pretty sure huddy could destroy zito's curve, alas.
I am slightly torn, but only slightly. The only reason to wish I was back in DC, clearly. No, I shouldn't say that. That city was damn good to me. And though I do enjoy the FIRST-PLACE WASHINGTON NATIONALS, as evidenced by the dozen times we got out to RFK in a month and a half, the FIRST-PLACE WASHINGTON NATIONALS do not take priority over certain others. The FIRST-PLACE WASHINGTON NATIONALS will have to wait until the weekend for me to re-dedicate myself. As they are the FIRST-PLACE WASHINGTON NATIONALS, I think they'll be fine.
Sadly, Hudson will not pitch against the A's in Atlanta. That's a shame, yo, sincerely.
Well, Zito cut his hair. (Thank you, babe. You look fabulous.) So, as promised.
Snuck another Bull Durham quote in this one. That movie’s got me totally whipped. Bonus points for those who can identify it.
And yeah. Someone help me figure out what's wrong with this story. There's something, doubtless.
Blind Against the White
Zito got caught out in the rain once. Cleveland or Chicago, or wherever it was, and the club was right down the street from the hotel and the streets were dry when they went in, but that didn’t last.
The other guys left early, left Zito with a crowd around him because that’s where Zito belonged, and he didn’t leave until the lights came on. At the front entrance, there was a bottleneck and everybody was pushing forward, shouting, “fuckin’ move, come on,” and then they saw the weather and started shouting, “motherfucker” in the general direction of the universe.
Up and down the sidewalk, indie-rock kids in hoodies and sneakers taped up like baseballs hunched their shoulders and got one cigarette lit to light five more, because no way could you get a lighter going more than once in that wind. Grown-ups in expensive overcoats hailed cabs desperately, busted umbrellas twisted like torn-off wings in the gutters. Packs of people crushed together at the bus stop, turning their faces into a stranger’s back to keep out of it.
Zito didn’t have anything, not a raincoat or an umbrella or anything. He was wearing a red shirt with gold stitching, and a brand-new suede jacket that he was not about to see ruined. The hotel was maybe eight blocks away; it was three in the morning.
Zito tucked his money in the waist of his boxers so it wouldn’t get wet, and stuck himself close against the wall, the short overhang doing very little to keep him safe. He called everyone on the team who wouldn’t kill him for the hour, begging them to bring him a raincoat or a garbage bag he could fashion into a poncho, or in some other way save him, but Hudson didn’t pick up and neither did Byrnes, and Chavez said, “get your own self home, jesus,” and Mulder barely spared the breath to laugh at him before hanging up.
It took him better than an hour to go those eight blocks. He would run to an awning, an alcove, whatever, and wait until the rain let up a bit, then he’d run again. He’d watch for the rain falling in front of headlights and streetlamps; he could only ever see it when it was backlit. He watched the puddles and the sewer grates, small biblical floods carrying leaves and razor blades and empty bottles.
It took him more than an hour, but he got back, got in a shitload of trouble for missing curfew, his shoes and the cuffs of his jeans soaked, his hair damp and all fucked up by the wind, his new jacket unharmed.
Zito tells that story drunk one night, and no one’s sure what the point is. Zito’s stories always have points, though, morals and punchlines, which makes him easy to listen to and hard to understand, so there’s probably something they’re missing.
*
Danny Haren, like Barry Zito and Bobby Crosby and Eric Chavez and Mark Kotsay and a bunch of the others, grew up in Southern California. So he understands about weather, or the lack thereof, and how it can catch you by surprise, knock you down.
He spent a long time in A-ball in Peoria, and they have weather in Illinois. Lots of weather, terrible arid humidity and lightning storms and tornado warnings on the radio. He never really got around to appreciating it, because it was one more thing to think about, one more thing to be prepared for.
Haren had trouble sleeping when it was raining. He figured he’d grow out of that, though. He’d live in St. Louis and get used to it because he’d have no choice. It would become restful, and soothing, and all the things it was supposed to be, rattling on his windows and washing in sheets down his windshield. He just needed time.
Then he was a footnote in the trade that stopped the world dead in its tracks, and when he woke up to Billy Beane on the television and on his voicemail, the thing Haren remembers thinking most clearly was that at least he wouldn’t have to deal with fucking seasons anymore.
*
The first day in Phoenix, it’s overcast and the air is as dry as straw. Haren is accustomed to spring training in the depths of coastal Florida, but this is without a doubt better. When the sky clears at noon, there’s the kind of sun where you can feel your skin getting darker, sharp and targeted.
The new training facility is right next to the zoo. Like, literally, across the street. Haren has always liked zoos, so that seems like a good sign. His hand gets shook a lot. Haren was still in Triple-A when the A’s played the Cardinals in interleague last year, so he doesn’t really know them, and is abjectly humiliated when he accidentally gets Eric Chavez mixed up with one of the sure-to-be-cut utility men.
And he keeps looking past Zito without seeing him for about an hour, until a few of them start tossing a ball around idly in their street clothes, and Haren recognizes the fall of Zito’s hand, remembering his face a second later, because not too far back, everybody in baseball learned who Barry Zito was and what he looked like.
They get right back to the game and that never changes. Danny’s been joining and leaving teams for five years now, bounced around the Midwest in search of some inland ocean that would solve all his problems.
But wherever he finds himself on the first day of spring, all the baselines are the same length they’ve always been, still sixty feet six and a hundred and eight, still six-four-three behind him, the plate is still seventeen inches across and the ball still weighs five ounces. Haren still throws four pitches and still wears the number 24 on his back. It’s nice to be able to count on that, cold hard statistics, immutable to wind and rain.
So he’s the same too, looking back from the mirror, same blue eyes, same hair that turns Oriental black when it’s wet, same narrow face and big hands. Everything adds up and nobody plays for one team for their whole career anymore, it’s unheard of. These guys, these new teammates of his, it’s like they never learned that, even the ones who’ve played for other teams themselves. There’s a continuing strain of shock and betrayal among them that makes no sense, but Danny Haren’s just trying to make friends.
When all the pitchers are sitting on the outfield grass waiting for the coaches to get their act together, Rich Harden, who Danny already knows he’s gonna like a whole lot, leans towards him and says, “I’d like to outnumber the lefties this year, so try real hard to make the rotation, all right?”
Haren grins and agrees. It won’t be hard. The camp is stacked with righties, they’ve invaded. Everybody except Zito and Meyer, really, not counting the back-to-Double-A invitees just here for variety, and nobody’s paying much attention to Meyer.
Many of those who’ve been around for awhile (which is largely everybody) walk around with fearful looks on their faces, but Haren has chosen not to pay attention to that. Pitching for Oakland is not like pitching for St. Louis, because all Oakland is, is pitching. He’s shown up in the middle of an unrewarded dynasty. Or, right after the end of one. It’s still unclear, because it’s only spring training.
*
By the time the season starts, Zito’s hair is very long. Longer than Haren’s last girlfriend’s, actually, though that’s weird to think about. Zito flicks his head to get it out of his eyes, and has a red and yellow beanie that he wears to keep it tucked back.
He gets teased about it a lot, and for reasons that are not explained to Haren, Tim Hudson seems to be to blame for the whole surfer shag thing, and Haren tries to make that work in his mind, maybe this is Zito’s version of mourning a loss, maybe it’s penance. None of what he comes up with sounds too plausible, though. Tim Hudson is the reason Zito’s hair is so long, and that’s just the way things are, at least until they go to Atlanta for interleague.
Haren, who can’t say shit because his own hair is past his collar, has a mildly unsettling dream the second week of April. There’s a ballpark and a wide purple sky, and Haren fists his hand in Zito’s hair, way down deep in it, winding tightly, and leads Zito somewhere like that, Zito moving under his arm and against his side.
He wakes up feeling like the broad stretch of the Arizona desert has slid into his throat, and drinks water from the bathroom sink out of his cupped hands, soaking his T-shirt and taking it off. He drinks too fast and his chest starts to feel fluorescent white, so he lies on the bathroom floor until the pain fades, and stares up at the ceiling, wishing that Zito would just get his fucking hair cut, already.
*
Bobby Crosby doesn’t like him.
Haren learns that real early, because Crosby’s not very discreet about it. He never came up in Phoenix and said, “hey man, good to have you,” like all the others, never brought Haren a Gatorade from the cooler when he was already bringing back for everybody else, never bought Haren a welcome-to-the-team drink or pointed out some girl who was checking him out from across the club. Crosby never talks to Haren, and when they’re in a group together, he looks at everybody else but never at Danny.
Haren’s worried, because he sees what Crosby means to this team. He’s not like Chavez, who’s been here so long that they take him for granted, and he’s not like Zito, who walks around smiling harmlessly at everyone and is forgotten a second after he’s gone.
Haren watches and figures it out, and he can see it because he’s new, he’s got nothing to compare it to. Crosby is very important to the team this year, as the heart or the soul or the future or something, and if Crosby doesn’t like him, he’s pretty much screwed.
Crosby gets hurt on Opening Day, which is kinda helpful, because Crosby’s not around as much, can’t dislike him quite so publicly. There’s a day or two when Crosby doesn’t seem to like anyone, and then a constant forced smile that barely sticks to his face. Haren doesn’t know if Crosby’s ribs hurt, if he’s able to sleep at night, and it’s not like he’s about to ask.
“It’s not you,” Harden tells him. They have become friends, him and Rich, just like Haren thought they would. Harden pulls on his undershirt, tugging it flat across his chest and stomach. “It’s Mulder.”
Haren has recently learned that he cannot stand talking about Mark Mulder. He never even met the guy, but still. He sags back. “He’s not even here anymore.”
Harden half-grins. “Yeah, man, exactly. Bobby, he’s kinda. Doesn’t deal with disappointment well. He isn’t used to not getting what he wants.” Harden shrugs. “And he looks at you and all that he sees is that you’re not Mark, and, well.”
Haren scowls at the floor. “That’s not my fault.”
“He’s just a kid. He’ll get over it.” Haren looks up and Harden is buttoning his jersey, ducking a bit to peer in the little mirror he’s got stuck up in his locker, licking his fingers and smoothing them over a ruff of hair poking out from the side of his head. Harden rarely seems to register that he’s only twenty-three years old himself, almost two full years younger than Crosby, and you’d never know it from how he talks, the way he keeps his shoulders up.
“How much is it gonna fuck you guys up this year, not having them around?” Haren asks, and he hears his dad in his head, telling him not to ask questions he doesn’t want to hear the answers to. But Haren doesn’t have that kind of restraint.
Harden gives him a tired smile. “Oh, pretty good, I think. Some of us more than others, of course. You don’t know how it was. I mean, Zito alone-”
Harden abruptly stops talking, and Haren follows his gaze to Zito, over by the candy rack talking to Curt Young. Zito is still fighting for his strength to come back, everyone can see that, and there’s a baseball held so tightly in his hand that his knuckles blend right in.
Sighing, Harden continues, “It’s gonna be a long year.” He shakes his head. “Every year’s a long year.”
*
Zito stole a car once.
Well, not really, but that’s how he starts the story because it makes him sound badass. He was sixteen, having a terrible week, and there was something in the water at this party, something laced in the jay he’d been handed. He wasn’t in his right mind, all sorts of fucked up, and he fell down on his knees in the hallway, cried against the carpet with his hands in his hair, awful neon pictures in his head.
And he ran off, late enough that no one noticed, found his buddy’s car keys in the grass where they’d sat in a circle and had a power hour. Zito was wearing a shirt that didn’t belong to him, a long tear over the left shoulder, his face flushed and still damp.
He unlocked his buddy’s car and took all the quarters out of the coin tray, and he had visions of Mexico, a true escape, get these fucking colors out of his eyes, sweat the drugs out of his system and be okay again, but he only made it a block.
