricky, dude!” Casey yells, and Chavez laughs, sets him back down on his feet. Cheech bounds around them ecstatically, barking and pawing up Chavez’s back, big pink tongue lapping at Chavez’s shirt.
“Shh, bro, working neighborhood, remember?” Chavez tells him with an affectionate smile, the street cool and restful.
Casey pokes at Chavez’s still-novel goatee, and bounces over to get his bags, hunching under the weight of the big duffel, staggering towards the house.
Eric stands in the front yard for a little while, flexing his shoulders against the stiffness of the car ride, craning back to see the stars. Cheech circles him, rubbing against his legs and giving him a devotedly joyful dog-grin. He thinks, ‘home,’ and is so happy he could cry.
He’s not going to think about his career or baseball in those terms, not until the spring. He’s going to remove it from his physical life, be a fan again, and see the world like everybody else does.
Chavez rents a two-bedroom house in Manhattan Beach, draped on the edge of a cliff. It’s twenty minutes from USC, and he can watch the dolphins leaping in shiny gray arcs like machinery in the ocean from every room that faces west.
Munson basically moves in, four or five nights a week in Manhattan Beach, and they sleep on the living room floor like little kids who couldn’t make it to midnight on New Year’s Eve. They sleep on the couch on long Sundays, the Padres at one o’clock, an East Coast game at four, and then the Dodgers or the Angels at seven, half-waking groggily to roll their heads on each other’s shoulders and protest in cottony voices, “no, I’m up, who’s winning?” They sleep on Chavez’s big new mattress, which he never bothered to set up the box spring for, so that when Munce rolls off the edge, he just rolls right onto the floor and doesn’t even wake up, not until he gets cold an hour or two later and fumbles his way back, still asleep, knotting himself around Chavez’s warm body.
Eric Chavez gets to know Munson’s schedule, knows when Munson has time to come over in the middle of the day between classes and wake him up by pulling his hair, knows when Munson will be around to the watch the Simpsons and go out for beers afterwards. He meets Munson on campus and they play pick-up basketball, they mess around with Aerobes on the quad. They get back to Manhattan Beach and fuck until they fall asleep. Munson’s parents start calling Eric Chavez’s number before they call Munson’s dorm.
Chavez tackles his best friend onto the couch and kisses him with crumpling magazines under Munson’s back. They go out to Dodger Stadium and Chavez buys a big foam finger for the purposes of whapping Munson upside the head, and Munson gets him a white and blue pennant that says Chavez Ravine on it, which immediately gets hammered into the place of honor on the wall above Chavez’s mattress.
It’s amazing. Eric Chavez hasn’t touched a baseball in three weeks, and he can’t remember anything as good as this.
Steve Scogin, their second-best friend from high school, is at nearby Long Beach State and hangs out a lot too, surfing with Munson and whipping perfect football spirals down the length of the shore to Chavez, both of them barefoot and sprinting past the tanned families, the intricate moated castles made of sand.
Chavvy leaves the door unlocked, more out of principle than anything else, because he’s so safe all the time, he can’t imagine anything changing that, and that’s how Scogin walks in on them one afternoon a few days before the World Series starts.
He doesn’t see much. He doesn’t really see anything. Chavez and Munson are in the kitchen, trying to make brownies from scratch because store-bought mixes are for geeks, and the whole thing is generally a fiasco from the start.
Chavez has got sugar in his hair and there’s flour all over the counter, handprinted, finger-written to read, ‘Eric C = dork,’ and the answering ‘Eric M = dork-lover,’ both of them giggling and yelping, jumping away from the blistering corners of the stove. The stereo’s on loud, pushing a good beat through the house, a rattled flood of words that they can’t keep up with.
Munce brushes the back of his hand across his face without thinking and leaves a smear of chocolate batter, dark like war paint on his cheek, and Chavez is laughing as he backs Munson up against the refrigerator, his hands in fists on Munson’s stomach, their knees bumping. He noses in, hiccupping with laughter, feeling the music pulse in his head and Munson’s body rumbling, hitching breaths and high loose tricks of laughter coming from him too.
Chavez closes his eyes, grinning, and swipes his tongue on Munson’s cheek, chocolate in his mouth and Scogin’s shocked voice from the doorway, above the bass and the rhythm, “What the fuck?”
Munce shoves Chavez away so hard, Chavez trips over one of the chairs and goes sprawling on his back on the stony tile floor.
He feels something crack like a twig in his elbow where it hits the floor, a killing pain that radiates out, and he hears Munson saying frantically, “We were just messing around, Steve, it’s nothing, nothing.”
