MS 1st person past (Word)

It was almost perfection itself: Little League championship game, smalltown U.S.A., bottom of the last inning, score tied, bases loaded, two outs. Nine boys in red faced nine boys in blue. Smell of popcorn on the evening air, sno-cones, cotton candy on a stick. If only my elbow didn't shriek like a rabid animal dragged from its hole every time I so much as lifted a peanut to my lips. (But no sunflower seeds, not in my dugout. And any kid who even used "sun" and "flower" in the same sentence rode the bench, "Rule 5 - Everybody Bats" be damned.)

I clapped a couple times and muttered some half-hearted encouragement to my defense. Let's look alive out there. But who was I kidding? I just wanted it to end --- a passed ball, balk, brush fire, runaway comet, anything so I could go home and get my arm under a hot shower. I was pretty sure it took more than tap water to drive out a legion of demons, but that didn't stop me from running the stuff down the Duplantis family drain by the hogshead. But then nothing helped anymore, hadn't for years. Percodan, Darvon, Darvocet, Lortab, Oxycontin. Two M&M's three times a day would've done as much good.

I sagged against the dugout wall and pulled for the fat kid at the plate to bounce one off the scoreboard, nevermind that my own son was on the mound, sweating every delivery. But the fat kid only managed a dribbler to first. Side retired. Extra innings. Fan-damn-tastic.

I once toyed with writing a guide to coaching Little League baseball. It included the following fundamentals: 1) Don't chew on your glove. 2) Always pee before the game. 3) If you want to survive middle school, don't let your mom put your cup on you in the parking lot. There was a short section on how to finagle a sponsor whose kid bats .490 and has an arm like an M1A1 Pack Howitzer, two-hundred and nineteen pages on "Managing the Difficult Parent," and a special supplement devoted to the calculus of staffing the concession stand. Throw the ball, catch the ball, hit the ball? Way down the list.

My team, Thriblett Funeral Home (and heaven knows I begged the league president to find me another sponsor, Port-A-Potty, Tampax, anything but a funeral home) was the typical pee-wee roster: Hardison, Dumont, Fusco, Vanover and Fontenot, who didn't know first base from the concession stand; Mahaffey, Etheridge, Beeson and Lawhorn, who managed to keep up with their caps and gloves through six innings; and then there was Amos Pridemore, who came to practice humping pancake training mitts for everybody, arm strengtheners, a batting tee, hurricane net, a dozen balls, gloves and an array of custom-balanced aluminum alloy bats, all crammed in a rolling game bag big enough to take shelter in in case of rain. Amos was the best player in the league by far, and had he ended up on another team, I can't say for certain that I wouldn't have traded my own son for him, a lifetime supply of Twizzlers thrown in to sweeten the deal, so to speak.

They came loping off the field, cross as wet wasps, already up past their bedtime, and the dugout, so serene only a moment before --- just little Fontenot alone at the far end of the bench talking to his Pez dispenser --- was suddenly awash with short tempers and bellows of blame. I had planned a big pep talk, We can take this team, got 'em right where we want 'em, and so forth and so on, but instead I had to wade in and separate my shortstop and second baseman, who were working out their differences over who was supposed to cover the bag by trading blows to the breadbasket, one of which went astray and caught me bang on the old elbow. I roared, kids squalled, and then the ump was barking for a batter. The pep talk would have to wait.

Don't get the wrong idea: I wasn't one of those honey-I'm-home dads who sat down his briefcase, loosened his tie and went straight out into the backyard to show Junior a few pointers while Mom cooked dinner. I coached because I had been there myself --- ten years old and eaten up with baseball. Shoebox full of trading cards, Redbirds on the radio, Sunday sports section spread out on the living room floor like a sacred manuscript. I must've chucked a million balls up against the side of our house on 21st street trying to get the pitches down --- fastball, curve, slider, change-up. I threw in downpours, hailstorms, flash floods, blizzards. Threw dawn to dusk and by the light of the silvery moon. Threw until my fingers cracked and bled, healed over and cracked and bled again. Other kids my age wanted to be firemen when they grew up, astronauts, stock car racers. I dreamed only of becoming a big league ballplayer, of perfectly straight chalklines and the way my name would echo from the loudspeaker: Pitching for the Cardinals, Max Duplantis ... Duplantis ... Duplantis...