He rolled the car up on the curb, and stalled out, because he could only drive a manual in theory. The whole world tilted sideways, and it wouldn’t right itself no matter what he tried, so he crawled in the back and curled up, bare feet kicking at the door. He pulled his shirt half-off, up over his head so it covered his face, and fell asleep. The worst nightmare he ever had, he had that night, but he couldn’t remember the specifics, just that he’d been terrified beyond reason, and his heart had nearly stopped.
In the morning, he got woken up by his buddy pounding his fist on the window and hollering at him, muffled through the glass. He was never allowed to drive anyone else’s car ever again, and declared himself to be off pot for good, but that didn’t last till noon, because the only real cure for a hangover is bong rips.
It wasn’t badass at all, just a stupid fucked-up kid without a name for the shit he was on, a kid having a rough night and not even able to successfully run away. So, really, kinda pathetic.
Haren thinks about Zito passed out in the back of his friend’s car, some neighborhood street in San Diego, and when Zito was sixteen, Haren was fourteen, off getting into trouble himself, a two-hour drive north.
*
Haren watches tape a lot, because there are literally hundreds of players that he has to learn now, a whole new league. At the Coliseum, they just re-did the basement, white walls and clean yellow lights, nothing smudged or dimmed. That’s where the video room is, the basement.
Joe Blanton comes down looking for someone to drawl at, but Haren’s deeply involved in an A’s-Twins game from last year, and he keeps saying, “uh-huh. Uh-huh. Sure, Joey, yeah,” until Blanton gets impatient and leaves, telling Haren, “You can’t learn baseball like that, hoss.”
Haren thinks that’s probably true, because he’s not really watching the game to figure anything out anymore, he’s not fast-forwarding through the A’s at-bats or the inning breaks. He’s just watching a game.
In Minnesota, under the roof, Zito leaves his fastball up and it gets lifted into short right. Hatteberg goes back, face tilted to the fake sky, and Haren sees his eyes scanning frantically, sees Hatteberg’s arms come out to his sides, his free hand turned palm up. He’s lost the ball in the roof; it happens all the time.
Haren, though this game is a year old and he already knows what’s gonna happen, all the things that are gonna happen, the game and the second-half collapse and the off-season and everything else, though he knows all this, Haren still gets jerky and anxious, bending towards the monitor and mouthing, ‘find it, find it.’
On the screen, Hatteberg’s mouth opens and he clearly screams, “help!” and the Metrodome is louder than a rave even with the sound muted, and then Marco Scutaro darts from the side of the screen and knocks his shoulder into Hatteberg’s chest, tripping over him and Scutaro somehow corrals the ball out of the air and into his glove as they’re both falling hard onto the turf.
Zito trots over then, the inning done, and Haren winces at the sight of him without being aware of it. Zito shakes his glove off and offers them his hands, pulls both of them up in one motion, grinning big and clapping Scutaro on the shoulder again and again, and Haren wonders where the fuck Zito was when his first baseman was blind against the white.
*
Rich Harden strains a muscle in his side, which is uncomfortably reminiscent for everybody who was around last year, and stops shaving every day, coming into the park looking like a young Indiana Jones, except for the whip and the hat and the doctorate in archaeology. He’s not too bitter, he still snickers and goes in on pranks, but the right-handed fellowship between him and Danny Haren loses some of its immediacy.
Harden starts hanging out with Huston Street a lot, driving in with him from the house they share, splitting Powerbars in the clubhouse, and Haren is weirded out by their effortless complicity with each other, the way Street says, “hey?” and Harden answers, “yeah, you can have some.”
Harden and Street fit right in with their low, mostly unspoken conversations, because nobody talks much these days. Haren can’t stand it being so quiet, he wants to jump on someone’s back or a start a clothes fight, but he doesn’t know any of them well enough yet.
They’re off to a bad start. Actually, a patently miserable start, as bad as they’ve done in years, since before Eric Chavez was a rookie.
Nobody’s hitting and the rotation’s pitching batting practice, and by their faces, you’d think this is the worst thing that’s ever happened, the worst it could possibly get. Danny Haren, who’s already lost a World Series, can only roll his eyes and bite his tongue.
Without Harden to keep him company, Haren listens to Blanton talk about country music until he wants to put a fork in his eye, and holes up in the workout room for hours at a time, feeling bitterly cheated by this team, which he was promised would be fun, if nothing else.
In the bullpen, fifty-five thousand empty seats looming around him, Haren’s back is to the field as he throws, so he doesn’t see Zito coming, just suddenly hears at his back:
“Dude, don’t be so careful.”
Haren jerks mid-delivery, and the ball sails into the stands. Melhuse stands and pulls off his mask. “Thanks, Z,” he calls, and Zito waves merrily in response.
It’s been better than a month since the worst start of Zito’s career, and he seems mostly recovered. He’s still got no luck, and he still won’t talk about how beautifully Mulder and Hudson are doing in the National League, but he’s putting up a good front.
Haren catches the new ball and glances back over his shoulder at Zito. “What do you mean?”
Zito steps up on the other rubber. “Fuck the corners, man. Don’t try to paint everything. Strikes get called when they’re in the zone,” he tells Haren pedantically, wide-eyed as if he’s the first one to stumble upon that realization. “They’ll swing at what you want them to swing at, if it’s in the zone.”
Zito shrugs, continuing, “I mean, if you’re feeling it, by all means, Maddux that shit. But you’re not feeling it, are you?”
Haren looks down at the ball in his hand, and shakes his head, shamed to admit it. “Not really.”
“Didn’t think so. Here.” Zito holds out his hand, and Haren hands him the ball. Melhuse sighs loudly, and moves behind the other plate. Haren watches Zito’s knee hike up, his eyes angled downwards, and Zito throws a low two-seam across the heart of the plate. “They make contact with that, all they’re gonna do is roll it to somebody, yeah?”
“Guess so.”
“No need to guess, man. It’s about confidence. Be, you know, fearless.”
Zito catches Melhuse’s throw and passes the ball to Haren. Haren finds a splitter grip and waits for Melhuse to move back like a patient chess piece. Haren wants badly to snap the split off on the outside corner, but forces his eyes to stay centered, and dusts it. Zito’s right; the pitch is unhittable.
“Huh,” Haren says, looking to Zito hopefully. Zito nods in approval, and Haren kinda hates the proud swell in his chest when he sees that.
“It’s real easy,” Zito says, squinting into the light. “All you gotta do is believe you can.”
Haren almost snorts, and wants to ask what New Age self-improvement book Zito pulled that gem out of, but he’s twenty-four and he’s supposed to be learning. It doesn’t really matter who from.
*
This one time, Zito pitched a perfect game.
Of course, he did it on a video game. RBI Baseball, the original NES game, with the pixilated graphics and the squat little players with their square hats. There was no fielding, and only ten teams, though the names were real. Don Mattingly, Roger Clemens, Andre Dawson. The stars of the eighties, when it was a different game.
Zito was nine years old, still living in Las Vegas, playing out nine-game seasons on Saturdays before real baseball practice. It was summertime and he was living on Popsicles and instant lemonade. His mom had taught him how to make it, six cups of water filled to the brim and splashing on his hand, carefully poured into the pitcher, followed by one packet of the lemonade powder, stir well. Sometimes, he would stick his wet fingers in the packet and then lick them clean, the powder sugary and tart, close enough to candy, which his parents didn’t allow him.
The Nintendo controller was impossibly sticky, like his hands and his mouth. Zito chewed on the long plastic spoon he used to mix the lemonade, and the house was empty as he went twenty-seven up, twenty-seven down, pitching Fernando Valenzuela because the local TV station played Dodgers games, and Zito liked Fernando’s blind delivery, though of course it didn’t show up in the game.
On the carpet, with his dad at a rehearsal and his mom out shopping, Zito had no one to jinx it, though he could feel the words in his own throat, struggling to rush out of him: perfect game perfect game perfect game. He bit his lip, swallowed it down hard, the first and last superstition of everyone who’d ever played, to not mention it, give it no sound and no dimension, a no-hitter, a perfect game, something too fragile to be exposed to the air. Even if it was just a video game, the rule still applied. It was still baseball.
So nobody was there except for the heat, Zito’s hair almost black from sweat. They didn’t have air-conditioning, and there was a spider on the wall, a daddy long legs as big as Zito’s hand. There were spiders all over their house in Las Vegas, because neither Zito nor his parents were particularly afraid of them, and his sister Bonnie, who was, was already at college.
The game had no way of distinguishing a perfect game from any other kind, it just flashed the same ‘YOU WIN!’ message at the end, just like always, but Zito didn’t need to be told, he knew it as well as if he’d been keeping score on paper, pencil lead on the side of his hand.
He whooped and tossed the controller away, leapt to his feet. He made three victory laps through the kitchen and down the hall, and danced on the couch until he landed wrong and almost broke his ankle. He fell onto the floor and rolled around on his back, still cheering with his hands clasped around his ankle and tears streaming down his face, running into his open laughing mouth, salt on his tongue.
Zito makes up the details he doesn’t remember, and it all sounds pretty true. All he’s been trying to do for the ensuing seventeen years is get back to that one perfect moment, when real baseball and video baseball were close enough that the difference didn’t matter. All he’s been trying to do is do it again.
*
Haren comes down the hallway, and just before the turn, he hears Zito saying, “So, what, you don’t return calls anymore?”
Haren stops, and looks back over his shoulder. It’s empty, a stray cap tucked up against the wall, but that’s it. Haren moves silently over, and leans on his shoulder, crossing his arms over his chest.
“No, man, I know. You think I don’t know?”
Zito’s voice echoes slightly, a rough catch to it, and Haren’s not the sharpest knife in the drawer, but if someone would give him two guesses, he’d bet an awful lot that he knows who Zito’s talking to.
Zito’s quiet for a minute, making little hmm’ing sounds to indicate that he’s still listening.
“Dude, whatever,” he says eventually, sounding kinda pissed off. “I’m not asking you to be my fucking pen pal. Just, like, stay in touch. Remember how you said you’d stay in touch?”
Pause.
“No.”
Pause.
“No.”
Pause.
“Dude, shut up.”
Haren smirks, looking up at the ceiling. He can hear Zito pacing around, short scraping steps, and Haren should probably get out of here, Zito could come around the corner any second now.
“Okay, you know what? That doesn’t really fly. Huddy’s going through exactly the same stuff, but I still talk to him all the time.”
Now Haren only needs one guess. This is getting more interesting by the minute.
“Oh, so you talk to him, but not me? I see.” Very short pause this time, and then Zito’s talking fast, “Don’t call me an asshole, are you fucking kidding me? I know you talk to Chavvy and Bobby and Ellis and Rich, but what? I’m fucking non-existent or something?”
Zito’s voice breaks, and Haren starts to get embarrassed for him.
“Look, fine. Forget about it, fine. I don’t fucking care.” Haren thinks, ‘liar.’ “But just be, like, aware that I know everything that happened and if you wanna pretend it didn’t, that’s your problem.”
And Haren holds his breath, all through the pause that follows, this endless fucking pause. He’d give anything to know what Zito’s hearing, but all he gets is a heavy sigh from around the corner, the soft thump of Zito falling back against the wall.
“Yeah,” Zito says almost too quiet to hear. “It’s just. It’s kinda rough, right now. I don’t know. It’s weird.” He doesn’t sound angry anymore, just very tired. Zito sighs again. “Haren’s all right. I don’t know.”
Haren starts, flushing suddenly and jerking his head up, guiltily eyeing the corner of the wall that separates them.
“Kinda funny-looking,” Zito says, and Haren scowls at the wall. As if Zito’s got room to talk about funny-looking, with his bug eyes and slasher grin.
“Anyway. Everything’s changing all the time.” Pause. “I throw a slider now, did I tell you?” Pause. “Dude, quit laughing.”
Haren snorts, covering his mouth with his hand, and hears Zito continuing, “I was thinking about that time we went to that place in Texas, remember, and almost got arrested?”
