“Pete Garner—”
“From the Pirates.”
“Yeah?”
I walked the phone away from the guests. As I cupped the receiver with my free hand, I glanced at two old women sitting on the couch, eating tuna salad from paper plates.
“They got their Old Timers game, right?” my father said. “And Pete tells me Freddie Gonzalez bailed out. Some crap with his paperwork.”
“I don’t get why—”
“It’s too late for them to make calls for a replacement. So I say to Pete, ‘Hey, Chick’s around.’”
“Dad. I’m not around.”
“You can be. He don’t know where you’re at.”
“An Old Timers game?”
“So he says, ‘Oh, yeah? Chick is?’ And I say, “Yeah. In good shape, too—’”
“Dad—”
“And so Pete says—”
“Dad—”
I knew where this was going. I knew it immediately. The only person who had a harder time giving up my baseball career than me was my father.
“Pete says they’ll put you on the roster. All’s you got to do is—”
“Dad, I only played—”
“Get up here—”
“Six weeks in the majors—”
“Around ten A.M.—”
“I only played—”
“And then—”
“You can’t do an Old Timers game with—”
“What’s your problem, Chick?”
I hate that question. What’s your problem? There is no good answer except, “I don’t have a problem.” Which clearly was not true.
I sighed. “They said they’d put me on the roster?”
“That’s what I’m saying—”
“To play?”
“Are you deaf? That’s what I’m saying.”
“And this is when?”
“Tomorrow. The guys from the organization will be there and—”
“Tomorrow, Dad?”
“Tomorrow. What?”
“It’s like, three o’clock already—”
“You’re in the dugout. You bump into these guys. You strike up a conversation.”
“I bump into who?”
“Whoever. Anderson. Molina. Mike Junez, the trainer, the bald guy? You make it a goddamn point to bump into them. You get to talking, you never know.”
“What?”
“Something opens up. A coaching spot. A batting instructor. Something in the minors. You get a foot in the door—”
“Why would they want me—”
“That’s how these things—”
“I haven’t swung a bat in—”
“—Happen, that’s how they happen, Chick. You get a foot in the door—”
“But I—”
“It’s who you know when these jobs open—”
“Dad. I have a job.”
A pause. My father could hurt you more with a pause than any man I’d ever known.
“Look,” he said, exhaling. “I finagled an opening. You want this or not?”
His voice had shifted, the fighter angering, balling his fists. He had dismissed my current existence as swiftly as I wished I could. It made me recoil, and in recoiling, of course, a fight is lost.
“Just get your butt out here, OK?” he said.
“It’s Mom’s birthday.”
“Not tomorrow, it ain’t.”
LOOKING BACK ON that conversation, there are many things I wished I’d asked. Did he give a hoot that his ex-wife was having a birthday? Did he want to know how she was feeling? Who was there? What the house looked like? If she ever thought about him? Fondly? Badly? At all?
There are a lot of things I wished I’d asked him. Instead, I said I’d call him back. I hung up the phone. And I let the opportunity my father had “finagled” dance around my head.
I thought about it as my mother sliced her vanilla layer cake and put each piece on a paper plate. I thought about it as she opened her presents. I thought about it as Catherine, Maria, and I posed around her for a photo—Maria now covered in purple eye shadow—and my mom’s friend Edith held up the camera and said, “One, two...uch, wait, this thing, I can never figure it out.”
And even as we stood there forcing our smiles, I was picturing my swing.
I tried to focus. I tried to wrap my mother’s birthday party around me. But my father, a thief in many ways, had robbed me of my concentration. Before the paper plates were tossed, I was down in the basement, on the phone, booking the last plane out.
My mother used to start her sentences with “Be a good boy...,” as in “Be a good boy and take out the garbage...” or “Be a good boy and run to the store...” But with one phone call, the good boy I had been when I arrived that day had taken a powder, and another boy had taken his place.
I HAD TO lie to everyone there. It wasn’t hard. I wore a pager for work, and I called it from the downstairs phone, then went upstairs quickly. When the pager went off in front of Catherine, I acted annoyed, grumbling about them “bothering me on a Saturday.”
I faked the return phone call. Faked my dismay. Faked a story about having to fly to a client who could only do the meeting on a Sunday, and wasn’t it awful?
“They can’t wait?” my mother asked.
“I know, it’s ridiculous,” I said.
“But we’re having brunch tomorrow.”
“Look, what do you want me to do?”
“You can’t call them back?”
“No, Mom,” I snapped. “I can’t call them back.”
She looked down. I exhaled. The more you defend a lie, the angrier you become.
An hour later, a cab pulled up. I grabbed my bag. I hugged Catherine and Maria, who forced smiles that were really half-frowns. I yelled a good-bye into the gathering. The group yelled back, “So long...Bye...Good luck...”
I heard my mother’s voice last, above the others: “Love you, Char—”
The door shut mid-sentence.
And I never saw her again.
Times My Mother Stood Up for Me
“But what do you know about running a restaurant?” my wife says.
“It’s a sports bar,” I say.
We are sitting at our dining room table. My mother is there as well, playing peekaboo with little Maria. This is after I’ve quit baseball. A friend wants me to partner in a new business.