In my reveries, I was a fan favorite, a leader on and off the field, always available to host a black-tie event for charity or toss the ball around with a few kids in the stadium parking lot. I dominated the National League, fanned McCovey, set down Aaron, caught Rose looking like he was nothing, a cigar store indian, a rube, an ultramaroon. I was the first person to pitch back-to-back no-hitters since Johnny Vander Meer did it in '38, then bested him by hurling a third in my next start. My seventy-six shutouts tied Cy Young's record. The World Series rings piled up on my dresser, the Hall of Fame automatic. And then on a corker of a September afternoon in the deep green of my backyard, my dog Wimpy panting at the end of his chain, I retired. I stood through a solemn and tearful pre-game ceremony, my dad preserving the moment with his Bell & Howell Filmosonic Super 8, as the organization retired my jersey, everybody from the club owner to the batboy taking a turn at the microphone, lump in my throat, toeing the dirt at the plate, the ovation washing over me like a tender tide. Oh, I had been there, all right. Been there and then some.

Officially I blew out my elbow warming up in the bullpen. The papers didn't mention the Jumbo-Pak of Maysweet Sunflower Seeds. (And "jumbo" doesn't begin to describe it. This is a bag you squat to lift, a bag you throw over your shoulder, the beginnings of a levee. With this thing, the Central Division is fixed for sunflower seeds. Except I would never get to insert the first one into my mouth because the bag was designed to ride out a plunge into the heart of the sun. Impregnable. Bulletproof. Seaworthy.) The rest of the team was finished taking infield, the ump dusting off the plate, and I was still in the bullpen, going at this bag of sunflower seeds like my family was trapped inside. I've tried everything short of TNT when suddenly the thing opens, by which I mean explodes in every direction, a sunflower seed supernova, and there's no chance of salvaging even a handful. And anyway, by that time even the beer guy's wondering where I am, the organist scrambling for something to else to play. So I bolted out of the bullpen and got maybe three steps before I tripped over a shadow or something and went down hard. The pain was so sudden and intense I thought I'd been shot, and I even glanced up into the stands --- sunflower seeds in my hair, in my jock --- half expecting to see a couple of good Samaritans already scuffling with the gunman.

I got to my feet, but then I was slipping, fading out, the crowd noise a distant buzz. I watched my teammates abandon their positions and float toward me, one of them (is it Pasco or Swinghammer? And how on God's green earth would I know? I've been in town what --- eight minutes?) shouting and waving for the trainer. My head swam, my knees buckled, and then the ground was up against my cheek, a blade of grass in my ear. And through it all was the elbow, an elbow that had suffered some sort of fundamental collapse, an abrupt and irreversible transformation from elbow to something else entirely, an elbow that was simply no longer an elbow at all.

The skipper took one look at the MRI and slung his arm around my shoulder. Tough break, kid. You got a ride home? My dad drove three and a half hours to pick me up, the ride back a morphine blur. And then I was back in my old bedroom among the faded pennants and posters, bobbleheads, souvenir programs, popcorn-box megaphone, AM radio, Reggie Jackson nightlight. Dad stood in the doorway with his hands in his pockets while Mom, in her green bathrobe, shook imaginary dust out of my blankets and fussed with my Felix the Cat alarm clock, finding reasons to linger. I couldn't blame her. I was twenty-two years old, feet hanging over the end of the bed, job offers turned down, college skipped, bereft of even the most rudimentary knowledge that kept a roof overhead and food on the table, no more self-sufficient than the day she brought me into this world.