Haren narrows his eyes, mildly confused. There’s some string that’s running through this conversation that would make it intelligible, but he can’t locate it with only Zito’s end available to him.
“Well, it was a public park in Texas, man, what did you expect?”
Pause.
“Yeah, okay. Next time. Next time we’re both hammered and in the same city, sure. Pencil it in.” A pause that’s barely time enough for a breath, and then Zito’s saying softly, “I don’t miss you as much as I thought I would, but I definitely miss you. I don’t expect you to be the same, but I thought you should know.”
Pause.
“Okay.”
Pause.
“Okay.”
Haren starts to slip back down the hall, sensing that the conversation is almost over. He picks up the lost cap and stuffs it in his back pocket, and the last thing he hears Zito say, or the last thing he thinks Zito says, anyway, is:
“Anything you want, man, anytime.”
*
Against his better judgment, Danny starts listening to Zito.
The thing about confidence, arrogance, subtle self-obsession, it strikes a chord, worms its way in. The thing about Zito with his stupid stories and his girl’s hair, the difference between their hands, the calm in Zito even though his ERA is still near five, and Danny Haren is searching everywhere for his footing, and it’s no more unlikely that he should find it here than anywhere else. Zito’s like a gateway drug-he leads to everything.
So they talk about splitters and curveballs, they talk about falling off the mound the right way, they talk about reading the batter, the drop of a shoulder, a skidded step and that means you can pitch it on the inside half with two strikes and get away with it, and stay low but stay in the zone, and listen to Kendall, above all things, listen to Kendall, because he’s much smarter than you are, man.
Haren lets Zito talk, Zito’s very favorite thing to do, and probably a tenth of what Zito says deserves to be remembered, which is a pretty good ratio, the nature of pitching being what it is.
They talk all the way out into the parking lot, and Zito’s not nearly done by the time they get to their cars, so he says, “come over tomorrow, okay, I’ll show you.” He takes Haren’s hand in his and writes down his address on Haren’s palm, and Haren watches the thin lines on Zito’s forehead, the curl of his hair around his ear. Zito claps him on the shoulder and takes off without ever getting an assent from Haren, but that’s something Haren’s getting pretty used to.
It’s a Saturday afternoon, and in the back on Zito’s Corvette is a white plastic bucket with the David sunflower seed logo on the side, full of baseballs. They go to this little park two streets from Zito’s apartment, and Zito paces out sixty short steps, scratches a line in the dirt with his keys. The chain-link fence is all pocked and dented out of shape, circles where there should be diamonds.
Zito shows him some new stuff, this cute little slider that seems just wrong coming out of Zito’s hand, and they pitch to imaginary line-ups, this guy’s a switch-hitter batting left, and he’s got power to opposite field-go.
Haren is doing pretty well, throwing about half as hard as his best, because it’s important not to get worn down. Little kids play soccer at their backs, and the sun is high in the sky. After awhile, they get off the subject of baseball, though not really, because Zito’s asking about St. Louis.
“So what’s it like, dude?”
Haren shrugs, gets another ball from the bucket. “Regular, I guess. I mean, they’re more, like. Grown-up. But other than that, pretty much the same.”
“Didja get a place? Was it by the river?” Zito’s messing around, trying to throw a knucklecurve. He’s not having any luck; his nails have been bitten too short to get the right grip.
“I crashed on my cousin’s couch. I was only there for two months.”
“Nobody on the team would let you stay with them?”
“Didn’t ask.”
“But if you had, you think they would have?”
Haren looks over at him. They’re facing each other, mirror-imaged, practically the same size except that Haren’s shoulders are broader and Zito’s legs are longer. Zito’s chewing on his bottom lip, flicking his hair out of his eyes.
“I don’t know, man. Maybe. If I’d have stuck around, maybe.”
Zito stops, resting his glove on his hip. He’s wearing a trucker hat turned around backwards, a faded yellow T-shirt with a picture of redwood tree on it, jeans with frayed cuffs and sneakers with the laces untied. Haren’s pretty sure Zito rolled out of bed, answered the door, and then came out to the park with him.
“Truth, man,” Zito says solemnly. Haren nods. “Better there, or better here?”
Haren has the suspicion that Zito’s got an ulterior motive for all these questions. He’s got a pretty good idea what that motive might be, too. Who that motive might be. He gets a slow nauseous feeling in his stomach, fucking shadows pinned to his back, following him around everywhere.
Haren lifts his shoulders, stares over Zito’s shoulder at the rusting cage of the jungle gym. “They’re a better team than you guys,” he says, and sees Zito’s mouth tighten. “But the weather’s nicer here.”
He makes a grin, feeling like he might be about to throw up, an injured defensive look on Zito’s face, Zito’s hand squeezing a baseball compulsively.
“You don’t know anything,” Zito tells him shortly. “You’ve barely been around five minutes, you think you got it all figured out.”
“Dude, you asked. You said truth.”
Zito looks away, tosses the ball back into the bucket. “Okay, I’m about done. You think you can find your own way home?” He doesn’t wait for an answer, picking up the bucket and carrying it over to the fence, scooping up the balls littered in the dirt.
Haren follows him, looms over him with Zito down there on his knees. “At least give me a ride to the subway. And, you know. Stop being a jerk.”
Zito’s hands stop, and he bows his head for a second, sighing. Then he looks up, squinting at Haren. “Yeah, okay.”
Haren drops down next to him, helping him get the last of the baseballs, and when they stand again, Zito closes his hand on Haren’s shoulder, leaves it there all the way back to the car, and there’s a handprint in brown dust on Haren’s shirt, but that doesn’t bother him too much.
*
Zito went temporarily blind once.
It was a fever; he was eleven years old. He was feeling pretty bad, but getting to skip school and watch games shows and drink nothing but 7-Up was making up for that nicely.
The floor around the living room couch was covered in balled-up Kleenexes, and at first Zito thought that it was just the sunlight coming across the room, sliding up over his face and chest, and that was the only reason he was sweating so badly, stinging in his eyes. He kicked off the blanket and tipped an ice cube into his mouth, but it didn’t help. He felt like he was melting.
He passed out during a commercial break, towards the end of ‘Let’s Make a Deal.’ One skinny arm falling off the couch with his fingers curled in the Kleenexes, his head canted and lolling, his breath shallow.
His dad came home to check on him and couldn’t wake him up. Joe panicked and picked his son up, ran with him to the bathroom, where he held him under the faucet, gushing cold water.
Zito woke up sputtering and coughing, his body wracked with shivers. He opened his eyes and all he could see was gray, soft bad-reception gray. His dad was saying his name over and over again, and Zito reached out for him, found his shoulder, his shirt soaked.
“Dad?”
“Hey, hey,” Joe said, relieved, pushing Zito’s hair off his forehead. “How ya doing, kid?”
“Can’t see.” Zito felt the walls of the tub, his bare feet squeaking and his pajama pants clinging to his legs like cellophane. “Can’t see, Dad, why can’t I see?”
“Barry, don’t joke.”
Zito found his dad’s face and started to cry. “I can’t play if I can’t see.”
His dad wiped Zito’s eyes with his fingers, beat musician’s fingers that were callused and familiar. He picked Zito back up, carried him into the kitchen and laid him on the table. He put a cold compress on Zito’s face and called an ambulance.
Zito shook so hard he knocked the newspaper onto the floor. He shook until he fainted again, and when he woke up the second time, he was back on the couch, and the first thing he saw was his father’s face. His dad was the one crying now, pressing a towel wrapped around ice cubes to his son’s neck and face.
Zito’s eyes went very wide, he could see everything, and he laughed, hugged his dad as tightly as he could, and the red siren lights spun in through the front windows, come to rescue him, but they were too late.
*
The month of May stretches out like taffy, and drags all of them down with it. Sometimes they play well and don’t win; mostly, they play badly and don’t win. Haren likes the way his pitches are dropping, likes the cut on his fastball and believes Zito when Zito tells them that it won’t stay like this, but he seems to be the only one.
Haren hears Chavez say angrily, whipping his glove into the wall, “What the fuck did you think would happen?” and Haren has learned not to pay much attention to Eric Chavez, who has a tendency to be the worst kind of fair-weather fan, but sometimes it’s hard.
They go to San Francisco for the first interleague series, and after they drop the second game, Zito follows Haren over the bridge to his downtown apartment, game tapes and notebooks in his bag, beers from the 7-11 down the street.
By the time the first six-pack is gone, they’ve moved on from baseball and are talking about all sorts of shit. Haren’s vaguely uncomfortable, weird after all the time he’s spent with Zito, but it’s different here alone in his apartment, with the buses going by on the street, and Zito slouched back into the couch with his knees sprawled open.
“You know what’s weird?” Zito says, inspecting his hands.
Haren cracks another beer. “What’s that?”
“Stop, drop, and roll.”
“Stop,” Haren repeats slowly, trying to see where Zito’s going with this.
“Drop, and roll,” Zito finishes.
“The fire safety thing?” Haren asks, pretty much lost. Zito nods. “What’s so weird about it?”
Zito waves a hand around indistinctly. “It’s what you’re supposed to do if you’re on fire. Not if the house is on fire, or, like, the car is on fire. What you’re supposed to do if you, personally, are on fire. And they teach it to little kids.”
“Um. Yeah?”
“Little kids shouldn’t have to worry about being on fire.”
Haren looks at him sidelong, but Zito’s being totally serious, or totally drunk-serious, anyway. Haren shrugs, and tells him, “Nobody should have to worry about being on fire.”
“I just never. I never really thought about it. I don’t even remember when they taught us that, I musta been so young. Kindergarten, probably. Like, five fucking years old, and already I had to worry about what to do if I caught fire.”
Zito looks disturbed, the image of small children in flames dancing around behind his eyes. Haren shakes his head.
“You’re kind of a strange guy,” he tells Zito, putting down his beer to rub his palm with his thumb.
“You know, you’re the first person who’s ever said that to me.”
Haren smiles, and looks up, finds Zito smiling back. Something unexpected happens in Haren’s chest, a contraction, and for a second he has trouble breathing.
He drags his hand over his face, shaking it off. Drunk, that’s all. Drunk.
Zito is too, probably even more than Haren, because Zito is, at least minutely, smaller than he is.
“See, Danny, the thing is, none of the stuff that they told you would matter actually, like, matters.”
Haren nods, tipping his head back against the back of the couch and closing his eyes. The philosophical part of the evening seems to have begun.
“You think it matters that I’m strange? Nobody cares about that.”
Haren smirks. “Win twenty games in the Show and the press’ll call you colorful.”
“Hey!” Zito sounds happily surprised, but Haren doesn’t look back at him, because he’s tired, he’s comfortable, he’s drunk, he never wants to move again. “Nice, dude. Totally appropriate.”
“Yeah, I thought so.”
Haren yawns and slips his hand under his shirt, scratching his stomach. This is good, dark on his face and perfectly warm, a perfect clean drunken place to be. Zito’s maybe crazy, but at least he’s interesting.
“I haven’t won twenty games yet, though,” Haren says, his eyes still closed. “So I guess I’m still just strange.”
There’s a pause that’s oddly prescient, during which Haren’s heart beats out of rhythm and his skin prickles, and then Zito’s moving, Haren can hear him get out of the chair and feel him when Zito sits down on the couch next to him. Haren’s forehead lines, but he doesn’t open his eyes.
Zito touches Haren’s arm, sliding his palm along until his hand is under Haren’s shirt too, on top of Haren’s own, pushing his fingers between the fan of Haren’s, fingertips hard like pebbles on the skin of Haren’s stomach.
Haren sucks in a breath between his teeth, and squeezes his eyes shut tighter. “Dude,” he says hoarsely.
“Hmm?” Zito answers half-heartedly, then licks Haren’s stretched-out neck, making Haren jerk.
