because he knows you better than anyone
Stories from Philadelphia. Actually, first, stories from I-95 and text-messaging everybody I know, 'Hi. I'm in Delaware.' (If you don't get the reference, you are out of the cool club.) The outskirts of Wilmington and Philadelphia where it's badly industrial, ice walkers from the planet Hoth and these eerie fucking torches with live flames hovering up at the level of the highway overpass.
The place where we got dinner, skinny little matchbooks stuffed into our pockets. West Philly and apartments with metal screens on the windows. Illegal activities and chocolate cake. UPenn and it's so creepy there at night, with those gothic brick buildings and everything's weighted, haunted.
The Theatre of Living Arts, getting our hands stamped with martini glasses, bitching about how it's a non-smoking show (it's a band thing; one of my friends saw them the night before in DC. Way to be this close to the coolest band ever and then not allow smoking at your concerts, Arcade Fire). A couple steps up by the bar and sliding between tall people because we are short and easy on the eyes, and it doesn't take much more than that to move a boy out of the way.
The Arcade Fire. The Arcade Fire. Their last tour date in the States is tomorrow at the Roxy in Boston. It's sold out (so was the DC show and so was the Philly show. We bought our tickets for $12, and day of, they were going on Craig's List for better than a hundred), but I, honestly, if I was in Boston I'd go down there and pay scalper prices and say fuck it. It was one of the best live shows I have ever seen. And, you know. That's saying something.
If you happen to be in Europe in March.
I won't go into it, because I don't really feel I can do it justice. Just know that where we were standing was just above the main crowd and I could look and see everyone in the place moving as a whole. It was. Yeah.
Crashing at four in the morning and waking up at six to drive back to DC. Oh, that was fun. Man oh man was that fun. Barely avoided falling asleep outside Baltimore, bad traffic into Rockville. Dropped the car off and I slipped on the ice up there in Maryland. Me and my buddy did a crossword puzzle on the Metro and when we got home we brushed out teeth, smoked another spliff, and watched Fight Club. I laid down for a nap at four in the afternoon and woke up at nine this morning, still wearing my jeans and my watch, my stamped hand unwashed.
It was great.
In other news, I have purchased spring training tickets, biznickie! It is the height of excitement. Soon, I will have a new computer, too. It'll be able to burn DVDs. Washington DC has begun to grow on me again, goddamn it. It does this a couple times a year just to confuse me. Fuckin' pretty place with so much history I'm basically breathing it in all the time.
And so on.
Apologies to the Detroit fans in the audience (all . . . one of you). I know it's very painful and all, but I had to write about it, man.
Table of Contents
Pictures courtesy bradausmus12 and Jen's Baseball Page
The Rest of Your Life
By Candle Beck
Part the Thirteenth: Deconstruction
(parasites)
Eric Chavez starts attending a church group. Not at that Catholic church, because he doesn’t want to see that priest, who knows way too much about him and there’s a reason they’ve got screens in the confessionals.
It’s at his regular church, where they know only the parts of him that he lets show. They like him a lot, over there. He helps with their charities and gets the team involved and buys twenty tickets for the kids in the congregation a dozen times a season.
It’s mainly that he hates Tuesday nights. There’s nothing good on television, it’s always long and slow and makes him think about stuff he doesn’t want to be thinking about. So he sees the blue Xeroxed flier on the church bulletin board, Bible study at 8 o’clock every Tuesday night, and figures he could probably do with some of that.
They read different parts of the Scripture and talking about meaning and interpretation and how it applies to modern life, and he’s bored a lot of the time, but he plays it off all right. It’s a kind of reassuring drone to be in the midst of, verses like torn bits of paper, the phone number of a girl picked up in a bar, scraps that are easy to lose on the walk home, the subway, when his jeans go through the wash.
But it lulls him, and he’s often able to sleep Tuesday nights after he gets back. Not always, but often. More than before.
Chavez isn’t exactly happy with himself, these days. Sadly, he actually remembered the telephone call from the rooftop in the morning, he knows what he said. So fucking stupid. He showed his hand, showed everything.
He’s honestly not sure what the fuck he even wanted, saying that shit to Munson, who’s embarrassed now, embarrassed for both of them and this awful parasitic thing that they have become.
Anyway. Church group, Bible study, and Phoenix is less than a month away. Phoenix is less than a month away and a young woman comes in one Tuesday night, smiles at the group and finds a seat in the circle near the door.
She’s got blonde hair. Pale pale white-gold, unbleached, and when she leans forward over her Bible, it makes a waterfall in front of her face. Eric Chavez plays it cool and lets his eyes casually trawl over to her again and again, until she finally notices, and blushes pleasurably, looks away. She’s lovely.
He catches her on the sidewalk after the group disperses, his hand on her elbow and when he says, “I wanted to introduce myself, are you new to the church?” she ducks her head down, smiles at the sidewalk and says, “I know who you are.”
He grins, and she meets his gaze, blue-eyed, pilot lights, match flame. “I’m Alex,” she says, and when he asks her if she wants to go get some coffee, the words are barely out of his mouth before she’s nodding, and blushing again, and grinning herself.
They’ve got less than a month, and they don’t sleep together until the sixth date, because they’re responsible like that. Chavez was worried that maybe she was a better Christian than him, as far as pre-marital whatevers go, but she twines around him like ivy and the crosses around their necks clink against each other in passing.
When they’re at the airport, Eric Chavez about to get on a plane for Arizona, he thinks he might have a girlfriend again, but he’s not sure. He asks Alex, and she rolls her eyes at him.
“Yes, you have a girlfriend, Eric. But don’t worry. She’s the understanding type.” Then she kisses him goodbye and he cups his hand around the back of her head, his nose against her cheek and the good rose-powder scent of her skin.
When he’s through security, he turns back and she’s still there, and he feels a sudden blast of hatred for terrorism and hijacked airplanes, for no other reason than that his pretty girlfriend isn’t allowed to wave at his plane from the terminal window anymore, and when he gets back to California, she won’t be able to meet him at the gate and he won’t be able to touch her again until baggage claim.
But he goes to Phoenix, grinning at nothing until Hudson cuffs him on the shoulder and says, “Knock it off, you’re freakin’ me out.”
Back to baseball and maybe he’s trying not to fall in love with Alex, because he’s been in love with two people at the same time before and it was basically the worst thing that’s ever happened to him.
He gets bold and manipulative on the phone to Eric Munson, just to reaffirm that he’s only in love with one person, and he coaches Munson through it, Munson in his spring training motel room in Florida. He says, “Shirt first, dude, T-shirt or buttons?” And Munson breathes unevenly and says, “T-shirt.”
“Pull it up, then. Don’t take it off, just. Pull it up.” And he can hear the rustle as Munson obeys. Chavez says, “Your hand, and . . . get your fingers wet. Your palm,” and there’s a sucking sound, and Munson doesn’t even ask him what this is supposed to mean anymore.
Chavez says, “Good,” when Munson starts to make fast breathy noises, and he finds all sorts of dirty words that turn his face red, desperately not thinking about his mom and what she would think, stuff he wasn’t really aware he knew. He can let his voice drop to a husky range, and he can draw filthy pictures over the phone lines, but really all he needs to do is hiss “Munce,” and he knows that his best friend will groan and that will be enough for him, too.
He calls Alex after, jeans still undone and he hasn’t even washed his hand yet. He’s on the phone with her longer than he was with Munson, but it’s not the same thing. She tells him, “Listen, you know what, I think I really like you.”
And Eric Chavez smiles, smiles hugely until his face aches, and for the first time in a decade, Eric Munson isn’t the last thing he thinks of before he falls asleep.
Eric Munson isn’t having the same luck.
If Eric Chavez isn’t as dumb as he makes himself out to be, Eric Munson isn’t nearly as well-adjusted as he seems. It’s weird, because he’s very close to being a totally functional individual, and the only difference between that Eric Munson and this one is that this Eric Munson’s best friend decided to be sorta gay when they were seventeen years old.
Being gay is hard, even if it’s only just the one person that he wants to be gay with. Munson’s spent a good deal of his life trying not to think about it. Mostly it’s easy. When Eric Chavez isn’t actually in the room, it’s easy to be the regular straight guy he would have been if Jesse DiMartino hadn’t died.
And he’s married now and maybe they’re gonna try to have a baby pretty soon, when he gets back to Detroit, and having phone sex with his best friend makes him feel pretty fucking juvenile. Like he hasn’t learned anything. To everyone in the world besides the two of them, Eric Munson’s life appears settled, everything in order, everything the way it’s supposed to be.
In Munson’s head, though, is the sound of Chavez’s voice, and the flip of his hair from under the back of his cap, and the slits of his eyes against the sun, and the landmark scar on his chest, the barely-there slant of his nose from when Eric Munson broke it. In Munson’s head, Chavez is half undressed, shirt hanging open and off his shoulders, and his belt unbuckled but still threaded through the loops, and Chavez has got his head cocked to one side and a certain mischievous smile on his face, an expression of his that hasn’t changed since they were eight years old, reading clearly, ‘Let’s get into trouble, man.’
But anyway. The team is taking up most of his attention, or so he imagines. He’s twenty-five, and several years older than most of the others, these terrified clean-faced children, twenty, twenty-one, and he’s kind of worried about their chances. The pre-season predictions, almost without exception, have the Detroit Tigers finishing dead last in the division, if not the league, if not the majors as a whole.
But stranger things have happened than a team like this surprising the hell out of everyone and making a run at the title. Like, for instance, Eric Chavez and Eric Munson still being in love with each other.
Fuck.
Baseball. And his beautiful wife waiting for him to get back to Detroit and start a family with her. Which is what he wants. Beautiful wife. Family. Detroit (okay, Detroit is a stretch, but he’s gotten used to it, maybe it’s starting to grow on him). Eric Chavez in the sides of photographs, half out of the frame, and only rarely, because grown-up best friends don’t see that much of each other. Especially not best friends who are major league ballplayers.
Eric Munson wants to know what’s so fucking special about Eric Chavez. It’s been more than eight years. They were just best friends for eight years, too. Their whatever is outpacing their friendship. The old version of their friendship, when they wrestled in the middle of a hurricane and slept on a fold-out couch and didn’t wake up in compromising positions. The good version.
He thinks about Eric Chavez saying, “Ruin your life.” It makes him feel cold and wild with adrenaline. The idea of it. The vision where he could leave this crummy Florida motel room and fly all night to Arizona, find the hotel and push open Eric Chavez’s room door. He won’t call ahead. He’ll just show up. Maybe Chavez will be asleep and Munson will crawl into bed and kiss him until he wakes up. Maybe Chavez will be miserably awake because he can’t sleep for missing his best friend. But they’ll be in the same room again and Eric Munson will say, “I’ve been in love with you since before I can remember. I’ll be in love with you forever.” And Eric Chavez will grin, and pull him down, and tell him everything.
