Add This to the List of Things That You Are

by Chris Fink

  Mike Royko

  Where we’re from we have this saying, Happiness is Chicago in the rearview mirror. Each of us has been heard saying this. We like to make fun of the people of Chicago and call them citiots because they can’t change their own oil or plumb their own sinks. Of course when our friend from Chicago invites us to the city, we’re the first to go. And we always take cash out of the bank in big bills, and in Chicago we appear to spend it freely because we don’t want to look like cheap hicks to the people of Chicago. But it hurts us. Each twenty peeled from our rolls and blown in the windy city of Chicago hurts us, though we don’t make it known.

  The reason we go to Chicago is to see the Chicago Cubs play baseball in Wrigley Field. Somehow the Cubs belong to us, even though we don’t belong to Chicago, and all the things that we revile about Chicago do not apply to the Chicago Cubs. We usually go twice per year, once in the spring when the season is full of hope, and once in late summer when the season has been pissed away and all hope is lost.

  Most of us don’t think about a Chicago Cubs game as a thing we would like to do. None of us would put a Cubs game on the calendar, and none of us would get on StubHub and pay eighty dollars for a ticket. But when our friend from Chicago calls in August, like he does every August, and says he has extra tickets, and he got them free so don’t worry, we’re the first to accept. After we accept, we think of the misery of driving to Chicago and finding a place to park and then forking over fifty dollars just for the parking spot. We think about the awful crowds and the bodies crammed into small spaces. Granted we think about the beautiful bodies of women we’ll see who are somehow baseball fans. But we think more about hundred-dollar bills shrinking into twenty-dollar bills, and we can see ourselves peeling those from our rolls and handing them out like singles for rounds of beer and for soft pretzels, and later for cab rides and more rounds of beer and a burrito as big as our heads. We can actually picture the twenties peeling off like that and our rolls diminished. It makes us sick to think that we’ll act bigger than we are, and that we’ll come home poorer than we were.

  We think about that whole day gone and what we’ll be trading it for and will it be worth it. We think about how much beer we’ll consume and how we’ll feel the next day. We think we would rather get the boat out, or maybe catch up on yard work, or stay in bed all morning for once with our wives, or get the woodpile where it needs to be. But we accept the tickets because we feel the pull of Chicago as a place we should want to be, even though we were smart never to have been suckered into living there. Chicago is a death sentence we have, until this fateful summer in the year of our Lord—Jesus Christ, 2006—avoided.

  After we accept the tickets for next weekend’s game, we spend the week regretting our decision. We complain to our wives, and when our wives say, Just stay home if you’re going to hate it so much, we get angry that our wives don’t understand us and never even seem to want to try. We love our wives, we do. But we tell ourselves that a day in Chicago away from our wives is just what we need, if they’re going to treat us this way. And so we go to Wrigley Field, twice per year we go, and we’ve been going for two decades now and would probably continue to go if it weren’t for the events of this upcoming game.

  Some of us hold a vague hope that something will happen at Wrigley Field, something improbable and memorable enough to talk about at work on Monday, or maybe even at future Cubs games. Others of us think the key to happiness is never to expect anything to happen, ever. None of us in our small hayfield brains can begin to fathom the events that will occur later that drunken afternoon just beyond the friendly confines of Wrigley Field.

  We are farmers and contractors and small-business owners and one of us is even a teacher and one of us is a union slug. One of us was the valedictorian of our class, and one of us flunked out but later got an advanced degree. One of us is a veteran of the Iraq campaigns and has just been discharged after two decades in the military. This game, in fact, is a celebration of TK’s discharge, or it happens to coincide with his discharge. Whichever. In high school, we were teammates on the best baseball team in recent school history. Yes, we led our team to the state playoffs for the first time in decades, where we were eliminated in round one. For that reason, our names are still uttered around town, even by the younger generations. At school our pictures still grace the trophy case along with a grass-stained baseball with all of our tiny signatures. We remain heroes of sorts, something for the younger generations to aspire to. And that responsibility binds us. When one of us shows up to a high school baseball game in our town it’s like Ernie Banks at Wrigley Field. Something like that.