“But isn’t it hard to run a bar?” Catherine says. “Aren’t there things you have to know about?”
“He knows that stuff,” I say.
“What do you think, Mom?” Catherine asks.
My mother takes Maria’s hands and flops them up and down.
“Would you have to work nights, Charley?” she asks.
“What?”
“Nights. Would you have to work nights?”
“I’m the investor, Mom. I’m not gonna wait tables.”
“It’s a lot of money,” Catherine says.
“If you don’t invest money, you can’t make money,” I say.
“Isn’t there something besides this?” Catherine says.
I exhale loudly. In truth, I don’t know what there is. When you play sports, you train yourself not to think too much about anything else. I can’t imagine myself behind a desk. This is a bar. I know about bars. I have already begun a reliance on alcohol as part of my daily existence and secretly there is appeal in having it so handy. Plus, the place has the word
“sports” in it.
“Where is it?” my mother asks.
“About a half an hour from here.”
“How often would you have to go?”
“I don’t know.”
“But not at night?”
“Why do you keep asking about nights?”
She wiggles her fingers in Maria’s face. “You have a daughter, Charley.”
I shake my head. “I know, Mom, OK?”
Catherine rises. She clears the dishes. “It scares me, that’s all. I’m just being honest.”
&
nbsp; I slump. I stare down. When I look up, my mother is watching me. She puts a finger under her chin and lifts it slightly, telling me, in her way, that I should do the same.
“You know what I think?” she announces. “I think you have to try things in life. Is this something you believe in, Charley?”
I nod yes.
“Belief, hard work, love—you have those things, you can do anything.”
I sit up. My wife shrugs. The mood has changed. The odds have improved.
A few months later, the sports bar opens.
Two years later, it goes out of business.
Apparently, you need more than those three things. At least in my world, if not hers.
The Game
I STAYED IN A BEST WESTERN hotel the night before the Old Timers game, which reminded me of my playing days and the road trips we took. I couldn’t sleep. I wondered how many people would be in the ballpark. I wondered if I could even make contact with a pitch. At 5:30 A.M., I got out of bed to try some stretching. The red light on my phone was blinking. I called the front desk. It rang at least twenty times.
“I have a message light on,” I said when someone finally answered.
“One sec...,” the voice groaned. “Yeah. There’s a package for you.”
I went downstairs. The clerk handed me an old shoe box. It had my name taped on top. He yawned. I opened it.
My cleats.
Apparently, my father had kept them all these years. He must have dropped them off sometime during the night, without even phoning the room. I looked for a note, but there was nothing else in the box. Just my shoes, with all their old scrapes.
I ARRIVED AT the ballpark early. I had the cab drop me off, out of habit, near the players’ entrance, but the guard directed me to the employee gate, where the beer and hot dog vendors enter. The stadium was empty and the halls smelled of sausage grease. It was strange, returning to this place. I had wanted, for so many years, to earn my way back as a player. Now I was part of a promotion, Old Timers Day, a few innings of free nostalgia, a way to sell tickets—like Cap Day, Ball Day, or Fireworks Day.
I found my way to an auxiliary locker room where we were supposed to dress. An attendant at the door checked my name off a list and gave me my uniform for the day.
“Where can I...?”
“Anyplace over there,” he motioned, pointing to a row of metal lockers, greasepaint blue.
Two white-haired guys were talking in the corner. They gave me a chin nod without stopping their conversation. It felt awkward, like going to a high school reunion for someone else’s class. Then again, I’d had six weeks in the major leagues. It wasn’t like I’d made lifelong friends.
MY UNIFORM HAD “BENETTO” stitched across the back, although upon careful inspection, I could see the fabric shading from an old name that had been there before. I pulled the top over my head. I wiggled my arms through the sleeves.
When I tugged it down, I turned, and Willie “Bomber” Jackson was standing a few feet away.
Everyone knew Jackson. He was a terrific hitter, famous for both his power and his cockiness at the plate. Once, during the playoffs, he pointed his bat to the right-field fence, calling his shot, and then delivered with a towering home run. You only have to do this once in your career to be immortalized, what with the replays they have on TV. And he was.
Now he sat on a stool next to me. I had never played with Jackson. He was pudgy, almost inflated-looking in his blue velour sweatsuit, but there was still something regal about him. He nodded at me and I nodded back.
“What’s up?” he said.
“Chick Benetto,” I said, offering my hand. He grabbed the inner fingers and yanked them. He never said his name. It was understood he didn’t have to.
“So, Chuck, what’re you doing these days?”
I didn’t correct his pronunciation. I said I was in “marketing.”
“And you?” I asked. “Still broadcasting?”
“Mmm. Little bit. Mostly investments now.”
I nodded. “Cool. Yeah. Good move. Investments.”
“Mutual funds,” he said. “Some shelters, unit trusts, stuff like that. Mostly mutuals.”
I nodded again. I felt stupid for already wearing my uniform.
“You into the market?” he said.
I flipped my palm. “You know, here and there.” That was a lie. I was neither here nor there in the market.
He studied me, moving his jaw.
“Well, lookit. I can hook you up.”