And Munson’s life will be destroyed, and he won’t care.
Naturally, he tries to get rid of thoughts like that as soon as fucking possible. Because it’s not true. That they could make it, be something real. That it would all work out and Eric Chavez would stop trying to kill him with possibility and uncertainty, and Eric Munson would get over being a little bit gay and just be in love, and they’d be enough for each other and their parents would be proud of them and smile to see them together.
When Munson really thinks about it, when he’s in the quiet space of a drunk that comes between a buzz and a blackout, when there’s a lunar eclipse or a bad storm, when he’s so tired from the day’s workout that he can’t cut off the thought before it’s fully formed, he can see the truth of it.
It’s got nothing to do with baseball, and it’s got nothing to do with them being gay. Those are convenient excuses and they mean fucking nothing. Their whatever will never have a real name put to it, they’ll never be proud to be what they are, and it’s not because they’re ballplayers.
It’s because they share a heart. It’s because they know each other too well. It’s because falling in love with your best friend is the worst idea in the world. It doesn’t get better than being best friends. It shouldn’t get better. They wanted too much, they tried too hard. They were happy like they were and they fucked it up, and the end of their history will be nothing more than what they deserve.
*
(fundamentals)
Eric Munson’s first full year in the big leagues, the Detroit Tigers lose 119 games.
It’s . . . unbelievable. Horrific.
All summer, they’re the whipping boys of the American League, except for the couple of weeks of interleague when the National League gets in on the fun. Half the country, it seems, is actively rooting for them to supplant the 1962 Mets as the worst team in the history of the game. They get booed in their home park, they get heckled mercilessly on the road. They are safe nowhere.
Their infield is astonishingly young, unformed, matched only by their pitching staff, which will boast the first twenty game loser in twenty years (one Jeremy Bonderman late-September flare of future-brilliance short of two twenty game losers), and Maroth’s actually not that bad.
None of the team is really that bad, they’re just young and in the crucible. They’ll come out of this stronger than they went in, they’ll have to, there’s no other way to take it.
In all the ways Eric Munson ever imagined his rookie year going, this possibility never even occurred to him.
He can’t find it and he can’t get any better. They’re trying to make him into a third baseman now and he’s never been that before, he’s so lost on the corner. He’s been a catcher ever since they stopped playing with tees, still a catcher at heart when he stood at first base and his fingers twitched with pitch signs.
Eric Chavez was a shortstop and that’s a clean transition, but this, this is impossible. It’s his whole life that he’s got to unlearn, a whole new life to force into instinct.
He hits .240 his rookie year and the worst part about playing for the worst team in the majors is that the Tigers are the only team he belongs with. He keeps thinking about all the people who are seeing this, this immolation, this fucking holocaust of a season.
His family, who keep telling him they’re proud, but who could really be proud of a .240-hitting, fucking amateur third baseman? His old teammates, decades of them, who are shaking their heads and wondering what the fuck happened to him. Barry Zito with his fucking Cy Young and his brilliant October stats. Ex-girlfriends who are laughing and saying he deserves it. Anyone who’s ever been jealous of him, back when he was good.
Munson wishes he could play with his face hidden. A paper bag, a Zorro mask, his old catcher’s gear, something. He’s as ashamed of this as Eric Chavez is of being in love with him.
And Eric Chavez. Out of everyone in the world that Munson wishes was not watching this, Eric Chavez is at the top of the list.
But of course Eric Chavez is following Munson’s progress closer than he’s following his own. They talk on the phone, but usually not for very long because Munson doesn’t have much of an attention span these days for anything other than extra batting practice, extra work at third, extra time studying pitchers. All Munson wants to do these days is go to the field, any field, a Little League field if he’s got to, and try to find his game again.
Eric Chavez is careful and hesitant, ducking around bad topics like Munson’s errors in the field and the way Munson’s dropping his left shoulder chasing the off-the-plate split. But it’s in the background of their every conversation, even if Munson’s the only one that ever hears it, the fact that for every game the Tigers win, they lose three.
For every game they win, they lose three. It’s just ungodly.
The Tigers first go to Oakland three weeks into the season, and Eric Munson has already forgotten that this is the realization of their dream, the two of them on the same field, major league ballplayers and all their wishes come true.
He knows all about tunnel vision now and about not lifting your head for fear of what you’ll see. He knows all kinds of stuff that he never wanted to learn.
Munson takes the field at the Coliseum, the stands unpopulated because they don’t open the gates until it’s the A’s turn for infield warm-ups. He fields backhand, to his right, to his left, back to the grass. He judges the good hop and this is all still conscious for him, he’s got to think and remember before he can make the play, and he thinks about how catching, blocking, sliding to his knees behind the plate, all that is in his muscle memory, carved on his DNA.
Chavez crashes into his back while he’s not paying attention. Munson, startled, whips his elbow back and slams his best friend hard in the chest, knocking him down.
“You fucking jerk, it’s me!” Chavez yells from the ground, pressing a hand to his chest and scowling in pain. “Fucking ouch, man!”
Munson can see a scattering of the A’s in their dugout, over the line and across all the foul territory in this park, watching them and laughing. But they must know who he is, because none of them are charging out to get their boy’s back or anything. Munson wonders if he’s gonna get brushed back today anyway, because Zito’s there and definitely laughing more at Munson than at Chavez.
“Sorry,” Munson says, and offers Chavez his hand. Chavez knocks it away, pushing himself to his feet and immediately hugging Munson very tightly. Chavez is all about mixed signals, apparently.
Munson thinks with clear intention, ‘here I am, hugging my best friend on a major league baseball field.’ It doesn’t feel any different than all the other times he’s hugged Eric, all the other baseball fields.
Chavez pulls back but keeps his hands on Munson’s arms. “How’re you doing?”
Munson makes a sarcastic little smile. “We’re 1-16.”
Chavez drops his hands, shrugs uncomfortably. “It’s only April.”
“Yeah.” Munson looks down, kicks at the dirt. Chavez reaches up and fiddles with the sleeve of Munson’s jersey.
“Look at you,” Chavez says, a small upward bend in his mouth.
“I try not to,” Munson answers, feeling short-tempered and cynical under this perfect California sky. The maybe-smile or whatever it was fades off Chavez’s face.
“You’ll be around, tonight? After the game?” Chavez asks. Munson sighs, nods. Chavez narrows his eyes a bit, but just claps him on the arm. “’Kay. Have a good game, then. Well. Not too good. Well. Um.”
And Chavez looks pathetically torn, wanting to wish Munson well but not the Tigers, but then, wanting the Tigers to win because it would make Munson happy, but then, wait. It’s confusing.
Munson hits him lightly on the shoulder, the boy-way of saying thanks. “I know. You too.”
Chavez is smiling, relieved, but shaking his head. “I’m not playing today. I’m having a, sorta, a back thing. But it’s fine. By tomorrow, better’n new.”
Munson smiles back, because it is good to see Chavez, even though Chavez is at the start of his fifth season and Munson’s just a fucking rookie.
The A’s beat the Tigers and Detroit is 1-17. Eric Munson goes 0-for-4 and he won’t be in the line-up tomorrow, he already knows, because the pitching is as good as it’s ever going to get, and he can’t hit anything.
He waits around in the players’ parking lot, over by the fence that runs along the eastern side. There are railroad tracks and a polluted sewer-creak through the fence, and Eric Munson would train-watch if there were any trains going by.
He watches the A’s trickle slowly out of the clubhouse door, in packs and pairs, still looking too close, having too much fun. None of them recognize him, except for when Mulder and Zito emerge, arguing swift and carelessly about something and Zito’s eyes find him, loitering by the fence. Zito smirks and elbows Mulder, who looks over and maybe scowls at him but Munson can’t really tell. Munson looks at the ground for awhile until he’s sure they’re gone.
Eric Chavez is one of the last ones out, and the only one to come out alone. He comes for Munson and Munson hooks his fingers in the chain-link, pulls a little bit. He looks over towards the Oakland hills, and he only knows that Chavez has reached him when he sees Chavez’s shadow on his arm.
“Dude,” Chavez says, and Munson’s still not quite ready to look at him. Chavez touches his hand on the chain-link. “Dude?”
Munson watches Chavez’s fingers on the back of his hand, his knuckles and the flare of his tendons. He clears his throat, lets his hand fall so that Chavez’s will too.
“So. Yeah. What’re we doing?” Munson asks, staring determinedly at Chavez’s ear. He keeps thinking about Eric Chavez wanting him to ruin his life. Keeps thinking about how maybe his life is ruined now anyway, maybe 1-17 is wreckage defined and he doesn’t even have his best friend to get him through it.
Chavez wants to get his hand on Munson’s face and force him to look him in the eye, but Munson is skittish and maybe five seconds away from bolting.
“Well . . . whatever you want, man. Get some dinner. Go hang out with the guys.”
Munson shakes his head without thinking. He wants to stay as far away from the house in Alamo, the new house with Mark Mulder’s traces on everything, as possible. He doesn’t want to be in the same state as the house in Alamo, not tonight.
It’s not like he’s got a better idea, though. Maybe he wants to drive around aimlessly, but he can’t really suggest that to Chavez. Or, he can, and Eric would say yes, and they’d get in his car and maybe Chavez would even let him drive, maybe Chavez would keep quiet if he asked, and they could just roll.
But he won’t ask.
“I don’t know,” Munson says with a small shrug, for lack of anything else. “I’m kinda tired.”
He sneaks a look in time to see lines pull across Chavez’s forehead, and then a second later the visible effort to clear them away. “If we went back to my house, we could just chill and play videogames and stuff.”
“I don’t want to go back to your house, Chavez.”
Chavez’s eyebrows pull down. “Are you pissed off or something?”
Munson scowls. He doesn’t know why there’s all this obligation just because they’re in the same city again. Like they’ve got to be joined at the hip. “Look, whatever, man. Maybe I just don’t want to spend my night with the fucking enemy.”
Chavez’s face goes briefly struck, hurt. “I’m the enemy now?”
Munson looks at him in surprise. He didn’t mean that. Chavez should have known that he didn’t mean that. “Not you. Just, you know . . . them.” He waves his hand back towards the Coliseum, the ring of flags around the outside and the tall Oakland Athletics banner spilling down the gray concrete.
Chavez pushes a hand through his hair. “They’re my friends, dude.” And to anyone else in the world, he would have said that they were, in fact, his best friends, but Munson won’t take that right.
“Fine. But they’re not mine,” Munson answers, and he’s sounding jagged and more than a little bit mean.
Chavez wishes he could just knock Munson upside the head and get him acting normal again. Maybe if this were a movie, that kinda shit always works in movies. Or a comic book. Chavez shakes his head, what kind of random stuff is that to be thinking.
“Why are you being like this?” he asks.
Munson cracks his thumb against his palm. “What am I being like?” he says with a sarcastic drag to his voice.
