MS 1st person past

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. A scene as wholesome as a bowl of cornflakes. 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 Pridemore --- "Attaboy Amos" --- 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 couldn't let the game go, 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 old white clapboard house out on dusty Route 19, trying to get the pitches down --- fastball, curve, slider, change-up, split-finger, circle-change. I threw in blizzards, in cyclones, in apocaplyptic downpours that sent the town council scurrying for old disaster plans and heatwaves that roasted the corn in the fields. I 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, caught Aaron looking, set down Rose 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" didn't begin to describe it. This was a bag you squatted to lift and threw over your shoulder, the beginnings of a levee. With this thing, the Central Division was 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 where was I? Still in the bullpen, going at that bag of sunflower seeds like my family was trapped inside. And I'd tried everything short of TNT when suddenly the thing opened, by which I mean exploded in every direction, a sunflower seed supernova, and there was no chance of salvaging even a handful. And anyway, by that time even the beer guy was wondering where I was, the organist scrambling for something else to play. I bolted out of the bullpen and got maybe three steps before I tripped over the shadow of the Gateway Arch 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 scrambled to my feet, embarrassed, already waving off the trainer --- I'm all right, I'm all right --- when the state of Missouri detached itself from my cleats and dropped away into the yawning depths of the universe. I lurched, the cloudless sky blackening at the edges, the crowd noise a distant buzz. I saw my teammates abandon their positions and float toward me, one of them (was it Pasco or Swinghammer? And how on God's green earth would I know? I'd been in town what --- eight minutes?) shouting and waving toward the dugout. 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? And there it was then, I was a cup of coffee, washed up before the crowd could squirt mustard on their hot dogs, in the bigs barely long enough to get my cap back on after the national anthem. 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 to the mound.

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 shook imaginary dust out of my blankets in her green bathrobe 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 all too much: the humiliation in front of the home crowd, the drugs, the long drive, the notion that baseball was in the past (and I still couldn't imagine it, couldn't make it real). And with Joltin' Joe, the Iron Horse and the Bambino frowning down from the walls in disgust, I pulled my bedspread over my head and bawled until I felt the familiar weight of my mother on the bed beside me.

The sun came up, then the sun went down. Tomatoes ripened on the kitchen windowsill. The seasons rolled past my bedroom window like a sleepy grade school filmstrip, and the North American continental plate drifted beneath my feet. 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 and named him after Honus Wagner. (And if that wasn't evidence of my wife's understanding of the bigger picture, I didn'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 started early. 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, poked in the cobwebbed corners of my parent's attic for my oldest and most-prized memorabilia. The crib could've been commissioned by the Topps Baseball Card Company, one in their limited commemorative Infants of the National League Series, and a gigantic mobile featuring pint-sized versions of all thirty team mascots turned overhead playing a music-box “Take Me Out to the Ballgame.” I left nothing to chance. There wasn't a teething ring, Beanie Baby or Little Golden Book that wasn't a nod to the grand old game.

And each night, like some stooped and devout curate charged with raising the chosen one, I carried my son to the cathedral, laid him on the altar and beseeched the saints for their blessing. Mantle, Mays, Williams, DiMaggio. This was the canon, the names I whispered. And the boy prospered, delighting in Cracker Jacks and corndogs even as he learned the ways of the journeyman and the free agent. He calculated slugging percentages before he lost his first tooth and absorbed the arcana of the double-switch and the infield fly rule even as other children his age were wrestling with their ABC's.

For his fourth birthday I wrapped up my own first baseball bat, an Al Kaline Signature Series Louisville Slugger. The handle was all taped up, and I had darkened in the signature with a Magic Marker before I knew any better, but aside from that and a few nicks in the barrel from hitting rocks out of my driveway, it was in great shape. So when the cake was consumed, the grandparents and neighbors heading for the exits, I dug a ball out of the closet, took him out into the backyard and placed the bat in his impossibly small hands, hands I could have put in my mouth. I stood him up straight, adjusted his stance, stepped back and showed him the ball.

This was it: the payoff pitch. A mock wind-up for Mom behind the video camera, and then I released the gentlest of underarm lobs. The ball arced toward the boy, his eyes locked onto it, he swung, and praise Hillerich and Bradsby, 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 because the boy was already running to first trailing wails of joy that would have melted the heart of Tyrus Raymond Cobb, himself.

