Add This to the List of Things That You Are

by Chris Fink

  In the top of the third, the Pads nick Maddux for a run on a bunt single, a stolen base, and a couple of groundouts. In the bottom of the inning the Padres starter sets the Cubs down in order. Christ, one of us says, let’s at least see a fly ball. The game is indeed shaping up to be a pitcher’s duel despite the favorable wind. The outfielders for both teams blow bubbles and stretch their legs.

  With nothing much to see on the ballfield, we concern ourselves with rounds of beer and trips to the head. We catch up with Henry and Simon. After high school, Henry did a hitch in the Navy, he tells us, but never left San Diego, what they called Operation Desert Vacation. Now he’s back, living in Chicago, running trades on the floor of the Merc—where he met Simon—and taking law classes nights on the GI Bill.

  Henry is a version of us a dozen years newer. Here’s a hometowner making a go of it in the city, though he is no citiot. Henry belongs in these bleachers in ways we do not. He’s one of the Young and the Beautiful, sure, but he’s one of ours, too. He looks into our eyes when he talks to us and asks each of us about our wives and families. When Henry takes out his roll to pay for a round, one of us says, Put that away, and we all say, Yes, put that away, Henry.

  Henry is a handsome boy, one of us thinks, though in your middle twenties are you still a boy? Each of us finds himself wondering about Henry, the shiny new member of the team. What makes Henry so charming, one of us thinks, is that he shows us a devotion we didn’t earn. Henry saw our pictures in the trophy case every day at school. We were the boys Henry grew up wanting to be. Do you ever outgrow that devotion? Most of Henry’s attention seems directed at TK, which makes sense since they share the military. Still, at least one of us wishes the seats were rearranged.

  Beer here! calls the vendor. True to the spirit of Armed Forces Day, the rounds keep coming for TK. Drunken bleacher bums can’t seem to thank him enough for his service to our country. Two or three Cubs models ask to take selfies with TK, and we suddenly realize why he isn’t wearing civvies. Henry could cash in on this Support-Our-Troops Lovefest, but he does not, even though he’s sitting right beside TK talking about his discharge.

  We don’t yet know the nature of his discharge. We tell ourselves that it’s honorable, but we confess to our wives that we’re not sure.

  By the fourth inning the beer doesn’t even want to loiter in our bladders before demanding release. One of us leans forward, unzips, and fills the very cup he just emptied. Behind our sunglasses some of us close our eyes and nod off in the sun. We stir only when we hear the crack of a bat, and we stand and cheer, or else we boo. Behind our sunglasses our heads swim and our moods turn sour. In between cracks of the bat and trips to the head we dwell on the Cubs’ sad state of being, what some of us think of as Cubness. It’s not like us to dwell, but this is a battle of cellar-dwellers after all, and a pitcher’s duel to boot.

  Each year our Cubs find new and unexpected ways to flounder. They start each season with foolproof plans to win, yet lose. They win the sweepstakes for the bona fide star but the bona fide star fades in Cubby blue and bloats with the contract. They nurture a blue chipper through four years on the farm, only to see the blue chipper’s ulnar collateral rupture into spaghetti. They bring in an old vet to unify the clubhouse. They hire a new skipper. Invest in Latin America. They make the investments, but the investments don’t pan out. Each investment seemed sound at the time but in the August sun of the bleacher seats seems glaringly bad. There are limitless ways to lose, each of us knows. Promise leads to disappointment leads to Waveland Avenue. Seventy-five losses on the year thus far. One hundred losses is within our reach.

  Every decade or so the hibernating Cubs arise from the cellar to threaten a run, but then they tucker and collapse and settle back in the cellar where they seem most comfortable. Still, 41,072 souls arrive to see the spectacle.

  This is what it means to be middle-aged, we begin to fathom. It’s August in the major leagues. All potential is gone, the cake of our mediocrity baked.

  Why do we drive all this way? one of us says.

  It’s like asking why we live in a hick town in a hayfield where the weather is the only thing that blows.

  Next year we’ll go see the Brew Crew, one of us says.

  Word up, one of us comes back.