For a moment there was something to this, the famous Jackson willing to hook me up, and I began in my mind to come up with money I did not have. But as he reached in his pocket, presumably for a business card, someone yelled “JACKSON, YOU FAT FART!” We both spun and there was Spike Alexander, and he and Jackson embraced so hard they almost tumbled into me. I had to step out of the way.
A minute later they were across the room, surrounded by others, and that was it for my time in mutual funds.
THE OLD TIMERS game was played an hour before the real game, which meant the stands were mostly empty when we began. An organ sounded. The PA announcer welcomed the sparse crowd. We were introduced alphabetically, beginning with an outfielder named Rusty Allenback who played in the late 1940s, followed by Benny “Bobo” Barbosa, a popular infielder from the 1960s with one of those huge, wide grins. He ran out waving. The fans were still clapping for him when my name was called. The announcer said, “From the pennant-winning team of 1973...,” and you could hear a tingle of anticipation and then “Catcher Charles ‘Chick’ Benetto,” and there was a sudden drop in volume, enthusiasm melting to politeness.
I darted out of the dugout and almost ran up Barbosa’s legs. I was trying to take my place before the applause died, to avoid that embarrassing silence where you can hear your own feet on the gravelly sand. Somewhere in that crowd was my old man, although when I pictured him, his arms were crossed. No clapping from the home team.
AND THEN THE game itself. It was like a train station in the dugout, guys shuffling in and out, grabbing bats, bumping around each other as their cleats rang on the concrete floor. I had one inning catching, which was plenty, because squatting down after all those years had my thighs burning as early as the third pitch. I kept shifting my weight from foot to foot, until one batter, a tall, hairy-armed guy named Teddy Slaughter, said, “Hey, pal, you wanna stop hopping around back there?”
To the arriving crowd, I suppose it looked like baseball. Eight fielders, one pitcher, one batter, one umpire dressed in black. But we were far from the fluid, powerful dance of our younger days. We were slow now. Clunky. Our swings were leaden, and our throws were high and loping, too much air beneath them.
In our dugout, there were big-bellied men who had clearly surrendered to the aging process, and who cracked jokes like, “Jesus, somebody get me some oxygen!” And then there were guys who still held to the code of taking all games seriously. I sat next to an old Puerto Rican outfielder, he had to be at least sixty, who kept spitting tobacco juice on the floor and mumbling, “Here we go, babies, here we go...”
When I finally came to bat, the stadium was less than half full. I took a few practice swings and then stepped into the batter’s box. The sun went behind a cloud. I heard a vendor yell. I felt perspiration on my neck. I shifted on my feet. And even though I had done this a million times in my life—gripped the bat handle, raised my shoulders, set my jaw, narrowed my gaze—my heart was racing. I think I just wanted to survive for more than a few seconds. The first pitch came in. I let it go. The umpire called, “Ball one!” and I wanted to thank him.
DO YOU EVER think while something is happening, about what’s happening someplace else? My mother, after the divorce, would stand on the back porch at sunset, smoking a cigarette, and she’d say, “Charley, right now, as the sun is going down here, it’s coming up someplace else in the world. Australia or China or someplace. You can look it up in the encyclopedia.”
She’d blow smo
ke and stare down the row of square backyards, with their laundry poles and swing sets.
“It’s such a big world,” she’d say, wistfully. “Something is always happening somewhere.”
She was right about that. Something is always happening somewhere. So when I stood at the plate in that Old Timers game, staring at a pitcher whose hair was gray, and when he threw what used to be his fastball but what now was just a pitch that floated in toward my chest, and when I swung and made contact and heard the familiar thwock and I dropped my bat and began to run, convinced that I had done something fabulous, forgetting my old gauges, forgetting that my arms and legs lacked the power they once had, forgetting that as you age, the walls get farther away, and when I looked up and saw what I had first thought to be a solid hit, maybe a home run, now coming down just beyond the infield toward the waiting glove of the second baseman, no more than a pop-up, a wet firecracker, a dud, and a voice in my head yelled, “Drop it! Drop it!” as that second baseman squeezed his glove around my final offering to this maddening game—just as all that was happening, my mother, as she once noted, had something else happening back in Pepperville Beach.
Her clock radio was playing big band music. Her pillows had been freshly plumped. And her body was crumpled like a broken doll on the floor of her bedroom, where she had come looking for her new red glasses and collapsed.
A massive heart attack.
She was taking her last breaths.
WHEN THE OLD TIMERS game was finished, we walked back down the tunnel, passing the current players. We took each other’s measure. They were young and smooth-skinned. We were fat and balding. I nodded at a muscular guy carrying a catcher’s mask. It was like watching myself going out as I was coming in.
Inside the locker room, I packed up quickly. Some of us took showers, but it seemed silly. We hadn’t really worked that hard. I folded my uniform top and kept it as a souvenir. I zipped my bag shut. I sat for a few minutes, fully dressed. Then there didn’t seem to be much point.
I exited the way I’d come in, through the employees’ entrance. And there was my father, smoking a cigarette and looking up at the sky. He seemed surprised to see me.
“Thanks for the cleats,” I said, holding them up.