i refuse to accept blame for the winds off the coast
right, so. eric chavez gets involved, at least peripherally. i like this story, it's pretty much exactly what i wanted it to be. where the situation is gonna kill you, but not just yet. i foresee that in about a month, the zito in this story will be fucked up beyond recognition, but for now he's still okay.
yes yes. makes me miss my brothers. aw.
Title: Everybody’s Got A Crush On Eric Chavez
Author: Candle Beck
Email: meansdynamite@yahoo.com
Category: MLB, Oakland A’s
Pairing: Barry Zito/Eric Chavez (Who’s surprised I wrote something other than Zito/Mulder? Because I sure am.)
Rating: PG
Archive: Let a kid know.
Feedback: Absolutely.
Disclaimer: The boys don’t belong to me. Neither does the girl. But if they did, I’d have a baseball team *and* a rock band, and that would be pretty sweet.
Summary: He didn’t have the person he wanted most of all, but he knew who it was that he wanted most of all, and that was a pretty okay thing.
Everybody’s Got A Crush On Eric Chavez
By Candle Beck
After surfing, Zito hauled his board up the skinny winding dirt path from the beach to the parking lot on the cliff where his car was. He shook himself like a dog, his eyes scrunched shut as his wet hair flipped back and forth, getting the worst of the water off. It was late afternoon in Santa Cruz, and the families, some of which had come from as far away as Modesto in search of the beach, were beginning to pack up their chaotically-colored beach towels and big straw picnic baskets, little kids running around in bare feet, as brown and slippery as seals, yelling to their newfound playmates in Spanish and English, understanding each other perfectly even when they were speaking different languages.
Zito hit speed-dial number four on his cell and leaned back against his car, holding the phone to his ear, listening to the muffled clicks and whirs of the connection going through.
The voice that picked up was bright and so well-known that a smile came to his lips instinctively.
“Hello?”
“Hey, Sal.”
“Barry!” his sister exclaimed happily, and Zito loved that Sally always seemed so glad to hear from him.
“How’re you doing?” he asked, watching cars leaving the parking lot, threading out slowly, inching onto the road.
“I’m doing good. Got a gig to play at the Sunset this weekend,” Sally answered, a touch of sibling smugness sneaking into her voice.
“No way!” Zito said. “Dude, I’m so jealous. Everyone cool plays the Sunset.”
Sally liked to tease Zito about the rock star life he had given up to become a pitcher. Zito usually let her, because most families could only bear one rock star, and his sister had had that staked out since she was ten years old.
Sally laughed, and said, “Hey, you’re doing all right, though. Saw part of the Angels game last night. You were on.”
Remembering the game, the muscle memories, the ghostly remnant soreness in his arm, the smell of French fries smothered white with vinegar, which had come to him with startling force right when he struck out Troy Glaus in the fifth, Zito responded, “Yeah, I was on until about the seventh, when my arm started feeling like jelly and I was basically throwing underhand, for all the velocity I was putting on the ball.”
Zito could almost hear Sally rolling her eyes. “If you’re going to fish for compliments, you should just call Mom.”
Zito laughed, scuffing at the ground with his foot. “Hey, have you heard that Dad wants to buy a boat? What’s up with that?”
Sally answered, “Yeah, like, way to have a midlife crisis and decide to become a sailor, Dad.”
Grinning, Zito leaned down to pick up a little silvery-gray rock and sling it sidearm over the cliff. The rock cartwheeled down, splashing into the water with a small explosion of foam and spray.
“I don’t think we gotta worry, though,” he continued. “I mean, Mom still likes him okay, so she’ll probably not let him go off on some crazy sea-faring escapade that ends with him drowned or, you know, piratized.”
“Our dad, scourge of the seven seas. Bluebeard Zito.”
“It’s got a ring to it.”
Sally chuckled, then asked, “So what else is going on?”
Zito kicked absently at the car’s tire, feeling the hollow rubber thud. He looked out towards the ocean, looking for Japan on the horizon just like he always did.
“Well, I think I’ve got a crush on Eric Chavez.”
He expected silence, or some noise of shock. Sally knew, of course, as did their whole family, that Zito occasionally found himself drawn to men in a way that wasn’t really concrete or analyzed enough to be called an orientation. Just a . . . tendency, which focused itself on the clean strong lines of shoulders and the scratch of stubble on his skin. His family hadn’t been too surprised; his mother had actually had a bigger reaction to him coming home with blue hair than him coming home with a boy named Michael and a bite mark on his neck.