  But none of us can really imagine it. Our dads didn’t root for the Brew Crew, after all. It’s not as if you can simply choose for whom to root. If you could, the citiots would surely go elsewhere. They have their brownstones in Bucktown or Roscoe Village that doubled in value just last year. Any night of the week they might take a cab to Division Street and bring home a willing bedfellow. Like ours, their dads too must have taken these seats for a quarter, and so they’re stuck here with us, in the only place that could bring us together, rooting for a team that will never win.

  No fan from anywhere else can quite understand what it’s like to reside in these bleachers. This is Cubness. Here we are and we don’t quite understand it ourselves. If you root for another team you can always console yourself by thinking back to the glory days when your team brought home the World Series trophy. With the Cubs that was generations ago. Our dads weren’t even alive back in that day. Our granddads and their dads were born into this ancient losing streak.

  In the fifth inning it’s still 1–0 and Maddux is dealing like the Maddux of old, nibbling at the corners, changing speeds just perceptibly. Maddux is a pitcher our fathers deeply admired, a bridge of our generations. That old fucker still owns the plate, one of us says. Delavan breaks a C-note for a round. Henry is still chatting with TK, all smiles and gestures suggest he’s telling TK a happy story. It’s strange to have Henry out here with us. These biannual trips and this stupefying drunkenness are routine, but Henry is a newness we didn’t expect.

  In the bottom of the fifth, or maybe it’s the sixth, the Pads scotch another Cubs rally. Cubs’ next white hope Murton K’s on a hanging slider to end the threat.

  Sosa would have gone yard on that pitch, one of us says.

  This declaration leads us to recount the names of bygone Cubs, something we often do to pass the time and cheer ourselves. We say the litany of usuals. We say Banks and we say Santo and we say Williams and Jenkins and Sandberg, and we do say Sosa, in spite of the bad things he did. One of us reaches way back and brings forth Mordecai Three Fingers Brown, but none of us is a historian of the game. Three Fingers Brown is like Honest Abe Lincoln or some other dead president from days of yore that you can name, but you can’t ever know. We shun history, which we don’t understand, for the deep cuts of our youth, naming players who were our personal favorites, or perhaps the Cubs who disappointed us the most.

  Kingman, one of us says.

  Kingman, another of us repeats. If you can say Kingman I can say Ron Cey.

  Bobby Dernier, one of us says, as if changing the subject.

  Grace, one of us says.

  Word, one of us replies.

  Recall Rick Reuschel, another of us says.

  Another of us says another Rick. Sutcliffe.

  Fucking Sutcliffe.

  How about Dunston?

  How about Bowa?

  Jo-dy, Jo-dy Davis, sings Jody, and we all laugh out loud.

  It takes quite a while for one of us to summon the nerve to say Buckner, who always gets said last.

  William Joseph Buckner, one of us replies. Jesus Christ.

  His Cubness. Billy Buck.

  Beer here! yells the vendor, and Mike Bell digs out his roll.

  As the game drags on each of us gets lost in the daydreamy innings of the August afternoon. Our minds follow tangents like flyballs from our youth that we lost in the sun. The game seems like it will never end, yet at the same time we know that when the end does come, it will seem too soon.

  One of us thinks about shagging flies with his dad on a summer afternoon. They popped flies in the fenced pasture between the horse barn and the line of trees. That expanse once seemed like all the space you would ever need. The
father stood, barn as a backstop, lofting flies over the horse pasture with the electrified fence. The son tried to snag the flies without touching the fence. Can of corn, the father called out when the son gloved a ball. Once in a while the father unleashed his potential and sent a Ruthian clout sailing over the trees. That one’s in orbit, the father said, and the son believed him.

  One of us thinks of gluttony: 41,072 bodies consuming and then expelling beer and bratwurst and peanuts and mustard and pretzel dough and tobacco juice, and add a cupful of bodily pearlescence to wash it down into the soil under Wrigley, where surely it must moisten and weaken the century-old footings upon which our collective weight depends.

  Another of us thinks about that ripe young peach two rows up and the asshole next to her. How did he rate her? Maybe she’s just another cooze with cum dripping down her leg from what happened in the john before the game. Everything gets taken to its logical conclusion. In the john before the game. Under the bleachers between innings. On the cab ride home. Or maybe they make it all the way to her friend’s efficiency under the L and her friend says, Sure, I’ll step out for a bit, feel free to use the futon. It’s happened already or it’s going to happen. It’s just not going to happen to one of us, unless we run a batch off in the stall with ten guys waiting to use it.