Chavez shuts his eyes, the jarred pain like an explosion, and he can’t breathe.
“What the fuck do you mean, it’s nothing!” Scogin shouts, and Chavez, without opening his eyes, knows how he looks, an expression of dumb surprise, his blue eyes round, jerking his hands through his hair the way he does when he’s upset, making his helix blonde curls stick up crazily.
Chavez sits up, his bent arm clutched to his chest, still blind and his head down, clenching his teeth so hard his jaw aches, and he hears himself whispering, “Nothing, Steve.”
He forces his eyes open, forces his head up. “Just messing around, dude,” looking at just Scogin, like it’s just the two of them and Munce is somewhere else, somewhere far away, his dorm room at USC or his parents’ house down south or the bottom of the fucking ocean.
Scogin gives him a baffled look of disbelief. “Then why are you on the floor, Eric, you fucking liar,” Scogin asks him, his hands closed in fists. Steve’s angry and stunned and their second-best friend, and Chavvy can only shake his head, sugar dusting like snow onto his face.
“We were just being dumb,” Chavez tells him numbly, having to speak stupidly loud to be heard over the pulse of the music. “Because it’s nothing.” His arm hurts so bad. He can taste sugar in his mouth, he can taste chocolate. He feels like he might be about to burst into tears.
Scogin stares at him for a moment longer, burning, and then yanks his head in a tight refusal. “Whatever. Just . . . fucking whatever,” he says, more confused than anything else, and walks out, the song ending just as the door bangs shut behind him.
Eric, on the floor, studies the pattern of the tile intently, pushing his thumb around the linked octagon shapes. There’s a spoon under the table.
“Chavvy,” Munson attempts hoarsely, and Chavez can see his feet, his favorite pair of Rainbow flip-flops, his hairy legs with streaks of white, flour and sugar.
“Get the fuck out of here,” Chavez tells him for the second time in their life, his voice slivered and strong. He looks up then, his eyes black, and his lungs feel crushed, Munce staring down at him with mute remorse, but it’s too late.
There’s a moment when Chaves hates him, as much as he’s ever hated anyone, and in that moment his upper lip sneers and he says, “Don’t come back.”
He won’t let himself look away until Munson makes a choked noise and leaves as quickly as he can, and Chavez is alone, shaking on the kitchen floor.
*
(black-and-white movie)
Before the sun goes down that day, Eric Munson has left nine messages on Chavez’s voicemail, all of them saying pretty much the same thing, skirting an apology, telling Chavez not to be dumb, call me back, please, dude, don’t be a punk, call me back.
Chavez goes down to the liquor store on the corner and buys a bottle of Johnnie Walker Red, feeling very film-noir about the whole thing as he drinks himself into a stupor on the deck overlooking the cliff, passing out on the wooden planks, tacky with salt and fire.
He stays that way for about a week, Munson’s messages crowded on his phone unheard, sleeping for as much as he can and being drunk for the rest of the time.
Munce wakes him up, a week later, Chavez having left the front door unlocked again, though he’s not safe anymore. He’s out on the deck and it’s still dark, the seabirds splashing white against the sky, the moon bending on the ocean.
Munson is smoothing the hair back from his forehead, over and over again, murmuring his name. Chavez smiles, still mostly unconscious, and turns his face into Munson’s hand. He swims upward, his mind coming into focus, and when he remembers, his eyes flick open and he pushes away off the deck, splinters in the palm of his hand. He pulls himself into a sitting position and Munson is on his knees, new lines on his face.
“I told you not to come back,” he rasps, his mouth fuzzy and his vocal chords scoured.
Munce looks like he wants to reach out again, but he holds himself back. “You really expected me to stay away?” he asks, his eyes sorrowful.
“Yeah,” Chavvy answers, glaring at him, and then his stomach rears up, his face blanching, and he barely gets out, “Fuck,” as he scrambles for the edge of the deck, thrusting his head between the rails and vomiting into the brush, lying on his stomach with his hands clutching the wood.
He feels Munson’s hand on his back, and wrenches away, banging his neck against the rail. “Don’t . . . don’t fucking touch me,” and then he’s throwing up again, his eyes wet and acid in his throat. Munson’s hand is gone, and Chavez keeps vomiting until it’s just wracking dry heaves, empty inside.
He slowly pulls himself back, coughing weakly and crying a little bit. Munce is crouched in front of him, holding out a glass of water. Chavez wants to knock it out of his hand, broken glass on the deck, but all he can taste is rotted and disgusting, so he grudgingly takes it and washes out his mouth, spitting water over the side, until his mouth is clean, his throat burning.