But having a crush on Eric Chavez was a little different than having a crush on most every other guy, and Zito had expected some sort of reaction. He wasn’t expecting Sally to reply unconcernedly, “Everybody’s got a crush on Eric Chavez.”
“Yeah, but . . . wait, what do you mean, everybody’s got a crush on him?”
Sally’s shrug came over the phone lines as clearly as her answer, “What, you’ve never seen those sixteen year old girls with the ‘I heart Chavez’ T-shirts? You think those were all coincidence?”
Zito scratched his head, his hair thick with salt from surfing and still a bit damp, several shades darker than it was usually. “But those are just like . . . fans. Fans wear all sorts of crazy stuff. Do other people have crushes on him also?”
“Sure. Barry, he’s a good-looking young athlete who’s got a glove with sixth-sense and the ability to hit the ball into the stands. How are people not supposed to have crushes on him?”
Zito narrowed his eyes. “You’ve got a crush on him, too, don’t you?”
Sally didn’t bother trying to deny it, just said, “He’s a very handsome man, Barry.”
Zito slumped back against the car, moaning melodramatically, “I knoooow. He’s like, idiotically good-looking. And, like, really nice? And funny? And wonderful? He’s pretty much perfect. It’s driving me a little crazy, maybe.”
“Well, you didn’t have very far to go.”
“Oh, ha ha. Very amusing. Thanks for the support, I’m real glad I called you.”
His sister shifted the phone, a soft brush of static, then argued, “I’m supportive. I’m full of support. Come on, tell me about it.”
Zito sighed, picking at the hem of his shirt. There were wet spots on his lower back and at his collar, where his hair brushed the fabric. “I don’t know, it’s just like, he’s always been really cool, you know? Like, he’s that cool, popular guy in high school that everybody wanted to be friends with, and he was friends with everybody. And you kind of half want him to turn out to be a jerk, because he’s so popular and everything, but then he totally turns out to be the nicest guy you’ve ever met. You know that kind of guy?”
“Yeah. His name was Jack Darvoth, when I was in school. God, he was an awesome kid. Used to have parties at his parents’ lake house, all the time. Spent half a summer there.”
Zito smiled a bit at the tangent, before trying to draw her back on track. “Okay, that’s great, but we’re not really done with my thing yet. You know? Chavez? And the love that dare not speak its name?”
Sally laughed at that. “Wow, you just went like, nineteenth century on me for a second.”
“Just trying to be eloquent.”
“Oh, you’ve succeeded. If succeeding means failing miserably.”
Zito widened his eyes in a pretense of outrage, though he knew Sally couldn’t see it, and said, half-sarcastically, “Jeez, I don’t know how I’ve gotten by without your hilarious wit to keep me company.”
“You know you miss it,” Sally answered, and part of Zito agreed with her, though it was not the part that had any vote in what he ended up saying.
Picking up the thread, Sally said, “So you’ve got a crush on Eric Chavez. You gonna put the moves on him?”
A surprised laugh burst out of him, and Zito shot back, “Oh, yeah, that’s the next thing I’m gonna do. Tomorrow in the dugout, I’m gonna go right up to him and do that dumb movie theatre yawning thing where you stretch your arm out and real subtly put it around his shoulders. Then I’m gonna ask him to wear my varsity letter jacket and we can hold hands in homeroom.”
Amused by the image he had painted, Zito smiled, and briefly pictured what would happen if he *did* put his arm around Chavez’s shoulders in the dugout. It was funny until he began wondering what it would feel like to have Chavez tucked against him, the angles of their bodies resting together like puzzle pieces. Then he felt a little dizzy and flushed, and he resolutely turned his mind away from thoughts of Chavez’s body and the easy comfort he could imagine there.
Sally answered, her tone dubious, “Those are your moves? The yawning thing? That’s really lame. How in the world do you get people to go out with you?”
Zito shrugged, “I usually just sort of keep bumping into them sideways until they get annoyed and start dating me to avoid further injury.”
“Good method.”
“Yeah, it works.”
There was a moment of silence, then Sally said, in that no-nonsense way of hers that brooked very little argument, “You should put the moves on him anyway. Not those particular moves, because . . . lame. But better moves. You do *have* better moves, right?”
Zito, feeling a little silly talking about his hook-up strategies with his sister, answered, “Well, yeah. Kind of. But I can’t put the moves on him. It’d be total catastrophe.”
“How come?”
Zito searched his sister’s voice for any sign of joking, but she seemed totally sincere. “What do you mean? I’d put the moves on him, then he’d laugh or hit me or get Mulder to hit me or something. And then the whole team would know. Thus, catastrophe.”