  We’re Lutheran or we used to be, though one of us is Catholic but he had to go to church in the next town. We’re white, each of us, though our friend who works for ComEd is some part Mexican and his nickname, Babosa, is Mexican for slug. We’re approaching middle age, or we’ve already arrived, though none of us can quite understand what that means. As younger men we thought of middle age as the pathetic end of natural life, but now that we’re knocking on the door of middle age we don’t feel completely dead. We’re all straight, though some of us have experimented and may continue to experiment, though none of us knows which one of us that might be, though we have our suspicions. If we talked about it, which we don’t, our opinions would differ on whether occasionally sleeping with another man makes you gay. Our friend with the tickets is Jewish, though none of us knew any Jews growing up, and we knew exactly one black person, who is now in prison, which some of us say just goes to show. Though we have a Jewish friend, we still don’t know a single Muslim. TK, who fought in Desert Storm, has unified our low opinion of Muhammad’s people.

  Each of us inherited the Cubs from our parents, who were also fans, and each of us understands, some of us more clearly than others, that childhood allegiances—to friends, to sports teams, to religions, or to implement manufacturers—are the biggest predictor of adulthood allegiances. We’re also beginning to understand that lifelong allegiances can fray under pressure, or they can simply molder from disuse and inattention.

  With game day approaching, none of us wants to drive, though each of us has an SUV big enough for the five of us. Except for the teacher, whose name is Jody, who of course drives a rice burner. One of us finally agrees to drive if he doesn’t have to supply the beer for the ride. Agreed, we say. It is the same one of us who always agrees to drive. It is Delavan, who owns a small business selling ag byproducts no one has ever heard of. Delavan is also a farmer, though that’s just so he can collect the subsidies, we tease.

  Delavan drives to pick us up at our houses on Saturday morning, and we pick up TK last, on account of his house is furthest east. TK we find standing at the end of his gravel drive like a boy waiting for the school bus. His school uniform is digital camo and Cubbie blue, and his lunch bucket is an outsized red beer cooler. Some of us wonder why TK continues to wear the military issue, though none of us mentions it.

  S’up n-words, TK says when he boards the bus.

  My n-word, Babosa says, taking the cooler from his hands.

  You can’t say that, Jody says and accepts a beer from the cooler. TK passes beers all around and Delavan points the SUV toward Chicago. The five of us ride together to the game just as we did to our high school games, and the seating chart is even the same. Delavan at the helm and Mike Bell at his right hand. Mike Bell is a contractor who is really more of a roofer. In the back, TK and Babosa are separated by Jody, who is the closest thing we’ve got to a female, and who therefore always rides bitch.

  At the game we attended in May it was decided that this was the year for the Cubs, though by June it was decided it might be next year. In July the Cubs fired their skipper and started dumping contracts. Now it’s August and the Chicago Cubs have the worst record in all of baseball. Still, Wrigley Field promises to be sold out today.

  We always drink beers on our biannual sojourns to Wrigley Field. We remind ourselves about the old high school
covenant: The D the D, or, The Driver’s the Drunkest, and we drink beers one after the other for the duration of the two-hour ride into Wrigleyville. We drink so much beer that we must stop at the Belvidere tollway oasis and then the Des Plaines Oasis to use the toilet. By the time we get to the Des Plaines Oasis we’re bleary and grinning. One of us says he’s hungry for a Longaberger basket. Another of us says, Des Plaines, Des Plaines, as if enjoying the taste of the words in his mouth. We load back into the SUV and pass out fresh beers and drive. The D the D, yo, one of us puts out, and gets fist bumps in return.

  The trust we have in our driver is unimpeachable, like a child’s trust in his father. None of us suspects that our friend will careen off the interstate and manslaughter us or some other motorist, and indeed he does not. Our drunken savior Delavan keeps us safe, for now.

  We are one unit as we hurdle in our SUV through the tollway corridor, past exits for towns that have become in our lifetime the exurbs, then past the western suburbs and into the near-western suburbs. We are veterans of many campaigns to Wrigley Field. On the tollway other SUVs and pickups full of men and boys head to Wrigley Field. The closer we get, the more the vehicles on the tollway seem like a convoy headed for a rendezvous. As we near our destination, the mood in the SUV becomes somber. The tightly wound orbit in which we travel is beginning to fray. It frays so gradually none of us even knows it’s happening.