Later, the dishes done, party favors in the trash and the little All-Star tucked in snug, I was watching the highlight reel for the umpteenth time when Elaine yawned off to bed. And that was when I noticed the bee, bombus sylvestris, diving at the ball like a MiG intercepting a jumbo-jet that had wandered into Soviet airspace. 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 was watching, the bee he swung at. The ball just happened to be in the way. And he wasn't running to first trailing any wails of joy, either. He was just plain old running and wailing. It was a blow, a kick in the gut. I had already telephoned everybody short of the commisioner of baseball to brag about how it was early yet, but the kid looked like he was going to be a real gamer, a chip off the old block, when in fact the boy was just trying to save his own skin.

I curled up on the floor and tried to picture myself with one of those sons who doesn't get sports, a thin-wristed, reedy-voiced pantywaist with zero coordination and even less backbone. I'd grown up with a pigeon-toed, horn-rimmed-glasses-wearing milquetoast named Gilbert Cuppernell who spent all his afternoons under a tree with his nose in a book. We showed him no mercy. He came to school everyday wearing high-water dress slacks and carrying a dry pair of underwear in his book satchel to change into instead of facing the torture awaiting him in the boys' bathroom.

I imagined Wagner in Gilbert's place, backed up against the playground fence, glasses slipping down his nose, wilting into a warm puddle of his own making. And I thought: maybe if I put a television in his room and signed up for that on-demand cable sports package deal so he could watch all the out-of-market games. Sure, that was the ticket. And between innings I could flip over to the Disney Channel and have Tinkerbell sprinkle a little pixie dust on the old elbow.

I laid there on the floor like a man lost at sea, unable to summon the will to regain the sofa, let alone stand upright, cross the room and climb the stairs to the bedroom. And that was how Elaine found me the next morning, deflated, a heap of hollowed-out flesh in front of the TV, the picture frozen on a ball and a bee and a boy who didn't know the difference.

The ump called the coaches out to the plate to ask how we wanted to handle the extra innings. He addressed us as "gentlemen" and explained that if this were the regular season, we would go one extra frame and if neither team scored, the game would be declared a draw. "And everybody goes to the Dairy Queen for milkshakes," I said, suspecting that was all the kids wanted in the first place.

The ump gave me a weary smile full of sore feet and aching back and continued. "But since this is the championship, gentlemen," --- and I could tell he'd rather eat third base than finish the sentence --- "I've been authorized to allow the game to continue until one team emerges victorious."

I rubbed my elbow and shrugged, open to anything that would end it --- one inning, coin flip, rock-paper-scissors. But the other coach, a real blowhard by the name of Hoyt Bracy --- demands to go by the book, major league rules, and screw this one-extra-inning-and-share-the-trophy shinola. He wants a fight to the finish, head-to-head competition, gladiators deciding the outcome on the field of play.

I asked Bracy to be reasonable. He got a laugh from the peanut gallery questioning the existence of certain private parts of my anatomy. I pointed out that it was already past ten o'clock and the gladiators were all tuckered out. He shot back that maybe certain gladiators were just a big bunch of pussies.

And that tears it. In a flash we were nose to nose, chewing through a litany of profanities, kicking up dust, bumping bellies. The crowd rushed the backstop. The ump slung his mask and struggled to get between us as the dugouts disgorged a frenzied squall line of four-foot tornadoes, shrieking and spun up on an eight-hour diet of Sugar Babies, Cherry Coke and Laffy Taffy.

And it is this, the sight of my team --- my own son --- crazed and out for blood, that tore me away from the confrontation. "Fine, fine, fine," I said, backing away, both palms up. "We'll do it your way."

The teams had formed up behind us, and I was relieved to see that they were following the schoolyard script of posturing and name-calling. A couple more years on them and there might have been real trouble. Bracy grinned, nodded and stepped toward me, extending his hand. "No hard feelings?"

I looked at his hand like it might've been a live wire. Bracy knew about the elbow. The boys, the crowd, the entire Western Hemisphere knew about the elbow. But what could I do? Every eye was on me, lives in the balance. So I shook. And Bracy really went to town, pumping my arm like a politician down ten points in the polls.

And it was all I could do to remain upright. The pain is off the scale. I wanted to bolt, run the bases until I dropped, bash my head against the foulpole, get down on all fours --- or all threes, at least --- and chew up the infield turf. My eyes watered, my ears rang, the ballpark tilted beneath my feet, and if not for the crush of boys at my back I could've just fallend backward into my grave.

