Benchwarmer

by Josh Wilker

  Of the pitchers with a career ERA of infinity, Doc Hamann faced the most batters—seven—without recording an out and also is the only member of the infinity club to add a wild pitch to his appearance. But he didn’t end up with a loss. Of the three pitchers with an infinite ERA and a winning percentage of zero, Harry Heitmann allowed the most earned runs to score, with four. This is in some way irrelevant, though: all the pitchers in question will give up an infinite number of runs. In my view it was Marty Walker who had it the worst. He faced six batters, more than anyone but Doc Hamann, and took a loss as well. He walked three and gave up two hits; a sixth batter evidently reached base, presumably on an error. This means Marty Walker had a chance to escape infinity—he’d done his part. But a teammate—either Don Hurst or Pinky Whitney, both listed by baseball-reference.com as error makers in that game—foiled this chance.

  The members of the infinity club are guardians of eternity, of a specific and singular version of eternity, the only version I could ever dwell on without wanting to scream. I like Marty Walker’s version of this guardian of eternity the best because he is the only one aided in his guardianship by a teammate, possibly one named Pinky, someone to help carry the burden. We are finite in an infinity. All we can do is bungle ground balls, trying to help.

  “We’re all in this together,” I’ll say to my infinity-terrified son.

  “But what happens when we die?” he will ask, I assume, because I used to stay up nights thinking about this, sitting on the stairs, asking my brother. My brother would ask me baseball trivia to calm me down. What with genetics and all, what with the eventual unavoidable crossing of thresholds of awareness, the question will probably come back to me through my son.

  “Did you know,” I will say, “that Marty Walker’s full name was Martin Van Buren Walker? He’s the only player to be named after the eighth president of the United States.”

  “But what is infinity? What does infinity mean?”

  “Marty Walker’s nickname,” I’ll reply, “was Buddy.”

  It Is What It Is

  “I don’t entirely believe in what I do,” I said to Bubby Brister. “My job, I mean.”

  He and I were over by the lake, near the site of my wife’s most recent harassment, and I was complicit in a process, primarily acted out by the former quarterback, of feeding footballs into a machine that catapulted them one by one out into the gray water. I had my hands in my pockets but seemed, by relative proximity, to be in charge of the cache of footballs, which were in the reusable bags I sometimes remembered to bring with me to the grocery store.

  “I edit these tests,” I said. “Multiple choice, mostly, all day long. I sit in a box honing devices to make people fit into boxes.”

  Catapulting the footballs out into the lake seemed wasteful, risky in a certain special sense: I was worried we’d get caught. An ominous hush settled over everything, the spine of this silence the dull rhythmic thumping of the football catapult. Bubby Brister seemed to be bristling with an anger that I feared I was agitating, if not the sole cause of, and yet I continued to babble.

  “There will be a reckoning, maybe, but probably not,” I said. “I mean for being so useless. But probably life will just go along like always until it verges on ending, at which point I will suddenly want it to continue. Wait, wait. Not yet. That’s what I’ll be saying. Am I right?”

  Bubby Brister turned to me and, with some dramatic deliberation, opened his mouth wide. It was in terrible shape. He let me have a nice long look then narrowed it to a smile, his eyes like those on a mannequin. He spoke, a familiar phrase that jolted the whole moment, the lake, the footballs, to nothing.

  I bolted to a sitting position in my bed beside my wife and baby, seized by the nauseating fear that I might lose my job. It had been a couple of weeks since the layoffs, the warnings about the printer and the pens, but I was still waking every morning to this dread. The thumping of the lakeside football catapult had changed to the sound of the cats banging on the cardboard-and-vacuum-cleaner barrier outside the bedroom door. I pulled myself out of bed, into my life, haunted by Bubby Brister’s proclamation, his ruined teeth. His teeth had all either been knocked out altogether or existed only as jagged remains. His words formed a motto that had in recent years gained permanence and ubiquity above all through sports, the flat incantation spreading like a deadening viral invasion throughout our only widespread public rituals of doubt and failure. Mistakes, complication, loss—all began sometime in the early twenty-first century to get waved away by this circular meaningless press conference bludgeon.