“Wait,” Haren whispers, but his hand isn’t paying attention, it’s running up Zito’s arm and into Zito’s hair, getting lost in there just like Haren knew he would.
Zito unbuckles Haren’s belt, undoes his fly and opens his mouth under Haren’s jaw. “Scoot down,” he suggests, and Haren does so without hesitating, lets Zito push his legs apart. He palms Zito’s head, all that hair covering up his hand completely, tickling his arm, his fingers on Zito’s ear. Zito’s hand is inside his shorts and working diligently, and Haren’s breathing in tight hard drags, little whistling sounds.
He’s so drunk he’s afraid he might die. Zito tries to lever up and kiss him on the mouth, but Haren moans and turns his head away. Zito breathes out a rough laugh against his face, mumbling, “okay, whatever,” and returns attention to Haren’s neck, his ear, pulling out the collar of Haren’s T-shirt to bite at his chest.
Haren isn’t thinking about anything beyond the heat of Zito’s breath and the movement of his hand, the spin of his mind, the sick terror lit under his skin.
Haren guides Zito down, winding pieces of Zito’s hair between his fingers, tying knots so he won’t be able to pull free. Zito’s teeth are on his stomach for a second, and Haren pushes his hips up, and his other hand finds Zito’s shoulder, holds him in place.
*
He should have known.
Sharpest knife in the drawer or not, Zito’s so obvious it’s kind of absurd. Haren can see it all now, the sheer ripped away from his eyes and his vision clear again. The missing pieces, the strings that run through everything-fuck.
Zito wears brightly-colored clothes, and listens to chick rock, and calls his sisters all the time, calls his mom even more, and that hair, that face, that smile that makes you want to trust him implicitly. Zito is thoughtful and easily wounded and constantly holding grudges, and he lives in San Francisco, Noe Valley this year, which is just a steep hill away from the Castro, and yes. Of course.
Haren keeps his eyes down and blushes all the time. He thinks that everybody must be able to see it, his eyes are windowpanes and nothing stays hidden. He remembers it all the time whether he wants to or not. And he doesn’t want to remember it, that should be made clear. It’s hard to fight.
Haren sleeps irregularly, imagines it’s raining outside. He lies in hotel beds and thinks about how, after Haren was done and gasping and fucked up forever, Zito had hooked his right arm around the back of Haren’s neck and pressed his face into Haren’s shoulder, jerking himself off with one leg over Haren’s, his body so hot up against Haren’s that Danny felt his hair curling. If he wore glasses, they’d have steamed up for sure, he wouldn’t have been able to see anything.
And Haren keeps wondering if Zito always uses his left hand, or if when you’re semi-ambidextrous the way Zito is, you can use either, and is that better, and other stuff that he shouldn’t be thinking about. Lots of other stuff that he shouldn’t be thinking about.
Haren’s got a hickey at the spot where his neck meets his shoulder, three skinny scratch marks on his stomach, and a bad taste in his mouth all the time.
On the plane to Tampa Bay, on the bus to the hotel, in the lobby waiting to get checked in, Zito keeps grinning at him, he says, “Danny,” and Haren looks up, and Zito grins at him, and that’s all. It’s driving him nuts. Zito’s driving him around the fucking bend.
Haren figures Zito wants to do it again. The way Zito’s been looking at him, the way Zito’s maybe always looked at him, and he’s only seeing it now, yeah. Yeah. Haren hears it sometimes in his head, it sneaks up on him when the room is quiet: ‘he wants to fuck me. he wants me to fuck him.’ It astonishes him.
Haren throws the bolt on the door, unnecessary of course because he’s got both keys, but it makes him feel better. He pulls the curtains tight and builds a little wall of the pillows so he can jam his head under and pretend he doesn’t hear the soft knock that comes at three-thirty in the morning.
The knocking continues for awhile. Haren continues pretending he doesn’t hear it until it finally goes away.
Haren binds himself tightly to Rich Harden and Huston Street the next day, and they let him in without comment, though Harden gives him a curious worried look, pokes him in the arm a couple of times, as if to make sure he’s not a ghost.
Haren keeps his back to Zito, and dreams of a world where Mark Mulder never got traded, and Haren got to stay in St. Louis, and be in first place, and none of this would have ever happened.
That works for four days, four long nights of pretending nobody’s knocking. Then they go to Cleveland, and Danny’s alone in the batting cages, raking liners off the machine just for fun, and Zito grabs his shoulder from behind, flips him and pushes him into the fence.
A ball goes whizzing behind Zito, and Haren tries to throw Zito off, but Zito’s got a hand on Haren’s stomach and a hand on his chest and he’s held down.
“You sleep hella deeply, you know that?” Zito says with a grin, leaning forward and scraping his rough cheek on Haren’s, kissing the side of his mouth. Haren snaps his head and shoves Zito off him, hard enough to almost knock Zito down.
“I wasn’t asleep, I was ignoring you, okay? Okay?”
Zito blinks, like the idea never even occurred to him, which it likely didn’t. “What?”
Haren’s still got the bat in his hand, which is good. A possible weapon, should it come to that. “I meant to tell you. I’m not. Like. I’m not like that.”
Zito’s eyebrows hunch, his teeth pushing out his lower lip petulantly. “The fuck you’re not.”
“Dude, fuck you,” Haren says sharply, jabbing Zito in the chest with his free hand. “You don’t get to say that.”
Zito steps forward, back in Haren’s space. Haren presses back against the fence, but he’s got nowhere to go. “You liked it,” Zito tells him, and puts his hand on Haren’s shoulder, curling his thumb over Haren’s collarbone.
Haren knocks him away. “I generally enjoy getting my dick sucked, yeah. That doesn’t mean I want you to do it.”
Zito grins, differently this time, not sweet and innocent the way he does most times. “What do you want me to do, then? Huh?”
He leans in again, and Haren barely gets his hand up into Zito’s face before Zito’s mouth hits his skin. Zito snuffles against his palm, his eyes surprised between Haren’s fingers. They’re so close, Haren can see gold in his eyes.
“Go away,” Haren whispers, and Zito’s tongue comes out and twists in the webbing between his fingers. Haren inhales hard, and takes his hand down. He focuses resolutely on Zito’s ear, and repeats, “I want you to go away.”
Zito shakes his head briskly. “You’ve been checking me out all fucking season, and now you’re just, what? Straight?” He says it with a tone of pure disgust, his lip sneered.
“And what the fuck are you? A date rapist? Don’t take no for an answer?” Haren tosses the bat away, and it bounces and rolls, clatters into the fence. “Fucking right, I’m straight. I’ve never been anything else.”
Zito laughs, or, really, it’s more of a cackle. It makes Haren’s stomach and arms break out into goosebumps. “Yeah I’m sure. I’m so sure.”
Haren clenches both fists, quick images of Zito with his face bloodied tearing through his mind. He can’t put his hands on Zito, though, he doesn’t think he’d be able to stop if he did.
“Look,” Haren starts, then takes a breath. “Look.” He turns his eyes down, staring at Zito’s Pumas. “Thank you for everything you’ve done for me this year. Thanks for all the stuff you taught me. But that’s it, man, okay? That’s all.”
He looks up, and finds Zito staring back at him with shock all over his face. And Haren gets that fucked-up feeling unspooling hotly in his stomach again, and he’s watching Zito’s mouth, lips slightly parted, a fraction of white teeth and Haren has to look away.
“Now will you let me go?” he asks softly, rubbing his palms on his pants, his head aching.
Danny keeps his eyes down; he doesn’t like what Zito’s face is doing to him, the memory of Zito’s mouth and Zito’s hands, Zito blistering against him and tonguing his neck. Doesn’t like any of this, not even a little bit.
“Go,” Zito tells him, barely audible. “Who’s stopping you?”
Haren brushes past him, looks back only once to see Zito standing there in the fluorescent lights, his fingers hooked in the fence and his shoulders slack, his left hand hanging uselessly.
*
A week later, and Haren has slept maybe six hours total. It’s not healthy. It’s not right.
They lose every single game on the trip, not counting the first in San Francisco, which doesn’t really count because San Francisco is hardly on the road. By the time they lose the third to the Indians, Haren just wants to crawl under a bed and never come out.
Haren’s still not making eye contact with Zito, but it’s okay because Zito’s not looking at him anymore either, not even to glare. Haren finds himself occasionally staring at Zito’s back, though, when he stops paying attention. He finds himself noticing how tight Zito wears his uniform pants, tight enough to read the dates on the coins in his pockets, if he carried coins in his pockets, which he doesn’t. Haren finds himself looking at Zito’s legs, the lines of his calves, and Zito’s arms, and Zito’s neck.
It’s only when he stops paying attention, and it’s not that often, so he’s not too worried about it. Naturally, Zito trying to fuck him up the way he did is going to take awhile to shake. Like the thing about being told not to think about an elephant, and then all you can think of is elephants.
They get back to Oakland and Zito gets his hair cut. Haren has trouble recognizing him for a day or two, all cleaned up with the nape of his neck clear.
In the clubhouse, Harden asks him, “Did someone, like, step on your pet turtle? Was there a heartbreaking crunch?”
Haren rips his eyes away from Zito’s back, which is wet-bare and sleek, and looks at Harden with his expression stricken and ashamed. “I. I don’t have a pet turtle.”
Harden smiles. “I know. It was a, a metaphor. Because you look like shit.”
Haren slumps down and crosses his arms over his chest. “Sorry.”
“Don’t be sorry, man. Just don’t be all miserable and stuff.” Harden’s got ice packed on his strained side, bandages tightly wrapped. He takes a look around the room, one corner of his mouth curling up the way it does. “Anyway, there’s no need. We’re about to turn it around.”
Haren shakes his head, his mouth already open before he remembers that Harden has no idea that something other than the skid could be upsetting him. He shuts up, tips his head down so his hair falls in front of his eyes. “Okay, Rich, sure.”
Harden punches him on the shoulder. “Don’t blow me off. I’m telling you the truth.” Harden hits him again, friendly this time, and goes off to talk to Crosby, who’s getting ready for his first game back with a grin the size of Iowa on his face.
Haren pushes his hair back and thinks about how this has been just a terrible month, altogether wretched, but June’s coming up fast, and it really can’t get much worse.
*
They win four games straight, and on the last night of May, Haren goes the distance for the first time ever, and keeps saying Zito’s name in the post-game interview, not really meaning to, it’s just all he can think about: Zito in the bullpen beside him, Zito in the park with the little kids playing soccer behind them, Zito telling him to stay in the zone and stay in on the hands.
The team is happy again, they talk and joke and play stupid music in the clubhouse, but Haren still can’t sleep, still can’t keep from thinking about the stuff he doesn’t want to think about. He gets talked into going to a club in San Francisco, mostly because he’s too tired to argue.
On the way to the VIP section, Zito’s in front of Haren, and he turns back to let a waitress pass, tray held high. His hand is on Haren’s chest and he’s pressing Haren down against the wall to make room, their chests barely touching. It’s the closest they’ve been since that day in the batting cages, and Haren is aware of every centimeter where they’re in contact with each other.
Zito’s hand slides down briefly and he grins all neat and cruel at Haren in the colored light, barely shorter than him and right fucking there, clipping his fingertips off Haren’s belt and then off, moving forward again.
Haren stays back against the wall for a while, not moving, his eyes wide and his mouth dry. Watches Zito enter past the velvet rope and climb the stairs, high above for a moment, shark-tank crowd and a bad Latin remix of something pounding hard.
Haren’s stomach is tense, his face heated, and his hands start to shake, his life and all the things he believes falling down around him. Zito hasn’t taught Haren everything he knows, just everything that matters. And if Zito’s right about baseball, maybe he’s right about the rest of it, too.
Haren wonders who he can call back in St. Louis, how he can track down the man he’s replacing and figure out what happened between them, how it started and how it ended.
He needs to know what he’s in for.