  This year one of our wives will be born again.

  One of us will give his father his final shave.

  One of our daughters is pulling out all her hair.

  One of us will find his brother hanging from a barn rafter.

  One of our wives is about to invite a friend into the bedroom.

  On the Kennedy Expressway there are so many lanes of traffic one of us tries to count them and has to start over. Each of us stares in wonder as the Chicago skyline reveals itself. Now we can see the skyscrapers. There’s the Standard Oil building, one of us thinks, or maybe that’s not it. There’s the Sears Tower. Each of us is certain about that. On our fourth-grade field trip each of us went to the top of the Sears Tower, and none of us has been back since. Each of us is grateful to see the West Addison Street exit for Wrigley Field, for each of us again has to piss.

  If Wrigley Field is known as the confines, then what do we call the myriad streets and alleys radiating away from the old edifice? One of us is reminded of an old European quarter, what with the narrow passages and the rows of merchandise and the hawkers and pushers, some holding fistfuls of money as they make confusing transactions with the hordes. Mike Bell peels a hundred from his roll to pay for the slim gap in the alley where Delavan somehow squeezes his SUV. And though the slot is so narrow we can barely open our doors, we each manage to piss right there between the telephone poles and old garages of Wrigleyville. The old Polish woman who sells us the spot looks like a character from a fairy tale with her brown sweater and plaid headscarf. She makes change for Mike Bell even while Mike Bell has one hand on his dick. We drain our beers and enter the mighty current that pulls us toward the ballpark.

  Arriving at Clark and Addison at the main Wrigley gate, some of us are surprised, even after so many arrivals, to see that the place exists in color, for we grew up watching the Cubs on black-and-white sets, and in our first thousand views of this fabled place, the shapely marquee that reads, Wrigley Field, Home of the Chicago Cubs, was not brilliant red but monochrome. One of us imagines the marquee as an alluring set of feminine lips. We stand before it with a few extra minutes on our hands. Still time, thanks to Delavan’s good driving, to dip into the Cubby Bear, where Jody breaks his first C-note on a quick round of tallboys.

  In the Cubby Bear our attention is captured by a dazzling twenty-something couple. The man wears an orange track suit and aviator glasses, and the blonde beauty on his arm looks like an advertisement for this place. Her tight Cubs T-shirt looks painted on, and the bear cub in the logo of her snug team shorts seems to nuzzle the succulent cup of her buttocks. Her blonde hair she wears in a bun under a Cubs visor. There is little to suggest she belongs to the same species we do. The smear of eye black she wears under each eye is the proverbial frosting on the cake.

  Tell me a chick with eye black is not the sexiest thing you’ve ever seen, one of us says. We watch in amazement as Orange Track Suit guides the Cub Model into the men’s john, past the line of men who are in fact waiting for the john. None of us can believe it when the door shuts behind them. Did you see that? we say to one another, and we answer with the same question, Did you see that?

  In the time it takes us to finish our tallboys, the door opens again and the couple walks out, the line of waiting men parting for them. The Cub Model’s eye black looks streakier now, which is somehow even sexier, and her blonde bun looks mussed. Are we imagining this? Did Orange Track Suit just wink at another dude in the line? Chicago is a difficult city to understand, we all agree, and the transactions that occur here mystify us. In our town, we would invite Orange Track Suit to taste our pavement outside our local bar. In Chicago, he gets to eff the hottest number in the place while everyone stands around imagining it. Anything, it appears, is possible within the radiant halo of Wrigley Field.

  Back in the sunlit intersection of Clark and Addison, in the confusion and mayhem, the cabs honk and eddy. One nearly mows us down as we jaywalk across Addison. The cabbie is dark and turbanned and yells something at us in a language we cannot fathom, the sounds like bringing up phlegm from deep within and expelling the moistness toward us. One of us slaps the rear fender of the yellow beast as it rushes past. We barely register the calamity we just avoided before we pass beneath the glistening red marquee, and Wrigley Field swallows us.