“Like a fucking punk,” Chavez answers, thinking that this is good, because they’re talking about it. He can still call Munson on stuff, sure. Look how fucking grown-up they are.
“Well, excuse the fuck out of me,” Munson says, his mouth warping. “Didn’t mean to bring you fucking down.”
Chavez fucking hates it when Munson sounds like this. It doesn’t happen very often, which is a lucky thing, because it makes Chavez’s throat feel tight, makes him feel like there’s nothing he can do.
He swallows and tries not to get angry, though clearly that’s where Munson wants him, angry, blind and mean same as he is. “Look,” he attempts gently. “I know this isn’t going like you thought it would. I know how hard it is.”
Munson hits the fence with the side of his hand, branging the metal and it’s surprisingly loud. Chavez jumps but Munson barely even hears it.
“No,” Munson answers, and his voice is starting to go, get ragged and unsteady. “Fuck you, you do not know how hard this is. You have no fucking clue, and I’m not gonna let you stand there and say you do, you son of a bitch. You son of a bitch.” Munson says it a couple of more times, like slamming a car door over and over again to make sure it sticks.
“You have never been sixteen games under .500 in your fucking life, Eric. Never once have you played for three weeks and only won one motherfucking game. Not even when you came up in ’98 and they were already in last place, you were still closer to good than this fucking team will ever be. You can take your three postseason appearances and your division titles and your fucking compassion and just go fuck yourself. You have no idea.”
“Okay!” Chavez shouts, cutting him off. “Okay, fine, I’m fucking sorry, all right! Jesus. I’m just trying to help, for fuck’s sake.”
“You’re failing. Miserably,” Munson tells him cruelly, and not caring, because the Detroit Tigers have only won one game and he’s allowed to be cruel right now. It’s kinda nice. Freeing. In an agonizing sort of way.
Chavez’s expression tightens. “I’m not gonna feel bad because my team’s got a winning record. You can yell at me all you want, I’m still gonna be proud of it.”
“Well, fucking bully for you, man,” Eric Munson sneers, and he’s thinking that it must be nice to have something to be proud of.
Chavez goes to take his arm, but Munson pulls back and Chavez is left hanging, feeling stupid. “It . . . you’ll get better, Munce. The team. Sometimes it takes time. Most of the time, probably.”
“Not like you’d know anything about it,” and Munson is searching desperately for some line to cross, either to push them both over the edge or get them started on their way back. Something past this, either way, because this is unbearable.
Kinda wanting to hit the fence himself, feel the metallic rattle on his knuckles, Chavez makes his eyes thin and suspicious. He’s just trying to figure out how baseball could hurt his best friend this much. Trying to figure out what else could be wrong. “Is this about what I said when I was on that roof?”
Munson scoffs and looks at him incredulously. “Christ, Chavvy, not everything that goes wrong in my life has to do with you being an asshole.”
“Never figure that from how much you whine about it,” Chavez mutters, but it’s automatic and makes no real sense, because Munson doesn’t whine about it, he just lies back and does what Chavez tells him to. So Chavez doesn’t even bother trying to defend himself when Munson punches him hard on the arm, just sighs a little moan and closes his hand around the point of impact. There’s a lot of stuff that he knows he deserves.
“You’re just . . . you really want to take this out on me?” Chavez says, rubbing his arm. “I mean, you can, ‘cause, whatever, that’s what I’m here for. Whatever you need, and all. But. You know you’re not really mad at me.”
Munson’s face is all twisted up, and sure, that’s kind of true, but if he’s got an excuse to be mad at Eric Chavez guilt-free, then he really feels like he should take advantage of it. He wants to punch Chavez again. Maybe in the chest, thinking about the thump of his elbow making contact on the field. Chavez on the ground.
“Thanks a bunch, but don’t do me any favors, okay? I don’t need your permission to be mad at you.” Munson pulls a hand through his hair, and doesn’t think before he says, “Fuck, but I’m sick of you being so fucking superior all the time. You’ve been doing it since we were eighteen years old.”
“The fuck I have!” Chavez cries. “I never-”
“Oh, fuck you, you never,” Munson breaks in, thinking about the highway between San Diego and Los Angeles and Eric Chavez telling him, “you’ll fucking learn where you really fall.” Where you really fall, on a small tight loop in his mind, everything is flashing and he can’t keep up with it. All this stuff coming down around him, and maybe it’s just his turn to do the damage.
“It’s all over your face, it always is. You got your first place team and your pretty little life and you got me on the side because that’s the only place you want me.”
Eric Chavez touches his hand to his chest, hollow pain like he’s being struck hard, abstractly surprised to feel his heartbeat still going on under his palm. This sounds like something that been in the works for years now, pushing closer to the surface, but that’s fucking impossible, he would have seen it coming. It’s not true, it can’t be.
“But you . . . you got your, your. Your whole life, man. You too. Your good life, perfect life. This, it’s, you know, it’s just your game that’s not good right now. You got everything else.”
“None of it means anything if I don’t have my game,” and that’s another thing Munson didn’t expect to say, his anger suddenly cracking so hard he almost hears it. He falls on his shoulder against the fence, and steeples his fingers over his eyes. He focuses for a little while on holding himself together. He really doesn’t want to cry right now, not in this fucking parking lot, under this fucking sky.
“It’s been gone for so long, now, Eric, I can’t, I don’t.” Munson stops, and takes a deep breath. “I can’t hit. I can’t see anything. I thought it’d get better once I came up. I was sure. But it’s worse. It’s . . . so bad, man. It makes me hate you. For what you got. I don’t even wanna watch you play anymore.” He whispers it, astonished.
Chavez reaches out and takes Munson’s hand down, tugging at his wrist until he relents and lets it drop. Munson’s eyes stay shut, and Chavez replaces Munson’s hand with his own, his fingers light atop Munson’s eyelids, shimmering at the touch.
“You can hate me. That’s okay. You can blame it on me, I don’t mind.”
Munson shakes his head, sounds a low moan. “Only half of this is your fault,” he says and Chavez’s hand is cool on his face, restful.
Chavez half-smiles, feeling stupid and slow, like pieces of him have been removed and hammered out of form and then shoved back in place, uneven angles and awkward points. “Only half? Woulda thought at least three-quarters.”
Munson shivers, and then he grabs Chavez’s hand and pulls it down. His eyes are wide open and so bright it’s terrifying.
“Chavvy,” Munson says, his voice breaking. “Please help me. Eric. Please.”
Chavez stares at him for a long time. Then he looks away, watches the fuzz of car headlights behind the highway overpass on the far side of the stadium, the split second before the car crests the rise, when all he can see is the haze of light on the false horizon.
He turns back, and Munson’s eyes are still huge and scared. Chavez swallows past something thick in his throat, and he nods, thinking that they can do this, the two of them, they can fix anything.
“C’mon,” he whispers, and picks up Munson’s bag off the asphalt, hiking it over his shoulder. Munson smiles shakily, humiliated and relieved, and Chavez takes him across the bay to the batting cages stuck next to the highway in Redwood City, where Chavvy slips the security guy a hundred dollar bill to let them in and let them hit the floods.
He pitches to Munson all night long, under the cold neon lights, until Chavez’s arm is rubbery, numb with fatigue that will be a deep wrecking throb the next day, the next three days, gritting through it, not admitting it to anyone because they’ll just yell at him and call him a dumb motherfucker, which he probably is.
And Munson swings quick and he swings slow, he swings inside-out, at high pitches and low pitches and Chavez’s best attempt at a slider, his surprisingly good curveball, and they dissect his swing, his grip, his eye. Chavez tries to explain the inarticulate secrets of his own success, says over and over again, “see the ball into the bat, Munce, just like fielding, watch it hit.”
Chavez’s hands on Munson’s hips, pulling them sharply around, and Chavez’s hands covering Munson’s ears, forcing his head to stay in on the pitch, and Chavez kneeling at Munson’s feet, hands closed around Munson’s ankles, fixing his stance.
And Chavez behind Munson, arms wrapped around his body, their hands overlapped on the bat handle, Chavez breathing into Munson’s neck and blowing Munson’s hair out of his face, slowly swiveling them through the motion, Chavez’s knees chocked into the hollows at the backs of Munson’s, bodies pressed tight and Chavez doing his very best to ignore this, ignore everything.
They don’t talk about anything but baseball, at the batting cages that night. They don’t talk about their life or being in love or what either of them is owed by the other, because they’re getting their priorities straight.
There will be time for all the rest of it later, maybe nothing all that real because they said too much to each other today, they admitted stuff they should have kept hidden. Right now, baseball comes first. Eric Chavez remembers for the first time in a long time that baseball, really, baseball has always come first, no matter how they tried to change that.
They’re there all night, trying to figure out what’s gone wrong.
*
(slow down)
They get halfway there and then they turn back. They start to tell the truth and they end up not saying anything. There’s something very important happening between the two of them, the space of time and the distance between Detroit and Oakland, but they’re committed to not recognizing it.
After everything that’s gone wrong and all the bad they’ve done in each other’s names, Eric Munson goes back to his wife and Eric Chavez goes back to his girlfriend and it’s hard to say how much longer they’ll be able to hang on through this.
The Tigers keep losing, the A’s keep winning. They’re twenty-five years old and nothing’s the same.
Munson calls him just before the break and they talk about their families and rock concerts and old television shows and stuff that happened in the eighties. They try not to let it show. It’s a normal conversation like normal best friends must have, but when Munson hangs up the phone, he feels sick and there’s a moment there when he never wants to hear Eric Chavez’s voice again.
A few weeks later, Shanda tells him, “You don’t talk about Eric that much anymore,” and Munson just nods, eats cornflakes so that he won’t have to answer.
Chavez introduces Alex to his parents. She sleeps over almost every night when he’s in town, and they’re looking at apartments downtown. Mulder calls him a punk and pushes him in the pool when he says he’s thinking about moving out, but that doesn’t make Eric change his mind.
It’s the summer, it’s another season.
Sometime in August, it occurs to Eric Munson that this is the worst he’s going to feel for a long time, maybe forever. No matter what happens next year, it can’t hurt more than this. He’s suddenly a bit easier, because this is as bad as it’s going to get and he’s still getting up every morning.
He calls Eric Chavez, leaves a message that’s kinda apologetic and kinda impatient and kinda complicated. He talks for too long and keeps waiting for the beep to cut him off. At the end, he says, “So anyway, I’m being weird and introspective. I think you should call me.”
He checks his phone constantly, but Chavez doesn’t call back.
It’s not like they had a fight. It’s not like Eric Chavez shouldn’t be able to tell how deep this goes. He’ll never understand, he’s the blessed one, but he should at least be aware that Munson’s life is getting away from him.
But Eric Chavez is falling in love again. This is all very familiar. He’s got the same old tight feeling in his stomach, the fuck-it-up, fuck-it-up-for-good urge when he catches a stranger’s eyes in a bar, but he’s learning to look away.