But I didn't let go, didn't want to give Bracy the satisfaction. Instead, I locked my jaw, ignored the blitzkrieg in my somatosensory cortex, and thought, If this is the way you want it, you fat mother scratcher, okay then. Let's play ball.

By twelve o'clock, word had gotten around town and everyone except the very young and the very old were streaming into the park like holy bugs drawn to a waterstain Virgin Mary. They arrived in comfy, oversized sweats, flannel pajamas, terrycloth bathrobes. They carried lounge chairs, cots, sleeping bags, blankets and goose-down pillows. Up and down the foul lines, campstoves were assembled, tents raised. Fathers congregated in twos and threes to lay bets; mothers sat on the ground and read bedtime stories to tots tucked in and yawning beneath snug mounds of handmade quilts. The concession stand had long since run out of everything and the fans picked up the slack potluck style --- hot dogs and marshmallows roasted over open fires, soft drinks and beer materialized from oversized coolers. Here and there portable smokers punctuated the night air with the essence of hot wings, polish sausage, ribs, beef brisket.

Bracy's team got the crowd on its feet in the bottom of the eleventh, putting two on with nobody out. But the next three batters went down swinging and everybody settled back into their nests. Then, in the top of the twelfth, Amos Pridemore led off with a triple, the ball rolling right past the head of Bracy's right fielder who was flat on his back, sound asleep in the grass. Bracy called time and hustled in a substitute. The right fielder was too worn out to even walk back to the dugout, and his father had to trot out onto the field to carry the boy to the car.

The next pitch bounced six feet in front of the plate, dribbled between the catcher's legs, and Pridemore sprinted down the third base line to score. The crowd came unglued, and I was right there with them. It was the first blood I'd smelled in four hours, and I was ready to go in for the kill. Okay, sure, these were ten-year old boys playing for the Podunk title, and I might not have particularly even wanted the trophy. But Bracy did.

Bracy bawled threats of bodily harm from the sideline, and his team rallied to put out the next three batters in fine fashion. Still, I sent my boys out for the bottom half of the twelfth up one run and three outs away from pee-wee league imortality. But it wasn't to be. Bracy's catcher sent the first pitch over the centerfield fence, and we went into the thirteenth locked up at seven apiece.

A ripple went through the crowd when a crew from Channel 6 showed up in the fourteenth to tape a segment for the morning news. It was almost one-thirty in the morning, but the reporter was a local celebrity and nobody wanted to miss her. Little kids mugged for the camera and the women whispered about how thin the reporter looked. Too thin, if you asked them. Skin and bones, really, and she would be sorry someday when she just wasted away to nothing.

[PICK UP FLASHBACK HERE]

There was trouble in the middle of the sixteenth, a couple of parents arguing a close play at second, one saying his son got in under the tag, the other saying his son laid on the tag a good five feet in front of the bag and anybody who couldn't see that must be blind or retarded or both. Other parents chimed in with their incendiary remarks and the situation ignited like they'd been sitting in gasoline all night long. It took a combined response from the police, sheriff's office and volunteer fire department to bring the crowd under control, but nine paramedic calls and five arrests later the bottom of the inning was underway. A cordon of officers outfitted in riot gear remained on hand, and the red-and-blues rotating atop the ring of squad cars parked around the field pulsed across the grass like the heartbeat of a barely tamed beast.

In the bottom of the seventeenth, my boys dragging themselves around the field like zombies on a drive-in picture screen, the news crew long gone, the communal feast a ball lost and forgotten in the weeds, Bracy had the top of the order up and in minutes the basepads were jammed. It was a turning point in a marathon contest that had seen very few reasons for the crowd to rouse itself from the numbing sameness of batting orders cycled through so many times even the moths busy in the lights knew them by heart. But the bleachers were all but silent, glum as an oncologist's waiting room. They'd seen it all before. And sure enough, the next batter fanned. And the one after him just stood with the bat on his shoulder like he'd been exhumed.

Facing the grim certainty of an eighteenth inning, a few of the parents enlisted the brawn of a sympathetic deputy and approached Bracy in the dugout, demanding to leave with their kids. Bracy stomped and snorted and was pulling out the permission sheets the parents had all signed at the beginning of the season when there was a wail from behind the plate. I looked over and Beeson, my catcher, was supine in the dust, the ump on one knee, waving me over.