*
And one time, Zito saw a leopard shark in the bay and followed it for better than a mile, until his arms burned and his chest felt electrocuted. He swam back and collapsed on the shore, his legs in the surf, gasping for air and calling soundlessly for Danny, who was lying on the hood of the car with his sunglasses on, already in mourning, believing with all his heart that Zito had drowned.
THE END
Sadly, Hudson will not pitch against the A's in Atlanta. That's a shame, yo, sincerely.
Well, Zito cut his hair. (Thank you, babe. You look fabulous.) So, as promised.
Snuck another Bull Durham quote in this one. That movie’s got me totally whipped. Bonus points for those who can identify it.
And yeah. Someone help me figure out what's wrong with this story. There's something, doubtless.
Blind Against the White
Zito got caught out in the rain once. Cleveland or Chicago, or wherever it was, and the club was right down the street from the hotel and the streets were dry when they went in, but that didn’t last.
The other guys left early, left Zito with a crowd around him because that’s where Zito belonged, and he didn’t leave until the lights came on. At the front entrance, there was a bottleneck and everybody was pushing forward, shouting, “fuckin’ move, come on,” and then they saw the weather and started shouting, “motherfucker” in the general direction of the universe.
Up and down the sidewalk, indie-rock kids in hoodies and sneakers taped up like baseballs hunched their shoulders and got one cigarette lit to light five more, because no way could you get a lighter going more than once in that wind. Grown-ups in expensive overcoats hailed cabs desperately, busted umbrellas twisted like torn-off wings in the gutters. Packs of people crushed together at the bus stop, turning their faces into a stranger’s back to keep out of it.
Zito didn’t have anything, not a raincoat or an umbrella or anything. He was wearing a red shirt with gold stitching, and a brand-new suede jacket that he was not about to see ruined. The hotel was maybe eight blocks away; it was three in the morning.
Zito tucked his money in the waist of his boxers so it wouldn’t get wet, and stuck himself close against the wall, the short overhang doing very little to keep him safe. He called everyone on the team who wouldn’t kill him for the hour, begging them to bring him a raincoat or a garbage bag he could fashion into a poncho, or in some other way save him, but Hudson didn’t pick up and neither did Byrnes, and Chavez said, “get your own self home, jesus,” and Mulder barely spared the breath to laugh at him before hanging up.
It took him better than an hour to go those eight blocks. He would run to an awning, an alcove, whatever, and wait until the rain let up a bit, then he’d run again. He’d watch for the rain falling in front of headlights and streetlamps; he could only ever see it when it was backlit. He watched the puddles and the sewer grates, small biblical floods carrying leaves and razor blades and empty bottles.
It took him more than an hour, but he got back, got in a shitload of trouble for missing curfew, his shoes and the cuffs of his jeans soaked, his hair damp and all fucked up by the wind, his new jacket unharmed.
Zito tells that story drunk one night, and no one’s sure what the point is. Zito’s stories always have points, though, morals and punchlines, which makes him easy to listen to and hard to understand, so there’s probably something they’re missing.
*
Danny Haren, like Barry Zito and Bobby Crosby and Eric Chavez and Mark Kotsay and a bunch of the others, grew up in Southern California. So he understands about weather, or the lack thereof, and how it can catch you by surprise, knock you down.
He spent a long time in A-ball in Peoria, and they have weather in Illinois. Lots of weather, terrible arid humidity and lightning storms and tornado warnings on the radio. He never really got around to appreciating it, because it was one more thing to think about, one more thing to be prepared for.
Haren had trouble sleeping when it was raining. He figured he’d grow out of that, though. He’d live in St. Louis and get used to it because he’d have no choice. It would become restful, and soothing, and all the things it was supposed to be, rattling on his windows and washing in sheets down his windshield. He just needed time.
Then he was a footnote in the trade that stopped the world dead in its tracks, and when he woke up to Billy Beane on the television and on his voicemail, the thing Haren remembers thinking most clearly was that at least he wouldn’t have to deal with fucking seasons anymore.
*
The first day in Phoenix, it’s overcast and the air is as dry as straw. Haren is accustomed to spring training in the depths of coastal Florida, but this is without a doubt better. When the sky clears at noon, there’s the kind of sun where you can feel your skin getting darker, sharp and targeted.
The new training facility is right next to the zoo. Like, literally, across the street. Haren has always liked zoos, so that seems like a good sign. His hand gets shook a lot. Haren was still in Triple-A when the A’s played the Cardinals in interleague last year, so he doesn’t really know them, and is abjectly humiliated when he accidentally gets Eric Chavez mixed up with one of the sure-to-be-cut utility men.
And he keeps looking past Zito without seeing him for about an hour, until a few of them start tossing a ball around idly in their street clothes, and Haren recognizes the fall of Zito’s hand, remembering his face a second later, because not too far back, everybody in baseball learned who Barry Zito was and what he looked like.
They get right back to the game and that never changes. Danny’s been joining and leaving teams for five years now, bounced around the Midwest in search of some inland ocean that would solve all his problems.
But wherever he finds himself on the first day of spring, all the baselines are the same length they’ve always been, still sixty feet six and a hundred and eight, still six-four-three behind him, the plate is still seventeen inches across and the ball still weighs five ounces. Haren still throws four pitches and still wears the number 24 on his back. It’s nice to be able to count on that, cold hard statistics, immutable to wind and rain.
So he’s the same too, looking back from the mirror, same blue eyes, same hair that turns Oriental black when it’s wet, same narrow face and big hands. Everything adds up and nobody plays for one team for their whole career anymore, it’s unheard of. These guys, these new teammates of his, it’s like they never learned that, even the ones who’ve played for other teams themselves. There’s a continuing strain of shock and betrayal among them that makes no sense, but Danny Haren’s just trying to make friends.
When all the pitchers are sitting on the outfield grass waiting for the coaches to get their act together, Rich Harden, who Danny already knows he’s gonna like a whole lot, leans towards him and says, “I’d like to outnumber the lefties this year, so try real hard to make the rotation, all right?”
Haren grins and agrees. It won’t be hard. The camp is stacked with righties, they’ve invaded. Everybody except Zito and Meyer, really, not counting the back-to-Double-A invitees just here for variety, and nobody’s paying much attention to Meyer.
Many of those who’ve been around for awhile (which is largely everybody) walk around with fearful looks on their faces, but Haren has chosen not to pay attention to that. Pitching for Oakland is not like pitching for St. Louis, because all Oakland is, is pitching. He’s shown up in the middle of an unrewarded dynasty. Or, right after the end of one. It’s still unclear, because it’s only spring training.
*
By the time the season starts, Zito’s hair is very long. Longer than Haren’s last girlfriend’s, actually, though that’s weird to think about. Zito flicks his head to get it out of his eyes, and has a red and yellow beanie that he wears to keep it tucked back.
He gets teased about it a lot, and for reasons that are not explained to Haren, Tim Hudson seems to be to blame for the whole surfer shag thing, and Haren tries to make that work in his mind, maybe this is Zito’s version of mourning a loss, maybe it’s penance. None of what he comes up with sounds too plausible, though. Tim Hudson is the reason Zito’s hair is so long, and that’s just the way things are, at least until they go to Atlanta for interleague.
Haren, who can’t say shit because his own hair is past his collar, has a mildly unsettling dream the second week of April. There’s a ballpark and a wide purple sky, and Haren fists his hand in Zito’s hair, way down deep in it, winding tightly, and leads Zito somewhere like that, Zito moving under his arm and against his side.
He wakes up feeling like the broad stretch of the Arizona desert has slid into his throat, and drinks water from the bathroom sink out of his cupped hands, soaking his T-shirt and taking it off. He drinks too fast and his chest starts to feel fluorescent white, so he lies on the bathroom floor until the pain fades, and stares up at the ceiling, wishing that Zito would just get his fucking hair cut, already.
*
Bobby Crosby doesn’t like him.
Haren learns that real early, because Crosby’s not very discreet about it. He never came up in Phoenix and said, “hey man, good to have you,” like all the others, never brought Haren a Gatorade from the cooler when he was already bringing back for everybody else, never bought Haren a welcome-to-the-team drink or pointed out some girl who was checking him out from across the club. Crosby never talks to Haren, and when they’re in a group together, he looks at everybody else but never at Danny.
Haren’s worried, because he sees what Crosby means to this team. He’s not like Chavez, who’s been here so long that they take him for granted, and he’s not like Zito, who walks around smiling harmlessly at everyone and is forgotten a second after he’s gone.
Haren watches and figures it out, and he can see it because he’s new, he’s got nothing to compare it to. Crosby is very important to the team this year, as the heart or the soul or the future or something, and if Crosby doesn’t like him, he’s pretty much screwed.
Crosby gets hurt on Opening Day, which is kinda helpful, because Crosby’s not around as much, can’t dislike him quite so publicly. There’s a day or two when Crosby doesn’t seem to like anyone, and then a constant forced smile that barely sticks to his face. Haren doesn’t know if Crosby’s ribs hurt, if he’s able to sleep at night, and it’s not like he’s about to ask.
“It’s not you,” Harden tells him. They have become friends, him and Rich, just like Haren thought they would. Harden pulls on his undershirt, tugging it flat across his chest and stomach. “It’s Mulder.”
Haren has recently learned that he cannot stand talking about Mark Mulder. He never even met the guy, but still. He sags back. “He’s not even here anymore.”
Harden half-grins. “Yeah, man, exactly. Bobby, he’s kinda. Doesn’t deal with disappointment well. He isn’t used to not getting what he wants.” Harden shrugs. “And he looks at you and all that he sees is that you’re not Mark, and, well.”
Haren scowls at the floor. “That’s not my fault.”
“He’s just a kid. He’ll get over it.” Haren looks up and Harden is buttoning his jersey, ducking a bit to peer in the little mirror he’s got stuck up in his locker, licking his fingers and smoothing them over a ruff of hair poking out from the side of his head. Harden rarely seems to register that he’s only twenty-three years old himself, almost two full years younger than Crosby, and you’d never know it from how he talks, the way he keeps his shoulders up.
“How much is it gonna fuck you guys up this year, not having them around?” Haren asks, and he hears his dad in his head, telling him not to ask questions he doesn’t want to hear the answers to. But Haren doesn’t have that kind of restraint.
Harden gives him a tired smile. “Oh, pretty good, I think. Some of us more than others, of course. You don’t know how it was. I mean, Zito alone-”
Harden abruptly stops talking, and Haren follows his gaze to Zito, over by the candy rack talking to Curt Young. Zito is still fighting for his strength to come back, everyone can see that, and there’s a baseball held so tightly in his hand that his knuckles blend right in.
Sighing, Harden continues, “It’s gonna be a long year.” He shakes his head. “Every year’s a long year.”
*
Zito stole a car once.
Well, not really, but that’s how he starts the story because it makes him sound badass. He was sixteen, having a terrible week, and there was something in the water at this party, something laced in the jay he’d been handed. He wasn’t in his right mind, all sorts of fucked up, and he fell down on his knees in the hallway, cried against the carpet with his hands in his hair, awful neon pictures in his head.
And he ran off, late enough that no one noticed, found his buddy’s car keys in the grass where they’d sat in a circle and had a power hour. Zito was wearing a shirt that didn’t belong to him, a long tear over the left shoulder, his face flushed and still damp.
He unlocked his buddy’s car and took all the quarters out of the coin tray, and he had visions of Mexico, a true escape, get these fucking colors out of his eyes, sweat the drugs out of his system and be okay again, but he only made it a block.
He rolled the car up on the curb, and stalled out, because he could only drive a manual in theory. The whole world tilted sideways, and it wouldn’t right itself no matter what he tried, so he crawled in the back and curled up, bare feet kicking at the door. He pulled his shirt half-off, up over his head so it covered his face, and fell asleep. The worst nightmare he ever had, he had that night, but he couldn’t remember the specifics, just that he’d been terrified beyond reason, and his heart had nearly stopped.