  Another of us thinks of Henry. Here was Henry who still had a chance. Henry seemed to grow more radiant as the game went on. There was something youthful and hopeful about him. And something physically inviting. The delicate sunburned skin on his neck, the promise of salt on his skin, and the full healthiness of his hair. The mismatched jersey in a sea of blue. Henry was no joiner. Henry made his own way.

  Another of us can’t stop dwelling on Buckner, the epitome of all the Cubs’ hope and failing. Buckner spent years building an argument for the Hall of Fame and had that future stolen on a slow roller. How was that fair? How could a ground ball define a career? Had that grounder found the web of Buckner’s glove, he would be a cinch for the Hall. Open up your legs, Cooperstown, here comes Billy Buck, sliding home head first. But it was not to be, as everyone knows. That dribbler Mookie hit was like a grenade lobbed toward first. It exploded everything. What remains is this viral mental image of a broken-down Buckner stooped over, out beyond first bag. Everyone knows what’s coming to him. Bent over out there in those ridiculous high tops. Bent over so many thousands of times the ankles gone and can’t bend over good when it counts.

  It’s better just to imagine Buckner on his big ranch in Idaho. That’s better. Buckner’s just in from shooting grouse, and he cracks a beer and doesn’t think about baseball at all. Buckner’s ranch has like a hundred solid-wood, six-panel doors. His baseball career is behind one of them. It’s a door Buckner never opens anymore. Buckner only opens the doors that lead to good places.

  A most thunderous, deafening boom interrupts our musings and we follow the eyes of our bleacher mates skyward. It’s not so far past 9/11 that some of us don’t still get nervous in a crowd in our major cities. Especially when three fighter jets shatter the sound barrier just above our heads. There go the three Tomcats, or whatever they are. They’ve just buzzed our bleachers. What the hell?

  No, we are not being attacked. We are being invited to stretch, and to salute the members of our armed forces. It’s the middle of the seventh, and there’s John Fogerty hanging out of the announcer’s box to sing with us. Uh-one, uh-two, uh-three . . .

  We do sing. The bleachers are a sea of sloppy drunks, beer sloshed from the sonic boom, mascara running, buttons sprung, cleavages and crotches ripening in the sun. We’re sodden and slurring and we spill more beer and embrace each other and we sing. One of us sings the lyrics from the forgotten verse. There isn’t anyone else like me / Maybe I’ll go down in his-tory . . . We’re triumphant and blissful and none of us thinks about anything else at all until we finish the song, and then we exhale, and we give some skin to our neighbors and settle back into our collective stupor.

  During the stretch TK gets more attention. Fans fall over themselves to shake his hand. Thank you for keeping us safe, the fans say, and then ask for a selfie. Yes, everyone seems to want to suck TK’s dick, especially the men.

  We’re surprised that Henry tells us that after the stretch he has to go.

  Go in a cup, yo, one of us says. Fist bumps. More skin.

  Duty calls, Henry tells us. He’s got class tonight and he has to go home to study.

  Sure, Henry you’ll go home and study, we think. We can all imagine what Henry has waiting in his apartment for him. It isn’t a book. . . . But it does have a spine! Booh-yeah, Henry! We cheer Henry in our minds. Here’s one of us who conquered the city. Here’s one who deserves what’s coming to him. Here’s our boy, Henry!

  So long, Henry, each of us says. We bro-hug him and give him skin and tell him we’ll buy him a beer at the Best Shot next time he’s in town. Yes, Henry could hold his own with the citiots, and he could run the table back home too. The Cubs might lose a hundred games, but not our Henry.

  I’d like to get to know that kid better, more than one of us thinks.

  When he gets to the aisle, Henry looks back and gives us a big sweeping wave and a smile. He shoots TK a salute, and TK says, Cubs suck.

  Hey, anyone can have a bad century, Henry comes back. It sounds like he’s quoting someone. One of his old naval officers, or maybe some Cubs legend of yore. We can’t tell if he’s serious or full of shit. In any case, those are his last words, and that’s the last we ever see of him. None of us will ever get to know Henry any better than we already know him.