It’s different, because Alex is sweet and funny and has him totally figured out. She brings him warm brown sugar and cinnamon Pop-Tarts in mornings and she drives around with a Chupa Chup in her mouth, and he leans over at stoplights and pulls the skinny plastic stick out, kisses her all candy-sweet and sticky. She tells him he’s good and he’s about ready to believe it.
He only wants to see her every day, and if he does, he’s okay. Even if he doesn’t, he’s still pretty okay, because she’s on the backs of his eyelids and the front of his mind and when he thinks about Eric Munson, when he hears Eric Munson’s message and erases it without a second thought or anything resembling guilt, when he thinks about Eric Munson, his best friend is hazy, sepia-toned, almost like something from the past. Which is maybe true, or on its way to being true, or something.
Chavez figures that the key to everything, all of this, is not just to burn your bridges but to make sure they’re ash when you walk away. You leave stuff behind, that’s fine. That’s how it’s supposed to be. He’s mature and his life is falling into place. He’s a day or two away from being normal again, and sane, and clean.
Munson’s tinged picture in his mind like a memory, Munson’s recorded voice from his phone, Munson in a SportsCenter highlight but only about once a month, and Chavez’s chest hurts with this slow faded pressure that he can almost get to enjoy.
He’s thinking about leaving people behind. He’s thinking about moving on.
Eric Munson is still waiting for him to call, but he’s given up expecting it. He thinks about all the stuff that’s happened, how it keeps ending and starting again and he can’t figure out why they can’t just stay away. He wonders, after all this, if they’re any different, any better off. He’s got Shanda and she loves him and he loves her, and Eric Chavez still has precedence. Professional baseball fucked everything up, but Eric Munson’s pretty sure it would have happened anyway.
He sees them at seventeen, broken noses in the desert, and eighteen on the basketball court the night before the draft.
Have they changed? Would he be able to tell if they had?
Munson hears someone say that the time you should leave is when you can’t remember why you came. He won’t sleep tonight, thinking about that.
*
(side-note)
In October of 2003, Eric Munson goes on a road trip. The terrible season is finally over, and the Oakland Athletics have burned their way into the playoffs for the fourth consecutive year, but Chavez and Munson haven’t spoken since before the All-Star break.
Chavez forgot Munson’s birthday. Or remembered and didn’t call. Something.
Everything feels very old and very tired, and most of this is nothing more than a memory. There’s an empty spot inside them both and maybe there wouldn’t be if none of this had ever started.
Munce starts in San Diego, visiting his parents, loops down into Mexico and comes back in Arizona, heads north up through the desert. He calls Shanda every day, when he’s getting gas, when he can’t sleep in southwestern motel rooms. She’s working and couldn’t come with him, so he buys her stupid tacky souvenirs from roadside stands and takes a lot of pictures.
He’s certain that he has no actual destination, except for Detroit again eventually, but when he finds himself driving over the Sierra Nevada Mountains just south of San Jose, he sighs and takes the exit for Oakland. The Red Sox are in town and the A’s have already won Game One.
Eric pulls into the driveway of the Alamo house, wedging a spot to park in between the sleek lines of the ballplayers’ cars, their ‘toys,’ the first rewards of their signing bonuses.
He steps out, thin-eyed and tired. It’s already warm in the East Bay, not yet ten in the morning and the branches of the trees heavy with the day, sagging and the leaves green like melted crayons.
There’s shape in the doorway of the house, a long body filling the space, and Munson waits for his eyes to adjust, color and shading slowly filling in. It’s Mark Mulder, one hip shot out against the frame, barefoot and watching him without expression.
Munson’s still kind of nervous around Mulder, though it’s not like they’re often in the same room. The simple fact of Mark Mulder’s existence irritates the fuck out of Eric Munson.
Mulder’s always giving him looks, which Munson can handle just fine, but he’s also always giving Chavez looks, deeply considering looks with his lazy half-closed blue eyes, slow drawn-out slips of Mulder’s arm around Chavez’s shoulders. And Munson remembers Chavez’s teeth against Mulder’s stomach, wobbling on the diving board, the chlorine explosion as they fell together.
Even though Chavez has assured him that despite his best attempts, Mulder never took him up on anything more than a friendship, Munce still can’t quite get past it. One day, maybe, someday Mark Mulder will have his blinders removed and see what’s being offered him, and it’s not like Chavez will turn him down.
In most things, Mulder’s as good as a man can get, and Munson doesn’t like to think about all the time Chavez and Mulder spend together, their years right down the hall from each other in all these identical ranch-style houses, the way Chavez falls in love quickly, in the blink of an eye, and nothing’s quite as attractive as a good slider.
Munson has not really been kept up to date on the course of Chavez’s life, recently.
He stops on the front path and hesitantly lifts a hand. Mulder tips his chin up slightly.
“Hello, Munson,” he says casually.
“Hello, Mulder,” Munson replies, jamming his hands in his pockets, digging his thumbs against the seams. He looks for a crutch or something, but there’s nothing. Mulder’s got a broken hip, but Munson’s not sure if it’s the hip tilted against the doorjamb or the other. Fuck if Mulder looks hurt. Fuck if Mark Mulder doesn’t look better hurt than just about everyone else looks healthy.
Mulder hooks an eyebrow. “What’re you doing here, man?”
Munson blinks, and entertains a brief paranoid fantasy of Chavez telling all his housemates to not let him in.
“I’m . . . looking for Chavez.”
Now it’s Mulder’s turn to pause. His motherfucker eyes temper, get a bit pitying. “He doesn’t live here anymore, Munce,” Mulder tells him quietly.
Munson just stares at him for a long moment, not understanding that. Eric woulda told him, he woulda said something.
Munson bites the inside of his cheek hard enough to taste blood, snaps out of it. “What?” he asks dumbly.
Mulder nods, leaning a shoulder against the doorframe, crossing his arms over his chest. “He got a place downtown with his girlfriend two months ago. Didn’t he tell you?”
His face hot, Munson pulls his eyes away, shrugging uncomfortably. “’Course he did, yeah. Yeah. Guess I forgot.”
Mulder’s eyebrow ticks again, but he doesn’t call Munson on it. He jerks his head towards the inside. “Well, c’mon. I got the address somewhere.”
Munson follows him in, head down and shoulders drawn up. Mulder only limps a little bit, so slightly that Munson wouldn’t have noticed if he wasn’t looking for it.
The Alamo house is the same as the Lafayette house, the Walnut Creek house, any of the places Chavez has ever lived. There are white stucco walls and piles of shoes in the front hallway. It’s still sparsely furnished, everything rented, a rat’s nest of black and gray wires around the big screen in the living room, connecting the DVD player and the Xbox and the Playstation 2 and the Tivo and god knows what else.
The kitchen’s barren, a clatter of dirty dishes in the sink and a rank of empty liquor bottles on the high shelf over the refrigerator. Mulder goes digging in a drawer filled with ragged scraps of paper, most of them phone numbers scammed off girls in bars. Munson shifts from foot to foot, scratches at the inside of his pocket. His cheek hurts where he bit it, and he feels pretty stupid.
A kinda familiar voice suddenly rings down the hall, getting closer. “Mulder! Your goddamn shower’s broken again!”
Munson starts, his hands coming half out of his pockets, and he whips his head around, feeling so on edge he’s about to fall right off.
Barry Zito walks in without a shirt on, a pair of blue-striped pajama pants slung low on his hips, his hair a soft just-awoken wreck. He stops short, seeing Munson standing there and stealing glances out of the corner of his eye.
“Oh. Munson,” Zito says with a flat lack of welcome, and his eyes zip over to Mulder for a half-instant. Then a well-known stupid grin breaks on his face. “Munce! How’s it going, dude?” He holds out his hand for Munson to slap, claps him on the arm, playing the old-teammate-reunion card to its fullest, as if the two of them ever even halfway liked each other.
Munson shrugs. “Pretty good. How . . . how’re you doing?” he answers hesitantly, and he’s stammering a little bit, awfully nervous, trying to keep his eyes above Zito’s neck. That day in the USC locker room seems very long ago, like maybe it happened to two other guys. He tries to remember what it was like when all he wanted to do was hit Zito in the face, and it’s a hollow space inside him, a gap.
Zito bobs his head. “Good as ever.”
“He’s looking for Chavvy,” Mulder interjects over his shoulder, up to his wrists in torn bits of paper.
Zito looks confused. “Chavvy doesn’t live here anymore.”
Mulder snorts. “Yes, thank you.”
Munson’s eyes switch between the two of them, certain things becoming clear to him and certain fears being laid to rest. And at the same time he wants to sneer, curl his lip up and spit on the kitchen floor. This is all so fucking predictable, they couldn’t even go for the surprise twist ending.
Zito goes to rummage in a cabinet, pushing boxes of cereal around, and Munson sees the finger-shaped bruises on his lower back, three on each side. Inches between each purpled mark-big hands.
“Hey.”
Munson flicks his attention back, his face coloring darkly, aware that he’s been caught staring, and Mulder’s looking at him coldly, be-fucking-careful-man. Munce swallows hard, but Mulder just holds out the piece of paper with Chavez’s address scribbled on it, and Munson takes it, stuffing it in his pocket.
“Right, well . . .” Munson trails off, clears his throat. Mulder’s gone to sit at the table, flapping open the paper and Munson can’t see his face. One of Mulder’s legs is propped up on a chair, resting like a bridge. He doesn’t look injured at all. “See ya later.”
Zito toasts him with a dripping spoon, grinning his axe-murderer grin. “Later, Munce.”
Just before he leaves, knowing he shouldn’t, Munson asks as if with someone else’s voice, “Hey, deuce, are you . . . are you living here now?”
The paper obscuring Mulder rustles minutely. Zito’s face is closed off, but he smiles easily enough. “Nah. Mulder just decided I was too drunk to drive last night.”
From behind the sports section: “I didn’t write the fucking law, Z.”
Munson thinks, ‘yeah well fuck it,’ and says “bye,” but they’re not paying attention to him anymore. They’re two wins away from the league championship series. They’ve got more important things to worry about. There are reasons this kind of shit stays secret, anyway.
Munson goes back through the frat-boy house and into the struck heat of the morning. He drives down out of the hills and he’s heading for Chavez’s new place, this girlfriend-shared place, but instead he finds himself in the parking lot of a 7-Eleven, sitting there for a long time with both hands on the wheel, watching people go in and come out with Slurpees and lidded cups of coffee.
He goes inside to get a book of paper matches, earns a scowl from the clerk for not buying anything, and out in the little parking lot, he drops to his catcher’s crouch on the blistered asphalt, lighting the scrap of paper and holding it until the flames lick at his fingers.