In the morning, he got woken up by his buddy pounding his fist on the window and hollering at him, muffled through the glass. He was never allowed to drive anyone else’s car ever again, and declared himself to be off pot for good, but that didn’t last till noon, because the only real cure for a hangover is bong rips.
It wasn’t badass at all, just a stupid fucked-up kid without a name for the shit he was on, a kid having a rough night and not even able to successfully run away. So, really, kinda pathetic.
Haren thinks about Zito passed out in the back of his friend’s car, some neighborhood street in San Diego, and when Zito was sixteen, Haren was fourteen, off getting into trouble himself, a two-hour drive north.
*
Haren watches tape a lot, because there are literally hundreds of players that he has to learn now, a whole new league. At the Coliseum, they just re-did the basement, white walls and clean yellow lights, nothing smudged or dimmed. That’s where the video room is, the basement.
Joe Blanton comes down looking for someone to drawl at, but Haren’s deeply involved in an A’s-Twins game from last year, and he keeps saying, “uh-huh. Uh-huh. Sure, Joey, yeah,” until Blanton gets impatient and leaves, telling Haren, “You can’t learn baseball like that, hoss.”
Haren thinks that’s probably true, because he’s not really watching the game to figure anything out anymore, he’s not fast-forwarding through the A’s at-bats or the inning breaks. He’s just watching a game.
In Minnesota, under the roof, Zito leaves his fastball up and it gets lifted into short right. Hatteberg goes back, face tilted to the fake sky, and Haren sees his eyes scanning frantically, sees Hatteberg’s arms come out to his sides, his free hand turned palm up. He’s lost the ball in the roof; it happens all the time.
Haren, though this game is a year old and he already knows what’s gonna happen, all the things that are gonna happen, the game and the second-half collapse and the off-season and everything else, though he knows all this, Haren still gets jerky and anxious, bending towards the monitor and mouthing, ‘find it, find it.’
On the screen, Hatteberg’s mouth opens and he clearly screams, “help!” and the Metrodome is louder than a rave even with the sound muted, and then Marco Scutaro darts from the side of the screen and knocks his shoulder into Hatteberg’s chest, tripping over him and Scutaro somehow corrals the ball out of the air and into his glove as they’re both falling hard onto the turf.
Zito trots over then, the inning done, and Haren winces at the sight of him without being aware of it. Zito shakes his glove off and offers them his hands, pulls both of them up in one motion, grinning big and clapping Scutaro on the shoulder again and again, and Haren wonders where the fuck Zito was when his first baseman was blind against the white.
*
Rich Harden strains a muscle in his side, which is uncomfortably reminiscent for everybody who was around last year, and stops shaving every day, coming into the park looking like a young Indiana Jones, except for the whip and the hat and the doctorate in archaeology. He’s not too bitter, he still snickers and goes in on pranks, but the right-handed fellowship between him and Danny Haren loses some of its immediacy.
Harden starts hanging out with Huston Street a lot, driving in with him from the house they share, splitting Powerbars in the clubhouse, and Haren is weirded out by their effortless complicity with each other, the way Street says, “hey?” and Harden answers, “yeah, you can have some.”
Harden and Street fit right in with their low, mostly unspoken conversations, because nobody talks much these days. Haren can’t stand it being so quiet, he wants to jump on someone’s back or a start a clothes fight, but he doesn’t know any of them well enough yet.
They’re off to a bad start. Actually, a patently miserable start, as bad as they’ve done in years, since before Eric Chavez was a rookie.
Nobody’s hitting and the rotation’s pitching batting practice, and by their faces, you’d think this is the worst thing that’s ever happened, the worst it could possibly get. Danny Haren, who’s already lost a World Series, can only roll his eyes and bite his tongue.
Without Harden to keep him company, Haren listens to Blanton talk about country music until he wants to put a fork in his eye, and holes up in the workout room for hours at a time, feeling bitterly cheated by this team, which he was promised would be fun, if nothing else.
In the bullpen, fifty-five thousand empty seats looming around him, Haren’s back is to the field as he throws, so he doesn’t see Zito coming, just suddenly hears at his back:
“Dude, don’t be so careful.”
Haren jerks mid-delivery, and the ball sails into the stands. Melhuse stands and pulls off his mask. “Thanks, Z,” he calls, and Zito waves merrily in response.
It’s been better than a month since the worst start of Zito’s career, and he seems mostly recovered. He’s still got no luck, and he still won’t talk about how beautifully Mulder and Hudson are doing in the National League, but he’s putting up a good front.
Haren catches the new ball and glances back over his shoulder at Zito. “What do you mean?”
Zito steps up on the other rubber. “Fuck the corners, man. Don’t try to paint everything. Strikes get called when they’re in the zone,” he tells Haren pedantically, wide-eyed as if he’s the first one to stumble upon that realization. “They’ll swing at what you want them to swing at, if it’s in the zone.”
Zito shrugs, continuing, “I mean, if you’re feeling it, by all means, Maddux that shit. But you’re not feeling it, are you?”
Haren looks down at the ball in his hand, and shakes his head, shamed to admit it. “Not really.”
“Didn’t think so. Here.” Zito holds out his hand, and Haren hands him the ball. Melhuse sighs loudly, and moves behind the other plate. Haren watches Zito’s knee hike up, his eyes angled downwards, and Zito throws a low two-seam across the heart of the plate. “They make contact with that, all they’re gonna do is roll it to somebody, yeah?”
“Guess so.”
“No need to guess, man. It’s about confidence. Be, you know, fearless.”
Zito catches Melhuse’s throw and passes the ball to Haren. Haren finds a splitter grip and waits for Melhuse to move back like a patient chess piece. Haren wants badly to snap the split off on the outside corner, but forces his eyes to stay centered, and dusts it. Zito’s right; the pitch is unhittable.
“Huh,” Haren says, looking to Zito hopefully. Zito nods in approval, and Haren kinda hates the proud swell in his chest when he sees that.
“It’s real easy,” Zito says, squinting into the light. “All you gotta do is believe you can.”
Haren almost snorts, and wants to ask what New Age self-improvement book Zito pulled that gem out of, but he’s twenty-four and he’s supposed to be learning. It doesn’t really matter who from.
*
This one time, Zito pitched a perfect game.
Of course, he did it on a video game. RBI Baseball, the original NES game, with the pixilated graphics and the squat little players with their square hats. There was no fielding, and only ten teams, though the names were real. Don Mattingly, Roger Clemens, Andre Dawson. The stars of the eighties, when it was a different game.
Zito was nine years old, still living in Las Vegas, playing out nine-game seasons on Saturdays before real baseball practice. It was summertime and he was living on Popsicles and instant lemonade. His mom had taught him how to make it, six cups of water filled to the brim and splashing on his hand, carefully poured into the pitcher, followed by one packet of the lemonade powder, stir well. Sometimes, he would stick his wet fingers in the packet and then lick them clean, the powder sugary and tart, close enough to candy, which his parents didn’t allow him.
The Nintendo controller was impossibly sticky, like his hands and his mouth. Zito chewed on the long plastic spoon he used to mix the lemonade, and the house was empty as he went twenty-seven up, twenty-seven down, pitching Fernando Valenzuela because the local TV station played Dodgers games, and Zito liked Fernando’s blind delivery, though of course it didn’t show up in the game.
On the carpet, with his dad at a rehearsal and his mom out shopping, Zito had no one to jinx it, though he could feel the words in his own throat, struggling to rush out of him: perfect game perfect game perfect game. He bit his lip, swallowed it down hard, the first and last superstition of everyone who’d ever played, to not mention it, give it no sound and no dimension, a no-hitter, a perfect game, something too fragile to be exposed to the air. Even if it was just a video game, the rule still applied. It was still baseball.
So nobody was there except for the heat, Zito’s hair almost black from sweat. They didn’t have air-conditioning, and there was a spider on the wall, a daddy long legs as big as Zito’s hand. There were spiders all over their house in Las Vegas, because neither Zito nor his parents were particularly afraid of them, and his sister Bonnie, who was, was already at college.
The game had no way of distinguishing a perfect game from any other kind, it just flashed the same ‘YOU WIN!’ message at the end, just like always, but Zito didn’t need to be told, he knew it as well as if he’d been keeping score on paper, pencil lead on the side of his hand.
He whooped and tossed the controller away, leapt to his feet. He made three victory laps through the kitchen and down the hall, and danced on the couch until he landed wrong and almost broke his ankle. He fell onto the floor and rolled around on his back, still cheering with his hands clasped around his ankle and tears streaming down his face, running into his open laughing mouth, salt on his tongue.
Zito makes up the details he doesn’t remember, and it all sounds pretty true. All he’s been trying to do for the ensuing seventeen years is get back to that one perfect moment, when real baseball and video baseball were close enough that the difference didn’t matter. All he’s been trying to do is do it again.
*
Haren comes down the hallway, and just before the turn, he hears Zito saying, “So, what, you don’t return calls anymore?”
Haren stops, and looks back over his shoulder. It’s empty, a stray cap tucked up against the wall, but that’s it. Haren moves silently over, and leans on his shoulder, crossing his arms over his chest.
“No, man, I know. You think I don’t know?”
Zito’s voice echoes slightly, a rough catch to it, and Haren’s not the sharpest knife in the drawer, but if someone would give him two guesses, he’d bet an awful lot that he knows who Zito’s talking to.
Zito’s quiet for a minute, making little hmm’ing sounds to indicate that he’s still listening.
“Dude, whatever,” he says eventually, sounding kinda pissed off. “I’m not asking you to be my fucking pen pal. Just, like, stay in touch. Remember how you said you’d stay in touch?”
Pause.
“No.”
Pause.
“No.”
Pause.
“Dude, shut up.”
Haren smirks, looking up at the ceiling. He can hear Zito pacing around, short scraping steps, and Haren should probably get out of here, Zito could come around the corner any second now.
“Okay, you know what? That doesn’t really fly. Huddy’s going through exactly the same stuff, but I still talk to him all the time.”
Now Haren only needs one guess. This is getting more interesting by the minute.
“Oh, so you talk to him, but not me? I see.” Very short pause this time, and then Zito’s talking fast, “Don’t call me an asshole, are you fucking kidding me? I know you talk to Chavvy and Bobby and Ellis and Rich, but what? I’m fucking non-existent or something?”
Zito’s voice breaks, and Haren starts to get embarrassed for him.
“Look, fine. Forget about it, fine. I don’t fucking care.” Haren thinks, ‘liar.’ “But just be, like, aware that I know everything that happened and if you wanna pretend it didn’t, that’s your problem.”
And Haren holds his breath, all through the pause that follows, this endless fucking pause. He’d give anything to know what Zito’s hearing, but all he gets is a heavy sigh from around the corner, the soft thump of Zito falling back against the wall.
“Yeah,” Zito says almost too quiet to hear. “It’s just. It’s kinda rough, right now. I don’t know. It’s weird.” He doesn’t sound angry anymore, just very tired. Zito sighs again. “Haren’s all right. I don’t know.”
Haren starts, flushing suddenly and jerking his head up, guiltily eyeing the corner of the wall that separates them.
“Kinda funny-looking,” Zito says, and Haren scowls at the wall. As if Zito’s got room to talk about funny-looking, with his bug eyes and slasher grin.
“Anyway. Everything’s changing all the time.” Pause. “I throw a slider now, did I tell you?” Pause. “Dude, quit laughing.”
Haren snorts, covering his mouth with his hand, and hears Zito continuing, “I was thinking about that time we went to that place in Texas, remember, and almost got arrested?”
Haren narrows his eyes, mildly confused. There’s some string that’s running through this conversation that would make it intelligible, but he can’t locate it with only Zito’s end available to him.
“Well, it was a public park in Texas, man, what did you expect?”
Pause.