“Why would he get Mulder to hit you? Doesn’t Chavez do his own dirty work?”
Sally often latched onto the strangest parts of a conversation. Zito responded, “Well, they’re housemates. And Mulder’s bigger than me. I’m sure Chavez would call in a favor to get Mulder to kick my ass. Promise to do his laundry or something.”
The first faint streaks of sunset appeared on the horizon, creeping flushes of pink and orange, the sun a huge red blaze, just beginning to sink into the ocean. Down south aways, in Carmel, everyone went to the beach to watch the sunset, and when it had finally ducked all the way down, the heart-stopping sprawl of colors painting the sky darkening into night, the shadowed people would applaud and call out “Author! Author!” like they might do at a play, as if they were expecting God to step out from behind the curtain and take a bow.
Sally, three hundred miles away beside the same ocean, asked, “But why would he want you beat up? I mean, he doesn’t really seem like that kind of guy, you know? And who says he wouldn’t be all, awesome! And jump your bones?”
Zito rolled his eyes, a grin tugging at his mouth. “That would be cool. But somehow, I doubt it.”
Sally sighed, saying, “So pessimistic. You always think the worst is gonna happen.”
Fiddling with the windshield wiper, Zito sighed too, echoing Sally. It was beginning to get chilly, the last of the day’s surfers and sunbathers shivering, their bodies patterned with rashes of goosebumps. Zito was tired and the exertion of the day was dragging on him a bit, his muscles quietly throbbing. He was a little sad, but in a good way, a kind of vague distracted pain in his heart, because he didn’t have the person he wanted most of all, but he knew who it was that he wanted most of all, and that was a pretty okay thing.
“It’s not pessimism. Nothing can happen. He’s entirely straight. Like, arrow straight. Like, he was married, and divorced pretty bitterly. Like, we have to beat him off from girls at bars. Really, very, super straight,” Zito explained.
Sally made a slightly dismissive sound. “Oh, whatever. I’m sure that’s what everyone says about you, too. You don’t know for sure he wouldn’t be into it.”
Zito thought of the girl Chavez had picked up the week before in Seattle. She had been pretty, soft brown hair and a worn red hooded sweatshirt that looked more comfortable than anything Zito owned. She talked with her hands, and her mouth and eyes were older than the rest of her, making her look wise in the way of smart young women. She had known who Billy Martin was and actively worried about whether hanging out with a bunch of Oakland Athletics was a betrayal of her Mariners. She’d been a very neat girl. Zito had liked her a lot. He wondered if Chavez ever called her back. Probably he had. Chavez was a good guy like that.
“Trust me on this one, Sal. I tell him how I feel, there’s gonna be an Eric Chavez-shaped hole in the wall of the clubhouse, ‘cause he’s gonna be running away from me as fast as he can.”
He sighed again, spreading out his hand on the warm metal of the car, and Sally said, her voice lowering a bit, more serious, “Listen, Barry, I know I joke around and everything, but you’ll be okay, you know. Crushes, they go away.”
Zito nodded, but he was thinking of Chavez’s unassisted double play in the game a few days ago, the rocket line drive, extra bases for sure, that Chavez had somehow managed to fling his glove in the way of, laying himself full out, for a moment his whole body stretched and flying off the ground, his shadow bisected by the white foul line, then the ball slapped into the mesh and Chavez had crashed, skidding, scraping his elbows and smearing brown dirt on the front of his jersey, before he had wrenched himself to his knees and made a headfirst dive to smack his glove on third base, barely catching off the runner who had broke halfway down the line at contact.
Zito was thinking of Chavez defying gravity, and the wide grin on his dusty face after he had clambered up and taken his position back at third, bouncing lightly on the balls of his feet, pounding his glove, because he knew he had done good, and he was waiting for the chance to do some more.
“Yeah, I know,” Zito answered, wondering where Chavez was now, if he was watching the sunset somewhere. It’s the same ocean everywhere in California, the same shore running pale down the end of the country, the same sparkling water that bound them all together. “It’s just hard, you know? Because I see him every day, and then if I don’t see him, I end up thinking about him, and I know nothing could ever happen, because he’s not . . . not like me, but the weird thing is, I don’t really *want* this crush to go away. I kind of like it. It’s hopeless, I know, but it’s a good feeling. Like, the fact that he’s there, that I get to see him, it makes me happy.”
Sally took a moment, and when she spoke again, her voice was edging concerned, “Hey, you’ve just got a crush on him, right? I mean, you haven’t done anything stupid like fall in love with him, right?”