  “It is what it is,” Bubby Brister had declared.

  J

  Jackson, Bo

  See OFP.

  Joke

  One day in ninth grade at the end of gym class a girl named Mindy ran to me. Yes, that’s how it seemed: my dream of having a girl run to me was finally coming true. She was laughing, her white teeth shining. She grabbed me by the arm! The sudden sunny attention was thrilling, and that night and for many months onward, even after I better understood the context of the situation, Mindy’s touch, the brief squeeze of my puny biceps, would work its way into my nightly orgies with the women of the early 1980s television landscape. It was the most physical contact I’d had with a girl since fifth grade, when one wearing a George Harrison button on her jean jacket had driven her sneaker into my nuts.

  “We want to play you,” Mindy said. It took me a moment to realize what was happening, that I was being approached not to be freed from the crushing burden of loneliness but as the emissary of my terrible ninth grade basketball team, that it was another challenge, even worse than the one that had happened the year before, in eighth grade, when the seventh grade boys squad had challenged us and then, laughing throughout, beat us.

  What could we do? We had to play the girls. Laughter riddled the proceedings, the girls on the court with us giggling, the sidelines and bleachers pocked with cackling peers. Each team had difficulty scoring, so the game was close for a long time, laughably, ulcerously close. Finally our smallest player, Jon, a good athlete who was during regular games too slight and quiet to avoid being swallowed into invisibility by our collective inep­titude, discovered he could strip the ball from the other team’s point guard. He stole it from her and scored a layup, then did it a couple of more times to secure a win that changed nothing: we’d been challenged by girls.

  “You got lucky!” Mindy boomed in my general direction the next day in gym. There were others within earshot. I couldn’t think of anything to say. I’d always wanted to believe I was good at sports. If I wasn’t good at sports, what was I?

  “We’d a beatcha without Jon,” Mindy concluded. I looked down at my sneakers, the gray wormy laces. A guy named Dale, standing nearby, snickered. Dale did a little bullying in his free time and had the kind of glasses that got dark in the sun and then were supposed to get clear again inside but never really did.

  “What a joke,” Dale said.

  Life with a baby, among other things, is often pretty tedious. Time, that fuckhead, drags. You sit on the floor with a rattle for hours. You drift, stiffen, worry, and things long buried arise. How Dale’s thin lips curled with loving scorn on that word. How, during the game, a rebound up for grabs, your elbow grazed Mindy’s small left breast.

  “Oh, Mindy,” I moaned that night and every night for a long, long time.

  Jolly, James Beau

  See Paychecki, Gene

  Juggling

  I never knew what to do with Jack. That thought, which I’d been trying to keep from myself, crystallized one afternoon in mid-December. Jack was about four and a half months old by then. Freezing rain was pelting the big picture window, driving home the point that going for a walk outside was out of the question, and winter was settling in; we’d be sitting inside and staring at one another on the little square of living room carpet for the next several mont
hs.

  There was a rattle and some clean, unfolded laundry between us. The rattle had already proved itself useless. Were some guys just born knowing what to do with a baby? I tried dangling a pair of my underwear in front of Jack, as if he were a cat. He stared at it then started fidgeting, his body stiffening. I’d seen this before, recognized that if I didn’t do something, he’d start jerking his head back, flailing, wailing. I put the pair of Hanes on my head and pretended to sneeze, dumping the underwear from my head into Jack’s lap. The joke flopped. He flung himself backward and started to cry. I put the underwear back on my head, but then, panicking further, I instead tried juggling three loosely balled-up socks. They instantly unraveled. My wife, who had been attempting to find a few minutes alone in a bathtub, conferenced into the situation by way of screaming.

  “What are you doing out there?” Her voice knifed through several walls.

  “Handling it!” I yelled, underwear on my head. I still gripped a sock.