“Yeah, okay. Next time. Next time we’re both hammered and in the same city, sure. Pencil it in.” A pause that’s barely time enough for a breath, and then Zito’s saying softly, “I don’t miss you as much as I thought I would, but I definitely miss you. I don’t expect you to be the same, but I thought you should know.”
Pause.
“Okay.”
Pause.
“Okay.”
Haren starts to slip back down the hall, sensing that the conversation is almost over. He picks up the lost cap and stuffs it in his back pocket, and the last thing he hears Zito say, or the last thing he thinks Zito says, anyway, is:
“Anything you want, man, anytime.”
*
Against his better judgment, Danny starts listening to Zito.
The thing about confidence, arrogance, subtle self-obsession, it strikes a chord, worms its way in. The thing about Zito with his stupid stories and his girl’s hair, the difference between their hands, the calm in Zito even though his ERA is still near five, and Danny Haren is searching everywhere for his footing, and it’s no more unlikely that he should find it here than anywhere else. Zito’s like a gateway drug-he leads to everything.
So they talk about splitters and curveballs, they talk about falling off the mound the right way, they talk about reading the batter, the drop of a shoulder, a skidded step and that means you can pitch it on the inside half with two strikes and get away with it, and stay low but stay in the zone, and listen to Kendall, above all things, listen to Kendall, because he’s much smarter than you are, man.
Haren lets Zito talk, Zito’s very favorite thing to do, and probably a tenth of what Zito says deserves to be remembered, which is a pretty good ratio, the nature of pitching being what it is.
They talk all the way out into the parking lot, and Zito’s not nearly done by the time they get to their cars, so he says, “come over tomorrow, okay, I’ll show you.” He takes Haren’s hand in his and writes down his address on Haren’s palm, and Haren watches the thin lines on Zito’s forehead, the curl of his hair around his ear. Zito claps him on the shoulder and takes off without ever getting an assent from Haren, but that’s something Haren’s getting pretty used to.
It’s a Saturday afternoon, and in the back on Zito’s Corvette is a white plastic bucket with the David sunflower seed logo on the side, full of baseballs. They go to this little park two streets from Zito’s apartment, and Zito paces out sixty short steps, scratches a line in the dirt with his keys. The chain-link fence is all pocked and dented out of shape, circles where there should be diamonds.
Zito shows him some new stuff, this cute little slider that seems just wrong coming out of Zito’s hand, and they pitch to imaginary line-ups, this guy’s a switch-hitter batting left, and he’s got power to opposite field-go.
Haren is doing pretty well, throwing about half as hard as his best, because it’s important not to get worn down. Little kids play soccer at their backs, and the sun is high in the sky. After awhile, they get off the subject of baseball, though not really, because Zito’s asking about St. Louis.
“So what’s it like, dude?”
Haren shrugs, gets another ball from the bucket. “Regular, I guess. I mean, they’re more, like. Grown-up. But other than that, pretty much the same.”
“Didja get a place? Was it by the river?” Zito’s messing around, trying to throw a knucklecurve. He’s not having any luck; his nails have been bitten too short to get the right grip.
“I crashed on my cousin’s couch. I was only there for two months.”
“Nobody on the team would let you stay with them?”
“Didn’t ask.”
“But if you had, you think they would have?”
Haren looks over at him. They’re facing each other, mirror-imaged, practically the same size except that Haren’s shoulders are broader and Zito’s legs are longer. Zito’s chewing on his bottom lip, flicking his hair out of his eyes.
“I don’t know, man. Maybe. If I’d have stuck around, maybe.”
Zito stops, resting his glove on his hip. He’s wearing a trucker hat turned around backwards, a faded yellow T-shirt with a picture of redwood tree on it, jeans with frayed cuffs and sneakers with the laces untied. Haren’s pretty sure Zito rolled out of bed, answered the door, and then came out to the park with him.
“Truth, man,” Zito says solemnly. Haren nods. “Better there, or better here?”
Haren has the suspicion that Zito’s got an ulterior motive for all these questions. He’s got a pretty good idea what that motive might be, too. Who that motive might be. He gets a slow nauseous feeling in his stomach, fucking shadows pinned to his back, following him around everywhere.
Haren lifts his shoulders, stares over Zito’s shoulder at the rusting cage of the jungle gym. “They’re a better team than you guys,” he says, and sees Zito’s mouth tighten. “But the weather’s nicer here.”
He makes a grin, feeling like he might be about to throw up, an injured defensive look on Zito’s face, Zito’s hand squeezing a baseball compulsively.
“You don’t know anything,” Zito tells him shortly. “You’ve barely been around five minutes, you think you got it all figured out.”
“Dude, you asked. You said truth.”
Zito looks away, tosses the ball back into the bucket. “Okay, I’m about done. You think you can find your own way home?” He doesn’t wait for an answer, picking up the bucket and carrying it over to the fence, scooping up the balls littered in the dirt.
Haren follows him, looms over him with Zito down there on his knees. “At least give me a ride to the subway. And, you know. Stop being a jerk.”
Zito’s hands stop, and he bows his head for a second, sighing. Then he looks up, squinting at Haren. “Yeah, okay.”
Haren drops down next to him, helping him get the last of the baseballs, and when they stand again, Zito closes his hand on Haren’s shoulder, leaves it there all the way back to the car, and there’s a handprint in brown dust on Haren’s shirt, but that doesn’t bother him too much.
*
Zito went temporarily blind once.
It was a fever; he was eleven years old. He was feeling pretty bad, but getting to skip school and watch games shows and drink nothing but 7-Up was making up for that nicely.
The floor around the living room couch was covered in balled-up Kleenexes, and at first Zito thought that it was just the sunlight coming across the room, sliding up over his face and chest, and that was the only reason he was sweating so badly, stinging in his eyes. He kicked off the blanket and tipped an ice cube into his mouth, but it didn’t help. He felt like he was melting.
He passed out during a commercial break, towards the end of ‘Let’s Make a Deal.’ One skinny arm falling off the couch with his fingers curled in the Kleenexes, his head canted and lolling, his breath shallow.
His dad came home to check on him and couldn’t wake him up. Joe panicked and picked his son up, ran with him to the bathroom, where he held him under the faucet, gushing cold water.
Zito woke up sputtering and coughing, his body wracked with shivers. He opened his eyes and all he could see was gray, soft bad-reception gray. His dad was saying his name over and over again, and Zito reached out for him, found his shoulder, his shirt soaked.
“Dad?”
“Hey, hey,” Joe said, relieved, pushing Zito’s hair off his forehead. “How ya doing, kid?”
“Can’t see.” Zito felt the walls of the tub, his bare feet squeaking and his pajama pants clinging to his legs like cellophane. “Can’t see, Dad, why can’t I see?”
“Barry, don’t joke.”
Zito found his dad’s face and started to cry. “I can’t play if I can’t see.”
His dad wiped Zito’s eyes with his fingers, beat musician’s fingers that were callused and familiar. He picked Zito back up, carried him into the kitchen and laid him on the table. He put a cold compress on Zito’s face and called an ambulance.
Zito shook so hard he knocked the newspaper onto the floor. He shook until he fainted again, and when he woke up the second time, he was back on the couch, and the first thing he saw was his father’s face. His dad was the one crying now, pressing a towel wrapped around ice cubes to his son’s neck and face.
Zito’s eyes went very wide, he could see everything, and he laughed, hugged his dad as tightly as he could, and the red siren lights spun in through the front windows, come to rescue him, but they were too late.
*
The month of May stretches out like taffy, and drags all of them down with it. Sometimes they play well and don’t win; mostly, they play badly and don’t win. Haren likes the way his pitches are dropping, likes the cut on his fastball and believes Zito when Zito tells them that it won’t stay like this, but he seems to be the only one.
Haren hears Chavez say angrily, whipping his glove into the wall, “What the fuck did you think would happen?” and Haren has learned not to pay much attention to Eric Chavez, who has a tendency to be the worst kind of fair-weather fan, but sometimes it’s hard.
They go to San Francisco for the first interleague series, and after they drop the second game, Zito follows Haren over the bridge to his downtown apartment, game tapes and notebooks in his bag, beers from the 7-11 down the street.
By the time the first six-pack is gone, they’ve moved on from baseball and are talking about all sorts of shit. Haren’s vaguely uncomfortable, weird after all the time he’s spent with Zito, but it’s different here alone in his apartment, with the buses going by on the street, and Zito slouched back into the couch with his knees sprawled open.
“You know what’s weird?” Zito says, inspecting his hands.
Haren cracks another beer. “What’s that?”
“Stop, drop, and roll.”
“Stop,” Haren repeats slowly, trying to see where Zito’s going with this.
“Drop, and roll,” Zito finishes.
“The fire safety thing?” Haren asks, pretty much lost. Zito nods. “What’s so weird about it?”
Zito waves a hand around indistinctly. “It’s what you’re supposed to do if you’re on fire. Not if the house is on fire, or, like, the car is on fire. What you’re supposed to do if you, personally, are on fire. And they teach it to little kids.”
“Um. Yeah?”
“Little kids shouldn’t have to worry about being on fire.”
Haren looks at him sidelong, but Zito’s being totally serious, or totally drunk-serious, anyway. Haren shrugs, and tells him, “Nobody should have to worry about being on fire.”
“I just never. I never really thought about it. I don’t even remember when they taught us that, I musta been so young. Kindergarten, probably. Like, five fucking years old, and already I had to worry about what to do if I caught fire.”
Zito looks disturbed, the image of small children in flames dancing around behind his eyes. Haren shakes his head.
“You’re kind of a strange guy,” he tells Zito, putting down his beer to rub his palm with his thumb.
“You know, you’re the first person who’s ever said that to me.”
Haren smiles, and looks up, finds Zito smiling back. Something unexpected happens in Haren’s chest, a contraction, and for a second he has trouble breathing.
He drags his hand over his face, shaking it off. Drunk, that’s all. Drunk.
Zito is too, probably even more than Haren, because Zito is, at least minutely, smaller than he is.
“See, Danny, the thing is, none of the stuff that they told you would matter actually, like, matters.”
Haren nods, tipping his head back against the back of the couch and closing his eyes. The philosophical part of the evening seems to have begun.
“You think it matters that I’m strange? Nobody cares about that.”
Haren smirks. “Win twenty games in the Show and the press’ll call you colorful.”
“Hey!” Zito sounds happily surprised, but Haren doesn’t look back at him, because he’s tired, he’s comfortable, he’s drunk, he never wants to move again. “Nice, dude. Totally appropriate.”
“Yeah, I thought so.”
Haren yawns and slips his hand under his shirt, scratching his stomach. This is good, dark on his face and perfectly warm, a perfect clean drunken place to be. Zito’s maybe crazy, but at least he’s interesting.
“I haven’t won twenty games yet, though,” Haren says, his eyes still closed. “So I guess I’m still just strange.”
There’s a pause that’s oddly prescient, during which Haren’s heart beats out of rhythm and his skin prickles, and then Zito’s moving, Haren can hear him get out of the chair and feel him when Zito sits down on the couch next to him. Haren’s forehead lines, but he doesn’t open his eyes.
Zito touches Haren’s arm, sliding his palm along until his hand is under Haren’s shirt too, on top of Haren’s own, pushing his fingers between the fan of Haren’s, fingertips hard like pebbles on the skin of Haren’s stomach.
Haren sucks in a breath between his teeth, and squeezes his eyes shut tighter. “Dude,” he says hoarsely.
“Hmm?” Zito answers half-heartedly, then licks Haren’s stretched-out neck, making Haren jerk.
“Wait,” Haren whispers, but his hand isn’t paying attention, it’s running up Zito’s arm and into Zito’s hair, getting lost in there just like Haren knew he would.