Zito blushed, looking down at his feet. “Because falling in love is such a voluntary action,” he replied, trying to laugh it off.
But Sally wasn’t biting. “Have you?” she asked seriously.
Zito rubbed the back of his neck and scoffed, “I haven’t fallen in love with a guy since I was seventeen years old.”
Sally snorted, and said with sarcasm dripping from her voice, “Oh, and congratulations on that. Real accomplishment.”
“You *just* said it’d be stupid of me to fall in love with a guy!” Zito protested.
“No, stupid if you’ve fallen in love with Chavez, not stupid if you’d fallen in love with just any guy.”
Squinting, the sun melting into the sea, Zito asked, “What’s so wrong with Chavez?” though he already knew the answer.
Sally began to tick them off, “One, he’s a teammate. Two, he is, for all the evidence we have, and by your own admission, really really straight. Three, he’s just getting past a rough divorce. Four . . . well, there is no four. But if there was, it’d be a really good reason.”
“I’ll bet.”
“Don’t think I didn’t notice that you haven’t answered the question,” she continued, not letting him off the hook.
“Which question?” Zito replied lamely.
“Oh, sure, play dumb. It suits you. The question of have you fallen in love with Eric Chavez?”
Zito didn’t answer for a moment, staring out over the cliff. The beach was nearly empty. There was a kid way off down the rocks, his jeans rolled up to his knees, the thick cuffs soaked, carefully moving across the jagged stones, waiting for the tide to come and go, and when he straightened, his thin silhouette was punched out against the water, his hands full of shells and his hair sticking straight up.
Zito cleared his throat, and answered cautiously, “It’s . . . possible.”
Sally’s voice was surprised and subdued, as she said, “Oh. Damn. That sucks, Barry.”
Zito laughed a little bit, at the absurdity of the situation, the unreasonable nature of his heart, and responded, “I know.”
Being in love, this was a good thing. Being in love with a straight man, this was not so much a good thing. But still, he was in love. Sometimes that’s all you need.
“So, what’re you gonna do?” Sally asked, her words careful with sympathy and curiosity.
Zito shrugged, “Keep being his friend, I guess. Keep playing with him and being thankful for the fact that the guy I’m secretly in love with is so cool.”
Sally laughed a little bit, because it wasn’t such a terrible thing. “He is pretty cool.”
Zito smiled, adding, “He’s also got really good taste in music.”
“Barry, what did I tell you about falling for people because of their music tastes?”
“Do it as often as possible?”
“Yes. Exactly,” Sally confirmed, and their simultaneous smiles at the neat alley-oop joined them over the distance that separated them.
After a moment, Sally said, clearly trying to shake the drifting morose mood of their conversation, “All right, well. If that’s the way it’s gonna be, we should at least make the best of it. Can I start making jokes about the hot corner?”
Zito grinned, replying firmly, “No.”
“How ‘bout the inherent hilarity of trying to get to third base with a third baseman?”
He couldn’t hold in his laugh on that one, chuckling briefly, then said, “How ‘bout you shut up?”
“How ‘bout you and Eric use ‘Take Me Out to the Ballgame’ as your song?” Sally fired back.
Snickering in a pretty constant way at this point, Zito kept up the ricochet of their banter, “How ‘bout the fact that you suck?”
“How ‘bout the fact that you smell?” Sally answered, and Zito hadn’t heard that comeback since the third grade.
“I do not!” he denied, laughter tracing his voice.
“Dude, I can smell you from L.A. You reek.”
At that, Zito pretty much dissolved into giggles, and by the time he caught his breath, he was light-headed and a little woozy, his stomach aching, feeling content.
After they had both settled down a bit, Zito said, “Okay, well, I guess I should let you go. I’ve gotta drive back to San Francisco, and I don’t want to take Highway 17 too late at night.”
“Very wise,” Sally answered sagely.
“Thanks for talking, though, Sal. Sorry if I went all emotional on you.”
“Hey, it’s what I’m here for.” She paused, then said, “You’re gonna be okay, Barry.”
Zito smiled, feeling tears prick at his eyes, and he nodded as he blinked them away, before he said what he always said when he was saying good-bye to Sally.
“Bye, big sis.”
“Bye, little bro,” she answered, the same as she’d always done, making Zito feel small and safe and well-loved.
Zito turned off his phone and put it in his pocket, then sat on the bumper of his car for a long time, staring out at the ocean as the sun set, thinking about dark-eyed third basemen and all the things he had ever wished for.
THE END
The moral: Go call your family. They miss you.