That night I dreamed of voter registration, compound interest, resumes, life insurance, laundry, tire rotation, termite control and all the other mundane details of life that even the dullest among my high school graduating class had long since mastered. Barely an hour had ticked off old Felix when I woke, disoriented, the sheets damp with my own sweat, the house silent. The drugs had worn off and my elbow felt as if Dad had crept back in while I was sleeping and applied a little good old-fashioned handyman know-how with his trusty Black & Decker Multi-Tool. Reaching for the bottle of painkillers in the gloom, I knocked over the glass of water Mom had left on the nightstand, and suddenly it was too much: the injury, the drugs, the long drive, the notion that baseball (and I still couldn't imagine it, couldn't make it real) was in the past. And I pulled my Heroes of the National League bedspread over my head, Joltin' Joe, the Iron Horse and the Bambino frowning down from the walls in disgust, and cried until I felt the familiar weight of my mother on the bed beside me.

Max Duplantis. Washed up before the crowd could squirt mustard on their hot dogs, in the bigs barely long enough to get his cap back on after the national anthem. Fan favorite? Hall of Fame? I was a trivia question on SportsCenter, a joke for the late innings of a televised blowout: Name the only major league pitcher to suffer a career-ending injury without ever actually getting into a game.

I married my high school sweetheart and took a job selling sporting goods at a family friend's department store. I brought forth a son, wrapped him in a rally towel and named him after Honus Wagner. (And if that wasn't evidence of my wife's understanding of the bigger picture, I don't know what could have been. All she asked was that we call the boy by his middle name. And when I thought about it, "Honus Duplantis" did sound a bit, what's the word --- contagious?)

I was thrilled. A boy. Chip off the old block, and no sunflower seeds for this one. I hired a local artist at seventy-five bucks an hour to paint a homerun fence around three walls of the nursery and a miniature diamond on the hardwood floor. The room was smothered with memorabilia, the crib looked as if it had been created under the direct supervision of the Topps Baseball Card Company, and a mobile hovered over it all playing “Take Me Out to the Ballgame.” There wasn't a block, Beanie Baby or Little Golden Book that wasn't a nod to the grand old game. And each night I laid my son in that temple, that shrine to baseball, and sent him off to dreamland, not with lullabies, but with the whispered names of the saints: DiMaggio, Mays, Mantle, Williams.

For his fourth birthday I bought him a bat and ball, not regulation, not yet, but real wood, cork and horsehide, nonetheless. And when the cake was consumed, the grandparents and neighbors heading for the exits, I took him out into the backyard and placed the bat in his impossibly small hands, hands I could have put in my mouth, soft, pudgy hands yet to crack and bleed and heal over and crack and bleed again.

I stood him tall, adjusted his stance, stepped back and showed him the ball. And this was it: the payoff pitch. A mock wind-up for Mom behind the video camera, and then the gentlest of underarm deliveries. The ball arced toward the boy, his eyes locked onto it, he swung, and praise Hillrich and Bradley, it nearly took my ear off. I threw up my hands out of reflex and my elbow gave me hell for it, but I hardly noticed, hardly noticed at all.

Later, the dishes done, party favors in the trash and the little All-Star tucked in and dreaming of peanuts and Cracker Jacks, Elaine yawned off to bed. I told her I'd be right up, I just wanted to watch the highlight reel one more time. And that was when I noticed the bee, bombus sylvestris, following the same flight path as the ball. I thumbed the remote, rewound the tape, got down on my knees and pressed my nose to the screen. I ran it backward and forward, frame by frame, with sound and without. Over and over, long into the night until there was no doubt, no doubt at all. It was the bee the boy went for. The line shot that almost took my ear off was a fluke. And that was where Elaine found me the next morning, deflated, a heap of hollowed out flesh in front of the TV, the picture frozen on a bee and a ball and a boy who didn't know the difference.

The ump called me and the other coach out to the plate to ask how we wanted to handle the extra innings.