He drops the ashed remains of Chavez’s address and grounds it to powder under his shoe, and then he gets back in his car and drives west over the bridge, cursing steadily and wiping his eyes with the side of his hand, the world long-since sunk underwater by the time he gets to the ocean.
(end part thirteen)
*
part fourteen
The place where we got dinner, skinny little matchbooks stuffed into our pockets. West Philly and apartments with metal screens on the windows. Illegal activities and chocolate cake. UPenn and it's so creepy there at night, with those gothic brick buildings and everything's weighted, haunted.
The Theatre of Living Arts, getting our hands stamped with martini glasses, bitching about how it's a non-smoking show (it's a band thing; one of my friends saw them the night before in DC. Way to be this close to the coolest band ever and then not allow smoking at your concerts, Arcade Fire). A couple steps up by the bar and sliding between tall people because we are short and easy on the eyes, and it doesn't take much more than that to move a boy out of the way.
The Arcade Fire. The Arcade Fire. Their last tour date in the States is tomorrow at the Roxy in Boston. It's sold out (so was the DC show and so was the Philly show. We bought our tickets for $12, and day of, they were going on Craig's List for better than a hundred), but I, honestly, if I was in Boston I'd go down there and pay scalper prices and say fuck it. It was one of the best live shows I have ever seen. And, you know. That's saying something.
If you happen to be in Europe in March.
I won't go into it, because I don't really feel I can do it justice. Just know that where we were standing was just above the main crowd and I could look and see everyone in the place moving as a whole. It was. Yeah.
Crashing at four in the morning and waking up at six to drive back to DC. Oh, that was fun. Man oh man was that fun. Barely avoided falling asleep outside Baltimore, bad traffic into Rockville. Dropped the car off and I slipped on the ice up there in Maryland. Me and my buddy did a crossword puzzle on the Metro and when we got home we brushed out teeth, smoked another spliff, and watched Fight Club. I laid down for a nap at four in the afternoon and woke up at nine this morning, still wearing my jeans and my watch, my stamped hand unwashed.
It was great.
In other news, I have purchased spring training tickets, biznickie! It is the height of excitement. Soon, I will have a new computer, too. It'll be able to burn DVDs. Washington DC has begun to grow on me again, goddamn it. It does this a couple times a year just to confuse me. Fuckin' pretty place with so much history I'm basically breathing it in all the time.
And so on.
Apologies to the Detroit fans in the audience (all . . . one of you). I know it's very painful and all, but I had to write about it, man.
Table of Contents
Pictures courtesy bradausmus12 and Jen's Baseball Page
The Rest of Your Life
By Candle Beck
Part the Thirteenth: Deconstruction
(parasites)
Eric Chavez starts attending a church group. Not at that Catholic church, because he doesn’t want to see that priest, who knows way too much about him and there’s a reason they’ve got screens in the confessionals.
It’s at his regular church, where they know only the parts of him that he lets show. They like him a lot, over there. He helps with their charities and gets the team involved and buys twenty tickets for the kids in the congregation a dozen times a season.
It’s mainly that he hates Tuesday nights. There’s nothing good on television, it’s always long and slow and makes him think about stuff he doesn’t want to be thinking about. So he sees the blue Xeroxed flier on the church bulletin board, Bible study at 8 o’clock every Tuesday night, and figures he could probably do with some of that.
They read different parts of the Scripture and talking about meaning and interpretation and how it applies to modern life, and he’s bored a lot of the time, but he plays it off all right. It’s a kind of reassuring drone to be in the midst of, verses like torn bits of paper, the phone number of a girl picked up in a bar, scraps that are easy to lose on the walk home, the subway, when his jeans go through the wash.
But it lulls him, and he’s often able to sleep Tuesday nights after he gets back. Not always, but often. More than before.
Chavez isn’t exactly happy with himself, these days. Sadly, he actually remembered the telephone call from the rooftop in the morning, he knows what he said. So fucking stupid. He showed his hand, showed everything.
He’s honestly not sure what the fuck he even wanted, saying that shit to Munson, who’s embarrassed now, embarrassed for both of them and this awful parasitic thing that they have become.
Anyway. Church group, Bible study, and Phoenix is less than a month away. Phoenix is less than a month away and a young woman comes in one Tuesday night, smiles at the group and finds a seat in the circle near the door.
She’s got blonde hair. Pale pale white-gold, unbleached, and when she leans forward over her Bible, it makes a waterfall in front of her face. Eric Chavez plays it cool and lets his eyes casually trawl over to her again and again, until she finally notices, and blushes pleasurably, looks away. She’s lovely.
He catches her on the sidewalk after the group disperses, his hand on her elbow and when he says, “I wanted to introduce myself, are you new to the church?” she ducks her head down, smiles at the sidewalk and says, “I know who you are.”
He grins, and she meets his gaze, blue-eyed, pilot lights, match flame. “I’m Alex,” she says, and when he asks her if she wants to go get some coffee, the words are barely out of his mouth before she’s nodding, and blushing again, and grinning herself.
They’ve got less than a month, and they don’t sleep together until the sixth date, because they’re responsible like that. Chavez was worried that maybe she was a better Christian than him, as far as pre-marital whatevers go, but she twines around him like ivy and the crosses around their necks clink against each other in passing.
When they’re at the airport, Eric Chavez about to get on a plane for Arizona, he thinks he might have a girlfriend again, but he’s not sure. He asks Alex, and she rolls her eyes at him.
“Yes, you have a girlfriend, Eric. But don’t worry. She’s the understanding type.” Then she kisses him goodbye and he cups his hand around the back of her head, his nose against her cheek and the good rose-powder scent of her skin.
When he’s through security, he turns back and she’s still there, and he feels a sudden blast of hatred for terrorism and hijacked airplanes, for no other reason than that his pretty girlfriend isn’t allowed to wave at his plane from the terminal window anymore, and when he gets back to California, she won’t be able to meet him at the gate and he won’t be able to touch her again until baggage claim.
But he goes to Phoenix, grinning at nothing until Hudson cuffs him on the shoulder and says, “Knock it off, you’re freakin’ me out.”
Back to baseball and maybe he’s trying not to fall in love with Alex, because he’s been in love with two people at the same time before and it was basically the worst thing that’s ever happened to him.
He gets bold and manipulative on the phone to Eric Munson, just to reaffirm that he’s only in love with one person, and he coaches Munson through it, Munson in his spring training motel room in Florida. He says, “Shirt first, dude, T-shirt or buttons?” And Munson breathes unevenly and says, “T-shirt.”
“Pull it up, then. Don’t take it off, just. Pull it up.” And he can hear the rustle as Munson obeys. Chavez says, “Your hand, and . . . get your fingers wet. Your palm,” and there’s a sucking sound, and Munson doesn’t even ask him what this is supposed to mean anymore.
Chavez says, “Good,” when Munson starts to make fast breathy noises, and he finds all sorts of dirty words that turn his face red, desperately not thinking about his mom and what she would think, stuff he wasn’t really aware he knew. He can let his voice drop to a husky range, and he can draw filthy pictures over the phone lines, but really all he needs to do is hiss “Munce,” and he knows that his best friend will groan and that will be enough for him, too.
He calls Alex after, jeans still undone and he hasn’t even washed his hand yet. He’s on the phone with her longer than he was with Munson, but it’s not the same thing. She tells him, “Listen, you know what, I think I really like you.”
And Eric Chavez smiles, smiles hugely until his face aches, and for the first time in a decade, Eric Munson isn’t the last thing he thinks of before he falls asleep.
Eric Munson isn’t having the same luck.
If Eric Chavez isn’t as dumb as he makes himself out to be, Eric Munson isn’t nearly as well-adjusted as he seems. It’s weird, because he’s very close to being a totally functional individual, and the only difference between that Eric Munson and this one is that this Eric Munson’s best friend decided to be sorta gay when they were seventeen years old.
Being gay is hard, even if it’s only just the one person that he wants to be gay with. Munson’s spent a good deal of his life trying not to think about it. Mostly it’s easy. When Eric Chavez isn’t actually in the room, it’s easy to be the regular straight guy he would have been if Jesse DiMartino hadn’t died.
And he’s married now and maybe they’re gonna try to have a baby pretty soon, when he gets back to Detroit, and having phone sex with his best friend makes him feel pretty fucking juvenile. Like he hasn’t learned anything. To everyone in the world besides the two of them, Eric Munson’s life appears settled, everything in order, everything the way it’s supposed to be.
In Munson’s head, though, is the sound of Chavez’s voice, and the flip of his hair from under the back of his cap, and the slits of his eyes against the sun, and the landmark scar on his chest, the barely-there slant of his nose from when Eric Munson broke it. In Munson’s head, Chavez is half undressed, shirt hanging open and off his shoulders, and his belt unbuckled but still threaded through the loops, and Chavez has got his head cocked to one side and a certain mischievous smile on his face, an expression of his that hasn’t changed since they were eight years old, reading clearly, ‘Let’s get into trouble, man.’
But anyway. The team is taking up most of his attention, or so he imagines. He’s twenty-five, and several years older than most of the others, these terrified clean-faced children, twenty, twenty-one, and he’s kind of worried about their chances. The pre-season predictions, almost without exception, have the Detroit Tigers finishing dead last in the division, if not the league, if not the majors as a whole.
But stranger things have happened than a team like this surprising the hell out of everyone and making a run at the title. Like, for instance, Eric Chavez and Eric Munson still being in love with each other.
Fuck.
Baseball. And his beautiful wife waiting for him to get back to Detroit and start a family with her. Which is what he wants. Beautiful wife. Family. Detroit (okay, Detroit is a stretch, but he’s gotten used to it, maybe it’s starting to grow on him). Eric Chavez in the sides of photographs, half out of the frame, and only rarely, because grown-up best friends don’t see that much of each other. Especially not best friends who are major league ballplayers.
Eric Munson wants to know what’s so fucking special about Eric Chavez. It’s been more than eight years. They were just best friends for eight years, too. Their whatever is outpacing their friendship. The old version of their friendship, when they wrestled in the middle of a hurricane and slept on a fold-out couch and didn’t wake up in compromising positions. The good version.
He thinks about Eric Chavez saying, “Ruin your life.” It makes him feel cold and wild with adrenaline. The idea of it. The vision where he could leave this crummy Florida motel room and fly all night to Arizona, find the hotel and push open Eric Chavez’s room door. He won’t call ahead. He’ll just show up. Maybe Chavez will be asleep and Munson will crawl into bed and kiss him until he wakes up. Maybe Chavez will be miserably awake because he can’t sleep for missing his best friend. But they’ll be in the same room again and Eric Munson will say, “I’ve been in love with you since before I can remember. I’ll be in love with you forever.” And Eric Chavez will grin, and pull him down, and tell him everything.
And Munson’s life will be destroyed, and he won’t care.