Zito unbuckles Haren’s belt, undoes his fly and opens his mouth under Haren’s jaw. “Scoot down,” he suggests, and Haren does so without hesitating, lets Zito push his legs apart. He palms Zito’s head, all that hair covering up his hand completely, tickling his arm, his fingers on Zito’s ear. Zito’s hand is inside his shorts and working diligently, and Haren’s breathing in tight hard drags, little whistling sounds.
He’s so drunk he’s afraid he might die. Zito tries to lever up and kiss him on the mouth, but Haren moans and turns his head away. Zito breathes out a rough laugh against his face, mumbling, “okay, whatever,” and returns attention to Haren’s neck, his ear, pulling out the collar of Haren’s T-shirt to bite at his chest.
Haren isn’t thinking about anything beyond the heat of Zito’s breath and the movement of his hand, the spin of his mind, the sick terror lit under his skin.
Haren guides Zito down, winding pieces of Zito’s hair between his fingers, tying knots so he won’t be able to pull free. Zito’s teeth are on his stomach for a second, and Haren pushes his hips up, and his other hand finds Zito’s shoulder, holds him in place.
*
He should have known.
Sharpest knife in the drawer or not, Zito’s so obvious it’s kind of absurd. Haren can see it all now, the sheer ripped away from his eyes and his vision clear again. The missing pieces, the strings that run through everything-fuck.
Zito wears brightly-colored clothes, and listens to chick rock, and calls his sisters all the time, calls his mom even more, and that hair, that face, that smile that makes you want to trust him implicitly. Zito is thoughtful and easily wounded and constantly holding grudges, and he lives in San Francisco, Noe Valley this year, which is just a steep hill away from the Castro, and yes. Of course.
Haren keeps his eyes down and blushes all the time. He thinks that everybody must be able to see it, his eyes are windowpanes and nothing stays hidden. He remembers it all the time whether he wants to or not. And he doesn’t want to remember it, that should be made clear. It’s hard to fight.
Haren sleeps irregularly, imagines it’s raining outside. He lies in hotel beds and thinks about how, after Haren was done and gasping and fucked up forever, Zito had hooked his right arm around the back of Haren’s neck and pressed his face into Haren’s shoulder, jerking himself off with one leg over Haren’s, his body so hot up against Haren’s that Danny felt his hair curling. If he wore glasses, they’d have steamed up for sure, he wouldn’t have been able to see anything.
And Haren keeps wondering if Zito always uses his left hand, or if when you’re semi-ambidextrous the way Zito is, you can use either, and is that better, and other stuff that he shouldn’t be thinking about. Lots of other stuff that he shouldn’t be thinking about.
Haren’s got a hickey at the spot where his neck meets his shoulder, three skinny scratch marks on his stomach, and a bad taste in his mouth all the time.
On the plane to Tampa Bay, on the bus to the hotel, in the lobby waiting to get checked in, Zito keeps grinning at him, he says, “Danny,” and Haren looks up, and Zito grins at him, and that’s all. It’s driving him nuts. Zito’s driving him around the fucking bend.
Haren figures Zito wants to do it again. The way Zito’s been looking at him, the way Zito’s maybe always looked at him, and he’s only seeing it now, yeah. Yeah. Haren hears it sometimes in his head, it sneaks up on him when the room is quiet: ‘he wants to fuck me. he wants me to fuck him.’ It astonishes him.
Haren throws the bolt on the door, unnecessary of course because he’s got both keys, but it makes him feel better. He pulls the curtains tight and builds a little wall of the pillows so he can jam his head under and pretend he doesn’t hear the soft knock that comes at three-thirty in the morning.
The knocking continues for awhile. Haren continues pretending he doesn’t hear it until it finally goes away.
Haren binds himself tightly to Rich Harden and Huston Street the next day, and they let him in without comment, though Harden gives him a curious worried look, pokes him in the arm a couple of times, as if to make sure he’s not a ghost.
Haren keeps his back to Zito, and dreams of a world where Mark Mulder never got traded, and Haren got to stay in St. Louis, and be in first place, and none of this would have ever happened.
That works for four days, four long nights of pretending nobody’s knocking. Then they go to Cleveland, and Danny’s alone in the batting cages, raking liners off the machine just for fun, and Zito grabs his shoulder from behind, flips him and pushes him into the fence.
A ball goes whizzing behind Zito, and Haren tries to throw Zito off, but Zito’s got a hand on Haren’s stomach and a hand on his chest and he’s held down.
“You sleep hella deeply, you know that?” Zito says with a grin, leaning forward and scraping his rough cheek on Haren’s, kissing the side of his mouth. Haren snaps his head and shoves Zito off him, hard enough to almost knock Zito down.
“I wasn’t asleep, I was ignoring you, okay? Okay?”
Zito blinks, like the idea never even occurred to him, which it likely didn’t. “What?”
Haren’s still got the bat in his hand, which is good. A possible weapon, should it come to that. “I meant to tell you. I’m not. Like. I’m not like that.”
Zito’s eyebrows hunch, his teeth pushing out his lower lip petulantly. “The fuck you’re not.”
“Dude, fuck you,” Haren says sharply, jabbing Zito in the chest with his free hand. “You don’t get to say that.”
Zito steps forward, back in Haren’s space. Haren presses back against the fence, but he’s got nowhere to go. “You liked it,” Zito tells him, and puts his hand on Haren’s shoulder, curling his thumb over Haren’s collarbone.
Haren knocks him away. “I generally enjoy getting my dick sucked, yeah. That doesn’t mean I want you to do it.”
Zito grins, differently this time, not sweet and innocent the way he does most times. “What do you want me to do, then? Huh?”
He leans in again, and Haren barely gets his hand up into Zito’s face before Zito’s mouth hits his skin. Zito snuffles against his palm, his eyes surprised between Haren’s fingers. They’re so close, Haren can see gold in his eyes.
“Go away,” Haren whispers, and Zito’s tongue comes out and twists in the webbing between his fingers. Haren inhales hard, and takes his hand down. He focuses resolutely on Zito’s ear, and repeats, “I want you to go away.”
Zito shakes his head briskly. “You’ve been checking me out all fucking season, and now you’re just, what? Straight?” He says it with a tone of pure disgust, his lip sneered.
“And what the fuck are you? A date rapist? Don’t take no for an answer?” Haren tosses the bat away, and it bounces and rolls, clatters into the fence. “Fucking right, I’m straight. I’ve never been anything else.”
Zito laughs, or, really, it’s more of a cackle. It makes Haren’s stomach and arms break out into goosebumps. “Yeah I’m sure. I’m so sure.”
Haren clenches both fists, quick images of Zito with his face bloodied tearing through his mind. He can’t put his hands on Zito, though, he doesn’t think he’d be able to stop if he did.
“Look,” Haren starts, then takes a breath. “Look.” He turns his eyes down, staring at Zito’s Pumas. “Thank you for everything you’ve done for me this year. Thanks for all the stuff you taught me. But that’s it, man, okay? That’s all.”
He looks up, and finds Zito staring back at him with shock all over his face. And Haren gets that fucked-up feeling unspooling hotly in his stomach again, and he’s watching Zito’s mouth, lips slightly parted, a fraction of white teeth and Haren has to look away.
“Now will you let me go?” he asks softly, rubbing his palms on his pants, his head aching.
Danny keeps his eyes down; he doesn’t like what Zito’s face is doing to him, the memory of Zito’s mouth and Zito’s hands, Zito blistering against him and tonguing his neck. Doesn’t like any of this, not even a little bit.
“Go,” Zito tells him, barely audible. “Who’s stopping you?”
Haren brushes past him, looks back only once to see Zito standing there in the fluorescent lights, his fingers hooked in the fence and his shoulders slack, his left hand hanging uselessly.
*
A week later, and Haren has slept maybe six hours total. It’s not healthy. It’s not right.
They lose every single game on the trip, not counting the first in San Francisco, which doesn’t really count because San Francisco is hardly on the road. By the time they lose the third to the Indians, Haren just wants to crawl under a bed and never come out.
Haren’s still not making eye contact with Zito, but it’s okay because Zito’s not looking at him anymore either, not even to glare. Haren finds himself occasionally staring at Zito’s back, though, when he stops paying attention. He finds himself noticing how tight Zito wears his uniform pants, tight enough to read the dates on the coins in his pockets, if he carried coins in his pockets, which he doesn’t. Haren finds himself looking at Zito’s legs, the lines of his calves, and Zito’s arms, and Zito’s neck.
It’s only when he stops paying attention, and it’s not that often, so he’s not too worried about it. Naturally, Zito trying to fuck him up the way he did is going to take awhile to shake. Like the thing about being told not to think about an elephant, and then all you can think of is elephants.
They get back to Oakland and Zito gets his hair cut. Haren has trouble recognizing him for a day or two, all cleaned up with the nape of his neck clear.
In the clubhouse, Harden asks him, “Did someone, like, step on your pet turtle? Was there a heartbreaking crunch?”
Haren rips his eyes away from Zito’s back, which is wet-bare and sleek, and looks at Harden with his expression stricken and ashamed. “I. I don’t have a pet turtle.”
Harden smiles. “I know. It was a, a metaphor. Because you look like shit.”
Haren slumps down and crosses his arms over his chest. “Sorry.”
“Don’t be sorry, man. Just don’t be all miserable and stuff.” Harden’s got ice packed on his strained side, bandages tightly wrapped. He takes a look around the room, one corner of his mouth curling up the way it does. “Anyway, there’s no need. We’re about to turn it around.”
Haren shakes his head, his mouth already open before he remembers that Harden has no idea that something other than the skid could be upsetting him. He shuts up, tips his head down so his hair falls in front of his eyes. “Okay, Rich, sure.”
Harden punches him on the shoulder. “Don’t blow me off. I’m telling you the truth.” Harden hits him again, friendly this time, and goes off to talk to Crosby, who’s getting ready for his first game back with a grin the size of Iowa on his face.
Haren pushes his hair back and thinks about how this has been just a terrible month, altogether wretched, but June’s coming up fast, and it really can’t get much worse.
*
They win four games straight, and on the last night of May, Haren goes the distance for the first time ever, and keeps saying Zito’s name in the post-game interview, not really meaning to, it’s just all he can think about: Zito in the bullpen beside him, Zito in the park with the little kids playing soccer behind them, Zito telling him to stay in the zone and stay in on the hands.
The team is happy again, they talk and joke and play stupid music in the clubhouse, but Haren still can’t sleep, still can’t keep from thinking about the stuff he doesn’t want to think about. He gets talked into going to a club in San Francisco, mostly because he’s too tired to argue.
On the way to the VIP section, Zito’s in front of Haren, and he turns back to let a waitress pass, tray held high. His hand is on Haren’s chest and he’s pressing Haren down against the wall to make room, their chests barely touching. It’s the closest they’ve been since that day in the batting cages, and Haren is aware of every centimeter where they’re in contact with each other.
Zito’s hand slides down briefly and he grins all neat and cruel at Haren in the colored light, barely shorter than him and right fucking there, clipping his fingertips off Haren’s belt and then off, moving forward again.
Haren stays back against the wall for a while, not moving, his eyes wide and his mouth dry. Watches Zito enter past the velvet rope and climb the stairs, high above for a moment, shark-tank crowd and a bad Latin remix of something pounding hard.
Haren’s stomach is tense, his face heated, and his hands start to shake, his life and all the things he believes falling down around him. Zito hasn’t taught Haren everything he knows, just everything that matters. And if Zito’s right about baseball, maybe he’s right about the rest of it, too.
Haren wonders who he can call back in St. Louis, how he can track down the man he’s replacing and figure out what happened between them, how it started and how it ended.
He needs to know what he’s in for.
*
And one time, Zito saw a leopard shark in the bay and followed it for better than a mile, until his arms burned and his chest felt electrocuted. He swam back and collapsed on the shore, his legs in the surf, gasping for air and calling soundlessly for Danny, who was lying on the hood of the car with his sunglasses on, already in mourning, believing with all his heart that Zito had drowned.
THE END