  “Just bring him in here!” she screamed. I picked up the boy.

  “There, there,” I cooed, wanting to hurl myself into a wood chipper. He wailed and jerked, and that’s when I almost dropped him. I managed to deliver him in one piece to my angry, soapy, naked wife. Despite the situation, I ogled her like a starving man staring into a bakery.

  “Mama’s here,” she said, and Jack immediately began to calm down.

  Returning to the living room, I exhaled and underwear slid off my head. I sat on the couch and tried to hide from all my thoughts behind the vision of my wife’s naked body, but the feeling of almost dropping the boy lingered in my hands. From the start the feeling of holding him had been indistinguishable from the anxiety of almost dropping him. Just when I’d been getting used to having the impossibly slight weight of the entire universe in my hands, he’d started this new thing of spiking his meltdowns by suddenly jerking his body like a boated stingray. I’d almost dropped him down the stairs. I’d almost dropped him on concrete. These exceptions had multiplied, becoming the norm. A lifetime of hesitation and doubt intensified and narrowed to one unceasing question, my life stuck in the in-breath gasp that comes just after a ball has been bobbled, juggled—not an error or an incompletion, not yet.

  Among the most famous instances of this kind of on-field juggling came in the latter moments of the 1980 World Series. The Philadelphia Phillies seemed on the brink of shedding the burden of being the longest-tenured team in the league without a title, but then, late in the clinching game, reliever Tug McGraw loaded the bases and catcher Bob Boone and first baseman Pete Rose converged with alarming confusion in the vicinity of the presumed landing area of a foul popup off the bat of Frank White, a chilling echo of the fateful 1912 World Series snafu involving a foul ball landing between catcher Chief Meyers and first baseman Fred Merkle (see boner). Boone, in later years, bristling at the role in the play that history foisted on him, would point out that Rose erred in not handling the chance himself, which was indeed much closer to first base than to home, and, failing that, in not even venturing to communicate with Boone as the play unfolded. Without this direction, and fearing that Rose would barrel into him, the hustling catcher made a tentative last-instant lunge for the ball and bobbled it. The ball popped out of his glove and into the air. Rose, as if he’d orchestrated the whole thing, appeared just then, a dashing mop-headed brute, a hero, and snatched the juggled ball from the air.

  I was thinking about all this while staring down at the unfolded laundry at my feet. Fucking Pete Rose, I was thinking. Always saving the day, and flying headlong through the air for triples, and racing to first on walks, and shattering catchers in collisions, and mauling middle infielders in brawls, and surpassing immortal records by sheer force of will. Some people never seem to hesitate or doubt. And yet who would want his life now, exiled to forever hunch beady-eyed behind folding tables, scribbling his name again and again like he’s signing for a bill that never stops coming? No immunities, no exceptions. Everyone’s bound to this book.

  Junkin, Trey

  See Snap, Bad.

  K

  Klotz, Red

  See Losing.

  Klutz

  I dreamed I was trying to juggle but had forgotten how. I lurched around a cramped, suffocating cubicle, knocking over stacks of papers and schedules. An ache in my chest. To have that thing so long with me gone. I woke up on the couch, unfolded laundry at my feet. There was always unfolded laundry. My wife, naked from yet another interrupted bath, another attempt for a few minutes alone, sat across from me in the recliner, nursing Jack.

  “Nice nap?” Abby said. She glared at her fingernails. Soap was visible on her body. She must have had to come out of the bath in a hurry, having to attend to a crying baby because the baby’s father was snoring nearby on the couch.

  “I couldn’t juggle,” I mumbled. “Do . . . do we?” I got up. I was not very far from crying.

  “What?”

  “We have tennis balls, right?”

  There was a catch in my throat. It was suddenly the most important thing in the world to reaffirm that I could juggle. I stalked around the house searching for tennis balls. I bumped into things, clumsy. I found the first two tennis balls in opposite ends of the main floor of the condo. Was everything like this now, dismembered by entropy? I went down to the basement. Abby followed with Jack attached.