It was important at this level not to make too big a deal about injuries. Most were superficial and fussing over them too much just scared the kid even more. But Beeson wasn't moving. Trotting to the plate, I decided I'd had enough. The kids were walking in their sleep. Somebody was going to get killed, and I was praying somebody hadn't already.

I bent over the boy, and the ump pointed to where the ball had gone in, just above the chest protector. I extracted the ball and bent in close. I had seen a broken larynx once in double-A ball, and as far as I knew, the poor guy still carried a notepade on a string around his neck and ate through through a tube. I felt the shadows of Mr. and Mrs. Beeson fall across my back, and I called the boy's name, asked if he could hear me. The gurgle sent the boy's mother into hysterics, and I hollered for somebody to call 911 before remembering we had every unit short of Hawaii Five-0 already waiting in the wings. Being the thoughtful human being he was, Bracy put his hands around his mouth and bawled, "Nine-one-ooooone! Nine-one-ooooone!" but it didn't get as big a laugh as he hoped and he skulked back to his dugout to scold his team about their jocks smelling up his dugout or their shoes being tied the wrong way.

Fifteen harrowing minutes later, spent syringes and bloody latex gloves strewn around the plate, my boys parted to allow the ambulance to depart, Mr. and Mrs. Beeson visible through the back window, absolutely stricken. And I was heading for the dugout to bag up the gear, wondering whether I should go straight to the hospital or wait until there was word on the boy, when Bracy bellowed, "What's the count, Blue?"

I wheeled around, stunned. "'What's the count?' Are you kidding me? 'What's the count?'"

Bracy shrugged, said the kids had been out there a long time, put out a lot of effort. He'd hate to see all that come to nothing. I stalked up to him and said that if he cared at all about the kids, he would see that they were worried sick about that boy they just carted off to the hospital with enough tubes in him to reanimate the 1908 St. Louis Browns. Bracy surveyed the field and said it didn't look that bad to him. Besides, they couldn't do anything for Gleason now.

"Beeson," I barked.

"Whatever."

It was 3:17 a.m. and I shoved my watch in Bracy's face (and that was a mistake; my elbow lashed out and for a second the Earth fell out from under me). He shrugged, and I remember thinking that if I didn't walk away, that very instant, I was going to pick up the aluminum bat at my feet and beat the bastard until the infield was decorated with his redneck blood, collapsing star in my elbow notwithstanding.

"We're done," I snapped and stomped off. Then the ump said, "You forfeiting, coach?"

I stopped and turned. The crowd was standing, breathless, hanging on my answer. I started to argue, then stopped. A breeze lifted the American flag on its pole out past the centerfield fence then dropped it again, the moon slipped a degree lower in the sky. Forfeit? Well, no I wasn't forfeiting. I was behaving like an adult, putting things in proper perspective. But then --- and I wouldn't have admitted it under penalty of death --- Bracy had point: there wasn't anything I could do for Beeson. And the odds of something like that happening again were what --- a million to one against? Ten million?

And then a voice from the stands piped, Play ball! and I came around. Play what? I couldn't think straight. I was exhausted, my elbow cranked up like it hadn't been since the first few weeks after the injury. And when did I last eat, for the love of God? I seemed to recall an Egg McMuffin this --- no, yesterday morning. I was starving, the hunger pains all of a sudden sucking me inside out. This was insane. We were insane: me, Bracy, the boys, the cops, the parents --- especially the parents. These were children, for crying out loud.

I turned in circles, desperate to explain, tell them how I'd been there once, eaten up with baseball. And though I'd heard it said a thousand times, in that moment I understood: baseball was just a game. But then another voice drifted from the shadows down the left field line: Play ball!, and the voices came together, one by one, growing like a battle cry, like a movement, until it was deafening. Play ball! Play ball! Play ball! Play ball! I imagined people all over town, throughout the county, statewide, standing on rooftops, hanging out bedroom windows, dangling from grain silos and radio towers, all shouting toward the field, Play ball! Play ball! Play ball! Play ball!

I looked at my team, at my wife on the top row of the bleachers behind home plate. And then my son was slipping the ball out of my hand and taking the mound. The ump replaced his mask and the batter stepped back into the box. The bases were still loaded and for an instant I considered flashing the sign for an intentional walk, but I knew the kid would never go for it.

THE END