  The seventh inning is to a baseball game what early August is to summer. By the time August rolls around you can kiss the summer good-bye and likewise the ball game. After the stretch, everything rushes toward conclusion and you had better drink up, yo, because they stop watering the bleachers in the middle of the eighth.

  Last call! shouts the vendor, and Jody peels two more twenties from his roll. Let these be the last, he thinks, and they are.

  In the ninth the Cubs muster one last gasp. With two gone and the bases empty Ramirez sends a moon shot deep to left. The bleachers rise as one to accept the ball. The Pads’ left fielder backs to the warning track and readies his leap into the ivy. This will be close. From our vantage point we lose the ball, and for a moment no one is sure what happened. Then a deep cheer erupts from Wrigley and we know. It is. A home run.

  Some bleacher bum from a generation ago holds the ball aloft in a landing net. He’s got no shirt and a big red U painted on his fat gut. His friends’ midsections spell the rest of the home team. Those old fuckers might be happier than they’ve ever been, one of us thinks. Ramirez rounds the bases with his fist in the air. Wrigley rocks. The stadium really does seem to pitch and heel. We can barely maintain our balance. Here it is. Vindication. Ramirez’s two-out home run is our home run. His success against the odds is the unlikely success of each fan still in attendance. At Wrigley Field you get what you pay for after all. We’ve won. Or at least we’ve forestalled losing, which might be the same thing. Our exaltation, complete for several moments, fades just perceptibly at the prospects of facing extra innings without beer. Too bad Henry didn’t stay for the finale, one of us says. Henry would have loved to see this.

  But wait a minute, the umpires are gathered in the infield. Something has gone awry. Dusty Baker trots out of the dugout and confronts the umps. The conference continues with Baker pointing to the sky and then shaking his fist at the left-field bleachers, like he’s scolding us. Finally, the umps point to the dugout and Ramirez comes limp-trotting back out into the infield with his head hung low. The umps assign him to second base, and they toss a defiant Baker just for good measure. The home run has been ruled a double. Wrigley Field groans to its buttresses. It is a groan that unleashes a century’s worth of groans stored in the grain of this old architecture. It appears as if the fat schmuck with the U belly has gone Bartman and interfered with the outfielder. We deserve each other,
one of us thinks. Our Cubs and their fans. Cruel, cruel life. Two security guards await the sorry-ass fan in the aisle. Here’s another loser that will be defined by a moment, one of us thinks, and this one not even original. That was a live one lobbed his way and he should know better than to touch it.

  You can’t make this shit up anymore, one of us says. Let’s go home.

  As if he hears our friend’s voice in his ear, Theriot, the little pussy, nubs a weak comebacker to the mound to end the game. Even with the conclusion we expect, there is still a sharp intestinal ache at the final verdict. That’s us down there in the batter’s box failing to extend the game. Each of us feels it. Final score: One-zip. Zilch. Nil. Nulla. Cubs lose. Cubs lose. Cubs lose.

  We start at Murphy’s Bleachers and then head to Guthrie’s Tavern. One of us wonders if Cubs fans drink more after a win or after a loss. Once you’ve drunken yourself sober, it takes more work to get your grin back on. It becomes clear that we will not leave until our rolls have been depleted. It would be a deadly sin to leave Chicago with a single bill in our rolls, we seem to agree.

  Night has fallen without our wherewithal. Simon decides to head back to his condo in Wicker Park. We say good-bye to Simon and say thanks for the good times. Say hey to Henry when you see him, we say. Now it’s just the hometown crew. Most of the Cubs fans seem to have gone home, and regular people trickle into the bar, people on dates, or people just starting for the night, ready to take over our shift. We’re like the last hangers on at a party the host can’t convince to leave. TK’s gone silent, one of us notices. Another of us has pissed himself and spends too long in the john with the hand dryer. And yet another round arrives and departs like the last.

  One of us finally insists we go to the Billy Goat on Michigan. The Billy Goat is the appropriate place to say good-bye. But the Billy Goat means a cab ride, so we check our rolls to see who’s paying, and guess what? Our rolls are exhausted. Nothing to spend means no more to drink means time to go home. We stumble out of the tavern to search for our SUV among the ancient back alleys of Wrigleyville.