Naturally, he tries to get rid of thoughts like that as soon as fucking possible. Because it’s not true. That they could make it, be something real. That it would all work out and Eric Chavez would stop trying to kill him with possibility and uncertainty, and Eric Munson would get over being a little bit gay and just be in love, and they’d be enough for each other and their parents would be proud of them and smile to see them together.
When Munson really thinks about it, when he’s in the quiet space of a drunk that comes between a buzz and a blackout, when there’s a lunar eclipse or a bad storm, when he’s so tired from the day’s workout that he can’t cut off the thought before it’s fully formed, he can see the truth of it.
It’s got nothing to do with baseball, and it’s got nothing to do with them being gay. Those are convenient excuses and they mean fucking nothing. Their whatever will never have a real name put to it, they’ll never be proud to be what they are, and it’s not because they’re ballplayers.
It’s because they share a heart. It’s because they know each other too well. It’s because falling in love with your best friend is the worst idea in the world. It doesn’t get better than being best friends. It shouldn’t get better. They wanted too much, they tried too hard. They were happy like they were and they fucked it up, and the end of their history will be nothing more than what they deserve.
*
(fundamentals)
Eric Munson’s first full year in the big leagues, the Detroit Tigers lose 119 games.
It’s . . . unbelievable. Horrific.
All summer, they’re the whipping boys of the American League, except for the couple of weeks of interleague when the National League gets in on the fun. Half the country, it seems, is actively rooting for them to supplant the 1962 Mets as the worst team in the history of the game. They get booed in their home park, they get heckled mercilessly on the road. They are safe nowhere.
Their infield is astonishingly young, unformed, matched only by their pitching staff, which will boast the first twenty game loser in twenty years (one Jeremy Bonderman late-September flare of future-brilliance short of two twenty game losers), and Maroth’s actually not that bad.
None of the team is really that bad, they’re just young and in the crucible. They’ll come out of this stronger than they went in, they’ll have to, there’s no other way to take it.
In all the ways Eric Munson ever imagined his rookie year going, this possibility never even occurred to him.
He can’t find it and he can’t get any better. They’re trying to make him into a third baseman now and he’s never been that before, he’s so lost on the corner. He’s been a catcher ever since they stopped playing with tees, still a catcher at heart when he stood at first base and his fingers twitched with pitch signs.
Eric Chavez was a shortstop and that’s a clean transition, but this, this is impossible. It’s his whole life that he’s got to unlearn, a whole new life to force into instinct.
He hits .240 his rookie year and the worst part about playing for the worst team in the majors is that the Tigers are the only team he belongs with. He keeps thinking about all the people who are seeing this, this immolation, this fucking holocaust of a season.
His family, who keep telling him they’re proud, but who could really be proud of a .240-hitting, fucking amateur third baseman? His old teammates, decades of them, who are shaking their heads and wondering what the fuck happened to him. Barry Zito with his fucking Cy Young and his brilliant October stats. Ex-girlfriends who are laughing and saying he deserves it. Anyone who’s ever been jealous of him, back when he was good.
Munson wishes he could play with his face hidden. A paper bag, a Zorro mask, his old catcher’s gear, something. He’s as ashamed of this as Eric Chavez is of being in love with him.
And Eric Chavez. Out of everyone in the world that Munson wishes was not watching this, Eric Chavez is at the top of the list.
But of course Eric Chavez is following Munson’s progress closer than he’s following his own. They talk on the phone, but usually not for very long because Munson doesn’t have much of an attention span these days for anything other than extra batting practice, extra work at third, extra time studying pitchers. All Munson wants to do these days is go to the field, any field, a Little League field if he’s got to, and try to find his game again.
Eric Chavez is careful and hesitant, ducking around bad topics like Munson’s errors in the field and the way Munson’s dropping his left shoulder chasing the off-the-plate split. But it’s in the background of their every conversation, even if Munson’s the only one that ever hears it, the fact that for every game the Tigers win, they lose three.
For every game they win, they lose three. It’s just ungodly.
The Tigers first go to Oakland three weeks into the season, and Eric Munson has already forgotten that this is the realization of their dream, the two of them on the same field, major league ballplayers and all their wishes come true.
He knows all about tunnel vision now and about not lifting your head for fear of what you’ll see. He knows all kinds of stuff that he never wanted to learn.
Munson takes the field at the Coliseum, the stands unpopulated because they don’t open the gates until it’s the A’s turn for infield warm-ups. He fields backhand, to his right, to his left, back to the grass. He judges the good hop and this is all still conscious for him, he’s got to think and remember before he can make the play, and he thinks about how catching, blocking, sliding to his knees behind the plate, all that is in his muscle memory, carved on his DNA.
Chavez crashes into his back while he’s not paying attention. Munson, startled, whips his elbow back and slams his best friend hard in the chest, knocking him down.
“You fucking jerk, it’s me!” Chavez yells from the ground, pressing a hand to his chest and scowling in pain. “Fucking ouch, man!”
Munson can see a scattering of the A’s in their dugout, over the line and across all the foul territory in this park, watching them and laughing. But they must know who he is, because none of them are charging out to get their boy’s back or anything. Munson wonders if he’s gonna get brushed back today anyway, because Zito’s there and definitely laughing more at Munson than at Chavez.
“Sorry,” Munson says, and offers Chavez his hand. Chavez knocks it away, pushing himself to his feet and immediately hugging Munson very tightly. Chavez is all about mixed signals, apparently.
Munson thinks with clear intention, ‘here I am, hugging my best friend on a major league baseball field.’ It doesn’t feel any different than all the other times he’s hugged Eric, all the other baseball fields.
Chavez pulls back but keeps his hands on Munson’s arms. “How’re you doing?”
Munson makes a sarcastic little smile. “We’re 1-16.”
Chavez drops his hands, shrugs uncomfortably. “It’s only April.”
“Yeah.” Munson looks down, kicks at the dirt. Chavez reaches up and fiddles with the sleeve of Munson’s jersey.
“Look at you,” Chavez says, a small upward bend in his mouth.
“I try not to,” Munson answers, feeling short-tempered and cynical under this perfect California sky. The maybe-smile or whatever it was fades off Chavez’s face.
“You’ll be around, tonight? After the game?” Chavez asks. Munson sighs, nods. Chavez narrows his eyes a bit, but just claps him on the arm. “’Kay. Have a good game, then. Well. Not too good. Well. Um.”
And Chavez looks pathetically torn, wanting to wish Munson well but not the Tigers, but then, wanting the Tigers to win because it would make Munson happy, but then, wait. It’s confusing.
Munson hits him lightly on the shoulder, the boy-way of saying thanks. “I know. You too.”
Chavez is smiling, relieved, but shaking his head. “I’m not playing today. I’m having a, sorta, a back thing. But it’s fine. By tomorrow, better’n new.”
Munson smiles back, because it is good to see Chavez, even though Chavez is at the start of his fifth season and Munson’s just a fucking rookie.
The A’s beat the Tigers and Detroit is 1-17. Eric Munson goes 0-for-4 and he won’t be in the line-up tomorrow, he already knows, because the pitching is as good as it’s ever going to get, and he can’t hit anything.
He waits around in the players’ parking lot, over by the fence that runs along the eastern side. There are railroad tracks and a polluted sewer-creak through the fence, and Eric Munson would train-watch if there were any trains going by.
He watches the A’s trickle slowly out of the clubhouse door, in packs and pairs, still looking too close, having too much fun. None of them recognize him, except for when Mulder and Zito emerge, arguing swift and carelessly about something and Zito’s eyes find him, loitering by the fence. Zito smirks and elbows Mulder, who looks over and maybe scowls at him but Munson can’t really tell. Munson looks at the ground for awhile until he’s sure they’re gone.
Eric Chavez is one of the last ones out, and the only one to come out alone. He comes for Munson and Munson hooks his fingers in the chain-link, pulls a little bit. He looks over towards the Oakland hills, and he only knows that Chavez has reached him when he sees Chavez’s shadow on his arm.
“Dude,” Chavez says, and Munson’s still not quite ready to look at him. Chavez touches his hand on the chain-link. “Dude?”
Munson watches Chavez’s fingers on the back of his hand, his knuckles and the flare of his tendons. He clears his throat, lets his hand fall so that Chavez’s will too.
“So. Yeah. What’re we doing?” Munson asks, staring determinedly at Chavez’s ear. He keeps thinking about Eric Chavez wanting him to ruin his life. Keeps thinking about how maybe his life is ruined now anyway, maybe 1-17 is wreckage defined and he doesn’t even have his best friend to get him through it.
Chavez wants to get his hand on Munson’s face and force him to look him in the eye, but Munson is skittish and maybe five seconds away from bolting.
“Well . . . whatever you want, man. Get some dinner. Go hang out with the guys.”
Munson shakes his head without thinking. He wants to stay as far away from the house in Alamo, the new house with Mark Mulder’s traces on everything, as possible. He doesn’t want to be in the same state as the house in Alamo, not tonight.
It’s not like he’s got a better idea, though. Maybe he wants to drive around aimlessly, but he can’t really suggest that to Chavez. Or, he can, and Eric would say yes, and they’d get in his car and maybe Chavez would even let him drive, maybe Chavez would keep quiet if he asked, and they could just roll.
But he won’t ask.
“I don’t know,” Munson says with a small shrug, for lack of anything else. “I’m kinda tired.”
He sneaks a look in time to see lines pull across Chavez’s forehead, and then a second later the visible effort to clear them away. “If we went back to my house, we could just chill and play videogames and stuff.”
“I don’t want to go back to your house, Chavez.”
Chavez’s eyebrows pull down. “Are you pissed off or something?”
Munson scowls. He doesn’t know why there’s all this obligation just because they’re in the same city again. Like they’ve got to be joined at the hip. “Look, whatever, man. Maybe I just don’t want to spend my night with the fucking enemy.”
Chavez’s face goes briefly struck, hurt. “I’m the enemy now?”
Munson looks at him in surprise. He didn’t mean that. Chavez should have known that he didn’t mean that. “Not you. Just, you know . . . them.” He waves his hand back towards the Coliseum, the ring of flags around the outside and the tall Oakland Athletics banner spilling down the gray concrete.
Chavez pushes a hand through his hair. “They’re my friends, dude.” And to anyone else in the world, he would have said that they were, in fact, his best friends, but Munson won’t take that right.
“Fine. But they’re not mine,” Munson answers, and he’s sounding jagged and more than a little bit mean.
Chavez wishes he could just knock Munson upside the head and get him acting normal again. Maybe if this were a movie, that kinda shit always works in movies. Or a comic book. Chavez shakes his head, what kind of random stuff is that to be thinking.
“Why are you being like this?” he asks.
Munson cracks his thumb against his palm. “What am I being like?” he says with a sarcastic drag to his voice.
“Like a fucking punk,” Chavez answers, thinking that this is good, because they’re talking about it. He can still call Munson on stuff, sure. Look how fucking grown-up they are.