Munson’s sitting cross-legged, watching him with a disorienting scared look on his face, looking uncertain and guilty. “You okay?”
Chavez snarls and hurls the empty glass into the black. Even without his legs into the throw, it’s still a long time before they hear the shatter.
“I want you gone.”
Munson hardens his face, shakes his head. “I’m not going anywhere.”
Chavez moves to stand, go into the house and lock his best friend out, let him break a window if he wants to stick around, but Munson grabs his wrist before he can rise, Munson’s eyes bright, saying desperately, “Look, what the fuck was I supposed to do? I panicked, okay? I just . . . when I heard him, it was, like . . . instinct.”
Chavez rips his hand out of Munce’s grip. “Oh, thanks a fucking bunch, Munson, good to know that you pushing me away is an instinct,” he says with tearing sarcasm.
Munson sweeps his hands violently through his hair, scraping his nails on his scalp. His control starts to go, shuddering. “Goddamn it, it wasn’t . . . I didn’t . . . I, I’m sorry.”
“You should be, motherfucker,” Chavvy says, the wind off the ocean raising goosebumps on the skin of his arms, creeping around his stomach.
Munson’s eyes get thin and bitterly angry. “Classy, Chavez, really, way to accept an apology.”
“Shut the fuck up, dude, you don’t get to be an asshole right now.”
Munce blows out a breath, looking out towards the water, the silver-black pull of the tide. He doesn’t want to be four feet away from Chavez anymore. He doesn’t want to be out here on this fucking deck.
Eric Munson knows that this doesn’t mean anything, no matter what he says or what he does, this isn’t gonna make anything different. If he convinces Chavvy to take him back, and Steve or anybody walks in on them again, he’ll push Eric away just as hard, just as fast. Munson does not doubt this, and he won’t fight it. He can’t fix this for them, because it’s not really broken, this is just the way it is.
Munce speaks slow and careful, measuring out each word and hiding the parts that are lies, “Look, I’m trying . . . I’m trying . . . to tell you that I was an idiot. And I got no excuse, all right? But, fuck, man. I don’t . . . I don’t know how to deal with this. I’ve never known how to deal with this.”
Chavvy rubs his hand quickly across his face. His hollow stomach is still uneasy, that nauseated dizzy feeling in his head and his sinuses clogged. He doesn’t look at his best friend, tells him low, “Yeah, well, maybe I’m tired of waiting for you to figure it out.”
Munson stares at him, shakes his head automatically, his chest tight. “You don’t mean that.”
The rails are digging into Chavvy’s back, and he wants to be angrier than he is. If he could be angrier, he wouldn’t be so fucking miserable. He makes his voice hard and sharp, “You know what, I do. I do mean it. It’s no tougher for you than it is for me, and I’ve made my fucking peace.”
Munson’s eyes flare, and he retorts, “The hell you have. How many people have you told about you and me? Your parents? Chris and Casey? Your teammates?”
Chavez rolls his eyes impatiently, coughs out a humorless laugh. “Oh, that’s such bullshit, man. The second I breathed word fucking one to anybody, you would have cut me off so quick, don’t even pretend like you wouldn’t have. You would have acted like you don’t even know me.”
Munson goes still, staring at him, and Munce is surprised by the deep fall in his chest to hear Eric say that to him. He shakes his head slowly, wrapping his arms around his stomach, elbows in his hands, and says, “I . . . no, I wouldn’t. I never would. Act like I don’t . . . dude, I don’t know how to breathe without you. How’m I supposed to act like I don’t know you?”
“Did a pretty fucking good job of it with Steve,” Chavez says, feeling mean and trying not to see too far into his friend.
Munce flinches, and snaps in response, “Well, excuse me for not being ready to pin a rainbow flag on my chest and then go back out with my fucking team.”
Chavez shakes his head, his heart beating out of its rhythm. “Don’t bring baseball into this. Baseball’s got nothing to do with it.”
Munson’s eyes widen, and he half-shouts in frustration, “Baseball’s got everything to do with it! If we weren’t ballplayers, it wouldn’t matter!”
Chavvy matches him, staying on the same level, the same side, “It shouldn’t matter anyway, jackass!”
Munce feels the dim salt spray on his face, matting his hair. It’s cold, what passes for cold in the Los Angeles autumn, and velvet black beyond the reach of the hanging orange deck lights. He finds himself wondering if this was bound to happen, if this was the place they’ve been moving towards their whole life. When he pulls a hand across his face, it’s the exact same as wiping away tears, though he’s not crying.
“But it does,” Munson tells him. “Yeah, perfect world, it wouldn’t matter, but it’s far from a perfect world, I don’t know if you’ve noticed.”