  The sun always shines on the left-field bleachers at Wrigley Field, and it is shining hotly this day as we emerge from the stadium’s bowels to search for our seats. The game is already underway, and one of us asks, The fuck are the Cubs playing anyway? and one of us answers, The lowly Pads. We have, gentlemen, a puncher’s chance.

  Of the five of us, only Babosa is worth a shit at reading the tickets. As we wait, one of us licks a finger, holds it up, and announces the wind is indeed blowing out. Babosa is triumphant, and he finds the five empty seats in the middle of a row. There is our ticket patron, Simon, waving to us, and before we can even sit down next to him, the closest vendor yells, Beer Here! TK peels a Franklin from his roll, hands it down the line, and five tallboys come back down the line toward our accepting arms.

  Thanks for the tickets, hey Simon, one of us says. Free tickets and they’re still a ripoff.

  Up yours, Simon says, giving us the finger. Then Simon says, Hey look who I found. At his right is a golden-haired young man in a camo Angels’ jersey smiling like he knows us. He’s the only person in the bleachers not wearing blue.

  It takes us a moment, but we finally recognize him as one of our own. Yes, he’s from our town. Nice kid, Gin Phillips’s little cousin Henry. A good ballplayer too, we remember.

  Hey Henry, we all say.

  TK fucked you, Henry, another of us says, meaning Henry was shorted a beer.

  Henry, we remember, was like a dozen years behind us in school. Gin was in our class, though he rode the pine on our winning team. We give high fives to Simon and Henry. One of us went to college with Simon, and now he’s our adopted Jewish citiot, an honorary member of our hometown who works at the Mercantile Exchange. He comes to our town in the fall and shoots our deer from our shelterbelts and carries back with him our venison and good oak firewood. In return, he furnishes these bleacher seats and stock tips we rarely use. We are glad to have our own private citiot, Simon.

  We settle back and take in the expanse of the confines: the green, green perfection of the outfield grass, the impeccably raked diamond infield, the tight rows of box seats rising like the galleries of a ship, up to the air-conditioned skyboxes where those rich pricks sit and palm their highballs. Down below us, the miniature ballplayers punch their gloves and hurl the p
earl around the horn. Here is the oldest yard in the majors, bar one, and we bush-league pals are among the thousands who brine the rim of it. Already we’re drunker—more drunk—than we’ve been in many weeks and it’s still the first inning and first blood has not yet been scratched by either team. One of us imagines Wrigley as a giant ark cradling the last of our kind. Another of us is thinking about the brick outfield walls cloaked in ivy, which makes Wrigley seem more like a coliseum than a ballpark, home to sport’s most ancient rivalries. An old place, like Wrigley, is better than a new place, all of us would agree. Len Kasper announces a sellout crowd of 41,072 souls. Announces Armed Forces Day, and we all yell, Hooray. TK tips his digital camo hat and takes applause from the bleacher fans around us. He’s assured not to buy another beer for the duration, and one of us thinks the lucky SOB will get home with his roll intact.

  In the bottom of the second the Cubs mount a threat, but the inning ends with our guys stranded at first and third. The Padres starter worked his ass out of a jam and is now liable to settle down. Maddux is pitching for our guys. Yes, crafty old Maddux is back in Chi-town for a swan song and tossing two-seamers at like eighty-two.

  Please don’t let this be a pitcher’s duel, one of us says.

  The bleachers refuel between innings, and we take in the spectacle, arguing whether or not these are the same seats we had last year, or the year before that. Some of us remember our dads talking about paying a quarter for bleacher seats after the war. Talking about how, in those days, women could come to the games free. Our dads, some of them dead now, may have sat in these very seats next to dames who got in for nothing. Now, a bleacher seat set you back the same as a field box, and the bleachers are the more coveted. We come to watch baseball, sure, but we also come to watch the Young and the Beautiful, for most everyone in the bleacher seats these days seems cast for the show. Looking out over the sea of young fans, one of us thinks of a saying he heard one time. What was it? Youth is the only thing worth having.