“Well, excuse the fuck out of me,” Munson says, his mouth warping. “Didn’t mean to bring you fucking down.”
Chavez fucking hates it when Munson sounds like this. It doesn’t happen very often, which is a lucky thing, because it makes Chavez’s throat feel tight, makes him feel like there’s nothing he can do.
He swallows and tries not to get angry, though clearly that’s where Munson wants him, angry, blind and mean same as he is. “Look,” he attempts gently. “I know this isn’t going like you thought it would. I know how hard it is.”
Munson hits the fence with the side of his hand, branging the metal and it’s surprisingly loud. Chavez jumps but Munson barely even hears it.
“No,” Munson answers, and his voice is starting to go, get ragged and unsteady. “Fuck you, you do not know how hard this is. You have no fucking clue, and I’m not gonna let you stand there and say you do, you son of a bitch. You son of a bitch.” Munson says it a couple of more times, like slamming a car door over and over again to make sure it sticks.
“You have never been sixteen games under .500 in your fucking life, Eric. Never once have you played for three weeks and only won one motherfucking game. Not even when you came up in ’98 and they were already in last place, you were still closer to good than this fucking team will ever be. You can take your three postseason appearances and your division titles and your fucking compassion and just go fuck yourself. You have no idea.”
“Okay!” Chavez shouts, cutting him off. “Okay, fine, I’m fucking sorry, all right! Jesus. I’m just trying to help, for fuck’s sake.”
“You’re failing. Miserably,” Munson tells him cruelly, and not caring, because the Detroit Tigers have only won one game and he’s allowed to be cruel right now. It’s kinda nice. Freeing. In an agonizing sort of way.
Chavez’s expression tightens. “I’m not gonna feel bad because my team’s got a winning record. You can yell at me all you want, I’m still gonna be proud of it.”
“Well, fucking bully for you, man,” Eric Munson sneers, and he’s thinking that it must be nice to have something to be proud of.
Chavez goes to take his arm, but Munson pulls back and Chavez is left hanging, feeling stupid. “It . . . you’ll get better, Munce. The team. Sometimes it takes time. Most of the time, probably.”
“Not like you’d know anything about it,” and Munson is searching desperately for some line to cross, either to push them both over the edge or get them started on their way back. Something past this, either way, because this is unbearable.
Kinda wanting to hit the fence himself, feel the metallic rattle on his knuckles, Chavez makes his eyes thin and suspicious. He’s just trying to figure out how baseball could hurt his best friend this much. Trying to figure out what else could be wrong. “Is this about what I said when I was on that roof?”
Munson scoffs and looks at him incredulously. “Christ, Chavvy, not everything that goes wrong in my life has to do with you being an asshole.”
“Never figure that from how much you whine about it,” Chavez mutters, but it’s automatic and makes no real sense, because Munson doesn’t whine about it, he just lies back and does what Chavez tells him to. So Chavez doesn’t even bother trying to defend himself when Munson punches him hard on the arm, just sighs a little moan and closes his hand around the point of impact. There’s a lot of stuff that he knows he deserves.
“You’re just . . . you really want to take this out on me?” Chavez says, rubbing his arm. “I mean, you can, ‘cause, whatever, that’s what I’m here for. Whatever you need, and all. But. You know you’re not really mad at me.”
Munson’s face is all twisted up, and sure, that’s kind of true, but if he’s got an excuse to be mad at Eric Chavez guilt-free, then he really feels like he should take advantage of it. He wants to punch Chavez again. Maybe in the chest, thinking about the thump of his elbow making contact on the field. Chavez on the ground.
“Thanks a bunch, but don’t do me any favors, okay? I don’t need your permission to be mad at you.” Munson pulls a hand through his hair, and doesn’t think before he says, “Fuck, but I’m sick of you being so fucking superior all the time. You’ve been doing it since we were eighteen years old.”
“The fuck I have!” Chavez cries. “I never-”
“Oh, fuck you, you never,” Munson breaks in, thinking about the highway between San Diego and Los Angeles and Eric Chavez telling him, “you’ll fucking learn where you really fall.” Where you really fall, on a small tight loop in his mind, everything is flashing and he can’t keep up with it. All this stuff coming down around him, and maybe it’s just his turn to do the damage.
“It’s all over your face, it always is. You got your first place team and your pretty little life and you got me on the side because that’s the only place you want me.”
Eric Chavez touches his hand to his chest, hollow pain like he’s being struck hard, abstractly surprised to feel his heartbeat still going on under his palm. This sounds like something that been in the works for years now, pushing closer to the surface, but that’s fucking impossible, he would have seen it coming. It’s not true, it can’t be.
“But you . . . you got your, your. Your whole life, man. You too. Your good life, perfect life. This, it’s, you know, it’s just your game that’s not good right now. You got everything else.”
“None of it means anything if I don’t have my game,” and that’s another thing Munson didn’t expect to say, his anger suddenly cracking so hard he almost hears it. He falls on his shoulder against the fence, and steeples his fingers over his eyes. He focuses for a little while on holding himself together. He really doesn’t want to cry right now, not in this fucking parking lot, under this fucking sky.
“It’s been gone for so long, now, Eric, I can’t, I don’t.” Munson stops, and takes a deep breath. “I can’t hit. I can’t see anything. I thought it’d get better once I came up. I was sure. But it’s worse. It’s . . . so bad, man. It makes me hate you. For what you got. I don’t even wanna watch you play anymore.” He whispers it, astonished.
Chavez reaches out and takes Munson’s hand down, tugging at his wrist until he relents and lets it drop. Munson’s eyes stay shut, and Chavez replaces Munson’s hand with his own, his fingers light atop Munson’s eyelids, shimmering at the touch.
“You can hate me. That’s okay. You can blame it on me, I don’t mind.”
Munson shakes his head, sounds a low moan. “Only half of this is your fault,” he says and Chavez’s hand is cool on his face, restful.
Chavez half-smiles, feeling stupid and slow, like pieces of him have been removed and hammered out of form and then shoved back in place, uneven angles and awkward points. “Only half? Woulda thought at least three-quarters.”
Munson shivers, and then he grabs Chavez’s hand and pulls it down. His eyes are wide open and so bright it’s terrifying.
“Chavvy,” Munson says, his voice breaking. “Please help me. Eric. Please.”
Chavez stares at him for a long time. Then he looks away, watches the fuzz of car headlights behind the highway overpass on the far side of the stadium, the split second before the car crests the rise, when all he can see is the haze of light on the false horizon.
He turns back, and Munson’s eyes are still huge and scared. Chavez swallows past something thick in his throat, and he nods, thinking that they can do this, the two of them, they can fix anything.
“C’mon,” he whispers, and picks up Munson’s bag off the asphalt, hiking it over his shoulder. Munson smiles shakily, humiliated and relieved, and Chavez takes him across the bay to the batting cages stuck next to the highway in Redwood City, where Chavvy slips the security guy a hundred dollar bill to let them in and let them hit the floods.
He pitches to Munson all night long, under the cold neon lights, until Chavez’s arm is rubbery, numb with fatigue that will be a deep wrecking throb the next day, the next three days, gritting through it, not admitting it to anyone because they’ll just yell at him and call him a dumb motherfucker, which he probably is.
And Munson swings quick and he swings slow, he swings inside-out, at high pitches and low pitches and Chavez’s best attempt at a slider, his surprisingly good curveball, and they dissect his swing, his grip, his eye. Chavez tries to explain the inarticulate secrets of his own success, says over and over again, “see the ball into the bat, Munce, just like fielding, watch it hit.”
Chavez’s hands on Munson’s hips, pulling them sharply around, and Chavez’s hands covering Munson’s ears, forcing his head to stay in on the pitch, and Chavez kneeling at Munson’s feet, hands closed around Munson’s ankles, fixing his stance.
And Chavez behind Munson, arms wrapped around his body, their hands overlapped on the bat handle, Chavez breathing into Munson’s neck and blowing Munson’s hair out of his face, slowly swiveling them through the motion, Chavez’s knees chocked into the hollows at the backs of Munson’s, bodies pressed tight and Chavez doing his very best to ignore this, ignore everything.
They don’t talk about anything but baseball, at the batting cages that night. They don’t talk about their life or being in love or what either of them is owed by the other, because they’re getting their priorities straight.
There will be time for all the rest of it later, maybe nothing all that real because they said too much to each other today, they admitted stuff they should have kept hidden. Right now, baseball comes first. Eric Chavez remembers for the first time in a long time that baseball, really, baseball has always come first, no matter how they tried to change that.
They’re there all night, trying to figure out what’s gone wrong.
*
(slow down)
They get halfway there and then they turn back. They start to tell the truth and they end up not saying anything. There’s something very important happening between the two of them, the space of time and the distance between Detroit and Oakland, but they’re committed to not recognizing it.
After everything that’s gone wrong and all the bad they’ve done in each other’s names, Eric Munson goes back to his wife and Eric Chavez goes back to his girlfriend and it’s hard to say how much longer they’ll be able to hang on through this.
The Tigers keep losing, the A’s keep winning. They’re twenty-five years old and nothing’s the same.
Munson calls him just before the break and they talk about their families and rock concerts and old television shows and stuff that happened in the eighties. They try not to let it show. It’s a normal conversation like normal best friends must have, but when Munson hangs up the phone, he feels sick and there’s a moment there when he never wants to hear Eric Chavez’s voice again.
A few weeks later, Shanda tells him, “You don’t talk about Eric that much anymore,” and Munson just nods, eats cornflakes so that he won’t have to answer.
Chavez introduces Alex to his parents. She sleeps over almost every night when he’s in town, and they’re looking at apartments downtown. Mulder calls him a punk and pushes him in the pool when he says he’s thinking about moving out, but that doesn’t make Eric change his mind.
It’s the summer, it’s another season.
Sometime in August, it occurs to Eric Munson that this is the worst he’s going to feel for a long time, maybe forever. No matter what happens next year, it can’t hurt more than this. He’s suddenly a bit easier, because this is as bad as it’s going to get and he’s still getting up every morning.
He calls Eric Chavez, leaves a message that’s kinda apologetic and kinda impatient and kinda complicated. He talks for too long and keeps waiting for the beep to cut him off. At the end, he says, “So anyway, I’m being weird and introspective. I think you should call me.”
He checks his phone constantly, but Chavez doesn’t call back.
It’s not like they had a fight. It’s not like Eric Chavez shouldn’t be able to tell how deep this goes. He’ll never understand, he’s the blessed one, but he should at least be aware that Munson’s life is getting away from him.
But Eric Chavez is falling in love again. This is all very familiar. He’s got the same old tight feeling in his stomach, the fuck-it-up, fuck-it-up-for-good urge when he catches a stranger’s eyes in a bar, but he’s learning to look away.