“Believe me, man, that’s been made clear,” Chavez says, blinking fast against the wind.
Getting so tired of this, slamming his head against the wall, doing his best and not getting anywhere, Munson glares at him and asks, “Dude, what do you want? I told you I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have pushed you away, that was a dick thing to do. Since turning back time isn’t really an option, can we just forget about it and move the fuck on, already?”
The orange light on his face, Chavez takes a long long time, picking the splinters out of the palm of his hand, before answering with his voice soft, “No.”
Munson blinks. “What?” He must have heard wrong. Or misinterpreted. Something.
Chavvy swallows, grimaces at the taste. He wonders if he’s gonna throw up again. He feels like he might, though there’s nothing left to go. He presses his thumb against his eye, until it hurts so bad he can’t stand it.
Chavez says without looking at Munson, “I . . . I think you were right. In Modesto. This is gonna be . . . it’s already too hard.”
Munson stares at him in disbelief. Yeah, he fucked up, he did something stupid, but he’s done a million stupid things, and Chavez has never gotten rid of him, never even tried to. They forgive each other, forgive each other everything, because they’re best friends and that’s what best friends do.
“You’re . . . quitting? Just like that?”
Chavez moves his head carefully, mouthing ‘no.’ He takes his hand down from his eyes, figuring he owes it to Munson to at least look at him, at least that. “Not just like that. I can’t . . . I’m not asking you to take out a fucking ad about it, and I get that you freaked out when Steve came in, but. I think me still being in love with you would be a really bad idea right now.”
“What are you talking about?” Munson asks helplessly, a vertigo sense of tailspin unraveling in his stomach. “You’re . . . not, anymore?”
Chavez shrugs, drops his eyes, because that look on Munson’s face, that look . . . “Not as much as I was,” he whispers. “And less every day.”
If that’s a lie, Chavez doesn’t want to know about it. If it’s a lie, it’s something that should be true.
“Jesus, Eric,” Munson manages, feeling struck dumb, struck down.
Chavez rushes ahead, looking for something to hold on to. He threads an arm between the rails, stretches to clench his hand around the skinny square strut, feeling the give of the wood under his strong fingers. He tries to sound like he doesn’t care, and mostly succeeds:
“Look, you’re the one who’s always been fucked up about this. So, here’s your way out, dude. Take it while you can.”
“Fuck you!” Munson cries out, suddenly furious. “I never asked for a way out!”
Chavez flaps his free hand through the air, exhausted and maybe still a little bit drunk, still sick, still off his game. “Well, whatever. You’re getting one. So am I.”
Hands in fists, Munson feels the power in his chest and shoulders, the soar of blood pounding in his head. Yeah, better to be angry, definitely better. “You fucker, you can’t just . . . that’s, it’s . . . that’s not fair, man!” and he breaks a little bit, falls back on a kid’s argument, something that holds no water.
Chavez makes a sound like a moan, clutching the rail so tight he keeps waiting for it to snap. “Just . . . go back to school, all right?” he says, a near-plea. “Maybe not seeing each other for awhile would be a good thing. Healthy. Or whatever.”
Munce forces his body to relax, because he’s not going to hit Chavez, not tonight. He focuses on breathing, oxygen in, carbon dioxide out, full-lunged inhales. He asks, feeling weightless, “You don’t want to see me anymore? Like, not even as friends?”
Chavvy shakes his head, staring off at the strip of white beach, the edges frayed. “No. Not right now.”
Munson swallows hard, and he thinks, ‘you’ve never been able to stay away from me, why do you want to start now.’
He asks, cringing at the plaintive nature of it, “But . . . someday, you will again, right?”
Chavvy sighs, the angle of his shoulders resigned. “I guess.”
Munson scans Chavez’s face, and Chavez looks the same as he always does, just solemn and afraid, his drunk eyes puffy, his lower lip chewed almost raw. There’s something spiked and thick stuck in Munson’s throat, and he whispers, “Eric . . .”
Chavez’s face warps, a slam of pain, and he covers up his face with his hands, begging, “Oh, Christ, please, Munce, get out of here, please.”
So Munson goes, knowing all the while that if he’d stayed, even just a minute longer, even just a second or two, Chavvy would have lost his strength and his ability to break them apart. Munson knows, as he drives back to USC and does his very best not to aim his headlights over the guardrail, that if he’d just refused to leave one more time, Chavez would have stopped wishing him gone.
The sun is coming up over Receda and Eric Munson is laughing himself to hysterical tears on the southern California highway, laughing so hard it sounds like a scream.
(end part four)
*
part five