  “What is happening here?” she said.

  I was on my hands and knees, peering under a stack of furniture I’d been meaning to lug to the storage closet. Entropy, clumsiness, to-do list always undone. I looked up at Abby. Jack was in her arms. He was naked too. The light fixture in the low ceiling had one of its bulbs burnt out, and the soft light made the dried soap all over her body resemble fading scars.

  “You are so beautiful,” I said.

  “What’s wrong with you?”

  “I don’t know, I can’t explain it. It was this dream. I have to . . . ”

  I got up and went back upstairs. Who would marry a writer? It’s like chaining yourself to someone needing, as if it were life-saving medication, to juggle. God, if you exist, hear my deep gratitude to have found someone willing to tolerate my idiotic wanting. Abby put Jack down in a belted high chair and joined the search. She found the third ball behind a bureau.

  “Here,” she said and stomped toward the bathroom to shower off the bureau dust and dried soap. As I watched her naked ass disappear around a corner, I ached like a fellow in a sonnet of yore. It had been roughly one billion years since we’d fucked. Must everything be subject to worsening change? I turned to Jack. I held the three tennis balls. All I’d wanted to do since waking from my brief slip into unconsciousness was juggle, but now, because the dream had felt so real, something so long with me gone, I was afraid to start.

  I hadn’t juggled since some time before Jack was born, but I’d been juggling for most of my life. When I was ten my grandmother had gotten me a book called Juggling for the Complete Klutz. Attached to the book was a small red mesh sack with three square beanbags inside. All things outside of sports that required trying and failing repelled me, but in this instance I’d kept trying to get all three beanbags aloft at once, a faint, alluring pull in the ongoing failure of something almost happening, as if the latch of a locked treasure chest was on the brink of giving way. Finally it happened, all three beanbags flying. I lost control of my throws almost as quickly as I had all the other times before, but this time the slight difference was unmistakable. I’d juggled. Learning to walk must have felt the same way. Learning to ride a bike. A moment adrift, the laws of gravity loosened. I ran downstairs to find someone. Tom was in the kitchen flattening balls of dough into tortillas.

  “I can juggle!” I said. I managed a very brief but discernible demonstration. Tom’s eyes widened with delight. This reaction repeated itself with everyone in my family. But then I marched off to school with my three square beanba
gs, envisioning kids chanting my name as they carried me on their shoulders through the hallways; instead, everyone I juggled for smiled, then asked over rapidly encroaching boredom whether I could juggle four things, then turned away to other more interesting matters, such as learning multiplication tables or poking one of the classroom gerbils with a pencil. This reaction was a letdown that could serve as a prototype for all subsequent letdowns in my life. Eventually I came to understand that I had devoted myself with uncharacteristic tenacity to learning something so gaudily useless that it could, were it necessary, be used to illustrate the very concept of uselessness.

  I kept juggling. It became a solitary practice, like most of the other things I did or would do or still do, like reading, writing, walking, mulling fantasy sports rosters, jogging, shooting baskets, meditating, beating off. I learned how to juggle bowling pins, big plastic rings, sneakers, marbles, clods of dirt, tennis rackets. Anything, everything. I learned to flip things under my leg, around my back, off my head, my chest, my knees, the walls. However, as if to highlight the gulf growing between me, the juggler, and a hypothetical audience, a possible connection, I never was able fulfill the inevitable ubiquitous request of anyone who ever saw me juggling—can you juggle four?—with any regularity. I juggled three things, just three things, in increasing seclusion. I tried to imagine that it was some kind of a spiritual practice. At my wintry college, my Zen pretensions at their most pronounced levels, I juggled snowballs outside the classroom before big tests “to focus.” I’m sure I secretly hoped that I’d be seen doing so and admired, but no one ever said anything about it, at least not to my face. Once at this college I juggled three basketballs during a lull in a practice for the Mayflower Conference doormat on which I was the backup to the backup forwards. Our terrible coach, an English teacher in wrinkled clothing, noticed this display.