It’s different, because Alex is sweet and funny and has him totally figured out. She brings him warm brown sugar and cinnamon Pop-Tarts in mornings and she drives around with a Chupa Chup in her mouth, and he leans over at stoplights and pulls the skinny plastic stick out, kisses her all candy-sweet and sticky. She tells him he’s good and he’s about ready to believe it.
He only wants to see her every day, and if he does, he’s okay. Even if he doesn’t, he’s still pretty okay, because she’s on the backs of his eyelids and the front of his mind and when he thinks about Eric Munson, when he hears Eric Munson’s message and erases it without a second thought or anything resembling guilt, when he thinks about Eric Munson, his best friend is hazy, sepia-toned, almost like something from the past. Which is maybe true, or on its way to being true, or something.
Chavez figures that the key to everything, all of this, is not just to burn your bridges but to make sure they’re ash when you walk away. You leave stuff behind, that’s fine. That’s how it’s supposed to be. He’s mature and his life is falling into place. He’s a day or two away from being normal again, and sane, and clean.
Munson’s tinged picture in his mind like a memory, Munson’s recorded voice from his phone, Munson in a SportsCenter highlight but only about once a month, and Chavez’s chest hurts with this slow faded pressure that he can almost get to enjoy.
He’s thinking about leaving people behind. He’s thinking about moving on.
Eric Munson is still waiting for him to call, but he’s given up expecting it. He thinks about all the stuff that’s happened, how it keeps ending and starting again and he can’t figure out why they can’t just stay away. He wonders, after all this, if they’re any different, any better off. He’s got Shanda and she loves him and he loves her, and Eric Chavez still has precedence. Professional baseball fucked everything up, but Eric Munson’s pretty sure it would have happened anyway.
He sees them at seventeen, broken noses in the desert, and eighteen on the basketball court the night before the draft.
Have they changed? Would he be able to tell if they had?
Munson hears someone say that the time you should leave is when you can’t remember why you came. He won’t sleep tonight, thinking about that.
*
(side-note)
In October of 2003, Eric Munson goes on a road trip. The terrible season is finally over, and the Oakland Athletics have burned their way into the playoffs for the fourth consecutive year, but Chavez and Munson haven’t spoken since before the All-Star break.
Chavez forgot Munson’s birthday. Or remembered and didn’t call. Something.
Everything feels very old and very tired, and most of this is nothing more than a memory. There’s an empty spot inside them both and maybe there wouldn’t be if none of this had ever started.
Munce starts in San Diego, visiting his parents, loops down into Mexico and comes back in Arizona, heads north up through the desert. He calls Shanda every day, when he’s getting gas, when he can’t sleep in southwestern motel rooms. She’s working and couldn’t come with him, so he buys her stupid tacky souvenirs from roadside stands and takes a lot of pictures.
He’s certain that he has no actual destination, except for Detroit again eventually, but when he finds himself driving over the Sierra Nevada Mountains just south of San Jose, he sighs and takes the exit for Oakland. The Red Sox are in town and the A’s have already won Game One.
Eric pulls into the driveway of the Alamo house, wedging a spot to park in between the sleek lines of the ballplayers’ cars, their ‘toys,’ the first rewards of their signing bonuses.
He steps out, thin-eyed and tired. It’s already warm in the East Bay, not yet ten in the morning and the branches of the trees heavy with the day, sagging and the leaves green like melted crayons.
There’s shape in the doorway of the house, a long body filling the space, and Munson waits for his eyes to adjust, color and shading slowly filling in. It’s Mark Mulder, one hip shot out against the frame, barefoot and watching him without expression.
Munson’s still kind of nervous around Mulder, though it’s not like they’re often in the same room. The simple fact of Mark Mulder’s existence irritates the fuck out of Eric Munson.
Mulder’s always giving him looks, which Munson can handle just fine, but he’s also always giving Chavez looks, deeply considering looks with his lazy half-closed blue eyes, slow drawn-out slips of Mulder’s arm around Chavez’s shoulders. And Munson remembers Chavez’s teeth against Mulder’s stomach, wobbling on the diving board, the chlorine explosion as they fell together.
Even though Chavez has assured him that despite his best attempts, Mulder never took him up on anything more than a friendship, Munce still can’t quite get past it. One day, maybe, someday Mark Mulder will have his blinders removed and see what’s being offered him, and it’s not like Chavez will turn him down.
In most things, Mulder’s as good as a man can get, and Munson doesn’t like to think about all the time Chavez and Mulder spend together, their years right down the hall from each other in all these identical ranch-style houses, the way Chavez falls in love quickly, in the blink of an eye, and nothing’s quite as attractive as a good slider.
Munson has not really been kept up to date on the course of Chavez’s life, recently.
He stops on the front path and hesitantly lifts a hand. Mulder tips his chin up slightly.
“Hello, Munson,” he says casually.
“Hello, Mulder,” Munson replies, jamming his hands in his pockets, digging his thumbs against the seams. He looks for a crutch or something, but there’s nothing. Mulder’s got a broken hip, but Munson’s not sure if it’s the hip tilted against the doorjamb or the other. Fuck if Mulder looks hurt. Fuck if Mark Mulder doesn’t look better hurt than just about everyone else looks healthy.
Mulder hooks an eyebrow. “What’re you doing here, man?”
Munson blinks, and entertains a brief paranoid fantasy of Chavez telling all his housemates to not let him in.
“I’m . . . looking for Chavez.”
Now it’s Mulder’s turn to pause. His motherfucker eyes temper, get a bit pitying. “He doesn’t live here anymore, Munce,” Mulder tells him quietly.
Munson just stares at him for a long moment, not understanding that. Eric woulda told him, he woulda said something.
Munson bites the inside of his cheek hard enough to taste blood, snaps out of it. “What?” he asks dumbly.
Mulder nods, leaning a shoulder against the doorframe, crossing his arms over his chest. “He got a place downtown with his girlfriend two months ago. Didn’t he tell you?”
His face hot, Munson pulls his eyes away, shrugging uncomfortably. “’Course he did, yeah. Yeah. Guess I forgot.”
Mulder’s eyebrow ticks again, but he doesn’t call Munson on it. He jerks his head towards the inside. “Well, c’mon. I got the address somewhere.”
Munson follows him in, head down and shoulders drawn up. Mulder only limps a little bit, so slightly that Munson wouldn’t have noticed if he wasn’t looking for it.
The Alamo house is the same as the Lafayette house, the Walnut Creek house, any of the places Chavez has ever lived. There are white stucco walls and piles of shoes in the front hallway. It’s still sparsely furnished, everything rented, a rat’s nest of black and gray wires around the big screen in the living room, connecting the DVD player and the Xbox and the Playstation 2 and the Tivo and god knows what else.
The kitchen’s barren, a clatter of dirty dishes in the sink and a rank of empty liquor bottles on the high shelf over the refrigerator. Mulder goes digging in a drawer filled with ragged scraps of paper, most of them phone numbers scammed off girls in bars. Munson shifts from foot to foot, scratches at the inside of his pocket. His cheek hurts where he bit it, and he feels pretty stupid.
A kinda familiar voice suddenly rings down the hall, getting closer. “Mulder! Your goddamn shower’s broken again!”
Munson starts, his hands coming half out of his pockets, and he whips his head around, feeling so on edge he’s about to fall right off.
Barry Zito walks in without a shirt on, a pair of blue-striped pajama pants slung low on his hips, his hair a soft just-awoken wreck. He stops short, seeing Munson standing there and stealing glances out of the corner of his eye.
“Oh. Munson,” Zito says with a flat lack of welcome, and his eyes zip over to Mulder for a half-instant. Then a well-known stupid grin breaks on his face. “Munce! How’s it going, dude?” He holds out his hand for Munson to slap, claps him on the arm, playing the old-teammate-reunion card to its fullest, as if the two of them ever even halfway liked each other.
Munson shrugs. “Pretty good. How . . . how’re you doing?” he answers hesitantly, and he’s stammering a little bit, awfully nervous, trying to keep his eyes above Zito’s neck. That day in the USC locker room seems very long ago, like maybe it happened to two other guys. He tries to remember what it was like when all he wanted to do was hit Zito in the face, and it’s a hollow space inside him, a gap.
Zito bobs his head. “Good as ever.”
“He’s looking for Chavvy,” Mulder interjects over his shoulder, up to his wrists in torn bits of paper.
Zito looks confused. “Chavvy doesn’t live here anymore.”
Mulder snorts. “Yes, thank you.”
Munson’s eyes switch between the two of them, certain things becoming clear to him and certain fears being laid to rest. And at the same time he wants to sneer, curl his lip up and spit on the kitchen floor. This is all so fucking predictable, they couldn’t even go for the surprise twist ending.
Zito goes to rummage in a cabinet, pushing boxes of cereal around, and Munson sees the finger-shaped bruises on his lower back, three on each side. Inches between each purpled mark-big hands.
“Hey.”
Munson flicks his attention back, his face coloring darkly, aware that he’s been caught staring, and Mulder’s looking at him coldly, be-fucking-careful-man. Munce swallows hard, but Mulder just holds out the piece of paper with Chavez’s address scribbled on it, and Munson takes it, stuffing it in his pocket.
“Right, well . . .” Munson trails off, clears his throat. Mulder’s gone to sit at the table, flapping open the paper and Munson can’t see his face. One of Mulder’s legs is propped up on a chair, resting like a bridge. He doesn’t look injured at all. “See ya later.”
Zito toasts him with a dripping spoon, grinning his axe-murderer grin. “Later, Munce.”
Just before he leaves, knowing he shouldn’t, Munson asks as if with someone else’s voice, “Hey, deuce, are you . . . are you living here now?”
The paper obscuring Mulder rustles minutely. Zito’s face is closed off, but he smiles easily enough. “Nah. Mulder just decided I was too drunk to drive last night.”
From behind the sports section: “I didn’t write the fucking law, Z.”
Munson thinks, ‘yeah well fuck it,’ and says “bye,” but they’re not paying attention to him anymore. They’re two wins away from the league championship series. They’ve got more important things to worry about. There are reasons this kind of shit stays secret, anyway.
Munson goes back through the frat-boy house and into the struck heat of the morning. He drives down out of the hills and he’s heading for Chavez’s new place, this girlfriend-shared place, but instead he finds himself in the parking lot of a 7-Eleven, sitting there for a long time with both hands on the wheel, watching people go in and come out with Slurpees and lidded cups of coffee.
He goes inside to get a book of paper matches, earns a scowl from the clerk for not buying anything, and out in the little parking lot, he drops to his catcher’s crouch on the blistered asphalt, lighting the scrap of paper and holding it until the flames lick at his fingers.
He drops the ashed remains of Chavez’s address and grounds it to powder under his shoe, and then he gets back in his car and drives west over the bridge, cursing steadily and wiping his eyes with the side of his hand, the world long-since sunk underwater by the time he gets to the ocean.
(end part thirteen)
*
part fourteen